16 Ways Coronavirus May Change the Way We Look at the World

Carin Ism and Julien Leyre. Together with Carin Ism, Leyre is co-founder of the Future of Governance Agency (FOGA).

Crisis. A situation where danger and opportunity intersect. In the last several weeks, we’ve heard and learned a lot about the danger and suffering caused by Covid-19. But opportunities are here too, and not only for soap producers and bitcoin holders. This is not to downplay the gravity of the situation, but rather go back to the root of the word crisis, and its original meaning of “choice.” This brutal challenge to our existing systems may open new windows of opportunity for long-awaited change.

Here’s a list of 16 positive changes to the collective mindset this era of emergency may bring.

1. A new appreciation for the benefits of self-sufficiency.

From aquaponics to vertical urban gardens, plant-based diets, and desktop 3D printers, this situation will make many of us see the benefits of relying on locally sourced food and goods—instead of products demanding long and distant supply chains. These practices have been widely advocated for from a sustainability point of view, but this kind of self-sufficiency is ultimately about power. About how independence brings you to a position where, instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping government leaders will do a good enough job protecting you, you can maintain some influence over your own destiny and that of your loved ones.

2. Faster adoption of solar panels.

As yet, no region has experienced a power outage due to the systemic consequences of this pandemic. It would, however, be naive to think that it will not happen in certain places. Whether you end up personally affected currently depends on the border lottery—where you happened to be born and where you happened to be stranded during the outbreak. Solar panels mark the move away from a more or less centralized system supplying the juicy electricity we all love. The benefit of decentralized systems is, simply put, that they don’t have central points of failure. Again, solar panels have been sold as a morally superior option, a way to do the right thing for the planet—but the Covid times will reveal how much they can also be a matter of personal agency.

3. Fast-tracked innovation and adoption of drone technology.

Our species now has the technology to deliver all sorts of products to the doors of any self- or forcefully quarantined person. So far, drones have largely been known as a way to deliver violence and conduct surveillance. But as with any technology, they function like muscles, helping us realize our desires, constructive or destructive. In the case of Covid, this could mean automating many systems at scale, delivery drones and disinfecting robots marking a mere humble beginning. There are already examples of NGOs using drones to carry medicines to remote locations with impressive precision. Now that the ability to get goods without human touch is a more appealing value proposition than ever, mainstream adoption could be driven forward by an immense increase in drone delivery demand.

4. Universal basic income.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Bertrand Russell, Milton Friedman, and many others agreed that a civilized society ought to provide its citizens with money for basic needs to ensure no one ever has to live in a state of indecent desperation.

Automation has made this topic steaming hot, with US presidential hopeful Andrew Yang running on the policy, before suspending his campaign. During the current (or impending) lockdown, many jobs will, and have already, vanished overnight. Stock market losses reflect a concern for just how big a change in consumption this could bring.

In light of this, Hong Kong already approved a kind of emergency UBI, giving each citizen 10,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $1,290). Proposals to grant a monthly cash transfer to all citizens over the course of the pandemic have been supported by liberals and conservatives alike in many other states too. Learnings from these experiments, others already underway, and those very likely to follow, will yield considerable new knowledge and help complete the picture Rutger Bregman skillfully depicted on previous UBI experiments in his book Utopia for Realists (2017).

5. A healthy wake up call to never blindly trust a leader.

Citizens of the world right now have a front-row seat to watch how differently leaders around the world are handling the very same disease. Once the dust settles and figures can be studied, we’ll be able to see what worked and what didn’t. But more than that, we’ll have a strong example of how arbitrary the choices that leaders make can be. People have already died because a certain leader took the wrong approach at the wrong time. This doesn’t have to mean citizens no longer trust anyone. Rather, we should demand that more than success at the polls or holding an office be treated as sufficient authority in questions where there is science to consider.

6. Learning and loving to do the least.

What do we need? Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) ignited a lot of excitement last year. It questioned how many of the activities we’re involved in every day actually benefit us. Doing less has its perks, for the climate and the environment as a whole, as well as for our stress levels and peace of mind. Covid-19 will, at least for a time, bring an extreme decrease in productivity. This will also give us a new baseline to compare with our “normal” lives. When we find ourselves forced to stop for a while, what will we end up really missing—and what won’t we miss at all? Hitting the pause button will give us an opportunity to take stock of what really deserves the glory in our glorification of being “busy.”

7. Wider adoption of decentralized internet protocols.

Quarantine can be an introvert’s dream—until the internet stops working. Hopefully, this won’t happen. But if we were running decentralized internet protocols, we could move from hoping to knowing. The internet was built to be resilient in times of crisis. Over time, however, a small number of companies have come to own a large number of the servers directing traffic. This undercuts the internet’s celebrated design feature of decentralization. Amazon Web Services, for example, operates a whopping third of the servers running the cloud. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a new protocol we could adopt to make the internet properly peer-to-peer again—meaning, it might give us an internet more equipped for a crisis.

8. A post-post-truth world.

And just like that, accuracy mattered. As we face a range of possible scenarios, from the mild to the frankly catastrophic, we can feel it collectively now: We want to know the facts. How much should we fear a sneeze? A handshake? Is everything under control, or should we stock up on food and water at home? We want to know. Not guess, but know. And even though doubt in science has grown ever greater in recent years, you don’t see hordes of people turning down the thought of a vaccine now.

9. Telepresence bonanza.

Social distancing is luckily happening in a time when we already love to be social far, far away from one another. The meetings that could have been emails have quickly turned into emails. For the rest, there’s telepresence, video conferencing, and even digital avatars and virtual stages. The longer the quarantine, the more we’ll see whatever brings us our loved ones and colleagues in high definition as the best thing since stock crackers. That summits and concerts are finding digital iterations is all great news for a world that’s been relying on air travel far more than carbon budgets allow. In terms of aviation, what is a state of emergency now, great telepresence services could help make far more normal after the virus.

10. Corona-boom babies.

Blackouts and snow-ins result in baby bumps: this has been commonly observed. Is it that when you’re stuck at home, sex is the next best option? Or is it that in times of despair, the prospect of bringing a new life into the world is a bulwark against the sense of impending doom? Whatever it is, you might look forward to some lustful pleasures during the quarantine. And if you don’t feel like this is the right time for you to conceive the next generation, you might consider stocking up on contraceptives while (or if) you can. Suggested names of this generation to come: Quaranteens or Coronials.

11. Paying our heroes with more than just applause.

The true value of the labor that keeps society—and our sanity—afloat, is now being keenly felt. People homeschooling their children are expressing new appreciation for teachers’ day-to-day. Garbage collectors and delivery people are receiving proper thank-yous for usually thankless services. And the health care providers risking their own health for the sake of others are now receiving a measure of gratitude. We’re learning what’s essential. Now, instead of paying the heroes of this crisis with nothing but applause, could this sudden appreciation instead take a monetary form and translate into better pay for our most crucial professions?

