Lifeboat Foundation

“In the case of the Industrial Revolution, people’s lives didn’t improve for seven decades,” Frey says. “That’s two generations. I think we need to be very concerned about some of these short-term effects on people.”

Frey says for seven decades wages were stagnant, food consumption decreased and “people’s living standards deteriorated.” The economy was doing quite well, but most of the workers weren’t seeing the benefits of that economy.

“Because people’s living standards deteriorated, people rioted against mechanized factories. The Luddites are often portrayed as these irrational enemies of progress, and to some extent, that’s right if you take a very long term view,””

Continue reading “If this era of automation mirrors the past, we’re in trouble” »

Those calling for a government-funded universal basic income are acting as though it’s a hot new idea. It’s not. It’s been tried before—and it didn’t work.

In essence, universal basic income—also known as guaranteed minimum income—provides cash payments to all citizens, regardless of need.

Advocates range from tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to libertarian scholar Charles Murray.

Universal Basic Income usually creates a confusion and heated debates when people get divided between doomsday and Utopian scenarios. With faster than expected development of AI, we might be faced with no choice. In such case, what will UBI mean for most of us and how will it be implemented?

Let’s say it was possible to buy your health by the day. How much would you be willing to pay for each year of perfect health? What if you could buy years of health for your loved ones, too? At what price point would you draw the line?

This sort of difficult calculus, on a much larger and chronologically longer scale, underpins many decisions we make in medicine — not just decisions that we make as patients, but also the decisions that are made for us by employers, health insurance funders and policymakers. We don’t have the resources to pursue every possible treatment, to research every possible breakthrough, so how do we allocate the resources available? It turns out that there is an entire field of healthcare economics devoted to understanding the costs and benefits of conventional medicine, and to navigating the trade-offs between more expense and better healthcare.

Continue reading “Econogenomics: The Economics of Genomic Testing for Health” »

Andrew Yang today announced the creation of Humanity First, an organization that will fund programs for universal basic income and data as a property right.

Before the outbreak, China’s tech industry was already under pressure from the ongoing trade war with the US, which has seen expansion plans crimped by a tighter funding environment and macro economic slowdown. A rapid rise in the number of unemployed could pose a big challenge for the world’s second-largest economy which has seen growth rates already slow to near three-decade lows.

A growing number of Chinese tech-related companies have adopted ‘self-rescue’ plans as the coronavirus epidemic disrupts their business operations.

Another important question is the extent to which continued increases in computational capacity are economically viable. The Stanford Index reports a 300,000-fold increase in capacity since 2012. But in the same month that the Report was issued, Jerome Pesenti, Facebook’s AI head, warned that “The rate of progress is not sustainable…If you look at top experiments, each year the cost is going up 10-fold. Right now, an experiment might be in seven figures but it’s not going to go to nine or 10 figures, it’s not possible, nobody can afford that.”

AI has feasted on low-hanging fruit, like search engines and board games. Now comes the hard part — distinguishing causal relationships from coincidences, making high-level decisions in the face of unfamiliar ambiguity, and matching the wisdom and commonsense that humans acquire by living in the real world. These are the capabilities that are needed in complex applications such as driverless vehicles, health care, accounting, law, and engineering.

Despite the hype, AI has had very little measurable effect on the economy. Yes, people spend a lot of time on social media and playing ultra-realistic video games. But does that boost or diminish productivity? Technology in general and AI in particular are supposed to be creating a new New Economy, where algorithms and robots do all our work for us, increasing productivity by unheard-of amounts. The reality has been the opposite. For decades, U.S. productivity grew by about 3% a year. Then, after 1970, it slowed to 1.5% a year, then 1%, now about 0.5%. Perhaps we are spending too much time on our smartphones.

Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking are not alone in their calls for humanity to become a multi-planetary species. But they certainly are the most visible advocates for space colonization. And while the moon might be the most obvious jumping off point to the solar system and beyond, nothing stands out as a potential site for long term settlement more than Mars.

But just how realistic is sending astronauts to the Red Planet anytime soon–let alone colonizing it permanently? The obstacles are many, and aerospace engineering may well be the least of them. The human biological, psychological tolss and survival strategies–radiation, low gravity, isolation and the marshalling air, water, and food resources–all stand in the way. And then there is the economic cost and the political and public will. In this edition of Seeking Delphi,™ I talk to former NASA Mars mission navigator, Moriba Jah, about the many challenges of leaving of our home planet.

As coronavirus outbreaks have become more threatening outside China in recent days, attention has turned to the likely damage to global output and to the possible reaction of macroeconomic policymakers. This has become urgent with the catastrophic decline in China’s PMI business surveys yesterday. The question now is whether a global recession can be avoided.

The global economy faces a demand shock focused on services and consumer spending.