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How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

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How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

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"I worry far more what the judgement on me will be in a 1,000 years time than what the trolls are saying today." So wrote Cicero, Rome's most celebrated orator, in 59 BC. Although the comment was made privately to his close friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, no one would have been surprised to read it. Cicero was notorious among his fellow citizens for the insufferable quality of his conceit. The notion that anyone would remember him a millennium after his death would have been greeted in Rome with widespread hilarity.

Yet in truth Cicero was being modest. Not one but 2,000 years have passed since his death, and still he is being quoted. His posthumous fame is tribute not just to his own achievements, but also to the enduring hold on the popular imagination of the city of which he was a citizen. "Urbs Aeterna," the poet Ovid called Rome some 50 years after Cicero's death: "the Eternal City." The empire ruled by the Romans may long since have declined and fallen; its monuments crumbled into ruin; its language evolved to become Spanish, Italian, and French; but its memory remains a golden one. Indeed, according to a meme that has recently taken social media by storm, millions of men across America are apparently thinking about it every day.

Why? Not, I think, out of any particular devotion to Cicero or Ovid. The reason is likelier to be altogether more visceral. The Roman Empire was the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box-office.

If that makes it sound like a tyrannosaur, then perhaps that is no coincidence. The Romans, much like the dinosaurs, are not merely glamorous-they are also safely extinct. Two thousand years have passed since the heyday of the pax Romana. The age when the capital was at its most teeming and gilded, when the sands of the Colosseum were black with the blood of gladiators, when the rule of Caesar was backed by legions capable of visiting slaughter and ruin on all who opposed them, are long gone. Few people watching , no matter how much they might be rooting for Russell Crowe, feel complicit in the enthusiasm of the crowd. The Romans are too distant to be truly unsettling; instead, they have become exotic.

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The display of might-especially when backed up by color, clamor, and overpowering architecture-can be stirring, even thrilling. Successful empires have always understood this. It helps to explain why so many capitals in Europe and America are replete with monuments inspired by imperial Rome. Yet the shadow these buildings cast in the 21 st century is not merely a Roman one. We understand, as the designers of the Capitol and the Arc de Triomphe did not, to what extremes swagger and steel can lead. With fascism, a long tradition in Western politics reached a hideous climax and then expired.

But the fascination with power endures. Only the most toxic crank today would confess to finding the displays of Nazism alluring. Yet Julius Caesar-who was reported by one classical biographer to have slaughtered a million people and enslaved another million while conquering the region of Gaul-still has his statue in the centre of Rome, while, just down the road, touts dressed as centurions and gladiators encourage tourists to pose with them outside the Colosseum. The empire of the Caesars-unlike more recent empires-is removed in time enough from us to be protected by a certain statute of limitations.
Read More: Women in Ancient Rome Didn't Have Equal Rights. They Still Changed History
Of course, this does not explain why modern-day men of America are busy thinking about the Romans rather than, say, the Egyptians, or the Assyrians, or the Vikings. The answer, perhaps, lies in the way that the Romans, more than any other ancient people, seem to offer America a distorted reflection of itself. So they have always done. Just as American conservatives today look back wistfully to the Founding Fathers as patrons of an age of rugged independence and virtue, so did the Founding Fathers look back with an equal wistfulness to the early years of Rome. There, for any infant republic victorious in a war against a great monarchy, was a morality tale to be found that could hardly help but serve as inspiration. The Romans, like the Americans, had originally been ruled by a king; then, resolved no longer to live in servitude, they had dared all in a heroic and ultimately successful campaign to expel him. In 1832, commissioned to mark the centennial of George Washington's birth with a fittingly imposing statue, the sculptor Horatio Greenough represented him as a properly Roman hero, returning his sword to a grateful people. Simultaneously toga-clad and be-wigged, the first president of the United States was portrayed by Greenough as the heroic, if sartorially challenged, intersection point of twin republics: the Roman and the American.

In the 21 st century, the parallels drawn between ancient Rome and the modern United States tend to be gloomier. Wars in Iraq; the rise in the east of a rival superpower; political vendettas pursued in the law courts; anxieties that venerable constitutional traditions are menaced by populism; the emergence of radicals preaching that the last will be first, and the first will be last, to the excitement of many, and the consternation of others. All these are developments that will be familiar to anyone with even the most glancing familiarity with Roman history.

Gladiator-the most celebrated sword-and-sandals epic of the 21 st century (of which there is a sequel currently in the works)-offered a portrait of a world that seemed, in many ways, as much about the future as the past. Citizens fed on dazzling entertainments; armies striking at an elusive foreign foe; the high-tech delivery of weapons of fire. Here was a mirror being held up to the decades that were to come.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that so many Americans today should be thinking about the Roman Empire. They are thinking about a civilization that is at once strange and familiar; terrifying and glamorous; safely extinct and the image of themselves.

Contact us at letters@time.com.

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A historian on how Roman Empire offers a distorted view of America.

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UAW and Hollywood Unions are similar in that tech is replacing human jobs and leaving people with lower pay...so they're striking

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UAW and Hollywood Unions are similar in that tech is replacing human jobs and leaving people with lower pay...so they're striking

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Simultaneously striking against all three companies of the Detroit 3, the UAW is making history this month.

On today's podcast, we discussed common elements that have historically led to strikes, and looked at how the Hollywood and UAW strikes aren't so different.
GUEST ON TODAY'S PODCAST:

Roland Zullo, research scientist at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor,

Sonari Glinton, journalist and podcast host of Shattering the System

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Stateside Podcast: A new era for unions?

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The Stand Up Strike is a big moment for the UAW. We spoke with Roland Zullo and Sonari Glinton about the historical and current-day context of these strikes.

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AI outsider warns tech will force people to accept lower wages if we don't develop skills

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AI outsider warns tech will force people to accept lower wages if we don't develop skills

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Sure, there have been a few nutjobs out there who think AI will wipe out the human race. But ever since ChatGPT's explosive emergence last winter, the bigger concern for most of us has been whether these tools will soon write, code, analyze, brainstorm, compose, design, and illustrate us out of our jobs. To that, Silicon Valley and corporate America have been curiously united in their optimism. Yes, a few people might lose out, they say. But there's no need to panic. AI is going to make us more productive, and that will be great for society. Ultimately, technology always is.

As a reporter who's written about technology and the economy for years, I too subscribed to the prevailing optimism. After all, it was backed by a surprising consensus among economists, who normally can't agree on something as fundamental as what money is. For half a century, economists have worshiped technology as an unambiguous force for good. Normally, the "dismal science" argues, giving one person a bigger slice of the economic pie requires giving a smaller slice to the sucker next door. But technology, economists believed, was different. Invent the steam engine or the automobile or TikTok, and poof! Like magic, the pie gets bigger, allowing everyone to enjoy a bigger slice.

"Economists viewed technological change as this amazing thing," says Katya Klinova, the head of AI, labor, and the economy at the nonprofit Partnership on AI. "How much of it do we need? As much as possible. When? Yesterday. Where? Everywhere." To resist technology was to invite stagnation, poverty, darkness. Countless economic models, as well as all of modern history, seemed to prove a simple and irrefutable equation: technology = prosperity for everyone.

There's just one problem with that formulation: It's turning out to be wrong. And the economist who's doing the most to sound the alarm - the heretic who argues that the current trajectory of AI is far more likely to hurt us rather than help us - is perhaps the world's leading expert on technology's effects on the economy.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, is so prolific and respected that he's long been viewed as a leading candidate for the Nobel prize in economics. He used to believe in the conventional wisdom, that technology is always a force for economic good. But now, with his longtime collaborator Simon Johnson, Acemoglu has written a 546-page treatise that demolishes the Church of Technology, demonstrating how innovation often winds up being harmful to society. In their book " Power and Progress," Acemoglu and Johnson showcase a series of major inventions over the course of the past 1,000 years that, contrary to what we've been told, did nothing to improve, and sometimes even worsened, the lives of most people. And in the periods when big technological breakthroughs did lead to widespread good - the examples that today's AI optimists cite - it was only because ruling elites were forced to share the gains of innovation widely, rather than keeping the profits and power for themselves. It was the fight over technology, not just technology on its own, that wound up benefiting society.

"The broad-based prosperity of the past was not the result of any automatic, guaranteed gains of technological progress," Acemoglu and Johnson write. "We are beneficiaries of progress, mainly because our predecessors made the progress work for more people."

Today, in this moment of peak AI, which path are we on? The terrific one, where we all benefit from these new tools? Or the terrible one, where most of us lose out? Over the course of three conversations this summer, Acemoglu told me he's worried we're currently hurtling down a road that will end in catastrophe. All around him, he sees a torrent of warning signs - the kind that, in the past, wound up favoring the few over the many. Power concentrated in the hands of a handful of tech behemoths. Technologists, bosses, and researchers focused on replacing human workers instead of empowering them. An obsession with worker surveillance. Record-low unionization. Weakened democracies. What Acemoglu's research shows - what history tells us - is that tech-driven dystopias aren't some sci-fi rarity. They're actually far more common than anyone has realized.

"There's a fair likelihood that if we don't do a course correction, we're going to have a truly two-tier system," Acemoglu told me. "A small number of people are going to be on top - they're going to design and use those technologies - and a very large number of people will only have marginal jobs, or not very meaningful jobs." The result, he fears, is a future of lower wages for most of us.

Acemoglu shares these dire warnings not to urge workers to resist AI altogether, nor to resign us to counting down the years to our economic doom. He sees the possibility of a beneficial outcome for AI - "the technology we have in our hands has all the capabilities to bring lots of good" - but only if workers, policymakers, researchers, and maybe even a few high-minded tech moguls make it so. Given how rapidly ChatGPT has spread throughout the workplace - 81% of large companies in one survey said they're already using AI to replace repetitive work - Acemoglu is urging society to act quickly. And his first task is a steep one: deprogramming all of us from what he calls the "blind techno-optimism" espoused by the "modern oligarchy."

"This," he told me, "is the last opportunity for us to wake up."

Acemoglu, 56, lives with his wife and two sons in a quiet, affluent suburb of Boston. But he was born 5,000 miles away in Istanbul, to a country mired in chaos. When he was 3, the military seized control of the government and his father, a left-leaning professor who feared the family's home would be raided, burned his books. The economy crumbled under the weight of triple-digit inflation, crushing debt, and high unemployment. When Acemoglu was 13, the military detained and tried hundreds of thousands of people, torturing and executing many. Watching the violence and poverty all around him, Acemoglu started to wonder about the relationship between dictatorships and economic growth - a question he wouldn't be able to study freely if he stayed in Turkey. At 19, he left to attend college in the UK. By the freakishly young age of 25, he completed his doctorate in economics at the London School of Economics.

Moving to Boston to teach at MIT, Acemoglu was quick to make waves in his chosen field. To this day his most cited paper, written with Johnson and another longtime collaborator, James Robinson, tackles the question he pondered as a teenager: Do democratic countries develop better economies than dictatorships? It's a huge question - one that's hard to answer, because it could be that poverty leads to dictatorship, not the other way around. So Acemoglu and his coauthors employed a clever workaround. They looked at European colonies with high mortality rates, where history showed that power remained concentrated in the hands of the few settlers willing to brave death and disease, versus colonies with low mortality rates, where a larger influx of settlers pushed for property rights and political rights that checked the power of the state. The conclusion: Colonies that developed what they came to call "inclusive" institutions - ones that encouraged investment and enforced the rule of law - ended up richer than their authoritarian neighbors. In their ambitious and sprawling book, " Why Nations Fail," Acemoglu and Robinson rejected factors like culture, weather, and geography as things that made some countries rich and others poor. The only factor that really mattered was democracy.

The book was an unexpected bestseller, and economists hailed it as paradigm-shifting. But Acemoglu was also pursuing a different line of research that had long fascinated him: technological progress. Like almost all of his colleagues, he started off as an unabashed techno-optimist. In 2008, he published a textbook for graduate students that endorsed the technology-is-always-good orthodoxy. "I was following the canon of economic models, and in all of these models, technological change is the main mover of GDP per capita and wages," Acemoglu told me. "I did not question them."

But as he thought about it more, he started to wonder whether there might be more to the story. The first turning point came in a paper he worked on with the economist David Autor. In it was a striking chart that plotted the earnings of American men over five decades, adjusted for inflation. During the 1960s and early 1970s, everyone's wages rose in tandem, regardless of education. But then, around 1980, the wages of those with advanced degrees began to soar, while the wages of high-school graduates and dropouts plunged. Something was making the lives of less-educated Americans demonstrably worse. Was that something technology?

Acemoglu had a hunch that it was. With Pascual Restrepo, one of his students at the time, he started thinking of automation as something that does two opposite things simultaneously: It steals tasks from humans, while also creating new tasks for humans. How workers ultimately fare, he and Restrepo theorized, depends in large part on the balance of those two actions. When the newly created tasks offset the stolen tasks, workers do fine: They can shuffle into new jobs that often pay better than their old ones. But when the stolen tasks outpace the new ones, displaced workers have nowhere to go. In later empirical work, Acemoglu and Restrepo showed that that was exactly what had happened. Over the four decades following World War II, the two kinds of tasks balanced each other out. But over the next three decades, stolen tasks outpaced the new tasks by a wide margin. In short, automation went both ways. Sometimes it was good, and sometimes it was bad.

It was the bad part that economists were still unconvinced about. So Acemoglu and Restrepo, casting around for more empirical evidence, zeroed in on robots. What they found was stunning: Since 1990, the introduction of every additional robot reduced employment by approximately six humans, while measurably lowering wages. "That was an eye-opener," Acemoglu told me. "People thought it would not be possible to have such negative effects from robots."

Many economists, clinging to the technological orthodoxy, dismissed the effects of robots on human workers as a "transitory phenomenon." In the end, they insisted, technology would prove to be good for everyone. But Acemoglu found that viewpoint unsatisfying. Could you really call something that had been going on for three or four decades "transitory"? By his calculations, robots had thrown more than half a million Americans out of work. Perhaps, in the long run, the benefits of technology would eventually reach most people. But as the economist John Maynard Keynes once quipped, in the long run, we're all dead.

So Acemoglu set out to study the long run. First, he and Johnson scoured the course of Western history to see whether there were other times when technology failed to deliver on its promise. Was the recent era of automation, as many economists assumed, an anomaly?

It wasn't, Acemoglu and Johnson found. Take, for instance, medieval times, a period commonly dismissed as a technological wasteland. But the Middle Ages actually saw a series of innovations that included heavy wheeled plows, mechanical clocks, spinning wheels, smarter crop-rotation techniques, the widespread adoption of wheelbarrows, and a greater use of horses. These advancements made farming much more productive. But the reason we remember the period as the Dark Ages is precisely because the gains never reached the peasants who were doing the actual work. Despite all the technological advances, they toiled for longer hours, grew increasingly malnourished, and most likely lived shorter lives. The surpluses created by the new technology went almost exclusively to the elites who sat at the top of society: the clergy, who used their newfound wealth to build soaring cathedrals and consolidate their power.

Or consider the Industrial Revolution, which techno-optimists gleefully point to as Exhibit A of the invariable benefit of innovation. The first, long stretch of the Industrial Revolution was actually disastrous for workers. Technology that mechanized spinning and weaving destroyed the livelihoods of skilled artisans, handing textile jobs to unskilled women and children who commanded lower wages and virtually no bargaining power. People crowding into the cities for factory jobs lived next to cesspools of human waste, breathed coal-polluted air, and were defenseless against epidemics like cholera and tuberculosis that wiped out their families. They were also forced to work longer hours while real incomes stagnated. "I have traversed the seat of war in the peninsula," Lord Byron lamented to the House of Lords in 1812. "I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country."

If the average person didn't benefit, where did all the extra wealth generated by the new machines go? Once again, it was hoarded by the elites: the industrialists. "Normally, technology gets co-opted and controlled by a pretty small number of people who use it primarily to their own benefits," Johnson told me. "That is the big lesson from human history."

Acemoglu and Johnson recognized that technology hasn't always been bad: At times, they found, it's been nothing short of miraculous. In England, during the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, real wages soared by 123%. The average working day declined to nine hours, child labor was curbed, and life expectancy rose. In the United States, during the postwar boom from 1949 to 1973, real wages grew by almost 3% a year, creating a vibrant and stable middle class. "There has never been, as far as anyone knows, another epoch of such rapid and shared prosperity," Acemoglu and Johnson write, going all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. It's episodes like these that made economists believe so fervently in the power of technology.

So what separates the good technological times from the bad? That's the central question that Acemoglu and Johnson tackle in "Power and Progress." Two factors, they say, determine the outcome of a new technology. The first is the nature of the technology itself - whether it creates enough new tasks for workers to offset the tasks it takes away. The first phase of the Industrial Revolution, they argue, was dominated by textile machines that replaced skilled spinners and weavers without creating enough new work for them to pursue, condemning them to unskilled gigs with lower wages and worse conditions. In the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, by contrast, steam-powered locomotives displaced stagecoach drivers - but they also created a host of new jobs for engineers, construction workers, ticket sellers, porters, and the managers who supervised them all. These were often highly skilled and highly paid jobs. And by lowering the cost of transportation, the steam engine also helped expand sectors like the metal-smelting industry and retail trade, creating jobs in those areas as well.

"What's special about AI is its speed," Acemoglu says. "It's much faster than past technologies. It's pervasive. It's going to be applied pretty much in every sector. And it's very flexible."

The second factor that determines the outcome of new technologies is the prevailing balance of power between workers and their employers. Without enough bargaining power, Acemoglu and Johnson argue, workers are unable to force their bosses to share the wealth that new technologies generate. And what determines the degree of bargaining power is closely related to democracy. Electoral reforms - kickstarted by the working-class Chartist movement in 1830s Britain - were central to the Industrial Revolution transforming from bad to good. As more men won the right to vote, Parliament became more responsive to the needs of the broader public, passing laws to improve sanitation, crack down on child labor, and legalize trade unions. The growth of organized labor, in turn, laid the groundwork for workers to extract higher wages and better working conditions from their employers in the wake of technological innovations, along with guarantees of retraining when new machines took over their old jobs.

In normal times, such insights might feel purely academic - just another debate over how to interpret the past. But there's one point that both Acemoglu and the tech elite he criticizes agree on: We're in the midst of another technological revolution today with AI. "What's special about AI is its speed," Acemoglu told me. "It's much faster than past technologies. It's pervasive. It's going to be applied pretty much in every sector. And it's very flexible. All of this means that what we're doing right now with AI may not be the right thing - and if it's not the right thing, if it's a damaging direction, it can spread very fast and become dominant. So I think those are big stakes."

Acemoglu acknowledges that his views remain far from the consensus in his profession. But there are indications that his thinking is starting to have a broader impact in the emerging battle over AI. In June, Gita Gopinath, who is second in command at the International Monetary Fund, gave a speech urging the world to regulate AI in a way that would benefit society, citing Acemoglu by name. Klinova, at the Partnership on AI, told me that people high up at the leading AI labs are reading and discussing his work. And Paul Romer, who won the Nobel prize in 2018 for work that showed just how critical innovation is for economic growth, says he's gone through his own change in thinking that mirrors Acemoglu's.

"It was wishful thinking by economists, including me, who wanted to believe that things would naturally turn out well," Romer told me. "What's become more and more clear to me is that that's just not a given. It's blindingly obvious, ex post facto, that there are many forms of technology that can do great harm, and also many forms that can be enormously beneficial. The trick is to have some entity that acts on behalf of society as a whole that says: Let's do the ones that are beneficial, let's not do the ones that are harmful."

Romer praises Acemoglu for challenging the conventional wisdom. "I really admire him, because it's easy to be afraid of getting too far outside the consensus," he says. "Daron is courageous for being willing to try new ideas and pursue them without trying to figure out, where's the crowd? There's too much herding around a narrow set of possible views, and we've really got to keep open to exploring other possibilities."

Early this year, a few weeks before the rest of us, a research initiative organized by Microsoft gave Acemoglu early access to GPT-4. As he played around with it, he was amazed by the responses he got from the bot. "Every time I had a conversation with GPT-4 I was so impressed that at the end I said, 'Thank you,'" he says, laughing. "It's certainly beyond what I would have thought would be feasible a year ago. I think it shows great potential in doing a bunch of things."

But the early experimentation with AI also introduced him to its shortcomings. He doesn't think we're anywhere close to the point where software will be able to do everything humans can - a state that computer scientists call artificial general intelligence. As a result, he and Johnson don't foresee a future of mass unemployment. People will still be working, but at lower wages. "What we're concerned about is that the skills of large numbers of workers will be much less valuable," he told me. "So their incomes will not keep up."

Acemoglu's interest in AI predates the explosion of ChatGPT by many years. That's in part thanks to his wife, Asu Ozdaglar, who heads the electrical engineering and computer science department at MIT. Through her, he received an early education in machine learning, which was making it possible for computers to complete a wider range of tasks. As he dug deeper into automation, he began to wonder about its effects not just on factory jobs, but on office workers. "Robots are important, but how many blue-collar workers do we have left?" he told me. "If you have a technology that automates knowledge work, white-collar work, clerical work, that's going to be much more important for this next stage of automation."

In theory, it's possible that automation will end up being a net good for white-collar workers. But right now, Acemoglu is worried it will end up being a net bad, because society currently doesn't display the conditions necessary to ensure that new technologies benefit everyone. First, thanks to a decadeslong assault on organized labor, only 10% of the working population is unionized - a record low. Without bargaining power, workers won't get a say in how AI tools are implemented on the job, or who shares in the wealth they create. And second, years of misinformation have weakened democratic institutions - a trend that's likely to get worse in the age of deep fakes.

Moreover, Acemoglu is worried that AI isn't creating enough new tasks to offset the ones it's taking away. In a recent study, he found that the companies that hired more AI specialists over the past decade went on to hire fewer people overall. That suggests that even before the ChatGPT era, employers were using AI to replace their human workers with software, rather than using it to make humans more productive - just as they had with earlier forms of digital technologies. Companies, of course, are always eager to trim costs and goose short-term profits. But Acemoglu also blames the field of AI research for the emphasis on replacing workers. Computer scientists, he notes, judge their AI creations by seeing whether their programs can achieve "human parity" - completing certain tasks as well as people.

"It's become second nature to people in the industry and in the broader ecosystem to judge these new technologies in how well they do in being humanlike," he told me. "That creates a very natural pathway to automation and replicating what humans do - and often not enough in how they can be most useful for humans with very different skills" than computers.

Acemoglu argues that building tools that are useful to human workers, instead of tools that will replace them, would benefit not only workers but their employers as well. Why focus so much energy on doing something humans can already do reasonably well, when AI could instead help us do what we never could before? It's a message that Erik Brynjolfsson, another prominent economist studying technological change, has been pushing for a decade now. "It would have been lame if someone had set out to make a car with feet and legs that was humanlike," Brynjolfsson told me. "That would have been a pretty slow-moving car." Building AI with the goal of imitating humans similarly fails to realize the true potential of the technology.

"The future is going to be largely about knowledge work," Acemoglu says. "Generative AI could be one of the tools that make workers much more productive. That's a great promise. There's a high road here where you can actually increase productivity, make profits, as well as contribute to social good - if you find a way to use this technology as a tool that empowers workers."

In March, Acemoglu signed a controversial open letter calling on AI labs to pause the training of their systems for at least six months. He didn't think companies would adopt the moratorium, and he disagreed with the letter's emphasis on the existential risk that AI poses to humanity. But he joined the list of more than a thousand other signatories anyway - a group that included the AI scientist Yoshua Bengio, the historian Yuval Noah Harari, the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, and, strangely, Elon Musk. "I thought it was remarkable in bringing together an amazing cross-section of very different people who were articulating concerns about the direction of tech," Acemoglu told me. "High-profile efforts to say, 'Look, there might be something wrong with the direction of change, and we should take a look and think about regulation' - that's important."

When society is ready to start talking about specific ways to ensure that AI leads to shared prosperity, Acemoglu and Johnson devote an entire chapter at the end of their book to what they view as promising solutions. Among them: Taxing wages less, and software more, so companies won't be incentivized to replace their workers with technology. Fostering new organizations that advocate the needs of workers in the age of AI, the way Greenpeace pushes for climate activism. Repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to force internet companies to stop promoting the kind of misinformation that hurts the democratic process. Creating federal subsidies for technology that complements workers instead of replacing them. And, most broadly, breaking up Big Tech to foster greater competition and innovation.

I sensed an underlying discomfort among economists at the prospect of messing with how technology unfolds in the marketplace.

Economists - at least the ones who aren't die-hard conservatives - don't object in general to Acemoglu's proposals to increase the bargaining power of workers. But many struggle with the idea of trying to steer AI research and implementation in a direction that's beneficial for workers. Some question whether it's even possible to predict which technologies will create enough new tasks to offset the ones they replace. But in my private conversations with economists, I've also sensed an underlying discomfort at the prospect of messing with how technology unfolds in the marketplace. Since 1800, when the Industrial Revolution was first taking hold in the US, GDP per capita - the most common measure of living standards - has grown more than twentyfold. The invisible hand of technology, most economists continue to believe, will ultimately benefit everyone, if left to its own devices.

I used to think that way, too. A decade ago, when I first began reporting on the likely effects of machine learning, the consensus was that careers like mine - ones that require a significant measure of creativity and social intelligence - were still safe. In recent months, even as it became clear how well ChatGPT can write, I kept reassuring myself with the conventional wisdom. AI is going to make us more productive, and that will be great for society. Now, after reviewing Acemoglu's research, I've been hearing a new mantra in my head: We're all fucked.

That's not the takeaway Acemoglu intended. In our conversations, he told me over and over that we're not powerless in the face of the dystopian future he foresees - that we have the ability to steer the way AI unfolds. Yes, that will require passing a laundry list of huge policies, in the face of a tech lobby with unlimited resources, through a dysfunctional Congress and a deeply pro-business Supreme Court, amid a public fed a digital firehose of increasingly brazen lies. And yes, there are days when he doesn't feel all that great about our chances either.

"I realize this is a very, very tall order," Acemoglu told me. But you know whose chances looked even grimmer? Workers in England during the mid-19th century, who endured almost 100 years of a tech-driven dystopia. At the time, few had the right to vote, let alone to unionize. The Chartists who demanded universal male suffrage were jailed. The Luddites who broke the textile machines that displaced them were exiled to Australia or hanged. And yet they recognized that they deserved more, and they fought for the kinds of rights that translated into higher wages and a better life for them and, two centuries later, for us. Had they not bothered, the march of technology would have turned out very differently.

"We have greatly benefited from technology, but there's nothing automatic about that," Acemoglu told me. "It could have gone in a very bad direction had it not been for institutional, regulatory, and technological adjustments. That's why this is a momentous period: because there are similar choices that need to be made today. The conclusion to be drawn is not that technology is workers' enemy. It's that we need to make sure we end up with directions of technology that are more conducive to wage growth and shared prosperity." That's why Acemoglu dedicated "Power and Progress" not only to his wife but to his two sons. History may point to how destructive AI is likely to be. But it doesn't have to repeat itself.

"Our book is an analysis," he told me. "But it also encourages people to be involved for a better future. I wrote it for the next generation, with the hope that it will get better."
Aki Ito is a senior correspondent at Insider.

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'This is the last opportunity for us to wake up': A leading economist warns we're headed for an AI-driven cataclysm

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How Daron Acemoglu, one of the world's most respected experts on the economic effects of technology, learned to start worrying and fear AI.

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Big Tech meets on Capitol Hill and unanimously asks Congress to regulate AI

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Big Tech meets on Capitol Hill and unanimously asks Congress to regulate AI

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Capitol Hill saw a historic gathering of tech industry leaders - all in the name of AI. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explains why he's still hopeful they can pull off a plan to regulate AI.

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Sen. Schumer hopes legislation regulating AI can pass a divided Congress

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Capitol Hill saw a historic gathering of tech industry leaders - all in the name of AI. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer explains why he's still hopeful they can pull off a plan to regulate AI.

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This article informs readers about how influential AI technology can be on the economic state of a country. Specifically, how AI technology could start to create even more of a divide between the rich and the poor.

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How Artificial Intelligence Could Widen the Gap Between Rich and Poor Nations

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New technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, big data, and networks are expected to revolutionize production processes, but they could also have a major impact on developing economies. The opportunities and potential sources of growth that, for example, the United States and China enjoyed during their early stages of economic development are remarkably different from what Cambodia and Tanzania are facing in today's world.

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The article states that artifical intelligence can help make the healthcare field more efficient. There are many benefits to have artifical intelligence in the healthcare field like virtual nursing assistant.

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Artificial intelligence is being used in healthcare for everything from answering patient questions to assisting with surgeries and developing new pharmaceuticals.

How can artificial intelligence benefit healthcare?

According to , the artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare market, which is valued at USD 11 billion in 2021, is projected to be worth USD 187 billion in 2030. That massive increase means we will likely continue to see considerable changes in how medical providers, hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and others in the healthcare industry operate.

Better machine learning (ML) algorithms, more access to data, cheaper hardware, and the availability of 5G have contributed to the increasing application of AI in the healthcare industry, accelerating the pace of change. AI and ML technologies can sift through enormous volumes of health data-from health records and clinical studies to genetic information-and analyze it much faster than humans.

AI might help make healthcare operations more efficient

Healthcare organizations are using AI to improve the efficiency of all kinds of processes, from back-office tasks to patient care. The following are some examples of how AI might be used to benefit staff and patients:

Administrative workflow: Healthcare workers spend a lot of time doing paperwork and other administrative tasks. AI and automation can help perform many of those mundane tasks, freeing up employee time for other activities and giving them more face-to-face time with patients. For example, generative AI can help clinicians with note-taking and content summarization that can help keep medical records as thoroughly as possible. AI might also help with accurate coding and sharing of information between departments and billing.

Virtual nursing assistants: One study found that 64% of patients are comfortable with the use of AI for around-the-clock access to answers that support nurses provide. AI virtual nurse assistants-which are AI-powered chatbots, apps, or other interfaces-can be used to help answer questions about medications, forward reports to doctors or surgeons and help patients schedule a visit with a physician. These sorts of routine tasks can help take work off the hands of clinical staff, who can then spend more time directly on patient care, where human judgment and interaction matter most.

Dosage error reduction: AI can be used to help identify errors in how a patient self-administers medication. One example comes from a study in Nature Medicine , which found that up to 70% of patients don't take insulin as prescribed. An AI-powered tool that sits in the patient's background (much like a wifi router) might be used to flag errors in how the patient administers an insulin pen or inhaler.

Less invasive surgeries: AI-enabled robots might be used to work around sensitive organs and tissues to help reduce blood loss, infection risk and post-surgery pain.

Fraud prevention: Fraud in the healthcare industry is enormous, at USD 380 billion/year, and raises the cost of consumers' medical premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. Implementing AI can help recognize unusual or suspicious patterns in insurance claims, such as billing for costly services or procedures that are not performed, unbundling (which is billing for the individual steps of a procedure as though they were separate procedures), and performing unnecessary tests to take advantage of insurance payments.

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AI has the potential to improve the healthcare user experience

A recent study found that 83% of patients report poor communication as the worst part of their experience, demonstrating a strong need for clearer communication between patients and providers.

AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP), predictive analytics, and speech recognition might help healthcare providers have more effective communication with patients. AI might, for instance, deliver more specific information about a patient's treatment options, allowing the healthcare provider to have more meaningful conversations with the patient for shared decision-making.

AI might be used to increase efficiency in healthcare diagnoses

According to Harvard's School of Public Health , although it's early days for this use, using AI to make diagnoses may reduce treatment costs by up to 50% and improve health outcomes by 40%.

One use case example is out of the University of Hawaii , where a research team found that deploying deep learning AI technology can improve breast cancer risk prediction. More research is needed, but the lead researcher pointed out that an AI algorithm can be trained on a much larger set of images than a radiologist-as many as a million or more radiology images. Also, that algorithm can be replicated at no cost except for hardware.

An developed an ML algorithm to determine when a human expert is needed. In some instances, such as identifying cardiomegaly in chest X-rays, they found that a hybrid human-AI model produced the best results.

Another published study found that AI recognized skin cancer better than experienced doctors. US, German and French researchers used deep learning on more than 100,000 images to identify skin cancer. Comparing the results of AI to those of 58 international dermatologists, they found AI did better.

AI in healthcare organizations might mean better health monitoring and preventive care

As health and fitness monitors become more popular and more people use apps that track and analyze details about their health. They can share these real-time data sets with their doctors to monitor health issues and provide alerts in case of problems.

AI solutions-such as big data applications, machine learning algorithms and deep learning algorithms-might also be used to help humans analyze large data sets to help clinical and other decision-making. AI might also be used to help detect and track infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, tuberculosis, and malaria.

AI can help connect disparate healthcare data

One benefit the use of AI brings to health systems is making gathering and sharing information easier. AI can help providers keep track of patient data more efficiently.

One example is diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , 11.6% of the US population has diabetes. Patients can now use wearable and other monitoring devices that provide feedback about their glucose levels to themselves and their medical team.

AI can help providers gather that information, store, and analyze it, and provide data-driven insights from vast numbers of people. Using this information can help healthcare professionals determine how to better treat and manage diseases.

Organizations are also starting to use AI to help improve drug safety. The company SELTA SQUARE, for example, is innovating the pharmacovigilance (PV) process, a legally mandated discipline for detecting and reporting adverse effects from drugs, then assessing, understanding, and preventing those effects.

PV demands significant effort and diligence from pharma producers because it's performed from the clinical trials phase all the way through the drug's lifetime availability. Selta Square uses a combination of AI and automation to make the PV process faster and more accurate, which helps make medicines safer for people worldwide.

Sometimes, AI might reduce the need to test potential drug compounds physically, which is an enormous cost-savings. High-fidelity molecular simulations can run on computers without incurring the high costs of traditional discovery methods.

AI also has the potential to help humans predict toxicity, bioactivity, and other characteristics of molecules or create previously unknown drug molecules from scratch.

AI governance in healthcare

As AI becomes more important in healthcare delivery and more AI medical applications are developed, ethical, and regulatory governance must be established. Issues that raise concern include the possibility of bias, lack of transparency, privacy concerns regarding data used for training AI models, and safety and liability issues.

"AI governance is necessary, especially for clinical applications of the technology," said Laura Craft, VP Analyst at . "However, because new AI techniques are largely new territory for most [health delivery organizations], there is a lack of common rules, processes, and guidelines for eager entrepreneurs to follow as they design their pilots."

The World Health Organization (WHO) spent 18 months deliberating with leading experts in ethics, digital technology, law, and human rights and various Ministries of Health members to produce a report that is called Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health . This report identifies ethical challenges to using AI in healthcare, identifies risks, and outlines six consensus principles to ensure AI works for the public's benefit:

1. Protecting autonomy

2. Promoting human safety and well-being

3. Ensuring transparency

4. Fostering accountability

5. Ensuring equity

6. Promoting tools that are responsive and sustainable

The WHO report also provides recommendations that ensure governing AI for healthcare both maximizes the technology's promise and holds healthcare workers accountable and responsive to the communities and people they work with.

Future and potential of AI in the healthcare ecosystem

AI provides opportunities to help reduce human error, assist medical professionals and staff, and provide patient services 24/7. As AI tools continue to develop, there is potential to use AI even more in reading medical images, X-rays and scans, diagnosing medical problems and creating treatment plans.

AI applications continue to help streamline various tasks, from answering phones to analyzing population health trends (and likely, applications yet to be considered). For instance, future AI tools may automate or augment more of the work of clinicians and staff members. That will free up humans to spend more time on more effective and compassionate face-to-face professional care.

When patients need help, they don't want to (or can't) wait on hold. Healthcare facilities' resources are finite, so help isn't always available instantaneously or 24/7-and even slight delays can create frustration and feelings of isolation or cause certain conditions to worsen.

IBM watsonx™ Assistant AI healthcare chatbots can help providers do two things: keep their time focused where it needs to be and empower patients who call in to get quick answers to simple questions.

IBM watsonx Assistant is built on deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) models to understand questions, search for the best answers and complete transactions by using conversational AI.

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AI is used in healthcare for everything from answering patient questions to assisting with surgeries and developing new pharmaceuticals.

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The article tells us how major companies such as Google, Apple,Microsoft , and Amazon are spending billions of dollars to create products and services which is making AI a more prominent part of their curricula. AI is advancing on transportation , manufacturing, healthcare, education , media , workspace , and much more.

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Innovations in the field of artificial intelligence continue to shape the future of humanity across nearly every industry. AI is already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT, and generative AI has further expanded the possibilities and popularity of AI.

According to a 2023 IBM survey, 42 percent of enterprise-scale businesses integrated AI into their operations, and 40 percent are considering AI for their organizations. In addition, 38 percent of organizations have implemented generative AI into their workflows while 42 percent are considering doing so.

With so many changes coming at such a rapid pace, here's what shifts in AI could mean for various industries and society at large.

More on the Future of AI Can AI Make Art More Human?

The Evolution of AI

AI has come a long way since 1951, when the first documented success of an AI computer program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program completed a whole game on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester. Thanks to developments in machine learning and deep learning, IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the company's IBM Watson won Jeopardy! in 2011.

Since then, generative AI has spearheaded the latest chapter in AI's evolution, with OpenAI releasing its first GPT models in 2018. This has culminated in OpenAI developing its GPT-4 model and ChatGPT, leading to a proliferation of AI generators that can process queries to produce relevant text, audio, images and other types of content.

How AI Will Impact the Future

Improved Business Automation

AI's ability to analyze massive amounts of data and convert its findings into convenient visual formats can also accelerate the decision-making process. Company leaders don't have to spend time parsing through the data themselves, instead using instant insights to make informed decisions.

"If [developers] understand what the technology is capable of and they understand the domain very well, they start to make connections and say, 'Maybe this is an AI problem, maybe that's an AI problem,'" said Mike Mendelson, a learner experience designer for NVIDIA. "That's more often the case than, 'I have a specific problem I want to solve.'"

More on AI 75 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Companies to Know

Job Disruption

Business automation has naturally led to fears over job losses. In fact, employees believe almost one-third of their tasks could be performed by AI. Although AI has made gains in the workplace, it's had an unequal impact on different industries and professions. For example, manual jobs like secretaries are at risk of being automated, but the demand for other jobs like machine learning specialists and information security analysts has risen.

"One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we invest tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs," said Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the school's Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Data Privacy Issues

Companies require large volumes of data to train the models that power generative AI tools, and this process has come under intense scrutiny. Concerns over companies collecting consumers' personal data have led the FTC to open an investigation into whether OpenAI has negatively impacted consumers through its data collection methods after the company potentially violated European data protection laws.

In response, the Biden-Harris administration developed an AI Bill of Rights that lists data privacy as one of its core principles. Although this legislation doesn't carry much legal weight, it reflects the growing push to prioritize data privacy and compel AI companies to be more transparent and cautious about how they compile training data.

Increased Regulation

AI could shift the perspective on certain legal questions, depending on how generative AI lawsuits unfold in 2024. For example, the issue of intellectual property has come to the forefront in light of copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI by writers, musicians and companies like The New York Times. These lawsuits affect how the U.S. legal system interprets what is private and public property, and a loss could spell major setbacks for OpenAI and its competitors.

Ethical issues that have surfaced in connection to generative AI have placed more pressure on the U.S. government to take a stronger stance. The Biden-Harris administration has maintained its moderate position with its latest executive order, creating rough guidelines around data privacy, civil liberties, responsible AI and other aspects of AI. However, the government could lean toward stricter regulations, depending on changes in the political climate.

Climate Change Concerns

On a far grander scale, AI is poised to have a major effect on sustainability, climate change and environmental issues. Optimists can view AI as a way to make supply chains more efficient, carrying out predictive maintenance and other procedures to reduce carbon emissions.

What Industries Will AI Impact the Most?

There's virtually no major industry that modern AI hasn't already affected. Here are a few of the industries undergoing the greatest changes as a result of AI.

AI in Manufacturing

Manufacturing has been benefiting from AI for years. With AI-enabled robotic arms and other manufacturing bots dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, the industry has adapted well to the powers of AI. These industrial robots typically work alongside humans to perform a limited range of tasks like assembly and stacking, and predictive analysis sensors keep equipment running smoothly.

AI in Healthcare

It may seem unlikely, but AI healthcare is already changing the way humans interact with medical providers. Thanks to its big data analysis capabilities, AI helps identify diseases more quickly and accurately, speed up and streamline drug discovery and even monitor patients through virtual nursing assistants.

AI in Finance

Banks, insurers and financial institutions leverage AI for a range of applications like detecting fraud, conducting audits and evaluating customers for loans. Traders have also used machine learning's ability to assess millions of data points at once, so they can quickly gauge risk and make smart investing decisions.

AI in Education

AI in Media

AI in Customer Service

Most people dread getting a robocall, but AI in customer service can provide the industry with data-driven tools that bring meaningful insights to both the customer and the provider. AI tools powering the customer service industry come in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants.

AI in Transportation

Risks and Dangers of AI

Despite reshaping numerous industries in positive ways, AI still has flaws that leave room for concern. Here are a few potential risks of artificial intelligence.

