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Galactic Public Archives Presents: “New Narratives: Innovation for Jobs” the series

‘New Narratives: Innovation for Jobs’ is a series by i4j (Innovation for Jobs) and the GPA exploring perspectives on important topics that will impact the future of work, jobs and employment.

About i4j: (iiij.org/i4j) Innovation for Jobs conferences bring together individuals from the public and private sectors to discuss the changing economy. “We engage in initiatives creating structures for developing shared language across silos. The starting point for any innovation is the creation of shared language, enabling stakeholders and change agents to interact horizontally.”

This film was created at the Mountain View 2015 i4j Conference. What are your hopes and fears about the future of meaningful work?

Vint Cerf at i4j: Employment Disruption Does Not Need to be Destruction

About Vint Cerf:
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and on the faculty of Stanford University. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000–2007 and has been a Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1998. Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society (ISOC) from 1992–1995. Cerf is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the British Computer Society, the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He currently serves as Past President of the Association for Computing Machinery, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), chairman of StopBadWare and recently completed his term as Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. President Obama appointed him to the National Science Board in 2012. Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Tunisian National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and 21 honorary degrees. In December 1994, People magazine identified Cerf as one of that year’s “25 Most Intriguing People.”

David Nordfors and Vint Cerf at i4j: Innovation Ecosystems Disrupting Unemployment

About David Nordfors:

David Nordfors is CEO and co-founder of IIIJ and the chair of the i4j Summit. He was previously co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Innovation and Communication at Stanford University. He was one of the World Economic Forum Innovation 100 in 2009, and has served on WEF Global Agenda Councils. He serves on advisory boards of the Poynter Institute, Discern Investment Analytics and Black & Veatch. He is an adjunct professor at IDC Herzliya in Israel, a visiting professor at Tallinn University, the Tecnologico de Monterrey, and the Deutsche Welle Akademie. He was advisor to the Director General at VINNOVA, the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, where he co-initiated the national Swedish Incubator System and set up a bi-national R&D fund between Sweden and Israel for mobile applications. He was Director of Research Funding of the Knowledge Foundation, KK-stiftelsen, administering an endowment of $300MUSD, building a funding framework underwriting over a hundred innovation initiatives between universities and industry. He initiated and headed the first hearing about the Internet to be held by the Swedish Parliament. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the Uppsala University and did his postdoc in Theoretical Chemistry in Heidelberg, Germany.

Marjory Blumenthal at i4j: Our Blindspots in Forecasting the Future of Work

About Marjory Blumenthal:

Marjory Blumenthal is the Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). She joined PCAST after a decade combining academic leadership at Georgetown University with research and advisory activities (including as a RAND adjunct) aimed at understanding Internet and cybersecurity technology trends and policy implications. At PCAST, she manages the Council and its program of analyses yielding policy recommendations to the President and the Administration, and she fosters the implementation of PCAST recommendations. This work spans the broad landscape of science and technology, addressing implications for the economy, society, and government programs. It engages PCAST’s approximately 20 distinguished scientists and engineers from industry and academia plus hundreds of experts consulted for study-projects and the Council’s regular meetings. Working under tight time constraints, in May 2014 she produced the PCAST report, Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective. Between July 1987 and August 2003, Marjory was the Executive Director of the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, producing over 60 influential reports that frequently addressed the evolution of the Internet and/or cybersecurity. Marjory did her undergraduate work at Brown University and her graduate work at Harvard University.

John Hagel at i4j: The (Painful) Big Shift to Meaningful Work

About John Hagel:

John Hagel is a consultant and author who specializes in the intersection of business strategy and information technology. In 2007, Hagel, along with John Seely Brown, founded the Deloitte Center for the Edge, a research center based in Silicon Valley. Hagel is also involved with a number of other organizations, including the World Economic Forum, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Aspen Institute. He is credited with inventing the term “infomediary” in his book, NetWorth with Marc Singer, published by the Harvard Business School Press in 1999. He has published a series of seven books including the best-selling business books, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, The Only Sustainable Edge and, most recently, The Power of Pull.

