Category Archives: Direccion Estrategica

Prediciendo el futuro de largo plazo hacia el 2118

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Predicting the Long-Term Future – 2043, 2118, and 2218

Tomado de: Fast future publishing, https://us10.campaign-archive.com/?u=b2bac6b3fa5b485c0809f5c81&id=b937ebb586 or http://mailchi.mp/fastfuturepublishing.com/2018-12gdpr, 04/06/2018

The team at Fast Future have been doing an exercise to envisage scenarios of what our world might look 25, 100, and 200 years into the future. Here are the outcomes. We’d welcome your thoughts on these scenarios, and your own views on how our world might play out.

2043: How the world might look in 25 years 

Artificial living – artificial intelligence (AI) will permeate our world. The technology will be in use across every aspect of society from healthcare and education to entertainment and financial services. Smart systems could manage our social lives, help us select the ideal partners for dating, marriage, and reproduction, monitor our health in liaison with our doctors, and personalise our education so content is delivered in the way we learn best. The technology will be making legal decisions in court, determining our benefit payments, fact checking politicians, and powering the transport sector.

Smarter money – By combining the power of AI and blockchain, the concept of money could evolve into electronic tokens with far more types of assets tradeable within the one “currency”. For example, we might earn tokens from our employment, as rewards from retailers and airlines, and as micro-credits for completing workplace training or school learning tasks. Instead of simply liking a track from a musician, we could now make a micro-payment to them with a fraction of a token. This evolution from cash and cryptocurrencies towards a universal means of exchange could mean the end of cash and foreign exchange markets.
Rohit Talwar, CEO, Fast Future

Autonomous city centers – Following a widely invoked policy to ban petrol and diesel fuelled vehicles from city centers, the same happened with manually driven cars. An era marked by exponential change has seen changing ideas of asset ownership, radical leaps forward in AI, increasingly efficient electric propulsion units for vehicles, and the emergence of smart city infrastructures. These relatively smooth transitions led to other changes in cities, including the removal of redundant traffic signals and the remodelling of some street intersections.

Autonomous cargo aircraft – While most passengers are sceptical about an autonomous plane ride to their destination in the sun, cargo has no such qualms. While regulations allow the operation of autonomous aircraft for cargo purposes, they are still operated between specialist cargo hub airports, separate from passenger traffic.

Autonomous commuter trains – Overground and subway / metro commuter services are now fully automated in many cities. At busier stations and at peak travel times, train staff supervise the safety of passengers at the station, but the trains themselves are fully autonomous with AI systems driving the train and monitoring passengers. As yet, long distance express trains retain on board crews, although much like civilian aircraft, the drivers’ roles are to supervise the systems and provide on board customer service.

The first 3D printed Moonbase – Following a series of missions to create an autonomous 3D accommodation manufacturing facility on the Moon’s surface, the facility is now ready. The Moonbase will support greater and more extensive autonomous and human exploration of the Moon’s surface and serve as a base for onward missions to deep space.
Steve Wells, COO, Fast Future

Food revolution – Within next 25 year every aspect of the life we know will change. The way we produce our food will change. Fruits and vegetables might be grown in buildings controlled by AI rather than on farms, meat could be cloned, and we might see widespread consumption of 3D printed food.

Asia rising – Looking at the development of the Asian market, is reasonable to expect that within 25 years world economic and industrial leadership will have passed to China and India. The growth of China and other Asian economies will continue to outstrip more developed nations as see Asian nations as the driving force of the world economy rather than the USA and European countries.
Karolina Dolatowska, Researcher, Fast Future

Agricultural disruption – The food chain will undergo a major transformation led by AI, vertical farming and lab grown meat. Hydroponics plants, fruits, and vegetable might change agriculture as we know it, and help revolutionize the food industry. Overpopulation is having major consequences, driving a lack of growing space and food in many parts of the world. The growing global population will force us to find creative solutions. Having AI-controlled hydroponic vertical farms on the sides of buildings might be one of the solutions.

Artificial meat – In-vitro cloned meat could be another future solution to our food supply problems. While lab grown meat may still face many challenges, such as flavour control, it also has many advantages such as less waste, less risk of viruses, reduced space requirements, and lower emissions and environmental impacts among others. These benefits seem to outweigh the disadvantages and drawback of traditionally reared livestock. The idea of artificial meat might disturb us, nonetheless this solution seems to be finding its way into our diets.
Helena Calle, Researcher, Fast Future

Water innovation – As climate change continues to alter rainfall patterns worldwide, water may become an increasingly scarce resource. Regions with the financial capital may be able to invest in the latest microfiltration technologies, thus allowing constant recycling of waste water into drinkable water. Desalination plants may be the solution in arid regions along coastlines. Hopefully, as technology improves, and costs fall, the issues associated with desalination, namely high energy usage and residual salt, could be resolved to such a degree that coastal regions all over the world would be able to afford desalination.
April Koury, Researcher, Fast Future

Artificial wombs – within the next 25 years it may be possible to prevent preterm mortality in infants by use of artificial wombs that provide all the conditions required to safely achieve full development and birth of a foetus. This technology would at first be used to save at-risk pregnancies but may over time become a reproductive technology available to consumers interested in having a baby without pregnancy.

Antibiotic failure – Many pathogens are gaining immunity to the antibiotic medicines available today. Without antibiotics, common illness and medical procedures, even pregnancy and childbirth, could become endangering events. In the next 25 years, is it possible that we will experience «the end of antibiotics» (as the World Health Organization put it in 2016)? Fortunately, the microbial threat is being met with advanced drug development, allowing medical researchers to explore new approaches to fight superbugs. New strategies on the horizon range from genetic modification of germs and implantable semiconductors through to the discovery of new antibacterial agents in soil.
Alexandra Whittington, Foresight Director, Fast Future

2118: How the world might look in 100 years 

The world has been transformed by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the emergence of artificial superintelligence (ASI), and the reworking of economic and financial systems using distributed technologies such as blockchain. The majority of people now work on a voluntary basis as all their basic needs are catered for by guaranteed incomes and free universal services such as transport, food, education, and utilities. Old notions such as government have been replaced by community decision making and the community at large now owns the intellectual property for all new advances in science and technology. The community is also a 50% shareholder in every business, with the returns reinvested based on priorities set by the community. You can still work if you want to – but no one has a job, we just play various roles in society, and self-organisation by activities is the way most things get done.

Society leads a far more balanced existence on the planet – only using what we need, managing our resources more sustainably. The focus of education is on maximising the individual’s talents and potential, and with lifespans of 150 years or more now routine, there is plenty of time to try our hand at everything we’d like to do. Wealth has been redistributed with a maximum multiple of ten between the assets of the richest and poorest, but most assets are in public ownership. Education centres such as schools, colleges, and universities have become the gathering centre for the community, where anyone can attend free courses, run 24/7/365 and delivered by anyone who has something to say – either in presence or via a variety of electronic delivery services.
Rohit Talwar, CEO, Fast Future

«A world divided between abundance and automation – where technology has been deployed for the good of society; where products and services are basically free across a numbers of linked nation states and trading / political blocks with reasonably successfully harmonised taxation and regulatory systems – and the rest; states initially side-lined as politically and economically incompatible and a number of disparate nation states struggling to make the transition to the «modern» world, and a source of unrest within their own borders and internationally, have basically divided the world in two.

Colonies on the Moon and Mars are beginning to thrive with corporate governance. Given the colonisation – initially through a moon base staging post to Mars – was established by the private sector rather than the state players involved in the 1960’s and 70’s space race, there was little that governments on earth could do other than hang onto their coat tails as the technology developed came through company R&D activities. Both the Moon and Mars became staging posts for autonomous missions deep into the solar system as the search and commercialisation of other planets gathers pace.»
Steve Wells, COO, Fast Future

2218: How the world might look in 200 years

“In 2218 the natural systems of the earth could be well on their way to rebounding from the brink of collapse. If today’s decision-makers choose to put resources toward avoiding ecological collapse (including strict adherence to carbon policies, and full support for development of renewable energy), the world of 2218 might be a more healthy and balanced place where life can be supported for hundreds of years to come. Some scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, warn that we have 100 years of life left on this planet. Instead of exacerbating the issues for another 100 years, we could solve the problems we have created on earth which threaten life as we know it. If we take that advice today, and begin repairing things now, we may have a very desirable, functional and safe ecosystem for future generations to enjoy. If we do not, I doubt there will be much to see in 2218”
Alexandra Whittington, Foresight Director, Fast Future

Earth has become part of the Inter-Galactic Federation of Planets (IGFP). The period from 2020-2050 saw a series of inter-related and cascading collapses of the economic, trade, financial, political, environmental, and social systems that had previously steered growth and progress. Advances in technologies such as AI had only served to accelerate dysfunctionality and wealth disparity. After the chaos of systemic failure, the planet gradually moved to adopt open, fairer, and more ecologically sound governance practices. As Earth started to establish a new equilibrium, so members of the IGFP started to make contact and introduce us to their values, ways of life, and advanced science and technology. Earth finally joined the IGFP in 2120 after a prolonged period of transition and adjustment.

In 2018, the New Earth now pursues an ecologically sound path and stewardship of the planet is a core part of the education curriculum alongside community engagement and civic responsibility. Abundance has become a reality, money no longer exists as a means of exchange, but citizens can accumulate credits for their acts of learning and service. Credits can be traded for the rights to visit the most distant of planets or to work on the most community focused initiatives. Manufacturing of goods is largely in the hands of technology, and ownership has been replaced by usership, with sharing a key organising principle across society. Everyone can have a say on every issue, and an elected IGFP governance council serves strict two year time limits to steward through the choices made by citizens.
Rohit Talwar, CEO, Fast Future

Los Precarios languidecen en el peldaño inferior del sistema laboral mundial

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Eventos, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Noticias, Prospectiva Comments off

Las 5 mentiras más grandes del capitalismo global

Escrito por

Guy Standing, Professorial research associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Las opiniones expresadas en este artículo son las del autor y no del Foro Económico Mundial.

Image: REUTERS/Gary Hershorn/Files (UNITED STATES – Tags: CITYSCAPE SOCIETY) ATTENTION EDITORS: PICTURE 04 OF 40 FOR PACKAGE ‘NYC – A SEASON IN THE CITY’ SEARCH ‘NYC HERSHORN’ FOR ALL IMAGES – RTX13TBE

15 ene 2017

Los Precariat se pueden dividir en tres otros grupos: los Atavists, que añoran un pasado perdido; Nostalgics (nostálgicos) que esperan en vano un presente, un hogar; y Progressives (progresistas) que esperan un futuro perdido. El último grupo incluye mayormente a los que van a la universidad solo para terminar con muchas deudas y poca esperanza de una carrera o desarrollo personal.

El primer grupo, los Atavists, es el que ha participado del alboroto político al apoyar el Brexit, el triunfo de Donald Trump, la Liga Norte de derecha en Italia, el Frente nacional de Marine Le Pen en Francia, y otros populismos nacionalistas en otros lugares de Europa. Básicamente, en cada lugar que parece ganar la derecha populista.

Pero los Progressives también se han revelado, parándose codo a codo con los gustos de Podemos en España, Bernie Sanders en los EE. UU., Jeremy Corbyn en Gran Bretaña, el Alternativet en Dinamarca y los nuevos movimientos de izquierda en Alemania, Portugal y Escandinavia.

Mientras tanto, las minorías, los inmigrantes y los refugiados que forman parte de los Nostálgicos, están latentes, y con seguridad no podrán seguir mucho más sin esperanza.

La era del odio

Hay claramente mucho odio allí afuera, un gran descontento sobre las élites y el orden establecido que alimenta bastante energía política. Los tres grupos de los Precariat están reaccionando de diferentes maneras al crecimiento de la desigualdad e inseguridad económica de las últimas tres décadas; todos han visto el desmantelamiento del sistema de distribución de ingresos del siglo 20 que vinculó ingresos y beneficios a trabajos.

