Lifeboat Foundation

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Work isn’t working anymore. Labour productivity has fallen in the UK since the financial crisis; 13.5 million people are living in low-income households; real wages are falling and the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, is rising.

The sustainability and quality of jobs in our economy is also decreasing – 7.1 million workers now face precarious working conditions, meaning that uncertainty (and for many, anxiety) itself is now built into our employment system. According to some estimates, 30 per cent of UK jobs could potentially be automated away by the early 2030s. Depending on the sector, this will mean a remarkable reduction of required hours of human labour. With less work to go around, we will find ourselves in heightened competition with machines and each other, ever more desperate for stability.

Is this our only future? No. But in order to change it and move beyond this crisis, we first need to confront our very conception of work. For a long time we have thought of work as a matter of individual choice – a free, private agreement between a single person and an employer. You, the thinking goes, are free to pick whatever job you like as long as the employer is happy to have you on board and there are a sufficient number of jobs created by the free market.

Continue reading “It’s possible that we can build a society where people don’t have to work – here’s how” »

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One manufacturing company just made history by successfully using a special 3D printer in extreme, space-like conditions.

The team printed polymer alloy parts in a super-high vacuum, and hope their new tech will allow the design and manufacture of much more ambitious spacecraft and space-based telescopes.

Continue reading “Meet The First-Ever 3D Printer That Can Do Construction in The Vacuum of Space” »

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Melinda Gates says that even she, a former Microsoft executive, has to learn how to be a parent in the digital age.

The equations of physics are things that we humans created to understand the Universe, and it can be hard to disentangle them from the Universe’s innate properties. It turns out that one of the weirdest things scientists have come up with, what Albert Einstein derisively called “spooky action at a distance,” is more than just math: It’s a fact of reality.

That concept is also known as entanglement, and it’s what allows particles that have once interacted to share a connection regardless of the separation between them. A team of physicists in the United Kingdom used some dense mathematics to come to their Einstein-angering conclusion, taking an important step towards proving whether quantum mechanics’ weirdness is just the math talking, or whether it speaks to innate physical requirements. Their mathematical proof’s main assumption is that any new physics theory should be backward-compatible with the physics you learned in high school.

Rob McInerney, the founder & CEO of Intelligent Layer and co-founder of IntelligentX Brewing Company, explains the use of artificial intelligence in improving everyday products.

“We wanted to see if in the future the most effective brands are the ones that talk to their customers not to make better advertising but to share ideas. We thought that they’d use artificial intelligence to help real people and brands talk to each other and we wanted to prove this in an industry which people have very strong views on and that which we had a pretty significant interest in as well… Beer… So we created intelligent X the world’s first beer brewed by artificial intelligence.”

Continue reading “Using Artificial Intelligence To Make Beer Better” »