Esther Wojcicki at i4j: Educating for the Unforeseen Jobs of the New Economy

About Esther Wojcicki:

Esther Wojcicki is an educational innovator using journalism courses as a vehicle for training youth in problem-based project-oriented learning, developing skill sets for the innovation economy. Applying this method, she has headed the development of what has become the largest high school journalism program in the U.S involving 600 students, at the Palo Alto High School. She was the 1990 Northern California Journalism teacher of the year, the 2002 California State Teacher Credentialing Commission Teacher of the Year, was recognized for inspiration and excellence in scholastic journalism advising by the National Scholastic Press Association in 2008, and was awarded the Gold Key Award by Columbia University Scholastic Press in 2009. She has served on the University of California Office of the President Curriculum Committee. She served as the Google educational consultant, co-designing the Google Teacher Academy and Google Faculty Institute. She holds a B.A. degree from UC Berkeley in English and Political Science, and a M.A. in Educational Technology from San Jose State University. She also has a Master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley and an advanced degree in French and French History from the Sorbonne, Paris. She has worked as a professional journalist for multiple publications and now blogs regularly for HuffingtonPost.

Curt Carlson at i4j: The Practice of Innovation

About Curt Carlson:

Curt Carlson was SRI’s President and CEO from 1998 to 2014. During this time SRI’s revenue more than tripled and SRI became a global model for the systematic creation of high-value innovations, such as HDTV, Intuitive Surgical, Siri (now on the iPhone), and other world changing advances. Mayfield Ventures partner, David Ladd, said, “SRI is now the leading company in the world at converting its technology into commercial value”. Carlson is a pioneer in the development and use of innovation best practices and an evangelist for innovation, education, and economic development, sharing best practices with government agencies, businesses, and foundations around the world. His insights on R&D and value creation led to creation of the Five Disciplines of Innovation process, used by companies, universities, and government agencies in the United States, Sweden, Finland, Chile, Malaysia, Japan, Brazil, and Taiwan. They are applying these innovation practices for growth, prosperity, and job creation. Before joining SRI, Carlson worked at RCA, GE, and the Sarnoff Corporation, which became part of SRI in 1987. In 1977 he started and helped lead the high-definition television (HDTV) program that became the U.S. standard and won an Emmy Award in 1997. Another team started by Carlson won an Emmy for satellite broadcast image quality in 2001.

He has helped form more than two-dozen new companies. Carlson was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2012. In 2006, Carlson won the Otto Schade Prize for Display Performance and Image Quality from the Society for Information Display with Roger Cohen. He served on President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation and Taiwan’s Scientific Advisory Board. In addition he serves on the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Engineering Advisory Council and has served on the Air Force Science Advisory Board, the Defense Science Board, various National Laboratory Review Panels, and the National Academy of Engineering Committee on Manufacturing, Design, and Innovation.
He has been on numerous commercial boards, including Nuance Communications, Pyramid Vision Technologies, Sensar, and Sarif. He was a member of the General Motors’ Science and Technology Advisory Board. Carlson has received honorary degrees from the Malaysian Technical University (MTU), Stevens Institute of Technology, Kettering University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he is a trustee.
With William Wilmot, Carlson wrote Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want, published by Random House and selected by BusinessWeek as one of the top 10 business books for 2006. Carlson received his B.S. degree in physics from WPI and was named in Who’s Who Among Students. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Skull. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees were from Rutgers University. Carlson has published or presented numerous technical publications and holds fundamental patents in the fields of image quality, image coding, and computer vision.

