This would transform the world.
Category: economics – Page 172
Eric Shuss, Ed Hudgins, Peter Voss, Zoltan Istvan, Gennady Stolyarov; Michael Shermer (mod) discuss artificial intelligence and robots. Will these developments lead the economy of the future or end capitalism as we know it?
Gennady Stolyarov II, FSA, ACAS, MAAA, CPCU, ARe, ARC, API, AIS, AIE, AIAF, is the second Chairman in the history of the U.S. Transhumanist Party and the Chief Executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. Mr. Stolyarov is an actuary, independent philosophical essayist, science-fiction novelist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov regularly produces YouTube videos discussing life extension, libertarianism, and related subjects, In December 2013, Mr. Stolyarov published Death is Wrong, an ambitious children’s book on life extension illustrated by his wife Wendy Stolyarov. Death is Wrong can be found on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats, and can also be freely downloaded in PDF format in the English, Russian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese languages.
Dr. Edward Hudgins is research director at the Heartland Institute, which seeks to develop and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Hudgins has written extensively on the promise of exponential technologies and the need for a human achievement and entrepreneurial ethos. Before joining Heartland, he worked at The Atlas Society, which promotes the philosophy of reason, freedom, and individualism developed by Ayn Rand. During his stint at the Cato Institute, Hudgins directed regulatory studies and produced the book, Space: The Free-Market Frontier. He has also worked at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and at The Heritage Foundation, where he pioneered the concept of an Index of Economic Freedom. Hudgins has a BA from the University of Maryland, an MA from American University, and a PhD from the Catholic University of America. He has taught at universities both in the United States and Germany.
Zoltan Istvan is a Libertarian candidate for California Governor in 2018. He is often considered one the world’s leading transhumanists after his popular run in the 2016 US Presidential race as a science and technology candidate. Zoltan began his futurist career by publishing The Transhumanist Wager, an award-winning, #bestseller in philosophy that has been compared to Ayn Rand’s work. Zoltan is also a leading technology journalist, a successful entrepreneur, and a former filmmaker and on-camera reporter for the National Geographic Channel. His futurist work and promotion of radical science has reached over 100 million people. He is a graduate of Columbia University, and lives in San Francisco with his physician wife and two young daughters. Breitbart wrote, “Istvan is a dynamic personality, as polarizing as he is engaging.” The New York Times wrote Zoltan has “a plausibly presidential aura.”
In the hopes of rising above the laws and regulations of terrestrial nations, a group of Silicon Valley millionaires has bold plans to build a floating city in Tahiti, French Polynesia. It sounds like the start of a sci-fi dystopia (in fact, this is the basic premise behind the video game Bioshock), but the brains behind the project say their techno-libertarian community could become a paradise for technological entrepreneurship and scientific innovation.
The Seasteading Institute was set up in 2008 by billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel and software engineer, poker player, and political economic theorist Patri Friedman. Both ardent libertarians, their wide-eyed mission is to “establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”
“Seasteading will create unique opportunities for aquaculture, vertical farming, and scientific and engineering research into ecology, wave energy, medicine, nanotechnology, computer science, marine structures, biofuels, etc,” their website reads.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents both the biggest opportunity and potentially the greatest threat to the legal profession in history.
This is part of a bigger global revolution – where society, business and government are likely to experience more change in the next 20–30 years than in the last 500.
This large-scale disruption is being driven by the combined effects of AI and other disruptive technologies whose speed, power and capability are growing exponentially – or faster.
These technologies, which are all are fed by AI, include quantum computing, blockchain technology, the internet of things (IoT), big data, cloud services, smart cities, and human augmentation. All of these could be hundreds or thousands of times more powerful within a decade.
The resulting changes mean the total transformation of every business sector, the birth of new trillion dollar industries and a complete rethink of law, regulation, legal infrastructures, and the supporting governance systems for every activity on the planet.
I’m really excited to announce a 5-page feature spread on my #transhumanism work and Libertarian Governor campaign in today’s Times of London Magazine, one of England’s oldest and largest papers. There’s a paywall for digital but I think you can get two articles free without registering. If you have access to the print, it’s in the magazine:
Zoltan Istvan is launching his campaign to become Libertarian governor of California with two signature policies. First, he’ll eliminate poverty with a universal basic income that will guarantee $5,000 (£3,800) per month for every Californian household for ever. (He’ll do this without raising taxes a dime, he promises.) The next item in his in-tray is eliminating death. He intends to divert trillions of dollars into life-extending technologies – robotic hearts, artificial exoskeletons, genetic editing, bionic limbs and so on – in the hope that each Californian man, woman and AI (artificial intelligence) will eventually be able to upload their consciousness to the Cloud and experience digital eternity.
“What we can experience as a human being is going to be dramatically different within two decades,” he…
Dear Mum,
We’ve missed you over the ten long years since you passed away. You wanted me to write to you to tell you what’s happened, so now in 2030 I am fulfilling that wish.
“[T]he idea is hardly new: In fact, it has resurfaced repeatedly over the centuries at times of economic transformation, winning allies across the ideological spectrum.”
Our economy is increasingly ruled by a few dominant firms. We see them everywhere, from established giants Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Walmart to fast-growing newcomers like Airbnb, Tesla, and Uber. There have always been large companies and outright monopolies, but there’s something distinctive about this new generation of what some economists call superstar companies. They appear across a broad range of business sectors and have gained their power at least in part by adeptly anticipating and using digital technologies that foster conditions where a few winners essentially take all.
Superstar companies are dominating the economy by exploiting a growing gap in digital competencies.
The UK government has revealed how investing in the space industry will form a key part of its strategy for boosting economic growth.
At the heart of the government’s strategy is a pledge to invest £99 million to create a National Satellite Testing Facility (NSTF) and another £4 million investment for a new National Space Propulsion Facility (NSPF).
The UK government hopeS the significant funding boost will enable the space industry to competitively bid for more national and international contracts and ensure it remains a world-leader for space technologies for decades to come.
Phase 1, which was the Design part of the competition, was completed back in 2015. Phase 2 is the Structural Member Competition, and the most recent level challenged competitors to 3D print a beam for bend testing. Scores were calculated based on the final material composition of the 3D printed beam and the maximum load that could be held before it failed.
Seoul-based Moon X Construction were not eligible for prize money, but $67,465 was awarded to Form Forge of Oregon State University for the second place entry. Foster and Partners with Branch Technology of Chattanooga, Tennessee came in third, earning $63,783, after getting $85,930 for getting first place in the first round of Phase 2. Fairbanks University of Alaska and CTL Group Mars of Illinois came in fourth and fifth respectively, with Singaporean team ROBOCON finishing in sixth place.
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