Por el interés de la competitividad en una economía mundial globalizada, los gobiernos de todas las facetas introdujeron reformas al mercado laboral que promovían flexibilidad pero acentuaban inseguridades de Precariat. Al debilitar las normativas para los bancos y las compañías financieras, permitieron que los financistas tengan más ingresos mientras empujan a los Precariat a mayores deudas. Reforzaron derechos de propiedad de todo tipo: físicos, financieros e intelectuales, que dieron una participación mayor de ingresos y riqueza a los poseedores de activos a expensas de todos los demás. Y otorgaron recortes impositivos para los ricos y subsidios generosos para las empresas, mientras demandaban reducciones en el gasto público para equilibrar presupuestos, cortaban beneficios para los Precariat y bajaban la renta absoluta y relativa.

En cada caso, el argumento era que las medidas impulsarían el crecimiento económico, al agrandar la torta para que todos puedan compartirla. En cambio, casi todas las ganancias han ido a una pequeña élite mundial, que, sin sorprender realmente, ha presionado incluso para obtener más. No hubo compensación alguna.

Y cuanto más se presente este prospecto fraudulento, más enojadas se pondrán todas las partes de los Precariat. Las feas consecuencias políticas deberían estar claras para todos.

No es demasiado tarde para que las democracias liberales presenten reformas transformadoras que respondan a los problemas de los Precariat mientras promueven el desarrollo y el crecimiento económico. Pero hasta ahora solo hubo palabras donde se necesitan acciones. Las élites liberales deben realizar verdaderas concesiones o encontrar los valores que reclaman conservar, tolerancia, libertad, seguridad económica y diversidad cultural, a un gran riesgo, en especial cuando se trata de la ira de los Atavists.

Lo primero que hay que hacer es enfrentar el sistema actual del capitalismo rentista. Aquí es donde una creciente proporción de riqueza va a propietarios de activos ya privilegiados (rentistas), mientras que los ingresos de la mayoría de los trabajos disminuyen de valor. John Maynard Keynes predijo en 1936 que el desarrollo del capitalismo durante el siglo 20 terminaría en “la eutanasia de los rentistas”, cuando la captación de rentas se haga más difícil. La realidad ha mostrado lo contrario. Las empresas y financieras han aprovechado su creciente influencia para inducir a los gobiernos y organizaciones internacionales a que construyan un marco global de instituciones y normativas que permitan a las élites maximizar sus ingresos por rentas.

El capitalismo moderno está basado en cinco mentiras:

1. La primera mentira es el reclamo de que el capitalismo mundial se basa en mercados libres. Sin exagerar, podríamos decir que lo que se ha construido es el sistema de mercado menos libre que se pueda imaginar. Además, la propiedad intelectual resulta ser una de las principales fuentes de ingresos por rentas, a través del poder de mercado creado por la divulgación de marcas (fundamental para una identidad corporativa), derechos de autor, derechos de diseño, indicaciones geográficas, secretos comerciales, y sobre todo, patentes.

Las industrias de alta aplicación de tecnología y conocimientos, que ahora representan más del 30 % de la producción mundial, ganan lo mismo o más en ingresos de renta por derechos de propiedad intelectual como por la producción de bienes o servicios. Esto representa una elección política de los gobiernos alrededor del mundo para otorgar monopolios sobre conocimiento a intereses privados, permitiéndoles restringir el acceso público al conocimiento y elevar el precio de obtenerlo, o de los productos y servicios que representan. No por nada Thomas Jefferson dijo que las ideas no deberían ser sujeto de propiedad.

2. La segunda mentira es que se necesitan fuertes derechos de propiedad intelectual para alentar y recompensar los riesgos de inversión en investigación y desarrollo. Incluso es el público, los contribuyentes normales, que soportan el costo de mucha de esa inversión. Muchas de las vacas lecheras empresariales derivan de la investigación financiada públicamente, en instituciones o universidades públicas, o a través de subsidios y exenciones tributarias. Además, la mayoría de las innovaciones que dieron grandes resultados en ingresos de rentas a las empresas o individuos son el resultado de una serie de ideas y experimentos atribuibles a muchos individuos o grupos que no son recompensados. Y muchas patentes se presentan para bloquear a la competencia o evitar demandas, y no están pensadas para ser explotadas para la producción.

3. La tercera mentira es que el fortalecimiento de los derechos de propiedad es bueno para el crecimiento. Por el contrario, al aumentar la desigualdad y distorsionar los patrones de consumo, se obstaculizó el crecimiento e hizo que el crecimiento existente sea menos sustentable. El crecimiento lento e inestable desarrolla frustración económica para millones, sin mencionar los riesgos políticos que vienen con ella.

4. La cuarta es que los beneficios crecientes reflejan la eficiencia administrativa y un retorno a asumir riesgos. En realidad, el aumento de participación en beneficios ha ido principalmente a aquellos que reciben un ingreso de rentas, en gran parte vinculado con activos financieros.

5. “El trabajo es el mejor camino para salir de la pobreza”. Esta es la quinta mentira, y la más importante políticamente. Para millones de personas entre los Precariat, es una broma pesada.

Guerra a los salarios

Esta es la clave. El sistema de distribución de ingresos se ha deshecho. En toda la OCDE, los salarios reales se han ido estancando durante tres décadas. La parte de ingresos que va al capital ha ido aumentando y es mucho más elevada de lo que solía ser. Y los asalariados con altos ingresos se llevan una mayor participación del ingreso que va al empleo, afectando más a los Precariat.

Tres relaciones económicas ilustran lo que sucede con los salarios. Primero, solía ser el caso de que cuando crecía la productividad, los salarios crecían en paralelo; ahora, en los EE. UU. y en otros lados, los salarios no cambian. Segundo, solía suceder que cuando aumentaban las ganancias, los salarios aumentaban; ahora, los salarios no cambian. Tercero, solía suceder que cuando aumentaba el empleo, los salarios promedio también aumentaban; ahora, los salarios promedio incluso pueden caer, porque los trabajos nuevos pagan menos.

Sin importar cuán duro trabajen los Precariat, enfrentan escasas perspectivas de escapar de una vida de inseguridad económica. Y cuanto más se mantenga esa verdad inconveniente, mayor es el peligro de que escuchen a los populistas autoritarios de cuasiverdad que ofrecen revertir la historia. La única forma de escapar a estas “políticas del infierno” es construir un nuevo sistema de distribución de ingresos apropiado para el siglo 21.

Escrito por

Guy Standing, Professorial research associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Las opiniones expresadas en este artículo son las del autor y no del Foro Económico Mundial.

10 tecnologías disruptivas para el 2018

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Eventos, Formación, Innovacion Social, Noticias, Prospectiva Comments off

 Dueling neural networks. Artificial embryos. AI in the cloud. Welcome to our annual list of the 10 technology advances we think will shape the way we work and live now and for years to come.

Every year since 2001 we’ve picked what we call the 10 Breakthrough Technologies. People often ask, what exactly do you mean by “breakthrough”? It’s a reasonable question—some of our picks haven’t yet reached widespread use, while others may be on the cusp of becoming commercially available. What we’re really looking for is a technology, or perhaps even a collection of technologies, that will have a profound effect on our lives.

For this year, a new technique in artificial intelligence called GANs is giving machines imagination; artificial embryos, despite some thorny ethical constraints, are redefining how life can be created and are opening a research window into the early moments of a human life; and a pilot plant in the heart of Texas’s petrochemical industry is attempting to create completely clean power from natural gas—probably a major energy source for the foreseeable future. These and the rest of our list will be worth keeping an eye on. —The Editors

3-D Metal Printing

DEREK BRAHNEY

While 3-D printing has been around for decades, it has remained largely in the domain of hobbyists and designers producing one-off prototypes. And printing objects with anything other than plastics—in particular, metal—has been expensive and painfully slow.

Now, however, it’s becoming cheap and easy enough to be a potentially practical way of manufacturing parts. If widely adopted, it could change the way we mass-produce many products.

3-D Metal Printing
  • BreakthroughNow printers can make metal objects quickly and cheaply.
  • Why It MattersThe ability to make large and complex metal ­objects on demand could transform manufacturing.
  • Key PlayersMarkforged, Desktop Metal, GE
  • AvailabilityNow

In the short term, manufacturers wouldn’t need to maintain large inventories—they could simply print an object, such as a replacement part for an aging car, whenever someone needs it.

In the longer term, large factories that mass-produce a limited range of parts might be replaced by smaller ones that make a wider variety, adapting to customers’ changing needs.

The technology can create lighter, stronger parts, and complex shapes that aren’t possible with conventional metal fabrication methods. It can also provide more precise control of the microstructure of metals. In 2017, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they had developed a 3-D-printing method for creating stainless-steel parts twice as strong as traditionally made ones. 

Also in 2017, 3-D-printing company Markforged, a small startup based outside Boston, released the first 3-D metal printer for under $100,000.

Another Boston-area startup, Desktop Metal, began to ship its first metal prototyping machines in December 2017. It plans to begin selling larger machines, designed for manufacturing, that are 100 times faster than older metal printing methods.

The printing of metal parts is also getting easier. Desktop Metal now offers software that generates designs ready for 3-D printing. Users tell the program the specs of the object they want to print, and the software produces a computer model suitable for printing.   

GE, which has long been a proponent of using 3-D printing in its aviation products (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2013: Additive Manufacturing”), has a test version of its new metal printer that is fast enough to make large parts. The company plans to begin selling the printer in 2018. —Erin Winick

Artificial Embryos

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

In a breakthrough that redefines how life can be created, embryologists working at the University of Cambridge in the UK have grown realistic-looking mouse embryos using only stem cells. No egg. No sperm. Just cells plucked from another embryo.

Artificial Embryos
  • BreakthroughWithout using eggs or sperm cells, researchers have made embryo-like structures from stem cells alone, providing a whole new route to creating life.
  • Why It MattersArtificial embryos will make it easier for researchers to study the mysterious beginnings of a human life, but they’re stoking new bioethical debates.
  • Key PlayersUniversity of Cambridge; University of Michigan; Rockefeller University
  • AvailabilityNow

The researchers placed the cells carefully in a three-dimensional scaffold and watched, fascinated, as they started communicating and lining up into the distinctive bullet shape of a mouse embryo several days old.

“We know that stem cells are magical in their powerful potential of what they can do. We did not realize they could self-organize so beautifully or perfectly,” Magdelena Zernicka­-Goetz, who headed the team, told an interviewer at the time.

Zernicka-Goetz says her “synthetic” embryos probably couldn’t have grown into mice. Nonetheless, they’re a hint that soon we could have mammals born without an egg at all.

That isn’t Zernicka-Goetz’s goal. She wants to study how the cells of an early embryo begin taking on their specialized roles. The next step, she says, is to make an artificial embryo out of human stem cells, work that’s being pursued at the University of Michigan and Rockefeller University.

Synthetic human embryos would be a boon to scientists, letting them tease apart events early in development. And since such embryos start with easily manipulated stem cells, labs will be able to employ a full range of tools, such as gene editing, to investigate them as they grow.

Artificial embryos, however, pose ethical questions. What if they turn out to be indistinguishable from real embryos? How long can they be grown in the lab before they feel pain? We need to address those questions before the science races ahead much further, bioethicists say. —Antonio Regalado

Sensing City

SIDEWALK TORONTO

Numerous smart-city schemes have run into delays, dialed down their ambitious goals, or priced out everyone except the super-wealthy. A new project in Toronto, called Quayside, is hoping to change that pattern of failures by rethinking an urban neighborhood from the ground up and rebuilding it around the latest digital technologies.

Sensing City
  • BreakthroughA Toronto neighborhood aims to be the first place to successfully integrate cutting-edge urban design with state-of-the-art digital technology.
  • Why It MattersSmart cities could make urban areas more affordable, livable, and environmentally friendly.
  • Key PlayersSidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto
  • AvailabilityProject announced in October 2017; construction could begin in 2019

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, based in New York City, is collaborating with the Canadian government on the high-tech project, slated for Toronto’s industrial waterfront.

