An ambitious proposal to create an Alaska-style social wealth fund that could transform the global economy.
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Category: economics – Page 145
The World Economic Forum suggests we are on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by ‘ubiquitous automation, big data and artificial intelligence’. The Institute for Public Policy Research, however, says that “despite the growing capability of robots and artificial intelligence (AI), we are not on the cusp of a ‘post-human’ economy.”
IPPR suggests that an estimated 60 percent of occupations have at least 30 percent of activities which could be automated with already-proven technologies. As tasks are automated, work is likely to be redefined, focusing on areas of human comparative advantage over machines.
The CIPD point out that “new technology has changed many more jobs than it has destroyed, and it does not destroy work. Overall, the biggest advanced industrialized economies have between them created over 50 million jobs, a rise of nearly 20 percent, over the past 20 years despite huge economic and technological disruptions.”
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NASA is partnering with U.S. companies and small businesses to develop technologies that have the potential to significantly benefit the economy and future NASA missions.
Recent announcements of selections for the agency’s Tipping Point solicitation and Phase II of NASA’s competitive Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program include several proposals with NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
NASA selected 10 Tipping Point proposals totaling approximately $44 million and Langley is a partner on one $3 million proposal. The agency also selected 20 research and technology proposals — valued at $15 million — from 19 American small businesses for STTR Phase II and Langley will manage three of the selected proposals totaling $2.25 million.
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What could possibly go wrong? Does anyone remember Fukushima?
Floating nuclear power plants offer several economic advantages.
A large percentage of the cost of a nuclear power plant is the construction and installation of the plant itself. This cost can vary and increase if the site has challenging weather and other conditions. Also, cold and harsh environments may not have a highly trained local workforce to build each plant.
“The big problem is that hospitals don’t buy new devices, and they keep using really dangerous ones ad infinitum — until they just stop working,” Corman said.
Corman wants these old, unsecured devices gone from hospitals. The fear is that, beyond freezing systems or hijacking medical records as they did during WannaCry, hackers could also actively manipulate medical equipment to harm patients by, say, administering a lethal dose of medication via an infusion pump. While newer devices aren’t ironclad, they are typically built with more robust security features. So Corman and others are urging health-care providers to scrap old, or “legacy,” equipment and replace it with newer models.
To nudge health-care providers to trade up, he’s put forth an idea for an incentive program akin to “Cash for Clunkers,” the 2009 federal auto-rebate plan that aimed to run gas-guzzling cars off the road. Under that program, which was formally called the Car Allowance Rebate System, people received cash in exchange for turning in fuel-inefficient vehicles, which they could then put toward new, more efficient ones. (The program fizzled after a few months, when it depleted its allotted budget.) Similarly, in this version, health-care providers would be compensated for junking old equipment, and could use the rebates toward the purchase of new devices. Corman said he hasn’t fully worked out the economics, but he believes device makers might be willing to subsidize the program in part, since it would help them move inventory.
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The Pentagon’s research arm is looking for teams to build an artificial intelligence tool that can automatically generate, test and refine its own scientific hypotheses.
By essentially automating steps of the scientific process, the tool would let top decision-makers take discoveries from the lab and rapidly apply them to the real world, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“Automation of model-based inference procedures could increase the speed and accuracy with which these models can be used to address key questions of national security by orders of magnitude,” officials wrote in a request for information published Aug. 17. They said the system could be used to verify the results of scientific studies and monitor “fragile economic, political, social or environmental” events.
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“This is the dark side of technological revolutions and that dark side has always been there,” Haldane added. “That hollowing out is going to be potentially on a much greater scale in the future, when we have machines both thinking and doing — replacing both the cognitive and the technical skills of humans.”
Haldane said that the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution — a digitally-driven paradigm shift similar to previous industrial revolutions in the West — had the potential to displace numerous jobs and leave people “technologically unemployed.”
“Each of those [industrial revolutions] had a wrenching and lengthy impact on the jobs market, on the lives and livelihoods of large swathes of society,” Haldane told the BBC.
The BOE economist cautioned that previous industrial revolutions resulted in “heightened social tensions,” “financial tensions” and “inequality.” The First Industrial Revolution, which took place during the Victorian era, transformed Britain’s economy, leading to the creation of ground-breaking industrial innovations including the steam train and advanced machine tools, all the while resulting in layoffs especially in industries like textiles.
We can’t turn back the clock, but neither is job insecurity inevitable. Just as the postwar period managed to make industrialization benefit industrial workers, we need to create new norms, institutions and policies that make digitization benefit today’s workers. Pundits have offered many paths forward — “portable” benefits, universal basic income, worker reclassification — but regardless of the option, the important thing to remember is that we do have a choice.
When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom. We are taught that technological innovation drove social change and radically reshaped the world of work.
Likewise, when we talk about today’s economy, we focus on smartphones, artificial intelligence, apps. Here, too, the inexorable march of technology is thought to be responsible for disrupting traditional work, phasing out the employee with a regular wage or salary and phasing in independent contractors, consultants, temps and freelancers — the so-called gig economy.
But this narrative is wrong. The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes.
Last week, NASA announced the awardees for an ongoing effort to foster commercial activity in space. This effort allows 13 companies to study the future of commercial human spaceflight in low-Earth orbit, including long-term opportunities for the International Space Station.
I’m pleased to share that NanoRacks is one of these awardees.
This study is not only a big step for NanoRacks, but a big step for the commercial space ecosystem. Today, we are the largest commercial user of the International Space Station and are proud of the impact we’ve made to help foster this ecosystem and bring customers from all over the world into to orbit. This study will allow us to take our vision to the next step and detail the viability for habitable and automated platforms for low-Earth orbit.
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