Job Losses

Human Biases

Deepfakes and Misinformation

Data Privacy

Automated Weapons

The use of AI in automated weapons poses a major threat to countries and their general populations. While automated weapons systems are already deadly, they also fail to discriminate between soldiers and civilians. Letting artificial intelligence fall into the wrong hands could lead to irresponsible use and the deployment of weapons that put larger groups of people at risk.

Superior Intelligence

"I don't think the methods we use currently in these areas will lead to machines that decide to kill us," said Marc Gyongyosi, founder of Onetrack.AI. "I think that maybe five or 10 years from now, I'll have to reevaluate that statement because we'll have different methods available and different ways to go about these things."

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The Future of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the World

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The future of AI is constantly in flux. AI is changing nearly every industry and will impact society in ways we are just beginning to understand.

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In this article, you can read about the effects of AI on jobs and how it may completely change the workforce for 2040. This is an interesting topic as it is uncertain whether the jobs that people do daily will be given off to AI and robots, and this articles shares a view against letting AI take over jobs.

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Will smart machines really replace human workers? Probably not. People and AI both bring different abilities and strengths to the table. The real question is: how can human intelligence work with artificial intelligence to produce augmented intelligence. Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov offers some unique insight here. After losing to IBM's Deep Blue, he began to experiment how a computer helper changed players' competitive advantage in high-level chess games. What he discovered was that having the best players and the best program was less a predictor of success than having a really good process. Put simply, "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process." As leaders look at how to incorporate AI into their organizations, they'll have to manage expectations as AI is introduced, invest in bringing teams together and perfecting processes, and refine their own leadership abilities.

In an economy where data is changing how companies create value - and compete - experts predict that using artificial intelligence (AI) at a larger scale will add as much as $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. As AI is changing how companies work, many believe that who does this work will change, too - and that organizations will begin to replace human employees with intelligent machines. This is already happening: intelligent systems are displacing humans in manufacturing, service delivery, recruitment, and the financial industry, consequently moving human workers towards lower-paid jobs or making them unemployed. This trend has led some to conclude that in 2040 our workforce may be totally unrecognizable.

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AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It

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Will smart machines really replace human workers? Probably not. People and AI both bring different abilities and strengths to the table. The real question is: how can human intelligence work with artificial intelligence to produce augmented intelligence. Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov offers some unique insight here.

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One section of this article explains how the cost of going to space is decreasing which makes the idea of future space tourism or settling on Mars more feasible. More and more people would be able to live and work in space quicker.

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The passengers who boarded commercial flights just after World War II didn't know that air travel would begin to soar over the next decade, nor did the masses who first logged onto the internet in the 1990s realize that computers would one day provide much of their news, entertainment, and social life. And today, few people understand that the space economy-broadly defined as activities in orbit or on other planets that benefit human beings-could soon transform how they live and work.

Some hints of the coming changes are apparent, including the frequent headlines about SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other private companies launching their own rockets and deploying satellite constellations. These activities, once primarily the domain of government agencies, are now possible in the private sector because recent technological advances in manufacturing, propulsion, and launch have made it much easier and less expensive to venture into space and conduct missions. Lower costs have opened the door to new start-ups and encouraged established aerospace companies to explore novel opportunities that once seemed too expensive or difficult. The technological improvements have also intrigued investors, resulting in a surge of space funding over the past five years.

The potential for innovative space applications is immense, especially if established aerospace companies form partnerships with businesses that traditionally haven't ventured into orbit. Pharmaceutical companies might establish a lab on a space station to study cell growth, for instance, or semiconductor companies might manufacture chips in extraterrestrial factories to determine whether any aspects of the space environment, such as the lack of gravity, improve the process. Such possibilities, which might have seemed like the stuff of science fiction a few years ago, could become an essential part of a business across multiple industries in the near future.

But how and when should companies take advantage of their greater access to space and pursue emerging use cases? And how can they decide what opportunities are most promising when the technology is so nascent? Although much remains uncertain, companies that begin exploring these questions now could gain a long-term advantage.

Space has long been a potent incubator for innovation-first from governments and large telcos and now from multiple private companies as well. From the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 through today, the space economy has delivered most of its value through satellite services, including communications and data and image collection and analysis. Satellites help large companies with multiple tasks, including inventory monitoring at distant locations, instant authorization of credit-card transactions, and international videoconferencing. Consumers use satellite technology whenever an online navigation system pinpoints their location, or when they make calls during plane flights or from rural locations that lack cell phone towers. And television viewers can thank satellites for beaming the signals that allow them to watch their favorite programs. The role of satellites in these activities is often overlooked-many people may think terrestrial computer networks provide the necessary connectivity-unless a glitch occurs and draws attention to the unobtrusive technology operating in the background.

In addition, satellites help world leaders address intractable social, environmental, and economic challenges. Consider a few ways that satellite data can provide insights-often more effectively and comprehensively than other sources:

Climate change. More than 160 satellites monitor Earth to assess the effects of global warming and detect activities, such as illegal logging, that might contribute to the problem. NASA has used an instrument mounted on its Aqua satellite to monitor environmental changes, including those related to ocean water, water vapor, clouds, sea and land ice, and precipitation, for more than 20 years. Other satellites provide information that can help government agencies take urgent action on wildfires, coastal erosion, and other climate-related natural disasters.

Food security. Satellite data is increasingly used to monitor crop development and potential threats to harvests, such as drought or insect invasions. The SERVIR project, a partnership between NASA and the US Agency for International Development, uses data from Earth-imaging satellites and geospatial technologies to help governments address multiple issues, including food shortages.

National security. Governments, often working with companies in the private sector, can use satellite images and data to gain valuable intelligence, such as information on the movement of troops or the installation of weapons systems.

According to the not-for-profit Space Foundation, the space economy was valued at $469 billion in 2021, up 9 percent from 2020, the highest recorded growth since 2014. Although the space economy now generates most value by enabling or enhancing activities on Earth, significant future value could arise from functions that occur entirely in orbit, such as in-orbit servicing, research and development, and manufacturing. That said, the satellite services available today will remain important and could be critical to some emerging use cases.

Researchers and other space enthusiasts have long discussed the potential for business activity in orbit, or even the development of space cities. But now, with lower costs and greater technological capabilities, the space economy may finally be at a tipping point, where businesses can conduct large-scale activities in space. As costs continue to drop, even more companies may contemplate space ventures; and for the first time, they might even be able to profit from forays into space.

More launches, lower costs

The costs for heavy launches in low-Earth orbit (LEO) have fallen from $65,000 per kilogram to $1,500 per kilogram (in 2021 dollars)-a greater than 95 percent decrease. Computer-aided design, 3-D printing, and other innovations have contributed to the cost reductions by streamlining the manufacturing process and improving supply chains. The emergence of new commercial launch providers that prioritize efficiency is also helping. For instance, engineers at these companies have developed reusable components for launch vehicles, which lowers costs while promoting sustainability. The recent increase in launch frequency, particularly at SpaceX, is accelerating the drop in costs.

Current R&D efforts could reduce launch costs even further. Relativity Space, for instance, plans to use 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and autonomous robotics to build a fleet of fully reusable, low-cost rockets. The first launch for these vehicles is planned for 2024 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Similarly, SpaceX plans to conduct a full-scale, orbital test flight for its reusable Starship launch vehicle-the tallest and most powerful ever built-in late 2022.

Smaller satellites, bigger gains

The size and weight of satellites have fallen significantly in recent years because of various advances, primarily driven by private companies, such as the use of lighter solar panels and more efficient batteries. These changes, combined with greater use of commercial, off-the-shelf components, have decreased satellite costs and made their launch and operation feasible for many more organizations. Greater satellite demand is also improving costs because manufacturers obtain economies of scale by increasing production volume. These lower costs have helped alter the space landscape. Large government satellites, some of which cost upward of $1 billion and tend to be deployed in orbits far from Earth, are now outnumbered by smaller commercial satellites in LEO, often deployed in constellations, that can cost $100,000 or less.

In tandem with the cost decrease for satellites, researchers have created new technologies, such as higher-resolution sensors, that are boosting image capture, data processing, and other functions. Satellites can now collect, analyze, and transfer much larger stores of data than they could just five years ago.

Greater investment, more innovation

Public agencies, especially NASA and the US Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, have traditionally provided most space investment. While these agencies will continue to be a major source of funding, the combination of lower costs and more sophisticated technology is attracting more investment from both special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and private investors-a trend that is driving innovation.

In 2021, private-sector funding in space-related companies topped $10 billion -an all-time high and about a tenfold increase over the past decade. The percentage of global space R&D funding coming from the US government decreased from about 70 percent to around 50 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the number of space-related start-ups funded annually increased more than twofold from 2010 to 2018. Commercial funding could surpass government funding within 20 years, a trend that government is largely embracing and that could lead to mutually beneficial public-private partnerships.

Although much uncertainty persists, analysts are so optimistic about space that some believe it will become a $1 trillion industry, thanks to enhancements to existing use cases and the development of entirely new applications. Much progress, including further reductions in launch and operational costs, must be made before many ambitious space projects can become a reality, but continued technology improvements are encouraging companies to increase their investments in the space economy now. The new use cases can be divided into two broad categories: space-for-Earth applications, which facilitate terrestrial activities, and space-for-space applications, which only involve activities that occur in orbit.

Space-for-Earth applications

Satellites are becoming more sophisticated each year, allowing researchers to enhance existing use cases and develop new offerings. Many companies have recently deployed smaller, less expensive satellites in LEO -an orbit that is ideal for high-bandwidth, low-latency communications-to provide better satellite connectivity. While most past efforts to launch LEO constellations failed because of high costs, limited demand, and inadequate funding, the situation is much different today. SpaceX's Starlink has already launched an LEO constellation and has paying customers for its satellite broadband network. OneWeb and Amazon's Project Kuiper, among others, also plan to deploy LEO constellations soon. Satellite imaging, another technology frequently used in current applications, has also improved and could enable multiple new use cases by providing more detailed and accurate information.

Some of the most important space-for-Earth applications include the following:

Internet services in remote locations. Terrestrial networks are often difficult or uneconomical to install in underserved or rural areas. Beyond basic inconveniences, a lack of connectivity can interfere with vital services, including provision of remote learning or online medical consultations. By providing internet services to these areas, satellite connectivity could increase educational equity and social interactions and improve public health, especially in cases where the COVID-19 pandemic still limits some in-person interactions.

Agriculture. Space-based remote sensors collect a multitude of data, including images, information on weather patterns, and measures for electromagnetic waves, all of which have applications for agriculture. McKinsey's annual digital farmer adoption survey shows that 29 percent of row-crop farmers and 45 percent of specialty-crop farmers already rely on such data or plan to do so. The greatest value from satellite sensors for agriculture relates to yield-improvement opportunities. For instance, farmers can use satellite images to identify areas that require replanting early in the season, rather than conducting a manual inspection that might be time consuming and miss some areas of the field.

Energy. Utilities can use satellite data to monitor vegetation that might be interfering with critical infrastructure, including power lines. By addressing the problems before they escalate, companies might avoid power outages.

Mining. Satellites can support some of the most important functions at mining companies. Better connectivity might improve productivity at remote sites by helping headquarters-based experts communicate with local staff to solve problems. Satellite data can also help mining companies map emissions, monitor shipments along the supply chain, and improve exploration efforts by identifying mineral-rich areas.

Insurance. Better imaging might allow more insurers to cost-effectively assess risks and damages at remote locations, with improved resolution and greater image-sequencing frequency pinpointing problems more clearly and eliminating the need for in-person visits. Pilot tests of radio-frequency-based mapping, which can detect "hidden" shipping activity, could help maritime and commodities-based hedge fund customers track the movement of goods overseas.

Space-for-space applications

Many of the emerging "space for space" applications are now possible for the first time because lower costs make frequent launches and long-term missions more financially viable. Consider a few use cases that could gain traction:

Research and development. Space R&D is not a new application, but businesses outside the aerospace sector have not traditionally undertaken large-scale projects in this area. With lower costs and better technologies, however, this could change as companies build upon the research done to date on the International Space Station. Among other applications, pharmaceutical companies could develop cell cultures for predicting disease models. While these cultures develop in well-known patterns on Earth, the novel environment in space would shift growth patterns and reveal new insights. Similarly, consumer goods companies might want to develop products in space, where high levels of radiation, a near vacuum-like state, and zero gravity might improve design and manufacturing. For instance, a manufacturer of beauty products might discover new information about skin care in the harsh space environment, which accelerates aging.

Manufacturing, construction, and assembly. Super-heavy launch vehicles, such as SpaceX's Starship, may make it easier for companies to create factories or manufacturing plants in orbit. Some semiconductor companies are already exploring the potential for creating chips at such facilities, since the natural vacuum in space could potentially facilitate innovative thin-layering techniques by reducing or eliminating gases during production.

Greater exploration and habitation in space. Innovative forms of deep space exploration, including crewed missions to Mars, might become possible if technologies such as nuclear propulsion continue to advance. Some leaders, including Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin, are already speculating that large numbers of people may even be able to live and work in space. Recent headlines about space tourism may be the first sign that space is no longer the domain of a few carefully selected astronauts.

Activity in most of these space-for-space areas is now very limited, but further technological improvements, such as laser communication between satellites and better edge processing (making sense of data in space, rather than after downloading it) could accelerate progress. Although it's still difficult to determine which use cases, if any, will gain significant traction, industry stakeholders may promote progress by considering measures that will help space companies and others navigate the new landscape. For instance, guidelines about use of orbits might help reduce the chance of collisions in space that could result in debris.

Thanks to lower costs and greater access, space is no longer the sole domain of large aerospace companies or public agencies with vast budgets. It's a place that can deliver many benefits-both on Earth and in orbit-to almost any business sector. Across industries, from pharmaceuticals to semiconductors, some companies are already expanding their space capabilities, exploring new use cases, or piloting innovative applications. In a few years, industry leaders may compare these early movers to businesses that recognized the internet's potential in the early 1990s and moved quickly to establish an online presence. The challenges ahead-both technological and financial-can't be understated, but the potential of space is also immense. Companies that ignore it, either because they are bogged down in current challenges or underestimate the opportunities ahead, might eventually find themselves scrambling to catch up to the early leaders.

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How will the space economy change the world?

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The space economy is no longer the sole domain of governments and aerospace and defense companies.

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Human Behavior Changes as a result of Covid-19

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Human Behavior Changes as a result of Covid-19

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The article informs how COVID-19 has influenced human behaviors. This includes changes in fields such as shopping, learning, work, and entertainment. Life has shifted from offline to online, resulting in more digital technologies (AI) and less in person contact.

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An unprecedented pandemic, an unprecedented shift, and an unprecedented opportunity are three phrases that we have used to describe the impacts of COVID‐19 on human behavior with emerging technologies (Yan, 2020). First, COVID‐19 is an unprecedented global pandemic across the world. It has been compared to the Second World War, the Great Depression, and the 1918 Spanish Flu in terms of unprecedented impacts on human behavior. Second, to control the COVID‐19 pandemic, various types of human behavior (e.g., shopping, learning, working, meeting, and entertaining) shifted from offline to online, resulting in an accelerated diffusion of emerging digital technologies among ordinary people, while the digital divide further increases between citizens with and without access to the technologies. Third, unprecedented changes in both human behavior shifts and emerging technology diffusion generate an unprecedented opportunity for our research community to study technology‐related behavior in the global crisis.

To respond to the unprecedented impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic and to advance the field of human behavior with emerging technologies, the journal has been seeking manuscripts urgently and enthusiastically. In April of 2020, we announced a call for manuscripts for a special issue on COVID‐19 and Human Behavior with Emerging Technologies. The responses from our community have been overwhelmingly strong ever since. The process of submitting, reviewing, editing, and producing has been unexpectedly smooth given the ongoing pandemic. After about 8 months of work with our diligent authors and thoughtful reviewers, now we are pleased to present to our readers this special issue.

This special issue aimed to address a basic question: How do humans behave with emerging technologies during the COVID‐19 pandemic? It has 20 articles, doubling the regular number of 10 articles per issue, which shows clear evidence of overwhelmingly strong responses from our community. These 20 articles strived to answer the basic question of the special issue from five different perspectives, knowledge‐synthesis, theoretically, methodologically, empirically, and historically, and consequently have made unique scientific contributions to the field. Based on five different perspectives, we categorized these 20 articles into five sections, which are briefly outlined below. Together, the entire special issue provides one of the most comprehensive descriptions of human behavior with emerging technologies during the COVID‐19 pandemic across the world. Its most important scientific contribution is that it has established the first scientific baseline knowledge of complex interactions between human beings and emerging technologies during a major crisis.

The first section of the special issue includes three review articles, addressing the basic question of how humans behave with emerging technologies during the COVID‐19 pandemic from a knowledge‐synthesis perspective. Based on 50‐years cognitive science research (e.g., Loftus, 2005), Greenspan and Loftus ( 2020) have synthesized the extensive literature on effects of misinformation on thoughts, actions, and memories in a concise critical review. They pointed out a shocking fact that the COVID‐19 pandemic occurs in parallel with the COVID‐19 infodemic, that is, COVID‐19 is currently penetrating both the human body through physical contacts and the human mind through digital contacts at the same time. Given this deep insight into COVID‐19, we place this article as the first one of the special issue. The second review by Vargo, Zhu, Benwell, and Yan ( 2020) could be considered the most comprehensive rapid review at this moment. They have identified and synthesized 281 journal articles from multiple disciplines published before June 2020 in a broad theoretical framework and thus sketched out a large picture of the current knowledge of how humans are using digital technologies during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Different from the first two reviews, Mbunge, Akinnuwesi, Fashoto, Metfula, and Mashwama ( 2020) explicitly focused on emerging technologies for tackling COVID‐19. Their review is a beautiful technical synthesis of strengths and challenges of 10 emerging technologies, that is, geospatial technology, artificial intelligence, big data, telemedicine, blockchain, 5G technology, smart applications, Internet of Medical Things, robotics, and additive manufacturing in detecting, monitoring, diagnosing, screening, surveillance, mapping, tracking, and creating awareness. A literature review is a critical step for understanding the state of arts and for advancing scientific knowledge. These three reviews provide a broad context for readers to appreciate the special issue.

The second section of the special issue consists of two theoretical articles, addressing the basic question of how humans behave with emerging technologies during the COVID‐19 pandemic from a theoretical perspective. Gaspar, Domingos, Brito, Leiras, Filipe, Raposo, and Arriaga ( 2020) advanced an innovative theoretical model, the Crisis Layers and Thresholds Model. They took the crisis management and crisis communication perspective to consider human responses to COVID‐19, stressed the importance of achieving crisis resilience rather than crisis resolution, and suggested a crisis sensing approach mediated with information and communication technologies (especially social media) to monitor social sensors for management of the COVID‐19 crisis. As a truly international team, Starcevic, Schimmenti, Billieux, and Berle ( 2020) took the perspective of public health and clinic Psychiatry, specified a psychiatric symptom cyberchondria (i.e., worrying excessively about health and seeking excessively for online health information), advanced a five‐factor model theorizing cyberchondria during public health crises, and provided theory‐based suggestions for prevention and intervention of cyberchondria during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Theoretical articles are difficult to develop but much needed to advance a field. These two theoretical articles present two latest theorizing efforts in understanding digital technologies and current pandemic and future crises.

The third section has three methodological articles, presenting three technological tools, (a) eMoodie for collecting mobile data passively (Domoff, Banga, Borgen, Foley, Robinson, Avery, Gentile, 2020), (b) SCD‐MVA for conducting single‐case experiments (Moeyaert, Bursali, Ferron, 2020), and (c) thematic maps for visualizing local COVID‐19 pandemic development (Li, 2020). The history of science indicates that methodological advances often lead to major research breakthroughs. These three methodological articles, by designing, implementing, and validating new technical tools are examples of what the field really needs to improve the current knowledge significantly.

The fourth section includes four empirical articles. We have received about 50 submissions of empirical studies. However, many of them are quite similar, focusing on similar questions about the transition to online teaching and using similar survey methods with simple questionnaires. As a result, many of them have not generated important empirical evidence worth of publication. In contrast, the four empirical studies published in the special issue (Evers, Greenfield, & Evers, 2020; Su, Wu, Li, Xue, Zhu, 2020, Elhai, McKay, Yang, Minaya, Montag, & Asmundson, 2020; Brown & Greenfield, 2020) are thoughtful and innovative, addressing unique and profound research questions and using novel and feasible research methods. Thus, these studies have made significant contributions to the empirical literature on human behavior and emerging technologies during the pandemic. Empirical studies are a foundation of a field of research by describing, explaining, and intervening a wide variety of phenomena scientifically. Overall, our current empirical studies on COVID‐19 and emerging technologies are essentially descriptive rather than explanatory or interventional. As demanded by scientific advancement and public health practice, we really look forward to seeing more explanatory or interventional studies in the near future.

The last section consists of nine case studies. The first case study (Zhu, 2020) reports an extremely popular video game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons that has been played worldwide during the COVID‐19 pandemic. This study has drawn attention from major media worldwide after it was recently published online as an Early View paper. The other eight case studies include two from Africa (Hadjeris, 2020; Tarisayi & Munyaradzi, 2020), two from the United States (Haji‐Georgi, Xu, & Rosca, 2020; Yan, S., 2020), two from Asia (Mahmood, 2020; Toquero & Talidong, 2020), and two from Europe (Westeren, Kjerkol, Linset, 2020; Zawacki‐Richter, 2020). These case studies are priceless, generating authentic historical records about how humans used technologies in battling against COVID‐19 across the world. Many of them might inspire and motivate new productive research programs.

The year of 2020 is ending and the year of 2021 is approaching. At present, the COVID‐19 pandemic is still taking thousands of lives every day across the world. Humans' battle against it might continue until at least 2024 (Kissler, Tedijanto, Goldstein, Grad, & Lipsitch, 2020). Thus, this special issue marks not only the end of our initial efforts in publishing useful research on COVID‐19 and emerging technologies but also the beginning of our continued efforts in disseminating usable knowledge of COVID‐19 and emerging technologies. Furthermore, while 2020 is an unprecedented year in the history of human beings, it is also an unprecedented year in the history of scientific research. In early 2020 when the pandemic broke out, we could hardly see relevant publications (e.g., Li, Wang, Xue, Zhao, & Zhu, 2020; Ting, Carin, Dzau, & Wong, 2020). However, within just a few months, hundreds and hundreds of research publications have rapidly been emerging. Many academic publishers (e.g., Wiley) and many journal editors (e.g., three of us) have been overwhelmed by the large number of submissions to handle. More thoughtful, impactful, and innovative studies (e.g., Beaunoyer, Dupéré, & Guitton, 2020; Budd et al., 2020; Ferretti et al., 2020; Ndiaye, Oyewobi, Abu‐Mahfouz, Hancke, Kurien, & Djouani, 2020; Sawyer, 2020) have been emerging during the process while we were editing this special issue. We have published three articles (Bao, 2020; Jiang, Chen, Yan, Lerman, & Ferrara, 2020; Skulmowski & Rey, 2020) in Issue 3 of 2020 through an expedited process in responding to the urgent needs before this special issue and will continue publishing COVID‐19‐related articles after this special issue. We hope that this special issue will inspire more "good work" (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 2001). When humans become more effective in adapting to and mitigating against the unprecedented pandemic in the coming months, we will have a better scientific knowledge to answer the question of how humans behave with emerging technologies during global crises and in daily lives.

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How humans behave with emerging technologies during the COVID‐19 pandemic?

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An unprecedented pandemic, an unprecedented shift, and an unprecedented opportunity are three phrases that we have used to describe the impacts of COVID‐19 on human behavior with emerging technologies (Yan, 2020). First, COVID‐19 is an unprecedented global pandemic across the world.

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This article explains how advancements in technology, such as 3D printing, has made it easier and more efficient to build rockets and satellites for space exploration. There is also a lot more involvement in this field with new countries and companies which is going to contribute further to our understanding of space.

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How space exploration is fueling the Fourth Industrial Revolution | Brookings

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Technological innovation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is fueling increased space exploration, which in turn sparks further technological advancement, creating technological and diplomatic opportunities and challenges for countries across the globe.

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Ai seems to be pretty creepy. if the US is restricting Ai chips from getting exported what does that tell you? Ai is different and changing but is it a good thing that it's becoming our future?

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The US has expanded the restriction of exports of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips beyond China to some countries in the Middle East.

Nvidia, which is one of the world's most valuable companies at $1.2tn, said in a regulatory filing this week the curbs affected its A100 and H100 chips, which are used to accelerate machine-learning tasks on major artificial intelligence apps, such as ChatGPT.

The firm said the controls would not have an "immediate material impact" on its results. It did not say which countries in the Middle East were affected by these restrictions.

Nvidia's rival in the sector, AMD, had also received an informed letter with similar restrictions, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Nvidia said in a statement: "During the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the USG (US government) informed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East."

The sales of A100 and H100 chips are already banned in China and Russia, and the extension of trade restrictions is an escalation of the Biden administration's efforts to curtail Beijing's ability to take advantage of the AI boom.

In August last year Nvidia said US officials had told them to stop exporting the chips to China. Officials told the firm the new export rule was implemented to address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a "military end use" or "military end user" in China.

In October, the US published further export controls designed to cut off China from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US equipment.

Senior government officials said many of the rules sought to prevent foreign firms from selling advanced chips to China or supplying Chinese firms with tools to make their own advanced chips.

Without the chips from companies such as Nvidia and AMD, Chinese organisations will struggle to cost-effectively carry out the kind of advanced computing used for image and speech recognition, among many other tasks.

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Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, warned in May this year that the US risked "enormous damage" to its tech industry if it continued with the restrictions on trade with China.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Huang said: "If [China] can't buy from ... the United States, they'll just build it themselves. So the US has to be careful. China is a very important market for the technology industry."

Earlier this month Nvidia reported $13.5bn in quarterly revenue, $2bn higher than predicted.

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US restricts exports of Nvidia AI chips to Middle East

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Controls apply to A100 and H100 chips, in escalation of US efforts to curb China's access to products

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I think ai due to the fact that the time that ai has been around has ecponetail growth t when other things have been around.

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Author Post: Will AI Take Over The World? Or Will You Take Charge Of Your World?

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“If you own or manage a midsize company, the pressing issue is how new developments in AI will affect your business.”

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Due to climate change, scientist are already able to predict the events in the future. Such as loss of sea ice, sea wave levels, etc. We have never had this problem before so it’s very scary to see that they are able to predict.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Our Trajectory

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

The potential future effects of global climate change include more frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions, and an increase in the wind intensity and rainfall from tropical cyclones. Credit: left - Mike McMillan/USFS, center - Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, right - NASA.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth's climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

" The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change - modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

Read more

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

What's the difference between climate change and global warming?

"Global warming" refers to the long-term warming of the planet. "Climate change" encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

detailed answer

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

" The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future." ²

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Future Effects in the U.S.

U.S. Regional Effects

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

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Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity, which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.

Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.

Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region's economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.

Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.

Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

References
References
Header image shows cracked mud stretches across sections of the Panamint Valley. Credit: NPS/Kurt Moses; A degree of concern thermometer image credit: Pixabay/geralt

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Long-term effects of global climate change in the United States.

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5 Reasons Space Exploration Is More Important Than Ever

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5 Reasons Space Exploration Is More Important Than Ever

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5 Reasons Space Exploration Is More Important Than Ever - ExtremeTech

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If we stop exploring, we stop being human.

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It may not be said directly that "this is a democracy vs dictatorship" but seen in the current conflicts that are ongoing in the world,it's obvious that there is a correlation between the 2 things. From what we can predict and see so far, these conflicts aren't going away if anything they are escalating. I'm sure you could imagine what chaos would occur if these current conflicts grow anymore serious.

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Photo: Skylines of Kyiv, Ukraine; Tehran, Iran; and Taipei, Taiwan.

We are living in uncertain and unstable times. There are missile attacks in Ukraine, surveillance balloons over America, and weapons grade Uranium being enriched in Iran.

WW3 Predictions: Kiev, Tehran, and Taipei

There are several conflict zones that could be the powder keg to start World War 3. However, the three most likely candidates were WW3 would begin are:

The continued invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin,

An Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities followed by an Iranian response, and

A Chinese attack on Taiwan.

Forty million people, both civilians and military, died in the first World War. World War II caused about 60 million casualties with an additional 20-30 million deaths from war-related disease and famine. World War 3 would likely be deadlier because the world has only become more advanced and destructive.

With the world already in a precarious state, one wrong move could be the spark that ignites the powder keg. This is why it is more important than ever for the international community to work together to prevent the outbreak of World War 3. This is why it's more important than ever to have leaders who understand the relevant issues and can be calm in a violent storm.

What is a World War?

Photo: Soviet soldiers plant their flag atop the Reichstag (German Parliament) following the Battle of Berlin cementing the fall of Nazi Germany - Yevgeny Khaldei (May 2, 1945)

A world war is generally defined as a large-scale conflict involving multiple countries from different parts of the world. World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) involved dozens of countries and millions of soldiers, civilians, and casualties.

Conflicts like the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Global War on Terrorism in Afghanistan (2001-2022) are generally not considered a world war because those conflicts:

Were centered in one region - the Korean Peninsula and Afghanistan - rather than spanning multiple continents.

Failed to involve as many countries as either of the two major global wars did.

Had less devastation than the previous world wars, even though the scale and intensity of the conflicts were very significant.

What Would Happen If World War 3 Started?

In the event of World War 3, what would World War 3 look like? The global landscape would undergo drastic and irreversible changes. The conflict could potentially be sparked by several flashpoints, such as the continued invasion of Ukraine by Russia, an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities followed by an Iranian response, or a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Each of these scenarios involves powerful nations with significant military capabilities, making the potential for a global conflict very real. The repercussions of such a war would be catastrophic.

Widespread destruction and loss of life would be inevitable if World War 3 happened, because modern warfare capabilities far exceed those of World War I and World War II. If World War 3 were to happen, the world's economy would likely collapse under the strain of sustained conflict, leading to a global recession or even a depression. Political structures would be upended, with alliances shifting and new powers potentially emerging. Societal norms would also be disrupted, as the world grapples with the aftermath of widespread destruction and loss.

It's crucial to understand that World War 3 is not a scenario anyone should wish for, as the cost of such a conflict would be immeasurable. The focus should be on diplomatic efforts to resolve conflicts and maintain peace.

Is WW3 Starting Right Now? - The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Photo: Destroyed Russian armored vehicles in the city of Bucha, described as the area facing one of the worst humanitarian situations in Ukrainian territory.

As I wrote in a recent blog, Americans should continue to care about Russia, Ukraine & Putin because they have the potential to impact our economy, our security, and our future. The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces under the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin is a complex geopolitical issue that has far-reaching consequences and can turn into WW3.

Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin miscalculated the resolve of Ukrainian forces and the willingness of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies to aid their friend in Eastern Europe. After Russia lost the Cold War, Putin has made it his mission to reestablish the territorial integrity of the Russian Empire that existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It's More Than Just a Bilateral Conflict

The Russians are conducting global disinformation campaigns including claiming the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipelines . The Russians have pulled out of the START III bilateral arms control treaty which was designed to help prevent World War 3. To further encircle Ukraine, they are attempting to destabilize Moldova to the South, a neighbor to NATO-member Romania. The Government of China is providing non-lethal military assistance and economic support to the Russian invasion, with indications they might supply military equipment. The country of Belarus has been used as a staging point for Russian forces. The Iranian Government is supplying deadly low-cost drones for Russian use in Ukrainian territory, and North Korea is supplying Putin with rockets and artillery shells.

At the U.N. General Assembly in March 2022, a resolution deploring Russia's invasion of Ukraine came up for a vote: 141 countries voted in favor of it, 5 countries voted against it, and 47 countries abstained. About 37 countries have imposed economic sanctions on the Russian economy. Many of the 27 members of the EU have provided military support along with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Norway. But no other country has significant troops on the ground engaging in hostilities, because nobody wants this conflict turning into World War 3.

The Death Toll Because Russia Invaded Ukraine

While it's very difficult to get reliable figures on how many people have died in Ukraine , reports from various governments and international organizations suggest the total number of Russian casualties are between 140,000 and 270,000.

The Norwegian military estimated in late January 2023, that Ukraine has suffered 30,000 civilian deaths and 100,000 military casualties since the invasion began. Additionally:

T he United Nations (UN) estimates that from the start of the invasion until the middle of December 2022 "more than 18 million people in Ukraine needed humanitarian aid, almost 8 million have fled the country and 6.5 million are internally displaced."

In January 2023, UNICEF said, "eleven months of war in Ukraine have disrupted education for more than five million boys and girls."

With seemingly no hope for peace in the near future, the death toll will continue to rise for Ukraine and Russia. As of right now the casualties are just limited to the only two combatants in this conflict, but this would change if the Russia Ukraine War turned into a World War 3.

What Would World War 3 Look Like in Ukraine

Photo: Tactical nuclear weapons can be launched on mobile short-range ballistic missile systems such as the Iskander shown here - Pavel Sarychev

World War 3 could be started by two Russian actions that would likely prompt the United States and Europe to go from just providing military aid to Ukraine to executing their own military actions against Russia: a use of a nuclear weapon or an attack of a NATO country.

Escalate to De-escalate - A Flawed Russian Military Doctrine

Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons throughout his invasion of Ukraine. He has primarily used this threat as an attempt to scare western governments to limit their support to Ukraine for fear of "escalation."

In diplomacy, escalation refers to the intensification of a conflict or dispute. In some cases, countries may avoid taking certain actions to prevent escalation. For example, a country might refrain from imposing harsh economic sanctions on another country to prevent the situation from deteriorating further. Or, a country might avoid conducting a military strike against another country, even if it feels justified, to prevent the outbreak of a full-blown war. Essentially, the goal is to avoid doing anything that could make the situation worse or push the other side into taking more aggressive action.

The Russians have a military doctrine described as "escalate to de-escalate." This strategy posits that by using a tactical nuclear weapon early in a conflict, Russia can intimidate their opponent into backing down, thus de-escalating the situation and preventing a global conflict like World War 3.

A tactical nuclear weapon is a type of nuclear weapon that is designed to be used on the battlefield, as opposed to a strategic nuclear weapon, which is designed for long-range strikes against major targets such as cities or military bases. A tactical nuke tends to be smaller in size and yield and designed to be more portable.

While "escalate to de-escalate" is risky, it shows that Russia has thought through using nuclear force to achieve their strategic goals. Almost every war game the United States has conducted testing this theory has led not to de-escalation but escalation, and in many cases these war games led to World War 3 and nuclear Armageddon.

The United States, European Union, and NATO have all strongly condemned any potential use of nuclear weapons by Russia. They have all stated that any use of nuclear weapons by Russia would be met with a strong response. In particular, the United States and NATO have made it clear that they would be willing to use their own nuclear weapons in response to any nuclear attack by Russia.

An Invocation of Article 5

Photo: NATO Headquarters, the political and administrative center of the Alliance, in Brussels, Belgium - NATO

In April 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained how the Russian Government viewed NATO support to Ukraine: "NATO is essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy." His deputy went even further by saying Russia would consider U.S. and NATO vehicles transporting weapons on Ukrainian territory as "legitimate military targets."

Putin knows that the war in Ukraine is not going how he had planned it. With Russian planes getting shot down over Ukraine and Russian soldiers being killed in the ground war, Putin knows his military forces are in such a weakened state that he is unlikely to win a multi-front war against countries with superior armed forces that are bound together through Article 5.

Article 5 is the provision in NATO's founding treaty that states that an attack on one member country is considered an attack on all members. So, if Russia were to invade or attack a NATO country, the other members would be obligated to come to that country's defense.

Throughout the Cold War between the West and Russia, Article 5 has been a key part of NATO's collective defense strategy. It has deterred potential aggression on NATO territory by making it clear that any attack on one member will be met with a unified response from the entire alliance.

The risk of nuclear war is greater today than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis almost turned the Cold War into a Hot War . The longer the Russia Ukraine War goes on, the greater chance this conflict could metastasize into World War 3. To prevent WW3 the United States and our allies need to do everything to help Ukraine win this conflict as soon as possible to include providing aircraft and the ability to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

When Israel Attacks Iran, Will WW3 Happen?

Photo: A Uranium conversion plant in Isfahan, Iran that converts yellowcake into fuel for the uranium enrichment process.

In January of 2023, the UN explained Iran has enough enriched uranium to make several nuclear weapons. The international community has been keeping a close eye on Iran's uranium enrichment activities for decades because of concerns over the potential for the country to develop a nuclear arsenal that could spark World War 3.

Uranium is a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, and if Iran can enrich enough of it to weapons-grade levels, they could theoretically build a nuclear bomb.

This prospect has alarmed many countries who worry about the destabilizing effects a nuclear-armed Iran could have on regional security. This realization of Iran's enriched uranium levels likely led to another significant event in early 2023.

Also in January 2023, a drone strike hit an advanced weapons-production facility in Isfahan, Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported Israel's intelligence agency Mossad was responsible for the attack that targeted an Iranian Ministry of Defense site with precision strikes. Iran's Defense Ministry said three drones were involved in an attack on a military factory, but contradicted press reporting by claiming no damage was done.

This attack appears to be just one more example in the long-running conflict between Israel and Iran, with Israel using covert actions to target Iran's nuclear program and its conventional weapons capabilities, and Iran arming militias along Israel's borders. One over reaction in this long simmer back-and-forth could spark World War 3.

The Government of Iran Is Not a Victim

Photo: A woman stands on top of a car as thousands of mourners defy a government crackdown and head to the Iranian cemetery where Mahsa Amini is buried - Twitter (Oct. 26, 2022)

The government of Iran has been at war with the U.S. since Iranian revolutionaries stormed our embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days. Also, following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the new regime in Tehran led by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini strongly opposed the existence of Israel, which it saw as a Western-backed, illegitimate state occupying Muslim land.

Subsequent regimes continued and exacerbated this stance. For example, in 2018 the current Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel a "cancerous tumor" that needed to be "removed and eradicated."

The Iranian Government is the world's top state sponsor of terrorism and has killed hundreds of thousands of people. It has killed U.S. troops, as well as its own people for peacefully protesting. The Iranian government even murdered a young woman, Mahsa Amini, for not wearing a headscarf. A government that has a history of killing civilians armed with nuclear weapons is a likely candidate to spark World War 3.

The Iranian Government, not the Iranian people or Persian culture, is responsible for escalating tensions with the rest of the world. If the Iranian government wants to rejoin the international community, it must do a few simple things:

Stop killing American citizens and our allies,

Stop lying about its nuclear program,

Stop using terrorism and coercion to prevent the people of Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Afghanistan from choosing their own future, and

Stop murdering its citizens for peacefully protesting.

What Would WW3 Look Like in the Middle East

"I have come back to office ... for one main reason," Benjamin Netanyahu said after winning his sixth term as Israel's prime minister, "to do everything I can to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons." Netanyahu's predecessor and leader of the current Opposition Yair Lapid has said "If the Iranian regime gets a nuclear weapon, they will use it ... It needs to be made clear to Iran that if it advances its nuclear program, the world will not respond with words, but with military force."

The likeliest scenario for World War 3 to erupt in the Middle East begins with Iran continuing to enrich uranium to produce a nuclear weapon. In an effort to protect their self-interest and right to exist, Israel conducts surgical strikes on Iranian facilities involved in the development of nuclear weapons. When responding to the attack on their nuclear facilities, the Iranian Government tries to "kill two birds with one stone." They go overboard in their response to the attacks because they try to use their response to redirect the current ongoing protests against them into national pride or Iran versus the world. Their overreaction results in significant civilian casualties in Israel, or even an attack against American interests in the region since the "Great Satan" is responsible for Israel's existence.

The current regime is failing to represent the will of the Iranian people. Since the end of 2022 and throughout 2023, Iranian women have led their countrymen in rising up against their theocratic dictatorship. It falls on America and our allies to not cheer from afar as we did during the Iranian Green Revolution, but to proactively support their cause to prevent WW3.

When Is WW3? Potentially, 2027 in Taiwan

Photo: Pacific Ocean seen off the coast of Taiwan - Dumitru Croitor (June 16, 2020)

In February 2023, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns shared intelligence that Chinese president Xi Jinping had instructed his country's army to be "ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion" of Taiwan. He cautioned that it was not clear whether Xi had actually decided whether to use military force for unification.

Taiwan is Important to the U.S. for economic, strategic, and political reasons that cannot be understated. Taiwan's 70 years of self-rule is in more danger today than it has been at any point in its history. The Xi regime in China seems determined to bring a decisive conclusion to its long-term strategic dance with its former territory. One way or the other, the status quo will be shattered.

As with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it will ultimately fall to the US and the world to decide whether an autocratic regime gets to decide if its neighbors should be free. That choice is likely coming sooner rather than later, and with so much at stake - economically, strategically, and most importantly with the lives of 23 million people hanging in the balance - we would do well to be prevant World War 3.

Is WW3 Coming to the South China Sea?

China will invade Taiwan . The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not going to give up its claim on Taiwan without a fight. The island has been part of Chinese territory for centuries, and the Chinese government has made it clear that it will use military force if necessary to reunify Taiwan with the mainland. An invasion of Taiwan impacts Japan, South Korea, Australia and the majority of Asian countries in the Pacific.