One of the project’s goals is to base decisions about design, policy, and technology on information from an extensive network of sensors that gather data on everything from air quality to noise levels to people’s activities.

The plan calls for all vehicles to be autonomous and shared. Robots will roam underground doing menial chores like delivering the mail. Sidewalk Labs says it will open access to the software and systems it’s creating so other companies can build services on top of them, much as people build apps for mobile phones.

The company intends to closely monitor public infrastructure, and this has raised concerns about data governance and privacy. But Sidewalk Labs believes it can work with the community and the local government to alleviate those worries.

“What’s distinctive about what we’re trying to do in Quayside is that the project is not only extraordinarily ambitious but also has a certain amount of humility,” says Rit Aggarwala, the executive in charge of Sidewalk Labs’ urban-systems planning. That humility may help Quayside avoid the pitfalls that have plagued previous smart-city initiatives.

Other North American cities are already clamoring to be next on Sidewalk Labs’ list, according to Waterfront Toronto, the public agency overseeing Quayside’s development. “San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, and Boston have all called asking for introductions,” says the agency’s CEO, Will Fleissig. —Elizabeth Woyke

AI for Everybody

MIGUEL PORLAN

Artificial intelligence has so far been mainly the plaything of big tech companies like Amazon, Baidu, Google, and Microsoft, as well as some startups. For many other companies and parts of the economy, AI systems are too expensive and too difficult to implement fully.

AI for Everybody
  • BreakthroughCloud-based AI is making the technology cheaper and easier to use.
  • Why It MattersRight now the use of AI is dominated by a relatively few companies, but as a cloud-based service, it could be widely available to many more, giving the economy a boost.
  • Key PlayersAmazon; Google; Microsoft
  • AvailabilityNow

What’s the solution? Machine-learning tools based in the cloud are bringing AI to a far broader audience. So far, Amazon dominates cloud AI with its AWS subsidiary. Google is challenging that with TensorFlow, an open-source AI library that can be used to build other machine-learning software. Recently Google announced Cloud AutoML, a suite of pre-trained systems that could make AI simpler to use.

Microsoft, which has its own AI-powered cloud platform, Azure, is teaming up with Amazon to offer Gluon, an open-source deep-learning library. Gluon is supposed to make building neural nets—a key technology in AI that crudely mimics how the human brain learns—as easy as building a smartphone app.

It is uncertain which of these companies will become the leader in offering AI cloud services.  But it is a huge business opportunity for the winners.

These products will be essential if the AI revolution is going to spread more broadly through different parts of the economy.

Currently AI is used mostly in the tech industry, where it has created efficiencies and produced new products and services. But many other businesses and industries have struggled to take advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence. Sectors such as medicine, manufacturing, and energy could also be transformed if they were able to implement the technology more fully, with a huge boost to economic productivity.

Most companies, though, still don’t have enough people who know how to use cloud AI. So Amazon and Google are also setting up consultancy services. Once the cloud puts the technology within the reach of almost everyone, the real AI revolution can begin.
—Jackie Snow

Dueling Neural Networks

ILLUSTRATION BY DEREK BRAHNEY | DIAGRAM COURTESY OF MICHAEL NIELSEN, “NEURAL NETWORKS AND DEEP LEARNING”, DETERMINATION PRESS, 2015

Artificial intelligence is getting very good at identifying things: show it a million pictures, and it can tell you with uncanny accuracy which ones depict a pedestrian crossing a street. But AI is hopeless at generating images of pedestrians by itself. If it could do that, it would be able to create gobs of realistic but synthetic pictures depicting pedestrians in various settings, which a self-driving car could use to train itself without ever going out on the road.

Dueling Neural Networks
  • BreakthroughTwo AI systems can spar with each other to create ultra-realistic original images or sounds, something machines have never been able to do before.
  • Why It MattersThis gives machines something akin to a sense of imagination, which may help them become less reliant on humans—but also turns them into alarmingly powerful tools for digital fakery.
  • Key PlayersGoogle Brain, DeepMind, Nvidia
  • AvailabilityNow

The problem is, creating something entirely new requires imagination—and until now that has perplexed AIs.

The solution first occurred to Ian Goodfellow, then a PhD student at the University of Montreal, during an academic argument in a bar in 2014. The approach, known as a generative adversarial network, or GAN, takes two neural networks—the simplified mathematical models of the human brain that underpin most modern machine learning—and pits them against each other in a digital cat-and-mouse game.

Both networks are trained on the same data set. One, known as the generator, is tasked with creating variations on images it’s already seen—perhaps a picture of a pedestrian with an extra arm. The second, known as the discriminator, is asked to identify whether the example it sees is like the images it has been trained on or a fake produced by the generator—basically, is that three-armed person likely to be real?

Over time, the generator can become so good at producing images that the discriminator can’t spot fakes. Essentially, the generator has been taught to recognize, and then create, realistic-looking images of pedestrians.

The technology has become one of the most promising advances in AI in the past decade, able to help machines produce results that fool even humans.

GANs have been put to use creating realistic-sounding speech and photorealistic fake imagery. In one compelling example, researchers from chipmaker Nvidia primed a GAN with celebrity photographs to create hundreds of credible faces of people who don’t exist. Another research group made not-unconvincing fake paintings that look like the works of van Gogh. Pushed further, GANs can reimagine images in different ways—making a sunny road appear snowy, or turning horses into zebras.

The results aren’t always perfect: GANs can conjure up bicycles with two sets of handlebars, say, or faces with eyebrows in the wrong place. But because the images and sounds are often startlingly realistic, some experts believe there’s a sense in which GANs are beginning to understand the underlying structure of the world they see and hear. And that means AI may gain, along with a sense of imagination, a more independent ability to make sense of what it sees in the world. —Jamie Condliffe

Babel-Fish Earbuds

GOOGLE

In the cult sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you slide a yellow Babel fish into your ear to get translations in an instant. In the real world, Google has come up with an interim solution: a $159 pair of earbuds, called Pixel Buds. These work with its Pixel smartphones and Google Translate app to produce practically real-time translation.

Babel-Fish Earbuds
  • BreakthroughNear-real-time translation now works for a large number of languages and is easy to use.
  • Why It MattersIn an increasingly global world, language is still a barrier to communication.
  • Key PlayersGoogle and Baidu
  • AvailabilityNow

One person wears the earbuds, while the other holds a phone. The earbud wearer speaks in his or her language—English is the default—and the app translates the talking and plays it aloud on the phone. The person holding the phone responds; this response is translated and played through the earbuds.

Google Translate already has a conversation feature, and its iOS and Android apps let two users speak as it automatically figures out what languages they’re using and then translates them. But background noise can make it hard for the app to understand what people are saying, and also to figure out when one person has stopped speaking and it’s time to start translating.

Pixel Buds get around these problems because the wearer taps and holds a finger on the right earbud while talking. Splitting the interaction between the phone and the earbuds gives each person control of a microphone and helps the speakers maintain eye contact, since they’re not trying to pass a phone back and forth.

The Pixel Buds were widely panned for subpar design. They do look silly, and they may not fit well in your ears. They can also be hard to set up with a phone.

Clunky hardware can be fixed, though. Pixel Buds show the promise of mutually intelligible communication between languages in close to real time. And no fish required. —Rachel Metz

Zero-Carbon Natural Gas

MIGUEL PORLAN

The world is probably stuck with natural gas as one of our primary sources of electricity for the foreseeable future. Cheap and readily available, it now accounts for more than 30 percent of US electricity and 22 percent of world electricity. And although it’s cleaner than coal, it’s still a massive source of carbon emissions.

A pilot power plant just outside Houston, in the heart of the US petroleum and refining industry, is testing a technology that could make clean energy from natural gas a reality. The company behind the 50-megawatt project, Net Power, believes it can generate power at least as cheaply as standard natural-gas plants and capture essentially all the carbon dioxide released in the process.

Zero-Carbon Natural Gas
  • BreakthroughA power plant efficiently and cheaply captures carbon released by burning natural gas, avoiding greenhouse-gas emissions.
  • Why It MattersAround 32 percent of US electricity is produced with natural gas, accounting for around 30 percent of the power sector’s carbon emissions.
  • Key Players8 Rivers Capital; Exelon Generation; CB&I
  • Availability3 to 5 years

If so, it would mean the world has a way to produce carbon-free energy from a fossil fuel at a reasonable cost. Such natural-gas plants could be cranked up and down on demand, avoiding the high capital costs of nuclear power and sidestepping the unsteady supply that renewables generally provide.

Net Power is a collaboration between technology development firm 8 Rivers Capital, Exelon Generation, and energy construction firm CB&I. The company is in the process of commissioning the plant and has begun initial testing. It intends to release results from early evaluations in the months ahead.

The plant puts the carbon dioxide released from burning natural gas under high pressure and heat, using the resulting supercritical CO2 as the “working fluid” that drives a specially built turbine. Much of the carbon dioxide can be continuously recycled; the rest can be captured cheaply.

A key part of pushing down the costs depends on selling that carbon dioxide. Today the main use is in helping to extract oil from petroleum wells. That’s a limited market, and not a particularly green one. Eventually, however, Net Power hopes to see growing demand for carbon dioxide in cement manufacturing and in making plastics and other carbon-based materials.

Net Power’s technology won’t solve all the problems with natural gas, particularly on the extraction side. But as long as we’re using natural gas, we might as well use it as cleanly as possible. Of all the clean-energy technologies in development, Net Power’s is one of the furthest along to promise more than a marginal advance in cutting carbon emissions. —James Temple

Perfect Online Privacy

MIGUEL PORLAN

True internet privacy could finally become possible thanks to a new tool that can—for instance—let you prove you’re over 18 without revealing your date of birth, or prove you have enough money in the bank for a financial transaction without revealing your balance or other details. That limits the risk of a privacy breach or identity theft.

Perfect Online Privacy
  • BreakthroughComputer scientists are perfecting a cryptographic tool for proving something without revealing the information underlying the proof.
  • Why It MattersIf you need to disclose personal information to get something done online, it will be easier to do so without risking your privacy or exposing yourself to identity theft.
  • Key PlayersZcash; JPMorgan Chase; ING
  • AvailabilityNow

The tool is an emerging cryptographic protocol called a zero-­knowledge proof. Though researchers have worked on it for decades, interest has exploded in the past year, thanks in part to the growing obsession with cryptocurrencies, most of which aren’t private.

Much of the credit for a practical zero-knowledge proof goes to Zcash, a digital currency that launched in late 2016. Zcash’s developers used a method called a zk-SNARK (for “zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge”) to give users the power to transact anonymously.

That’s not normally possible in Bitcoin and most other public blockchain systems, in which transactions are visible to everyone. Though these transactions are theoretically anonymous, they can be combined with other data to track and even identify users. Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, the world’s second-most-popular blockchain network, has described zk-SNARKs as an “absolutely game-changing technology.”

For banks, this could be a way to use blockchains in payment systems without sacrificing their clients’ privacy. Last year, JPMorgan Chase added zk-SNARKs to its own blockchain-based payment system.

For all their promise, though, zk-SNARKs are computation-heavy and slow. They also require a so-called “trusted setup,” creating a cryptographic key that could compromise the whole system if it fell into the wrong hands. But researchers are looking at alternatives that deploy zero-knowledge proofs more efficiently and don’t require such a key. —Mike Orcutt

Genetic Fortune-Telling

DEREK BRAHNEY

One day, babies will get DNA report cards at birth. These reports will offer predictions about their chances of suffering a heart attack or cancer, of getting hooked on tobacco, and of being smarter than average.

Genetic Fortune Telling
  • BreakthroughScientists can now use your genome to predict your chances of getting heart disease or breast cancer, and even your IQ.
  • Why It MattersDNA-based predictions could be the next great public health advance, but they will increase the risks of genetic discrimination.
  • Key PlayersHelix; 23andMe; Myriad Genetics; UK Biobank; Broad Institute
  • AvailabilityNow

The science making these report cards possible has suddenly arrived, thanks to huge genetic studies—some involving more than a million people.

