Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: economics – Page 120

Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking are not alone in their calls for humanity to become a multi-planetary species. But they certainly are the most visible advocates for space colonization. And while the moon might be the most obvious jumping off point to the solar system and beyond, nothing stands out as a potential site for long term settlement more than Mars.

But just how realistic is sending astronauts to the Red Planet anytime soon–let alone colonizing it permanently? The obstacles are many, and aerospace engineering may well be the least of them. The human biological, psychological tolss and survival strategies–radiation, low gravity, isolation and the marshalling air, water, and food resources–all stand in the way. And then there is the economic cost and the political and public will. In this edition of Seeking Delphi,™ I talk to former NASA Mars mission navigator, Moriba Jah, about the many challenges of leaving of our home planet.

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As coronavirus outbreaks have become more threatening outside China in recent days, attention has turned to the likely damage to global output and to the possible reaction of macroeconomic policymakers. This has become urgent with the catastrophic decline in China’s PMI business surveys yesterday. The question now is whether a global recession can be avoided.

The global economy faces a demand shock focused on services and consumer spending.

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Ogba Educational Clinic

Theoretically, workers have been on the fast track to obsolescence since the Luddites took sledgehammers to industrial looms in the early 1800s.

In 1790, 90 percent of all Americans made their living as farmers; today it’s less than 2 percent. Did those jobs disappear? Not exactly. The agrarian economy morphed, first into the industrial economy, next into the service economy, now into the information economy.

Automation produces job substitution far more than it does job obliteration. And even when automation takes hold of a range of professional roles, this doesn’t always create the dire results we expect.

Continue reading “For a Bright Future of Work, We Must Get Better at Collaborating With Machines” | >

But in recent years, Americans — Silicon Valley leaders included — have put too much faith in the private sector to ensure U.S. global leadership in new technology. Now we are in a technology competition with China that has profound ramifications for our economy and defense — a reality I have come to appreciate as chairman of two government panels on innovation and national security. The government needs to get back in the game in a serious way.

We can’t win the technology wars without the federal government’s help.

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While robotics and automation create a plethora of opportunities for skilled labor, they substitute many jobs of unskilled labor. Philips’ automated shaver factory in the Netherlands employs one-tenth of the workforce of its factory in China that makes the same shavers. Such developments accentuate inequality and pose severe social pressure in developed countries, which would need to be addressed by government in the years to come.

Technology can complement humans but it can also eliminate their jobs.

Lilac Nachum

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This is a guest post by Mohammed Murad, vice president, global sales and business development, Iris ID.

The world is in the grip of a coronavirus epidemic the impact of which extends well beyond people’s health, including more than 1,300 reported deaths. The fear of this recently identified disease has closed businesses and grounded thousands of flights. The impacts have led to estimates of reduced economic growth in many countries.

While the virus that was first discovered in a Chinese province has killed far fewer people than influenza this year, the fatality rate has people worried. Influenza reportedly kills between 10 to 20 people per 100,000 infections each year. The death rate from the coronavirus tops 2,300 deaths per 100,000 cases. Those latter statistics change virtually daily as more cases of the virus are reported.

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Never in history have we seen wealth concentrated (Apple is worth over a trillion dollars). Money and congressional power answers why legislators: let drug companies squeeze dollars from sick people, refuse to stop a president who winks and nods at Putin, at right-wing agitators, who stoke bigotry, or singles out Black, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees (let’s just lump them together). Fear of others comes from seeds planted early in life. Fear is personal — you don’t feel mine, I don’t feel yours.

But, alas, the future will be like nothing we have experienced. It’s a HUUUGE planet, with decades to come, which, if we lived long enough would from today’s vantage be unrecognizable. What we do know from our lives is that we are but a small part, not only small in terms of our kind or beliefs (political, religious, cultural), but small in influence over the planet’s trajectory (war, maybe atomic, population growth, immigration, climate, economy, racial, ethnic composition, e.g., in the U.S.).

Exceptionalism once stood for the idea that Americans served as an example of progressive values (democracy, justice and humanity), control over their destiny; could tame the environment, extract resources (oil, coal) without limit, and provide jobs for everyone through capitalism. For our successors, what they look like and what they believe in will go beyond change wrought by anything imaginable, today.

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According to a new study from Oxford Economics, within the next 11 years there could be 14 million robots put to work in China alone.

Economists analyzed long-term trends around the uptake of automation in the workplace, noting that the number of robots in use worldwide increased threefold over the past two decades to 2.25 million.

While researchers predicted the rise of robots will bring about benefits in terms of productivity and economic growth, they also acknowledged the drawbacks that were expected to arise simultaneously.

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The space industry is in the midst of a widespread transformation, as the last decade has seen several young, private companies seek to profit in areas historically dominated by governmental interests. Among these areas is lunar mining, which represents a crucial step for the development of the space economy by enabling the utilization of lunar resources. Though significant opportunities exist for wealth creation and societal benefits, it will require sustained multibillion-dollar investment to develop a vibrant lunar mining industry.

Exploration is the essential first step for any mining endeavor, terrestrially or otherwise, but with the technical challenges of lunar mining largely solved, access to capital has become the prevailing constraint. While the uncertainty of operating in space is the commonly used explanation for capital constraints, in reality, terrestrial explorers have seen funding steadily decline for a decade, with investors favoring lower risk, passive exposure to the mining sector. For lunar mining firms seeking to attract capital for exploration, this essay details the incompatibility of traditional investment options, the financing strategies developed by the similarly cash-strapped terrestrial mining industry, and how prospective lunar miners should capitalize on emerging trends in project finance.

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