To prevent an invasion of Taiwan, the Taiwanese must get to a point where it is so clear they can win a fight that China decides against using violence to get its way. The United States could prevent WW3 from coming to the South Chian Sea but we can't make the same mistakes with Taiwan that we made with Ukraine by not helping them be prepared for a war with Russia before an actual invasion.

The United States and our allies need to continue helping Taiwan's defense forces close the performance gap between them and the People's Liberation Army. It's also time for American leaders to transition from a position of strategic ambiguity to a firm clear declaration that we will support Taiwan in their forceful resistance to an invasion. We are already entangled with Taiwan and to act any other way would be against our interests.

What Countries Will Be in World War 3

Photo: WW3 Map, the likely countries where World War 3 would start - Ukraine, Iran, and Taiwan

Predicting the exact countries that would be involved in World War 3 is a complex task due to the intricate web of global politics and alliances. However, current geopolitical tensions suggest a few key players.

If the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalated into World War 3, then the 29 European countries of the NATO alliance and it's two North American members - Canada and the United States - would most definitely be drawn into the conflict.

An Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities could provoke a response not just from Iran, but also from other countries in the region turning this potential conflict into World War 3. Since the Obama administration, the Sunni Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia have been improving bilateral relations with Israel in an effort to build an alliance against Iran. However, the Biden Administrations poor relationships with traditional Arab partners like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have caused the Saudis and its Gulf allies to pursue a detante with Iran. Depending on U.S. foreign policy at the time, Israel could be on its own with the Arab World coalescing behind Iran.

Should World War 3 erupt in East Asia, because of China's ambitions towards Taiwan then the United States and our allies in Asia - Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Philippines would potentially be involved. North Korea, with its nuclear capabilities and volatile leadership, is another potential participant on the side of China.

Places That Have Almost Started World War III in the Past

Potential conflicts in recent history have almost sparked World War 3.

Little Rocket Man

A potential trigger for World War 3 has always been North Korea. The rogue nation has been developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles for years. It has repeatedly threatened to use them against the United States and its allies. In 2017, tensions between North Korea and the US reached a boiling point. Both sides exchanged hostile rhetoric and threats. North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un continues to be provocative. Kim's continuous testing of his strategic arsenal, keeps the region on the brink of a conflict that could erupt into WW3.

The Great Game

India and Pakistan have had a long-standing rivalry. It has brought the two countries close to World War 3 on multiple occasions. Both countries possess nuclear weapons and have fought three wars against each other since partition in 1947. In recent years, tensions have been high, particularly over the disputed region of Kashmir. In 2019, a terrorist attack in Kashmir killed 40 Indian soldiers, leading to a military confrontation between the two countries. The situation was diffused. However, many worry that a future conflict could quickly escalate into a nuclear war, drawing other countries into WW3.

Will World War 3 Happen?

Whether or not conflicts in Kyiv, Tehran, and Taipei will lead to World War 3 is impossible to predict. However, what is clear is that these three regions are powder kegs that the world should be watching closely. As we've learned in the past, all it takes is one spark to set everything off. Could the efforts of BRICS nations to form a One World Currency be that spark?

Being prepared for all potential conflicts is not warmongering or paranoia. It's smart policy that will save money and lives and prevent WW3. By that same token, foreign policy is not foreign. Solving foreign crises where they start is less expensive for the American taxpayer than waiting until the ripples of those crises arrive on our shores.

Will there be a World War 3? The short answer is it doesn't have to happen. While the potential for conflict always exists, so does the potential for peace. If nations worldwide commit to diplomatic resolutions, prioritize mutual understanding, and uphold international law, World War 3 can be prevented. It is in our collective hands to ensure that the horrors of another global conflict remain confined to the pages of history. The future will be shaped by our actions today, and if we do the right thing, we can avoid such a catastrophic event.

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Three Conflicts that Could Turn into World War 3

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In this blog Will Hurd explains how the current tensions in Ukraine, Taiwan and Iran could lead to World War III.

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Since her father's death from COVID-19 in 2021, Alexy Hernandez's days have become emotional minefields. Any small thing can be a gut punch, reminding her of what's lost.

Perhaps it's a football highlight, since she and her father, Josue, shared a love of the sport. Coffee has become complicated since her dad always got a kick out of pictures she sent of the creative designs left in her latte foam.

Or maybe it will simply be the small pieces of her daily routine - getting into work in the morning, coming home at night - experiences that warranted a quick text to her dad, who always wrote back with love and encouragement.

Alexy Hernandez, left, and her father, Josue, right, enjoyed watching sports such as football, basketball and soccer together. Photo courtesy of Alexy Hernandez.

A survey of American attitudes about the COVID-19 pandemic from August 2022 shows that roughly three out of four people don't think life is fully back to pre-pandemic normal. Source: Gallup.

Project ROUSE showed that the pandemic had profound effects on everyone, including that, during the pandemic's first year, roughly 40 percent of nearly 5,000 study respondents were at risk of moderate or severe depression.

As the pandemic's difficult early days fade, Kranton said that other changes will likely endure, such as a willingness
to connect in new ways, reassess careers, or build lives with more flexibility.

"I think there's probably a new normal, and I think that new normal includes both good things and bad things," Kranton said.

Hernandez's life won't be the same after her father's death, but she is moving forward.

She's learned not to stress about trivial things and thinks often about how she can make her father proud. Nothing, she said, can be taken for granted.

"Losing my dad has completely changed how I view and interact with the world and has given me more clarity on what
I value," said Hernandez, who has worked at Duke for four years.

We asked staff and faculty to share how the pandemic changed their lives, and here's what some colleagues shared.

George Grody, top left, leads a virtual session of his MMS 197 Organizational Leadership & Management class. Image courtesy of George Grody.

'I've learned from students'

"It's a new normal. You've got to deal with what you've got to deal with. Teaching markets and management, I've tried to move on and try to keep things fun. I like to make my courses interactive. So whether that's changing materials or adding new things to a class, I've had to adapt. A lot of new stuff I've learned from students, whether it's using polls, or Kahoot, or other activities. You've got to keep things fresh. The world is changing, you've got to change with it."
George Grody, 64, Lecturing Fellow of Markets & Management, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences

Pamela Bowman opens gifts at her retirement party at Duke Regional Hospital in November 2022. Photo courtesy of Pamela Bowman.

Value of Life

"I appreciate more than ever before, not only the value of life, but a strong appreciation for others in the respiratory field and healthcare. I have been a respiratory therapist 33 years, and I've worked at Duke 35 years. Many have come and some have gone from this world. It's devastating when you've worked so hard on patients, and they don't make it out. Nothing can replace the value of life and what it means. Life is so important, and each and every day that you work with your patients is important. This all taught me a lot about what it means to really care for your patients, and it taught me a great deal of humility in caring for those who needed me."
Pamela Bowman, 63, recently retired Respiratory Care Practitioner, Duke Regional Hospital

For Sadie Horton, the pandemic has been a time to work on herself. Photo courtesy of Sadie Horton.

Out of the Quiet

"Though it's crazy to say, my life started to flourish during the pandemic in more ways than one. I went back to school at the beginning of the pandemic at Durham Technical Community College to study business. I got in the best shape of my life by focusing on clean eating, and I lost 35 pounds. I started earning more money by taking a job at Duke. The pandemic was a time for me to quiet down the noise around me. Personally, I was able to shut out the world, decide what I really wanted out of life, and for myself, and start making those things happen. Ever since things started getting back to how they were pre-pandemic, those progressions I've made slowly started to derail. I gained back the 35 pounds I lost once the world started to open up again, and it's just been harder to do everything I was doing to better myself every day. I went into a bit of a depression, but now I'm finally coming out of it. I'm back down 20 pounds. I'm learning how to cope with things and get back to being able to do those things that progressed for me and made me happy, even though I'm not able to get the same quietness I once had."
Sadie Horton, 27, Staff Assistant, Academic Support, Fuqua School of Business

Clara Bailey spends a quiet moment with her mother, Johnnie Mae Snipes, before the pandemic began. Photo courtesy of Clara Bailey.

Cherish Loved Ones

"My mom, Johnnie Mae Snipes, was put on hospice on Jan. 11, 2021, and she passed away on January 20, 2021, at age 83. Me and my sisters were holding her hand, and, needless to say, we lost the strongest woman we ever knew. Our queen was gone. My mother had six daughters, 17 grandchildren, 44 great grandchildren and seven great, great grandchildren. My mother passed away from dementia and COVID. The past few years have taught me to never take anything for granted and to cherish your loved ones. It also has showed me how the world can change in one day. But one thing I know for sure that will never change is God is still in charge."
Clara Bailey, 58, Staff Assistant, Department of Medicine, Oncology

Sandy Oullette plays Mrs. Claus at the 2020 Jordan Lake Christmas Tree Farm. Photo courtesy of Sandy Oullette.

'I don't go anywhere without my mask'

"When Dr. Anthony Fauci came out and said we need to wear masks in public, I did it. I'm claustrophobic, so when I first started wearing the cloth masks, I would have panic and anxiety attacks, particularly at the grocery store. Over time, I got used to it, and I started feeling safer by wearing my mask. Now, I don't think I will ever go into another crowded event without a mask. As a woman, we have our purses. We don't go anywhere without our purses. Now, I don't go anywhere without my mask. Since wearing my mask, I haven't caught a cold, let alone anything else. It's a piece of cloth, no big deal."
Sandy Ouellette, 62, Access Specialist, Consultation & Referral Center

Since moving to Virginia in October 2020, Christopher Morgenstern, left, and his wife, Tara, have enjoyed exploring their new home and visiting places in the Virginia foothills. Photo courtesy of Christopher Morgenstern.

Rethinking What's Most Important

"During the pandemic, my wife got a new job in Virginia, and because I've been working remote since March 2020, it made it easy to move with her because, in the past, somebody would have had to quit their job, find a new job, and do all kinds of stuff. Personally, the pandemic has made me rethink what's most important in life, such as making sure to set aside time for family and friends. Now, I get to spend more time with my wife. We can do house projects, take our dogs out and explore. Now that our parents are getting older, we try to take advantage of any time we can spend with them. The pandemic made spending time with people who are important to you a little extra important because they're what helped
me get through."
Christopher Morgenstern, 39, Administrative Manager, Cardiology

Tricia Smar, left, and her husband, Brent Durden, celebrated the first birthday of their daughter, Eliana, in fall 2022. Photo courtesy of Tricia Smar.

'180-degrees different'

"My wedding, honeymoon, and bachelorette party were all canceled due to COVID, so my husband, Brent Durden, and I got married in our backyard with just our parents. We were going to wait several years to start a family so we could travel but decided to seize the day during quarantine after buying a house. Now, we have a beautiful 18-month-old daughter, Eliana. As tragic as the losses we experienced as a country and community have been through this pandemic, my entire world is 180-degrees different than it was before COVID, and it makes me so grateful to have the family that I do."
Tricia Smar, 36, Education and Training Coordinator, Duke Trauma Center

Doug Buehrle has made up for lost time, traveling to places such as Las Vegas, Colorado and Canada. Photo courtesy of Doug Buehrle.

'I'm fulfilling my bucket list'

"I have terminal prostate cancer. I live one day at a time. They gave me 18 months to live about six years ago. During the pandemic, I retired to fulfill my bucket list only to find disappointment. I made all sorts of plans, but everything was shut down so my plans were shot. I returned to work. I have a love for nursing and have no regrets coming back to patient care. I missed interacting with people. I missed my coworkers, I missed the patients. Now I travel, and I'm fulfilling my bucket list, but I always look forward to coming back to Duke for both my own care and to care for our patients."
Doug Buehrle, 68, Clinical Nurse, Apheresis, Duke University Hospital

Among the fun memories Kristin Byrne made with her family during the pandemic were strawberry picking adventures at DJ's Berry Patch in Apex with sons Joshua, left, and Derek, right. Photo courtesy of Kristin Byrne.

Savor Small Moments

"I learned to make the best out of a horrific situation. My kids, Derek and Joshua, were 5 and nearly 3 when COVID hit. In the clinical research field, we had to scramble to see which trials could keep going and which ones would have to go on pause. We had to be very flexible to work around each other's schedules and everyone's kid's schedules. But I got to spend a lot more time with my kids than I ever would have if COVID didn't hit, so I'm grateful I was able to do it. We got to spend time going to the park and flying kites since the playgrounds were closed. We went hiking and exploring since the museums were closed. Those were memories I am thankful to have made, and I'm hoping they don't fade."
Kristin Byrne, 41, Clinical Research Coordinator, Hematology

After moving across the country to care for patients, Lauren Berky celebrates receiving her first COVID-19 vaccine at Duke in 2021. Photo courtesy of Lauren Berky.

'Packed up my car with as much as I could fit into it'

"I graduated from nursing school at George Fox University in Oregon about a month after lockdown happened. I have a grandmother in High Point, so I started applying to hospitals in North Carolina, and Duke turned out to be the best option. In October of 2020, I packed up my car with as much as I could fit into it, and I drove across the country with my dad. I left my family, friends, my church back in Portland, and I've had to build an entirely new life here. My first nursing job was working for the medical-surgical float pool at Duke University Hospital, which basically staffed the COVID-19 floors for a while. I was thrown into the thick of it, and I really had to stay on my toes all the time. It was really hard, and it was really a dark period in my life, until I started to get my feet settled. I just started to put myself out there out of my comfort zone, and I started inviting people to do things with me. I found Bright City Church too. Over time, I started to find those little sparks of hope, when you send a patient home instead of the ICU. I've learned a lot from my nursing career, and I've learned a lot about myself and how to take care of myself."
Lauren Berky, 25, Clinical Nurse, Internal Staffing Resource Pool

William Edward Hammond has studied the intersection of health, data and technology since the 1960s. Photo courtesy of William Edward Hammond.

'More Openness to Change'

"I think COVID has opened the clinical community to change more than ever before. Sharing data has replaced hoarding data. Technology has come so far, and we had a hard time getting people to change the way they think about data. I think COVID opened their minds that we need other ways of dealing with data, particularly that the patient needs to be the centerpiece of everything that we're doing. Some people have said to me, that five years ago we'd have been laughed at for some of the things we're trying to do. But now, everybody is at least willing to have the conversation."
William Edward Hammond, 88, Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Family Medicine and Community Health

Anne Whisnant, left, and husband David enjoy a walk on Chapel Hill's Morgan Creek Trail in 2021. Photo courtesy of Anne Whisnant.

'Never take tomorrow for granted'

"I am much more committed to 'living in the moment,' appreciating what I have, and looking inward. At home, I find joy with my husband. I walk much more. I cook at home almost all the time. And, maybe most important, I appreciate the beautiful natural environment around our home on Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill, where husband, David, and I began walking nearly every afternoon in January 2021. I've learned to never take tomorrow for granted. To appreciate friendships and family and the place where we are, now. To be OK with less 'running around.' To not take progress for granted, and to realize that things can get worse."
Anne Mitchell Whisnant, 55, Director, Graduate Liberal Studies, and Associate Professor of the Practice, Social Science Research Institute

After giving birth to daughter, Lilly, in 2021, Marissa Ivester, right, enjoys the joys of parenthood with her husband, Andrew. Photo courtesy of Melissa Ivester.

Bittersweet Milestones

"COVID was honestly a bittersweet time. My father-in-law, Mark, the president of North Georgia Technical College, passed away from COVID on September 13, 2020. Then in January 2021, my husband, Andrew, and I found out we were pregnant with our first child, Lilly, after a very long time. We thought we couldn't have kids, so that was quite the surprise. When she was born on October 21, 2021, the joy of having her was indescribable. She just turned a year old, and I know she'll never know her grandfather, and he'll never know her. We want her to be happy and healthy and treat others the best way possible, and we'll continue to tell her about her Papa when we can. We can't wish Mark back because he's not coming back. We're living in the reality knowing that we can't change it; it's something Ecclesiastes calls our lot in life. COVID-19 brought out the worst for so many families, including ours, but it also brought so much good."
Marissa Ivester, 34, Fellowship Program Coordinator, Office of Pediatrics

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Three Years Later: How the Pandemic Changed Us | Duke Today

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Since her father's death from COVID-19 in 2021, Alexy Hernandez's days have become emotional minefields. Any small thing can be a gut punch, reminding her of what's lost. Perhaps it's a football highlight, since she and her father, Josue, shared a love of the sport.

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I think ai because they  already have consciousness but only some people know about them.We use google and the internet every day those are ais.

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I think ai because they  already have consciousness but only some people know about them.We use google and the internet every day those are ais.

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This article talks about how Ai will change the world. It states how Ai could revolutionize health and education and be worth $16 million. It also says how Ai experts placed bets that no humans will be alive by 2030

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By 2030, Artificial Intelligence could be looking after our elderly, making films and teaching lessons - or it could have wiped out the human race.

These are the wildly different predictions from eight AI experts from the US and UK, who predict how the technology may change our lives within the next decade.

It comes amid growing calls for regulators to put the lid on the development of AI, amid fears that it could lead to waves of job losses and render us obsolete.

Below are eight radical changes that will have happened by 2030:

Generate entire films in a day

AI technology could become so good that it will start to generate entire films within a day, predicts New York-based writer of Apple TV Sci-fi series Silo Mr Howey.

Speaking to DailyMail.com, he said it was only a matter of time before AI tools were capable of making films.

'I've had access to alpha versions of art generators for a few years now, and I've watched how quickly they go from very rough approximations to photo-realism so good that you can't distinguish the AI art from photography,' he said.

'Generated films are now in the same early stages that I saw still art go through two or so years ago. It's only a matter of time and processing power before films are created in real-time.

'The films will be terrible at first, but they'll only get better. I think people will watch them and be fascinated by them even when they aren't very good, the same way we find our nonsensical dreams captivating.'

He added: 'These things only get better, and their improvements are permanent. They don't have to re-learn and start over the way we do. They just grow and grow.'

His comments echo predictions from the director of Avengers: Endgame Joe Russo, who predicted last month that AI would be able to make movies in just two years' time.

Mr Russo told the entertainment news website Collider: 'I'm on the board of a few AI companies.

'Potentially, what you could do with [AI] is obviously use it to engineer storytelling and change storytelling.'

Teach lessons

AI also has the potential to transform the education sector and tailor lesson plans to classes.

Dr Ajaz Ali, the head of business and computing at Ravensbourne University in London, made the prediction.

He said children could soon have their own personalized AI tutor who will deliver lessons tailored to the areas they are struggling with.

This could even be done through augmented-reality glasses or robots, he suggested.

Dr Ali said: 'We could also see AI-powered virtual tutors, who will provide personalized feedback and support to students.

'In the next ten years, we may see AI-enabled virtual classrooms that can create a more immersive and interactive learning experience.'

It is expected that AI could be used to complement current conventional teaching methods, rather than fully replacing teachers.

Currently, available AI platforms like ChatGPT can already generate lesson plans for teachers tailored to a specific class.

Wipe out the human race?

Amid suggestions that AI will improve our lives immeasurably, there are also experts warning that it could end the human race by 2030.

Among the doomsayers is American computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky who has bet $100 that the human race will be wiped out entirely by January 1, 2030.

A renowned researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, he is one of the most vocal experts to warn over AI.

Writing in Time earlier this year, he said: 'If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.

'The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss.

'Valid metaphors include "a 10-year-old trying to play chess against Stockfish 15", "the 11th century trying to fight the 21st century", and "Australopithecus trying to fight Homo sapiens".'

He says that AI could obliterate humanity if its intelligence surpasses humans, and that it then develops different values and goals to humans.

Other leading experts saying that AI could 'destroy civilization' include billionaire Elon Musk and British scientist Stephen Hawking - although they stop short of suggesting all humans will be wiped out by 2030.

Musk has been sounding the alarm over AI for years, warning just last month that it could destroy civilization - although suggesting it will not totally wipe out humans because we are an 'interesting' part of the universe. He claimed that it would be more intelligent than humans by 2030.

Dr Hawking previously warned that AI could 'take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate' which humans, which are limited by biological evolution, would struggle to keep up with.

'We may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails.'

Boost world economy's value by nearly a fifth

Experts also suggest that AI could boost the value of the world economy by $15.7trillion by 2030, or more than the value of India and China's economies combined and up by a fifth compared to current levels.

The prediction was made by analysts working at 'Big Four' accountancy firm PwC, which is based in London.

They say this will be driven by the development of more enhanced and personalized products, which will trigger a consumer-driven boom.

PwC said in a study published in January: 'Our research also shows that 45% of total economic gains by 2030 will come from product enhancements, stimulating consumer demand.

'This is because AI will drive greater product variety, with increased personalization, attractiveness and affordability over time.'

Solve the energy crisis

There are also suggestions that AI could help to solve the world's energy crisis by 2030.

The most recent energy crisis was sparked by a combination of the Ukraine war, leading to blocks on fossil fuel imports from Russia, and the sudden surge in demand during the economic rebound after the Covid pandemic.

There is also a separate, ongoing energy crisis that seeks to gradually turn over energy production to renewable resources in order to limit global warming.

Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT and is based in San Francisco, California, has said that by 2030 AI will have solved the crisis.

In a series of Tweets in 2021, he said: 'The future can be so good that it's hard for any of us to imagine.

'My basic take on this is that we will have "unlimited" intelligence and energy, and all that will unlock. I think we will have these before this decade is out.

He suggested that AI would do this by helping to develop nuclear fusion, a way of unlocking energy from atoms for use that does not produce long-lived nuclear waste. A meltdown at these facilities is also practically impossible.

Late last year scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California made a breakthrough in developing this system by triggering a nuclear fusion reaction that led to a net energy gain.

Achieve human-like intelligence

Predictions also abound that AI could reach human-like intelligence by 2030.

Among those making the warning is former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, a renowned futurist who claims to have an 86 percent success rate on predictions.

While speaking at a Conference in Austin, Texas, in 2017, he said: '[The date] 2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence.'

He had previously said that in 2014 computers would 'break even' with humans, and be able to flirt, tell jokes and tell stories.

There are already mounting concerns that AI will lead to thousands of redundancies as companies start to use the technology to fill posts once staffed by people.

Professions, particularly at risk, include those working as paralegals, personal assistants and translators.

Predict medical problems

In healthcare, AI could predict problems before they happen by 2030, says AI expert Simon Bain, founder and CEO of software company OmniIndex, based in San Jose, California.

Mr Bain believes that the future of AI will be services built to answer specific needs.

But he adds that these will be very different from the current AIs, such as ChatGPT.

Bain said: 'By 2030, AI could be predicting future healthcare problems via specialists using specialist tools.

'That's because the future of AI will be services that directly answer our specific needs - quickly and easily. As in, we tell it what we want, and it gives it to us.'

He added: 'This future should NOT be based on the current mainstream generative AI (as in ChatGPT or Google's Bard), as this is simply using tech to regurgitate content and repurpose it.

'Why rip apart the Mona Lisa to create an unlimited number of similar yet "unique" portraits?

'While it might be fascinating and impressive and a fun profile picture, it is a waste. And it's dangerous because it's simply regurgitating the mistakes, prejudices, and limitations of our own historic content.'

Look after the elderly

Within the next decade, artificial intelligence could have assumed much of the role of looking after the elderly.

Heather Delaney, the founder of London-based PR firm targeting tech ventures Gallium Ventures, made the prediction while pointing to the emergence of care bots such as the ElliQ.

The robot - which looks like a desktop lamp - can help battle loneliness in older age and keep people up to date on their calendars.

It works by learning someone's interests and desires and daily routine to establish when they are available to strike up a question or to proactively suggest activities that they might enjoy. It also reminds older people of their day-to-day schedule and when to take any medications, helping to ensure that they don't miss any.

Ms Delaney told DailyMail.com: 'I expect a rise in technology design to assist, support and generally improve the quality of life of the elderly.

'Elderly homes will rely more on technology to monitor and assess the health and wellbeing of their community while those living in their own private homes will depend more on technology to maintain their home and keep them on track with health.'

Over time, the technology is expected to develop beyond the $250 robot ElliQ currently available.

Older people will also become more likely to accept it into their homes because they have grown up with technology, unlike swathes of the current generation that are more likely to steer clear of devices.

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How AI will have changed the world by 2030, according to experts

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By 2030, AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy, bigger than the output of China and India - or it could have wiped out the human race altogether, experts told DailyMail.com.

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discusses how COVID caused a possibility of a new normal in the future.

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people as greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation take hold in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Still, a portion believe life will be better in a 'tele-everything' world where workplaces, health care and social activity improve

When pandemics sweep through societies, they upend critical structures, such as health systems and medical treatments, economic life, socioeconomic class structures and race relations, fundamental institutional arrangements, communities and everyday family life. A new canvassing of experts in technology, communications and social change by Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center finds that many expect similar impacts to emerge from the COVID-19 outbreak.

Asked to consider what life will be like in 2025 in the wake of the outbreak of the global pandemic and other crises in 2020, some 915 innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded. Their broad and nearly universal view is that people's relationship with technology will deepen as larger segments of the population come to rely more on digital connections for work, education, health care, daily commercial transactions and essential social interactions. A number describe this as a "tele-everything" world.

Notable shares of these respondents foresee significant change that will:

worsen economic inequality as those who are highly connected and the tech-savvy pull further ahead of those who have less access to digital tools and less training or aptitude for exploiting them and as technological change eliminates some jobs;

enhance the power of big technology firms as they exploit their market advantages and mechanisms such as artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that seem likely to further erode the privacy and autonomy of their users;

multiply the spread of misinformation as authoritarians and polarized populations wage warring information campaigns with their foes. Many respondents said their deepest worry is over the seemingly unstoppable manipulation of public perception, emotion and action via online disinformation - lies and hate speech deliberately weaponized in order to propagate destructive biases and fears. They worry about significant damage to social stability and cohesion and the reduced likelihood of rational deliberation and evidence-based policymaking.

At the same time, a portion of these experts express hope that changes spawned by the pandemic will make things better for significant portions of the population because of changes that:

inaugurate new reforms aimed at racial justice and social equity as critiques of current economic arrangements - and capitalism itself - gain support and policymaker attention;

enhance the quality of life for many families and workers as more flexible-workplace arrangements become permanent and communities adjust to them;

produce technology enhancements in virtual and augmented reality and AI that allow people to live smarter, safer and more productive lives, enabled in many cases by "smart systems" in such key areas as health care, education and community living.

These six themes were commonly expressed by these experts in their responses to a question that asked them to consider the changes that were set in motion in 2020 by the COVID-19 outbreak and describe what the "new normal" might look like in 2025.

Some 47% of these respondents said life will be mostly worse for most people in 2025 than it was before the pandemic, while 39% said life will be mostly better for most people in 2025 than it was pre-pandemic. Another 14% said most people's lives in 2025 will not be much different from the way things would have turned out if there had been no pandemic.

Among the 86% who said the pandemic will bring about some kind of change, most said they expect that the evolution of digital life will continue to feature both positives and negatives. These expert views link in interesting ways with public attitudes. A Pew Research survey in August 2020 found that 51% of U.S. adults said they expected their lives to remain changed in major ways even after the pandemic is over.

This is a nonscientific canvassing, based on a nonrandom sample. The results represent only the opinions of the individuals who responded to the queries and are not projectable to any other population.

The bulk of this report covers these experts' written answers explaining their responses. They sounded many broad themes about the ways in which individuals and groups are adjusting in the face of the global crisis, describing the most likely opportunities and challenges emerging as humans accelerate their uses and applications of digital technologies in response. It is important to note that the responses were gathered in the summer of 2020, before the completion of the presidential election in the United States and before COVID-19 vaccines had been approved.

As these experts pondered what was happening in mid-2020 and the likely changes ahead, they used words like "inflection point," "punctuated equilibrium," "unthinkable scale," "exponential process," "massive disruption" and "unprecedented challenge." They wrote about changes that could reconfigure fundamental realities such as people's physical "presence" with others and people's conceptions of trust and truth.

They wondered, too, if humans can cope effectively with such far-reaching changes, given that they are required to function with "paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology," in the words of biologist E.O. Wilson.

Among the scores of changes they see is the emergence of: an "Internet of Medical Things" with sensors and devices that allow for new kinds of patient health monitoring; smart millimeter wave machines to diagnose people with disease symptoms; advances in synthetic biology and computational virology that improve drug testing and targeted disease therapies; diagnostic screenings that cover a person's diet, genes and microbiome; handheld detection devices that citizen swarms use to address environmental problems; and a new class of tele-care workers.

Additionally, these experts forecast the creation of 3-D social media systems that allow for richer human interaction (sometimes via hologram avatars); mediated digital agents (interdigital agents) gradually taking over significantly more repetitive or time-consuming tasks; a "flying Internet of Things" as drones become more prolific in surveillance, exploration and delivery tasks; ubiquitous augmented reality; an expanded gig economy built around work-from-home free agents; urban farming that reaches industrial scale; advances in trusted cryptocurrency that enable greater numbers of peer-to-peer collaborations; locally based, on-demand manufacturing; "local in spirit and local in practice" supply chains; a robust marketplace of education choices that allow students to create personalized schooling menus; "tele-justice" advances that allow courts to handle large numbers of cases remotely; "truth valuation" protocols that diminish the appeal of disinformation; and small, safer nuclear reactors for energy production.

At the more everyday level, these experts also think there will be better speech recognition, facial recognition (including sentiment discernment from facial expressions), real-time language translation, captioning and autocorrect capacity, sensory suits, robust video search, body motion sensors, 3D glasses, multimedia databases and broader network bandwidth that will enable full 3D virtual experiences and developments in AI allowing it to serve more of people's needs.

These themes and more are outlined in the accompanying tables.

Emerging change: As the global pandemic unfolds, experts predict people will develop greater reliance on swiftly evolving digital tools for good and for ill by 2025

The pandemic proves that world-upending phenomena can emerge from anywhere. The turn to living and working more intensively within digital communications networks shows the value of these complex systems. The pandemic brings more focus on both the upsides and the downsides of digital life.

Tele-everything is embraced: The broad adoption of "remote" processes - telework, telemedicine, virtual schooling, e-commerce and more - is growing. In 2025, there will be more people working from home, more virtual social and entertainment interactions and fewer forays in public than has been in the case in recent years.

Humans' yearning for convenience and safety fuels reliance on digital tools: The pandemic has rearranged incentives so that consumers will be more willing to seek out smart gadgets, apps and systems. This will speed up adoption of new education and learning platforms, rearrange work patterns and workplaces, change family life and upend living arrangements and community structures.

The best and worst of human nature are amplified: The crisis is enhancing digital interconnectedness that engenders empathy, better awareness of the ills facing humanity and positive public action. On the flip side, some individuals, cities and nation-states will become more insular and competitive as survival mode kicks in. Xenophobia, bigotry and closed communities will also increase.

Worries: As the global pandemic unfolds, experts fear growing social and racial inequality, worsening security and privacy and the further spread of misinformation

The advantaged enjoy more advantages; the disadvantaged fall further behind. Concerns particularly focus on the growing power of technology firms. Many suggested solutions have a double-edged quality because they threaten civil liberties. Automation could take many humans out of the work equation. And the spread of lies via social media and other digital platforms is likely to further damage all social, political and economic systems.

Inequality and injustice are magnified: The pandemic and quick pivot to the use of digitally driven systems will widen racial and other divides and expand the ranks of the unemployed, uninsured and disenfranchised. Power imbalances between the advantaged and disadvantaged are being magnified by digital systems overseen by behemoth firms as they exploit big data and algorithmic decision-making that are often biased. More people will be pushed into a precarious existence that lacks predictability, economic security and wellness.

As risk grows, security must also; privacy falls and authoritarianism rises: The health crisis spawned by the pandemic and broader dependence people have on the internet heighten threats of criminal activity, hacks and other attacks. Optimized security solutions may further reduce individuals' privacy and civil liberties. They are likely to expand mass surveillance, as authoritarian states will use this as an opportunity to silence dissent and abuse citizens' civil rights.

Threats to work will intensify from automation, artificial intelligence, robotics and globalization: In order to survive, businesses are reconfiguring systems and processes to automate as many aspects as possible. While artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics will enhance some lives, they will damage others, as more work is taken over by machines. Employers may outsource labor to the lowest bidder globally. Employees may be asked to work for far less; they may have to shift to be gig and contract workers, supplying their own equipment, and they may be surveilled at home by employers.

Misinformation will be rampant: Digital propaganda is unstoppable, and the rapidly expanding weaponization of cloud-based technologies divides the public, deteriorates social cohesion and threatens rational deliberation and evidence-based policymaking.

People's mental health will be challenged: Digital life was already high-stress for some people prior to the required social isolation brought on by the pandemic. The shift to tele-everything will be extensive and that will diminish in-person contact and constrict tech users' real-world support systems and their social connections.

Hopes: As the global pandemic unfolds, experts urge that calls for social justice be heeded and that technology design focus on human well-being

People have the chance now to reconfigure major systems such as the structure of capitalism, education, health care and workplaces. Advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence, smart cities, data analytics and virtual reality could make all systems safer, more humane and more helpfully productive. Better communication of more-accurate information can dramatically improve emergency responses in crises and alleviate suffering.

Social justice will get priority: The reawakening of public movements for social justice and economic equality may create more-responsive government and sociopolitical systems that are more attuned to diversity, equity and inclusion. This includes a focus on closing digital divides.

People's well-being will prevail over profit: Businesses may start to value serving the greater good above the typical goals of market capitalism. This could produce policies to fund broader safety nets such as universal health care, universal basic income and broadband as a basic utility. A reckoning for tech companies and their leaders might also occur.

The quality of life will improve: The transition to home-based work will reduce urban air pollution, overcrowding and transportation gridlock. It will enhance the overall quality of life, create a better environment for family life, allow more accommodations for those with disabilities and inspire other enhancements.

AI, VR, AR, ML will yield good: Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing will make virtual spaces feel much more real, in-person, authentic and effective.

Smarter systems will be created: Municipal, rural, state and independent services, especially in the health care sector, will be modernized to better handle future crises, quickly identifying and responding to emerging threats and sharing information with all citizens in more timely and helpful ways.

Source: Nonscientific canvassing of select experts conducted June 30-July 27, 2020. N=915.
"Experts Say the 'New Normal' in 2025 Will Be Far More Tech-Driven, Presenting More Big Challenges"

Following is a selection of some of the most comprehensive overarching responses shared by a number of the 915 thought leaders participating in this canvassing.

Marcel Fafchamps, professor of economics and senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, commented, "Here are some of the changes I anticipate. Please note that many of them were already in the background and could have occurred anyway, but I suspect less fast and less strongly.

Economic and social inequality: The economic contrast between the 'confined,' the 'essentials' and the 'unemployed' will perdure. The confined are those who can work from home and be productive. Because employers save money on them, they will continue to prosper. Anyone who cannot work from home will as a result earn comparatively less than without the introduction of work-from-home as a normal way of life. Many workers will be displaced or made redundant by this change, e.g., all those who support work-life (restaurants, transport including car making, maintenance of office buildings, etc.). A gig economy will arise that caters to the same needs for those working from home but, because they will work in a very competitive industry (they will compete with each other for each home-worker-customer) and they will be much harder to organize in unions, strikes, etc., they will earn less. And they will become invisible, like domestic workers or gardeners today.

The generalization of work-from-home will change where people live - possibly away from city centers, but this need not be the case if people value their social life, as is likely, especially for the young - possibly into small towns instead of big metropolis. This will in turn lead to more social segmentation/parochialism/segregation in terms of residential choice and social circle. Business districts force different people together by need rather than choice. If people can choose who they live with, they will sort on similar attributes, including wealth and all its correlates.

By reducing the cost of congestion inherent to having a workforce in large office buildings, these changes will enable even larger firms, leading to an even stronger concentration of corporate power into a small number of key actors. The last wave saw the concentration of financial and service industry into a small number of world banks into a small number of geographical centers (e.g., New York, London, Shanghai, Singapore, etc.). We have already seen this with Amazon, Alibaba, Google and the like for their respective industries. We will now see this spread to other work-from-home industries: more agglomeration, but this time happening in the digital world, and not requiring geographical concentration itself.

Civil liberties were severely curtailed during COVID-19. New tools and technologies were introduced to control people better, including phone apps that identify likely social interactions between people. These tools will be used by totalitarian regimes to control their population better, on the Chinese model. Furthermore, people working from home will be much harder to organize and much easier to target individually by repression. I therefore anticipate population control to become more efficient and effective, cutting down the productivity gap between autocratic regimes and democracies. As a result, democracy will be on the defensive, its spread will be reversed in many parts of the world, and democracies themselves will infringe more on civil liberties. We are entering a post-democratic era.

Privacy was always a luxury in the past - only the rich enjoyed it. Then it spread to a large fraction of the population in the West. Now it is receding again, in a way that mirrors the rise in inequality and the inevitable fall in civil liberties. The poor never have privacy. COVID-19 has justified the loss of the last bit of privacy we had left, namely, our health data and who we meet in the park.

In a not-too-distant future the Soviet Union will be seen as ahead of its time: Its main weakness was the inability to deal with the complexity of matching production and consumer demand. Now this can be achieved via Amazon or Alibaba, and the complex dispatch or matching algorithm that they and Google and Facebook have created. With concentration of corporate power, increase in inequality and weakening of civil liberties, it will be easy to recreate a post-democratic world that fulfills the Soviet promise, without necessarily requiring public ownership in the means of production: It will no longer matter who is formally the owner of capital, as China today demonstrates."

Amy Webb, quantitative futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute, said: "We've entered a new Bioinformation Age, a new period in human history characterized by the shift from privacy and personal choice to new social, government and economic structures that require our data to operate. You can expect to see a Flying Internet of Things: smart drones equipped with object- and face-recognition, audio analytics, motion detection and sense-and-avoid systems that communicate with each other in the air and back down to a command center on the ground. The Flying Internet of Things will be used for surveillance and deliveries of small payloads, such as medicines, medical supplies and other necessities. Drones will transport specimens between buildings on hospital campuses, and they will move prescriptions between drugstores and homes.

"The availability of diagnostic testing will be far more ubiquitous. Drugstores, schools and large company offices will have compact COVID-19 testing machines and technicians. A specimen will be taken, put onto a cartridge and results will be delivered within minutes. Meanwhile, at airports, offices and event spaces, smart millimeter wave machines will be used to algorithmically diagnose people with COVID-19 symptoms. The machines will include a thermal imager and a powerful suite of AI algorithms that in seconds will scan someone's heart rate, respiration rate, blood oxygen level and body temperature. Our new normal will include decentralized, persistent biometric surveillance. Within just a few years, biometric-recognition technology will transition from suspect, to reviled, to acceptable, to essential. Eventually, a massive biometric surveillance apparatus will become the invisible infrastructure enabling our economies to function again. ...

"The fate of regulation, as national governments try to reconcile the desire for public safety with a reality in which algorithms are encoded with bias, could take many years to sort out, and the result is likely a patchwork of different protocols and permissions around the world. In the Bioinformation Age, transparency, accountability and data governance are paramount, but few organizations are ready. Everyone alive today is under persistent surveillance from a host of technologies, and what most people don't realize is that tech companies don't need cameras to see you. From Wi-Fi signals to single strands of hair, it is possible to recognize you without submitting to face scans.

"Catastrophe can be a catalyst for positive change. In a race to find a vaccine, important areas of science - synthetic biology, computational virology - are accelerating. This will result in more-efficient drug testing, new approaches to targeted therapies and, someday, a future in which we engineer life itself.

"Many organizations in the public and private sectors had not invested in digital transformation. The virus provided an immediate impetus to change. On the other side of this, organizations should have better workflows, data management, information and cybersecurity, and new efficiencies. The virus could finally be an accelerant to healthcare equity in the U.S. The virus has highlighted the lack of broadband infrastructure in the U.S. and a growing digital divide. One of the coronavirus aftershocks will be a realization that American kids need internet access to perform well in school, and many families don't have it. We could categorize internet access the way we categorize food security and emerge from the pandemic with federal programs to provide internet and device assistance to families in need."

David Brin, physicist, futures thinker and author of " Earth" and " Existence," commented, "Assuming we restore the basic stability of the Western Enlightenment Experiment, and that is a big assumption, then several technological and social trends may come to fruition in the next five to 10 years.

Advances in cost-effectiveness of sustainable energy supplies will be augmented by better storage systems. This will both reduce reliance on fossil fuels and allow cities and homes to be more autonomous.

Urban farming methods may move to industrial scale, allowing similar moves toward local autonomy (perhaps requiring a full decade or more to show significant impact). Meat use will decline for several reasons, ensuring some degree of food security, as well.

Local, small-scale, on-demand manufacturing may start to show effects in 2025. If all of the above take hold, there will be surplus oceanic shipping capacity across the planet. Some of it may be applied to ameliorate (not solve) acute water shortages. Innovative uses of such vessels may range all the way to those depicted in my novel 'Earth.'

Full-scale diagnostic evaluations of diet, genes and microbiome will result in micro-biotic therapies and treatments. AI appraisals of other diagnostics will both advance detection of problems and become distributed to handheld devices cheaply available to all, even poor clinics.

Handheld devices will start to carry detection technologies that can appraise across the spectrum, allowing NGOs and even private parties to detect and report environmental problems.

