Lifeboat Foundation

Today sees the launch of the biennial UK Space Conference, taking place at Manchester Central, from 30 May through to 1 June. This year’s conference is designed to inspire, enable and connect the UK and international space community.

The multiple plenary and parallel sessions feature informative and interactive presentations, workshops and debates covering a wide range of topics from space science through to how satellite data is being used by many industries here on Earth. The programme has been designed to provide a compelling forum to discuss the changing economic and technological landscape impacting the UK space sector.

Stuart Martin, CEO of the Satellite Applications Catapult, said: “The UK Space Conference provides an invaluable opportunity for those involved or interested in the space sector to gain up-to-date information, network with peers, establish new contacts, exchange information and improve links with government, industry, academia, customers, suppliers, and the financial community.

Continue reading “Catapult joins over 1,000 delegates at the UK Space Conference in Manchester” »

Individuals who mine Bitcoins needn’t be miners. We call them ‘miners’ because they are awarded BTC as they solve mathematical computations. The competition to unearth these reserve coins also serves a vital purpose. They validate the transactions of Bitcoin users all over the world: buyers, loans & debt settlement, exchange transactions, inter-bank transfers, etc. They are not really miners. They are more accurately engaged in transaction validation or ‘bookkeeping’.

There are numerous proposals for how to incentivize miners once all 21 million coins have been mined/awarded in May 2140. Depending upon the network load and the value of each coin, we may need to agree on an alternate incentive earlier than 2140. At the opening of the 2015 MIT Bitcoin Expo, Andreas Antonopolous proposed some validator incentive alternatives. One very novel suggestion was based on game theory and involved competition and status rather than cash payments.

I envision an alternative approach—one that also addresses the problem of miners and users having different goals. In an ideal world the locus of users should intersect more fully with the overseers…

To achieve this, I have proposed that every wallet be capable of also mining, even if the wallet is simply a smartphone app or part of a cloud account at an exchange service. To get uses participating in validating the transactions of peers, any transaction fee could be waived for anyone who completes 1 validation for each n transactions. (Say one validation for every five or ten transactions). In this manner, everyone pitches in a small amount of resources to maintain a robust network.

Continue reading “How to Incentivize Bitcoin miners after all 21M BTC are awarded” »

Jobs in the solar field in the United States grew at a rate 17 times faster than the overall economy. This was part of a larger trend towards jobs in renewable energy and away from more dangerous, less sustainable jobs in fossil fuels.

A new report released by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reveals that solar jobs in the U.S. (and other nations) are expanding quickly. As of November 2016, the American solar industry employed 260,077 workers. This is an increase of 24.5% from 2015, with a growth rate that is 17 times faster than the United States economy as a whole.

Most jobs that exist today might disappear within decades. As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs. Many new professions are likely to appear: virtual-world designers, for example. But such professions will probably require more creativity and flexibility, and it is unclear whether 40-year-old unemployed taxi drivers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if the ex-insurance agent somehow makes the transition into a virtual-world designer, the pace of progress is such that within another decade he might have to reinvent himself yet again.

The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses through some scheme of universal basic income. The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content. People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day?

Continue reading “The meaning of life in a world without work” »

The Opportunity of Automation

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” – Dori Lessing in The Golden Notebook.

Continue reading “Automation Could Lead to the World’s Smartest Society” »

• Mark Zuckerberg spoke at Harvard’s commencement, saying that basic income is an “idea worth exploring.”
• With his endorsement of UBI, Zuckerberg joins a growing list of experts and innovators who believe supporting basic human needs must precede innovation.

This week Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the latest class of Harvard graduates, offering advice about the future and inspiration to grow on. Among his ideas was the notion that universal basic income (UBI), a standard base “salary” for each member of society that can help meet our basic needs regardless of the work we do, is worth exploring.

Future generations are on course to become enveloped in the biggest pension crisis in history, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), unless policymakers from the world’s leading economies take urgent action.

The Geneva-based organization predicted the challenges of an ageing population could result in the world’s largest economies being forced to tackle a pension time-bomb.

Analysis from WEF showed six countries with the biggest pensions, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Netherlands, Japan and Australia, as well as the two most densely populated countries in the world – China and India – would face a retirement savings gap in excess of $400 trillion in 2050, up from around $70 trillion in 2015.

Continue reading “Pensions time-bomb for world’s biggest economies could explode to $400 trillion, says WEF” »

The science community just figured out why we wont actually be doing space mining, until capitalism is no longer a factor anyways.

It might have just pushed back its manned mission to Mars, but NASA just fast-tracked a planned journey to 16 Psyche — an asteroid made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal.

Estimated to contain $10,000 quadrillion in iron alone, if we could somehow mine Psyche’s minerals and bring them back to Earth, it would collapse our comparatively puny global economy of $78 trillion many times over. Fortunately for the economic stability of our planet, NASA plans on looking but not extracting.

Continue reading “NASA Just Fast-Tracked Its Mission to Explore a $10,000 Quadrillion Metal Asteroid” »

He was 101 years old. I had the honor to meet Jacque and Roxanne Meadows last year at The Venus Project in Florida. I wrote an extensive article for Vice Motherboard on Jacque and the Resource-based economy: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/eliminating-money…chnoutopia And Now This Future did a video on my visit with him that now has 14 million views and over 180,000 Facebook shares: https://www.facebook.com/NowThisFuture/videos/1500983249942850/ I’m grateful I met Jacque. He was an amazing person! And his important work will live on.