Lifeboat Foundation

Japan’s combination of artificial intelligence and robotics may be the answer to its rapidly shrinking labor force

Todd Schneider, Gee Hee Hong, and Anh Van Le

While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the coming decades, it is likely to have an impact on portions of almost all jobs to some degree—depending on the type of work and the tasks involved. Set to move beyond routine and repetitive manufacturing activities, automation has the potential to appear in a much broader range of activities than seen until now, and to redefine human labor and work style in services and other sectors. In Japan, the rapid decline in the labor force and the limited influx of immigrants create a powerful incentive for automation, which makes the country a particularly useful laboratory for the study of the future landscape of work.

The plan includes seven major recommendations.

The first is creating a new state authority to oversee nuclear development. They’ll also establish a single point of contact to help companies navigate the complex permitting process.

Education is also a big focus of the plan. It calls for partnerships with community colleges and universities to train workers for these high-tech jobs.

Could AGI be here by 2025? In a shocking new interview, Sam Altman — OpenAI’s CEO — just dropped some MAJOR revelations about their path to artificial general intelligence.

Unlike his usual careful corporate speak, Sam appears surprisingly confident about what’s ahead.

Continue reading “Sam Altman: ‘We Know How to Build AGI by 2025’ 🤯” »

Your Social Security number is essential for finding employment, filing taxes and applying for credit. It can also be a nightmare to recover if thieves get a hold of your SSN and use it to apply for jobs, open accounts in your name and steal your tax refund.

Blocking electronic access to your SSN may feel extreme — it’s certainly inconvenient. But if you’ve been a victim of identity theft or your personal identifiable information was compromised in a recent data breach, like the hacks of Change Healthcare or National Public Data, where hundreds of millions of people were impacted, locking your SSN may protect you from future harm.

Blocking access or “locking” your SSN will make it extremely difficult for an identity thief to use your SSN for malicious actions. This, coupled with a credit freeze, can help stop identity thieves in their tracks.

Individuals born before 37 weeks of gestation, considered to be preterm infants, have, on average, lower employment income, university enrollment and educational attainment through age 28, according to a study publishing November 6, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Petros Pechlivanoglou of The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada.

Preterm birth affects about 10% of all births worldwide and accounts for one in five deaths in children. Economic and lifestyle factors can affect a family’s access to therapies and supports, financial stability and quality of life.

A comprehensive review of the economic impacts of nature-based solutions (NbS), led by the University of Oxford and published this week in PLOS Climate, concludes they can unlock prosperity by boosting local economies, increasing agricultural productivity and creating jobs.

“Our vision is for chip designers and engineering students, not just suppliers and manufacturers, to co-locate here, to create a value added ecosystem beyond just what it takes to build chips, and that’s how we’re going to create more value in the Phoenix economy,” Mack said.

A further three plants are also planned for the Phoenix site, which could bring TSMC’s total investment in the area to over $120 billion. Tech giant Apple has announced it will buy semiconductors from the fabrication plants.

The plants are anticipated to create 10,000 permanent jobs, and another 80,000 are expected to be created in the surrounding development.

Although UBTech is leaving 10% of work for humans in management, other AI tech is being specifically developed for that niche: OpenAI’s new framework, Swarm, allows AI agents to collaborate and independently execute complex tasks, potentially boosting business efficiency.

Artificial intelligence agents are everywhere, quietly reshaping industries and automating tasks we didn’t think possible a few years ago. Unlike basic automation, these AI agents can handle complex jobs, think independently and learn from their environment. The result? Healthcare, finance and logistics businesses are seeing rapid gains in efficiency — and, in some cases, doing away with manual work altogether.

What are AI agents exactly? They’re software programs that carry out specific tasks without constant supervision. Whether handling customer requests, diagnosing medical conditions or predicting market trends, AI agents are versatile workhorses. Instead of waiting for humans to input every command, these agents operate autonomously, reacting to real-time data and adjusting their actions accordingly.

Continue reading “AI Explained: AI Agents Are Quietly Taking Over Everyday Tasks” »

How can afforestation/reforestation (AR) help reduce climate change and help achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement calling for a maximum 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a team of researchers from Germany investigated how AR could contribute to meeting this goal. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, legislators, and the public better understand the steps that can be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change, for both the short and long term.

In simple terms, afforestation/reforestation (AR) is planting trees in areas that have experienced deforestation (tree removal) or areas where trees never existed. For the study, the researchers used Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to simulate how AR could contribute to the Paris Agreement goals by conducting more than 1,200 scenarios. In the end, the researchers found that AR contributions to climate change makes its biggest impact in 2052, along with decreasing average global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Finally, AR could also reduce the amount of time before average global temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius by 13 years.

“These results show that global AR can in fact make an important contribution to mitigating climate change, when applied at the large sale,” said Dr. Yiannis Moustakis, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München and lead author of the study. “But it is not a panacea and must be viewed in a more comprehensive framework that takes socioeconomic trade-offs equally into account. Planting a forest could create jobs, revenue, and promote ecosystem services, but it could also deprive people’s livelihood, exacerbate poverty, financially or physically displace people, and disturb local food networks.”