Socially, this extension of citizen vision will go beyond the current trend of assigning accountability to police and other authorities. Despotisms will be empowered, as predicted in 'Nineteen Eighty-four.' But democracies will also be empowered, as in 'The Transparent Society.'

I give odds that tsunamis of revelation will crack the shields protecting many elites from disclosure of past and present torts and turpitudes. The Panama Papers and Epstein cases exhibit how fear propels the elites to combine efforts at repression. But only a few more cracks may cause the dike to collapse, revealing networks of blackmail. This is only partly technologically driven and hence is not guaranteed. If it does happen, there will be dangerous spasms by all sorts of elites, desperate to either retain status or evade consequences. But if the fever runs its course, the more transparent world will be cleaner and better run.

Some of those elites have grown aware of the power of 90 years of Hollywood propaganda for individualism, criticism, diversity, suspicion of authority and appreciation of eccentricity. Counterpropaganda pushing older, more traditional approaches to authority and conformity are already emerging, and they have the advantage of resonating with ancient human fears. Much will depend upon this meme war.

"Of course, much will also depend upon short-term resolution of current crises. If our systems remain undermined and sabotaged by incited civil strife and distrust of expertise, then all bets are off. You will get many answers to this canvassing fretting about the spread of 'surveillance technologies that will empower Big Brother.' These fears are well-grounded, but utterly myopic. First, ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition are only the beginning. Nothing will stop them and any such thought of 'protecting' citizens from being seen by elites is stunningly absurd, as the cameras get smaller, better, faster, cheaper, more mobile and vastly more numerous every month. Moore's Law to the nth degree. Yes, despotisms will benefit from this trend. And hence, the only thing that matters is to prevent despotism altogether.

"In contrast, a free society will be able to apply the very same burgeoning technologies toward accountability. We are seeing them applied to end centuries of abuse by 'bad-apple' police who are thugs, while empowering the truly professional cops to do their jobs better. I do not guarantee light will be used this way, despite today's spectacular example. It is an open question whether we citizens will have the gumption to apply 'sousveillance' upward at all elites. But Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. likewise were saved by crude technologies of light in their days. And history shows that assertive vision by and for the citizenry is the only method that has ever increased freedom and - yes - some degree of privacy.

"I would wager that I am almost alone in saying this in this canvassing. The hand wringers are totally right about the problem and the danger presented by surveillance tech! And they are diametrically wrong in the common prescription. Trying to ban technologies and create shadows for citizens to hide within is spectacularly wrongheaded and disastrous. See my book, 'The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?' "

Barry Chudakov, founder and principal of Sertain Research, commented, "The 'new normal' for the average person in 2025 will entail adapting to multiple simultaneous accelerations. ... COVID-19 will be followed by other pandemics. Atmospheric climate change will accelerate. Wetlands deterioration will accelerate. The number of homeless refugees - due to soil, crop and weather devastation - will accelerate. Information speeds and content compression will accelerate. The invasiveness and accuracy of tracking, search and recognition technologies will accelerate. Our reliance on remote-distance technologies and interfaces will accelerate.

"The consequence of these accelerations is complexity: Problems and issues, programs and technologies, all are becoming more complex. The substrate of the new normal will be ineradicable complexity: Both our problems and our technologies (including how we deploy these technologies) have passed the stage of simple approaches. To quote McKinsey: ' Telemedicine experienced a tenfold growth in subscribers in just 15 days. Similar acceleration patterns can be seen in online education, nearshoring, and remote working, to name but a few areas. All these trends were clear before the crisis and have been amplified by it.'

"This is a fundamental amplification. The way people use and think about technology will progress further on the continuum of actual to virtual. We will become even more screen-dependent. We will see less of the world IRL (in real life) and more through interfaces and screens whose distancing will shield us from deadly viruses but also isolate us. Thus, the new normal with regard to the role of digital technologies in individuals' personal and professional lives will be to usher in, and learn to navigate, the emerging metaverse. ... What worries me most about the role of technology and technology companies in individuals' lives in 2025 is the deliberate depreciation of complexity. The diminishment of complexity invites tyranny. It is the tyranny of simple-ism and reductionism papered over by happy talk, lies and distortions designed to distract us from real issues.

"We urgently need clarity and sound thinking. Simplistic clichés and slight-of-hand responses won't solve the complex problems we face such as accelerating climate change, soil and shoreline erosion, global immigration or morphing pandemics. We must embrace transparency - make the science required to tackle this complexity easily understandable. To be clear: Complexity is not an end in itself; it is a fact of life that must be addressed, like the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. For example, Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of Affectiva, has written and spoken often about the need to embrace the complexity of gender, race, cultural context, accessibility, socioeconomic status and other variables that often are lacking in the environments that design the computer programs and algorithms that mediate our lives. We must humanize AI and make human variability the substrate of bits and qubits.

"A second level of complexity - and the more urgent one - is our engagement with our devices. We use them; we typically are not present with them. We don't notice how they bend our perceptions and behaviors. As complexity accelerates, curiously, our ability to embrace and engage with that complexity diminishes. This is in no small measure due to the ergonomic design of our devices that makes them both indispensable and makes us more likely to adhere in our thinking and action to their compression logic: They compress time, distance, communication, relationships. We have an active and reactive relationship with our tools. Because of this we need a meta layer of awareness that monitors how we change and adapt. Merely adopting tool logic as our own - texting while we drive, ghosting, growing alone together - is hardly a healthy response. Further, our lack of presence with our tools effectively means we are at the mercy of the surveillance capitalism and interruptive logic that pervades their inception. These technologies and the companies that create them daily gain in sophistication; this is a new acceleration.

"Much of this accelerated sophistication is outstanding and useful. But we pick up and use our devices and, as it were, live our lives eyes wide shut. We don't look at what we're using and how we're using it - we practice unconscious tech engagement. Our tools are so ergonomic, so easy to use, so quick to respond that we are seduced by the slick way they reorganize our thinking, our behavior and our lives. But we have reached a tipping point with our tools: They are now more sophisticated than our ability to fully appreciate their effects; those effects are hidden in the tool logic, the actions of the tool. We must become present with our tools; we must gain in meta-awareness, retool our understanding of how we think while tech-immersed versus how we think otherwise.

"Why is this a concern? In prior human history, the power to manipulate reality, facts, behaviors and lives was centered in visible entities with physical representatives: the king, the pope, the organizer, the leader. Institutions from churches to schools to governments were concrete entities with no metalife. If you couldn't talk to the king or the pope every day, you knew where they lived in a castle or the Vatican. While many institutions can fossilize and grow weedy with bureaucratic complexity, newer technologies present the ability to avoid presence. More than absence, this is the ability to hide, to obfuscate, to distort. The more virtual we become, the more I worry that we abandon the concrete for becoming gadgeteers and, as Neil Postman put it, 'amusing ourselves to death.' The more we disembody, the more virtual our realities become, the more we exhibit antisocial, even psychopathic behaviors. Alone together we lose empathy; we lose compassion; we lose focus. As computing goes quantum, as algorithms and AI mediate more of our interactions, our educational structures have either lagged far behind or have given up altogether trying to prepare young minds for the world they will inherit. The more device dependent we become, the more incumbent it is upon all users to fully understand the tool logic and business model of the tool they pick up and use. Surveillance is a business model; exploitation of data exhaust is a business model; tracking is a business model; observation and analysis is a business model. In whose interest is it for us to embrace that business model? In ' Everybody Lies ' Seth Stephens-Davidowitz says, 'Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.' In other words, the human psyche is an emerging business model."

Brad Templeton, internet pioneer, futurist and activist, a former president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, "It has been suggested that this is the first battle in our last war on disease - that, partly as a result of this, we will come to understand viruses at a fundamental level. And now the budget will be there (due to the obvious benefit) to create the ability to make a vaccine or counter-agent to a virus on demand - just sequence the virus and quickly be able to generate agents that will be known to be safe and effective. It's very likely we'll get much better at diagnostics as well. These are tremendous goods, and one would even say worth the cost of the pandemic, except we were trying to make them before and this just kickstarts them. This could prevent the death of millions, and if you can attribute it to the pandemic, you would have to go into the 'wildly, wildly positive' camp on the pandemic.

"We're learning a great deal about videoconferences and meetings, holding large events online, holding parties online. We still suck at it, but we're learning lots and getting better. The video call was something that was going to be 'the next thing' since the 1950s. The pandemic made that finally happen, and it's probably here to stay. We may even develop means to do pretty significant business travel without the travel, which has benefits in cost, time and pollution. ...

"We may learn to do occasional 'dry runs' of all the technologies necessary for hard lockdown - online shopping, delivery, virtual meeting spaces and remote learning and more. We will probably learn that the right approach is to use those technologies to generate a very hard lockdown for a short time, rather than a moderate lockdown for a very long time. Delivery robots (in which I am involved) will gain more appreciation. Public transit will mostly recover but only because it has to; long-overdue changes away from its 20th-century models will be hastened in reaction to that decline, and fear for several years of cramped, packed spaces. This will slightly hasten the eventual replacement of most public transit with robotic group and solo transportation. The world will probably get a bit cleaner. Ultraviolet disinfection will become common. This may reduce the spread of other infections like flu."

danah boyd, founder and president of the Data & Society Research Institute and principal researcher at Microsoft, wrote, "Inequality will create a huge division between those who are thriving and those who are in dire straits. There will be plenty of high-status people who will come out of the pandemic with wealth, health and their life goals intact. But a large amount of society will be dealing with all sorts of ripple effects. There will be those who got sick and never fully recovered. There will be those who lost their jobs and precarity turned to poverty fast. But there will also be mothers whose careers took a left turn after multiple years of trying to be a stay-at-home parent plus a teacher while working at home. There will be so many people who will be facing tremendous post-traumatic stress disorder as they struggle to make sense of the domestic violence they experienced during the pandemic, the loss of family and friends and the tremendous amount of uncertainty that surrounded every decision. Digital technologies always mirror and magnify the good, bad and ugly. People will continue to use technology to get support and help, but they will also struggle with how technology becomes a place of hostility and information confusion. A cohort of young people will be accustomed to engaging friends through technology, but also struggle with a range of face-to-face encounters as the fears/confusion over illness persist. If we're lucky, schools, conferences, mental health and general health care will be forever reimagined to consider hybrid ways of approaching services. But this is more likely to be something that magnifies inequality rather than actually doing the connective work that could be possible. The biggest unknown in the United States concerns political leadership."

Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and author, wrote, "2025 may be a whole lot more local in spirit and local in practice. As global supply chains falter and reveal their structural inadequacies, people will come to depend more on locally produced goods. This will also mean fewer ridiculous, meaningless, valueless cubicle jobs, and more time spent actually creating value. I'm thinking simple, real tasks like growing food, building houses, teaching kids, health care and providing energy may dominate what we now think of as 'work.' In other words, instead of developing careers in industries, people will learn how to do things - which could prove truly fulfilling and psychologically stabilizing.

"The climate and economic challenges may be bigger, but our resilience as people could be stronger. It's only three or four years out, so I don't anticipate we'll be through the disillusionment at the failure of global corporate capitalism. As for the role of digital technologies? I don't know if they will be quite as important in their own right. They'll likely be more embedded into other stuff, and less fetishized on their own. The only tech-related change I'm really hoping for is less of it. It's really draining. Even typing this right now I'm using tech to write to you about the future of tech? As for tech making life better? The obvious ones: solar, regenerative energy, less-industrial agriculture (more low- or light-tech solutions to topsoil depletion, air pollution, watershed destruction). More simple stuff that solves real problems. Less social networks designed to create new problems.

"My worries? Well, there are now trillions of dollars invested in companies that depend on addiction, isolation and fear to keep growing. That's very dangerous, since these companies will spend their war chests on deliberately causing panic, pain and fear. They know the more upset and reactive we are, the more likely we are to engage with their platforms. So, when the wealthiest industry in the world is doing everything it can to attack our basic sense of well-being, I do get concerned we may not have the resilience as people to oppose these forces. Once they really get a handle on using AI for this purpose, I'm not sure how we get ourselves out of it. Even now, we see people on social media platforms attacking those with whom they should be allied. They cancel people rather than collaborate with them. If AIs determine that turning people against each other is the easiest way for them to deliver desired metrics, then we could be in great trouble."

Esther Dyson, internet pioneer, journalist, entrepreneur and executive founder of Wellville, responded, "Things will be both better and worse. Many people will be dead and many others more will be permanently damaged, physically or mentally or economically. And those people will mostly be the ones who were worse-off in the first place, poor, Black or another minority, disabled or ill, or otherwise challenged. Yet at the same time, the U.S. and even the world at large are much more aware of the disparities and the unfairness of this situation.

"With luck, we will start to think long-term (to the next pandemic?) and realize how much better things could be for all (including rich employers who want educated, happy, productive employees and well-off customers) if we would invest in our greatest asset - human beings. The money one spends keeping pregnant/new mothers healthy, providing child care (and paying care workers' wages that honor their work), educating children, keeping people healthy instead of trying to fix them when it's too late - all that money delivers a huge return on investment. It's just that the rewards don't go directly to those who pay; they go to society as a whole and make the world a better place for both rich and poor (but with more impact on the poor because their condition has so much more room for improvement).

"That's the optimistic view of things. I'm doing everything in my power to make it come true. The short version is that we need to think long-term and invest in everyone's future versus grabbing what we can for our narrowly defined selves. Ah yes, and you were asking about 'digital tech.' We're going to discover that it is getting cheaper to do a lot of things, including many varieties of telemedicine, less travel and jet lag for the rich, upper-class workers, and that we can actually afford to invest in human capital cost-effectively. We need to do that and we need to train a large new cadre of tele-care workers to help deal with the residual effects of COVID-19 (including contact tracing). The human communication skills needed for contact tracing now are the same skills that will also make for better child care, mental health and other care workers.

"One really interesting impact will be on privacy: Any stranger could be infectious, so there will be demands for testing and immunity passports and the like - and a similar demand for secrecy from (usually poor) people terrified of losing their physical-presence-required jobs, their ability to travel, etc., etc. It's akin to issues around concealed weapons, etc., etc. A lot will depend on how immunity/vaccines/and other medical issues play out over the next year.

"There will be a lot less traveling and a lot more appreciation for face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) connections when we do make them. Much more telehealth and a healthier population. More self-aware use of social networks and an understanding of how addictive they can be. The use of all kinds of digital monitors should help people to manage their own health and resilience better (though they can be abused/addictive like everything else). I would love for every third grader in this country to get a continuous glucose monitor along with an age-appropriate scientific curriculum so that they could see for themselves how the food they eat affects their bodies and their mood. Or more cheaply, at least a Mouse House with four mice - two sedentary and two with a running wheel, orthogonally two on a healthy diet and two eating the kind of processed, overly sweetened junk still found in many schools' cafeterias. Maybe PETA would sue, which would just help to make the point of how badly we feed so many children. Meanwhile, the kids could just watch and see the impact of the four combinations of choices. I worry that poor and minority people still will have limited access to all the tech and tools that the rich take for granted. ... Disparities in access to tech can aggravate other disparities. I also worry that people will turn to tech rather than to other people for human comfort."

Jamais Cascio, research fellow at the Institute for the Future, predicted, "Three big arenas of technological uncertainty we're likely to see by 2025 emerge from social dynamics well underway now: the prevalence and availability of remote work and the technologies used to enable it; the manifestation of authority and policing, particularly in the balance of surveillance of citizens and surveillance by citizens; and the degree of trust and accountability of social media systems, in terms of both personal privacy and protections against manipulation. All three of these issues could have radically divergent outcomes in a relatively short amount of time, making it very difficult to pin down 2025.

Remote work: The speed and stability of an actual recovery from the pandemic will shape how much we continue to rely upon remote work; there's a very good chance that a significant portion of the pandemic remote workforce will want to continue to work from home, but the longer the forced isolation lasts, the greater the likelihood that people will be desperate to return to human contact at work. Increasing improvements in automation will eliminate some of the 'essential' delivery jobs. It's possible that these may be semi-automated tasks, where a remote pilot controls the drone or robot used to make deliveries (to handle the unexpected and customer interaction).

Policing and surveillance: The capacities of surveillance technologies are increasing rapidly, but their use against civilian populations and their use as a way to monitor authorities are not necessarily correlated. The degree to which institutions of authority adapt to changing social demands will shape the level to which surveillance could be imposed upon them; conversely, if authorities are able to suppress demands for change, the spread of top-down surveillance will likely accelerate.

Social media networks: Even as Facebook demographics continue to age, Millennials desiring a more stable platform for social (and family) engagement will start to look beyond transient interaction apps. Facebook could remain the default if it manages to act as a bulwark against social manipulation and tighten up its privacy-related behavior, but since that's not a highly likely scenario, we'll probably see the emergence of something else that fills that role for younger adults. This 'something' will allow for both persistent interaction and advanced privacy protection; what that would look like remains to be seen. I'd like to see more systems that allow for improved privacy, accountability and insight.

"Beyond information technology, we could see major improvements in our lives through the acceleration of the shift away from fossil fuels: more electric cars and the corresponding infrastructure, more power-self-sufficient homes and much longer-lived energy storage/batteries. I also hope that the pandemic will trigger a variety of advances in medical and biotech systems, improving the overall quality of health and life for millions (or billions)."

Jim Spohrer, director of cognitive open technologies and the AI developer ecosystem at IBM, noted, "The new normal by 2025 will likely be better. 1) Dealing with pandemics will be improved, vaccine speed of development will be improved, preparedness for next pandemic will be improved. 2) Online education, health and government services will be improved, and more people will have experience with them. 3) Businesses will continue to encourage more online meetings (less travel) and more work from home (less travel). 4) There will be more retail robots, tele-presence robots and robots at home - all with more investment, deployments and success stories. 5) There will be a resurgence in community approaches to local jobs in service of community culture and development."

Fernando Barrio, a lecturer in business law at Queen Mary University of London expert in AI and human rights, wrote, "More than 20 years ago we all had a very optimistic and naive view of the evolution of technology in people's lives, so it was paramount to allow the technology to develop unhindered by regulatory intervention. The result is a vast and resilient network that allows us to do even more things than we envisioned. But it also means a world where wealth is more concentrated than ever, where science takes second place to charlatans and gossipers that cause serious damage to millions, where the political arena is hijacked by a combination of media and foreign interventions making a mockery of democracy, and the list of not very nice things is quite longer than the nice moments of the Arab Spring and #MeToo movements. And it seems that, yet again, we are planting the seeds for the new normal to be very nice in the surface, while creating a society more unequal, unfair and sharply divided about too many things that need social consensus. In 2025 the new normal will imply a society more sharply divided between those who have access and those who don't. In this context, access is multi-pronged: access to food, access to wealth, access to connectivity and technology, access to power.

"When one thinks about people's relationship with technology, one is thinking of the group of people that have access to it - unfettered access. If we restrict the view to that group, the new normal will be an enhanced form of what we are living today, where the economy, the education, the human relations and the politics are technologically mediated. Before the COVID-19 crisis, there was already a push by certain sectors of the media-IT corporations to normalize the use of certain technologies where the possibility of individuals' control is purely theoretical. That push was supported in part by elite universities, academia, due to funding from those corporations or because the ideological shift had already taken place within them.

"Accordingly, it was possible to see all around the globe members of those groups advocating the change from text to voice, therefore encouraging voice-managed assistants in every room of people's homes, disregarding the immense possibilities of surveillance and absolute control over people's lives that those technologies introduce. Not focusing on the need to have better privacy agreements regardless of the countless examples of violations of agreements that discourage the use of the information for any purpose without individuals' control and consent.

"The COVID-19 crisis showed that the resilience of the vast global network over which different layers of protocols, software and applications run is being used to exalt the upper applications layer because it is the one that made possible the tele-everything that we are experiencing. Thus, in the new normal hyper-intrusive technology is taken for granted. Instead of embedding privacy, security and protection of individual rights in every layer that runs over the network, in the crisis the new normal is that those concepts are modified to allow technologies to intrude in people's lives (as they already do in certain nondemocratic countries). That paradigm shift will also blur the limits between people's personal, professional and public lives. For example, instances of cyber-sacking - in which one loses a job for comments or information posted online - will become more common, having an impact on the quality of the discussions and information put forward by individuals, and even private conversation held in private groups or within hearing of voice-managed assistants at home might be also processed at that effect."

Christine Boese, a consultant and independent scholar, wrote, "Thanks to the horrors of COVID-19, as we sit in our homes and take stock of our personal economic situations, make hard decisions, suddenly what is absolutely essential becomes clear. It is a reset, and - despite the horrors - it was long, long overdue. ...

"It is in difficult times when we see the seams and frayed edges of our thin veneer of civilization, the illusions of the fractured U.S. health care system and even the severe limits to much-touted electronic medical records innovations. In times like this, we don't have to look so hard to separate technology hype from reality. We face failing infrastructure across the U.S. Other countries have systems that work, at all levels, while ours falters. Without this horrific stress test, we would not be able to see, let alone correct for, these fault lines. That thin veneer of civilization balances precariously on a consumption engine, and American culture is literally consuming itself, even as Rush Limbaugh suggests we need to adapt to this self-consumption 'like the Donner Party did.' As with most absurdities, it comes with its own irony: Like the Roman Empire, we make little ourselves and instead consume the cheaply produced, slavery-inducing trifles created elsewhere, as if it fills some kind of deep emptiness inside. The extremis of the COVID-19 situation glaringly exposes several things that had previously been invisible:

The actual power of mass media, even as channels multiply and become diffuse. One channel, Fox News, has created an entire class of people who are actively putting themselves at risk of death or lifelong health problems. As someone with relatives who have fallen prey to this external programming, I can attest that no rhetoric, no persuasion, no methods currently known to me can penetrate this closed belief set. What we are living in right now makes Leni Riefenstahl look like a mere piker.

The manipulative panoptic power of interactive social media in the hands of malevolent agents. When I began to do internet research in the 1990s, I speculated that the active and interactive power of user-directed and navigated media would lead to a more aware and awake populace, even if not fully democratized. What I did not anticipate (and I am currently studying now) is the power of dark UX patterns driven by algorithmic assumptions, whether accurate or not, and, very soon, a real Pandora's box of AI-driven machine learning.

How dangerously hollowed out the U.S. infrastructure is, from endemic underfunding of systems and anything that requires attention to detail below the surface to business-school 'top-line' summaries of a management layer that flies above anything that takes more than five minutes to scan. Newspapers and universities were hollowed out first, the agents that created and fostered critical thinkers. The gutting of public education was the third leg of that stool. Remove anything that might question the status quo, that engages in detailed work (even engineering!) or requires long-term planning. Boeing itself fell prey to something that, from the outside, looks like the Agile-ification of all work, which must, despite protestations by the manifesto's philosophy, degenerate into surface-level patch work and the delivery of marginal improvements called 'features.'

Lastly, how deeply distorted the cultural fabric of American life has become, when, upon being forced to actually live in our homes for extended months on end rather than merely using them as places to sleep and consume things because our primary away-from-home activity was work, we discovered how much our homes lacked in all those 'things' we own that actually enrich our lives. As livelihoods were put perilously at risk, many of us came to realize what we were being expected to die for and discovered that that was as hollowed out as everything else, driven by a churn to consume as a red herring to keep us from noticing how thin our lives were becoming, even as we all, as a society at large, have consumed ourselves into larger and larger sizes."

Craig Silliman, an executive vice president for a major global company, wrote, "While COVID-19 has forced us to distance physically, it has brought individuals closer together. Many of us have spent years in countless meetings and meals and on airplanes with colleagues and yet never learned as much about them as we have in the past four months. When we lost our physical proximity, we created emotional bridges that connected us in new and profound ways. It turns out that it took forced distancing to bring out our most complete and authentic humanity. I believe that once we are together again physically, we will not forget what we learned while we were apart, and that will make for richer and deeper relationships for years to come.

"On the technology front, most of the technologies that we are using daily are not new. What has changed is not the capability but our behavior. I have talked to numerous colleagues who have observed that they never again will board a six-hour flight for a two-hour meeting. We previously might have thought that this was highly inefficient but didn't feel we had 'permission' to suggest video conferencing because we weren't sure how a boss/client/customer might react. Because this was a simultaneous discontinuity in work patterns globally, it will have caused us all to change our work habits, particularly involving the use of technology to be more efficient. We will be working in very (positively) different ways in 2025 as a result of COVID-19. We previously have thought about the office as a place where one must go to 'be at work' or to 'do work,' even if the office environment wasn't the most effective location for a particular task. We will increasingly think about a spectrum of locations where work can be done, and a spectrum of technologies that are a platform for work to be done, and start by asking what the task is that we seek to accomplish and then using the appropriate location and technology to best accomplish that task. That will allow us to design office spaces to serve as platforms for what shared, collaborative spaces do best while liberating workers to find the mode and place of working that makes them most effective."

Abigail De Kosnik, associate professor and director of the Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted, "Climate change, invasive corporatized technologies and increasing economic precarity will all combine to give rise to a far more paranoid society in 2025 than we had at the start of 2020. In some ways, widespread fear and anxiety will have positive results, as people will be more environmentally conscious than ever before and will engage en masse in efforts to regulate corporate resource extraction and pollution, and will show a collective willingness to adopt less environmentally harmful lifestyles (for example, I expect a huge upsurge in mass transit use and a corresponding movement to improve the quality of mass transit in cities across the U.S.). However, the paranoia will be justified - there will be fewer opportunities for college graduates who do not have family connections, and climate change will make large regions uninhabitable. This will lead to huge problems in mental health and will negatively impact at least a couple of generations of Americans in terms of their relationships, sense of self and lifetime- happiness quotient.

"I am especially worried about the fact that technology companies are overall having a hugely negative effect on the environment and on humans' ways of thinking about and understanding the world ... and they don't seem to care much about spreading misinformation and training hundreds of millions of people all over the world to think less critically about information are my biggest concerns. The tech industry will likely continue to produce technologies that either do nothing to improve everyday life or make it significantly worse. What can happen to improve technology is better organization on the part of users and tech workers who object to their companies' negative social impact.

"I have hope that we will see a wave of activism and unionization and the formation of alternate types of organizations ( B Corps or P Corps for example) that will yield new technologies whose aim will not be profit but actual problem solving - mobilizing collective intelligence to solve the problems of environmental disaster, massive social inequity and lack of opportunity that we will face in 2025."

Adam Clayton Powell III, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, predicted, "The 2025 'new normal' will be better, often much better, for the affluent and for other global elites. They have now and will continue to have access to and can afford the best technologies to serve them in their personal and professional lives. But 2020 has been such a setback for the hundreds of millions of people, most in Asia and Africa, who have just emerged from poverty and whose progress has now been reversed that it is difficult to imagine these reversals can be entirely cured by 2025. In the U.S. we had record employment - some said 'full' employment - as recently as February of this year. While one can hope that the sudden plunge to Depression-level unemployment can be temporary, there are so many changes - especially in any industry relying on people crowding together (transportation, entertainment) - that the shift to video communication and streaming home entertainment suggests these coping mechanisms for 2020 will not entirely recede.

"Many have said that the virus pandemic has accelerated changes in uses of digital technologies that were already underway. There does not seem to be any reason to believe we will return to 2019. For a start, why would I ever want to commute to an office again? For decades, we have said that the internet brings to our fingertips the riches of the world's libraries. Now people around the world - people who are connected, that is - realize they have the riches of the world's information and entertainment video and experiential technologies at their fingertips. This will not go away. Consider history: The Metropolitan Opera is streaming opera productions every day. It was during the Depression that the Met started transmitting its productions on radio. The Depression ended but the Met's radio broadcasts didn't."

Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst for Altimeter Group, observed, "Technology is ultimately about power - about who frames a problem, what 'solving' it looks like, who benefits, who is overlooked. So, if anything would make post-pandemic life better, it would be a willingness to, as John Lewis has said, 'get in good trouble.' My main concern is that the large technology companies have far too much power to frame what we know and how we live, and that, ultimately, we are all assets to be leveraged for shareholder value. Technology should be a tool - not a weapon, a religion or a government. The biggest issue for technology is essentially a choice: Do we commit to building models that describe and classify people and the world without excluding, discriminating and amplifying inequality?

"In a year in which we mourn the deaths of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor and too many others and again confront our long history of systemic racism can we finally acknowledge that technology has been deeply complicit? More to the point, can we stop hiding behind the fig leaf that data and technology are a) neutral and b) always the answer? Yes, people are messy, yes this is hard. But we need to stop hiding behind excuses. This isn't to say we should toss our phones and flee to the hills. But we do have to ask the hard questions and make the harder choices about how we solve problems, and whether, in solving one set of problems, we're creating others that are more insidious and longer-lasting.

"Will we, in the interest of public health and safety, increasingly surveil our employees, guests, customers, neighbors? Will we address the inevitable issues of discrimination and exclusion of vulnerable and marginalized populations? Do these technology solutions actually work, and are there other, less invasive ways to keep people safe? Did we leave anyone behind? I hope we can use this moment in our history as an opportunity to reflect on the choices we've made and what, finally, we value. If we say Black Lives Matter, are we willing to speak up in meetings where design decisions have the potential to put Black lives at risk? Are we willing to challenge cultural norms to ensure that we have representation from the people who are most affected by the decisions we make and whose talent we have overlooked? Are we willing to sit down so someone else can speak, and amplify their voices?"

Paul Jones, professor emeritus of information science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, predicted, "Let's look at changes that were underway and that will likely prevail by 2025:

Cashless payments: No stopping them. COVID-19-era purchasing, whether retail or curbside pickup, is making cashless the norm. In the U.S. this was already apace. In China, cashless is already a done deal. Every phone, every new card, every over-the-phone purchase is cashless and checkless. Goodbye money, coins, etc. Too late for Harriet Tubman to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, except in the area - much needed - of symbolism in the U.S.

Officeless organizations: They will proliferate. The organization of work within a physical location is, for the most part, done. At home, everyone has their own corner office with a view. Every day is Bring Your Pet to Work Day. Every day is - from the waist down anyway - Casual Friday. The toll paid to commute is fully recognized and rejected. All of this was underway but now the issues are resolved and normalized.

Distributed access to education: This is much more complex that virtual offices or virtual organizations. Despite various rhetorical stances that education is actually job training or something of the sort, countries who provide actual education always take the lead in innovation and tech. That said, we have quickly gotten much better in the U.S. at pushing the limits of our skills to both educate and train, learning what we knew in the physical classroom that, as Marshall McLuhan quipped, 'Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.' A straightforward, traditional online lecture has limited educational utility. The reimagining of the classroom for digital life is still underway, but we can expect both the practice and expectations of learning to be changed radically by tech. Mentorship, whether in the classroom, laboratory, or at work, is indispensable. Tools for collaboration will be extended and embraced. Slack, Zoom, GitHub, Google Drive and cousins are already firmly in place and will be improved upon. If tech and policy align correctly, this will make our lives better.

Transportation: Post-COVID-19 we will have seen this shift accelerated, but in which direction? In the near term, public transport (trains, buses, etc.), mass transport (air, cruises, ferries, etc.) and shared ride services including taxis are stagnated. Personal transport is also underused. We are realizing we need not drive, fly or float as much as we have been doing before. We may yearn to travel but not for work. The lack of traditional benefits for ride-share drivers will have to be better addressed - by their own organizing or by government advocacy and regulation. Transportation ownership by people under 35 was already on the decline - except for skateboards. Fewer people will own cars in the U.S. - this will have accelerated by 2025. Business air travel will have also decreased and perhaps become novel.

Food: During COVID-19, people have learned to cook again and to enjoy doing so. We have turned in a few months from a nation of restaurant-goers to a nation of pickup and home cooking. Tech will continue to assist this trend which should continue through 2025. Instapot is only the first shot fired. Plant-based eating will continue to trend. Americans having gained weight during lockdown are looking in the mirror and thinking of carrots and salads. Our taste for vegetables has returned as quickly as our reluctance to eat as much meat. Thank you, Instagram, for making meal presentation, even of home cooking, into a visual art.

Tech itself: Training in tech has had the attitude that tech is at worst neutral, that people will do with tech what they will (absolving tech from any responsibility), that 'we just create this stuff then people used it or don't.' This concept of socially agnostic engineering was already under challenge but computer science departments in particular are slow at letting go. Father John Culkin said, 'We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.' This is often incorrectly attributed to Marshal McLuhan. Techno-social scholars have been on the forefront of this concept, looking closely through qualitative and quantitative means at the tech landscape. This has led to overdue attention to diversity issues within tech and to inquiries into social limits as well as tech limits. I expect these inquiries to become much more important than, say, increasing the number of pixels rendered or megaflops produced. We used to teach people how to use tech, now we teach tech how to use people. Not just in information architecture, but in design, the tech business has learned that the lower the barriers to use, the more people will use a product and use it more often and be more engaged. We will see more engagement from sociology, psychology and other disciplines in what we now know as tech. Information science will be more significant than computer science or a disengaged data science."

Jeanne Dietsch, New Hampshire senator and former CEO of MobileRobots Inc., said, "Disruption is always difficult. Until we task AI with the complex logistics needed to optimize the use of resources and the smart automation needed to perform low-skilled jobs, many workers will be overtaxed: teachers, bus drivers, health professionals, mental health professionals, caregivers, administrators, just to name a few. We face a vast amount of work that has been ignored over the past decades full of short-sighted decisions. We have failed to maintain our infrastructure, but more importantly, we have failed to care for the future of the next generation. To turn that work into jobs requires determination and the ability to stand up for our values, stand up against a system that rewards corporations seeking short-term profit over any other goal. Carbon fee and dividend is the first step toward shifting the structure of our economy toward a more egalitarian one, with better values. The use of AI to optimize the logistics of resource use could dramatically improve our nutrition, education, health and even our social interactions. The addition of sensor feedback into automation of all types, from traffic handling to regulatory regimes, could greatly improve the functionality of our systems. What concerns me most is technology's ability to enable people to magnify ignorance and misinformation."

Alexa Raad, co-founder and co-host of the TechSequences podcast and former chief operating officer at Farsight Security, commented, "The pandemic has already highlighted and exacerbated the gap between the haves and the have-nots, not only in terms of the cost of lives lost but also in terms of economic disparity. The policies of the current administration have accelerated that divide. ... The pandemic also put a spotlight on broken systems and processes such as health care that require a significant effort and will to fix. ...

"The pandemic highlighted the importance of internet connectivity. Many companies in the tech and service industries will realize that a work-at-home model is efficient and less costly for some or many of their workforce and that they do not need expensive commercial urban real estate. Therefore, more people will work from home, which affects everything from daily routines to the makeup of services offered to the home. However, this is a luxury for only a set of individuals who can work from home and can afford the set up (high-speed access, required space and internet-enabled equipment) to work from home. This of course sets a new and quite complex normal for managing cybersecurity threats. Large-scale industry events will be less prevalent, as will the frequency of corporate travel. All of these will have rippling affects across multiple industries like airlines, hospitality and event/exhibit management. Overall, there will be less economic security. One of the legacies of the pandemic is the realization that although many conveniences of modern life are predicated on the simple assumption that close proximity of people yields economic and social benefits, in an age of accelerating climate change and multiple pandemics (COVID-19 is likely a precursor of others yet to come) that will no longer hold true. Conveniences such as airplane travel, movies, amphitheater, subways, high-rise apartment units, shopping malls, were based on this assumption and as a result densely packed areas were sustained hotspots of infection. ... Technologies to identify and manage the spread of infections will be intrusive in terms of privacy (example - contact-tracing apps) unless very thoughtful governance of data privacy is implemented. ...

"The new normal will put a greater strain on our health care system. The pandemic highlighted how unprepared we as a nation are, not only in terms of our acceptance of scientific and evidence-based advice, but also in regard to having the means to efficiently and economically deal with a public health crisis. A beneficial tech-related change will be the delivery of some aspects of health care into the home. For example, people will continue to have online consultations with health professionals instead of an inconvenient in-person visit. This is already happening and will be the new normal.

"Internet of Things-based devices will be more plentiful and will serve as a means to monitor everyday health and diagnose and in some cases remotely manage illnesses without the need for intrusive surgery. However, they will also pose a much greater threat in terms of privacy and cybersecurity. More and more private data will be generated, collected and used. Unless there are appropriate safeguards and controls as to how the data is handled, we will see an erosion of our privacy and further loss of control over our choices and decisions as a result. Internet of Things devices have the potential to greatly improve our well-being, and we will see AI-enabled IoT devices which will, for example, monitor our health, provide biological feedback, anticipate and warm of an impending health crisis, etc. But IoT devices increase the attack surface and vectors for bad actors. We will see rise of new cybersecurity threats. Imagine, for example, a nation-state targeting a public figure by hacking into his/her pacemaker. Given where we are now in terms of lacking a basic level of cyber hygiene for these devices, unless we make significant progress we will fall further and further behind the bad actors.

"A few of my concerns:

The consolidation of services and power into very few largely unregulated companies worries me a great deal. If this trend continues, we will be beholden to very few companies for the many services our lives rely on. These companies will become 'too big to fail.' In the financial crisis of 2008, the government bailed out financial institutions who were deemed too big to fail, even though the actions of those same institutions were directly and indirectly responsible for the crisis. Many organizations use Amazon's AWS cloud services for their web presence and mission-critical applications. Concentrated dependency has never been a harbinger of benefits.

I also worry about the lack of proper governance for potential threats posed by AI. And by 'threats' I mean in regard to security (AI can also be used by our adversaries), economic impact (the loss of blue collar jobs without provisions for retraining or alternative employment will only increase the economic gap) loss of privacy, loss of agency, etc. Although the promise of the best of AI is probably likely to come to fruition beyond 2025, we need to be thinking of proper governance and risk mitigation now, and we are behind.

I worry about the societal cost of social media. Social media platforms have become the breeding ground for disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, extremist groups, online bullying, anti-vaxxers and bots that manipulate opinions and sow division and discord. ... When journalism and legitimate news media struggle to compete, we lose one of the fundamental bulwarks of democracy - a free press. And then there is the lack of proper guardrails and defined consequences for social media companies' use of our personal data (example - Cambridge Analytica). Lastly, social media effects tap into the brain's reward system and the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. It is addictive, and its premise is that of addictive entertainment and not critical thinking. When critical thinking is eroded, so is trust in science - and we collectively pay the price."

Maja Vujovic, a consultant for digital and ICT at Compass Communications, predicted, "If entire sectors - education, tourism and hospitality, food production, entertainment and more - continue to experience the deep freeze caused by COVID-19 through 2020 and beyond, the 'new normal' will likely not remain limited to benign disruptions, such as blended learning or continued work from home and the related office space redux. If the pandemic persists for many months or spills over into another year, the recession will go into free fall. Countries with strong social security systems and/or capital will activate a range of protective measures to prevent public disorder. Countries without such a safety net will be forced to choose between solidarity and oppression.

"If the pandemic persists longer than a year, it will affect the world's economy like a global war; in that case, food rationing and other wartime measures will become inevitable. This will entail identification, allocation, distribution and delivery - all of it enabled by a range of digital tech. Identity control will therefore have to be enforced very strictly, to avoid fraud. Other previously inconceivable disruptions will occur, e.g., primary and secondary education will need to enter into public-private partnerships with commercial providers of automated instruction, learning and testing platforms at scale, able to instruct the majority of students, while teachers from formal schools deal with small numbers of exceptions, such as special-needs students etc.

"Higher education will become a terrain where a small number of entertainment-savvy lecturers attract huge student audiences via tech-enabled remote learning, while professors unskilled in it become dispensable. A 'marketplace' will emerge, where students will be able to pick and choose courses from any university, to create unique, personalized schooling 'menus.' This will create a demand for a certification mechanism at a level above individual universities. Distinguished schools with vast traditions will thus have to reconsider and redefine their missions and their very purpose and a number of them may not prove sustainable. Overwhelmed health systems will become the reserve of emergency and infection treatments. Workplaces will become leaner and nimbler. Specialized teams will work on project-based assignments, often without the need for a large enterprise to sustain them. Taxation and labour laws will need to change, to enable individuals to participate in a more secure, more equitable digitally enabled gig economy."

Jon Lebkowsky, CEO, founder and digital strategist at Polycot Associates, wrote, "My hopes:

Technical innovations to address and mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Not just clean energies, but also technologies to balance CO2 in the air. Regarding clean energy, innovative battery technologies for energy storage.

(related) Smarter and lighter transportation technologies, including proliferation of high-speed rail systems and smarter last mile travel, diminishing the number of individual automobiles and the use of fossil fuels.

Improved space technology and potential colonization of the moon and Mars.

Innovative methods for managing disease, including ways to combat viruses through genetic modifications and nanotech.

Development of small, safer nuclear reactors as new sources for energy.

Ongoing development of new food sources and evolution away from meat consumption as we can derive complete proteins from lab-developed sources.

And I am most worried about technology-mediated indoctrination through propaganda and 'managed alternate truths.' And I am also concerned about the potential for the increasing and evolving use of AI-driven surveillance technologies."