Robin Chase at i4j: New Labor Systems can Save the Climate

About Robin Chase:

Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur. She is founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world; Buzzcar, a service that brings together car owners and drivers in a carsharing marketplace in France; and GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. She is also Executive Chairman of Veniam, a vehicle communications company building the networking fabric for the Internet of Moving Things. She is on the Boards of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the World Resources Institute, and Tucows. She also served on the National Advisory Council for Innovation & Entrepreneurship for the US Department of Commerce, the Intelligent Transportations Systems Program Advisory Committee for the US Department of Transportation, the OECD’s International Transport Forum Advisory Board the Massachusetts Governor’s Transportation Transition Working Group, and Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force. Robin lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design, and environment, including Time 100 Most Influential People, Fast Company Fast 50 Innovators, and BusinessWeek Top 10 Designers. Robin graduated from Wellesley College and MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was a Harvard University Loeb Fellow, and received an honorary Doctorate of Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Mikko Kosonen at i4j: A Vision for Sustainable Wellbeing

About Mikko Kosonen:

Mikko Kosonen has been the President of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra since 2008. He worked for Nokia between 1984 and 2007, his last two positions being Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Infrastructure and Senior Advisor. Kosonen has served as a board member with a number of companies and institutions, including Itella Corporation, Kesko, Kuntien Tiera Oy, Telia-Sonera, Fifth Element Oy, Technology Academy Finland and the Foundation for Economic Education.Mikko Kosonen completed his PhD in International Business at the Helsinki School of Economics in 1991. He was awarded Honorary Professorship of Budapest Business School in 2012. He has published several books and articles on strategic management, most recently Fast Strategy – How Strategic Agility will help you stay ahead of the game (2008) and New Deal at the Top – Harvard Business Review (2007), both with Professor Yves Doz.

Steve Jurvetson at i4j: Going Long on the Future of Work?

Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm. He was the founding VC investor in Hotmail (MSFT), Interwoven (IWOV), Kana (KANA), and NeoPhotonics (NPTN). He also led the firm’s investments in other companies which were then acquired for $12 billion in aggregate. Current Board positions include SpaceX, Synthetic Genomics, and Tesla Motors (TSLA). Previously, Steve was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where seven of his communications chip designs were fabricated. His prior technical experience also includes programming, materials science research (TEM atomic imaging of GaAs), and computer design at HP’s PC Division, the Center for Materials Research, and Mostek. He has also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT Software. Steve also holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. He received his MBA from the Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. He also serves on the Advisory Boards of SRI International, STVP, and the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund and is Co-Chair of the NanoBusiness Alliance. He was honored as “The Valley’s Sharpest VC” on the cover of Business 2.0 In 2005, Steve was honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and a Distinguished Alumnus by St. Mark’s, where he was the 2010 Commencement Speaker.

Astro Teller at i4j: Innovation Requires Inspired Workers (Systematizing Innovation)

About Astro Teller:

Dr. Astro Teller currently oversees Google[x], Google’s moonshot factory for building magical, audaciously impactful ideas that can be brought to reality through science and technology. Before joining Google, Astro was the co-founding CEO of Cerebellum Capital, Inc, an AI-based investment management firm. Previously, Astro was the co-founding CEO of BodyMedia, a leading wearable body monitoring company. Prior to BodyMedia, Dr. Teller was co-founding CEO of SANDbOX AD, an advanced development technology incubator. Dr. Teller holds a BS in computer science and an MS in symbolic and heuristic computation, both from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon, where he was a recipient of the Hertz fellowship. Through his work as a scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, Dr. Teller holds many U.S. and international patents related to his work in hardware and software technology. Astro is also a successful novelist and screenwriter, with a new book out entitled “Sacred Cows.”

Astro Teller at i4j: Innovation that Works Can’t Wait for Miracles

You Won’t Be Automated: Innovation for Jobs

Legal Consulting Firm Believes Artificial Intelligence Could Replace Lawyers by 2030

Quoted: “Tony Williams, the founder of the British-based legal consulting firm, said that law firms will see nearly all their process work handled by artificial intelligence robots. The robotic undertaking will revolutionize the industry, “completely upending the traditional associate leverage model.” And: “The report predicts that the artificial intelligence technology will replace all the work involving processing information, along with a wide variety of overturned policies.”