12. All the great books, movies, jokes, and memes to come.

And just like that, you did get the time to finish your novel. The same is true for a myriad of artists, currently in lockdown, many of them likely creating their most inspired pieces yet. Shakespeare famously wrote King Lear during his time in quarantine. From the existential motives of serious filmmakers to the escapist hedonism and meme extraordinaires—a pandemic, in all its brutality, can be quite the muse.

13. Updated emergency protocols.

As bad as Covid-19 is, those of us in the global catastrophic risk community know there are far worse scenarios, and we can get far better at preparing and de-risking our lives. Books like Feeding Everyone No Matter What (2014) by David Denkenberger has never before gotten the attention they deserve. We could use this situation to change that, making us wiser and more resilient in the face of vaster issues. Proposals like Denkenberger’s to develop large-scale storage, underground mushroom farms, or even bacteria-based foods to survive a potential nuclear winter or supervolcanic eruption no longer seem as eccentric as they once did. Rather, they seem wise and considered, as the words “hope for the best, plan for the worst” are beginning to more widely resonate.

14. Longevity reimagined.

The status and suffering of the elderly is generally scarcely covered. Before this pandemic, 100,000 people died from illnesses directly related to the underlying condition of an aged body—every single day. As Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting the older part of the population and medical professionals are making calls based on age, this issue ought to see serious momentum. Intergenerational solidarity could become more of a thing as we come to fully realize that an able-bodied condition is ever so temporary. Healthspan—and lifespan—extension is a problem we might more seriously use our collective talent to combat, as we give more weight to the argument often put forward by those in the field that aging ought to be classified as a disease.

15. An understanding of what is possible through collective belief.

Particularly when it comes to debt. The Federal Reserve is offering $1.5 trillion in short-term loans (and a whole lot more is on the way) to stabilize the market due to Covid-19. In a world where fiat currencies are only backed by belief, a lot can be done once there is sufficient support. By comparison, the total amount of student loan debt in the US is $1.6 trillion. If you want to study a concept during all your in-house downtime, maybe look up “debt jubilee.” Or, if you’re looking for a longer read, there’s David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). A lot of time in your house means a lot of time to learn and organize for change with people who share your beliefs and could amplify them. Whether in relation to debt, or something else.

16. A shared enemy.

In the ’90s, some thinkers focused on globalization argued that our shared global village was turning into a “McWorld,” with consumer culture as its common denominator. Arguably, there is something far more wholesome all humans have in common: We all want a safe tomorrow. In Covid-19, we’ve found a common enemy, attacking people regardless of their appearance or passport.

This takes us back to that original meaning of crisis: the present situation offers a choice. Either we try to piece the world back together as it was before this catastrophic occurrence, or we can use this shared event as the founding moment of a unifying global narrative. One acknowledging that underneath our badges of belonging we are all vulnerable bodies, very much dependent on each other and on systems of governance.

We’ve been aware of our global interconnectedness for some time, every second TED talk makes reference to it. But we’ve never felt it as much as we do now. We’ve already witnessed the lack of global coordination to control the spread of the virus early on. We are now witnessing how the government of each state is turning this shared global event into so many singular, nationally defined experiences.

All this tells the tale of a world that has become interlinked, yet holds on to a governance model pretending we’re not. This can change. We can tell another story. One that demands global risks receive a global response and proclaims that certain issues are so important they stand above all partisanship. A virus can spread quickly and change us profoundly. So can an idea. Stuck, alone in our houses, there has never been a better time to come together.

Carin Ism and Julien Leyre. Together with Carin Ism, Leyre is co-founder of the Future of Governance Agency (FOGA).

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

What Will the World Be Like After Coronavirus? Four Possible Futures

Simon Mair is a research fellow in Ecological Economics, Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, University of Surrey.

Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I lie awake at night wondering what the future holds for my loved ones. My vulnerable friends and relatives. I wonder what will happen to my job, even though I’m luckier than many: I get good sick pay and can work remotely. I am writing this from the UK, where I still have self-employed friends who are staring down the barrel of months without pay, friends who have already lost jobs. The contract that pays 80 percent of my salary runs out in December. Coronavirus is hitting the economy badly. Will anyone be hiring when I need work?

There are a number of possible futures, all dependent on how governments and society respond to coronavirus and its economic aftermath. Hopefully we will use this crisis to rebuild, produce something better and more humane. But we may slide into something worse.

I think we can understand our situation—and what might lie in our future—by looking at the political economy of other crises. My research focuses on the fundamentals of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages, and productivity. I look at the way that economic dynamics contribute to challenges like climate change and low levels of mental and physical health among workers. I have argued that we need a very different kind of economics if we are to build socially just and ecologically sound futures. In the face of COVID-19, this has never been more obvious.

The responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises: the prioritization of one type of value over others. This dynamic has played a large part in driving global responses to COVID-19. So as responses to the virus evolve, how might our economic futures develop?

From an economic perspective, there are four possible futures: a descent into barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism, and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid. Versions of all of these futures are perfectly possible, if not equally desirable.

Small Changes Don’t Cut It

Coronavirus, like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although both appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially driven.

Yes, climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that’s a very shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases. Likewise with COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires us to understand human behavior and its wider economic context.

Tackling both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential economic activity. For climate change this is because if you produce less stuff, you use less energy, and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The epidemiology of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People mix together and spread infections. This happens in households, and in workplaces, and on the journeys people make. Reducing this mixing is likely to reduce person-to-person transmission and lead to fewer cases overall.

Reducing contact between people probably also helps with other control strategies. One common control strategy for infectious disease outbreaks is contact tracing and isolation, where an infected person’s contacts are identified, then isolated to prevent further disease spread. This is most effective when you trace a high percentage of contacts. The fewer contacts a person has, the fewer you have to trace to get to that higher percentage.

We can see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are effective. Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they weren’t introduced earlier in European countries and the US.

A Fragile Economy

Lockdown is placing pressure on the global economy. We face a serious recession. This pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures.

Even as 19 countries sat in a state of lockdown, the US president, Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called for rollbacks in mitigation measures. Trump called for the American economy to get back to normal in three weeks (he has now accepted that social distancing will need to be maintained for much longer). Bolsonaro said: “Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept … We must, yes, get back to normal.”

In the UK meanwhile, four days before calling for a three-week lockdown, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was only marginally less optimistic, saying that the UK could turn the tide within 12 weeks. Yet even if Johnson is correct, it remains the case that we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at the next sign of pandemic.

The economics of collapse are fairly straightforward. Businesses exist to make a profit. If they can’t produce, they can’t sell things. This means they won’t make profits, which means they are less able to employ you. Businesses can and do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don’t need immediately: they want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won’t. So, more people lose their jobs or fear losing their jobs. So they buy less. And the whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression.

In a normal crisis the prescription for solving this is simple. The government spends, and it spends until people start consuming and working again. (This prescription is what the economist John Maynard Keynes is famous for).

But normal interventions won’t work here because we don’t want the economy to recover (at least, not immediately). The whole point of the lockdown is to stop people going to work, where they spread the disease. One recent study suggested that lifting lockdown measures in Wuhan (including workplace closures) too soon could see China experience a second peak of cases later in 2020.