Mary Chayko, author of " Superconnected," said, "In the absence of a national commitment and strategy to assist marginalized populations in attaining online access, skills and literacy, social inequalities will persist and deepen in the 'new normal.' This will exacerbate all current societal problems: racial and gender discrimination, poverty, health crises and complications, educational and work-related inequities, privacy and surveillance. Digital technologies can be employed to help to improve these conditions, but unless their benefits can be realized by all, social justice and equality will remain elusive. Digital technology, and the means to use and understand it, must be considered a primary social good. Technologies that will assist people in living productive, healthy lives - like online learning, working and telemedicine tools - should be freely and widely available, along with necessary and relevant information and support. I am most worried that the scope of tech companies' impact on our lives will become so deep, sophisticated and far-reaching that we will fail to see and resist it or grow weary of doing so."

Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center and professor of journalism innovation at City University of New York, commented, "Yes, there may be unintended positive consequences, including greater awareness of racial inequities in society; less travel and thus less environmental damage; greater ability to work at home and remotely and be closer to family. But we cannot gloss over the still-unknown health repercussions that millions of needlessly infected people will have to deal with; the severe economic impact on so many sectors of a service economy permanently affecting the employment of people in lower-paid jobs; the likely permanent economic damage to universities and colleges as institutions; the lost educational time for children during the pandemic; and mental stress on everyone. As much we may now suffer Zoom fatigue, I believe that in the long run, having become accustomed to seeing people in online calls, we will find they provide richer interaction. At work we will still be addicted to having too many damned meetings but if we can waste less time traveling or commuting to them, all the better. Social media enabled us to connect with people anywhere in glancing ways; video conferencing in many forms - virtual conferences, happy hours and so on - will let us connect in more direct and meaningful ways. I would like to think that we would see the value in gathering and sharing health data at a level that would allow us to spot and treat problems early in their spread in the future, but I fear a growing moral panic around data may prevent that."

Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote, "I expect that, when it comes to technology, our 'new normal' will be an even greater dependency on privately owned infrastructure and platforms, making us more beholden to Silicon Valley than before. I worry that the amount of time that we're now spending at home has led us to this greater reliance on it, and that companies are not adapting along with us. When it comes to platforms, specifically, one of my biggest concerns is the impact they have on our speech and our well-being or dignity. On the one hand, hate speech is rampant and companies are responding piecemeal. On the other hand, at a time when many of us need platforms for our livelihoods, companies are cracking down prudishly on nudity, sexuality and the human body. The impact that this has on sex workers, burlesque performers and others whose work touches on these themes must not be ignored; by banning content around these topics without their consultation, we've essentially created an untouchable class of workers.

"I worry about the unaccountability of Silicon Valley and the ways in which corporate policymakers practice 'both-sidesism' in order to craft policies that benefit the lowest common denominator without upsetting too many others. I worry about the fact that so many people are willing to hand over the governance of their speech to unaccountable actors. I worry about the potential for technology companies to keep our own history from us - already we've seen images from U.S. protests taken down (often for violating rules on 'graphic violence' - even when it's the Feds committing the violence - or in some cases, bans on nudity), echoing what Syrians have been pointing out for years about the erasure of videos, many of which contain documentation of war crimes, emerging from their country. I worry about the continued capture of data for no purpose other than to sell us more stuff we don't need."

Morgan G. Ames, associate director of the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology & Society, responded, "While I am heartened by the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement in the United States as well as protest movements in Hong Kong and elsewhere around the world, I look to previous disasters and broader trends as a probable guide to what will be coming. And what I see are too many opportunities for the powerful to retrench and expand their power. Ubiquitous surveillance, increasingly fascist policing tactics, the expansion of hate groups that amplify the worst state ideologies, and the widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everyone else are all global structural trends that will be incredibly difficult, and incredibly disruptive, to reverse. As much as I would like to hold out hope that the disruptions caused by the novel coronavirus can be turned toward social justice, the evidence so far that this is the case is really not good."

Vint Cerf, Internet Hall of Fame member and vice president at Google, observed, "We may see more flexibility in work-from-home provisions. Travel may be less necessary thanks to video conferencing. I have maintained significant international interactions despite time zone challenges for the past three months. I further expect:

Cloud computing and cloud commuting!

We will see an Internet of Medical Things (sensors mostly), as remote doctor house calls escalate. There is an interesting tension involved in digitally linking a lot of one's online life: calendar, messaging, travel, geo-tracking/location - all this information can be usefully correlated to make life easier but, if exposed, also erodes (destroys?) privacy. The more we rely on online resources, the more tempting it is to interlink information to take automatic and useful actions.

Reminders and notifications, etc. For example, I am on email a lot of my time, and getting an email saying a FedEx package has arrived is actually very helpful. Of course, if there are too many 'messaging' applications all running at once they 'self-pollute' as in getting an email because you have a LinkedIn message (Aaaaargh!).

I am optimistic about the use of information technology to automate chores and to facilitate cooperative work. Shared access to Google Docs has been a remarkably enabling capability - shared spreadsheets for tracking group activity for example. Still, there is the exposure of personal information, lax security leading to serious compromises, poor user attention to security. Reliance on autonomous software leading to unexpected failures and consequences."

Christina J. Colclough, an expert on the future of work and the politics of technology and ethics in AI, observed, "Unless our governments step into another gear, we will:

Become super-surveilled at the expense of our fundamental rights and human rights.

Work will become more and more individualised and precarious as companies first cut costs by making working from home the norm and then by hiring contract workers rather than permanent employees.

Mental health will suffer as loneliness, financial struggles and competitive forces pressure individuals.

Innovation will decline as social capital declines due to the above.

Workers who need to go to work (physically) will be segmented from the 'others.' I am tech optimist under the condition that it is regulated and governed.

"I would like the following to be regulated:

Improved workers' data rights. These are either weak in current regulation, or nonexistent.

Collective data rights. All data regulations (bar some discussions currently held within Indian Parliament) are concerned with an individual's rights. We need to think of communities, of workers, of citizens, of businesses and of the relationship between state, market and civil society and ask: How can we benefit from digital tech so it benefits people and planet?

We must break up Big Tech. Its power is unfathomable and comes even at the expense of democracy and governments' scope to regulate.

Public procurement must include a demand that all data generated and produced is shared between public and private actors.

We must globally enforce the principle of data minimisation and, preferably, data emphermality.

We need to talk redistribution again and close tax havens. Probably tax revenue and not profit.

We need vastly improved rights over data inferences.

"Among my worries are these:

That we lose the right to be human, in as such that who you are, what you want, your dreams, desires and aspirations become subordinate to algorithms and algorithmically defined choices on your behalf.

That we are monitored and surveilled at home, in the public space and at work without the means and power to resist.

That democracy will suffer, as the public sector is fundamentally dependent on data from tech companies and all that that entails of desired versions of 'reality.'"

Alan D. Mutter, a consultant and former Silicon Valley CEO, wrote, "We are not going to code our way out of the moral and political mess we are in. Technology will help if the right people do the right things. It will do epic damage if they don't. The social media were hijacked by thugs and trolls to do incalculable damage. Their efforts were at once ignored and abetted by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk to amp up page views to boost ad revenues. Social media had great promise to level the intellectual playing field by giving everyone the power to give or get whatever information they wanted. Instead, the social media have become treacherous cesspools of mis- and mal-information. Artificial intelligence can do wondrous things so long as it is properly trained and deployed. That is its notable fail. For instance, AI often fails to accurately recognize the faces of people of color. When AI is used to recommend sentences for criminals, it tends to discriminate against people of color. The failures of social media and AI are not technology problems. They are problems of human design and execution. Technology is only as good as the people who devise and control it. I am less interested in potential technology advances; I am worried about whether new developments will be wisely and safely deployed."

Kathleen M. Carley, director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University, commented, "More people will be able to work remotely, allowing companies access to greater pools of talent, and a possible leveling of pay across cities. There will be an increased understanding of viruses and how to create vaccines and improved technology to support health care. There will be regulation of and self-imposed constraints on social media platforms.

"There will also be: increased public understanding of the limits of, and problems with, machine learning; police-hiring reform; an international response to disinformation; improved technologies for group meetings online; new agile business models for technologies that mainly employ the web; improved health standards in schools and public places; improved sick leave policies; a decrease in business travel, possibly leading to a better carbon footprint; less middle management. There will be a small increase in automation, but more effort on designing and building even more automation for the home and small businesses that will become more ubiquitous and some type of certification for AI to show that it meets some ethical standards. There will be certification for online tools to show that they meet some privacy standard.

Expect to see: increased access to the internet; more stores that operate only for pickup and returns; more mail-in voting, and experiments with online voting; increased provision of medical advice and appointments online; increased online services for legal issues.

There will be: more jobs requiring more computer skills, or skills with online web tools; improved search routines; new parental control panels for online-group-meeting technologies; new toys that support interaction through the internet for very young children and grad school 'children'; an increase in self-paced online master's programs for those working remotely.

There are some things that are likely to reduce the quality of life: a decrease in the variety of items carried by grocery stores and, indeed, all stores; a decrease in gourmet food items, specialty tools, and high-end fashion or a major increase in their cost; favorite restaurants will have closed; food prices will increase.

There will be an emergence of an overwhelming number of stories, movies, songs dealing with the pandemic.

In many countries, there will be fewer women in the workforce, and fewer women in schools.

There will be an initial increase in income disparity, which should eventually be reduced through an increase in service jobs and greater access to the internet.

Scams, fraud and price gouging will rise due to new internet services, delivery services and online shopping services.

"Other things - it is not clear if they will be good or bad, but are possible:

There will be a new baby boom entering preschool and kindergarten in 2025.

Expect to see mandatory health screening in organizations.

I hope we will increase the national debate and create a shared perception about what level of regulation is acceptable on what type of technology.

That there will be recognition that disinformation is like pornography and it has to be treated similarly in legal terms. There will be improved transparency through online access, etc., of health processes, legal and government processes and assorted other processes.

There will be certification programs for privacy-preserving software and for ethical software and there will be international treaties relating to information on social media.

There will be more funding for research on robotics for home use, and a consequent transition to market, improved technologies for measuring and removing particulates from the air, improvements in our understanding of how viruses and bacteria impact the human body, and so increased speed in generating and testing vaccines. If the cost of computing does not go down, it will slow down the development of the Internet of Things, however, we should expect to see more smart technology in the home and workplace."

Sam S. Adams, a 24-year veteran of IBM now working as a senior research scientist in artificial intelligence for RTI International, wrote, "The confluence of the global pandemic and the U.S. presidential election cycle is likely to accelerate a large number of large-scale changes in multiple domains and industries. Given the caveats of no multiple concurrent pandemics and no revolution-scale social unrest, these changes will likely accelerate a number of positive transitions that will improve life in general.

Telework and resulting de-urbanization: The forced telework situation due to the pandemic has opened many eyes to new possibilities. Living in the city to avoid nasty commutes gives way to moving to the country and buying land vs. a high-priced apartment. If commuting patterns change drastically, then lots of other dominoes fall, including pollution and its impacts.

Telehealth is here to stay: No way customer management systems will return to requiring in-person visits for practitioners to get paid. This will accelerate other forms of telehealth, expand the physician assistant and nurse practitioner ranks, and allow doctors and specialists to telework as well, resulting [in] more optimal use of medical resources without reducing quality of care. I expect quality of care by 2025 to actually improve because of this transition.

Tele-justice: The U.S. court system has been all but shut down during the pandemic. Some jails have released large numbers of lesser offenders to prevent pandemic blooms. This pandemic straw will break the judicial backlog's back, and a number of new approaches will take root. I predict this will also force legal reforms in how trials are conducted, which may even cause major changes in the legal profession.

Tele-education: Forced virtual schooling (where most parents are also forced into part-time homeschooling as well) forces state public school systems to create virtual curricula, which is then available to non-local, non-physical attending students, including traditional homeschoolers. Competition for quality and the digital nature of the content transforms the education system into a hybrid physical-virtual system, where access and quality of content and instructors is better distributed. The MOOC revolution in college and professional training will accelerate into the primary/secondary grade levels, and commercial education content providers will grow dramatically as parents of even public school children are able to augment their kids' education with high-quality commercial sources, cafeteria-style at low costs.

Communication networks: In 2025, 5G deployment is widespread, driven by a national mandate to eliminate internet have-nots. Broadband access becomes a human right-level issue."

J. Scott Marcus, an economist, political scientist and engineer who works as a telecommunications consultant, predicted, "The impact of the pandemic is large, but the world will eventually recover (assuming that the virus does not mutate to a still-more-dangerous form). This was the case in 1919 and there is no reason to expect anything different here. Changes such as remote work, teleconferencing, telemedicine and remote learning are mostly positive. The changes that have emerged were technically feasible for years but held up by institutional rigidities.

"Things will not go back to where they were - not entirely, anyway. As a whole, I think most people will be worse off, not solely because of the pandemic, but at least as much due to intensifying trade wars, a decline in international cooperation and more. The impact of climate change will still not be catastrophic, but it will continue to grow. I hope for the acceleration of trends toward remote work for jobs in the upper-income quartile or two. The greatly increased use of teleconferencing, with a corresponding decline in travel; tourism will take a long time to return to previous levels, if ever. Increased reliance on telemedicine. A major retooling of the education and training systems was needed anyway, not only to shift to remote learning (which is not simply the same as current practice done from afar), but also to lifelong learning.

"My worries are information bubbles, fake news and their negative impact on traditional (more reliable) news media and public broadcasting. I worry about the growing dominance of a small number of platforms. My worry for AI and big data is challenges with explainability."

Glenn Edens, professor at Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University, previously a vice president at PARC, observed, "There is a good chance by 2025 society will have forgotten all about the current crisis. A key question is, how soon do we find a viable vaccine and how long does it take to put that into production, and when does it become part of the annual flu-season vaccine? If for some reason a vaccine and treatment continue to be elusive, then all bets are off for recovery by 2025.

"The economic fallout from the current crisis will likely take a decade to 'fix' - we should be prepared for five to seven years of lower growth prospects, higher taxes, continued failures of firms and an uneven recovery. It is reasonable to expect that some industries will find it harder to return to 'pre-COVID-19' status quo. Some will not recover - for example, e-commerce, on-demand delivery and working from home are not retreating. Many firms are realizing they don't need huge commercial real estate or physical infrastructure - I'd predict a significant restructuring of commercial real estate. The displacement of brick-and-mortar retail by e-commerce, which has been steady and slow, has been kicked into high gear - how will the convenience of e-commerce versus the experience of physical retail unfold? My bet is that many brands and chains will not survive and the very nature of a 'shopping mall' will have to change dramatically - these facilities will survive, as will site-specific retail experiences. Consumption = convenience, so I'd suggest e-commerce is likely to jump to account for 50% or more of all retail sales and it will continue to grow.

"The conflict of the individual versus the good for the commons has been vividly brought to the forefront, and so far the results are not looking so good for the commons. While working from home (or remotely under different scenarios) is not perfect or anywhere near as good as it could be, it is here to stay. Many firms are discovering it is very cost-effective. The jury is still out on the true impact of productivity gains or losses due to working from home. Many of the firms I've talked to are seriously thinking about incorporating working from home as a long-term part of their human resources and commercial real estate strategy. This will continue to provide funding for more innovations in the communications technology sector - we are already seeing improved security and some small advances in user interface and user-experience improvements (we may finally get real spatialized audio).

"There is a dark side of these tools, which is not well understood yet - many managers I've spoken to are intrigued with (giddy about?) the increased tools for monitoring employees, their work output, productivity, work styles and intricate details of their behavior - this will be exploited and may lead to unintended consequences. At the same time, it is interesting that the 'internet' didn't collapse - it held up pretty well, and it is pretty clear that investing in high-speed internet access is going to continue to set geographic areas apart economically. We seem to also be getting more serious about security. Longer-term it is clear, of course, that society will continue to increase its dependence on digitally intermediated systems for every facet of life: health care, education, shopping, groceries, entertainment, transportation, work and finance - that trend is unstoppable. At the same time, we are a social species and we crave social interaction - risks will not sway us. :)"

Gregory Shannon, chief scientist at the CERT division of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute observed, "I see willingness to trust and flexibility in trust as a key element of the 'new normal.' Previous trust modes/models/habits/norms will evolve, and those most successful in the new normal will have adapted/optimized their approaches on trust. Those who don't adapt/evolve their approach to trust will be hampered, inefficient and even isolated in the new normal.

"The new normal will continue and accelerate the move towards digital spaces, which, without in-person interaction, are abstract and hard for many to grasp. I find it interesting that many modern efficiencies are based on getting many people physically close together. Transportation, sports events, restaurants, education, work teams, hospitals, city parks, gyms, places of worship, Fifth Avenue, etc. Who and where do we each trust to get close to others? Can we get 'close' in a meaningful way via technology? It's not clear to me how.

"Will we see an exodus from cities as density becomes more of a bug than a feature? How will we meet new people? Will it be much more localized, like to our neighborhood? I expect a real increase in social isolation, especially for those older, or less tech savvy, or with few resources to connect virtually. I expect smart virtual avatars/agents will make and manage connections. They can suggest/negotiate introductions to new colleagues with relevant yet diverse perspectives. The agents could also warn/caution when new colleagues seem insincere, untrustworthy or even artificial.

"I expect we'll see much better virtual collaboration technologies. From wikis and such to continuous virtual conferencing. I worry about the availability of accessible, stable and secure bandwidth. The current 'best effort' residential connectivity plans are failing. There are too many dropped calls, glitchy video, audio drops (every other word) and a lack of scalability for group discussions. Privacy is also certainly an issue. If these are not addressed well it will increase social isolation."

Chris Arkenberg, research manager at Deloitte's Center for Technology, Media and Telecommunications, predicted, "While a five-year horizon will see some classes of society claiming benefits from the COVID-19 discontinuity such as more remote-working arrangements, fewer commutes, better habits in many high-traffic institutions, etc., many will still be under the economic downturn. Many jobs are simply disappearing under the twin engines of small-business destruction and enterprise-scale automation. More job providers are already seeking the security of automation to hedge against the next crisis. Eventually COVID-19 will also likely accelerate the deconstructing of an aging capitalism that fails to allocate resources to teachers, workers, 'essential services' and many other economic sectors that have been undervalued while favoring rent-seekers and financial vaporware that adds no real value to society. This will take 10 years at least.

"At the same time, global political leaders who recently rode a far-right, nationalistic wave of anti-immigration will see more election cycles by 2025. With such strong economic challenges, it is unclear if nationalism will retain its influence or if there will be a mandate for a more technocratic and educated leadership. One might hope for the latter, given the [Trump] administration's failure to manage COVID-19. In short, a five-year horizon will likely still feel disrupted and degraded for most, while a 10-year horizon may see some of the sea changes underway that were only amplified by COVID-19 start to yield meaningful results.

"The reality is that global, national and state institutions are being reconceived under the impact of globalization, the internet, global warming and, now, global pandemic. There will be a rocky transition to the next stable state."

Kenneth Cukier, senior editor at The Economist and co-author of " Big Data," said, "I see this for 2025: Economic crises, less global trade and constant international political conflict. Companies substituting technology (machines and algorithms) for human labor. A rise in populist or 'infotainment' governments means serious, long-term problems aren't addressed by the state, and well-meaning civil institutions can't have the impact they'd like.

"The educated, wealthy, moderates (aka 'elites') retreat even further from mainstream society, believing the situation unfixable and to avoid being a target of attack. Worthy social-justice issues like racism get hijacked by extremists, creating a 'cultural revolution' of intolerance that crimps free expression and ideas.

"New technologies will greatly improve the quality of life, such as AI in health care. We will be able to scale up productivity to new heights by applying software and data to all areas of economic activity. Tech will also be on the front lines of responding to climate change. But tech will continue to foment huge problems like misinformation and social platforms that drive people apart. It will create new problems, such as dominating the business landscape by dint of size and scale that offline players can't compete against. And in tech will be the vital ingredient of a new class of weaponry without safeguards to control it well."

Stephen Downes, senior research officer for digital technologies with the National Research Council of Canada, commented, "The net result of the pandemic will be an increased recognition of the role of governance and civil society, seen in an increased interest in social and economic support, including, for example, the need for public health care and for income support. It will also be seen in greater social and civic responsibility, including new controls on policing and greater access to services for minorities and underserved populations. And it will be seen in a wider recognition of social responsibility, for example a return to more progressive taxation, especially corporate taxation, as a response to income inequality.

"The most significant change could be summarized with the slogan 'protocol, not platform,' as Mike Masnick argued last year. The idea is that instead of depending on a specific social media application to connect with friends and colleagues, people could use the application of their choice and use a common messaging standard. This makes it more difficult for platforms to shape discourse using algorithms and to monetize discourse using tracking and advertising. The current structure of dialogue and media privileges extreme and provocative content, which tends to polarize society and to make it more difficult to come to consensus on social issues. Discourse that is more cooperative and creative enables constructive responses to be adopted society-wide to pressing issues of the day, including but not limited to equity, environment, prejudice and policing. With common communications protocols, solutions to pressing issues will begin to emerge. Common protocols also enable greater security, through such mechanisms of zero-knowledge proofs, for example. This allows better insight into the effectiveness of social programs and enables governments and critics to evaluate innovation on more than merely financial or economic criteria.

"Our experience during the pandemic showed clearly how even modest improvements in interoperable communications can have a significant effect. Before the pandemic, there was no incentive to support widely accessible cross-platform video conferencing. Then we had Zoom, a simple tool everyone could use, and suddenly we could work from home, learn remotely or host conferences online. Having learned how convenient and efficient so many online services have become, we will be much less likely to commute to work, attend residence-based campuses or fly to conferences. This makes the world of work, learning and commerce much more accessible to large populations who previously did not have the resources to participate, and greatly increases our efficiency and productivity.

"My concern about the near future is that our technology choices will force us into mutually exclusive and competing factions. These factions may be defined politically or may be defined by class or race, by economic status or by power and control. Technological dystopia occurs when one faction uses technology against the other, perhaps by means of surveillance and spying, perhaps by means of manipulation and misinformation or ever by means of hacking and disruption. When technology divides us, it also disempowers us, as everything about us becomes subservient to the conflict. Our agency, our identity, our activities - all these become the means and mechanisms for one faction to fight the other. This is a worry about technological public spaces becoming private spaces: There's no application we can use or no online space we can go that isn't owned by some entity and designed to further the objectives of that entity, with the social goods of individual freedom and social cohesion taking a back seat to those objectives. It's the sort of world where we no longer own things, but can merely lease them, subject to the terms, conditions and digital rights management of the technology company. It's a world in which there is no space for creativity or free expression outside the constraints of end-user licensing agreements, and no public space for discussion, decision and action where the needs of society can prevail over private and corporate interests. By 2025 we will have a clear idea whether we are slipping into technological dystopia. The more difficult we find it to interact on an equal basis with people from other countries, other cultures, other political beliefs or even other platforms or social networks, the less likely we are to be able to find common solutions to global problems. The more prevalent surveillance and control through technological means becomes, the less likely a less-powerful people can redress the excesses of the more powerful. These, eventually, will manifest in physical symptoms of dystopia: shortages, outages, civil unrest, open conflict."

A lawyer and former law school dean who specializes in technology issues predicted, "There will be greater awareness of need for broadscale safety nets for employees - workforce employment protections (such as those implemented by EU). There will be greater societal demands for public health and safety protections supported by governments. There will be a widespread demand for more effective leadership of government institutions. Just contrast how the leadership overseeing the COVID pandemic problems in New Zealand, much of Europe, Taiwan and South Korea with the anemic, chaotic leadership in the U.S. People will demand more and better leadership traits in their elected leaders. My hopes are for better social media 'ethics' by movements to constrain and reduce hate speech, overt hatred online and manifest dishonesty on social and political issues. A greater societal awareness of need to rely on truth-telling online, especially the major influential sources (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) while recognizing that some things are opinions and should be respected as long as not false, defamatory, hateful, likely to inspire hatred, etc. There will be a movement from the essential lawlessness of the internet to a demand for a more civil and civic discourse approach. I worry over the tech companies' lack of respect for the importance of civic discourse on their platforms. Much of the social media space is essentially the Wild West: no laws, no rules, hate speech is permitted if it supports advertising revenues, etc. Those companies' employees are revolting within the context of their employment, and they are demanding that the corporate leadership grow a spine and step up against the voices of discord, hatred, anarchy, etc."

Amali De Silva-Mitchell, a futurist and consultant participating in multistakeholder internet-governance processes, said, "Technology will ease the work-life balance; increase productivity; help reduce carbon emissions; allow for savings on infrastructure expenditures such as roads, although there should be more spending on internet infrastructure and actions to enable universal access. Life may seem to speed up, and new technologies that were supposed to still be in development for a decade will become available sooner. In-person social life with a human touch will be restricted and perhaps even mistrusted. The packed pub or tea house will only be open to those who can provide proof of vaccination.

"Evidence-based identification to show 'purity of health' and even health histories will be required everywhere. Face coverings will be commonplace, and each person may be embedded with an ID chip that can be tracked on the street. Outward appearances may appear to be the same as today, but the underlying monitoring of each person will be much greater. People will trade privacy for a semblance of the old normal. People will become more aware of their actions and feelings and be knowledgeable about repercussions. It is possible that brain waves will be used to monitor the emotional space of the public so as to predict behavior of crowds. We may see new forms of safeguards or barriers in projections via holograms which will also be common at business meetings.

"AI will be everywhere, but there will be issues with the quality. The individual's self-identity could decline, and the need to conform to a norm increase, as being out of step will create the need to sort out the exceptions. People will become more managed, spontaneous behavior will be discouraged, although creativity at work will be encouraged. Humans will be replaced in many settings by robots, forcing them to compete; economic security may become something of the past unless the state provides universal benefits. People will guard their minds as if they are a gold mine as that will be the ticket to their individual sustainability.

"Medical technologies may assist humans to live a full life, from telemedicine 24/7, to new medications from AI developments, to new monitoring devices and delivery devices, prosthetics, etc. Items such as clothing, footwear, nutrition, household goods, vehicles, etc., could be designed with technology to optimize output as well as service and be produced or delivered at reduced cost. Waste minimization, safekeeping, comfort, specification and adaptation will be key. Minimizing expenditures will be key for the average working person, hence technologies that assist with that goal to produce the product or service at little cost the consumer will do well, hence the trend to AI-driven technologies for production, etc. Wearable technologies will be important, as people keep all their possessions close to them for safekeeping, hence there will be more and more micro products and perhaps the use of holograms to assist with screen display. Voice and sound technology will assist the elderly and disabled in a very beneficial manner, as will text-to-speech and speech-to-text. These applications will be developed further to assist with everyday work productivity. The need to remember things will be something of the past.

"People are giving up a lot of privacy to receive the benefits of technology. Data risk management in an ethical manner is critical. Standards will lag behind new technical developments. The even greater risk will be the lack of transparency around emerging technologies, and thus the lack of feedback from the public to mitigate the risks of these new developments until an event occurs. A few companies will have data concentrated in their hands and any mismanagement, including poor ethical standards, could have serious outcomes."

Greg Sherwin, vice president for engineering and information technology at Singularity University, responded, "The new normal will include a greater awareness of systemic dependencies and the need for social goods. Linear thinking and highly individualistic, reductionist approaches to society and the planet will shift towards communitarianism. The myth of social atomism is being broken and more will observe the harm of that model on individual belonging and health as well as social and planetary cohesion and survival. That being said, privacy will continue to slide away as a mythical value. Algorithms will continue to rule our lives but will be questioned as to their validity, bias and rules for human appeal. We will also have quickly discovered before 2021 that we over-indexed for how we thought the pandemic would change our view towards health in our surroundings. Instead of the overarching narratives about how offices and architecture will never be the same, we will have found common ground with the human experiences of 1919 - where everyone quickly returned to their normal social habits."

Mike Godwin, former general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, "The 'new normal' has the potential to be more humane for workers in many ways. First, it seems clear that we are learning rapidly the extent to which 'knowledge workers' can work effectively from home, provided that they have the right informational infrastructure that supports such remote work. Cutting down on the need to commute, making schedules flexible and increasing the ability for employees to be caregivers and parents while working will be helpful.

"Second, there is a growing consensus that providing income security is the right approach to coping with abrupt economic downturns that can be caused by pandemics, by climate change, and by social unrest associated with both pandemics and unrest - including increased migration, which will be a major disruptor in this century. The greatest single improvement I hope for is increased access to reliable broadband internet for the purposes of remote work, as well as the more efficient coordination of aid and resources in response to weather crises or public-health crises. The digital devices at the endpoints of the broadband infrastructure (personal computers and phones, primarily, but more and more devices with other functions) already will have a great deal of local processing power, but the key point on the critical path will be the prioritization of broadband access that's inexpensive, robust, capacious and widely available in small towns and rural areas. Enabling competition and appropriate government subsidies and other support will likely play a central role in keeping prices down and keeping capacity rising. I worry that processing power and widespread data sharing will make it increasingly easy for individual privacy to be eroded, not least through technologies like facial recognition but also through traffic analysis and aggregation of individual transactional patterns. The amount of processing power this kind of monitoring and tracking of individuals will require is already here."

David Krieger, director of the Institute for Communication and Leadership, based in Switzerland, commented, "The growing need for a viable vision of a global future will (hopefully) shift political discourse away from traditional ideologies toward new horizons. Even if the impact of medical science on politics may be short-lived and ambiguous, the impact of digital technologies on society is enormous and will continue. Both in the private and the public sectors, in education, health care, research and other areas, organizations of all kinds have realized that home office, virtual delivery of services and products, virtual collaborative work, new work and decentralization function very well and reduce costs as well as solve pressing environmental problems.

"Many digital immigrants have been quickly and even forcibly 'naturalized' into the digital world, and traditional top-down, command-and-control management has received perhaps a death blow. There is a clear need to reduce bureaucracy and cut red tape, not only in health care but in all areas of society. The virus has disabled not only many people, but also many traditional convictions about social and economic order, about the way things have to be done.

"A further impact of the pandemic will probably lead to increasing demands for transparency and open information. Already many accuse China of dangerous censorship and secrecy with regard to information about the outbreak. Scientists have joined in a worldwide exchange of data and research. Publishers have torn down paywalls. Open access to information of all kinds is considered a priority. Intellectual property claims are becoming suspect. In addition to this, governments are deploying tracking apps, and citizens are accepting more disclosure of so-called 'personal information.'

"In the trade-off between liberty and security/health, security seems to have better cards. This becomes even more apparent when we consider that the shift of more governmental and business activities into the cyber realm will bring greater dangers of cyber criminality and cyber warfare, which in turn demand much greater investments in cybersecurity, or indeed, entirely new concepts of security and accompanying social and organizational changes. Taken together, it appears that in the wake of the pandemic, we are moving faster towards the data-driven global network society than ever before.

"Some have predicted that the pandemic will end the 'techlash,' since what we need to survive is more information and not less about everyone and everything. This information must be analyzed and used as quickly as possible, which spurs on investments in AI and big data analytics. Calls for privacy, for regulation of tech giants and for moratoriums on the deployment of tracking, surveillance and AI are becoming weaker and losing support throughout the world. Perhaps traditional notions of civil liberties need to be revised and updated for a world in which connectivity, flow, transparency and participation are the major values."

The sections of this report that follow organize hundreds of additional expert quotes under the headings that follow the common themes listed in the tables at the beginning of this report. For more on how this canvassing was conducted, including full question wording, see " About this canvassing."

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Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie and Emily A. Vogels

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Experts Say the 'New Normal' in 2025 Will Be Far More Tech-Driven, Presenting More Big Challenges

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A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people. Still, a portion believe things will be better in a 'tele-everything' world.

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AI and atoms: How artificial intelligence is revolutionizing nuclear material

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There's a three-dimensional solution to manage the evolving dual-use concern of AI: advance states-centric monitoring and regulation, promote intellectual exchange between the non-proliferation sector and the AI industry, and encourage AI industrial contributions.

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This article talks about how AI can create opportunities in the workplace. As AI develops it can be seen as dangerous, however AI creates opportunities in previously unexplored areas.

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Council Post: How Does Artificial Intelligence Create New Jobs?

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While AI may reduce the demand for some jobs, it can also create new employment opportunities in previously unexplored areas.

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5 Ways Autonomous Cars Will Reshape Our World

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5 Ways Autonomous Cars Will Reshape Our World

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Accompanying the rise of AI is the rise of many new out-of-this-world technologies, such as self-driving cars. Autonomous driving has many benefits: It is eco-friendly, safer, and more efficient. They are slowly rising in popularity with the rise of AI, and soon, our roads will be traversed by self-driving vehicles.

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What we consider to be autonomous car technology is a complex combination of algorithms, sensors, actuators, automotive parts and robust processors that run all the software. Each of these components play a critical role in enabling autonomous cars to accurately map their surroundings and monitor the location of nearby vehicles, traffic lights, pedestrians, road edges and lane markings. Each of these subsystems will need to undergo significant improvements to achieve a fully functioning and safe autonomous vehicle. While we haven't achieved enough progress in all these areas, recent trends show that we are not very far from perfecting these components. Once we do achieve these milestones, however, we won't just change the way cars are operated, but will also see consequences extending far beyond the realm of autonomous car technology.

5 Ways Autonomous Cars Will Reshape Our World

With the evolution of autonomous car technology, the world will see a drastic change in many different aspects.

1. Fewer Road Accidents

Approximately 1.3 million people die annually due to road traffic crashes. Most of these crashes are due to errors in human judgment and everyday, around 32 people die in The United States due to drunk-driving crashes, which means one person almost every 45 minutes. With the help of autonomous cars, there will be a significant reduction in the number of crashes as there will be no human action involved. Driverless or autonomous vehicles have sensors and cameras attached to their bodies, which help them to sense what is coming ahead, bad weather conditions and also how likely other cars are to go in a specific direction. Waymo has utilized this technology in its fifth-generation Waymo Driver, which consists of complementary sensors, which include LiDAR, 360-degree view cameras and radars. These technologies help the vehicle's movement to adapt based on the weather conditions, time of the day and other similar factors. Such features are estimated to lead to a 94% reduction in road fatalities if autonomous cars become the primary mode of transport.

2. Reduced Car Ownership

On average, owning a car costs $9,666 a year. Most of these cars remain unused or parked for around 95% of the year. This makes purchasing a car costly as it requires a lot of maintenance. Most driverless cars will likely run as shared vehicles, owned primarily by aggregators. Due to this, there will be a reduction in the number of car owners and will help to reduce traffic issues and increase parking spaces. It will also enable users to save money on owning a car. Families that own multiple cars are likely to own just one. They will be able to use the same autonomous car for different purposes. For example, in a single household, the same driverless car can drop the parents off at work and then drive back home to pick up the kids for school.

3. Automated Logistics Operations

Driverless cars will also be designed to deliver food and packages in the coming future. Autonomous vehicles will enable businesses to cater to customer demand quickly and smoothly. Autonomous cars and semi-trucks can be equipped with various special sensors and cameras to recognize objects and addresses. In addition to operational efficiencies, autonomous vehicles will also improve fuel efficiency and fleet utilization. By 2050 there is expected to be a 40% reduction in urban vehicle costs.

4. Improved Livability

The global carbon dioxide level measured in 2022 stood at 421 parts per million, an increase of 50% more than the pre-industrial levels. In the United States, passenger vehicles account for roughly 16.4% of GHG emissions. With the introduction of driverless cars, people can breathe fresher air, reducing their carbon footprint effectively. They will also have more space to walk and reach their destination faster. Autonomous car technology will provide a way to reduce parking spaces and traffic congestion. Walkability and livability will be greatly enhanced. It will also reduce noise pollution, making life easier for both humans and animals. GHG reduction benefits of driverless vehicles in the US would cause 87-94% lesser emission per vehicle-mile trip by 2030.

5. Commotion-Free Traffic and Parking Tickets

On average, Americans spend 17 hours per year searching for parking, costing $345 in wasted fuel, emissions and time. More than $20 billion is spent by Americans on overpaid parking costs. In addition to this, traffic ticket penalties can range from $280 - $ 490, depending on how fast the car is going. Additional fees and penalties may also be applied depending on the location. Driverless or autonomous cars are designed to avoid traffic tickets altogether as they are equipped with sensors that will tell them what speed the car is supposed to go and what the signal color is. Millions of traffic tickets and parking tickets are produced every year and this causes a lot of frustration among car owners. So with the usage of autonomous cars, users won't be required to pay for parking and traffic tickets, saving their costs and reducing their frustration.

How Autonomous Car Technology is Already Reshaping our World

Waymo is Google's platform for autonomous or driverless vehicles which operates fully driverless cars all days of the week around Phoenix, Arizona. Waymo has been titled the "World's Most Experienced Driver" by Alphabet AI. In 2020, the technology expanded to operate commercial trucks as well.

Before Waymo Driver operates in a new area, it will map out the entire territory with high detailing. This includes registering curbs and stops signs. Then the platform adapts these into a customized map which is equipped with real-time sensor data. The information noted is then incorporated with real-time details to see how the road user might accordingly drive or behave. Through machine learning, complex data is gathered and is deciphered as to what is around the vehicle. It also responds to signals and signs like temporary stop signs and traffic light colors. This experience has been built over 20 million miles of real world driving and over 20 billion miles traveled in simulation.

Currently, Waymo is one of the companies operating a fully autonomous (driverless) public ride-hailing service in the United States. They have partnered with automobile giants such as Volvo and Jaguar Land Rover to help incorporate the technology of self-driving in their vehicles, and with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to expose Waymo Driver to more people and places.

However, not only technology but also the confidence of the general public to allow driverless vehicles to drive them around needs to develop and advance. They have concerns over its safety level and that they will not be able to trust the driverless cars' judgment. But when we look at the data, it is found that the accidents caused by an error in human judgment or incapability to drive cause a greater increase in accidents than an AI machine that is highly trained. There will also be other benefits, like reduced carbon footprint and pollution index. People will have enhanced livability and walkability benefits. Therefore, utilizing driverless cars should be seen as an opportunity to rid the world of many dangers and inconveniences.

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ways autonomous cars will reshape our world

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5 Ways Autonomous Cars Will Reshape Our World

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The constant evolution of autonomous car technology is not just taking us closer to the future of driverless cars but also transforming the world as we know it.

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Findings from a study by a group of scientists suggest that 1993's iconic first-person shooter Doom could be powered by the joint effort of approximately 16 billion soldier crabs. In theory, at least.

The challenge to find the most outlandish platform upon which to play Doom has been going on for quite a while now, and has yielded such results as toasters and calculators, to a fridge and even pregnancy tests. And now here we are, finally having arrived at the next logical step: crabs!

RELATED: Doom Eternal Director Says There Are "More Stories To Tell"

Ethan Mollick - a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania - offered us some insight into this theory, which is based on a scientific paper published in 2011 by scientists in Japan and the UK. The paper discusses the use of swarms of soldier crabs moving through plastic structures to create computational models called logic gates.

Mollick theorized that if enough logic gates in a system were up and running, enough memory would be in place for the original Doom from 1993 to run just fine. According to Twitter user Normal Horoscopes, however, the catch is that you would need an estimated 16,039,018,500 soldier crabs all crabbing around in unison for there to be sufficient power to create enough logic gates.

RELATED: More People Finished Doom Eternal Than Doom 2016

Mollick also demonstrates the concept of Crab Power by using the analogy of how much memory is needed to store a single tweet:

It takes about 80 [crabs] to operate a logic gate, and there are 8 logic gates in a byte, so 640,000 crabs can be used to store a single tweet. Which seems kind of horrifying.

Not as horrifying as the thought of a swarm of 16 billion crabs scuttling around the inside of your computer while you play Doom. You would probably also have to make a couple of modest adjustments to your gaming rig before that's possible anyway.

So in terms of the most outlandish platform upon which to play Doom, we may have found the winner. Now all we have to do is go out there and find us some crabs.

Source: Twitter

READ NEXT: DOOM Graphics Mod Beautifies The Game Without Sacrificing Retro Charm (UPDATED)

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Scientists Think You Could Probably Play Doom Using The Power Of 16 Billion Crabs, If You Really Wanted To

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This article shows the business opportunities within AI. Most of the business opportunities deal with robots and robotics, especially in the engineering field. Right now we already have chat bots and translators but those can still be taken to another level.

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15 Business Opportunities Enabled by Artificial Intelligence - mobileLIVE

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Learn how Artificial Intelligence can enable innovation, enhance applications, and provide new opportunities for your business

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alchemy kind of works and maybe we can use it for something or turn lead we find on another planet

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The article talks about the critical risks posed by AI's rapid growth. It covers concerns such as lack of transparency in AI decision-making, bias and discrimination, privacy issues, AI misinformation, security risks, and more. The article emphasizes the need for responsible development, regulations, and global cooperation to avoid these risks and ensure AI benefits society without harming it.

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As the world witnesses unprecedented growth in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, it's essential to consider the potential risks and challenges associated with their widespread adoption.

The 15 Biggest Risks Of Artificial Intelligence
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AI does present some significant dangers - from job displacement to security and privacy concerns - and encouraging awareness of issues helps us engage in conversations about AI's legal, ethical, and societal implications.

Here are the biggest risks of artificial intelligence:

1. Lack of Transparency

Lack of transparency in AI systems, particularly in deep learning models that can be complex and difficult to interpret, is a pressing issue. This opaqueness obscures the decision-making processes and underlying logic of these technologies.

