Lifeboat Foundation

Here’s a short video and story from CCTV America (China’s Public TV in America) from my interview at the Augmented World Expo. I discuss robots, the Immortality Bus, and a Universal Basic Income:

CCTV America’s Mark Niu interviewed Zoltan Istvan, the founder of the Transhumanist Party and a 2016 candidate for the U.S. presidency. He asked Istvan one more question about his “immortality bus” and whether robots will take over our jobs.

Interesting twist; wonder how many tax dollars paid for the experts?

There is a bitter truth for economists, as well as professionals in other areas. Non-experts are typically better at forecasting future trends than experts.

It has been argued that economists should be historians rather than meteorologists and many years before the recent economic crash, John Kenneth Galbraith, the late Harvard economist, joked: “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

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“Supporters point to the fact that 21st-Century work is increasingly automated, with more and more traditional jobs, in factories, retail and even in finance and accounting, being done by machines. And they do not need salaries.”

(I highly recommend this article, with all kinds of pros and cons, spare a couple of minutes and read it)

Switzerland is holding a landmark vote on whether to give each citizen a guaranteed basic income, the BBC’s Imogen Foulkes reports.

The WSJ comes out in favor of UBI.

Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant is the best way to cope with a radically changing U.S. jobs market—and to revitalize America’s civic culture.

An Australian professor is building a robot to keep an eye on livestock.

With the robot economy looming large in the coming decades, one solution to vanishing jobs may simply be to give people money regardless of whether or not they work.

That idea is called “basic income,” and it just gained the support of one of the tech world’s founding fathers, Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

“I think a basic income is one of the ways of addressing massive global inequality,” Berners-Lee, who founded the Web in 1989, explained on a recent episode of The Economist podcast.

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QC will change many industries and even some fortunes as well. So, no wonders Canada & Australia both deem it as a priority.

Mike Lazaridis, founder of Blackberry Limited and the visionary who led the establishment of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo and Quantum Valley Investments, delivered a keynote address highlighting the Quantum Valley model in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada and the emphasis both federal and provincial governments have placed on the development of quantum technologies.

The Quantum Europe conference comes at a time when large scale investments from tech companies and governments around the world, including in Canada, are being made as part of the “Second Quantum Revolution” – a new global industry fueled by the commercialization of new transformative quantum technologies.

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My new article on how some technologies will inevitably make the government smaller:

However, there’s reason to believe that in the near future, government might dramatically shrink—not because of demands by fiscally astute Americans, but because of radical technology.

Indubitably, millions of government jobs will soon be replaced by robots. Even the US President could one day be replaced, which—strangely enough—might bring sanity to our election process.

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LOS ANGELES Some of the richest, smartest and most powerful humans have an important message for the rest of us as they convened this week to discuss pressing global issues: the robots are coming.

At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, at least four panels so far have focused on technology taking over markets to mining — and most importantly, jobs.

“Most of the benefits we see from automation is about higher quality and fewer errors, but in many cases it does reduce labor,” Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, said on Tuesday during a panel on “Is Any Job Truly Safe?”

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