Read the article here > https://hacked.com/legal-consulting-firm-believes-artificial…yers-2030/

The Blockchain is the New Database, Get Ready to Rewrite Everything

Quoted: “If you understand the core innovations around the blockchain idea, you’ll realize that the technology concept behind it is similar to that of a database, except that the way you interact with that database is very different.

The blockchain concept represents a paradigm shift in how software engineers will write software applications in the future, and it is one of the key concepts behind the Bitcoin revolution that need to be well understood. In this post, I’d like to explain 5 of these concepts, and how they interrelate to one another in the context of this new computing paradigm that is unravelling in front of us. They are: the blockchain, decentralized consensus, trusted computing, smart contracts and proof of work / stake. This computing paradigm is important, because it is a catalyst for the creation of decentralized applications, a next-step evolution from distributed computing architectural constructs.

Read the article here > http://startupmanagement.org/2014/12/27/the-blockchain-is-th…verything/

The Most Wanted Man in the World

Wired.com

The message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.”

ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.

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BitCoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology — The Ethereum Primer

Quoted: “Ethereum will also be a decentralised exchange system, but with one big distinction. While Bitcoin allows transactions, Ethereum aims to offer a system by which arbitrary messages can be passed to the blockchain. More to the point, these messages can contain code, written in a Turing-complete scripting language native to Ethereum. In simple terms, Ethereum claims to allow users to write entire programs and have the blockchain execute them on the creator’s behalf. Crucially, Turing-completeness means that in theory any program that could be made to run on a computer should run in Ethereum.” And, quoted: “As a more concrete use-case, Ethereum could be utilised to create smart contracts, pieces of code that once deployed become autonomous agents in their own right, executing pre-programmed instructions. An example could be escrow services, which automatically release funds to a seller once a buyer verifies that they have received the agreed products.”

Read Part One of this Series here » Ethereum — Bitcoin 2.0? And, What Is Ethereum.

Read Part Two of this Series here » Ethereum — Opportunities and Challenges.

Read Part Three of this Series here » Ethereum — A Summary.

Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology — Voting Systems

Quoted: “Bitcoin technology offers a fundamentally different approach to vote collection with its decentralized and automated secure protocol. It solves the problems of both paper ballot and electronic voting machines, enabling a cost effective, efficient, open system that is easily audited by both individual voters and the entire community. Bitcoin technology can enable a system where every voter can verify that their vote was counted, see votes for different candidates/issues cast in real time, and be sure that there is no fraud or manipulation by election workers.”

Read the article here » http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239809?hootPostID=ba473f…aacc8412c7