When people can't comprehend how an AI system arrives at its conclusions, it can lead to distrust and resistance to adopting these technologies.

2. Bias and Discrimination

AI systems can inadvertently perpetuate or amplify societal biases due to biased training data or algorithmic design. To minimize discrimination and ensure fairness, it is crucial to invest in the development of unbiased algorithms and diverse training data sets.

3. Privacy Concerns

AI technologies often collect and analyze large amounts of personal data, raising issues related to data privacy and security. To mitigate privacy risks, we must advocate for strict data protection regulations and safe data handling practices.

4. Ethical Dilemmas

Instilling moral and ethical values in AI systems, especially in decision-making contexts with significant consequences, presents a considerable challenge. Researchers and developers must prioritize the ethical implications of AI technologies to avoid negative societal impacts.

5. Security Risks

As AI technologies become increasingly sophisticated, the security risks associated with their use and the potential for misuse also increase. Hackers and malicious actors can harness the power of AI to develop more advanced cyberattacks, bypass security measures, and exploit vulnerabilities in systems.

The rise of AI-driven autonomous weaponry also raises concerns about the dangers of rogue states or non-state actors using this technology - especially when we consider the potential loss of human control in critical decision-making processes. To mitigate these security risks, governments and organizations need to develop best practices for secure AI development and deployment and foster international cooperation to establish global norms and regulations that protect against AI security threats.

6. Concentration of Power

The risk of AI development being dominated by a small number of large corporations and governments could exacerbate inequality and limit diversity in AI applications. Encouraging decentralized and collaborative AI development is key to avoiding a concentration of power.

7. Dependence on AI

Overreliance on AI systems may lead to a loss of creativity, critical thinking skills, and human intuition. Striking a balance between AI-assisted decision-making and human input is vital to preserving our cognitive abilities.

8. Job Displacement

AI-driven automation has the potential to lead to job losses across various industries, particularly for low-skilled workers (although there is evidence that AI and other emerging technologies will create more jobs than it eliminates).

As AI technologies continue to develop and become more efficient, the workforce must adapt and acquire new skills to remain relevant in the changing landscape. This is especially true for lower-skilled workers in the current labor force.

9. Economic Inequality

AI has the potential to contribute to economic inequality by disproportionally benefiting wealthy individuals and corporations. As we talked about above, job losses due to AI-driven automation are more likely to affect low-skilled workers, leading to a growing income gap and reduced opportunities for social mobility.

The concentration of AI development and ownership within a small number of large corporations and governments can exacerbate this inequality as they accumulate wealth and power while smaller businesses struggle to compete. Policies and initiatives that promote economic equity-like reskilling programs, social safety nets, and inclusive AI development that ensures a more balanced distribution of opportunities - can help combat economic inequality.

10. Legal and Regulatory Challenges

It's crucial to develop new legal frameworks and regulations to address the unique issues arising from AI technologies, including liability and intellectual property rights. Legal systems must evolve to keep pace with technological advancements and protect the rights of everyone.

11. AI Arms Race

The risk of countries engaging in an AI arms race could lead to the rapid development of AI technologies with potentially harmful consequences.

Recently, more than a thousand technology researchers and leaders, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, have urged intelligence labs to pause the development of advanced AI systems. The letter states that AI tools present "profound risks to society and humanity."

In the letter, the leaders said:

"Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an 'AI summer' in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt."

12. Loss of Human Connection

Increasing reliance on AI-driven communication and interactions could lead to diminished empathy, social skills, and human connections. To preserve the essence of our social nature, we must strive to maintain a balance between technology and human interaction.

13. Misinformation and Manipulation

AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, contributes to the spread of false information and the manipulation of public opinion. Efforts to detect and combat AI-generated misinformation are critical in preserving the integrity of information in the digital age.

In a Stanford University study on the most pressing dangers of AI, researchers said:

"AI systems are being used in the service of disinformation on the internet, giving them the potential to become a threat to democracy and a tool for fascism. From deepfake videos to online bots manipulating public discourse by feigning consensus and spreading fake news, there is the danger of AI systems undermining social trust. The technology can be co-opted by criminals, rogue states, ideological extremists, or simply special interest groups, to manipulate people for economic gain or political advantage."

14. Unintended Consequences

AI systems, due to their complexity and lack of human oversight, might exhibit unexpected behaviors or make decisions with unforeseen consequences. This unpredictability can result in outcomes that negatively impact individuals, businesses, or society as a whole.

Robust testing, validation, and monitoring processes can help developers and researchers identify and fix these types of issues before they escalate.

15. Existential Risks

The development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that surpasses human intelligence raises long-term concerns for humanity. The prospect of AGI could lead to unintended and potentially catastrophic consequences, as these advanced AI systems may not be aligned with human values or priorities.

To mitigate these risks, the AI research community needs to actively engage in safety research, collaborate on ethical guidelines, and promote transparency in AGI development. Ensuring that AGI serves the best interests of humanity and does not pose a threat to our existence is paramount.

To stay on top of new and emerging business and tech trends, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter, follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, and check out my books, Future Skills: The 20 Skills and Competencies Everyone Needs to Succeed in a Digital World andThe Future Internet: How the Metaverse, Web 3.0, and Blockchain Will Transform Business and Society.

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The 15 Biggest Risks Of Artificial Intelligence

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There's a dark side to AI. Learn about the potential negative consequences of this transformative technology and how we can help ensure a safer and more balanced future.

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While still relatively new, AI generated images has gained traction for it's ease of access, speed, and realistic presentations. However, multiple sources have confirmed that the datasets used in these bots were compiled from publicly posted images online without the artists express consent. Since this is still a grey area, development of the legalities and allowances will set precedence for not only this issue, but other issues concerning AI, which would likely mark the start of a transition 11.

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Generating art with AI engines is fun and exciting when you think about how this technology is transforming the art industry, but there are many problems to consider, as well.

Here are the ethical and legal pros and cons of AI art generation to keep in mind when playing around with DALL-E or Midjourney. It's up to you to decide how careful you want to be with your creations.

The Pros of Using AI Art Generators

There are so many platforms available today that let you create AI images on Android, iOS, and PC. The advantages of such software involve artistic freedom and the evolution of art.

1. Anyone Can Create Art With Artificial Intelligence

You just enter a prompt, and the AI generator delivers images to the best of its capabilities. The clearer and more detailed the prompt, the more interesting the results.

Start with these AI art prompt ideas and come up with concepts of your own. Anyone can produce art for their amusement or projects, from character art and surrealist paintings to AI background designs for portrait photography.

If nothing else, you don't have to depend on expensive and time-consuming professionals to get the job done. Leveling the artistic playing field is a significant ethical advantage.

2. You Don't Need to Pay a Fortune for Art

Another major perk of being able to generate your own designs with AI generators is that they're mostly free to use.

To be precise, some providers like NightCafé give you five free credits each day. Keep collecting them to create all the artworks you want.

What you can expect from DALL-E, on the other hand, has changed. Up until April 6, 2023, you got 50 credits upon sign-up and 15 every month after that. If you signed up before that date, you'll continue to get free monthly credits.

What makes this ethically appealing is that a human artist can charge a lot for a single commission, so if you're strapped for money or need more artwork than you can afford, a good AI image generator is an asset.

3. Services Are Starting to Acknowledge and Pay Original Artists

The biggest problem with generative AI is the unparalleled copyright violation it causes, a matter to be discussed shortly.

On the plus side, Shutterstock's ethical AI image generator, created in partnership with OpenAI, sets a positive example by compensating artists whose work the engine uses.

As a Shutterstock executive explains about the principles driving the company and its new AI tools:

Our attention should be laser-focused on developing technology which will not create unintended consequences, such as infringing human rights or fundamental freedom.

Other services are taking notice and should follow suit, what with legal action underway to combat the illegal use of copyrighted art, another issue we'll be exploring below.

4. AI Technology Revives Classic Artistic Styles

One of the most inspiring aspects of AI art generation is that the software can learn from old images and breathe new life into classics. You can ask for Van Gogh or Picasso-themed designs, and the generator will respond accordingly with varied results.

The best AI text-to-art generators are those with the most advanced data sets and the ability to accurately interpret prompts, all thanks to their machine learning.

These services produce the most impressive images that mimic old styles and, in a way, pay posthumous homage to classic artists that shaped the modern art world.

The Ethical Downsides of Using AI Art Generators

AI is changing the future of art in amazing ways, but the technology has several flaws to iron out, especially when it comes to its ethical use.

Copyright violation is the biggest problem alongside the ongoing debate on whether AI-generated images are real art at all.

1. AI Generators Learn From Images Without Artists' Permission

Whether the software uses generative adversarial networks or diffusion models, an AI art generator learns from existing images, videos, text, and so on, all of which come from the internet.

The AI's developers can just take this data and feed it into their engine without compensating or even notifying the original owners. Some people end up spotting artworks that look like theirs, but that they never created.

Blatant violation of copyright is only part of the ethical problem with AI art generators. Another is that, besides alerting the public that their work is being stolen, artists can do little to reclaim their property and stop engines from taking more.

Fortunately, measures are being taken to force lawmakers and companies to finally change how AI-generated art is seen and handled.

Creating art or any other material through artificial intelligence is a very complicated technology and one still in its infancy, so lawmakers don't quite know what to make of it or how to fully protect artists' copyright. Even big brands falling prey to it are reluctant to take action, but that's gradually changing.

In November 2022, the GitHub Copilot litigation began, filing a lawsuit against the engine's users-including Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI-for violating creators' legal rights.

In January 2023, the same team behind the lawsuit joined forces with three artists to also take Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt to court for the same reasons: illegally using billions of copyrighted works to train generative AI algorithms. Here's the Stable Diffusion litigation for further details.

And yet there's still work to be done in order to clearly define AI generators' nature, structure, and boundaries, not to mention what should count as a crime and who to blame.

Until we draw clear legal lines that account for all creative factors, such as what counts as a human product when working with technology, official safeguards for artists will have loopholes that anyone can exploit.

For a while longer, creators will have to rely on the terms set by individual platforms. The ban of AI art on Newgrounds, for example, specifies that computer-generated images aren't welcome, but allows the use of AI in small parts of artworks, as long as their creators make a note of these elements so that others are aware.

3. AI Generators Don't Compensate or Give Credit to Artists

What makes AI art even more unethical is that an engine's developers and users barely consider the original artists, who can't give permission or take credit or payment for their unwilling contribution to the new image.

While you don't always know whose art an engine will use when you put in a prompt, some platforms let you choose from specific artists. StarryAI offers Banksy, Greg Rutkowski, and Ilya Kuvshinov, among other popular names.

Other platforms offer styling tools with vague labels that expand your prompt. But look closely, and you may see names you recognize-the artists that will inspire your AI creations.

Additionally, there are no regulations or even tips compelling users to give credit where it's due and avoid other mistakes that technically make their AI art illegal.

4. Artists Lose Revenue Because People Turn to AI Generators

Besides AI engines and their developers taking advantage of copyrighted art without repercussions, artists also have to compete with free and easy-to-use art-generating software that makes potential customers turn to AI instead of human artists.

It doesn't matter that it can take several tries to get the artwork you want or that there are security concerns when you share data to create self-portraits on Vana, for example. It's a cheaper and faster option that artists can't beat yet.

So, using AI-generated images instead of commissioning an artist for your projects takes business away from them and restricts an already competitive industry so much more.

A fairer strategy would be to only use human artists for official business and leave AI engines for personal fun, but, once again, it all comes down to what you can afford.

Learn the Ethical Uses of AI in Image Generation

Producing art entirely through AI and capitalizing on it without notifying or rewarding the original artists in any way is unethical. In time, there's no doubt that it will become illegal. That's why understanding how to use AI art as ethically as possible is important. It'll stop you from getting into trouble now and when legal measures come into play.

There are already many ways to incorporate AI tools in your work and daily life without compromising your morals or someone else's copyright, so start exploring what this exciting industry has to offer.

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The Ethical Pros and Cons of AI Art Generation

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AI art generators opened the doors for endless creative possibilities. But it has a long way to go when it comes to being fair and ethical.

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this article talks about how the effects of climate change have already started in the form of the average global temperature going up. it also talks about how climate change will effect every aspect of our life like our health, food, and more.

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We often think about human-induced climate change as something that will happen in the future, but it is happening now. Ecosystems and people in the United States and around the world are affected by the ongoing process of climate change today.

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This article is about the current and future effects that climate may have on our Earth. If we take drastic climate action now, the effects of climate change will still not be reversable for the future. However, it will slow down the effects of climate change by a lot and temperatures will decrease and plateau

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Our Trajectory

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

The potential future effects of global climate change include more frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions, and an increase in the wind intensity and rainfall from tropical cyclones. Credit: left - Mike McMillan/USFS, center - Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, right - NASA.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth's climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

" The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change - modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

Read more

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

What's the difference between climate change and global warming?

"Global warming" refers to the long-term warming of the planet. "Climate change" encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

detailed answer

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

" The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future." ²

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Future Effects in the U.S.

U.S. Regional Effects

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

detailed answer

Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity, which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.

Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.

Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region's economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.

Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.

Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

References
References
Header image shows cracked mud stretches across sections of the Panamint Valley. Credit: NPS/Kurt Moses; A degree of concern thermometer image credit: Pixabay/geralt

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Long-term effects of global climate change in the United States.

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Covid-19 changed lifestyles of so many and made so many people upset because it tooked loved ones of a lot of people and life wasn't the same because of business was barely open or you couldn't even hang out.

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In Their Own Words, Americans Describe the Struggles and Silver Linings of the COVID-19 Pandemic

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The outbreak has dramatically changed Americans’ lives and relationships over the past year. We asked people to tell us about their experiences – good and bad – in living through this moment in history.

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Nation

United States of America (USA)

Objective(s)

Jupiter Flyby, Saturn Flyby

Spacecraft Mass

570 pounds (258.5 kilograms)

Mission Design and Management

NASA / ARC

Launch Vehicle

Atlas Centaur (AC-30 / Atlas 3D no. 5011D / Centaur D-1A)

Launch Date and Time

April 6, 1973 / 02:11 UT

Launch Site

Cape Canaveral, Fla. / Launch Complex 36B

Scientific Instruments

1. Imaging Photopolarimeter
2. Helium Vector Magnetometer (HVM)
3. Infrared Radiometer
4. Quadrispherical Plasma Analyzer
5. Ultraviolet Photometer
6. Charged Particle Instrument (CPI)
7. Cosmic Ray Telescope (CRT)
8. Geiger Tube Telescope (GTT)
9. Sisyphus Asteroid/Meteoroid Detector (AMD)
10. Meteoroid Detectors
11. Trapped Radiation Detector (TRD)
12. Triaxial Fluxgate Magnetometer

Firsts

First spacecraft to fly by Saturn

Key Dates

April 6, 1973: Launch

Mid-March, 1974: Flew through the asteroid belt

Dec. 3, 1974: Jupiter flyby

Sept. 1, 1979: Saturn flyby

Feb. 23, 1990: Crossed the orbit of Neptune

Sept. 30, 1995: NASA Ames Research Center made last contact with the spacecraft

Nov. 24, 1995: Scientists received last engineering data from Pioneer 11

NASA's Pioneer 11's path through Saturn's outer rings took it within 13,000 miles (21,000 kilometers) of the planet. Credit: NASA Ames

In Depth: Pioneer 11

Pioneer 11, the sister spacecraft to Pioneer 10, was the first human-made object to fly past Saturn and also returned the first pictures of the polar regions of Jupiter.

After boost by the TE-M-364-4 engine, the spacecraft sped away from Earth at a velocity of about 32,000 miles per hour (51,800 kilometers per hour), thus equaling the speed of its predecessor, Pioneer 10.

During the outbound journey, there were a number of malfunctions on the spacecraft-including the momentary failure of one of the RTG booms to deploy, a problem with an attitude control thruster, and the partial failure of the asteroidal dust detector-but none of these jeopardized the mission.

Pioneer 11 passed through the asteroid belt without damage by mid-March 1974. Soon, on April 26, 1974, it performed a midcourse correction (after an earlier one on April 11, 1973) to guide it much closer to Jupiter than Pioneer 10 and to ensure a polar flyby.

Jupiter as seen from above its north pole by Pioneer 11 in 1974.

Pioneer 11 penetrated the Jovian bow shock on Nov. 25, 1974, at 03:39 UT. The spacecraft's closest approach to Jupiter occurred at 05:22 UT on Dec. 3, 1974, at a range of about 26,400 miles (42,500 kilometers) from the planet's cloud tops, three times closer than Pioneer 10. By this time, it was traveling faster than any human-made object at the time, more than 106,000 miles per hour (171,000 kilometers per hour).

Because of its high speed during the encounter, the spacecraft's exposure to Jupiter's radiation belts spanned a shorter time than its predecessor although it was actually closer to the planet.

Pioneer 11 repeatedly crossed Jupiter's bow shock, indicating that the Jovian magnetosphere changes its boundaries as it is buffeted by the solar wind. Besides the many images of the planet (and better pictures of the Great Red Spot), Pioneer 11 took about 200 images of the moons of Jupiter. The vehicle then used Jupiter's massive gravitational field to swing back across the solar system to set it on a course to Saturn.

After its Jupiter encounter, on April 16, 1975, the micrometeoroid detector was turned off since it was issuing spurious commands which were interfering with other instruments. Course corrections on May 26, 1976, and July 13, 1978, sharpened its trajectory towards Saturn.

Pioneer 11 detected Saturn's bow shock on Aug. 31, 1979, about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) out from the planet, thus providing the first conclusive evidence of the existence of Saturn's magnetic field.

The spacecraft crossed the planet's ring plane beyond the outer ring at 14:36 UT Sept. 1, 1979, and then passed by the planet at 16:31 UT for a close encounter at a range of about 13,000 miles (20,900 kilometers). It was moving at a relative velocity of about 71,000 miles per hour (114,000 kilometers per hour) at the point of closest approach.

During the encounter, the spacecraft took 440 images of the planetary system, with about 20 at a resolution of about 56 miles (90 kilometers).

The images of Saturn's moon Titan (at a resolution of 112 miles or 180 kilometers) showed a featureless orange fuzzy satellite. A brief burst of data on Titan indicated that the average global temperature of Titan was minus 315 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 193 degrees Celsius).

Among Pioneer 11's many discoveries were a narrow ring outside the A ring named the F ring and a new satellite 124 miles (200 kilometers) in diameter. The spacecraft recorded the planet's overall temperature at minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 180 degrees Celsius) and photographs indicated a more featureless atmosphere than that of Jupiter. Analysis of data suggested that the planet was primarily made of liquid hydrogen.

After leaving Saturn, Pioneer 11 headed out of the solar system in a direction opposite to that of Pioneer 10, toward the center of the galaxy in the general direction of Sagittarius.

Pioneer 11 crossed the orbit of Neptune on Feb. 23, 1990, becoming the fourth spacecraft​-after Pioneer 10, Voyager 1 and 2-to do so.

Pioneer 11 will travel as a ghost ship in our galaxy.

- Fred Wirth, Pioneer Project Manager in 1995

Scientists expect that during their outbound journeys, both Pioneer 10 and 11 will find the boundary of the heliosphere where the solar wind slows down and forms a "termination shock," beyond which there would be the heliopause and finally the bow shock of the interstellar medium-the space beyond our solar system.

By 1995, 22 years after launch, two instruments were still operational on Pioneer 11.

NASA Ames Research Center made last contact with the spacecraft on Sept. 30, 1995, when Pioneer 11 was 44.1 AU from Earth. Scientists later received a few minutes of good engineering data on Nov. 24, 1995, but lost contact again once Earth moved out of view of the spacecraft's antenna.

Like Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11 carries a plaque with a message for any intelligent beings that may encounter it.

By Nov. 5, 2017, Pioneer 11 was estimated to be about 97.590 AU (9.1 billion miles or 14.599 billion kilometers) from Earth.

Key Source

Siddiqi, Asif A. Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958-2016 . NASA History Program Office, 2018.

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In Depth | Pioneer 11 - NASA Solar System Exploration

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Nation United States of America (USA) Objective(s) Jupiter Flyby, Saturn Flyby Spacecraft Mass 570 pounds (258.5 kilograms) Mission Design and Management NASA / ARC Launch Vehicle Atlas Centaur (AC-30 / Atlas 3D no. 5011D / Centaur D-1A) Launch Date and Time April 6, 1973 / 02:11 UT Launch Site Cape Canaveral, Fla.

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this article describes and tells the reader what happened the past years with COVID-19, and why the world is different now.

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Lifestyle and mental health disruptions during COVID-19

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Lifestyle and mental health disruptions during COVID-19

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This article shows evidence through graphs of changes in lifestyle such as more screen time, less physical activity and decrease in social interactions. There were also major changes in mental health like an increase in depression. These two changes seem to be related in many ways. These changes seem to be long term, as we see them now as well. This article shows how much of an impact COVID-19 has had on our society.

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This article suggests that COVID-19 brings into sharp relief how catastrophe feeds on dysfunction in national and international governance.

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On January 23, 2020, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 100 seconds to midnight. We board members warned then that the world's institutional and political capacity for reducing the possibility of civilization-scale catastrophe had been diminished, and the need for emergency action was urgent. In our statement, we explained that because of the worldwide governmental trend toward dysfunction in dealing with global threats, we felt compelled to set the Doomsday Clock closer than it had ever been to apocalypse.

Three months later, the transformation of the novel coronavirus outbreak into a global pandemic is demonstrating the importance of domestic and international governance, not only in the mitigation of and response to global challenges such as a pandemic, but also in their prevention. In short, as the world is now seeing, governmental dysfunction can cost lives. Competent, timely actions to prevent and mitigate future global crises-whether they involve biological, nuclear, climatic, or other major threats-will depend on the world's ability to address three fundamental governance concerns.

The first involves the need to repair a worldwide erosion of infrastructure for managing crises. We noted in January that leaders had undermined cooperative, science- and law-based approaches to managing the most urgent threats to humanity, helping to create a situation that will, if unaddressed, "lead to catastrophe, sooner rather than later." This dysfunction is most evident in the United States, where active political antagonism toward science and government-sanctioned disdain for expert opinion have led to the dismantling of programs crucial to disaster prevention (such as the US Agency for International Development program for warning of pandemics) and mitigation. The COVID-19 pandemic shows the dangers of dysfunction at many levels of government, exacerbated by failures to provide adequate authorities and resources necessary for a robust response.

Our second concern relates to immediately arresting and rapidly reversing the decreased commitment among nations to international cooperation. In our Doomsday Clock statement, we highlighted a disturbing trend, in which influential leaders had denigrated and discarded the most effective methods for addressing complex threats-international agreements with strong verification regimes-in favor of their own narrow interests and domestic political gain. Over the years, there has been no dearth of calls for increased international cooperation on biothreats-just a startling lack of response to those warnings. Imagine for a moment if a September 2019 report by the World Health Organization's Global Preparedness Monitoring Board about the lack of preparedness for a lethal respiratory virus had been heeded:

A rapidly spreading pandemic due to a lethal respiratory pathogen (whether naturally emergent or accidentally or deliberately released) poses additional preparedness requirements. Donors and multilateral institutions must ensure adequate investment in developing innovative vaccines and therapeutics, surge manufacturing capacity, broad-spectrum antivirals and appropriate non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Our third concern centers on addressing the manipulation and distortion of information that has led to a deterioration of governmental and civic response to global threats. A chaotic and corrupted global information environment now leads, far too often, to the devaluation of facts and rational discourse. Indeed, the World Health Organization describes the information environment surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic as an infodemic, making it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance.

This pandemic highlights how much is to be gained by avoiding the cost-in lives and treasure-of misinformation, especially when that misinformation is purveyed by government officials, as has occurred in many countries during the pandemic.

Our observations so far. COVID-19 brings into sharp relief how catastrophe feeds on dysfunction in national and international governance. The pandemic has illustrated, all too well, the diminishment of crisis management infrastructure, the decreased commitment to international cooperation, and the mis- and disinformation problems that we warned of in January. But the current crisis has also provided clues as to how governments around the world might improve their performance, not only during this and future pandemics, but also in regard to the global, existential threats presented by nuclear weapons and climate change.

Many thorough after-action assessments will be conducted once the coronavirus pandemic wanes. Already, however, the world's response to COVID-19 has shown some ways in which the management of global threats can and must be improved:

Proactive leadership beats off-the-cuff responses. The potential for a pandemic was well-known long before the COVID-19 outbreak began in China, and yet governments around the world failed to invest sufficiently in prevention, preparedness, and surveillance. The time to act on the lessons of Crimson Contagion -last year's US government pandemic exercise that eerily predicted many of the things we are seeing today-was December 2019, not March 2020.

For climate risks, timeliness is also key. Actions taken now to transition away from carbon-intensive energy can avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. Delay, on the other hand, will make the world choose between evils: hasty and costly energy transitions or enormous, unmanageable climate impacts, like the disruption of tropical monsoons that sustain food production for billions of people.

In the case of nuclear weapons, proactive leadership would involve the United States, Russia, and China engaging in serious strategic stability and arms control talks, to head off a new arms race that no country will be able to afford in the post-COVID-19 environment. Better to invest in cooperation now rather than competition that leads to disaster later.

In a crisis, even the prosaic can be profoundly important. Until this pandemic, only a few experts imagined that insufficient numbers of masks, gowns, and throat swabs could present such an enormous threat to humanity. In the case of nuclear weapons, common everyday events have triggered false nuclear alerts-solar storms, sunlight glinting off a cloud, the rising moon, and failures of telephone switches, computer chips, and human beings. Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change may depend in part on boring, well-known solutions-energy savings from more efficient vehicles and from buildings that are painted white to reduce cooling needs.

Attending to these smaller details, of course, requires implementing a larger strategy that builds awareness of the benefits-both to the public welfare and to the public's wallet-of simple measures that reduce global risk.

Thinking the unthinkable is not enough. The World Health Organization called for countries to "commit and invest" in global health preparedness. In the midst of the pandemic, the United States is allocating more than $2 trillion to fight a disease with a mortality rate of roughly two percent, an expenditure that now seems reasonable and necessary. Before COVID-19, US officials thought about the possibility of an unthinkable pandemic, but requested only about half a billion dollars in each of the last five years for global health security.

Today, massive lifestyle adjustments are necessary to limit the risk of infection; those adjustments seemed unthinkable just a month or two ago. The analogy to the climate situation is inexact, but instructive, nonetheless: Many people consider major and permanent changes in energy systems and consumption patterns to be unthinkable responses to a distant and abstract climate threat. But citizens around the world may find much more extreme sacrifices forced upon them-sacrifices produced by huge climate disruptions that humanity simply cannot control-should the world fail to take the necessary steps now to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, nuclear strategists have been "thinking about the unthinkable" at least since Herman Kahn published his book of the same name in 1962. But if the world is to survive the nuclear era, policy makers must somehow now think their way through the difficult problem of building a secure world that contains no nuclear weapons.

There is a risk in overestimating humankind's ability to control the escalation of a crisis. The pandemic, so far, has shown the difficulty and costs of making important decisions in the face of imperfect and competing sources of information. In the United States, President Trump downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic, seeking justification and support from unreliable and scientifically uninformed sources, inside and outside the government. In China, local officials suppressed information about the coronavirus outbreak for fear of angering the central government, thus delaying an effective response and increasing casualties. In these cases and many others, downplaying the risks of an escalation of the crisis has actually increased them.

A nuclear crisis would unfold far more rapidly than any pandemic, with more uncertainty and wider devastation. Much of the infrastructure we can rely on today (communications, logistics, transportation) could be wiped out in a nuclear exchange, complicating decision making. Acknowledging that nuclear war in any form would be unpredictable and uncontrollable is the first step toward seeking measures to eliminate the risk of such wars ever starting.

The climate crisis is unfolding much more slowly, but overestimating our ability to manage it also entails significant risks. It's not clear whether we will be able to control the disruption that will arise, if the climate system is pushed too far beyond the fairly stable state that has reigned over the past several millennia. The potential for irreversible and uncontrollable changes is significant. Even before the pandemic struck, urgent action was required to reduce these risks. The pandemic suggests that we may need to rethink our confidence in our ability to control escalation once a climate crisis begins in earnest-and plan accordingly.

Possible silver linings: better international cooperation, renewed respect for science. There is the possibility that the pandemic will give national governments around the world an opportunity to see and act on the genuine need for better international cooperation on the management of all global threats. At the very least, the spread of the virus reminds us of the interdependence of sovereign states and the very real human desire for connection. More important, many countries are experiencing the pain and dislocation of responding to a borderless and apolitical enemy. Such a pandemic deserves a global, cooperative response, not the pursuit of narrow interests and domestic political gains. The pandemic has also demonstrated the essential role of science and scientists in identifying and dealing with grave threats to humanity. Ensuring that science-based decision making continues will make our world safer.

We hope the world will emerge from this pandemic better prepared for the next, but there is another opportunity as well, which is to apply lessons learned in this crisis to other global existential challenges. Nuclear weapons and climate change affect human, animal, and plant populations worldwide, with long-lasting effects. Mitigating climate change requires recognizing it as an emergency and accepting that changes in lifestyle and the economy are worth the cost if they save the planet. Maintaining security while also reducing nuclear risks is a genuine challenge-but that effort is far less difficult and costly than the aftermath of nuclear war.

A sustainable future for the next generation will require decisive and proactive leadership, imagination and foresight in preparing for potential crises according to systematic scientific analyses, a dose of humility about our ability to address unexpected developments, and ample courage to make tough choices. That future will begin to arrive only when governments around the world recognize that none of them can achieve it without help from the others.

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COVID-19 and the Doomsday Clock: Observations on managing global risk

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The coronavirus pandemic is demonstrating the importance of domestic and international governance, not only in the mitigation of and response to global challenges, but also in their prevention.

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This article Explains why AI is the next big thing. It also explains the possibilities of AI and how it can be used to advance us. The article states how AI might play a big part of our lives much sooner than we ever thought.

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Erica Pandey and Dan Primack and Ina Fried

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Most of us are only now getting a glimpse of just how awe-inducing, and terrifying, artificial intelligence has become.

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we can increase our genetic pool and having more species is good for the ecosystem and we could get a much more balanced ecosystem

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A ‘De-extinction’ Company Wants to Bring Back the Dodo

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A de-extinction company known for its plans to resurrect the mammoth and Tasmanian tiger has announced it will also bring back the dodo

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This article discusses AI making its way into industries like healthcare, education, manufacturing, etc. There's so much room for AI to improve and ultimately be something we either fear or praise. With more development, this leads us into our next big transition as a society.

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Innovations in the field of artificial intelligence continue to shape the future of humanity across nearly every industry. AI is already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT, and generative AI has further expanded the possibilities and popularity of AI.

According to a 2023 IBM survey, 42 percent of enterprise-scale businesses integrated AI into their operations, and 40 percent are considering AI for their organizations. In addition, 38 percent of organizations have implemented generative AI into their workflows while 42 percent are considering doing so.

With so many changes coming at such a rapid pace, here's what shifts in AI could mean for various industries and society at large.

More on the Future of AI Can AI Make Art More Human?

The Evolution of AI

AI has come a long way since 1951, when the first documented success of an AI computer program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program completed a whole game on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester. Thanks to developments in machine learning and deep learning, IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the company's IBM Watson won Jeopardy! in 2011.

Since then, generative AI has spearheaded the latest chapter in AI's evolution, with OpenAI releasing its first GPT models in 2018. This has culminated in OpenAI developing its GPT-4 model and ChatGPT, leading to a proliferation of AI generators that can process queries to produce relevant text, audio, images and other types of content.

How AI Will Impact the Future

Improved Business Automation

AI's ability to analyze massive amounts of data and convert its findings into convenient visual formats can also accelerate the decision-making process. Company leaders don't have to spend time parsing through the data themselves, instead using instant insights to make informed decisions.

"If [developers] understand what the technology is capable of and they understand the domain very well, they start to make connections and say, 'Maybe this is an AI problem, maybe that's an AI problem,'" said Mike Mendelson, a learner experience designer for NVIDIA. "That's more often the case than, 'I have a specific problem I want to solve.'"

More on AI 75 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Companies to Know

Job Disruption

Business automation has naturally led to fears over job losses. In fact, employees believe almost one-third of their tasks could be performed by AI. Although AI has made gains in the workplace, it's had an unequal impact on different industries and professions. For example, manual jobs like secretaries are at risk of being automated, but the demand for other jobs like machine learning specialists and information security analysts has risen.

"One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we invest tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs," said Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the school's Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Data Privacy Issues

Companies require large volumes of data to train the models that power generative AI tools, and this process has come under intense scrutiny. Concerns over companies collecting consumers' personal data have led the FTC to open an investigation into whether OpenAI has negatively impacted consumers through its data collection methods after the company potentially violated European data protection laws.

In response, the Biden-Harris administration developed an AI Bill of Rights that lists data privacy as one of its core principles. Although this legislation doesn't carry much legal weight, it reflects the growing push to prioritize data privacy and compel AI companies to be more transparent and cautious about how they compile training data.

Increased Regulation

AI could shift the perspective on certain legal questions, depending on how generative AI lawsuits unfold in 2024. For example, the issue of intellectual property has come to the forefront in light of copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI by writers, musicians and companies like The New York Times. These lawsuits affect how the U.S. legal system interprets what is private and public property, and a loss could spell major setbacks for OpenAI and its competitors.

Ethical issues that have surfaced in connection to generative AI have placed more pressure on the U.S. government to take a stronger stance. The Biden-Harris administration has maintained its moderate position with its latest executive order, creating rough guidelines around data privacy, civil liberties, responsible AI and other aspects of AI. However, the government could lean toward stricter regulations, depending on changes in the political climate.

Climate Change Concerns

On a far grander scale, AI is poised to have a major effect on sustainability, climate change and environmental issues. Optimists can view AI as a way to make supply chains more efficient, carrying out predictive maintenance and other procedures to reduce carbon emissions.

What Industries Will AI Impact the Most?

There's virtually no major industry that modern AI hasn't already affected. Here are a few of the industries undergoing the greatest changes as a result of AI.

AI in Manufacturing

Manufacturing has been benefiting from AI for years. With AI-enabled robotic arms and other manufacturing bots dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, the industry has adapted well to the powers of AI. These industrial robots typically work alongside humans to perform a limited range of tasks like assembly and stacking, and predictive analysis sensors keep equipment running smoothly.

AI in Healthcare

It may seem unlikely, but AI healthcare is already changing the way humans interact with medical providers. Thanks to its big data analysis capabilities, AI helps identify diseases more quickly and accurately, speed up and streamline drug discovery and even monitor patients through virtual nursing assistants.

AI in Finance

Banks, insurers and financial institutions leverage AI for a range of applications like detecting fraud, conducting audits and evaluating customers for loans. Traders have also used machine learning's ability to assess millions of data points at once, so they can quickly gauge risk and make smart investing decisions.

AI in Education

AI in Media

AI in Customer Service

Most people dread getting a robocall, but AI in customer service can provide the industry with data-driven tools that bring meaningful insights to both the customer and the provider. AI tools powering the customer service industry come in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants.

AI in Transportation

Risks and Dangers of AI

Despite reshaping numerous industries in positive ways, AI still has flaws that leave room for concern. Here are a few potential risks of artificial intelligence.

Job Losses

Human Biases

Deepfakes and Misinformation

Data Privacy

Automated Weapons

The use of AI in automated weapons poses a major threat to countries and their general populations. While automated weapons systems are already deadly, they also fail to discriminate between soldiers and civilians. Letting artificial intelligence fall into the wrong hands could lead to irresponsible use and the deployment of weapons that put larger groups of people at risk.

Superior Intelligence

"I don't think the methods we use currently in these areas will lead to machines that decide to kill us," said Marc Gyongyosi, founder of Onetrack.AI. "I think that maybe five or 10 years from now, I'll have to reevaluate that statement because we'll have different methods available and different ways to go about these things."

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The Future of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the World

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The future of AI is constantly in flux. AI is changing nearly every industry and will impact society in ways we are just beginning to understand.

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The overview effect is another reason to speed up space exploration

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If we want humanity to survive long-term, we must harness the life-changing emotional response known as the “overview effect.”

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The article discusses how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and shaping various industries, from transportation to healthcare and beyond. It explores AI's impact on jobs, its potential near-future developments, and privacy concerns. The article emphasizes the need for retraining and ethical considerations as AI continues to advance.

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Innovations in the field of artificial intelligence continue to shape the future of humanity across nearly every industry. AI is already the main driver of emerging technologies like big data, robotics and IoT, and generative AI has further expanded the possibilities and popularity of AI.

According to a 2023 IBM survey, 42 percent of enterprise-scale businesses integrated AI into their operations, and 40 percent are considering AI for their organizations. In addition, 38 percent of organizations have implemented generative AI into their workflows while 42 percent are considering doing so.

With so many changes coming at such a rapid pace, here's what shifts in AI could mean for various industries and society at large.

More on the Future of AI Can AI Make Art More Human?

The Evolution of AI

AI has come a long way since 1951, when the first documented success of an AI computer program was written by Christopher Strachey, whose checkers program completed a whole game on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester. Thanks to developments in machine learning and deep learning, IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the company's IBM Watson won Jeopardy! in 2011.

Since then, generative AI has spearheaded the latest chapter in AI's evolution, with OpenAI releasing its first GPT models in 2018. This has culminated in OpenAI developing its GPT-4 model and ChatGPT, leading to a proliferation of AI generators that can process queries to produce relevant text, audio, images and other types of content.

How AI Will Impact the Future

Improved Business Automation

AI's ability to analyze massive amounts of data and convert its findings into convenient visual formats can also accelerate the decision-making process. Company leaders don't have to spend time parsing through the data themselves, instead using instant insights to make informed decisions.

"If [developers] understand what the technology is capable of and they understand the domain very well, they start to make connections and say, 'Maybe this is an AI problem, maybe that's an AI problem,'" said Mike Mendelson, a learner experience designer for NVIDIA. "That's more often the case than, 'I have a specific problem I want to solve.'"

More on AI 75 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Companies to Know

Job Disruption

Business automation has naturally led to fears over job losses. In fact, employees believe almost one-third of their tasks could be performed by AI. Although AI has made gains in the workplace, it's had an unequal impact on different industries and professions. For example, manual jobs like secretaries are at risk of being automated, but the demand for other jobs like machine learning specialists and information security analysts has risen.

"One of the absolute prerequisites for AI to be successful in many [areas] is that we invest tremendously in education to retrain people for new jobs," said Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the school's Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Data Privacy Issues

Companies require large volumes of data to train the models that power generative AI tools, and this process has come under intense scrutiny. Concerns over companies collecting consumers' personal data have led the FTC to open an investigation into whether OpenAI has negatively impacted consumers through its data collection methods after the company potentially violated European data protection laws.

In response, the Biden-Harris administration developed an AI Bill of Rights that lists data privacy as one of its core principles. Although this legislation doesn't carry much legal weight, it reflects the growing push to prioritize data privacy and compel AI companies to be more transparent and cautious about how they compile training data.

Increased Regulation

AI could shift the perspective on certain legal questions, depending on how generative AI lawsuits unfold in 2024. For example, the issue of intellectual property has come to the forefront in light of copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI by writers, musicians and companies like The New York Times. These lawsuits affect how the U.S. legal system interprets what is private and public property, and a loss could spell major setbacks for OpenAI and its competitors.

Ethical issues that have surfaced in connection to generative AI have placed more pressure on the U.S. government to take a stronger stance. The Biden-Harris administration has maintained its moderate position with its latest executive order, creating rough guidelines around data privacy, civil liberties, responsible AI and other aspects of AI. However, the government could lean toward stricter regulations, depending on changes in the political climate.

Climate Change Concerns

On a far grander scale, AI is poised to have a major effect on sustainability, climate change and environmental issues. Optimists can view AI as a way to make supply chains more efficient, carrying out predictive maintenance and other procedures to reduce carbon emissions.

What Industries Will AI Impact the Most?

There's virtually no major industry that modern AI hasn't already affected. Here are a few of the industries undergoing the greatest changes as a result of AI.

AI in Manufacturing

Manufacturing has been benefiting from AI for years. With AI-enabled robotic arms and other manufacturing bots dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, the industry has adapted well to the powers of AI. These industrial robots typically work alongside humans to perform a limited range of tasks like assembly and stacking, and predictive analysis sensors keep equipment running smoothly.

AI in Healthcare

It may seem unlikely, but AI healthcare is already changing the way humans interact with medical providers. Thanks to its big data analysis capabilities, AI helps identify diseases more quickly and accurately, speed up and streamline drug discovery and even monitor patients through virtual nursing assistants.

AI in Finance

Banks, insurers and financial institutions leverage AI for a range of applications like detecting fraud, conducting audits and evaluating customers for loans. Traders have also used machine learning's ability to assess millions of data points at once, so they can quickly gauge risk and make smart investing decisions.

AI in Education

AI in Media

AI in Customer Service

Most people dread getting a robocall, but AI in customer service can provide the industry with data-driven tools that bring meaningful insights to both the customer and the provider. AI tools powering the customer service industry come in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants.