As the economist James Meadway wrote, the correct COVID-19 response isn’t a wartime economy—with massive upscaling of production. Rather, we need an “anti-wartime” economy and a massive scaling back of production. And if we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood.

So what we need is a different economic mindset. We tend to think of the economy as the way we buy and sell things, mainly consumer goods. But this is not what an economy is or needs to be. At its core, the economy is the way we take our resources and turn them into the things we need to live. Looked at this way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow us to produce less stuff without increasing misery.

I and other ecological economists have long been concerned with the question of how you produce less in a socially just way, because the challenge of producing less is also central to tackling climate change. All else equal, the more we produce the more greenhouse gases we emit. So how do you reduce the amount of stuff you make while keeping people in work?

Proposals include reducing the length of the working week, or, as some of my recent work has looked at, you could allow people to work more slowly and with less pressure. Neither of these is directly applicable to COVID-19, where the aim is reducing contact rather than output, but the core of the proposals is the same. You have to reduce people’s dependence on a wage to be able to live.

What Is the Economy For?

The key to understanding responses to COVID-19 is the question of what the economy is for. Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of money. This is what economists call “exchange value”.

The dominant idea of the current system we live in is that exchange value is the same thing as use value. Basically, people will spend money on the things that they want or need, and this act of spending money tells us something about how much they value its “use”. This is why markets are seen as the best way to run society. They allow you to adapt, and are flexible enough to match up productive capacity with use value.

What COVID-19 is throwing into sharp relief is just how false our beliefs about markets are. Around the world, governments fear that critical systems will be disrupted or overloaded: supply chains, social care, but principally healthcare. There are lots of contributing factors to this. But let’s take two.

First, it is quite hard to make money from many of the most essential societal services. This is in part because a major driver of profits is labor productivity growth: doing more with fewer people. People are a big cost factor in many businesses, especially those that rely on personal interactions, like healthcare. Consequently, productivity growth in the healthcare sector tends to be lower than the rest of the economy, so its costs go up faster than average.

Second, jobs in many critical services aren’t those that tend to be highest valued in society. Many of the best paid jobs only exist to facilitate exchanges; to make money. They serve no wider purpose to society: they are what the anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs.” Yet because they make lots of money we have lots of consultants, a huge advertising industry and a massive financial sector. Meanwhile, we have a crisis in health and social care, where people are often forced out of useful jobs they enjoy, because these jobs don’t pay them enough to live.

Pointless Jobs

The fact that so many people work pointless jobs is partly why we are so ill prepared to respond to COVID-19. The pandemic is highlighting that many jobs are not essential, yet we lack sufficient key workers to respond when things go bad.

People are compelled to work pointless jobs because in a society where exchange value is the guiding principle of the economy, the basic goods of life are mainly available through markets. This means you have to buy them, and to buy them you need an income, which comes from a job.

The other side of this coin is that the most radical (and effective) responses that we are seeing to the COVID-19 outbreak challenge the dominance of markets and exchange value. Around the world governments are taking actions that three months ago looked impossible. In Spain, private hospitals have been nationalized. In the UK, the prospect of nationalizing various modes of transport has become very real. And France has stated its readiness to nationalize large businesses.

Likewise, we are seeing the breakdown of labor markets. Countries like Denmark and the UK are providing people with an income in order to stop them from going to work. This is an essential part of a successful lockdown. These measures are far from perfect. Nonetheless, it is a shift from the principle that people have to work in order to earn their income, and a move towards the idea that people deserve to be able to live even if they cannot work.

This reverses the dominant trends of the last 40 years. Over this time, markets and exchange values have been seen as the best way of running an economy. Consequently, public systems have come under increasing pressures to marketize, to be run as though they were businesses who have to make money. Likewise, workers have become more and more exposed to the market—zero-hours contracts and the gig economy have removed the layer of protection from market fluctuations that long term, stable, employment used to offer.

COVID-19 appears to be reversing this trend, taking healthcare and labor goods out of the market and putting it into the hands of the state. States produce for many reasons. Some good and some bad. But unlike markets, they do not have to produce for exchange value alone.

These changes give me hope. They give us the chance to save many lives. They even hint at the possibility of longer term change that makes us happier and helps us tackle climate change. But why did it take us so long to get here? Why were many countries so ill-prepared to slowdown production? The answer lies in a recent World Health Organisation report: they did not have the right “mindset.”

Our Economic Imaginations

There has been a broad economic consensus for 40 years. This has limited the ability of politicians and their advisers to see cracks in the system, or imagine alternatives. This mindset is driven by two linked beliefs:

  • The market is what delivers a good quality of life, so it must be protected
  • The market will always return to normal after short periods of crisis

These views are common to many Western countries. But they are strongest in the UK and the US, both of which have appeared to be badly prepared to respond to COVID-19.

In the UK, attendees at a private engagement reportedly summarized the Prime Minister’s most senior aide’s approach to COVID-19 as “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. The government has denied this, but if real, it’s not surprising. At a government event early in the pandemic, a senior civil servant said to me: “Is it worth the economic disruption? If you look at the treasury valuation of a life, probably not.”

This kind of view is endemic in a particular elite class. It is well represented by a Texas official who argued that many elderly people would gladly die rather than see the US sink into economic depression. This view endangers many vulnerable people (and not all vulnerable people are elderly), and, as I have tried to lay out here, it is a false choice.

One of the things the COVID-19 crisis could be doing, is expanding that economic imagination. As governments and citizens take steps that three months ago seemed impossible, our ideas about how the world works could change rapidly. Let us look at where this re-imagining could take us.

Four Futures

To help us visit the future, I’m going to use a technique from the field of futures studies. You take two factors you think will be important in driving the future, and you imagine what will happen under different combinations of those factors.

The factors I want to take are value and centralization. Value refers to whatever is the guiding principle of our economy. Do we use our resources to maximize exchanges and money, or do we use them to maximize life? Centralization refers to the ways that things are organised, either by of lots of small units or by one big commanding force. We can organize these factors into a grid, which can then be populated with scenarios. So we can think about what might happen if we try to respond to the coronavirus with the four extreme combinations:

1) State capitalism: centralized response, prioritizing exchange value
2) Barbarism: decentralized response prioritizing exchange value
3) State socialism: centralized response, prioritizing the protection of life
4) Mutual aid: decentralized response prioritizing the protection of life

State Capitalism

State capitalism is the dominant response we are seeing across the world right now. Typical examples are the UK, Spain, and Denmark.

The state capitalist society continues to pursue exchange value as the guiding light of the economy. But it recognizes that markets in crisis require support from the state. Given that many workers cannot work because they are ill, and fear for their lives, the state steps in with extended welfare. It also enacts massive Keynesian stimulus by extending credit and making direct payments to businesses.

The expectation here is that this will be for a short period. The primary function of the steps being taken is to allow as many businesses as possible to keep on trading. In the UK, for example, food is still distributed by markets (though the government has relaxed competition laws). Where workers are supported directly, this is done in ways that seek to minimize disruption of normal labor market functioning. So, for example, as in the UK, payments to workers have to be applied for and distributed by employers. And the size of payments is made on the basis of the exchange value a worker usually creates in the market, rather than the usefulness of their work.