World Inequality, Digital Life & the State

. @hjbentham. @TheVenusProject. @clubofinfo. #futurism. #LOrdre. #antistatism.
The creeping social inequality in Britain has become a source of growing concern to many. When strikes and despair over the income disparity within a single country or locale feature often in our politics, do we unjustly forget the scale of global wealth inequality?
I am not writing this article to belie the social calamity of income inequality in Britain, nor to argue for more urgency in remedial foreign policies such as development assistance. This is purely an analysis of the long-term crisis represented by global disparities of wealth, and the historical choices it will force on many actors in the world-system, from states to activists.
In a talk I heard in my studies at Lancaster University in 2012, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke gave his predictions on the greatest threats to global security in the short-term and long-term future. One of his predictions struck me as the most important: the ease with which modern media allows different strata of the world to see one another’s vastly different lifestyles, thus threatening to turn global inequality into an ever greater spectacle. This spectacle has the potential to inspire global rage, perhaps justifiable in the same sense as encountered in the years preceding the French Revolution. Indeed, the present world order resembles France’s Ancien Régime in many ways.
Interestingly, the term “Third World”, used to denote less “developed” states, comes from the term “Third Estate”, which referred to “commoners” in France’s Ancien Régime – the subjects who rose up and turned their kingdom into a republic. Famously, Alfred Sauvy coined the term when he presented an analogy between exploited colonial states under the European powers and exploited subjects living under absolute monarchy, in an article for L’Observateur in 1952.
Since Sauvy coined the term, decolonization has achieved its popular ends, but an exploitative structure remains in place. At least that is the view of dependency theorists, world-systems theorists and other structuralist critics of the international system. The most eminent of these analysts is Immanuel Wallerstein, possibly the greatest sociologist alive.
In Wallerstein’s analysis, the modern thesis of “development” supported by the United Nations and other intergovernmental institutions is as much to blame for world inequality as Europe’s colonial “civilizing” thesis that came before it. In his widely taught theory of the world-system, the world can be socially and geographically broken down into three strata based on the kind of production processes occurring in different states and geographic regions.
Immanuel Wallerstein sees world inequality not as something proceeding from countries lagging behind others as a result of historic oppression and debt, but as something proceeding from the existence of “countries” altogether. In his assessment, the division of the world into distinct nation-states is founded on arbitrary distinctions among the human race, and this gives rise to world inequality. Taking up such logic, it is hard for one to deny that the dissolution of the nation-state model itself would be a core part of any long-term political designs for remedying world inequality.
If the abandonment of the nation-state model seems too radical for you at this stage, it is not too radical for Wallerstein. In Utopistics (1998) he predicts that a crisis that could occur as early as the coming half-century will create real opportunities to seriously challenge the nation-state model. He does not say what alternative system this crisis entails, but argues that there will be a unique opportunity to construct something far more egalitarian than anything previously known. If a more equitable order is indeed gained, this would involve borders ceasing to be necessary or recognized, and authoritarian state norms becoming unsustainable.
We can already see antagonisms that are directly tied to the transnational wealth inequalities on which this article is focused. Often misleadingly framed as issues between two states, they are actually issues between opposing strata of the world-system itself. Such issues include crises on the land, like migration to the United States through its brutally enforced border with Mexico, and the inhumane occupation of Palestinian land by the Israeli State. They include crises on the water, such as migration from North Africa to Spain and Italy.
The crises tied to the enforcement of borders are part of the larger crisis gripping what Wallerstein calls the “interstate system”. This interstate system is the “political superstructure” of a global division of labor predicated on the historic industrial inequality persisting between entire continents and so-called nations. Strong states possess advanced factories and skills, while weak states are left to mine arduously. Wallerstein describes this exploitative situation in terms of a “core-periphery” relationship, in which the industrialized powers represent the “core”.
Another side to this crisis of the state is the alarming spread of internecine conflict and the growing perception of law enforcers as illegitimate, arbitrary and cruel (the 2014 Ferguson Riots are a compelling example of this and demonstrate that the US is not exempt). Such trends point inexorably towards the view that the nation-state may eventually be fated to be abandoned – not just in a particular country, but everywhere.
In my view, Wallerstein’s analysis is compelling. However, it lacks emphasis on the dawn of digital life, which has added a whole new dimension to the crisis of the world-system by literally turning the world into a community of individuals interacting on an unprecedented supranational level. This is historically important and bound to change global politics for very profound and complex reasons.
Another key historian of the world-system, Benedict Anderson, says something insightful about our modern nation-states in his book, Imagined Communities (1982). His analysis differs from Wallerstein’s, mainly due to his greater emphasis on technology and language. He gives the example of Bismarck’s Germany as the first modern nation-state, which differs from Wallerstein’s preoccupation with revolutionary France. In Imagined Communities, Anderson explains that the telegraph and rail systems allowed Germany to become a unified nation, by developing a sense of national consciousness.
If telegraph led to the formation of national consciousness through an illusory sense of community enough to give rise to a nation, surely it follows that the internet – with its profound revolution in our lives – will give rise to something equally significant. The champion of today’s rebel “cypherpunk” elite, Julian Assange, has said something very approximate to this in his own rhetoric, arguing that a “new body politic” is rising to challenge government authority through the internet. He also describes digital life as borderless and free, in such a way that can only become more and more real as digital technology continues its exponential growth. It is no accident that this sounds like the egalitarian post-state future leaned towards by Wallerstein as humanity’s noblest alternative.
Modern political legitimacy is founded on the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as Immanuel Wallerstein repeatedly points out in his works. One may be the citizen of a “nation” by having certain arbitrary qualities or place of birth, and as such may be treated equally and defended by a given state. This is what we call being part of a nation, whether it is the United States or a highly contested “state” like Palestine or Abkhazia. However, the basis of such an institution is very much in question, and in the future it will become increasingly weakened by the growing transnational consciousness brought about by weakening borders and exponential digital communication.
Where does this lead us? Shall we reject popular sovereignty as obsolete? Impossible. It is the sacrosanct foundation of all modern democracy and civil rights, and the only reliable metric of social progress. Self-determination of nations has been part of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, as is the idea that regimes must be legitimately elected to power by their constituent nations. However, if the nation is to become obsolete, as predicted in Wallerstein’s analysis of the crisis of the world-system, self-determination still stands because human rights are sacrosanct. The self-recognition of transnational humanity as sovereign must follow, and global lines of transport and communication make that feasible. The hard part is educating people that their dear “nation” no longer exists, and that is why speech and writing to sustain a global social narrative are so vital.
Perhaps the end result of the self-determination of humanity is not necessarily “global citizenship” as predicted by some (redundant, since citizenship is designed to exclude others and serves no purpose if it lacks this proscriptive power). Nor is it necessarily “world government”. However, we can know that human rights like self-determination will outlive the existence of the nation-state, and the alternative regime will then be designed and elected by the whole of transnational humanity rather than a particular group.
A new form of network-centric governance, authoritative but not authoritarian, based on scientific methods of evaluation, and tolerating no disparities in wealth or information, is a model that could supersede all the nations and make world inequality obsolete. Such a revised politics would be intellectually consistent with and assist to usher in a Global Resource-Based Economy.

