Barron’s (December 27)
“Megatrends, like aging and climate change, are forcing governments to take care of themselves, understanding there are going to be massive challenges. As a result, we’re starting to see the peak of globalization, meaning limits to the movement of free capital, goods, money, services, and knowledge.”
Tags: Aging, Capital, Challenges, Climate change, Globalization, Goods, Governments, Knowledge, Limits, Megatrends, Money, Peak, Services
Gizmodo (October 19)
A “stunning AI breakthrough” has moved “us one step closer to the singularity.” Over the past year, the world marveled as AlphaGo has defeated Go masters at a game that has more possible combinations than the known universe has atoms. That now seems like child’s play. An improved version AlphaGo Zero (AGZ) took “just three days to train itself from scratch and acquire literally thousands of years of human Go knowledge simply by playing itself.” After three days of preparation, AGZ beat AlphaGo in each of 100 games. The technological singularity is “inching ever closer.”
Tags: AI, AlphaGo Zero, Breakthrough, Go, Knowledge, Singularity, Stunning
Financial Times (May 2)
“First money and low-cost production jumped across borders, now it is creativity and services.” Knowledge intensive flows “are now worth a heady $12.6tn; to set this in context, this is half of all cross-border flows, and almost four-fifths the size of the US economy.” This new “globalisation does not just threaten western manufacturing jobs, but many service jobs too.”
Tags: Borders, Creativity, Globalisation, Jobs, Knowledge, Low-cost, Manufacturing, Money, Production, Service, Services, U.S.
Forbes (September 12)
About 11 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager 1 is the first man-made object to go beyond our Solar System. “Now that Voyager 1 is in the space between the stars, it will help improve our knowledge of what conditions are like in interstellar space. And we should get a lot of information about it until about the year 2020, when Voyager’s batteries will start to run out and shut down its systems.”
Time (August 16)
Mobile phones have rapidly transformed our lives. “It is hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. Not the knife or match, the pen or page.” We have grown “accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips. A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon. In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.”
Mobile phones have rapidly transformed our lives. “It is hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. Not the knife or match, the pen or page.” We have grown “accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips. A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon. In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.”
Tags: Apollo 11, Knowledge, Mobile phones, Smart phones