Could this be a successful scenario? Possibly, but only if COVID-19 proves controllable over a short period. As full lockdown is avoided to maintain market functioning, transmission of infection is still likely to continue. In the UK, for instance, non-essential construction is still continuing, leaving workers mixing on building sites. But limited state intervention will become increasingly hard to maintain if death tolls rise. Increased illness and death will provoke unrest and deepen economic impacts, forcing the state to take more and more radical actions to try to maintain market functioning.

Barbarism

This is the bleakest scenario. Barbarism is the future if we continue to rely on exchange value as our guiding principle and yet refuse to extend support to those who get locked out of markets by illness or unemployment. It describes a situation that we have not yet seen.

Businesses fail and workers starve because there are no mechanisms in place to protect them from the harsh realities of the market. Hospitals are not supported by extraordinary measures, and so become overwhelmed. People die. Barbarism is ultimately an unstable state that ends in ruin or a transition to one of the other grid sections after a period of political and social devastation.

Could this happen? The concern is that either it could happen by mistake during the pandemic, or by intention after the pandemic peaks. The mistake is if a government fails to step in in a big enough way during the worst of the pandemic. Support might be offered to businesses and households, but if this isn’t enough to prevent market collapse in the face of widespread illness, chaos would ensue. Hospitals might be sent extra funds and people, but if it’s not enough, ill people will be turned away in large numbers.

Potentially just as consequential is the possibility of massive austerity after the pandemic has peaked and governments seek to return to “normal”. This has been threatened in Germany. This would be disastrous. Not least because defunding of critical services during austerity has impacted the ability of countries to respond to this pandemic.

The subsequent failure of the economy and society would trigger political and social unrest, leading to a failed state and the collapse of both state and community welfare systems.

State Socialism

State socialism describes the first of the futures we could see with a cultural shift that places a different kind of value at the heart of the economy. This is the future we arrive at with an extension of the measures we are currently seeing in the UK, Spain, and Denmark.

The key here is that measures like nationalization of hospitals and payments to workers are seen not as tools to protect markets, but a way to protect life itself. In such a scenario, the state steps in to protect the parts of the economy that are essential to life: the production of food, energy, and shelter for instance, so that the basic provisions of life are no longer at the whim of the market. The state nationalizes hospitals, and makes housing freely available. Finally, it provides all citizens with a means of accessing various goods, both basics and any consumer goods we are able to produce with a reduced workforce.

Citizens no longer rely on employers as intermediaries between them and the basic materials of life. Payments are made to everyone directly and are not related to the exchange value they create. Instead, payments are the same to all (on the basis that we deserve to be able to live, simply because we are alive), or they are based on the usefulness of the work. Supermarket workers, delivery drivers, warehouse stackers, nurses, teachers, and doctors are the new CEOs.

It’s possible that state socialism emerges as a consequence of attempts at state capitalism and the effects of a prolonged pandemic. If deep recessions happen and there is disruption in supply chains such that demand cannot be rescued by the kind of standard Keynesian policies we are seeing now (printing money, making loans easier to get, and so on), the state may take over production.

There are risks to this approach; we must be careful to avoid authoritarianism. But done well, this may be our best hope against an extreme COVID-19 outbreak. A strong state able to marshal the resources to protect the core functions of economy and society.

Mutual Aid

Mutual aid is the second future in which we adopt the protection of life as the guiding principle of our economy. But, in this scenario, the state does not take a defining role. Rather, individuals and small groups begin to organize support and care within their communities.

The risks with this future is that small groups are unable to rapidly mobilize the kind of resources needed to effectively increase healthcare capacity, for instance. But mutual aid could enable more effective transmission prevention, by building community support networks that protect the vulnerable and police isolation rules. The most ambitious form of this future sees new democratic structures arise. Groupings of communities that are able to mobilize substantial resources with relative speed. People coming together to plan regional responses to stop disease spread and (if they have the skills) to treat patients.

This kind of scenario could emerge from any of the others. It is a possible way out of barbarism, or state capitalism, and could support state socialism. We know that community responses were central to tackling the West African Ebola outbreak. And we already see the roots of this future today in the groups organizing care packages and community support. We can see this as a failure of state responses. Or we can see it as a pragmatic, compassionate societal response to an unfolding crisis.

Hope and Fear

These visions are extreme scenarios, caricatures, and likely to bleed into one another. My fear is the descent from state capitalism into barbarism. My hope is a blend of state socialism and mutual aid: a strong, democratic state that mobilizes resources to build a stronger health system, prioritizes protecting the vulnerable from the whims of the market and responds to and enables citizens to form mutual aid groups rather than working meaningless jobs.

What hopefully is clear is that all these scenarios leave some grounds for fear, but also some for hope. COVID-19 is highlighting serious deficiencies in our existing system. An effective response to this is likely to require radical social change. I have argued it requires a drastic move away from markets and the use of profits as the primary way of organizing an economy. The upside of this is the possibility that we build a more humane system that leaves us more resilient in the face of future pandemics and other impending crises like climate change.

Social change can come from many places and with many influences. A key task for us all is demanding that emerging social forms come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy. The central political task in this time of crisis is living and (virtually) organizing around those values.

Simon Mair is a research fellow in Ecological Economics, Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, University of Surrey.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Fixing What’s Broken: If We Build a Moral Economy, the Future Will Be Better

Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve been eagerly awaiting a return to normal. We want to be able to go out again, see our friends, and be in public places without feeling like we’re risking our health or that of others.

Now that Covid-19 case counts have gone down and restrictions are starting to lift, it seems we’re at last on the path back to some semblance of normalcy. But as recent events have shown, the status quo before the pandemic wasn’t all that great for large swathes of the population, both in the US and around the world.

Do we really want to get “back to normal,” or should we be focusing on building a more just and inclusive future?

Last week at Singularity University’s digital summit on the future of work, SU chair of Future Studies Paul Saffo and chair for the Future of Work Gary Bolles discussed a piece of the old normal they think needs to change: the structure of the economy.

Over the last few decades, we’ve increasingly distanced ourselves from the values our ancestors built into post-World War II society, and it appears that in many ways, we’re worse off for it. Rather than sticking to the winner-take-all capitalism that’s gotten us where we are, Bolles and Saffo believe, the future will be far more promising—for everyone—if we re-orient towards a moral economy.

What Is a Moral Economy?

A simple definition of a moral economy is an economy that’s based on justice and fairness.

The term, Saffo said, is almost two centuries old. James C. Scott was one of the preeminent thinkers in this area, and he framed the concept of a moral economy like this: imagine you’re a farmer in a small agrarian village. You’ve had a bad year, but your neighbor is also a farmer and he’s had a good year. So you go to your neighbor and he freely shares some of his surplus with you, not because he’s just being nice, but rather because next year he may be the one who needs help, and you can be the one to help him then.