It turns out that most common diseases and many behaviors and traits, including intelligence, are a result of not one or a few genes but many acting in concert. Using the data from large ongoing genetic studies, scientists are creating what they call “polygenic risk scores.”

Though the new DNA tests offer probabilities, not diagnoses, they could greatly benefit medicine. For example, if women at high risk for breast cancer got more mammograms and those at low risk got fewer, those exams might catch more real cancers and set off fewer false alarms.

Pharmaceutical companies can also use the scores in clinical trials of preventive drugs for such illnesses as Alzheimer’s or heart disease. By picking volunteers who are more likely to get sick, they can more accurately test how well the drugs work.

The trouble is, the predictions are far from perfect. Who wants to know they might develop Alzheimer’s? What if someone with a low risk score for cancer puts off being screened, and then develops cancer anyway?

Polygenic scores are also controversial because they can predict any trait, not only diseases. For instance, they can now forecast about 10 percent of a person’s performance on IQ tests. As the scores improve, it’s likely that DNA IQ predictions will become routinely available. But how will parents and educators use that information?

To behavioral geneticist Eric ­Turk­heimer, the chance that genetic data will be used for both good and bad is what makes the new technology “simultaneously exciting and alarming.” —Antonio Regalado

Materials’ Quantum Leap

JEREMY LIEBMAN

The prospect of powerful new quantum computers comes with a puzzle. They’ll be capable of feats of computation inconceivable with today’s machines, but we haven’t yet figured out what we might do with those powers.

Materials’ Quantum Leap
  • BreakthroughIBM has simulated the electronic structure of a small molecule, using a seven-qubit quantum computer.
  • Why It MattersUnderstanding molecules in exact detail will allow chemists to design more effective drugs and better materials for generating and distributing energy.
  • Key PlayersIBM; Google; Harvard’s Alán Aspuru-Guzik
  • Availability5 to 10 years

One likely and enticing possibility: precisely designing molecules.

Chemists are already dreaming of new proteins for far more effective drugs, novel electrolytes for better batteries, compounds that could turn sunlight directly into a liquid fuel, and much more efficient solar cells.

We don’t have these things because molecules are ridiculously hard to model on a classical computer. Try simulating the behavior of the electrons in even a relatively simple molecule and you run into complexities far beyond the capabilities of today’s computers.

But it’s a natural problem for quantum computers, which instead of digital bits representing 1s and 0s use “qubits” that are themselves quantum systems. Recently, IBM researchers used a quantum computer with seven qubits to model a small molecule made of three atoms.

It should become possible to accurately simulate far larger and more interesting molecules as scientists build machines with more qubits and, just as important, better quantum algorithms. —David Rotman

La era del algoritmo ha llegado y tus datos son un tesoro

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Eventos, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Noticias, Prospectiva Comments off

Las fórmulas para convertir gigantescas cantidades de datos en información con valor económico se convierten en el gran activo de las multinacionales

Fuente: https://elpais.com/economia/2018/03/01/actualidad/1519921981_137226.html
LUIS DONCEL
San Fernando de Henares 
Sala de monitorización digital de Indra en San Fernando de Henares (Madrid) VICTOR SAINZ VÍDEO: JAIME CASAL

¿Qué tienen en común las menciones en las redes sociales al turismo de Mozambique, la recogida de residuos en la localidad riojana de Haro o la eficiencia energética de los edificios registrados en el catastro? En principio, nada. Pero una visita a la sala de monitorización de eventos de Indra basta para encontrar el nexo entre elementos tan dispares.

Un 90% de los datos de toda la historia se han generado en estos cinco años

Aquí, en esta habitación repleta de pantallas con luces tintineantes, un grupo de ingenieros controla 24 horas al día siete días a la semana la información que reciben de una infinidad de procesadores. Se dedican a observar la evolución de estos indicadores, y envían sus conclusiones a los clientes que han contratado sus servicios, ya sean empresas o administraciones públicas. Es este un excelente lugar para comprender por qué los algoritmos se han convertido en el secreto del éxito de muchas grandes compañías: un secreto que les permite canalizar un flujo ingente de información para tomar decisiones fundamentales para su actividad. 

MÁS INFORMACIÓN

Desde esta sala-observatorio que Indra tiene en la localidad madrileña de San Fernando de Henares, José Antonio Rubio explica que es aquí donde gigantescas cantidades de datos son convertidas en conocimiento susceptible de ser monetizar. “Los algoritmos no solo tienen la capacidad de explicar la realidad, sino también de anticipar comportamientos. Es una ventaja para evitar o minimizar riesgos o para aprovechar oportunidades”, asegura Rubio, director de Soluciones Digitales de Minsait, la unidad de negocio creada por Indra para encarar la transformación digital.

No es una novedad que las compañías obtengan datos de la analítica avanzada para estudiar características del producto que planean sacar al mercado; el precio al que lo quiere colocar o incluso decisiones internas tan sensibles como la política de retribuciones a sus empleados. Lo sorprendente es la dimensión. No es solo que recientemente se haya multiplicado hasta volúmenes difíciles de imaginar el número de datos en circulación —se calcula que la humanidad ha generado en los últimos cinco años un 90% de la información de toda la historia—. También han crecido vertiginosamente las posibilidades de interconectarlos. La palabra revolución corre de boca en boca entre académicos y gestores empresariales en contacto con el floreciente negocio de los algoritmos y el llamado big data.

“El reto ahora es transformar esos datos en valor”, dicen en el BBVA

“La primera revolución llegó hace unos años con el almacenamiento de inmensas cantidades de datos procedentes de las huellas electrónicas que todos dejamos. La segunda, en la que estamos inmersos, procede de la capacidad que tanto empresarios como usuarios o investigadores tienen para analizar estos datos. Esta segunda revolución procede de los algoritmos supercapaces y de lo que algunos llaman inteligencia artificial pero yo prefiero denominar superexpertos”, explica Estaban Moro, profesor de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid y del MediaLab del MIT de Boston.

Segunda revolución

José Antonio Rubio, director de Soluciones Digitales en Minsait
José Antonio Rubio, director de Soluciones Digitales en Minsait VICTOR SAINZ
 A esta segunda revolución ha contribuido cada uno de los millones de personas que cada día entregan sus datos de forma gratuita y continua, ya sea subiendo una foto a Facebook, comprando con una tarjeta de crédito o pasando por los torniquetes del metro con una tarjeta magnética.

Al calor de gigantes como Facebook y Google, que basan su enorme poder en la combinación de datos y algoritmos, cada vez más empresas invierten cantidades crecientes de dinero en todo lo relacionado con big data. Es el caso del BBVA, cuya apuesta va dirigida tanto a proyectos invisibles para los clientes —como los motores que permiten procesar más información para analizar las necesidades de sus usuarios— como a otras iniciativas fácilmente identificables, como la que permite a los clientes del banco prever la situación de sus finanzas a final de mes.

La ciberseguridad es ya la mayor preocupación de los inversores

“Hace décadas que el sector financiero usa modelos matemáticos. En los años setenta, el cliente de un banco venía definido por muy pocos atributos, como el lugar de residencia, edad, profesión o ingresos. Pero ahora deja una huella digital muy profunda que nos ayuda a conocerlos para particularizar nuestra oferta de servicios y minimizar los riesgos. La novedad es la profundidad de los datos y la capacidad analítica”, asegura Juan Murillo, responsable de divulgación analítica del BBVA. “El gran reto ahora es ver cómo se transforman todos esos datos en valor, no solo para la empresa, sino para nuestros clientes y para la sociedad”, añade.

Las amplísimas posibilidades que ofrecen los algoritmos no están exentas de riesgos. Los peligros son muchos: van desde la ciberseguridad —para hacer frente a hackeo o robo de fórmulas— hasta la privacidad de los usuarios, pasando por los posibles sesgos de las máquinas.

Así, un reciente estudio de la Universidad Carlos III concluía que Facebook maneja para usos publicitarios datos sensibles del 25% de los ciudadanos europeos, que son etiquetados en la red social en función de asuntos tan privados como su ideología política, orientación sexual, religión, etnia o salud. La Agencia Española de Protección de Datos ya impuso en septiembre una multa de 1,2 millones de euros a la red social de Mark Zuckerberg por usar información sin permiso.

La ciberseguridad, por su parte, se ha convertido en la principal preocupación de los inversores de todo el mundo: un 41% declaraba estar “extremadamente preocupado” por este asunto, según el Global Investors Survey de 2018 publicado esta semana por PwC. “Un problema de los algoritmos es que carecen de contexto. Pueden hacer estupendamente bien una tarea, pero si los sacas de esa actividad fallan estrepitosamente. Una empresa que se fusione con otra tendrá que aprender a entrenar de nuevo los algoritmos de la fusionada. Y para eso tienen que saber cómo se crearon”, reflexiona Moro, el experto del MIT estadounidense.

De vuelta a la sala de monitorización de Indra, Rubio desgrana las distintas utilidades que ofrece a sus clientes. Por motivos de confidencialidad, no puede hablar de las decenas de empresas a las que suministra información. Por eso pone ejemplos un tanto exóticos como el del turismo en Mozambique o los residuos de Haro. Cuando termina, la pregunta gira en torno a la posibilidad de que los algoritmos se hayan convertido en el tesoro más preciado de las empresas. “Definitivamente, sí”, responde sin dudar.

¿Y los riesgos? ¿Van a tomar las máquinas el lugar de los humanos? “Esto es algo que preocupa. Todo lo que desconocemos genera desconfianza. Pero la tecnología nos habilita para limitar los riesgos y acercar las industrias digitales a las personas. El riesgo es inherente al ser humano, no a las tecnologías”, concluye Rubio.

EL RIESGO DEL SESGO EN LAS MÁQUINAS

Al ser preguntada por la brecha salarial entre hombres y mujeres, Fuencisla Clemares, directora general de Google España, vino a decir que en su empresa no sabían lo que era eso. Allí, un algoritmo ciego a las cuestiones de género propone cuánto debe cobrar cada uno. La frialdad de las matemáticas puede lograr decisiones más objetivas y libres de prejuicios. Pero, ¿y si las máquinas tienen su propio sesgo? ¿Y si este es aún más invisible que el de los humanos?

Un reciente artículo del Financial Times contaba cómo en una empresa estadounidense de atención telefónica, la valoración del trabajo de los empleados había pasado de los humanos a las máquinas. Pero que estas puntuaban con una nota más baja a aquellos con un fuerte acento, ya que a veces no podían entender lo que decían. Ejemplos como este muestran el riesgo creciente de que los algoritmos se alcen como los nuevos jueces de un tribunal supremo e inapelable.

Esteban Moro, investigador de la Universidad Carlos III y del Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) centra el debate en una palabra: la escala. “El problema no es que los algoritmos tengan sesgo, porque los humanos también los tenemos. El problema es que estas fórmulas matemáticas pueden afectar a cientos de millones de personas y tomar decisiones con efectos mucho mayores que las sentencias de un juez”, explica. Así, una persona que busca empleo puede librarse de la tiranía de los gustos o prejuicios del director de recursos de una u otra empresa. Pero a cambio se enfrenta a los criterios que comparten macroportales de ofertas de trabajo. El monstruo se hace más grande.

Juan Francisco Gago, director de Prácticas Digitales en Minsait, de Indra, admite que, en la medida en que los algoritmos acaban tomando decisiones, pueden suscitar problemas morales. Y para ello pone el ejemplo de un aparato de inteligencia artificial capaz de hacer detecciones de cáncer. “Quizás con más precisión que un oncólogo humano”, matiza. “Pero al final, la responsabilidad no puede estar en una máquina, sino en los individuos que la programan. Es necesario que se establezca un marco regulatorio para esos casos”, asegura el directivo de Indra.

El Reglamento General de Protección de Datos, que entrará en vigor en la UE el próximo mes de mayo, establece que los ciudadanos europeos no deben ser sometidos a decisiones “basadas únicamente en el proceso de datos automáticos”, con una mención expresa a las “prácticas de contratación digital sin intervención humana”.

