Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: economics – Page 202

Researchers from the University of Alexandria have developed a cheaper, simpler and potentially cleaner way to turn seawater into drinking water than conventional methods.

This could have a huge impact on rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa, where access to clean water is a pressing issue if social stability and economic development is to improve.

Right now, desalinating seawater is the only viable way to provide water to growing populations, and large desalination plants are now a fact of life in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.

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A realistic article on AI — especially around AI being manipulated by others for their own gain which I have also identified as the real risks with AI.

Artificial intelligence (AI), once the seeming red-headed stepchild of the scientific community, has come a long way in the past two decades. Most of us have reconciled with the fact that we can’t live without our smartphones and Siri, and AI’s seemingly omnipotent nature has infiltrated the nearest and farthest corners of our lives, from robo-advisors on Wall Street and crime-spotting security cameras, to big data analysis by Google’s BigQuery and Watson’s entry into diagnostics in the medical field.

In many unforeseen ways, AI is helping to improve and make our lives more efficient, though the reverse degeneration of human economic and cultural structures is also a potential reality. The Future of Life Institute’s tagline sums it up in succinct fashion: “Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before…or to self-destruct.” Humans are the creators, but will we always have control of our revolutionary inventions?

To much of the general public, AI is AI is AI, but this is only part truth. Today, there are two primary strands of AI development — ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). ANI is often termed “weak AI” and is “the expert” of the pair, using its intelligence to perform specific functions. Most of the technology with which we surround ourselves (including Siri) falls into the ANI bucket. AGI is the next generation of ANI, and it’s the type of AI behind dreams of building a machine that achieves human levels of consciousness.

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Very concerning news for the US security; we’ll see how the US responds. Remember, our largest hackers in the US is China; so we’ll need to determine what this means as well as how vulnerable we are.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/969692.shtml

China’s stock markets have been stabilizing in recent days after the rollercoaster ride at the start of the year. And one bright point has been stocks related to quantum communications, showing renewed investor interest in the new technology, which will play an important role in creating a safety net for the increasingly information technology-savvy economy.

The fact that China has taken an early lead in developing the technology and translating it into real-world quantum communications projects should give added fuel to the market hype about the apparently unfathomable yet promising investment theme.

Continue reading “China’s newest tech can offer quantum of security” | >

I do believe that there will be some level of expansion of social services to help employees to be retrained for the new positions that are coming as well as assist lower skill workers to be retrained. However, the larger question is who should pay. Some people are saying tech should assist governments in retooling since the AI technology created the situation; others say it’s a governments issue only, etc. It will be interesting to say the least how the retraining program and other services are covered.

A leading artificial intelligence (AI) expert believes that societies may have to consider issuing a basic income to all citizens, in order to combat the threat to jobs posed by increased automation in the workplace.

Dr Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, believes that a basic income may be needed in the future as advances in automation and AI put human workers out of jobs.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Dr Vardi said: “Our current economic system requires people to either have wealth or to work to make a living, with the assumption that the economy creates jobs for all those who need them.”

Continue reading “Basic income may be needed to combat robot-induced unemployment, leading AI expert says” | >

What will be interesting most about block chaining is when more countries drop their own traditional currency models & move to block chaining like one of the countries in Africa announced 2 weeks ago. I do know that many 2nd & 3rd world countries are finding electronic currency more appealing due to the Central Bank’s policies; however, what will be the impacts at the end of the day felt across the world as more and more 2nd & 3rd world markets switch their models. Immediately, we see risks with central banks; the question is where else (WBO, WTO, US, etc)

Many countries have experimented with price fixing and central planning over the last century. Right now, Venezuela’s government is fixing the prices of many products. This has resulted in widespread shortages of goods which we, as the lucky inhabitants of semi-free economies, take for granted.

Price fixing has failed in every area of the economy in which it has been tried. But while few serious economists would suggest that we have a team of bureaucrats set the price of rubber, wheat or coffee, we do have one sphere of the economy which is still centrally planned – our monetary system. This will fail just like all central planning fails. We are now moving into a dangerous new phase of price fixing by central banks. Having failed to stimulate economies with years of zero per cent interest rates, they are now discussing the prospect of negative interest rates (and some have even introduced them), the reductio ad absurdum of modern monetary economics.

Economist Friedrich von Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 for his exposition of how central banks’ manipulation of money and interest rates causes distortions to the market and generates the boom bust cycle. He also wrote several papers in the 1970s on how allowing companies to issue their own private money would be the only long-term solution. If people could choose which money to use, it is highly unlikely that they would go with that which is routinely debased by the government or used for wild credit expansion by the banking sector.

Continue reading “How blockchain will save us from the perils of central bank price fixing” | >

Although this article highlights the lack of awareness by some CEOs and board members on all things around Cyber Security; I do see a larger gap and risk. I do believe if a fully funded and dedicated joint task force effort among Silicon Valley, US Government, and Wall Street are not in place tackling this jointly to help the country and economy to diffuse this situation within the next 14 to 18 months that AI could fail in its delivery due to public’s concerns around trust and security.

Therefore, tech spent millions if not billions on new AI technology that businesses and consumers see no value in due to risks.

Some board executives still need help from a search engine to explain cyber security issues, warns report.

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See even Space gets it — the importance of great Cyber Security is needed now.

The disruption of capabilities that space assets provide would have immediate, far-reaching and devastating economic, political, and geostrategic consequences. Over the past two decades, space vulnerabilities have grown dramatically in a manner commensurate with terrestrial dependency on space-based capabilities and enablers. This is true for both civilian and military activities. Purposeful interference with space systems could rather easily trigger a retaliatory spiral of actions that could compromise a safe and secure operating environment in space. Accordingly, having available a range of measures to prevent or preempt an incident, or even full-up conflict, is of rapidly growing importance to an increasing number of countries.

The interruption of space services through a cyber attack could involve large, and possibly very complex, knock-on effects. As the space and cyberspace domains are linked operationally—space cannot exist without cyber and cyber, in some cases, without space—and they permeate all other warfighting domains (i.e. land, air, and sea), cyber-related vulnerabilities of space assets are a major concern. Global effects would be virtually instantaneous.

Given these realities, space-dependent civilian governments are wise to be seeking new ways to engage in serious international discussions concerning how best to ensure responsible behavior in these two connected domains. Meanwhile, space-dependent militaries are, to varying degrees, bracing themselves for the worst by the establishment of crisis management mechanisms to address fast-moving security threats emanating from cyber-related vulnerabilities embedded in space systems and operations. In some cases, this mechanism includes taking proper account of growing government dependency on commercial providers as key parts of both military and civilian missions.

Continue reading “Governance challenges at the intersection of space and cyber security” | >