Essentially, a moral economy respects interdependence and relationships rather than leaving everyone to fend for his or herself with no regard for how others are faring. The other standout expert on this topic is E.P. Thompson, and he wrote about the moral economy in England before and after the Industrial Revolution. Moral contracts existed between landlord and peasants before the Industrial Revolution; but the rise of free-market thinking did away with putting these moral concepts first, and the long-standing contracts between people and groups were broken.

“The important thing about the concept of a moral economy today is that whenever there’s a big idea in the zeitgeist, we usually ask ourselves the wrong question,” Saffo said. “Back in 2009 everyone was asking ‘will robots steal our jobs?’, but then people realized that that was the wrong question, and we should be thinking about the future of work.” Now that we’ve shifted to focusing on that topic, the way to tie in the myriad issues around it—including the environment, equity, diversity, and technology—is to discuss the future of work within the context of a moral economy.

Then and Now

When looking at big disruptions to the economy, we tend to focus on the technologies that brought about massive change; the steam engine, nitrogen-based fertilizer, the incandescent light bulb, etc.—but it’s equally significant to examine the laws and norms that went into place during these historical shifts.

In England before the Industrial Revolution, Bolles said, there were a lot of small farms, and in between the farms there was a common space where the farmers are allowed to graze their animals. When the Industrial Revolution and mass production techniques came along, the farms started to get bigger, and laws called the Enclosure Acts were created to hand the common areas over to large landholders; they unsurprisingly ended up having the most land and the most money.

“A lot of the interconnections of those economies were lost, and they rewarded ‘more bigger faster stronger,’ and that echoes down to today,” Bolles said. Giant tech companies have created platforms, and we’ve rewarded them by putting more and more content and information and data on their platforms. The big get bigger, which ultimately leads to the small being forced out.

“Today, we should ask ourselves what the new Enclosure Acts are,” said Saffo. “There are always forces trying to do enclosures, and moral economies don’t appear by accident. People fight for them.”

After the Great Depression, American workers unionized and organized to demand a moral economy. World War II prompted the creation of one that lasted for several decades, until, Saffo said, the early 1980s, when laws were passed that began systematically dismantling it. The Gini coefficient measures how far a country’s income distribution deviates from being perfectly equal, and in the US this number has steadily risen since the 1980s. In 2015, the top 1 percent of earners in the US averaged 40 times more income than the bottom 90 percent.

“In the 1980s everybody took the order that had been created in the previous decades so much for granted that they didn’t fight to preserve it,” Saffo said. “In my opinion, we’re at the breaking point today.”

How Do We Fix It?

The world has changed dramatically since the 1980s (not to mention since January). Technological advancement has brought abundant food, resources, and income to many more people than ever before, but it’s also made us value independence (that is, a movement towards an individualistic society that de-emphasizes depending on and helping others) at the expense of interdependence, and now we’re seeing the fallout.

“We’re in the middle of this independence bubble, and independence has become a very dangerous myth,” Saffo said. Granted, in a small agrarian community it’s easier to make a moral economy work, because people see the consequences of their actions and get feedback from other parties. The massive global economy we’re living in, on the other hand, is a society of strangers, with little to no feedback and consequences that are invisible—until they’re not.

How, then, can we use technology to foster social solidarity and interdependence? How do we encourage the balancing of economies to benefit the most people possible? How would the world look different if it was built on these precepts?

Digital technology has done its share of harm to democracy and to social cohesion—how do we turn it around and harness it for good? “It’s not going to come down from the top,” Saffo said. “It’s going to have to come up from the bottom, with individual communities leading by example.”

Our current economic structure and reward system doesn’t take into account the most important factors for our collective well-being, like justice, equality, the environment, and our physical and mental health. We need to trade in our defunct system for one that pulls these things into the equation in a meaningful way.

As sci-fi writer William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” Building a moral economy may be the first step towards righting that imbalance.

Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

How Drones and Aerial Vehicles Could Change Cities

Paul Cureton is a drone pilot and Senior Lecturer in Design at ImaginationLancaster and member of the Data Science Institute, Lancaster University, UK.

Drones, personal flying vehicles, and air taxis may be part of our everyday life in the very near future. Drones and air taxis will create new means of mobility and transport routes. Drones will be used for surveillance, delivery, and in the construction sector as it moves towards automation.

The introduction of these aerial craft into cities will require the built environment to change dramatically. Drones and other new aerial vehicles will require landing pads, charging points, and drone ports. They could usher in new styles of building, and lead to more sustainable design.

My research explores the impact of aerial vehicles on urban design, mapping out possible future trajectories.

An Aerial Age

Already, civilian drones can vary widely in size and complexity. They can carry a range of items from high-resolution cameras, delivery mechanisms, and thermal image technology to speakers and scanners. In the public sector, drones are used in disaster response and by the fire service to tackle fires which could endanger firefighters.

During the coronavirus pandemic, drones have been used by the police to enforce lockdown. Drones normally used in agriculture have sprayed disinfectant over cities. In the UK, drone delivery trials are taking place to carry medical items to the Isle of Wight.

Alongside drones, our future cities could also be populated by vertical takeoff and landing craft (VTOL), used as private vehicles and air taxis.

These vehicles are familiar to sci-fi fans. The late Syd Mead’s illustrations of the Spinner VTOL craft in the film Blade Runner captured the popular imagination, and the screens for the Spinners in Blade Runner 2049 created by Territory Studio provided a careful design fiction of the experience of piloting these types of vehicle.

Now, though, these flying vehicles are reality. A number of companies are developing eVTOL with electric multi-rotor jets, and a whole new motorsport is being established around them.

These aircraft have the potential to change our cities. However, they need to be tested extensively in urban airspace. A study conducted by Airbus found that public concerns about VTOL use focused on the safety of those on the ground and noise emissions.

New Cities

The widespread adoption of drones and VTOL will lead to new architecture and infrastructure. Existing buildings will require adaptations: landing pads, solar photovoltaic panels for energy efficiency, charging points for delivery drones, and landscaping to mitigate noise emissions.

A number of companies are already trialing drone delivery services. Existing buildings will need to be adapted to accommodate these new networks, and new design principles will have to be implemented in future ones.

The architect Saúl Ajuria Fernández has developed a design for a delivery drone port hub. This drone port acts like a beehive where drones recharge and collect parcels for distribution. Architectural firm Humphreys & Partners’ Pier 2, a design for a modular apartment building of the future, includes a cantilevered drone port for delivery services.

The Norman Foster Foundation has designed a drone port for delivery of medical supplies and other items for rural communities in Rwanda. The structure is also intended to function as a space for the public to congregate, as well as to receive training in robotics.

Drones may also help the urban environment become more sustainable. Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have developed a re-configurable architectural roof canopy system deployed by drones. By adjusting to follow the direction of the sun, the canopy provides shade and reduces reliance on ventilation systems.

Demand for air taxis and personal flying vehicles will develop where failures in other transport systems take place. The Airbus research found that of the cities surveyed, highest demand for VTOLs was in Los Angeles and Mexico City, urban areas famous for traffic pollution. To accommodate these aerial vehicles, urban space will need to transform to include landing pads, airport-like infrastructure, and recharge points.