El equipo del MIT donde trabaja Moro desarrolla un proyecto de ingeniería inversa donde se pretende analizar cómo trabajan los algoritmos de gigantes como Google y Facebook. La idea es hacer experimentos con personas que introducen diversas informaciones en las redes, para ver luego cómo estas empresas reaccionan. Se trata, en el fondo, de intentar domar a la bestia y ver si es posible conocer cómo funcionan fórmulas matemáticas que tienen un impacto en nuestras vidas. Un impacto que nadie duda irá a más en los próximos años.

Cómo la realidad aumentada puede hacer mas segura y mejor la operación aeronáutica

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Eventos, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Noticias, Prospectiva Comments off

Let’s face it, we all have daydreamed of sitting in a cockpit and roaming the wild, blue yonder. It’s hard to find someone who wouldn’t have been fascinated by aviation at some point in their life. But for all the gratification that flying brings with it, no one can deny that it is also in equal measure, a dangerous thing. Now, for the number of moving parts that make up an aircraft, it is a surprisingly efficient and safe machine. The incredibly high standard to which an aircraft is made and maintained ensures that failure rates become a statistical improbability. No, the real weak link in the chain isn’t a plane’s hydraulics or engines or control surfaces as one might expect, but is in fact the pilot itself.

Current studies point that pilot error accounts for a staggering 85% of all aviation accidents. And while accident rates in commercial aviation have decreased over the past few years, in general, they have remained mostly the same. Accidents in personal flight have actually gone up by 20% in the last decade.

 ar helmet flight

Augmented Reality in General Aviation

With all the numbers, it’s easy to just point the finger at pilots and say they didn’t do their job right. But there is more to it than just that. Richard Collins in his article – Was it Really Pilot Error – Or Was it Something Else? sums up the real problem here very succinctly – “Pilots don’t err on purpose, though, they err because they don’t know better.”

Anyone who has flown (or has even tried out a desktop flight simulator) will tell you that flying ain’t easy. Even a glancing look at the controls of a Cessna 172 can confound a student pilot, let alone those of a Boeing 737 which consists of hundreds of switches and dials.

Pilots need to consider a lot of information before making the simplest of decisions and small errors have a way of snowballing out of control. Reading instruments, terrain, and weather to make decisions can get very tedious very fast. Being a pilot myself, I know at first hand how dangerous such a scenario can be.

This is where Augmented Reality (AR) steps in. The problem of pilot error isn’t so much as information not being available, but rather, too much information presented all the time that can lead to analysis paralysis. With AR applications, timely relevant information can be presented to the pilot when it is needed in an intuitive format, so that they can focus on the task at hand.

The idea of using AR in aviation isn’t so far fetched either, in fact, it has already been successfully implemented. Today, every fourth generation onwards fighter jet comes with a standard issue Heads Up Display (HUD) that displays critical navigational, flight, targeting, and mission related information on a piece of glass in front of the pilot. The idea is to ensure the pilot need not keep looking down at the instruments while in the heat of the battle. The fifth generation F-35 Lightning 2 has taken this concept even further by installing a complete AR package within the pilot’s helmet, giving them unprecedented 360 degree situational awareness and even see-thru ability.

Now, while most technologies typically trickle down from military applications to consumer markets, startups such as Aero Glass are also disrupting the traditional aviation landscape. Today, thanks to falling hardware prices and advancements in visualization technologies, AR is finally ready to make its appearance in commercial flying as well, a development that is long overdue. Many car models from Audi, BMW and Toyota have HUDs and it’s easy to find third party add ons for regular cars as well, so it’s definitely due for flight systems.

How AR Can Help Pilots

As stated before, the primary utility of AR in aviation is its ability to overlay relevant information on demand. Today’s AR systems can visualize terrain, navigation, air-traffic, instrument, weather, and airspace information in a 360-degree, 3D overlay that is easy to understand. Here are a few ways in which AR can assist a pilot. The following are shots from a working Aero Glass prototype in action.

AR runway markers can guide pilots during taxiing and taking off.

AR runway markers can guide pilots during taxiing and taking off.

So, let’s say a pilot is getting ready to taxi. Their AR HMD can create a virtual checklist that can help them with their pre-flight checks. Once the check is complete, the HMD can display runway information and guide the pilot to their designated runway. The pilot can even be alerted of other aircraft that are taxiing/landing/taking off.

AR overlays and instructions can be superimposed on runways to make landings easier.

AR overlays and instructions can be superimposed on runways to make landings easier.

Likewise, when the pilot is getting ready to take off or land, the AR system can display a simple corridor overlay to show the appropriate path. This is particularly useful as taking off and landings are the riskiest part of flying. As pilots are closer to the ground, any emergency needs to be addressed quickly. By telling a pilot exactly what needs to be done, an AR system can negate oversights making take-offs and landings simpler and safer.

A corridor overlay can let pilots know when they are going off course.

A corridor overlay can let pilots know when they are going off course.

Finally, an AR system can prove very handy during the cruise phase of the flight as well. Important information including artificial horizons, waypoints, weather updates, flight plans, restricted areas and terrain information can be displayed to provide complete situational awareness.

The display can be customized to a pilot’s preferences and modes can be turned on and off as well. It’s worth noting that a very high degree of precision is required to make this work and even the slightest different in overlay can have drastic (and potentially fatal) consequences.

Check out the below video to see a working Aero Glass prototype in action:

AR Use Cases Beyond Piloting

While the above mentioned uses of AR are quite obvious and well tested, the technology presents opportunities elsewhere as well. Maintenance Repair and Operations (MRO) are another area that can benefit greatly from AR. Training and licensing a technician can be very expensive and time consuming. In the U.S.A., it can take up to 8 years for a maintenance professional to become fully licensed primarily because training is usually hands-on and getting access to equipment can be tough at times.

AR, VR, and Mixed Reality are already proving to be invaluable here. By creating virtual replicas of the actual components, technicians can practice their skills in a safe environment as many times as needed. They can place their hands on virtual parts and work with them just as they would on the real thing. AR/VR based instructions can reduce the amount of time and money required to train a professional, while making training completely accident-free.

An AR follow-me car can guide a driver to their destination.

An AR follow-me car can guide a driver to their destination.

Likewise while HUDs are making appearances in automobiles, they are barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. Wearable AR systems can provide 360-degree situational awareness to drivers just like pilots and help them drive safer. Landmarks, navigational information, and hazards, can all be displayed in front of a driver’s line of sight so that they don’t need to keep taking their eyes off the road.

Some people are of the opinion that automation is the future of both general and military aviation. Autopilot and sensor technology are no doubt making great strides and they will make the skies safer. That being said, technology won’t be replacing the humble pilots anytime soon, error prone as they might be.

Take for instance the case of Flight 1549 (the flight the movie Sully is based on). Heading from New York City to Charlotte, North Carolina, the plane experienced a bird strike just 3 minutes after take off which took out both the engines. Finding that he couldn’t turn back, nor could they make it to New Jersey’s Teterboro airport, the pilot decided to ditch the plane in the Hudson river, which he successfully did saving all the 155 people onboard. Now known as the “Miracle on the Hudson,” the incident is a reminder that the human element cannot be overlooked as machines cannot make decisions of such nature.

Augmented reality applications such as those being developed by Aero Glass will help pilots of the future avoid costly mistakes and make timely decisions that will save lives. While the technology is still under development, it goes without saying that the enhancements to safety they bring are well worth the time.

Disclosure: This is a guest post by an actual pilot named Ákos Maróy; he is also the founder of Aero Glass. The content in this article was not produced by the UploadVR staff, but was edited for grammar and flow. No compensation was exchanged for the creation of this content.

Sostenibilidad no es suficiente; necesitamos culturas regenerativas

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Eventos, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Noticias, Prospectiva Comments off

Daniel Christian Wahl
Glocal educator, activist and consultant, generalized in whole systems design and transformative innovation for regenenerative cultures

Sustainability is not enough; we need regenerative cultures

Sustainability alone is not an adequate goal. The word sustainability itself is inadequate, as it does not tell us what we are actually trying to sustain. In 2005, after spending two years working on my doctoral thesis on design for sustainability, I began to realize that what we are actually trying to sustain is the underlying pattern of health, resilience and adaptability that maintain this planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish. Design for sustainability is, ultimately, design for human and planetary health (Wahl, 2006b).

A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity. The concept of resilience is closely related to health, as it describes the ability to recover basic vital functions and bounce back from any kind of temporary breakdown or crisis. When we aim for sustainability from a systemic perspective, we are trying to sustain the pattern that connects and strengthens the whole system. Sustainability is first and foremost about systemic health and resilience at different scales, from local, to regional and global.

Complexity science can teach us that as participants in a complex dynamic eco- psycho-social system that is subject to certain biophysical limits, our goal has to be appropriate participation, not prediction and control (Goodwin, 1999a). The best way to learn how to participate appropriately is to pay more attention to systemic relationships and interactions, to aim to support the resilience and health of the whole system, to foster diversity and redundancies at multiple scales, and to facilitate positive emergence through paying attention to the quality of connections and information flows in the system. This book explores how this might be done. [This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Using the Precautionary Principle

One proposal for guiding wise action in the face of dynamic complexity and ‘not knowing’ is to apply the Precautionary Principle as a framework that aims to avoid, as far as possible, actions that will negatively impact on environmental and human health in the future. From the United Nation’s ‘World Charter for Nature’ in 1982, to the Montreal Protocol on Health in 1987, to the Rio Declaration in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol, and Rio+20 in 2012, we have committed to applying the Precautionary Principle over and over again.

The Wingspread Consensus Statement on the Precautionary Principle states: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically” (Wingspread Statement, 1998). The principle puts the burden of proof that a certain action is not harmful on those proposing and taking the action, yet general practice continues to allow all actions that have not (yet!) been proven to have potentially harmful effects to go ahead unscrutinized. In a nutshell, the Precautionary Principle can be summarized as follows: practice precaution in the face of uncertainty. This is not what we are doing.

While high-level UN groups and many national governments have repeatedly considered the Precautionary Principle as a wise way to guide actions, day-to-day practice shows that it is very hard to implement, as there will always be some degree of uncertainty. The Precautionary Principle could also potentially stop sustainable innovation and block potentially highly beneficial new technologies on the basis that it cannot be proven with certainty that these technologies will not result in unexpected future side-effects that could be detrimental to human or environmental health.

Why not challenge designers, technologists, policy-makers, and planning professionals to evaluate their proposed actions on their positive, life-sustaining, restorative and regenerative potential?

Why not limit the scale of implementation of any innovation to local and regional levels until proof of its positive impact is unequivocally demonstrated?

Aiming to design for systemic health may not save us from unexpected side-effects and uncertainty, but it offers a trial and error path towards a regenerative culture. We urgently need a Hippocratic Oath for design, technology and planning: do no harm! To make this ethical imperative operational we need a salutogenic (health generating) intention behind all design, technology and planning: We need to design for human, ecosystems and planetary health. This way we can move more swiftly from the unsustainable ‘business as usual’ to restorative and regenerative innovations that will support the transition towards a regenerative culture. Let us ask ourselves:

How do we create design, technology, planning and policy decisions that positively support human, community and environmental health?

We need to respond to the fact that human activity over the last centuries and millennia has done damage to healthy ecosystems functioning. Resource availability is declining globally, while demand is rising as the human population continues to expand and we continue to erode ecosystems functions through irresponsible design and lifestyles of unbridled consumption.

If we meet the challenge of decreasing demand and consumption globally while replenishing resources through regenerative design and technology, we have a chance of making it through the eye of the needle and creating a regenerative human civilization. This shift will entail a transformation of the material resource basis of our civilization, away from fossil resources and towards renewably regenerated biological resources, along with a radical increase in resource productivity and recycling. Bill Reed has mapped out some of the essential shifts that will be needed to create a truly regenerative culture.

