Lifeboat Foundation

Our economy will be severely impacted as millions of lorry drivers, cabbies and delivery people are put out of work. In this era of endless innovation, humanity’s century-long relationship with the automobile is about to be permanently disrupted. The reason has nothing to do with millennials, Uber or improvements in mass transport. Driving should and will be made illegal because we now have the technology to prevent deadly traffic accidents, one of the greatest causes of premature deaths.

More than 1.2 million people are killed in car accidents each year. Last year, more than 275,000 Chinese, 238,000 Indians and 36,000 Americans died in preventable traffic accidents. Since Ralph Nader first took on the car industry by publishing Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, auto-mobile manufacturers have radically improved the safety and reliability of their vehicles. Seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, as well as tyre-pressure-monitoring, have all reduced traffic deaths. But, until now, makers were unable to deal with the single biggest cause of fatalities: human error. We now have the technology to save millions of lives, but does society have the willpower to mandate its use?

Google’s autonomous vehicles have logged 1.5 million kilometres on roads dominated by human-driven cars. Subjected to the same real-world conditions as us mere mortals, self-driving cars have been through rain, sleet and snow. These vehicles have driven the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe 40 times, without incident. In July, Google reported 14 minor road accidents in total — but in all of the cases blamed human error. According to the data, human-driver error is responsible for 94 per cent of all crashes.

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Space is not a government program; it’s the rest of the Universe. Private space business is now a major factor, bent on finding investors interested in generating profits by making space more accessible to more people. Space business pays taxes to governments; it does not consume tax revenues. Further, space business can offer launch services to government agencies at highly competitive rates, thus saving taxpayer dollars. How can they do this, competing with government-funded boosters with a 50-year track record? Simple: governments have no incentive to cut costs. Traditional aerospace industry giants have a huge vested interest in boosters that were developed to military and NASA standards, among which economy was not even an issue. But innovative, competitive companies such as XCOR Aerospace and Mojave Aerospace, without such baggage (and overhead) can drive costs down dramatically. This is a proven principle: notice that we are no longer buying IBM PCs with 64 k of RAM for $5000 a unit.

Even more important in the long view, space is a literally astronomical reservoir of material and energy resources. The profit potential of even a single such resource, such as solar power collectors in space beaming microwave power to Earth, is in the trillions of dollars. What would it be worth to the world to reduce fossil fuel consumption by a factor of 20 or 100 while lowering energy costs? Can we afford to continue pretending that Earth is a closed system, doomed to eke out finite resources into a cold, dark future?

Can we afford space? Wrong question. Can businesses afford space? Yes. We get to reap the benefits of their innovative ideas and free competition without footing the bill.

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Creative way to treat Cataracts.

What affects 20 million people, robs the global economy of billions of dollars and can be fixed with a five-minute procedure?

The answer is cataract blindness. The disease, which begins with clouding of the eyes and can lead to loss of vision without treatment, will probably afflict 12 million more people by 2020, as a shortage of skilled doctors limits access to care in developing nations, according to the Rand Corporation.

Continue reading “Virtual Reality Could Be The Next Big Thing In Curing Cataract Blindness” »

“According to many industry observers, we are today on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another…”

The World Economic Forum (WEF) published an analysis today on the technological and sociological drivers of employment.

The report, titled The Future of Jobs, validates the accelerating impact of technology on global employment trends, and also highlights serious concerns that job growth in certain industries is still very much outpaced by large scale declines in other industries.

Continue reading “The World Economic Forum On The Future Of Jobs” »

Essentially, the jobs being replaced will give rise to new roles that people can take up.

“There are new classes of jobs that we haven’t thought of yet. Those who can curate and manage the full rich data lifecycle will be a new class of professional,” Shadbolt added.

Whether you like it or not, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots are going to be a big part of the future workforce.

Continue reading “3 ways robots and AI will change the way you work” »

Kudos to Manpower’s CEO Jonas Prising — with the possibility on the horizon of a world wide loss of 5 million jobs; we need to make sure we a structure in place to absorb that hit with needs to include education & retraining and a financial support structure to help those laid off and their immediate family members (namely children). And, the earlier we can train folks; the less costly it will be for governments and countries in the long run.

ManpowerJonas Prising, CEO and Executive Chairman of Manpower, spoke to Business Insider in Davos for the WEF meeting.

Over 2,500 of the world’s most powerful people have talked about the risks and opportunities surrounding “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Continue reading “Manpower’s CEO just gave us an awesome solution to the ‘robots taking human jobs’ conundrum” »

This all sounds extremely familiar to me for some reason. And, really ties in well with my recent articles on “AI holding your data hostage” and “Quantum Computing — things that need to be considered” — glad more folks are speaking up.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy, said the device reading brain activity could be accessed by ‘not good Samaritans’.

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Go Hubo

The so-called ‘fourth industrial revolution’ will bring ever faster cycles of innovation, posing huge challenges to companies, workers, governments and societies alike Implantable mobile phones. 3D-printed organs for transplant. Clothes and reading-glasses connected to the Internet.

Such things may be science fiction today but they will be scientific fact by 2025 as the world enters an era of advanced robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing, according to executives surveyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Continue reading “Here come the robots, welcome to the next industrial revolution” »

“There is good reason for optimism about progress on reducing inequity,” he writes. He published the essay from Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum is taking place this week.

Gates points out that since the turn of the century, “Maternal deaths have almost halved; child mortality and malaria deaths have halved; extreme poverty has more than halved.” Plus, thanks to the Global Fund, a project supported by the Gates Foundation, 17 million lives have been saved from malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis.

Progress like that is encouraging him to believe that in a mere 14-ish more years, poverty can be wiped out. That’s the cornerstone of the Global Goals plan, which was been signed by the United Nations’ 193 countries agreed in September.

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