Furthermore, this whole logistics system in lower airspace (below 500 feet), or what I term “hover space,” will need an urban traffic management system. One great example of how this hover space could work can be seen in a speculative project from design studio Superflux in their Drone Aviary project. A number of drones with different functions move around an urban area in a network, following different paths at varying heights.

We are at a critical period in urban history, faced by climatic breakdown and pandemic. Drones and aerial vehicles can be part of a profound rethink of the urban environment.

Paul Cureton is a drone pilot and Senior Lecturer in Design at ImaginationLancaster and member of the Data Science Institute, Lancaster University, UK.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

The Moon’s Surface Has Enough Oxygen to Sustain 8 Billion People for 100,000 Years

John Grant is a lecturer in soil science at Southern Cross University. He has a doctorate in science looking at how the physical and chemical properties of soil impact tree growth.

Alongside advances in space exploration, we’ve recently seen much time and money invested into technologies that could allow effective space resource utilization. And at the forefront of these efforts has been a laser-sharp focus on finding the best way to produce oxygen on the moon.

In October, the Australian Space Agency and NASA signed a deal to send an Australian-made rover to the moon under the Artemis program, with a goal to collect lunar rocks that could ultimately provide breathable oxygen on the moon.

Although the moon does have an atmosphere, it’s very thin and composed mostly of hydrogen, neon, and argon. It’s not the sort of gaseous mixture that could sustain oxygen-dependent mammals such as humans.

That said, there is actually plenty of oxygen on the moon. It just isn’t in a gaseous form. Instead it’s trapped inside regolith—the layer of rock and fine dust that covers the moon’s surface. If we could extract oxygen from regolith, would it be enough to support human life on the moon?

The Breadth of Oxygen

Oxygen can be found in many of the minerals in the ground around us. And the moon is mostly made of the same rocks you’ll find on Earth (although with a slightly greater amount of material that came from meteors).

Minerals such as silica, aluminum, and iron and magnesium oxides dominate the moon’s landscape. All of these minerals contain oxygen, but not in a form our lungs can access.

On the moon these minerals exist in a few different forms including hard rock, dust, gravel, and stones covering the surface. This material is the result of impacts of meteorites crashing into the lunar surface over countless millennia.

Some people call the moon’s surface layer lunar “soil,” but as a soil scientist I’m hesitant to use this term. Soil as we know it is pretty magical stuff that only occurs on Earth. It has been created by a vast array of organisms working on the soil’s parent material—regolith, derived from hard rock—over millions of years.

The result is a matrix of minerals which were not present in the original rocks. Earth’s soil is imbued with remarkable physical, chemical, and biological characteristics. Meanwhile, the materials on the moon’s surface are basically regolith in its original, untouched form.

One Substance Goes In, Two Come Out

The moon’s regolith is made up of approximately 45 percent oxygen. But that oxygen is tightly bound into the minerals mentioned above. In order to break apart those strong bonds, we need to put in energy.

You might be familiar with this if you know about electrolysis. On Earth this process is commonly used in manufacturing, such as to produce aluminum. An electrical current is passed through a liquid form of aluminum oxide (commonly called alumina) via electrodes, to separate the aluminum from the oxygen.

In this case, the oxygen is produced as a byproduct. On the moon, the oxygen would be the main product, and the aluminum (or other metal) extracted would be a potentially useful byproduct.

It’s a pretty straightforward process, but there is a catch: it’s very energy hungry. To be sustainable, it would need to be supported by solar energy or other energy sources available on the Moon.

Extracting oxygen from regolith would also require substantial industrial equipment. We’d need to first convert solid metal oxide into liquid form, either by applying heat, or heat combined with solvents or electrolytes. We have the technology to do this on Earth, but moving this apparatus to the Moon—and generating enough energy to run it—will be a mighty challenge.

Earlier this year, Belgium-based startup Space Applications Services announced it was building three experimental reactors to improve the process of making oxygen via electrolysis. They expect to send the technology to the Moon by 2025 as part of the European Space Agency’s in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) mission.

How Much Oxygen Could the Moon Provide?

That said, when we do manage to pull it off, how much oxygen might the Moon actually deliver? Well, quite a lot as it turns out.

If we ignore oxygen tied up in the Moon’s deeper hard rock material—and just consider regolith which is easily accessible on the surface—we can come up with some estimates.

Each cubic meter of lunar regolith contains 1.4 tons of minerals on average, including about 630 kilograms of oxygen. NASA says humans need to breathe about 800 grams of oxygen a day to survive. So 630 kilograms of oxygen would keep a person alive for about two years (or just over).

Now let’s assume the average depth of regolith on the Moon is about ten meters, and that we can extract all of the oxygen from this. That means the top ten meters of the Moon’s surface would provide enough oxygen to support all eight billion people on Earth for somewhere around 100,000 years.

This would also depend on how effectively we managed to extract and use the oxygen. Regardless, this figure is pretty amazing!

Having said that, we do have it pretty good here on Earth. And we should do everything we can to protect the blue planet—and its soil in particular—which continues to support all terrestrial life without us even trying.

John Grant is a lecturer in soil science at Southern Cross University. He has a doctorate in science looking at how the physical and chemical properties of soil impact tree growth.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Magnetizable Concrete in Roads Could Charge Electric Cars While You Drive

Edd Gent a freelance science and technology writer based in Bangalore, India. My main areas of interest are engineering, computing and biology, with a particular focus on the intersections between the three.

One of the biggest barriers to electric vehicle adoption is the fear of running out of juice before you get to your destination. Roads that can charge your vehicle as you drive could be a solution, and they may be getting closer.

Rapid improvements in battery technology have seen the range of electric vehicles creep steadily upwards in recent years. But most still fall far short of gasoline-powered cars in this regard, and they take significantly longer to refuel if they do run dry.

One solution that has been discussed for many years is the idea of embedding some kind of charging technology in roads so that vehicles can charge their batteries as they drive. Most schemes envisage using the same kind of technology as the wireless chargers you can buy to top up your smartphone.

Revamping thousands of miles of highway with high-tech charging equipment is obviously no trifling matter, though, and so far progress has been slow. But recent developments suggest that the idea might be gaining traction and edging closer to commercial reality.

Last month, Indiana’s Department of Transport (INDOT) announced a collaboration with Purdue University and German company Magment to test out whether cement with embedded magnetized particles could provide an affordable road-charging solution.

Most wireless vehicle charging technologies rely on a process known as inductive charging, where electricity pumped into a wire coil creates a magnetic field that can induce an electric current in any other nearby wire coil. The charging coils are installed at regular intervals under the road, and cars are fitted with a receiver coil that picks up the charge.

But installing thousands of miles of copper under the road is obviously fairly costly. Magment’s solution is to instead embed standard concrete with recycled ferrite particles, which are also able to generate a magnetic field but are considerably cheaper. The company claims its product can achieve transmission efficiency of up to 95 percent and can be built at “standard road-building installation costs.”