“Instead of doing less damage to the environment, it is necessary to learn how we can participate with the environment — using the health of ecological systems as a basis for design. […] The shift from a fragmented worldview to a whole systems mental model is the significant leap our culture must make — framing and understanding living system interrelationships in an integrated way. A place-based approach is one way to achieve this understanding. […] Our role, as designers and stakeholders is to shift our relationship to one that creates a whole system of mutually beneficial relationships.” — Bill Reed (2007: 674)

Reed named ‘whole-systems thinking’ and ‘living-systems thinking’ as the foundations of the shift in mental model that we need to create a regenerative culture. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, we will explore these necessary shifts in perspective in some detail. They go hand- in-hand with a radical reframing of our understanding of sustainability. As Bill Reed puts it: “Sustainability is a progression towards a functional awareness that all things are connected; that the systems of commerce, building, society, geology, and nature are really one system of integrated relationships; that these systems are co-participants in the evolution of life” (2007). Once we make this shift in perspective we can understand life as “a whole process of continuous evolution towards richer, more diverse, and mutually beneficial relationships”. Creating regenerative systems is not simply a technical, economic, ecological or social shift: it has to go hand-in-hand with an underlying shift in the way we think about ourselves, our relationships with each other and with life as a whole.

Figure 1 shows the different shifts in perspective as we move from ‘business as usual’ to creating a regenerative culture. The aim of creating regenerative cultures transcends and includes sustainability. Restorative design aims to restore healthy self-regulation to local ecosystems, and reconciliatory design takes the additional step of making explicit humanity’s participatory involvement in life’s processes and the unity of nature and culture. Regenerative design creates regenerative cultures capable of continuous learning and transformation in response to, and anticipation of, inevitable change. Regenerative cultures safeguard and grow biocultural abundance for future generations of humanity and for life as a whole.

Figure 1: Adapted from Reed (2006) with the author’s permission

The ‘story of separation’ is reaching the limits of its usefulness and the negative effects of the associated worldview and resulting behaviour are beginning to impact on life as a whole. By having become a threat to planetary health we are learning to rediscover our intimate relationship with all of life. Bill Reed’s vision of regenerative design for systemic health is in line with the pioneering work of people like Patrick Geddes, Aldo Leopold, Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Ian McHarg, E.F. Schumacher, John Todd, John Tillman Lyle, David Orr, Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, and many others who have explored design in the context of the health of the whole system.

A new cultural narrative is emerging, capable of birthing and informing a truly regenerative human culture. We do not yet know all the details of how exactly this culture will manifest, nor do we know all the details of how we might get from the current ‘world in crisis’ situation to that thriving future of a regenerative culture. Yet aspects of this future are already with us.

In using the language of ‘old story’ and ‘new story’ we are in danger of thinking of this cultural transformation as a replacement of the old story by a new story. Such separation into dualistic opposites is in itself part of the ‘separation narrative’ of the ‘old story’. The ‘new story’ is not a complete negation of the currently dominant worldview. It includes this perspective but stops regarding it as the only perspective, opening up to the validity and necessity of multiple ways of knowing.

Embracing uncertainty and ambiguity makes us value multiple perspectives on our appropriate participation in complexity. These are perspectives that give value and validity not only to the ‘old story’ of separation, but also to the ‘ancient story’ of unity with the Earth and the cosmos. These are perspectives that may help us find a regenerative way of being human in deep intimacy, reciprocity and communion with life as a whole by becoming conscious co-creators of humanity’s ‘new story’.

Our impatience and urgency to jump to answers, solutions and conclusions too quickly is understandable in the face of increasing individual, collective, social, cultural and ecological suffering, but this tendency to favour answers rather than to deepen into the questions is in itself part of the old story of separation.

The art of transformative cultural innovation is to a large extent about making our peace with ‘not knowing’ and living into the questions more deeply, making sure we are asking the right questions, paying attention to our relationships and how we all bring forth a world not just through what we are doing, but through the quality of our being. A regenerative culture will emerge out of finding and living new ways of relating to self, community and to life as a whole. At the core of creating regenerative cultures is an invitation to live the questions together.

[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Soluciones de verdad para reversar cambio climático

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Prospectiva Comments off

SOLUTIONS

Fuente> www.drawdown.org/solutions

The objective of the solutions list is to be inclusive, presenting an extensive array of impactful measures already in existence. The list is comprised primarily of “no regrets” solutions—actions that make sense to take regardless of their climate impact since they have intrinsic benefits to communities and economies. These initiatives improve lives, create jobs, restore the environment, enhance security, generate resilience, and advance human health.

In our book Drawdown, each solution is measured and modeled to determine its carbon impact through the year 2050, the total and net cost to society, and the total lifetime savings (or cost). The exception to this are our «Coming Attraction» solutions, which are a window into what is still emerging. For these solutions, we did not measure cost, savings, or atmospheric impact, but we illuminate technologies and concepts whose growth we will continue to watch.

Solutions by Rank

Rank Solution Sector TOTAL ATMOSPHERIC CO2-EQ REDUCTION (GT) NET COST (BILLIONS US $) SAVINGS (BILLIONS US $)
1 Refrigerant Management Materials 89.74 N/A $-902.77
2 Wind Turbines (Onshore) Electricity Generation 84.60 $1,225.37 $7,425.00
3 Reduced Food Waste Food 70.53 N/A N/A
4 Plant-Rich Diet Food 66.11 N/A N/A
5 Tropical Forests Land Use 61.23 N/A N/A
6 Educating Girls Women and Girls 59.60 N/A N/A
7 Family Planning Women and Girls 59.60 N/A N/A
8 Solar Farms Electricity Generation 36.90 $-80.60 $5,023.84
9 Silvopasture Food 31.19 $41.59 $699.37
10 Rooftop Solar Electricity Generation 24.60 $453.14 $3,457.63

Summary of Solutions by Overall Rank

This table provides the detailed results of the Plausible Scenario, which models the growth solutions on the Drawdown list based on a reasonable, but vigorous rate from 2020-2050. Results depicted represent a comparison to a reference case that assumes 2014 levels of adoption continue in proportion to the growth in global markets.

NOTE: Energy Storage (utility-scale & distributed), Grid Flexibility, Microgrids, Net Zero Buildings, and Retrofitting were not modeled independently to avoid double counting impacts from other solutions.

Rank Solution Sector TOTAL ATMOSPHERIC CO2-EQ REDUCTION (GT) NET COST (BILLIONS US $) SAVINGS (BILLIONS US $)
1 Refrigerant Management Materials 89.74 N/A $-902.77
2 Wind Turbines (Onshore) Electricity Generation 84.60 $1,225.37 $7,425.00
3 Reduced Food Waste Food 70.53 N/A N/A
4 Plant-Rich Diet Food 66.11 N/A N/A
5 Tropical Forests Land Use 61.23 N/A N/A
6 Educating Girls Women and Girls 59.60 N/A N/A
7 Family Planning Women and Girls 59.60 N/A N/A
8 Solar Farms Electricity Generation 36.90 $-80.60 $5,023.84
9 Silvopasture Food 31.19 $41.59 $699.37
10 Rooftop Solar Electricity Generation 24.60 $453.14 $3,457.63
11 Regenerative Agriculture Food 23.15 $57.22 $1,928.10
12 Temperate Forests Land Use 22.61 N/A N/A
13 Peatlands Land Use 21.57 N/A N/A
14 Tropical Staple Trees Food 20.19 $120.07 $626.97
15 Afforestation Land Use 18.06 $29.44 $392.33
16 Conservation Agriculture Food 17.35 $37.53 $2,119.07
17 Tree Intercropping Food 17.20 $146.99 $22.10
18 Geothermal Electricity Generation 16.60 $-155.48 $1,024.34
19 Managed Grazing Food 16.34 $50.48 $735.27
20 Nuclear Electricity Generation 16.09 $0.88 $1,713.40
21 Clean Cookstoves Food 15.81 $72.16 $166.28
22 Wind Turbines (Offshore) Electricity Generation 14.10 $545.30 $762.50
23 Farmland Restoration Food 14.08 $72.24 $1,342.47
24 Improved Rice Cultivation Food 11.34 N/A $519.06
25 Concentrated Solar Electricity Generation 10.90 $1,319.70 $413.85
26 Electric Vehicles Transport 10.80 $14,148.00 $9,726.40
27 District Heating Buildings and Cities 9.38 $457.10 $3,543.50
28 Multistrata Agroforestry Food 9.28 $26.76 $709.75
29 Wave and Tidal Electricity Generation 9.20 $411.84 $-1,004.70
30 Methane Digesters (Large) Electricity Generation 8.40 $201.41 $148.83
31 Insulation Buildings and Cities 8.27 $3,655.92 $2,513.33
32 Ships Transport 7.87 $915.93 $424.38
33 LED Lighting (Household) Buildings and Cities 7.81 $323.52 $1,729.54
34 Biomass Electricity Generation 7.50 $402.31 $519.35
35 Bamboo Land Use 7.22 $23.79 $264.80
36 Alternative Cement Materials 6.69 $-273.90 N/A
37 Mass Transit Transport 6.57 N/A $2,379.73
38 Forest Protection Land Use 6.20 N/A N/A
39 Indigenous Peoples’ Land Management Land Use 6.19 N/A N/A
40 Trucks Transport 6.18 $543.54 $2,781.63
41 Solar Water Electricity Generation 6.08 $2.99 $773.65
42 Heat Pumps Buildings and Cities 5.20 $118.71 $1,546.66
43 Airplanes Transport 5.05 $662.42 $3,187.80
44 LED Lighting (Commercial) Buildings and Cities 5.04 $-205.05 $1,089.63
45 Building Automation Buildings and Cities 4.62 $68.12 $880.55
46 Water Saving – Home Materials 4.61 $72.44 $1,800.12
47 Bioplastic Materials 4.30 $19.15 N/A
48 In-Stream Hydro Electricity Generation 4.00 $202.53 $568.36
49 Cars Transport 4.00 $-598.69 $1,761.72
50 Cogeneration Electricity Generation 3.97 $279.25 $566.93
51 Perennial Biomass Land Use 3.33 $77.94 $541.89
52 Coastal Wetlands Land Use 3.19 N/A N/A
53 System of Rice Intensification Food 3.13 N/A $677.83
54 Walkable Cities Buildings and Cities 2.92 N/A $3,278.24
55 Household Recycling Materials 2.77 $366.92 $71.13
56 Industrial Recycling Materials 2.77 $366.92 $71.13
57 Smart Thermostats Buildings and Cities 2.62 $74.16 $640.10
58 Landfill Methane Buildings and Cities 2.50 $-1.82 $67.57
59 Bike Infrastructure Buildings and Cities 2.31 $-2,026.97 $400.47
60 Composting Food 2.28 $-63.72 $-60.82
61 Smart Glass Buildings and Cities 2.19 $932.30 $325.10
62 Women Smallholders Women and Girls 2.06 N/A $87.60
63 Telepresence Transport 1.99 $127.72 $1,310.59
64 Methane Digesters (Small) Electricity Generation 1.90 $15.50 $13.90
65 Nutrient Management Food 1.81 N/A $102.32
66 High-speed Rail Transport 1.52 $1,038.42 $368.10
67 Farmland Irrigation Food 1.33 $216.16 $429.67
68 Waste-to-Energy Electricity Generation 1.10 $36.00 $19.82
69 Electric Bikes Transport 0.96 $106.75 $226.07
70 Recycled Paper Materials 0.90 $573.48 N/A
71 Water Distribution Buildings and Cities 0.87 $137.37 $903.11
72 Biochar Food 0.81 N/A N/A
73 Green Roofs Buildings and Cities 0.77 $1,393.29 $988.46
74 Trains Transport 0.52 $808.64 $313.86
75 Ridesharing Transport 0.32 N/A $185.56
76 Micro Wind Electricity Generation 0.20 $36.12 $19.90
77 Energy Storage (Distributed) Electricity Generation N/A N/A N/A
77 Energy Storage (Utilities) Electricity Generation N/A N/A N/A
77 Grid Flexibility Electricity Generation N/A N/A N/A
78 Microgrids Electricity Generation N/A N/A N/A
79 Net Zero Buildings Buildings and Cities N/A N/A N/A
80 Retrofitting Buildings and Cities N/A N/A N/A
1050.99
$29,609.30
$74,362.37
BROWSE ALL SOLUTIONS

Las habilidades que los niños y jóvenes de hoy deberán tener para los trabajos del futuro

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Noticias, Prospectiva Comments off

This is the one skill your child needs for the jobs of the future

Image: REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

Where can your kids learn creativity and critical thinking? The answer is simpler than you think

Fuente: www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/skills-children-need-work-future-play-lego/?utm_content=buffer75105&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

15 Sep 2017
  1. Mirjam SchöningHead of Learning through Play in Early Childhood programme, The Lego Foundation
  2. Christina WitcombSenior Communication Manager, The Lego Foundation

However, this mindset is often eroded or even erased by conventional educational practices when young children enter school.