By Harry J. BenthamMore articles by Harry J. Bentham

Originally published in Issue 13 of The Venus Project Magazine

BitCoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology — A Brief Q&A

My Brief Q&A session with Christoffer De Geer, about BitCoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology.

This Q&A was first published by Mr. Geir Solem, Director of Cryptor Trust Inc., on the Cryptor Primary Investor Blog (Date: October 31, 2014).

Quote: “BitCoin was the first small step in what I believe will be a truly transformational journey, for each and every one of us. In 10 Years Cryptocurrency and Blockchains have every chance to have the same, or greater, impact on our lives, society, and civiliation, as the creation of Email had to the Postal Service, and the Fax Machine as compared to the Internet; in 25 Years Monetary Systems, Systems of Trade and Exchange, Systems of Transaction of Goods, Ledger and Recordation Systems, Everything You Know – Will – Be – Different – and, Unrecognizable relative to what we know today at the end of the year 2014.”

See the Q&A article here » [Article: BitCoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology] Continue reading “BitCoin, Cryptocurrency, and Blockchain Technology — A Brief Q&A” | >

Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

— The Guardian

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”

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Pa. department backs seed library protocol as reaction grows

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture sees its new protocol for seed libraries as an opportunity to safely regulate them while saving an organization or person from liability.

Proponents of seed libraries, however, see the department’s efforts as a way to effectively shut down movement to grow and maintain local seed varieties.

The issue at hand stems back to April 26, when the Joseph T. Simpson Public Library opened a seed library, in which it would allow residents to “borrow” seeds and then offer seeds back to the library to start the process over again. It’s the second part of that process that caught the attention of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, which then contacted the Cumberland County Library System to rectify what it saw as a violation of the Pennsylvania Seed Act of 2004.

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