It will still be some time before the technology is actually installed in real roads. The Indiana project involves two phases of lab testing and a trial run on a quarter-mile test stretch before it gets installed in highways. But if the cost savings turn out to be genuine, the approach could be a game-changer.

There are several electric road test beds already underway, and so far Sweden seems to be leading. In 2018 an electric rail was installed down the middle of a 1.2-mile stretch of road outside Stockholm. It can transfer power to a vehicle via a moveable arm attached to its bottom. And an inductive charging system built by Israeli firm ElectReon has been used to successfully charge an all-electric truck on a one-mile stretch on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.

These systems don’t come cheap. The first is estimated to cost about €1m per kilometer ($1.9 million per mile), while the second test project cost around $12.5 million in total. But given that it already costs several million dollars to build a mile of conventional road, it may not be such an unreasonable investment, at least on new roads.

Carmakers seem to be coming around to the idea, with German automotive giant Volkswagen leading a consortium that will integrate ElectReon’s charging technology into electric vehicles as part of a pilot project.

An alternative option is to leave the road itself alone, and instead string charging wires above the road that can charge trucks in much the same way urban trams are powered. The system, built by German engineering giant Siemens, has been installed on about three miles of road outside Frankfurt and is being tested by several trucking companies.

Installing the system is also not cheap at roughly $5 million per mile, but according to the New York Times, the German government thinks it may still be cheaper than having to switch to trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells or large enough batteries to enable long-haul deliveries. The country’s transport ministry is currently comparing the three approaches before making a decision about which to support.

Even if the economics make sense, rolling out road charging infrastructure will be an enormous effort, and it could take decades before every highway can help top your car up. But if the technology keeps progressing, it could one day make empty tanks a thing of the past.

Edd Gent a freelance science and technology writer based in Bangalore, India. My main areas of interest are engineering, computing and biology, with a particular focus on the intersections between the three.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

Google AI Researchers Are Dreaming Up a New Species of Search Engine

Jason Dorrier is managing editor of Singularity Hub. He did research and wrote about finance and economics before moving on to science and technology.

Imagine a collection of books—maybe millions or even billions of them—haphazardly tossed by publishers into a heaping pile in a field. Every day the pile grows exponentially.

Those books are brimming with knowledge and answers. But how would a seeker find them? Lacking organization, the books are useless.

This is the raw internet in all its unfiltered glory. Which is why most of our quests for “enlightenment” online begin with Google (and yes, there are still other search engines). Google’s algorithmic tentacles scan and index every book in that ungodly pile. When someone enters a query in the search bar, the search algorithm thumbs through its indexed version of the internet, surfaces pages, and presents them in a ranked list of the top hits.

This approach is incredibly useful. So useful, in fact, that it hasn’t fundamentally changed in over two decades. But now, AI researchers at Google, the very company that set the bar for search engines in the first place, are sketching out a blueprint for what might be coming up next.

In a paper on the arXiv preprint server, the team suggests the technology to make the internet even more searchable is at our fingertips. They say large language models—machine learning algorithms like OpenAI’s GPT-3—could wholly replace today’s system of index, retrieve, then rank.

Is AI the Search Engine of the Future?

When seeking information, most people would love to ask an expert and get a nuanced and trustworthy response, the authors write. Instead, they Google it. This can work, or go terribly wrong. Like when you get sucked down a panicky, health-related rabbit hole at two in the morning.

Though search engines surface (hopefully quality) sources that contain at least pieces of an answer, the burden is on the searcher to scan, filter, and read through the results to piece together that answer as best they can.

Search results have improved leaps and bounds over the years. Still, the approach is far from perfect.

There are question-and-answer tools, like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. But these tools are brittle, with a limited (though growing) repertoire of questions they can field. Though they have their own shortcomings (more on those below), large language models like GPT-3 are much more flexible and can construct novel replies in natural language to any query or prompt.

The Google team suggests the next generation of search engines might synthesize the best of all worlds, folding today’s top information retrieval systems into large-scale AI.

It’s worth noting machine learning is already at work in classical index-retrieve-then-rank search engines. But instead of merely augmenting the system, the authors propose machine learning could wholly replace it.

“What would happen if we got rid of the notion of the index altogether and replaced it with a large pre-trained model that efficiently and effectively encodes all of the information contained in the corpus?” Donald Metzler and coauthors write in the paper. “What if the distinction between retrieval and ranking went away and instead there was a single response generation phase?”

One ideal result they envision is a bit like the starship Enterprise’s computer in Star Trek. Seekers of information pose questions, the system answers conversationally—that is, with a natural language reply as you’d expect from an expert—and includes authoritative citations in its answer.

In the paper, the authors sketch out what they call an aspirational example of what this approach might look like in practice. A user asks, “What are the health benefits of red wine?” The system returns a nuanced answer in clear prose from multiple authoritative sources—in this case WebMD and the Mayo Clinic—highlighting the potential benefits and risks of drinking red wine.

It needn’t end there, however. The authors note that another benefit of large language models is their ability to learn many tasks with only a little tweaking (this is known as one-shot or few-shot learning). So they may be able to perform all the same tasks current search engines accomplish, and dozens more as well.

Still Just a Vision

Today, this vision is out of reach. Large language models are what the authors call “dilettantes.”

Algorithms like GPT-3 can produce prose that is, at times, nearly indistinguishable from passages written by humans, but they’re also still prone to nonsensical replies.  Worse, they heedlessly reflect biases embedded in their training data, have no sense of contextual understanding, and can’t cite sources (or even separate high quality and low quality sources) to justify their responses.

“They are perceived to know a lot but their knowledge is skin deep,” the authors write. The paper also lays out breakthroughs needed to bridge the gap. Indeed, many of the challenges they outline apply to the field at large.

A key advance would be moving beyond algorithms that only model the relationships between terms (such as individual words) to algorithms that also model the relationship between words in an article, for example, and the article as a whole. In addition, they would also model the relationships between many different articles across the internet.

Researchers also need to define what constitutes a quality response. This in itself is no easy task. But, for starters, the authors suggest high quality responses should be authoritative, transparent, unbiased, accessible, and contain diverse perspectives.

Even the most cutting-edge algorithms today don’t come close to this bar. And it would be unwise to deploy natural language models on this scale until they’re solved. But if solved—and there is already work being done to address some of these challenges—search engines wouldn’t be the only applications to benefit.

‘Early Grey, Hot’

It’s an enticing vision. Combing through web pages in search of answers while trying to determine what’s trustworthy and what isn’t can be exhausting.

Undoubtedly, many of us don’t do the job as well as we could or should.

But it’s also worth speculating how an internet accessed like this would change the way people contribute to it.

If we primarily consume information by reading prose-y responses synthesized by algorithms—as opposed to opening and reading the individual pages themselves—would creators publish as much work? And how would Google and other search engine makers compensate creators who, in essence, are making the information that trains the algorithms themselves?