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is often cited as an example of how children’s divergent thinking diminishes over time. 98% of children in kindergarten are “creative geniuses” – they can think of endless opportunities of how to use a paper clip.

This ability is reduced drastically as children go through the formal schooling system and by age 25, only 3% remain creative geniuses.

Most of us only come up with one or a handful of uses for a paperclip.

What is most concerning in connection with the human capital question is that over the last 25 years, the Torrance Test has shown a decrease in originality among young children (kindergarten to grade 3).

By the way, did you know you could combine six standard LEGO bricks in more than 915 million ways?

Wrong focus

The World Economic Forum has just released its Human Capital Report with the subtitle “Preparing People for the Future of Work”.

The report states that «many of today’s education systems are already disconnected from the skills needed to function in today’s labour markets».

It goes on to underline how schools tend to focus primarily on developing children’s cognitive skills – or skills within more traditional subjects – rather than fostering skills like problem solving, creativity or collaboration.

This should be cause for concern when looking at the skill set required in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are the three most important skills a child needs to thrive, according to the Future of Jobs Report.

Let’s take a moment to underscore that creativity has jumped from 10th place to third place in just five years.

And that emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility have also entered the skills list for 2020.

Worryingly, these skills are often not featured prominently in children’s school day where the norm still is the chalk-and-talk teaching approach that has prevailed for centuries.

Child’s play

A study in New Zealand compared children who learned how to read at age five with those who learned at age seven.

When they were 11 years old, both sets of children displayed the same reading ability. But the children who only learned how to read at age seven actually showed a higher comprehension level.

One of the explanations is that they had more time to explore the world around them through play.

It is clear that preparing children for the future demands re-focusing concepts of learning and education.

Knowing how to read, write and do maths remain important for children to unlock the world in front of them.

An increasingly interconnected and dynamic world means children will find themselves changing jobs several times during their lives – switching to jobs that don’t exist today, and which they might have to invent themselves.

The question is how do we foster the above-mentioned breadth of skills, and keep alive the natural ability of children to learn throughout a lifetime – instead of eroding it when they enter formal schooling?

Achieving this is simpler than you might think: engaging children in positive, playful experiences.

Different forms of play provide children with the opportunity to develop social, emotional, physical and creative skills in addition to cognitive ones.

Lifelong play

If we agree on the urgent need for developing skills of complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity, it is essential that we recognise that these skills are built by learning through play across the lifespan.

As we invest in our children’s future, let’s be sure to guard against directed learning, “schoolification” or three-year-olds learning their alphabet and numbers in written form when there is no evidence that this will make them better readers.

We need to challenge ourselves on the logic of flashcards and homework for our youngest at home, and see the value of continuing to create joyful, meaningful play moments with our children.

The natural ability of children to learn through play may be the best-kept, low-cost secret for addressing the skills agenda with potential to equip both our children and our economies to thrive.

Plus, it’s fun. So, what’s stopping us? Let’s play!

Written by

Mirjam Schöning, Head of Learning through Play in Early Childhood programme, The Lego Foundation

Christina Witcomb, Senior Communication Manager, The Lego Foundation

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Fuente: www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/skills-children-need-work-future-play-lego/?utm_content=buffer75105&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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50 economías mas innovadoras al inicio del 2018

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Prospectiva Comments off

The U.S. Drops Out of the Top 10 in Innovation Ranking

By

Michelle Jamrisko

and

Wei Lu
 Updated on 
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-22/south-korea-tops-global-innovation-ranking-again-as-u-s-falls
  • U.S. out of top 10 for first time in the gauge’s six years
  • South Korea, Sweden repeat as 2018 leaders, Singapore is 3rd

Score another one for Seoul while Silicon Valley slides.

 The U.S. dropped out of the top 10 in the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index for the first time in the six years the gauge has been compiled. South Korea and Sweden retained their No. 1 and No. 2 rankings.

The index scores countries using seven criteria, including research and development spending and concentration of high-tech public companies.

 

The U.S. fell to 11th place from ninth mainly because of an eight-spot slump in the post-secondary, or tertiary, education-efficiency category, which includes the share of new science and engineering graduates in the labor force. Value-added manufacturing also declined. Improvement in the productivity score couldn’t make up for the lost ground.

 “I see no evidence to suggest that this trend will not continue,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in Washington, D.C. “Other nations have responded with smart, well-funded innovation policies like better R&D tax incentives, more government funding for research, more funding for technology commercialization initiatives.”

Singapore jumped ahead of European economies Germany, Switzerland and Finland into third place on the strength of its top ranking in the tertiary-efficiency category.

“Singapore has always placed strong focus on educating her populace, especially in STEM disciplines,” said Yeo Kiat Seng, professor and associate provost at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It also has a “steadfast commitment to funding R&D and innovation,” added Yeo, who holds 38 patents.

Supplier Ecosystem

South Korea remained the global-innovation gold medalist for the fifth consecutive year. Samsung Electronics Co., the nation’s most-valuable company by market capitalization, has received more U.S. patents in the 2000s than any firm except International Business Machines Corp. And its semiconductors, smartphones and digital-media equipment spawned an ecosystem of Korean suppliers and partners similar to what Japan developed around Sony Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp.

China moved up two spots to 19th, buoyed by its high proportion of new science and engineering graduates in the labor force and increasing number of patents by innovators such as Huawei Technologies Co.

“One common trait of the U.S., Korea and China is that people accept failure as part of the process,” said Prinn Panitchpakdi, country head of CLSA Thailand, an Asian brokerage and investment group. “Innovation lags in countries where the culture emphasizes risk avoidance and where R&D is seen purely an expense, not an investment. That’s the mindset in Thailand.” It dropped one spot from a year earlier, to 45th.

Top-Tier Countries

Japan, one of three Asian nations in the top 10, rose one slot to No. 6. France moved up to ninth from 11th, joining five other European economies in the top tier. Israel rounded out this group and was the only country to beat South Korea in the R&D category.

South Africa and Iran moved back into the top 50; the last time both were included was 2014. Turkey was one of the biggest gainers, jumping four spots to 33rd because of improvements in tertiary efficiency, productivity and two other categories.

The biggest losers were New Zealand and Ukraine, which each dropped four places. The productivity measure influenced New Zealand’s shift, while Ukraine was hurt by a lower tertiary-efficiency ranking.

Movements in this year’s list were generally less dramatic than last year, when Russia took a 14-spot tumble following sanctions related to Ukraine and the plunge in energy prices. In the current index, it moved up one spot to 25th.

The 2018 ranking process began with more than 200 economies. Each was scored on a 0-100 scale based on seven equally weighted categories. Nations that didn’t report data for at least six categories were eliminated, trimming the list to 80. Bloomberg released the top 50 and category scores within this cohort. For additional data, click here.

Prospectiva como una herramienta de inteligencia estratégica – Philippe Destatte

Desarrollo Territorial, Direccion Estrategica, Formación, Innovacion Social, Investigacion y Desarrollo Tegnologico, Prospectiva Comments off

Foresight as a strategic intelligence tool

Liège, January 19, 2018

PhD2050 (Philippe Destatte)

Rien dans l’univers ne peut résister à l’ardeur convergente d’un nombre suffisamment grand d’intelligences groupées et organisées (Teilhard, 1947)

1. What is foresight, and in what way is it strategic? [1]

 In the form in which we know it today in Europe, foresight represents an encounter and interaction between French and Latin developments, on the one hand, and those in the Anglosphere on the other. In English-speaking countries, the practice of foresight has evolved over time from a concern with military interests (such as improving defence systems) to industrial objectives (such as increasing competitiveness) and societal issues (such as ensuring the welfare of the population or ensuring social harmony). Since the 1960s, its chosen field has shifted from fundamental science to key technologies, then to the analysis of innovation systems, and finally to the study of the entire societal system. Having started out within a single discipline, namely the exact sciences, foresight has become pluridisciplinary, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, with an openness to the social sciences [2]. In doing so, it has moved considerably closer to the French approach, abandoning many of its earlier forecasting ambitions for a more strategic focus.

The French school of foresight (referred to as la prospective) originates in the thought of the philosopher and entrepreneur Gaston Berger. Deriving from a philosophy of collective action and engagement, it deals with value systems and constructs knowledge for political purposes [3], and has likewise become increasingly strategic in nature through contact with the worlds of international organisations, companies and regional territories [4]. Taking account of the long-term and la longue durée by postulating the plurality of possible futures, adopting the analysis of complex systems and deploying the theory and practice of modelling, foresight generates a strategic desire and willingness in order to influence and affect history. As I have helped to define it in various contexts – European (the Mutual Learning Platform of DG Research, DG Enterprise & Industry, and DG Regional & Urban Policy, supported by the Committee of the Regions) [5], French (the European Regional Foresight College) created under the auspices of the Interministerial Delegation of Land Planning and Regional Attractiveness (DATAR) in Paris) [6] or in Wallonia (the Wallonia Evaluation and Foresight Society) [7]– foresight is an independent, dialectical and rigorous process, conducted in a transdisciplinary way and taking in the longer sweep of history. It can shed light on questions of the present and the future, firstly by considering them in a holistic, systemic and complex framework, and secondly by setting them in a temporal context over and beyond historicity. Concerned above all with planning and action, its purpose is to provoke one or more transformations within the system that it apprehends by mobilising collective intelligence [8]. This definition is that of both la prospective and foresight; at any rate it was designed as such, as part of a serious effort to bring about convergence between these two tools undertaken by, in particular, the team of Unit K2 of DG Research and Innovation at the European Commission, led at the time by Paraskevas Caracostas.

The main distinguishing characteristic of the strategy behind the process of la prospective or foresight – some refer to la prospective stratégique or strategic foresight, which to my mind are pleonasms – is that it does not have a linear relationship with the diagnosis or the issues. Fundamentally, this tool reflects both the long-term issues it seeks to address and a vision of a desirable future that it has constructed with the actors concerned. Its circular process mobilises collective and collaborative intelligence at every step in order to bring about in reality a desired and jointly constructed action that operates over the long term and is intended to be efficient and operational. Foresight watch takes place at every step of this process. I define this as a continuous and largely iterative activity of active observation and systemic analysis of the environment, in the short, medium and long term, to anticipate developments and identify present and future issues with the ultimate purpose of forming collective visions and action strategies. It is based on creating and managing the knowledge needed as input into the process of foresight itself. This process extends from the choice of areas to work on (long-term issues) and of the necessary heuristic, via the analysis and capitalisation of information and its transformation into useful knowledge, to communication and evaluation [9].

2. Foresight and strategic intelligence

The Strategic Intelligence Research Group (GRIS) at HEC Liège, under the direction of Professor Claire Gruslin, sees strategic intelligence as ‘a mode of governance based on the acquisition and protection of strategic and relevant information and on the potential for influence, which is essential for all economic actors wishing to participate proactively in development and innovation by building a distinctive and lasting advantage in a highly competitive and turbulent environment’ [10].

