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Archive for the ‘economics’ category: Page 134

Apr 27, 2018

How much does infrastructure boost an economy?

Posted by in categories: economics, food

Before 1870, India barely had railroads. It didn’t have many canals either, and only a small percentage of the population lived along the three main rivers. So when goods needed to be transported, people used steer, which could pull freight about 20 miles per day.

But the British, India’s colonial rulers, started building rail lines, and then built some more. By 1930, there were more than 40,000 miles of railroads in India, and goods could be shipped about 400 miles a day.

The result? As MIT economist David Donaldson shows in a newly published study on the economic impact of building infrastructure, railroads fostered commerce that raised real agricultural income by 16 percent.

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Apr 26, 2018

Balancing nuclear and renewable energy

Posted by in categories: economics, nuclear energy, solar power, sustainability

Nuclear power plants typically run either at full capacity or not at all. Yet the plants have the technical ability to adjust to the changing demand for power and thus better accommodate sources of renewable energy such as wind or solar power.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently explored the benefits of doing just that. If nuclear generated in a more flexible manner, the researchers say, the plants could lower electricity costs for consumers, enable the use of more , improve the economics of nuclear and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The team explored technical constraints on flexible operations at and introduced a new way to model how those challenges affect how power systems operate. “Flexible nuclear power operations are a ‘win-win-win,’ lowering power system operating costs, increasing revenues for nuclear plant owners and significantly reducing curtailment of renewable energy,” wrote the team in an Applied Energy article published online on April 24.

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Apr 23, 2018

Shaping the Future of Digital Economy and Society

Posted by in categories: business, economics

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971, and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is tied to no political, partisan or national interests.

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Apr 20, 2018

The Amount of Money A.I. Researchers Earn Will Shock You

Posted by in categories: economics, law, robotics/AI

Researchers in artificial intelligence can stand to make a ton of money. But this week, we actually know just how much some A.I. experts are being paid — and it’s a lot, even at a nonprofit.

OpenAI, a nonprofit research lab, paid its lead A.I. expert, Ilya Sutskever, more than $1.9 million in 2016, according to a recent public tax filing. Another researcher, Ian Goodfellow, made more than $800,000 that year, even though he was only hired in March, the New York Times reported.

As the publication points out, the figures are eye-opening and offer a bit of insight on how much A.I. researchers are being paid across the globe. Normally, this kind of data isn’t readily accessible. But since OpenAI is a nonprofit organization, it’s required by law to make these figures public.

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Apr 18, 2018

Bioquark Inc. — Cracking the Entrepreneur Code Podcast — Ira Pastor

Posted by in categories: aging, biotech/medical, business, disruptive technology, DNA, economics, finance, genetics, health, life extension

Apr 14, 2018

Google futurist and director of engineering: Basic income will spread worldwide by the 2030s

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, economics, employment, Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI

  • Basic income will be widespread by the 2030s, according to Google futurist and director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.
  • Kurzweil is known for making seemingly wild predictions. In 2016, he predicted that by 2029, medical technology will add an extra year to human life expectancies on an annual basis.
  • ” We’re going to have more and more powerful technology to keep our physical bodies going. We’ll think, ‘Wow, back in 2018, people only had one body, and they couldn’t back up their mind file,’” he said onstage at TED.

As it becomes apparent that artificial intelligence will replace ever-more jobs in the coming years, a growing number of politicians, nonprofits, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have started thinking about how we’ll cope with a world in which not everyone can — or needs to — work.

Basic income experiments, in which people are given a regular salary just to live, no strings attached, are popping up all over Europe, Africa, and North America.

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Apr 13, 2018

Ray Kurzweil: Universal Basic Income will arrive in the 2030s

Posted by in categories: economics, media & arts, Ray Kurzweil

That, he said, will lead to new forms of expression, such as music, that will be as different from today’s communication as current human expression is from that of primates.

Asked how the U.S. and other countries would pay for a basic income, given existing large deficits, Kurzweil predicted that massive deflation would make goods much cheaper.

Separately: Kurzweil debuted a new Google project called “Talk to Books,” a new free tool that allows people to use their voice to ask a question and that will go find the best answers from hundreds of thousands of books. Unlike traditional search, it is based on semantics, not keywords.

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Apr 13, 2018

Robot Cities: Three Urban Prototypes for Future Living

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, finance, governance, internet, robotics/AI

Before I started working on real-world robots, I wrote about their fictional and historical ancestors. This isn’t so far removed from what I do now. In factories, labs, and of course science fiction, imaginary robots keep fueling our imagination about artificial humans and autonomous machines.

Real-world robots remain surprisingly dysfunctional, although they are steadily infiltrating urban areas across the globe. This fourth industrial revolution driven by robots is shaping urban spaces and urban life in response to opportunities and challenges in economic, social, political, and healthcare domains. Our cities are becoming too big for humans to manage.

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Apr 12, 2018

Russia planning manned spaceflight to moon: Putin

Posted by in categories: economics, space travel

Russia is actively implementing a lunar program through 2030, aiming to send astronauts to the moon, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, Russia’s Cosmonautics Day.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin (L front)  visits the renovated Cosmos pavilion of the VDNKh exhibition centre. [Photo: IC]

Putin said “yes” to the question “We are going to fly to the moon, right?” when he visited the Space Pavilion at the all-Russian Center of Achievements of the National Economy, according to the Kremlin.

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Apr 12, 2018

DARPA Awards Ginkgo Bioworks and Transcriptic $9.5M to Bring AI into the Lab

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, employment, robotics/AI

The industry partners will use the money to train artificially intelligent laboratory robots.

Many people assume that when robots enter the economy, they’ll snatch low-skilled jobs. But don’t let a PhD fool you — AI-powered robots will soon impact a laboratory near you.

The days of pipetting liquids around were already numbered. Companies like Transcriptic, based in Menlo Park, California, now offer automated molecular biology lab work, from routine PCR to more complicated preclinical assays. Customers can buy time on their ‘robotic cloud lab’ using any laptop and access the results in a web app.

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