There would still be plenty of people reading the news, and in those cases, search algorithms would need to serve up lists of stories. But I wonder if a subtle shift might occur where smaller creators add less, and in doing so, the web becomes less information rich, weakening the very algorithms that depend on that information.

There’s no way to know. Often, speculation is rooted in the problems of today and proves innocent in hindsight. In the meantime, the work will no doubt continue.

Perhaps we’ll solve these challenges—and more as they arise—and in the process arrive at that all-knowing, pleasantly chatty Star Trek computer we’ve long imagined.

Jason Dorrier is managing editor of Singularity Hub. He did research and wrote about finance and economics before moving on to science and technology.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

3 einfache Schritte, um mit Bitcoin durchzustarten

  1. Besuche die Website bitcoin.org.
  2. Installiere eine Bitcoin Wallet auf deinem Smartphone.
  3. Suche nach einem Bitcoin Automaten (z. B. über https://coinatmradar.com) und zahle über den Geldautomaten Geld auf deiner Wallet ein.

Um mehr über Bitcoin zu lernen, lies die ganze Geschichte hier…

Um mehr über die technischen Details von Bitcoin zu lernen, lies das Bitcoin Whitepaper von Satoshi Nakamoto…

3 easy Steps to Get Started with Bitcoin

  1. Go to bitcoin.org.
  2. Install a bitcoin wallet on your smartphone.
  3. Search for a bitcoin ATM (e.g. by https://coinatmradar.com) and pay some money into the ATM to send it to your wallet.

To learn more about bitcoins, read the full story here…

To learn more about the technical details of bitcoin, read the Satoshi Nakamoto Whitepaper on Bitcoin…

How Cryptocurrencies Can Influence the Future of Freedom

Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

Bitcoin has steadily grown in popularity since its inception in 2009. We hear about how many people are getting rich quick from it, and how much energy it’s consuming, and how complex it is to mine.

But what we haven’t heard much about is how Bitcoin can play a role in human rights, and can give people who use it more financial and political freedom.

Alex Gladstein is chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, and he spoke about why Bitcoin matters for freedom in a talk at Singularity University’s Global Summit last week.

“It’s the first time that humans have ever had the ability to send money around the world globally without anyone being able to stop it,” he said. “You can argue that it’s the first time in our history that we have real censorship resistance.”

Gladstein feels we’re at a crossroads as a society—we’ll either go down a centralized path where our interactions are surveilled and censored, or we’ll go down a decentralized one that preserves our essential freedoms and rights.

Technology’s role is somewhat paradoxical in this crossroads; some forms can serve as a tool of control for governments or companies, while other forms put more power in the hands of citizens.

The Chinese government, Gladstein pointed out, keeps close tabs on its citizens’ behavior, location, finances, and communications. Facial recognition tech, smartphone apps, surveillance drones, and smart glasses are all used to gather information as people go about their daily lives, and this information is fed into the country’s social credit system. Obedient citizens gain privileges and praise, while dissidents, intellectuals, criminals, and other non-conformants can be denied access to services.

And that’s not all. “Predictive policing is real in China today. If the regime thinks your social credit score is indicative that you might do something wrong, they can come arrest you before you’ve committed a crime,” Gladstein said.

Less drastic examples exist in the West, he added, but should also be cause for concern, whether we’re talking about our data being sold without our knowledge or consent, our elections being influenced through online platforms, or a reputation score being assigned to Facebook users in an attempt to combat fake news.

Bitcoin, Gladstein believes, can help—and is already doing so. “Until Bitcoin, there was no way to globally transact other than to trust a third party,” he said. “Unstoppable money simply didn’t exist. I posit to you that Bitcoin is a revolutionary upgrade in how humans can network.”

The fact that it’s owner-less and decentralized gives Bitcoin some uniquely resilient properties. It can’t be changed, stopped, or interrupted. You don’t need to know or trust the party on the other end to transact with them. And even within the Bitcoin community, power is distributed; its ‘government’ works like so, Gladstein said:

Miners are the executive branch, because they work to win the right to add another block to the Bitcoin blockchain. Coders write the script that allows the language to upgrade; they’re the legislative branch. And users decide whether or not to install new blocks on their full nodes, making them comparable to the judicial branch.

“No one entity can control Bitcoin,” Gladstein said. “You have to have consensus among three very different groups, which makes it very hard to change.”

In fact, a clue about why Bitcoin was built was left in the code of the first Bitcoin block. It was a criticism of governments printing more money when financial crises take place. Bitcoin could do to financial monopolies what the internet did to information monopolies (that is, disrupt or destroy them).

As an example, Gladstein spoke about Venezuela’s current crisis and syrocketing inflation. The International Monetary Fund predicted the country’s inflation will reach 1,000,000 percent by the end of this year, and consumer prices have already risen 46,305 percent this year by one estimate.

“Bitcoin is an escape valve for people in Venezuela,” he said. “It gives them a way to store their money that their government can’t vaporize or inflate to nothing. It gives them a way to transact value with their relatives overseas. It upgrades the ability of remittances to be permanent.”

Bitcoin and other decentralized networks are most useful in countries where people can’t trust the government or the banking system. Gladstein said the most recent estimate of the number of people who have used a cryptocurrency is around 75 million, or 1 percent of the world’s population. “But 4 billion people, or almost half of the world’s population, live under an authoritarian regime,” he said. “That’s a massive opportunity.Whether it’s an opportunity for human impact or business impact, that’s up to you.”

He pointed out that it’s important to differentiate between open blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum, and private or enterprise blockchains, which are closed, centralized, usually permissioned, and censorable. Open blockchains are the new cash—they give users privacy and free speech, a way to use money without being tracked.

Gladstein shared a relevant quote from essayist and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Bitcoin’s mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely the currency, is no longer a monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.”

Though Bitcoin’s been around for almost a decade now, we’re really still at its beginning. Cell phones were expensive and hard to use at first too (poor design, low battery life, bad signal), but now people all over the world are using cell phones for cheap and doing much more than just making calls on them. Gladstein sees Bitcoin following a similar cycle of lowered barriers, increased user-friendliness, and wider adoption.

The problem is that Bitcoin was designed to be slow; its creators traded scalability and efficiency for security and censorship resistance. “If we’re going to think exponentially and get Bitcoin into the hands of a billion people instead of just a million people, we have to find another solution,” Gladstein said.

His proposal? Lighting Network, or systems like it. Lightning is a decentralized network that uses blockchain smart contracts to enable instant payments between participants, but transactions are settled off-blockchain, which makes for faster speeds and lower fees. Lightning can do millions of transactions per second.

Even if Lightning Network fails, Gladstein said, it’s useful as a blueprint for scaling decentralized technology. And in his eyes, the future of freedom depends on decentralized tech.

“I think we want to do everything we can to go down a path that has some sort of decentralization,” he concluded. “Where we preserve our freedoms and rights, and our privacy. We are going to want that for the future of our planet and for the future of our species.”

Vanessa Bates Ramirez is senior editor of Singularity Hub. She’s interested in renewable energy, health and medicine, international development, and countless other topics.

This article is republished from Singularity Hub under Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

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