For its part, the famous Martre Report of 1994, in its definition of economic intelligence, delineated a process fairly similar to that which I mentioned for foresight, likewise including monitoring, heuristics, the examination of issues, a shared vision and the strategy to achieve it, all set in a ‘continuous cycle’:

‘Economic intelligence can be defined as the set of coordinated actions by which information that is useful to economic actors is sought out, processed and distributed for exploitation. These various actions are carried out legally and benefit from the protection necessary to preserve the company’s assets, under optimal quality, time and cost conditions. Useful information is that needed by the different decision-making levels in the company or the community in order to develop and implement in a coherent manner the strategy and tactics necessary to achieve its objectives, with the goal of improving its position in its competitive context. These actions within the company are organised in a continuous cycle, generating a shared vision of the objectives to be achieved’ [11].

What is of particular interest in the search for parallels or convergences between economic intelligence and foresight is the idea, developed by Henri Martre, Philippe Clerc and Christian Harbulot, that the notion of economic intelligence goes beyond documentation, monitoring, data protection or even influence, to become part of ‘a true strategic and tactical intention’, supporting actions at different levels, from the company up to the global, international level[12].

 3. Foresight in strategic intelligence

At the turn of the millennium, as part of the European ESTO (European Science and Technology Observatory) programme, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) in Seville gathered a series of researchers to examine the idea of strategic intelligence as a methodological vehicle or umbrella for public policy-making. The idea was to recognise and take account of the diversity of methods made available to decision-makers in order to structure and mobilise them to ensure successful policy-making [13]. As Ken Ducatel, one of the coordinators of this discussion, put it, ‘The concept of strategic intelligence not only offers a powerful methodology for addressing (EU) issues, but has the flexibility to connect to other forms of interaction, adapt to new models of governance and open up to technological changes and social developments that are faster than we have ever known before’ [14].

At the time of the REGSTRAT project coordinated by the Stuttgart-based Steinbeis Europa Zentrum in 2006, the concept of Strategic Policy Intelligence (SPI) tools – i.e. intelligence tools applied to public policy – had become accepted, in particular among the representatives of the Mutual Learning Platform referred to earlier. As my fellow foresight specialist Günter Clar and I pointed out in the report on the subject of foresight, strategic intelligence as applied to public policy can be defined as a set of actions designed to identify, implement, disseminate and protect information in order to make it available to the right person, at the right time, with the goal of making the right decision. As had become clear during the work, SPI’s tools include foresight, evaluation of technological choices, evaluation, benchmarking, quality procedures applied to territories, and so on. These tools are used to provide decision-makers and stakeholders with clear, objective, politically unbiased, independent and, most importantly, anticipatory information [15].

This work also made it possible to define strategic intelligence as observed in this context. Its content is adapted to the context, with hard and soft sides and a distributed character, underpinned by scale effects, the facilitation of learning, a balance between specific and generic approaches and increased accessibility. Its process is based on demand, the need to mobilise creativity, making tacit knowledge explicit, the evaluation of technological potential, a facilitation of the process and an optimal link with decision-making [16].

From this viewpoint, foresight is clearly one of the tools of strategic intelligence for the use of policy-makers and stakeholders.

 Anticipation, innovation and decision-making

The Directorate General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission has been involved for some years in forward-looking activities (FLAs) [17], just as the European Institute in Seville had been – as we saw – when it developed strategic policy intelligence (SPI) [18] tools for use in public policy-making[19]. FLAs include all systematic and participatory studies and processes designed to consider possible futures, proactively and strategically, and to explore and map out paths towards desirable goals [20]. This field obviously includes numerous different methods for anticipation of future developments, evaluation of technological choices, ex-ante evaluation, and so on.

In 2001, Ruud Smits, Professor of Technology and Innovation at the University of Utrecht, made three recommendations that he regarded as essential. First, he stressed, it was time to call a halt to the debate about definitions and to exploit the synergies between the different branches of strategic intelligence. Next, he noted the need to improve the quality of strategic intelligence and reinforce its existing sources. Finally, Smits called for the development of an interface between strategic intelligence sources and their users[21]. This programme has yet to be implemented, and our work at GRIS could be seen as reflecting this ambition.

This cognitive approach without a doubt brings us back to the distinction put forward by psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who refers in his book Thinking fast and slow to two cerebral systems. He describes System 1 as automatic, direct, impulsive, everyday, fast, intuitive, and involving no real effort; we use it in 95% of circumstances. System 2, by contrast, is conscious, rational, deliberative, slow, analytical and logical; we only use it 5% of the time, especially to make decisions when we find ourselves in systems that we consider complex[22]. It is at such times that we have to make the effort to mobilise tools suited to the tasks we are tackling.

This question concerns all strategic intelligence tools, including foresight. Not just because the investments to be made in these fields of research are considerable, but because, often, many of us are unaware of the extent of that which we are unable to understand. All too commonly, we think that what we can see represents the full extent of what exists. We confine ourselves to the variables that we are able to detect, embrace and measure, and have a considerable capacity to refuse to recognise other variables. We know that this syndrome of WYSIATI (‘what you see is all there is’) is devastating: it prevents us from grasping reality in its entirety by making us think that we are in full command of the territory around us and the horizon. As Kahneman puts it, ‘You cannot help dealing with limited information you have as if it were all there is to know’ [23].

This flaw – and there are others – should encourage us to join forces to cross methodological and epistemological boundaries and work to create more robust instruments that can be used to design more proactive and better-equipped public policies.

 

Philippe Destatte

@PhD2050

 

[1] A first version of this paper was presented at the Liège Business School on September 28, 2016.

[2] Paraskevas CARACOSTAS & Ugar MULDUR, Society, The Endless Frontier, A European Vision of Research and Innovation Policies for the 21st Century, Brussels, European Commission, 1997.

[3] ‘(…) By applying the principles of intentional analysis associated with phenomenology to the experience of time, Gaston Berger substitutes for the “myth of time” a temporal norm, an intersubjective construct for collective action. His philosophy of knowledge is thus constituted as a science of foresight practice whose purpose is normative: it is oriented towards work on values and the construction of a political project; it is a “philosophy in action”.‘ Chloë VIDAL, La prospective territoriale dans tous ses états, Rationalités, savoirs et pratiques de la prospective (1957-2014), p. 31, Lyon, Thèse ENS, 2015. Our translation.

[4] On la prospective territoriale, representing an encounter between the principles of foresight and those of regional development, see the reference to the DATAR international conference in March 1968. Chloë VIDAL, La prospective territoriale dans tous ses états, Rationalités, savoirs et pratiques de la prospective (1957-2014)…, p. 214-215.

[5] Günter CLAR & Philippe DESTATTE, Regional Foresight, Boosting Regional Potential, Mutual Learning Platform Regional Foresight Report, Luxembourg, European Commission, Committee of the Regions and Innovative Regions in Europe Network, 2006.

http://www.institut-destree.eu/Documents/Reseaux/Günter-CLAR_Philippe-DESTATTE_Boosting-Regional-Potential_MLP-Foresight-2006.pdf

[6] Ph. DESTATTE & Ph. DURANCE eds, Les mots-clefs de la prospective territoriale, p. 43, Paris, DIACT-DATAR, La Documentation française, 2009.

[7] Ph. DESTATTE, Evaluation, prospective et développement régional, p. 381, Charleroi, Institut Destrée, 2001.

[8] Ph. Destatte, What is foresight ?, Blog PhD2050, May 30, 2013.

https://phd2050.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/what-is-foresight/

[9] René-Charles TISSEYRE, Knowledge Management, Théorie et pratique de la gestion des connaissances, Paris, Hermès-Lavoisier, 1999.

[10] Guy GOERMANNE, Note de réflexion, Tentatives de rapprochement entre la prospective et l’intelligence stratégique en Wallonie, p. 7, Brussels, August 2016, 64 p.

[11] Henri MARTRE, Philippe CLERC, Christian HARBULOT, Intelligence économique et stratégie des entreprises, p. 12-13, Paris, Commissariat général au Plan (Plan Commission) – La Documentation française, February 1994.

http://bdc.aege.fr/public/Intelligence_Economique_et_strategie_des_entreprises_1994.pdf

[12] ‘The notion of economic intelligence implies transcending the piecemeal actions designated by the terms documentation, monitoring (scientific and technological, competitive, financial, legal and regulatory etc.), protection of competitive capital, and influencing (strategy for influencing nation-states, role of foreign consultancies, information and misinformation operations, etc). It succeeds in transcending these things as a result of the strategic and tactical intention which is supposed to preside over the steering of piecemeal actions and over ensuring their success, and of the interaction between all levels of activity at which the economic intelligence function is exercised: from the grassroots (within companies), through intermediate levels (interprofessional, local), up to the national (concerted strategies between different decision-making centres), transnational (multinational groups) or international (strategies for influencing nation-states) levels.’ H. MARTRE, Ph. CLERC, Ch. HARBULOT, Intelligence économique et stratégie des entreprises…, p. 12-13. Our translation.

[13] Strategic intelligence can be defined as a set of actions designed to identify, implement, disseminate and protect information in order to make it available to the right person, at the right time, with the goal of making the right decision. (…) Strategic intelligence applied to public policy offers a variety of methodologies to meet the requirements of policy-makers. Derived from Daniel ROUACH, La veille technologique et l’intelligence économique, Paris, PUF, 1996, p. 7 & Intelligence économique et stratégie d’entreprises, Paris, Commissariat général au Plan (Plan Commission), 1994. – Alexander TÜBKE, Ken DUCATEL, James P. GAVIGAN, Pietro MONCADA-PATERNO-CASTELLO eds, Strategic Policy Intelligence: Current Trends, the State of the Play and perspectives, S&T Intelligence for Policy-Making Processes, p. V & VII, IPTS, Seville, Dec. 2001.

[14] Ibidem, p. IV.

[15] Günter CLAR & Ph. DESTATTE, Mutual Learning Platform Regional Foresight Report, p. 4, Luxembourg, IRE, EC-CoR, 2006.

[16] Ruud SMITS, The New Role of Strategic Intelligence, in A. TÜBKE, K. DUCATEL, J. P. GAVIGAN, P. MONCADA-PATERNO-CASTELLO eds, Strategic Policy Intelligence: Current Trends, p. 17.

[17] Domenico ROSSETTI di VALDALBERO & Parla SROUR-GANDON, European Forward Looking Activities, EU Research in Foresight and Forecast, Socio-Economic Sciences & Humanities, List of Activities, Brussels, European Commission, DGR, Directorate L, Science, Economy & Society, 2010. http://ec.europa.eu/research/social-sciences/forward-looking_en.html – European forward-looking activities, Building the future of « Innovation Union » and ERA, Brussels, European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2011. ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ssh/docs/european-forward-looking-activities_en.pdf

[18] ‘Strategic Intelligence is all about feeding actors (including policy makers) with the tailor made information they need to play their role in innovation systems (content) and with bringing them together to interact (amongst others to create common ground).’ Ruud SMITS, Technology Assessment and Innovation Policy, Seville, 5 Dec. 2002. ppt.

[19] A. TÜBKE, K. DUCATEL, J. P. GAVIGAN, P. MONCADA-PATERNO-CASTELLO eds, Strategic Policy Intelligence: Current Trends, …

[20] Innovation Union Information and Intelligence System I3S – EC 09/06/2011.

[21] R. SMITS, The New Role of Strategic Intelligence…, p. 17. – see also R. SMITS & Stefan KUHLMANN, Strengthening interfaces in innovation systems: rationale, concepts and (new) instruments, Strata Consolidating Workshop, Brussels, 22-23 April 2002, RTD-K2, June 2002. – R. SMITS, Stefan KUHLMANN and Philip SHAPIRA eds, The Theory and Practice of Innovation Policy, An International Research Handbook, Cheltenham UK, Northampton MA USA, Edward Elgar, 2010.

[22] Daniel KAHNEMAN, Thinking fast and slow, p. 201, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

[23] D. KAHNEMAN, Thinking fast and slow, p. 201.