AI in Transportation

Risks and Dangers of AI

Despite reshaping numerous industries in positive ways, AI still has flaws that leave room for concern. Here are a few potential risks of artificial intelligence.

Job Losses

Human Biases

Deepfakes and Misinformation

Data Privacy

Automated Weapons

The use of AI in automated weapons poses a major threat to countries and their general populations. While automated weapons systems are already deadly, they also fail to discriminate between soldiers and civilians. Letting artificial intelligence fall into the wrong hands could lead to irresponsible use and the deployment of weapons that put larger groups of people at risk.

Superior Intelligence

"I don't think the methods we use currently in these areas will lead to machines that decide to kill us," said Marc Gyongyosi, founder of Onetrack.AI. "I think that maybe five or 10 years from now, I'll have to reevaluate that statement because we'll have different methods available and different ways to go about these things."

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The Future of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the World

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The future of AI is constantly in flux. AI is changing nearly every industry and will impact society in ways we are just beginning to understand.

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we can grow human

I do not know what this is useful for but it is almost always good to have information as long as it doesn't mess with any other ideas

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An artist project offering an absurdist take on the lab-grown meat industry triggers a debate and backlash in London.

"Ouroboros Steak" (2019), vitamin-like discs produced from human cells, designed by Andrew Pelling, Grace Knight and Orkan Telhan, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year. Credit... Philadelphia Museum of Art; Joseph Hu

The installation of steak grown from human cells at the Design Museum in London was intended to criticize the meat industry's rising use of living cells from animals. It ended up triggering a roiling debate about bioethics and the pitfalls of artistic critique.

Orkan Telhan, an artist and associate professor of fine arts at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, spent the last year imagining how climate change might impact the future of food consumption. He collaborated with scientists to create a project that included 3-D printed pancakes, bioengineered bread and genetically-modified salmon. But it was their provocative, and less appetizing, development of what they call " Ouroboros Steak," meat cultivated from human cells and expired blood, that challenged the sustainability practices of the nascent cellular agriculture industry, which develops lab-grown products from existing cell cultures.

After the Ouroboros Steak traveled to the Design Museum in October, an intense online debate grew over the project's motivations, and the artist received dozens of threatening emails and social media posts calling him "wicked" and "pure evil." Some messages have demanded the destruction of the artwork. According to Mr. Telhan, who provided the emails and tweets to a reporter, "the focus quickly became centered on accusations that we were promoting cannibalism."

The team's "Ouroboros" cell feeding process. Cells fed with serum over time turn into steaks. Credit... via Ourochef

Mr. Telhan added, "It was a misinterpretation that became politicized in all the wrong ways because humans eating each other is a taboo topic."

Named after the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, "Ouroboros Steak" examines, but does not promote, auto-cannibalism as a satirical take on the increasing demand for meat products around the world, which scientists have warned will likely contribute to carbon emissions and reduced biodiversity. The designers hoped that shocking audiences with the suggestion would trigger an examination of environmental responsibility and the clean-meat industry, which has promoted itself as producing "kill-free" food, although most companies heavily rely on fetal bovine serum harvested during the slaughter of pregnant cows for cell cultivation.

"Our project provides an absurd solution to a serious problem," said Andrew Pelling, a biophysicist who partnered with Mr. Telhan and the industrial designer Grace Knight to create the steaks. "But in our scenario, you are at least giving consent by taking your own cells. In the world of lab-grown meats, you are taking cells from animals without their consent."

As controversial as the project has become, the bite-size chunks of meat toured museums around the United States last year without a problem - even when cheekily displayed on a dish with silverware.

Various "Ouroboros" steak designs featured together, from "Designs for Different Futures" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Credit... Ourochef and Philadelphia Museum of Art

"I called it a sleeper hit," said Michelle Millar Fisher, the curator who commissioned the steaks for the exhibition, "Designs for Different Futures," which began at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "The provocation at the heart of this project is really fair. It's important to ask ourselves where we get our proteins."

There are no plans to remove the installation from the Design Museum before the exhibition ends in March 2021, although Ms. Fisher and Mr. Telhan will address the criticism of "Ouroboros Steak" in an upcoming online conversation. Priya Khanchandani, head of curatorial at the Design Museum, has also defended the project, calling it "the equivalent of a design dystopia."

"It is asking a controversial question that in an epoch of severely depleted resources badly needs to be articulated," she added.

Investment in cellular agriculture has increased at a remarkable pace over the last few years, even as serious discussions around the bioethics of lab-grown meat have taken a back seat. Market researchers estimate that the cultured meat business could reach $214 million by 2025, and more than double to $593 million by 2032. Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation Growing Convergence program awarded the University of California, Davis, a $3.5 million grant for cell-based, lab-grown meat research. And on Dec. 2, Singapore became the first government to approve the consumption of chicken cells grown in bioreactors, telling the San Francisco-based company Eat Just that it could sell its bioengineered chicken nuggets.

"We need productive critique if we are ushering in a new technology," said Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, a nonprofit research institute focused on accelerating breakthroughs in cellular agriculture. "This technology holds the promise to create a more sustainable means of meat production, but how do we hold ourselves accountable to ensuring that happens?"

In recent decades, several artists have questioned the ethics of biotechnology by adopting the field's methods and machinery. The Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac worked with a team of geneticists in 2002 to splice an albino rabbit's DNA with that of a luminescent jellyfish to call attention to what the transgenic crossing of species' characteristics might imply for the human genome. In 2019, the artist Jordan Eagles projected magnified images of blood onto the gallery walls of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh as commentary on the stigma associated with L.G.B.T.Q. blood donations and those living with H.I.V./AIDS.

Despite the ongoing streams of hate mail flowing into Mr. Telhan's inbox, the artist and his collaborators say they have received a significant number of inquiries from ordinary people interested in purchasing a kit to grow meat from their own cells (it is not for sale). Dr. Pelling said that he has also received inquiries from several venture capitalists looking to invest early in "Ouroboros Steak" or join an accelerator program. For the time being, however, there are no plans to bring meat made from human cells to market.

"This project has been provocative, maybe too provocative," he joked. "That's just a symptom of the excitement around cultured meat."

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Steaks Grown From Human Cells Spark Interest and Outrage (Published 2020)

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An artist project offering an absurdist take on the lab-grown meat industry triggers a debate and backlash in London. The installation of steak grown from human cells at the Design Museum in London was intended to criticize the meat industry's rising use of living cells from animals.

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Covid-19 shrunk the global economy, and though it has recovered from the pandemic it is what where it originally was before the pandemic. Global trade has slowed down between nations significantly. It also decreased tourism and travel across the globe and affected worker productivity as a whole.

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In December 2019, COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China. Subsequently, confirmed cases were detected in Thailand and Japan before spreading to the United States. On January 21, 2020 the United States confirmed its first COVID-19 case. On January 30, 2020, following recommendations of the Emergency Committee, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director General declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) and on March 11, 2020 the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.

CDC works with other U.S. agencies to implement the U.S. government's international COVID-19 strategy. The goals of CDC's global response to COVID-19 are to:

Limit human-to-human transmission

Minimize the impact of COVID-19 in vulnerable countries with limited preparedness capacity

Reduce specific threats that pose current and future risk to the United States

To support implementation of the U.S. government's international COVID-19 strategy, CDC received emergency supplemental funding from Congress. CDC activities enhance COVID-19 response capabilities abroad and continue to build long-term, sustainable capacity for future responses to highly communicable diseases. CDC is funding activities across several areas of work and, in partnership with other U.S. government agencies, aims to draw on assets and relationships built overseas.

CDC Health Scientist Kimberly Won and Microbiologist Keri Robinson demonstrate the proper technique for fingerstick blood collection during a virtual training for the American Samoa Department of Health in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC has adapted to provide technical assistance virtually.

Credit: Tara Brant, CDC

To accomplish the U.S. government's international COVID-19 strategy, CDC:

Strengthens public health capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to local COVID-19 cases

Mitigates COVID-19 transmission in the community, across borders, and in healthcare facilities

Supports rapid identification of COVID-19 cases to improve patient care and minimize disruptions to health services

Addresses unknowns regarding clinical severity, extent of transmission, and infection support for special investigations

Ensures readiness to implement vaccines and therapeutics when available

Potential Impact of COVID-19 on the Global Economy

The COVID-19 pandemic could shrink global economic growth by 4.5% to 6% in 2020 with a partial recovery of a rate of 2.5% to 5.2% in 2021.

In addition to the tragic loss of life and devastating effects on the health and wellbeing of people around the world, disease outbreaks:

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Content source: Global Health

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CDC's Global Resources Pivot to Address COVID-19

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CDC works with other U.S. agencies to implement the U.S. government's international COVID-19 strategy.

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Space Exploration is beneficial because it allows us to discover new worlds and push the scientific boundaries. It will allow us to prove or disprove scientific theories.

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Humanity's interest in the heavens has been universal and enduring. Humans are driven to explore the unknown, discover new worlds, push the boundaries of our scientific and technical limits, and then push further. The intangible desire to explore and challenge the boundaries of what we know and where we have been has provided benefits to our society for centuries.
Human space exploration helps to address fundamental questions about our place in the Universe and the history of our solar system. Through addressing the challenges related to human space exploration we expand technology, create new industries, and help to foster a peaceful connection with other nations. Curiosity and exploration are vital to the human spirit and accepting the challenge of going deeper into space will invite the citizens of the world today and the generations of tomorrow to join NASA on this exciting journey.

A Flexible Path

This is the beginning of a new era in space exploration in which NASA has been challenged to develop systems and capabilities required to explore beyond low-Earth orbit, including destinations such as translunar space, near-Earth asteroids and eventually Mars.
NASA will use the International Space Station as a test-bed and stepping stone for the challenging journey ahead. By building upon what we learn there we will prepare astronauts for the challenges of long-duration flight and the permanent expansion of human exploration beyond where we have been before. Explorers may visit near-Earth asteroids where we may get answers to the questions humans have always asked. Visiting an asteroid will provide valuable mission experience and prepare us for the next steps-possibly for the first humans to step on Mars.
Robotic exploration continues to deliver profound answers about our Universe by visiting far-off destinations, providing reconnaissance and collecting scientific data. When combining both human and robotic exploration methods we will use technology and our senses to increase our ability to observe, adapt, and uncover new knowledge.

Why the International Space Station?

The first step in embarking on a long and challenging journey involves laying solid groundwork for a successful endeavor. The International Space Station serves as a national laboratory for human health, biological, and materials research, as a technology test-bed, and as a stepping stone for going further into the solar system. On the International Space Station we will improve and learn new ways to ensure astronauts are safe, healthy and productive while exploring, and we will continue expand our knowledge about how materials and biological systems behave outside of the influence of gravity.
NASA will continue its unprecedented work with the commercial industry and expand an entire industry as private companies develop and operate safe, reliable and affordable commercial systems to transport crew and cargo to and from the International Space Station and low Earth orbit.

Why Translunar Space?

Translunar space is vast expanse surrounding the Earth-moon system, extending far beyond the moon's orbit and dominated by the two bodies' gravity fields. Exploring in translunar space, beyond the protection of the Earth's geomagnetic field, will provide unprecedented experience in deep-space operations. Operating in translunar space, NASA can research galactic cosmic radiation-potentially the most threatening element to humans exploring deep space-and develop mitigation strategies that may also lead to medical advancements on Earth.
The Lagrange points-places in cislunar space where the gravitational influences of the Earth and moon cancel each other out-are advantageous areas for exploration and research in which almost no propulsion is required to keep an object or spacecraft stationary. The Lagrange point on the far side of the Earth-Moon system, called L2, also provides a "radio silence" zone for astronomical observations.
Missions to translunar space will give NASA and its partners the opportunity to develop tools and operational techniques to support decades of future exploration, while remaining in relative proximity to Earth.

Why Asteroids?

Asteroids are believed to have formed early in our solar system's history-about 4.5 billion years ago-when a cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula collapsed and formed our sun and the planets. By visiting these near Earth objects to study the material that came from the solar nebula, we can look for answers to some of humankind's most compelling questions, such as: how did the solar system form and where did the Earth's water and other organic materials such as carbon come from?
In addition to unlocking clues about our solar system, asteroids may provide clues about our Earth. By understanding more about asteroids we may learn more about past Earth impacts and possibly find ways to reduce the threat of future impacts.
Future robotic missions to asteroids will prepare humans for long-duration space travel and the eventual journey to Mars. Robotic missions will provide reconnaissance information about asteroid orbits, surface composition, and even return samples to Earth for further evaluation. These robotic missions are a critical step in preparing humans to visit asteroids where we will learn about the valuable resources available in space, and further develop ways to use them in our quest for more efficient and affordable exploration.

Why Mars?

Mars has always been a source of inspiration for explorers and scientists. Robotic missions have found evidence of water, but if life exists beyond Earth still remains a mystery. Robotic and scientific robotic missions have shown that Mars has characteristics and a history similar to Earth's, but we know that there are striking differences that we have yet to begin to understand. Humans can build upon this knowledge and look for signs of life and investigate Mars' geological evolution, resulting in research and methods that could be applied here on Earth.
A mission to our nearest planetary neighbor provides the best opportunity to demonstrate that humans can live for extended, even permanent, stays beyond low Earth orbit. The technology and space systems required to transport and sustain explorers will drive innovation and encourage creative ways to address challenges. As previous space endeavors have demonstrated, the resulting ingenuity and technologies will have long lasting benefits and applications.
The challenge of traveling to Mars and learning how to live there will encourage nations around the world to work together to achieve such an ambitious undertaking. The International Space station has shown that opportunities for collaboration will highlight our common interests and provide a global sense of community.

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Humanity's interest in the heavens has been universal and enduring. Humans are driven to explore the unknown, discover new worlds, push the boundaries of our scientific and technical limits, and then push further. The intangible desire to explore and challenge the boundaries of what we know and where we have been has provided benefits to our society for centuries.

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Pandemics, specifically COVID-19 transforms our society, economy and governing structures. There has been rapid change in population, aging, urbanization, resources, energy, technology, etc. which has shaped why COVID-19 has reshaped our future and our history.

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On March 11, 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Uncertainty reigned. But soon thereafter, in perhaps the greatest intellectual explosion of futures thinking in human history, governments, businesses, institutions, and individuals asked what this shift would mean for them. How would the SARS-CoV-2 virus reshape our society and our lives in the days, weeks, months, years, and even decades to come?

In an especially prescient piece about the future course of the public health challenge, CSIS's J. Stephen Morrison and Anna Carroll observed, "Pandemics change history by transforming populations, states, societies, economies, norms, and governing structures."

With the benefit of four months of study and reflection, this analysis is an attempt to think systematically about how Covid-19 has fundamentally changed major global trendlines out to 2050. This research was conducted through the analytic framework of the Seven Revolutions initiative, a macrotrends assessment that is continually updated with a 30-year time horizon.

The net assessment is that Covid-19 is highly disruptive in the near term and highly unpredictable in the medium to long terms across every macrotrend area analyzed in this paper. It is at once an accelerant, an irritant, and a stress test. Its effects will ebb and flow and hit various nations and populations in different ways and on differing timescales. It is this unevenness and unpredictability that defines the challenges ahead, as explained in greater detail in this scenario analysis co-authored with CSIS's Sarah Ladislaw. While there is high confidence in the assessment of first-order outcomes from this crisis, the second-order outcomes of events just now unfolding can only begin to be anticipated. For example, while the authors of this brief made predictions in early April that Covid-19 would likely accelerate global protest movements, it was never anticipated that by late May the United States would be the epicenter of a global protest movement and the focus of those protests would be police brutality and systemic racism. Many future such surprises should be expected, but the identifiable changes underway should still be cataloged to the best possible extent. Covid-19 marks the start of an era of continuous, rapid change.

Population

The virus infected the human population at a historic transition in its demographic structure. This year, for the first time ever, the number of people aged 60 years or older outnumbers people 5 years old or younger worldwide, with aging populations concentrated most heavily in high-income countries. Unfortunately, the virus is uniquely dangerous to this growing elderly cohort. For example, more than half of Covid-related deaths in the United States have been among those over the age of 65, and around 85 percent in Italy have been among people aged 70 years and over. Eldercare facilities have proven especially vulnerable to outbreak clusters and high mortality.

The higher risk posed to the elderly raises the question of what can be done to better ensure their health and safety not just in the course of this pandemic but in the event of likely future epidemics. The pandemic has also highlighted the degree to which older citizens remain important contributors in the workforce as caregivers and as social lynchpins within families and communities. Over time, the true costs of this loss of human life will be absorbed and likely change the approach to eldercare, including increased biosecurity and use of technology to help keep the elderly safer and more connected.

Urbanization

Pandemics have long changed cities. The advent of street cleaning, hospitals, water drainage systems, garbage disposal systems, and secular public health systems all arose from urban responses to past disease outbreaks.

Lasting changes to cities worldwide in the course of this pandemic are already underway. Urban planners are reorganizing public spaces to emphasize green spaces, outdoor recreation areas, and pedestrian zones. And while public transportation usage has broadly plummeted in partial favor of cars as a result of Covid-19-for example, New York City public transit is down 62 percent since January while driving is up 16 percent-cities from New York to Paris to Bogota to Vilnius have taken steps to increase bike lanes and minimize vehicle traffic. Urban communities are also increasing universal access to public services such as health care and electricity, without which some people could not comply with public health measures such as lockdown orders. Additionally, governments in places such as Kenya, Afghanistan, India, and South Africa are taking steps to authorize and upgrade informal settlements and slums and connecting new sanitation, electric, and health services to previously unserved areas in the process. Elsewhere, governments in countries such as Colombia, Spain, Togo, and South Africa have stepped up emergency cash transfers and universal basic income measures, creating a new social safety net overnight. In parallel, major technology firms such as Tencent and Qualcomm have announced plans to help cities improve access to services through "smart city" technologies.

The pandemic also has driven home just how vulnerable high-density populations are to the spread of disease. While 55 percent of the world's population now lives in urban areas, that percentage is forecast to grow to 66 percent by 2050, with much of this growth in the developing world. The Covid-19 pandemic likely originated in Wuhan, China, a megacity of 11 million people. It then decimated the New York metropolitan area-another megacity. Public health and disease surveillance will be a critical consideration for cities of the future.

Moreover, the very future of cities has been thrown open to question in some regions. Take, for example, the acceleration of the adoption of remote work. In the month of March 2020, the number of Americans working remotely doubled to 62 percent. Emerging research indicates that remote work could lead to significant productivity gains, and major companies such as Twitter have already announced plans to make remote work options permanent. This has opened to question the importance of workplace proximity, which could in turn decrease the importance of cities as job hubs, allowing white-collar services workers in particular to abandon high-cost urban hubs for less expensive destinations-an especially important consideration given a potentially slow economic recovery disrupting wage growth. There are limited indications such a trend may already be underway, with 27 percent of home searchers looking to move to another metropolitan area in April and May according to Redfin, a real estate broker. Areas previously struggling with growth may also see new opportunity. For example, some smaller U.S. cities are incentivizing relocation of remote workers, with Topeka, Kansas, for example, offering $15,000.

Resources

The pandemic brought immediate, seismic disruption to energy markets as broad swathes of the global economy shut down overnight. U.S. petroleum demand fell by over 25 percent, and gas sunk to its lowest level since the 1970s. Public transportation demand is down about 70 percent in San Francisco and Seattle and 62 percent in London. In Italy and France, demand declined by more than 80 percent across all major cities between mid-March and early May but then steadily increased over recent months as the countries started recovering from the pandemic. In Washington, D.C., for instance, driving only reached pre-pandemic levels in early July, while public transportation usage remains 64 percent lower than the baseline. Additionally, declining global goods trade-on track to decrease by 20 percent in 2020-has reduced energy-intensive shipping. Globally, energy demand saw its steepest decline in 70 years, and continued reduction in demand may prove durable if changes in overall energy usage driven by factors such as continued remote work persist. Depending on how lasting certain changes are, the pandemic may have made the " peak oil" demand arrive 15 years earlier than expected.

Future Pandemics and Climate Change

Climate change and pandemics are inherently linked, and as humanity encroaches further on wilderness areas, the United Nations expects a steady stream of animal-born "zoonotic" viruses to leap into human populations in the years ahead. Wildlife and livestock already serve as the source of 60 percent of viruses infecting humans, and of all emerging infectious diseases, 75 percent originate in animals. Key triggers for epidemic zoonoses include climate variability, flooding, and other extreme weather events linked to climate change. Climate change has also increased the geographic area in which a number of currently active zoonotic diseases regularly infect humans.

However, the lasting outcomes from the pandemic on the future course of climate change are yet to be written. The speed and extent of the global economic and public health response to the virus has been taken by many activists to signify that global mobilization on policy issues is possible, even when it requires historic disruptions to economies and livelihoods. The European Union and South Korea have given special consideration in their economic recovery and stimulus plans around a " green recovery," and it is conceivable that other countries will follow suit.

Mounting food insecurity poses risks to political stability, and food prices are directly linked to institutional breakdowns and mass protests. Food-related protests have occurred in multiple regions over past months. Given the political stakes, governments have moved to secure food supplies through measures such as increasing domestic production, diversifying food supplies to additional countries, and securing agricultural labor. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) already forecasts increasingly localized vegetable production and more interregional food markets to shorten food chains. Increasingly, food production could occur within cities themselves as urban farming increases, even down to the household level. Demand has increased dramatically for seeds, chickens, and hydroponic and other equipment for vertical and indoor farming. Increased scrutiny of the public health impacts of meat consumption in China and beyond also raises questions about whether the pandemic-linked increase in plant-based food consumption will last in the long term as consumers develop a taste for meat alternatives-currently a hot bet for venture capital.

Technology

During the pandemic, robots have been widely deployed in delivering services, disinfecting public spaces, and assisting health workers in order to mitigate virus spread. In the health care industry, the pandemic is accelerating the incorporation of robots in daily hospital operations and driving developments in applications that could help with more effective diagnosis, screening, and patient care. For example, Chinese researchers are designing new robots that remotely take blood samples and perform mouth swabs.

Additive Manufacturing

Internet of Things

Despite a higher rate of digitalization during Covid-19, including through work-from-home infrastructures, VPN networks, and collaboration tools such as video conferencing, the Internet of Things (IoT) itself is largely unaffected by Covid-19. IoT includes 1 trillion or more connected devices in the world today, spanning sectors and industries and representing the convergence between the physical and digital worlds. Despite Covid-19 moving many social and commercial activities online, IoT devices are running and sending similar amounts of data as they had prior to the crisis (a sign, more than anything, of the already breakneck pace of use).

Artificial Intelligence

By 2030, AI could comprise $15.7 trillion of the world economy, and there is evidence that Covid-19 is accelerating the overall pace of innovation in the field. The pandemic will accelerate the infusion of AI into health care perhaps more than any other sector. AI has been paired with robotics to create autonomous systems capable of interacting with the physical world and used to predict the spread of the virus, monitor infection rates, conduct contact tracing, and inform policy decisions on reopening. The pandemic has also accelerated the expanded use of digital assistance such as chatbots: in health care applications on the WHO and CDC websites; in banking and e-commerce to provide conversational banking with PayPal (e.g., to handle 65 percent of customer inquiries); and in the call center services industry. Researchers are also using machine learning to recognize virus patterns, allowing for early detection of disease.

Simultaneously, Covid-19 has highlighted the challenges inherent to AI and that society remains decades away from automated systems that could independently run themselves. Evidence suggests that inexplicable crisis-induced changes in human behavior, such as panic shopping of toilet paper and surges in purchases of garden equipment, are simply confusing for AI. This might prompt developers to train future AI on understanding past crisis events such as the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis in order to better predict future human behavior. The wild swings in the stock market, particularly in the March to April timeframe, may have been largely the result of AI algorithms overreacting and overreacting to a vastly different strategic environment beyond any previous data they could mine for context.

Biotechnology

Covid-19 has likely accelerated what was already on course to be the biotechnology century. Biotechnology is at the cutting edge of the Covid-19 response, enabling rapid progress and new approaches in diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccine developments. The global health crisis has put into context exactly what the stakes will be for achieving leadership in biotechnology and the related implications for economic competitiveness and national security. Convergent technologies such as AI and cloud computing are also further accelerating progress in this field. Even prior to the pandemic, global synthetic biology companies were expected to reach a market capitalization of almost $20 billion by 2022. Amid the pandemic, the market capitalization of some biotech companies working to develop vaccines is surpassing all expectations.

Information

Access and Privacy

Nearly half of the world's population is now online, and by 2030 this number is likely to be close to 100 percent. Covid-19 has proven digital connectivity a vital link amid lockdowns and social distancing. And while internet connectivity has been a net social good, it has also enabled the expansion of security and surveillance measures by governments and companies, likely with lasting implications for privacy and civil liberties.

Data Growth

The digitalization of commercial and social activities, industries, and services under Covid-19 and the growing adoption of technologies such as IoT and AI will lead to global data growth. As the virus and lockdown measures push daily activities online, millions are turning to the internet and technology for entertainment and work, causing unprecedented spikes in data traffic and in-home data usage and showing just how vital digital infrastructure is to the future of societies and economies.

Compared to the same time in March 2019, in-home data usage increased by a total of 18 percent in 2020, and average daily usage rates increased by 38 percent to 16.6 gigabytes compared to 12 gigabytes in 2019. Total internet use and traffic have also spiked by as much as 70 percent. Telecommunication companies such as Vodafone are reporting a 50 percent rise in internet use as Covid-19 places greater demand for home networks. Several technology platforms are also seeing major increases in usage. The number of daily Zoom users more than quadrupled, up 378 percent from last year, while data usage itself has doubled. Communications apps including WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams are also seeing a 45 percent increase in traffic. All of the above suggests that while it is possible that data use of some technologies will decrease after Covid-19 retreats, this moment may nevertheless accelerate the growth of data globally.

False News and Social Media

Since the onset of Covid-19, disinformation (intentionally false) and misinformation (inadvertently false) directly tied to the virus have proliferated. By no means a new phenomenon, fake information has already been supercharged in scale and speed by information technology, a next generation of "deepfakes" or synthetic media, and, sometimes, government actors seeking to distort the truth. Past disease outbreaks highlight the troubling nature of health misinformation. During the 2016 Zika outbreak, misinformation about the virus greatly outpaced credible sources of information. This was further complicated by the ability of false news to spread farther, faster, and more broadly than credible news.

Knowledge and Learning

Covid-19 has necessitated a hyper-acceleration in the adoption of online education. Many universities and schools around the world have already transitioned to online education in response to Covid-19. While the rapid changes have caused painful adjustments and highlighted shortcomings in unequal access to technology, a new hybrid model of education that synergizes the advantages of in-person education with online learning likely will be sustained.

The pandemic may force a better understanding of institutional factors that limit the effectiveness and reach of online education, such as a lack of administrative and marketing support, a lack of understanding of online learning styles by instructors and faculty, and the negative perception of online degrees by employers. It may also drive universities to reconsider tuition rates due to dropping student demand as a result of an arguably less desirable education experience. This mass ongoing experiment may also reveal the limits of online education, including for K-12 students.

Economics

Globalization

The pandemic represents the largest worldwide economic shock in memory-outstripping the Global Financial Crisis in its sweep and future uncertainty. The World Bank's June 2020 Global Economic Prospects paints a bleak picture of the current and future world economy, forecasting a 5.2 percent contraction in the global economy in both emerging markets and developing and developed economies. It is the first time in at least 60 years that the two groups of countries have experienced a recession as a group, painting a picture of a wide, deep, and synchronized global economic crisis. Economists and central banks worldwide forecast a slow recovery as they enact extraordinary stimulus and stabilization measures, with IMF Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department Gita Gopinath stating that this was "the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis."

Even with such a dire outlook, the demise of globalization has been predicted for decades without coming to pass. Despite the massive blow to global connectivity and trade absorbed amid Covid-19, globalization is certain to endure and could bounce back sooner than expected. The more important questions are how globalization will change and what the path to recovery could look like. As countries hide behind their borders and raise tariffs to protect teetering markets, foreign trade flows have fallen precipitously. The World Trade Organization projects a volume of global goods exports commensurate with levels in the late-2000s.

Supply Chains

The most consequential outcome of Covid-19 could be an intensification of national interests superseding free market incentives in guiding supply chain formation. Covid-19 was likely the largest international market shock in terms of restricting supply in the free flow of goods since the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973, in this case related to medical supplies such as ventilators and personal protective equipment. That shock intersected with existing supply chain tensions related to continued trade and export restrictions between the United States and China. Lasting national restrictions and government incentives to spark domestic growth of key industries could potentially fragment and regionalize supply chains, leading to reshoring or nearshoring of production in key markets and a growing fragmentation between Asian and non-Asian markets.

Other countries around the world will soon face similar debt challenges as credit markets dry up and refinancing capacity proves elusive. The crucial ingredient-foreign direct investment (FDI)-has all but dried up. The UN Conference on Trade and Development forecasts that FDI flows will decrease by up to 40 percent this year and a further 5 to 10 percent next year and are not likely to begin recovery until 2021.

Inequality

Unsurprisingly, inequality is likely to increase both globally and within individual nations as the pandemic disproportionally impacts poorer economic strata. In an analysis of five twenty-first century epidemics, the IMF found evidence that low-skilled and low-wage workers are disproportionally impacted by outbreaks. Gini coefficients-a commonly-used measure of wealth distribution in society-has increased following past pandemics, indicating greater wealth disparity during recovery. Job losses have been unequally distributed as well. The employment of those with advanced education was not significantly impacted, but for those with little or no formal training, employment averages fell by more than 5 percent, even after five years of recovery.

Labor Dislocation

Labor markets are in disarray around the globe. The IMF estimates that 300 million full-time jobs could be lost in the second quarter of 2020. In the retail, service, and hospitality industries, where the majority of low-income jobs are located, pandemic-induced job loss from economic dislocation will continue to be highest.

The pandemic's economic effects have been felt hardest by those closest to the poverty line as jobs in the "real economy" (i.e., providing physical goods and essential services) disappear due to quarantines and lockdowns. Long term, these workers will experience significant difficulty recovering from the pandemic.

Innovation

Digital wallets are already proliferating thanks to apps such as WeChat, but the shift away from currency will likely see increased development and adoption. Bain and Company adjusted their projections, estimating that by 2025 67 percent of all transaction values would be digital, an increase of 10 percent over pre-Covid-19 targets. Shadow banks are another beneficiary of this move away from physical banking, as their flexibility and remote access becomes more and more attractive in a cashless world.

Security

Expanding National Security

Covid-19 has underscored the reality that health security is national security. The need to broaden the definition of what is meant by national defense is clear. This could in turn give impetus to include other global trends such as migration and climate change in the conceptual bounds of national security as governments seek to renew trust with citizens shaken by the flat-footedness or even incompetence of many countries' national responses to the pandemic. At the same time, there is a danger, as a report of the CSIS Commission on Strengthening America's Health Security indicates, that the United States could fall once more into a "cycle of complacency and crisis" that has characterized America's response to past disease threats. While health security will demand greater investments, growing debt and budget pressures will increase in the slow-growth economic environment that follows.

Fragmentation

A recent interview of multiple CSIS scholars concludes that a long-term impact of Covid-19 is likely to be the acceleration of a transition to a more fragmented world order led by neither the United States nor China. This will not necessarily be a multipolar order, because its organizing principles remain unclear. Recent polling has affirmed that both the United States and China are viewed less favorably in light of their responses to Covid-19. Countries across the world are openly questioning the roles of the United States and China in a new world order. It will be increasingly difficult in this global environment for any single country to lead, as nations are poised to pursue their interests on a more ad hoc basis and as multiple powers gain sufficient capacity to influence events. The U.S. system of alliances is likely to remain the most important structure of influence in the world, but other axes and interests will also determine global events.

The Gray Zone

Gray zone activities-activities below the threshold of armed conflict but outside the usual practice of statecraft-have increased sharply over the past several decades. CSIS's Gray Zone Project explores the notable uptick in cyberattacks from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as well as other tactics such as financial support for proxy conflicts, political and economic coercion, and information influence operations.

Further, as CSIS's Todd Harrison has noted, the extraordinary fiscal impacts of Covid-19 will result in defense cuts around the globe. This could push more countries to lower cost, gray zone approaches to international competition. Budgetary constraints could also create military surprise, as it incents militaries to jettison legacy forces and innovate in new capabilities, including the broader adoption of emerging technologies such as autonomous systems.

Return to Terror

A note about non-state actors: their numbers and operations are likely to surge amid the pandemic and economic fallout. Non-state and terrorist groups have used the widespread disruption to retool, retrain, and reorganize, moving into the void left by retreating state capability and a near-singular focus by governments on pandemic and economic security. In the Middle East, for example, Iraq has seen a dramatic increase in terror attacks. During Q1 2019, Iraq experienced just under 300 attacks; in Q1 of 2020, it experienced just over 550.

Governance

Political Awakening

The pandemic has intensified nearly all the underlying factors that make mass protest more likely as laid out in our March report, The Age of Mass Protests. These range from use of social media and digital technologies to unemployment and inequality. The pandemic has also laid bare problems in governance and exacerbated ongoing economic crises in many countries.

Democratic Decline

On the other hand, the pandemic could prove a restorative moment for democracy, most notably by exposing the ineffectiveness of political populism. Populist governments currently represent about a third of global democracies, and virtually all of these governments have been caught flat-footed as they at times disregard medical advice, downplay the severity of the crisis, and are at war with their own administrative states and expert advice. The United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and Mexico-all with populists leading their governments-have suffered more cases and deaths than peer democracies such as Germany and South Korea. These failed populist responses to the pandemic could discredit their political style in the future; for example, polling for populist leaders in the United States, Brazil, and United Kingdom has trended sharply down in recent months. Meanwhile, support for democratic government has actually increased among established Western European democracies as societies coalesce to fight the pandemic together.

However, that "rally around the flag" effect quickly faded. Across the G7, public approval of government responses to the pandemic has continually declined, and the portion of those who trust government to manage the pandemic dipped to 50 percent across the G7 between April and June. In the United States, the percentage of those who with little or no confidence in information they receive from the federal government rose from 38 percent in March to 49 percent in May. As rally effects fade, public confidence in political institutions may decrease as well.

Conclusion

Those governments, businesses, institutions, and individuals that are most disciplined, rigorous, and honest in their assessment of the challenges now facing our world will emerge strongest from this crisis. The future does not just happen to us. We shape it actively by our actions and inactions, especially during times of massive upheaval, which this moment certainly represents. Rather than resigning to the trends outlined here, we should think how to actively design and mold the kind of world we want-one that avoids a repeat of the type of crisis that is now consuming us.
Sam Brannen leads the Risk and Foresight Group and is a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Stirling Haig is a former research assistant and Habiba Ahmed is a former intern for the Risk and Foresight Group. Henry Newton is an intern for the Risk and Foresight Group. This report is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s). © 2020 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.

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Covid-19 marks the beginning of an era of continuous, rapid change across seven global macrotrends.

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Technology and Innovation Trends: Shaping the Future of Our World - WIIPA

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Introduction Technology and innovation continue to transform our world at an unprecedented pace, disrupting industries, shaping societies, and redefining how we live, work, and interact. By staying informed about emerging trends, individuals and organizations can better anticipate and adapt to change, seize opportunities, and thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.

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Fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas are the major factors in terms of contributing to global climate change, accounting for over 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 90 percent of all carbon dioxide.
warmer temperatures over time are changing weather patterns and disrupting the usual balance of nature.

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Climate change is affecting life in all aspects such as agriculture, infrastructure, water, human health, and the environment as a whole

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We often think about human-induced climate change as something that will happen in the future, but it is happening now. Ecosystems and people in the United States and around the world are affected by the ongoing process of climate change today.

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This article suggests that technological advancements achieved in this era will be applied to other fields like genomics and material sciences and that technologies of our era may soon become outdated. Even so, this new era will still continue to be considered a technological one because it will continue to develop.

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In a famous scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, a family friend takes aside Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin Braddock, and whispers in a conspiratorial tone, "Plastics....There's a great future in plastics." It seems quaint today, but back then plastics really were new and exciting.

If the movie had been set in another age, the advice to young Braddock would have been different. He might have been counseled to go into railroads or electronics or simply to "Go West, young man!" Every age has things that seem novel and wonderful at the time, but tepid and banal to future generations.

Today digital technology is all the rage because after decades of development it has become incredibly useful. Still, if you look closely, you can already see the contours of its inevitable descent into the mundane. We need to start preparing for a new era of innovation in which different technologies, such as genomics, materials science, and robotics, rise to the fore.

To understand what's happening, it helps to look at earlier technologies. The rise of electricity, for example, began in the early 1830s, when Michael Faraday invented the electric dynamo and motor. Still, it wasn't until 50 years later that Edison opened his first power plant, and then 40 years after that, during the 1920s, electricity began to have a measurable impact on productivity.

Every technology follows a similar path of discovery, engineering, and transformation. In the case of electricity, Faraday uncovered new principles, but no one really knew how to make them useful. They first had to be understood well enough that people such as Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla could figure out how to make things that people would be willing to buy.

However, creating a true transformation takes more than a single technology. First, people need to change their habits, and then secondary innovations need to come into play. For electricity, factories needed to be redesigned and work itself had to be reimagined before it began to have a real economic impact. Then household appliances, radio communications, and other things changed life as we knew it, but that took another few decades.

Our world has been thoroughly transformed by digital technology. It would be hard to explain to someone looking at an IBM mainframe back in the 1960s that someday similar machines would replace books and newspapers, give us recommendations on where to eat and directions for how to get there, and even talk to us, but today those things have become matters of everyday habit.

And yet today there are several reasons to believe that the twilight of the digital age is upon us. (Importantly, I'm not arguing we'll stop using digital technology - after all, we still use heavy industry, we just no longer refer to ourselves as being in the Industrial Age.)

I see three main reasons that the digital era is ending. First is the technology itself. What's driven all the excitement about computers is our ability to cram more and more transistors onto a silicon wafer, a phenomenon we've come to know as Moore's Law. That enabled us to make our technology exponentially more powerful year after year.

Yet now Moore's Law is ending and advancement isn't so easy anymore. Companies such as Microsoft and Google are designing custom chips to run their algorithms because it is no longer feasible to just wait for a new generation of chips. To maximize performance, you increasingly need to optimize technology for a specific task.

Second, the technical skill required to create digital technology has dramatically decreased, marked by the rising popularity of so-called no-code platforms. Much as with auto mechanics and electricians, the ability to work with digital technology is increasingly becoming a midlevel skill. With democratization comes commoditization.

Finally, digital applications are becoming fairly mature. Buy a new laptop or mobile phone today, and it pretty much does the same things as the one you bought five years ago. New technologies, such as smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home, add the convenience of voice interfaces but little else.

While there is limited new value to be gleaned from things like word processors and smartphone apps, there is tremendous value to be unlocked in applying digital technology to fields like genomics and materials science to power traditional industries like manufacturing, energy, and medicine. Essentially, the challenge ahead is to learn how to use bits to drive atoms.

To understand how this will work, let's look at the Cancer Genome Atlas. Introduced in 2005, its mission was simply to sequence tumor genomes and put them online. To date, it has catalogued over 10,000 genomes across more than 30 cancer types and unlocked a deluge of innovations in cancer science. It has also helped inspire a similar program for materials called the Materials Genome Initiative.

These efforts are already greatly increasing our ability to innovate. Consider the effort to develop advanced battery chemistries to drive the clean energy economy, which requires the discovery of materials that don't yet exist. Historically, this would involve testing hundreds or thousands of molecules, but researchers have been able to apply high-performance supercomputers to run simulations on materials genomes and greatly narrow down the possibilities.

Over the next decade, these techniques will increasingly incorporate machine learning algorithms as well as new computing architectures, such as quantum computing and neuromorphic chips, that function very differently than digital computers do.

The possibilities of this new era of innovation are profoundly exciting. The digital revolution, for all of its charms, has had a fairly limited economic impact, compared with earlier technologies such as electricity and the internal combustion engine. Even now, information technologies make up only about 6% of GDP in advanced economies.

Compare that to manufacturing, health care, and energy, which make up 17%, 10%, and 8% of global GDP, respectively, and you can see how there is vastly more potential to make an impact beyond the digital world. Yet to capture that value, we need to rethink innovation for the 21st century.

For digital technology, speed and agility are key competitive attributes. Techniques including rapid prototyping and iteration greatly accelerated development and often improved quality, because we understood the underlying technologies extremely well. Yet with the nascent technologies that are emerging now, that is often not the case.

You can't rapidly prototype a quantum computer, a cure for cancer, or an undiscovered material. There are serious ethical issues surrounding technologies such as genomics and artificial intelligence. We've spent the last few decades learning how to move fast. Over the next few decades we're going to have to relearn how to go slow again.

So while the mantras for the digital age have been agility and disruption, for this new era of innovation exploration and discovery will once again become prominent. It's time to think less about hackathons and more about tackling grand challenges.

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The Industrial Era Ended, and So Will the Digital Era

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Every technology follows a path of discovery, engineering, and transformation before becoming quotidian. Today digital technology has transformed much of our world, but if you look closely, you can already see the contours of its inevitable descent into the mundane. As digital technologies and applications mature, we'll need to push new frontiers of discovery.

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solving the problem:To address climate change, we have to vastly raise our ambition at all levels. Much is happening around the world – investments in renewable energy have soared. But more needs to be done. The world must transform its energy, industry, transport, food, agriculture and forestry systems to ensure that we can limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C, maybe even 1.5°C.
Act now: The climate crisis continues unabated as the global community shies away from the full commitment required for its reversal. 2010 – 2019 was the warmest decade ever recorded, bringing with it massive wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, floods and other climate disasters across continents. Climate change is disrupting national economies and affecting lives and livelihoods, especially for the most vulnerable.Between 2010 and 2020, highly vulnerable regions, home to approximately 3.3–3.6 billion people, experienced 15 x higher human mortality rates from floods, droughts and storms compared to regions with very low vulnerability.

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covid changed the way people socialized during the pandemic

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Over the past two years, the world has seen a shift in behaviors, the economy, medicine and beyond due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts from the University of Alabama at Birmingham discuss changes starting in March 2020 that will forever stamp and change our lives.

"We've had to shift the way we approach most things in our lives," said Sarah Nafziger, M.D., vice president for Clinical Support Services at UAB Hospital. "As a hospital, we have reevaluated patient care. As an employer, we must look at the overall health of our employees and provide resources to meet their needs. As a leader in infection management, UAB has taken on a role in communicating with global audiences to provide guidance on how to get through the pandemic. Taking care of people has always been our business. As times change and the pandemic evolves, society must evolve to meet the needs of the people around us."

Shifting focus to mental health

While hospitals were full of COVID patients, another disease ran rampant through many homes. Lockdowns and quarantine caused many to be separated from their families, and with the unknowns of the economy, many Americans found themselves struggling with mental health.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Younger adults, racial/ethnic minorities, essential workers, and unpaid adult caregivers reported having experienced disproportionately worse mental health outcomes, increased substance use and elevated suicidal ideation."

The significant increase in reported mental health struggles allowed for the much-needed conversation on mental health to be addressed. Matthew Macaluso, D.O., clinical director of the UAB Depression and Suicide Center, says all the challenges society has faced during the past two years is leading to a shift in available mental health care.

"Before the pandemic, many rural Americans and Alabamians did not have access to mental health services due to geography," Macaluso said. "Innovative models for health care delivery relied heavily on virtual visits, and the now widespread use of telehealth has increased access for many patients, which could change the way we provide care in the future."

Self-care plans in the B Well App are tailored to each student and focus on good habits in sleep, movement, nutrition, routine and resiliency, and users can create private habit checklists and wellness journals to monitor their health journey. Plus, the B Well App includes self-help tools that put mental health services, mindfulness resources and related campus events at students' fingertips.

Health care heroes. And health care burnout.

In the early days of the pandemic, health care employees were lauded as heroes, selflessly caring for others while struggling to stay healthy themselves. There were military flyovers, fire department drive-bys with sirens blaring, meal donations, and signs expressing thanks on buildings, doors and hanging from windows. Harry Connick Jr. even stopped by to put UAB Hospital on national TV. And that outpouring of support was appreciated.

"In those early days, walking through the hospital was eerie," Nafziger said. "There weren't people walking about, and the emptiness was unsettling. The support of the community meant the world to me and others. Handwritten notes and chalk messages on the parking lot walls. One said, 'The task ahead of you is never greater than the strength within you.' I keep a picture of that one on my phone."

But two years is a long time, even for heroes. Eventually, signs of burnout appeared. As the case load surged and dropped and surged again, hospital and health care workers wondered how long they could keep going.

"Staffing has been a challenge, and we are still seeing that," Nafziger said. "The good news is that the number of employees now out due to COVID is minimal. At one point, we had 500 employees out sick or quarantining. Now we're at five or so per day."

Nafziger says, as the number of patients with COVID drops, hospital job duties are returning to normal, or at least the new normal. Staff continue to take precautions - masking and distancing can also help reduce the spread of other contagious diseases such as colds and the flu. But the transition to what will become normal will take time.

"As we get back to being together, we will have to find our own comfort levels," Nafziger said. "Some people will have an easy time integrating with others. Some will find it unsettling. The pandemic has changed us all. We will need to prioritize the things that we really value and work to find ways to be happier going forward than we were before the pandemic."

Vaccine innovation

COVID-19 has led to several advancements across multiple scientific fronts, including vaccine development.

Paul Goepfert, M.D., director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic at UAB, says scientists are now more adept at rapidly developing vaccines. This is due to several factors, including a more streamlined clinical testing strategy that does not detract from safety analysis, as well as mRNA technology that allows rapid vaccine product development.

"We demonstrated that we can quickly test drugs to help treat patients in the outpatient and hospitalized settings," Goepfert said. "The learned lessons can apply to future infectious and even non-infectious diseases."

Goepfert says that, astoundingly, COVID vaccine development took only 11 months - the previous record was a mumps vaccine that took five years to develop. A major factor in that short time frame was the work previously done with mRNA vaccines.

"mRNA vaccines will help the fight in that you can rapidly develop vaccines and they induce antibodies, B and T cells," Goepfert said. "However, they will not solve the problem of stopping viruses that are highly variable such as HIV and HCV."

Goepfert adds that researchers and developers are in a much better position to develop vaccines more rapidly and better respond to future epidemics and pandemics.

Telemedicine

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine experienced rapid growth as consumers and providers looked for ways to safely access and deliver health care. UAB providers went from having a few hundred pre-COVID telehealth visits to more than a half million telehealth visits during the last two years alone. With telemedicine, patients could connect with their health care team and get routine care without coming to a hospital or clinic coping with COVID restrictions.

Telemedicine has improved the safety and efficiency of treatment for patients with COVID-19 in all health care settings, especially in rural hospitals. Prior to the pandemic, rural hospitals would often transfer their sickest patients to larger medical centers that were better equipped to manage highly complex patients in need of subspecialist support. As COVID-19 swept through the nation and intensive care unit beds filled up, rural hospitals found their resources were stretched as they cared for their sickest patients in their own facilities.

Overall, telehealth has allowed physicians to address the disparities of care by facilitating subspecialty care and increasing access to care in rural areas. UAB doctors predict that telehealth is going to be part of health care delivery moving forward and is necessary for improved patient outcomes and economic survival of rural hospitals.

Barriers and breakthroughs in educating and caring for children

Resiliency, a word often used to describe COVID-19 frontline workers, can also describe children and adolescents. Throughout the pandemic, they have faced decreased structure, increased educational barriers, and many disruptions to their everyday activities and lives.

Virtual learning, while a safety precaution, created additional educational barriers for children in K-12 schools.

"Early childhood students, even the kindergarteners, were figuring out the online platforms while trying to learn the academic content," said Taajah Witherspoon, Ph.D., associate professor in the UAB School of Education. "The online platform intensified those barriers that we see in the classroom, such as noise levels, and it created unprecedented challenges for teachers and the young learners."

In addition to the new barriers, Witherspoon also recognizes that there were breakthroughs in education that came during the pandemic, such as new levels of proficiency and comfort with electronic platforms in a classroom setting.

Working through barriers and loss caused additional mental health obstacles for many during the pandemic. Candice Dye, M.D., pediatrician at UAB and Children's of Alabama, noted an increase in isolation, depression and anxiety in her adolescent patients since the beginning of the pandemic. To help combat these struggles, Dye encourages parents to continue routine checkups with their children's primary care physicians.

"Being an adolescent is tough on a good day, much less when there is an ongoing pandemic," Dye said. "Primary care physicians want to keep up with your physical and mental health. Routine visits allow for mental health screenings and help maintaining the important relationship between a pediatrician and their patients. That way, when life throws a curve ball, we can quickly address the issue and adequately help our patients."

She also suggests finding time for family activities, such as consistent family dinners, to provide another outlet for children and adolescents to discuss their worries and struggles. A helpful first step in creating open and transparent discussions is for families to take a step back, reflect on the past two years, and acknowledge the hardships and challenges that they not only faced but overcame.

"Mental health in teens and the general population has always been an area of concern," Dye said. "My hope is the pandemic shed a light on these issues so they're not so taboo, such as discussing depression and anxiety, so people are more willing to reach out to mental health providers and specialists for help."

Behavioral changes

Behavioral changes shifted fast when the pandemic began, such as social distancing, masking and isolation from others. Mitigation efforts created weak social ties that affected communications and trust.

"These weak social ties don't have the primary importance that strong ties do, but sociologists find that weak social ties have a lot of unexpected and important functions, like giving us access to new information," said Mieke Beth Thomeer, Ph.D., associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Sociology. "A lot moved online during the pandemic, but social media networks have been shown to be especially vulnerable to spreading false information, especially related to health care."

Thomeer says the misinformation that has been disseminated throughout the last two years has shaped society to be less trusting than before.

"There seems to be a major decline in trust of expertise and trust of people, as well as a rise in misinformation during the pandemic," she said. "It can be good to be critical of what is said in the media or online, but society seems to have swung to a place where people tend to be more dismissive and cynical - especially of information provided by public health agencies and medical experts."

A positive behavioral change brought about during the pandemic has been a great acceptance for flexibility, especially in the workplace. For those who may had a greater health risk, or had children who were virtual-learning at home, a sense of compassion was highlighted in some work fields.

"Some people have issues attending in-person meetings because of childcare or transportation issues, and having the option of online meetings can assist and make a work-life balance easier for some," Thomeer said.

A changing workforce and "Great Resignation"

The pandemic coined many new terms, one being the "Great Resignation," with many Americans' evaluating what they wanted out of their lives, their jobs and their futures.

"Instead of calling this the 'Great Resignation,' I think we approach this as the 'Great Rethink,'" explained Allen Gorman, Ph.D., associate professor of management and the chair of the Department of Management, Information Systems and Quantitative Methods in the Collat School of Business. "The pandemic has forced all of us to take a good hard look at ourselves and think about what we really want from our lives, including our jobs. For many people, the daily grind of the 9 to 5 just didn't seem as important as it once did. And recent evidence suggests that many of those people who quit during the pandemic found even better-paying jobs later."

Another shift for employees and employers alike was the accessibility - and necessity - of remote work. Initially implemented because of public health concerns, employees across hundreds of professional fields had a taste of the positive impact that remote work could have in their lives: more time with family, less time spent in the car and improved efficiencies, to name a few high points.

For employers, rethinking whether the cost of a physical office space is even necessary or how essential an in-person presence is has factored into new policies and opportunities for an eager workforce - even opening job opportunities once not an option due to physical location. Per Gorman, many experts suggest that a full return to the office to pre-pandemic levels will never happen, especially considering the ease of connecting to the office via improved technology and the likelihood of future global crises.

The pandemic has organizations rethinking traditional approaches to leadership. Managing and leading teams of remote workers scattered in various locations has created the need for a new skill set for leaders, skills that must help employees deal with constant change, emotional ups and downs of work-life conflict, and building relationships with co-workers who are not in the same physical location. Gorman notes that, most importantly, those who have emerged as effective leaders during the pandemic are those who lead with humanity, put people first, and are supportive and vulnerable.

Where's my package? Supply chain disruptions and growth

Since March 2020, a tremendous pain point for Americans and others across the world has been supply chain disruptions. Whether it is because of a baby crib on backorder, not seeing a familiar product on shelves at the grocery store or gifts' being hard to come by during the holiday season, almost everyone has been touched by supply chain issues as a byproduct of the pandemic.

These distributions, however, have national and global impacts and origins and did not happen in a vacuum, explains Thomas DeCarlo, Ph.D., Ben S. Weil Endowed Chair of Industrial Distribution in the Collat School of Business.

"From a global perspective, getting key parts from China, such as microchips for cars, has been very difficult," DeCarlo said. "This can be attributed to COVID-related labor restrictions and power supply restrictions in China, which slows down the manufacturing process and availability of microchips for U.S. auto manufacturers, resulting in fewer new cars for sale in the U.S. Contributing to this shortage is the stockpiling of chip inventory by some businesses to help alleviate their future shortages."

In the United States, DeCarlo notes, a lack of logistics space available for inventories has crippled the supply chain, such as backlogs of getting products off ships in ports and out for distribution. A common problem is in California, where ship cargo containers have been held up because of a shortage of a common truck framework that stores and transports containers to a warehouse. Coupled with warehouses full due to worker shortages and a lack of trucks to move product, a circular problem of inventory's not leaving port occurred, impacting the average consumer downstream.

Looking forward, what does a post-COVID future of supply chain issues hold? According to DeCarlo, Americans will likely see more technologies' being introduced into the supply chain to collect data in real time.

"The future for distribution, for example, will likely include more data analytics services to provide new ways to add value to a distributor's customers and suppliers. Not only will these technologies add value by determining how products, equipment or vehicles are performing, but they will link supply chain members in unique ways to drive inefficiencies out of the channel of distribution," DeCarlo said. "In addition, supply chain members will be better equipped to predict sources of uncertainty, leading to such advantages as adaptive inventory staging, flexible processes and better allocation of labor. It is likely the post-COVID supply chain will look more like a high-tech industry with state-of-the-art tools and applications that will attract a new pool of talent to manage this new automation."

A yo-yo economy

COVID has been largely devastating for the U.S. and global economies for many reasons; but there are a few key takeaways and even silver linings, as explained by Joshua Robinson, Ph.D., associate professor in UAB's Department of Marketing, Industrial Distribution and Economics.

"It is important to consider that recession caused by countrywide shutdowns - both mandatory and self-imposed - caused unemployment to reach more than 14.7 percent, a level of unemployment we've not seen for nearly 100 years," Robinson said. "A large set of stimulus bills helped us pull out of that recession at a record pace; however, that came with a cost."

One of the biggest indirect problems caused by COVID is inflation. The Federal Reserve dramatically increased the money supply, which combined with the several trillion dollars of stimulus passed by Congress, created the inflationary environment that persists. While these measures were necessary to avoid a much worse and longer-lasting recession, Americans are now dealing with the trade-off of much higher prices as the economy has improved.

In the near term, inflation will be handled delicately to not cause a second massive recession to occur as a way to get inflation under control, Robinson says.

Unwinding with a greater appreciation of the arts

Artists and performers have innovated new ways to provide engaging, entertaining and enriching activities and programs. In spring 2020, programming around the world shifted to a virtual, more accessible world. With none of the usual geographic limitations, people could join from wherever they were, and many activities were archived for use on demand.

"During the height of the pandemic, we learned how resilient we can be, how much we need each other and how vital the arts are to our daily lives," said Lili D. Anderson, executive director of UAB Visual and Performing Arts.

The original Theatre UAB production " Disconnect," a new work created by a student ensemble using both live and recorded media in virtual spaces, won five national awards, including a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Award and Special Achievement awards.

A series of speakers providing expert information on timely, compelling and fun topics presented by the National Alumni Society proved popular and still provides service to viewers. Musicians and health care staff have gone to great lengths to play livestreamed concerts to patients recovering in UAB Hospital. The Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center offered drive-in and streaming concerts until it was safely able to host patrons in-person again.

Performing together again in person is about more than just making beautiful music, says Professor Patrick Evans, chair of the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Music.

"During the pandemic, our medical professionals repeatedly told us that the arts will be important in helping us return to normalcy, and lift our spirits," Evans said. "They knew we needed safe, in-person audiences again, as the pandemic has taken a toll on our collective mental health."

UAB Arts in Medicine provided an easy tutorial to make a no-sew facemask that was shared around the world. Virtual activities from ArtPlay, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts and others were fun and inclusive - from a DIY calming kit, floral arranging and yoga to coloring with friends, conversations with artists and mental health Monday talks, to virtual tours of exhibitions, artist talks and panel discussions - helped soothe, restore and spark creativity.

The original Theatre UAB production "Disconnect," a new work created by a student ensemble using both live and recorded media in virtual spaces, won five national awards, including a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Award and Special Achievement awards.

A series of speakers providing expert information on timely, compelling and fun topics presented by the National Alumni Society proved popular and still provides service to viewers. Musicians and health care staff have gone to great lengths to play livestreamed concerts to patients recovering in UAB Hospital. The Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center offered drive-in and streaming concerts until it was safely able to host patrons in-person again.

"You're on mute."

The biggest change in how people communicated since March 2020 is, "in a word, Zoom," said Distinguished Professor Tim Levine, Ph.D., chair of the UAB College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Communication Studies.

"Video calls existed before COVID, but now we all have become expert in using them," Levine said. "We know Zoom etiquette and functionality and have adapted to it better than we thought we would."

From virtual team meetings and commencements to baby showers, birthday parties and happy hours, Zoom became the lifeline for socializing safely. Even the least tech-savvy have by now become proficient. Proper Zoom etiquette depends on the occasion but starts with good lighting, a quiet corner and an attractive - or at least tidy - background. To be polite, the microphone should be turned off until time to speak, which without fail leads to the most common refrain: "You're on mute."

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How the COVID-19 pandemic changed society

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COVID-19 changed the way we communicate, care for others, educate our children, work and more. Experts from UAB weigh in on these changes. Over the past two years, the world has seen a shift in behaviors, the economy, me...

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Sustainability and Climate Action is as important to us as safety | Volvo Cars

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Volvo Cars and their move towards Carbon Neutrality

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Volvo Cars and their move towards Carbon Neutrality

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Climate Change is affecting many aspects of our life, and one of them is sustainability efforts and carbon neutrality. Volvo Cars is one automotive company that is striving to make changes in the way their cars are produced. They have reached or are trying to reach many of their goals such as CO2 emission reduction per vehicle, reducing operational business emissions, and reducing supply chain emissions. I think this example shows us that Climate Change is the next major problem and that people are already working towards fixing it.

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We aim to have climate-neutral manufacturing operations by 2025. Since 2008, all our European plants have been running on hydroelectric power. Today, our global plants are powered by over 80 per cent climate-neutral electricity. We know it takes a lot of wins - big and small - to achieve our ambitions.

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Sustainability is as important to us as safety | Volvo Cars

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We aim to have climate-neutral manufacturing operations by 2025. Since 2008, all our European plants have been running on hydroelectric power. Today, our global plants are powered by over 80 per cent climate-neutral electricity. We know it takes a lot of wins - big and small - to achieve our ambitions.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Data from NASA's GRACE and GRACE Follow-On satellites show that the land ice sheets in both Antarctica (upper chart) and Greenland (lower chart) have been losing mass since 2002.

The GRACE mission ended in June 2017. The GRACE Follow-On mission began collecting data in June 2018 and is continuing to monitor both ice sheets. This record includes new data-processing methods and is continually updated as more numbers come in, with a delay of up to two months.

This is important because the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica store about two-thirds of all the fresh water on Earth. They are losing ice due to the ongoing warming of Earth's surface and ocean. Meltwater coming from these ice sheets is responsible for about one-third of the global average rise in sea level since 1993.

Note: You now need to create an Earthdata account to access NASA's ice sheet data. Register here for free. Once logged in, click "HTTP" under the charts on this page to access the data.

Missions That Observe Land Ice
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) NASA's IceBridge

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA.

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Climate change is likely to change multiple aspects of the Earth, for increased amounts of CO2 cascade into different problems such as a change in weather patterns across the globe to rises in sea levels to ocean acidification and etc. This is likely going to be a massive influence on both the physical world and for society since the world literally changes as climate change becomes more severe.

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On This Page

Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will have many effects

Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to increase unless the billions of tons of our annual emissions decrease substantially. Increased concentrations are expected to:

These changes will impact our food supply, water resources, infrastructure, ecosystems, and even our own health.

Future changes will depend on many factors

NRC Climate Stabilization Targets increase in greenhouse gas concentrations

Natural influences on climate (e.g., from volcanic activity and changes in the sun's intensity) and natural processes within the climate system (e.g., changes in ocean circulation patterns)

Scientists use computer models of the climate system to better understand these issues and project future climate changes.

Past and present-day greenhouse gas emissions will affect climate far into the future

Many greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for long periods of time. As a result, even if emissions stopped increasing, atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations would continue to increase and remain elevated for hundreds of years. Moreover, if we stabilized concentrations and the composition of today's atmosphere remained steady (which would require a dramatic reduction in current greenhouse gas emissions), surface air temperatures would continue to warm. This is because the oceans, which store heat, take many decades to fully respond to higher greenhouse gas concentrations. The ocean's response to higher greenhouse gas concentrations and higher temperatures will continue to impact climate over the next several decades to hundreds of years.

To learn more about greenhouse gases, please visit the Greenhouse Gas Emissions page and the Greenhouse Effect section of the Causes of Climate Change page.

Because it is difficult to project far-off future emissions and other human factors that influence climate, scientists use a range of scenarios using various assumptions about future economic, social, technological, and environmental conditions.

Future temperature changes

We have already observed global warming over the last several decades. Future temperatures are expected to change further. Climate models project the following key temperature-related changes.

Key global projections

Increases in average global temperatures are expected to be within the range of 0.5°F to 8.6°F by 2100, with a likely increase of at least 2.7°F for all scenarios except the one representing the most aggressive mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Except under the most aggressive mitigation scenario studied, global average temperature is expected to warm at least twice as much in the next 100 years as it has during the last 100 years.

Ground-level air temperatures are expected to continue to warm more rapidly over land than oceans.

Some parts of the world are projected to see larger temperature increases than the global average.

Key U.S. projections

By 2100, the average U.S. temperature is projected to increase by about 3°F to 12°F, depending on emissions scenario and climate model.

An increase in average temperatures worldwide implies more frequent and intense extreme heat events, or heat waves. The number of days with high temperatures above 90°F is expected to increase throughout the United States, especially toward the end of the century. Climate models project that if global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to grow, summertime temperatures in the United States that ranked among the hottest 5% in 1950-1979 will occur at least 70% of the time by 2035-2064.

Future precipitation and storm events

Patterns of precipitation and storm events, including both rain and snowfall are also likely to change. However, some of these changes are less certain than the changes associated with temperature. Projections show that future precipitation and storm changes will vary by season and region. Some regions may have less precipitation, some may have more precipitation, and some may have little or no change. The amount of rain falling in heavy precipitation events is likely to increase in most regions, while storm tracks are projected to shift poleward. Climate models project the following precipitation and storm changes.

Key global projections

Global average annual precipitation through the end of the century is expected to increase, although changes in the amount and intensity of precipitation will vary significantly by region.

The intensity of precipitation events will likely increase on average. This will be particularly pronounced in tropical and high-latitude regions, which are also expected to experience overall increases in precipitation.

The strength of the winds associated with tropical storms is likely to increase. The amount of precipitation falling in tropical storms is also likely to increase.

Annual average precipitation is projected to increase in some areas and decrease in others. The figure to the right shows projected regional differences in precipitation under two emission scenarios.

Key U.S. projections

Northern areas are projected to become wetter, especially in the winter and spring. Southern areas, especially the Southwest, are projected to become drier.

Heavy precipitation events will likely be more frequent, even in areas where total precipitation is projected to decrease. Heavy downpours that currently occur about once every 20 years are projected to occur between twice and five times as frequently by 2100, depending on location.

The proportion of precipitation falling as rain rather than snow is expected to increase, except in far northern areas.

The intensity of Atlantic hurricanes is likely to increase as the ocean warms. Climate models project an increase in the number of the strongest (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes, as well as greater rainfall rates in hurricanes.There is less confidence in projections of the frequency of hurricanes.

Cold-season storm tracks are expected to continue to shift northward. The strongest cold-season storms are projected to become stronger and more frequent.

Future ice, snowpack, and permafrost

Arctic sea ice is already declining. The area of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased since about 1970. Permafrost temperatures in Alaska and much of the Arctic have increased over the last century. To learn more about recent changes in snow and ice, visit the Snow and Ice page of the Indicators section.

Over the next century, it is expected that sea ice will continue to decline, glaciers will continue to shrink, snow cover will continue to decrease, and permafrost will continue to thaw. Potential changes to ice, snow, and permafrost are described below.

Key global projections

For every 2°F of warming, models project about a 15% decrease in the extent of annually averaged Arctic sea ice and a 25% decrease in the area covered by Arctic sea ice at the end of summer (September). Note that this decrease does not contribute to sea level rise.

The coastal sections of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are expected to continue to melt or slide into the ocean. If the rate of this ice melting increases in the 21st century, the ice sheets could add significantly to global sea level rise.

Glaciers are expected to continue to decrease in size. The rate of melting is expected to continue to increase, which will contribute to sea level rise.

Key U.S. projections

Northern Hemisphere snow cover is expected to decrease by approximately 15% by 2100.

Models project the snow season will continue to shorten, with snow accumulation beginning later and melting starting earlier. Snowpack is expected to decrease in many regions.

Permafrost is expected to continue to thaw in northern latitudes, damaging buildings, infrastructure, and ecosystems in Alaska.

Future sea level change

Warming temperatures contribute to sea level rise by: expanding ocean water; melting mountain glaciers and ice caps; and causing portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to melt or flow into the ocean.

Since 1870, global sea level has risen by about 7.5 inches. Estimates of future sea level rise vary for different regions, but global sea level for the next century is expected to rise at a greater rate than during the past 50 years.Studies project global sea level to rise by another 1 to 4 feet by 2100, with an uncertainty range of 0.66 to 6.6 feet.

The contribution of thermal expansion, ice caps, and small glaciers to sea level rise is relatively well studied, but the impacts of climate change on ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are less understood and represent an active area of research. Changes in ice sheets are currently expected to account for 1.2 to 8 inches of sea level rise by the end of this century.

Regional and local factors will influence future relative sea level rise for specific coastlines around the world. For example, relative sea level rise depends on land elevation changes that occur as a result of subsidence (sinking) or uplift (rising). Assuming that these historical geological forces continue, a 2-foot rise in global sea level by 2100 would result in the following relative sea level rise:

2.3 feet at New York City

2.9 feet at Hampton Roads, Virginia

3.5 feet at Galveston, Texas

1 foot at Neah Bay in Washington state

Relative sea level rise also depends on local changes in currents, winds, salinity, and water temperatures, as well as proximity to thinning ice sheets.

Future ocean acidification

Ocean acidification adversely affects many marine species, including plankton, mollusks, shellfish, and corals. As ocean acidification increases, the availability of calcium carbonate will decline. Calcium carbonate is a key building block for the shells and skeletons of many marine organisms. If atmospheric CO ₂ concentrations double, coral calcification rates are projected to decline by more than 30%. If CO ₂ concentrations continue to rise at their current rate, the combination of climate warming and ocean acidification could slow coral growth by nearly 50% by 2050.

References
[1] USGCRP (2014) Melillo, Jerry M., Terese (T.C.) Richmond, and Gary W. Yohe, Eds., 2014: Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment. U.S. Global Change Research Program. [2] IPCC (2013). Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis Exit. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. [3] NRC (2011). Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts over Decades to Millennia Exit. National Research Council. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, USA. [4] USGCRP (2009). Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. Thomas R. Karl, Jerry M. Melillo, and Thomas C. Peterson (eds.). United States Global Change Research Program. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA. [5] IPCC (2014). Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.

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Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to increase unless the billions of tons of our annual emissions decrease substantially. Increased concentrations are expected to: These changes will impact our food supply, water resources, infrastructure, ecosystems, and even our own health.

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In this article, climate change is described as anthropogenic, a significant impact humans have had on the planet. With concerning changes in sea levels and temperatures, the article makes the case that this should be treated as an existential crisis and humans need to take immediate action in response.

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Often when I give an interview about potential civilizations elsewhere in the universe, the fate of our own comes up at the end, given that we are facing at least one existential threat in the form of climate change.

"Will we make it?" they ask.

I always try to give a hopeful answer because I am a hopeful person. But the climate-driven extreme weather events of the last couple of years have forced me to think very carefully about the answers I give these days. Those answers are particularly close to me as I prepare for a talk to be delivered this Friday (October 1) titled "The Fate of Life On Earth and Everywhere Else." The Cazenovia Forum, which is hosting the event, generously allowed me to choose this topic which, I think, can be boiled down to that question: "Will we make it?" But to that query, I would also add "Does anyone make it?"

Will we make it?

Let's begin by unpacking the first question. Asking if we will make it is not a question about human extinction, at least not in the short-term. Even a full-scale nuclear war probably would not wipe out our species. Some people in some highly reduced state still would be around. The same can be said for the extreme versions of climate change, which is the true existential threat we face today.

So, if the great danger of the climate crisis is not to the species as whole, then what is at risk? The answer is simple: our project of civilization.

About 10,000 years ago, the last glaciers retreated and some people, for reasons that are still murky, began experimenting with a new way of being human. Rather than the hunter-gatherer lifestyles that everyone had pursued before them, some bands of people began domesticating themselves. This agrarian revolution was the beginning of our project of civilization. It required learning new ways of cooperating across ever larger groups, as well as learning how to harvest ever larger stores of energy. About four centuries ago, the discovery of what we now call science accelerated both processes. And then, with the discovery of fossil fuels, the whole project was blasted into exponential growth until there was no part of the planet left untouched.

Now we live in a "technosphere" that is both globally hyperconnected and energy intensive. Even those billions who do not share in the wealth represented by this project still find their lives tied to it through the circuits of its commerce or the consequences of its climate impacts.

Enter the Anthropocene

It is this vast, collective, planetary-scale endeavor that is at risk as the climate state shifts from the warm and moist conditions of the Holocene epoch to something new. It is something that has been called the " Anthropocene," a human-driven epoch. If an Anthropocene shift takes us into domains where the rain falls in significantly different ways, or the ocean currents slip into significantly different patterns, then it is not clear that our project would continue. Instead, it could splinter in ways that most likely would not be pretty. In that case, the Anthropocene would be a planetary epoch started by human civilization but would go on to outlast us.

So, will we make it? Will our project of civilization survive the planetary changes it initiated? On one level, the answer to that question will depend on a thousand, thousand details of wise policy and practice. These will have to be enacted at every level of organization in the complex adaptive system that defines our project.

But as an astrobiologist I am interested in a broader and more general way of looking at the question: If our project is to survive for the long-term, kind of planet do we need to become?

Does anyone make it?

For about ten years, some colleagues and I have been exploring the idea of the Astrobiology of the Anthropocene. We have asked if most young civilizations create their own versions of Anthropocenes, driving dangerous climate change that threatens their own existence. Our studies, including our most recent models, imply the answer is yes. We also have asked about the general characteristics of inhabited planets with a long-term, sustainable civilization. What must they look like? How must they function?

These studies have explored the ways in which a civilization must come into a cooperative re-integration with the rest of the biosphere to maintain itself. Recently, I have completed a new work with David Grinspoon and Sara Walker looking at the idea of what we called "Planetary Intelligence," which focuses on the differences between immature and mature versions of civilizations with respect to the long-term functioning of their host planets.

The common theme in all these studies is an attempt to embed the immediate question of our civilization's survival in its proper planetary context. The worsening climate crisis might seem like a political problem. For the heroic people on the ground fighting day in and day out on issues of financial regulation or supply chain dynamics, it is. It will only be through their tireless work that the nuts and bolts of different versions of our project of civilization are assembled.

But climate change is also something much, much deeper in terms of Earth's four-billion-year history. For the first time in our planet's long history, a new kind of life has emerged that is more than its DNA. With the emergence of human beings, culture and its externalized information flows have become just as important as the blind processes of Darwinian evolution. There is so much potential in what we have initiated. As Grinspoon and Caleb Scharf have both argued, if we do survive the implications of the Anthropocene tipping point, it could echo across the planet, the solar system, and even the galaxy for millennia - if not eons.

But that survival depends on recognizing that we are of the planet and not above it. It will require reimagining our place within the complex "tangled bank" of this living planet that has had a kind of global intelligence for billions of years before we arrived. If the climate crisis we have triggered forces us to make the evolutionary leap to that radical new understanding of ourselves then, yes, I am indeed very hopeful about our prospects. And if not, the Earth will simply move on without us to continue with its experiments.

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Climate change is an existential threat not to humanity but to our project of civilization

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Civilization is facing an existential threat from climate change. Will we humans make it? Does anyone in the universe make it?

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this article goes through many scenarios of how AI could cause a threat in the future the main one being something called the singularity which is described as when AI surpases humanity when it comes to intelligence and they say in the article that this could happen in the next decade

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Learn about Crypto & earn your NFT certificate of completion!

Sign up for free online courses covering the most important core topics in the crypto universe and earn your on-chain certificate - demonstrating your new knowledge of major Web3 topics.

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Some experts believe the Singularity could occur within the next decade, although the implications for this event are broadly unknown and speculative.

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How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control.

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Climate change has become the most important and biggest threat to humanity. With the increase in population by 2 billion in the next 3 decades, the use of fossil fuels will also increase and ultimately raise the temperature and pose a threat to the future.

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Exxon Mobil predicts global temperature increase over 2 degrees Celsius by 2050

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ExxonMobil is investing more money to increase oil and gas production than any other company in the United States, according to its website.

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Technology has made our lives better by making it easier to talk to each other, find information, and do business. It also helps us stay healthy, live more comfortably, and learn new things.

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As it is rightly said that necessity is the mother of invention, all technologies that have emerged and thrived so far have been invented to meet the needs of society. As newer technology is introduced, it certainly reflects the very essence of a population's needs and wants. Nowadays, technologies and societies are inseparable. It is like a cycle, where each one significantly affects the other. As humans evolve and their needs and wants change over time, advanced and modern technology come to the rescue to fulfill these needs.

Ways Technology Improves Our Daily Life

Technology is molding our society today. Following are some of the ways it is improving our daily lives.

Business Efficiency: A tidal wave of exponential technological progress is sweeping away the business world. Today's marketplace offers more than different ways to improvise, adapt and leap forward by means of the available technology. To enhance the customer experience, the utilization of business analytics has proved to be beneficial. Such business tools, which are powered by technology, have taken the aspects of business to different heights. Personalized messaging and user behavior analysis has also helped businesses to mark their fruitful presence in the marketplace.

Expedited Communication: The only certain answer to how technology has improved our lives is, it has dramatically changed the way we communicated with each other. It has led to the birth of several modes of electronic communication such as smartphone communication and social media. We have reached a certain point in civilization where instant and glitch-free communication is easily available. Speed is undeniably the significant improvement that technology has brought forth for communication. Instant and easy communication is now possible from the comfort of our homes.

Advanced Lifestyle: With technology at its helm, societies have been reshaped throughout history. Technology has played a pivotal role in the way humans behave and operate in the world. Technological improvements around us are a continuous thing. New advancements are emerging and it is surely impacting our lifestyles. Our lives are now radically different compared to earlier decades, thanks to technology. The touch of technology and its presence is felt everywhere such as commuting, farming, education, etc. On the other hand, the Internet of Things (IoT) has made our lives super easy.
Smart homes and advanced electronic gadgets, through the medium of IoT, have drastically improved our daily routines. It has made several aspects of life easier.

Information Accessibility: Technology has heavily influenced the way we transfer and access information. Nowadays, any information is available at the tip of our fingertips. We constantly find answers and gather information from the internet. Technology is readily accessible to us, both in terms of its authenticity and relevance, only if one knows how to browse better. To speak of the advantages of technology, information accessibility could be considered as the best one.

Influence of Technology

The influence of technology in our daily lives is far more widespread than we actually think. It is growing and progressing at a rapid pace. It has changed the way we access resources. It has also changed the way we learn new things. Nowadays, people tend to rely on technology for everything. Whenever we need to contact someone, we can just text that person instantly. Earlier, it was much slower with letters and meetings. This is the way technology has disrupted the way we communicate. Our requirements and technical demands continue to grow, which is eventually pushing the boundaries of technology and the way it influences us.

Improved Quality of Life

We have reached a point where it is difficult to imagine life without technology. It has considerably changed the quality of life. By seeping into every aspect of our life, technology has changed the way we behave and operate. From communication and transport to healthcare and connectivity, technology has enhanced our lives for the better. The best part is that it is ever-evolving by facilitating more advanced features. For instance, we have come far from traditional audio calls to instant messaging and facetime. Not to forget, technology has come to rescue during the pandemic. When the world was in lockdown mode, video calling and putting out words on the internet has paved the way for connecting with each other. Technology helped us stay together by living apart. Whilst the pandemic was fading away, work from home situation was possible only due to technology which further rolled the wheels of economy.

Since the dotcom boom, over time, the world is increasingly getting access to the internet. It is disrupting many lives and the way they interact with their daily matters. It all started with industrial automation which made work easy and efficient, further it penetrated into every aspect of life. Ever since it is changing every dimension of life.

Downsides to Consider

Though technology has changed things up, there are some downsides to consider. There are some pros and cons of technology. Privacy is the foremost concern that technology has brought forth. Digital technology means that enormous quantities of data are being collected and stored. This includes private information with regards to individuals and organizations. It is a challenging task to keep this information safe and secure. A single mistake or voluntary breach of data means that the private information landing into the hands of hackers, terrorists, etc.

On the other hand, real-life contact has been diminishing away since the advent of technology. People tend to meet and greet online rather than interacting in-person. This ultimately results in isolation and a sense of disconnect from society. Several studies have suggested that lesser interaction with the society has further brought forth various kinds of mental health issues such as depression and social anxiety.

With a slew of benefits of technology, there are some other downsides to consider such as job insecurity due to increasing automation, addiction to gadgets, less experience to life events, etc.

Positive and Negative Impact of Technology On Modern Businesses

There are so many pros of technology. Technology is continuously redefining the way organizations conduct their businesses by being more visible over the internet, accessible to customers. It is dramatically enhancing internal modus operandi as well as services they offer. Strategies concerning the execution of digital technologies have gained some ground of immense popularity over the last decade owing to the perks that businesses have been privileged to enjoy as a result of adapting to such technologies. By incorporating digital solutions, avant-garde tools and technologies, organizations have seamlessly managed processes, expedited production cycles and have been able to offer high quality products and improved customer experience whilst cutting down cost and boosting productivity and profitability. Technology has made organizations competitive with its sweeping impact.

Positive and negative impacts are two sides of the same coin. Face to face communication is decreased due to the availability of audio and video calls. This influences decision making and can lead to misunderstanding. Also, organizational data is sensitive. If someone hacks into the system, it can lead to irreparable loss. Dependency is another issue which can hamper productivity.

If you're eager to gain the skills required to work in a challenging, rewarding, and dynamic IT role - we've got your back! Discover the endless opportunities through this innovative Post Graduate Program in Full Stack Web Development course designed by our partners at Caltech CTME. Enroll today!

Conclusion

While technology has certainly increased our standard of living in numerous ways, it has also brought a whole host of new challenges and dangers that must be addressed. Our lives are now more interconnected than ever, yet this can come at the cost of our privacy and security. Cybersecurity threats are now commonplace and can cause serious disruption to our lives, while issues such as cyberstalking, sexting, and cyberbullying have all become issues that must be addressed by responsible adults and children alike.

Technology has changed our lives in countless ways, from the way we communicate with each other to the way we watch TV. As technology advances, more and more of our daily lives are being impacted.

If you are looking to enhance your software development skills, we would recommend you to check Simplilearn's Post Graduate Program in Full Stack Web Development in collaboration with Caltech CTME. This course can help you hone the right technological skills and make you job-ready.

If you have any questions or queries, feel free to post them in the comments section below. Our team will get back to you at the earliest.

Ways Technology Improves Our Daily Life

Technology is molding our society today. Following are some of the ways it is improving our daily lives.

Business Efficiency: A tidal wave of exponential technological progress is sweeping away the business world. Today's marketplace offers more than different ways to improvise, adapt and leap forward by means of the available technology. To enhance the customer experience, the utilization of business analytics has proved to be beneficial. Such business tools, which are powered by technology, have taken the aspects of business to different heights. Personalized messaging and user behavior analysis has also helped businesses to mark their fruitful presence in the marketplace.

Expedited Communication: The only certain answer to how technology has improved our lives is, it has dramatically changed the way we communicated with each other. It has led to the birth of several modes of electronic communication such as smartphone communication and social media. We have reached a certain point in civilization where instant and glitch-free communication is easily available. Speed is undeniably the significant improvement that technology has brought forth for communication. Instant and easy communication is now possible from the comfort of our homes.

Advanced Lifestyle: With technology at its helm, societies have been reshaped throughout history. Technology has played a pivotal role in the way humans behave and operate in the world. Technological improvements around us are a continuous thing. New advancements are emerging and it is surely impacting our lifestyles. Our lives are now radically different compared to earlier decades, thanks to technology. The touch of technology and its presence is felt everywhere such as commuting, farming, education, etc. On the other hand, the Internet of Things (IoT) has made our lives super easy.
Smart homes and advanced electronic gadgets, through the medium of IoT, have drastically improved our daily routines. It has made several aspects of life easier.

Information Accessibility: Technology has heavily influenced the way we transfer and access information. Nowadays, any information is available at the tip of our fingertips. We constantly find answers and gather information from the internet. Technology is readily accessible to us, both in terms of its authenticity and relevance, only if one knows how to browse better. To speak of the advantages of technology, information accessibility could be considered as the best one.

Influence of Technology

The influence of technology in our daily lives is far more widespread than we actually think. It is growing and progressing at a rapid pace. It has changed the way we access resources. It has also changed the way we learn new things. Nowadays, people tend to rely on technology for everything. Whenever we need to contact someone, we can just text that person instantly. Earlier, it was much slower with letters and meetings. This is the way technology has disrupted the way we communicate. Our requirements and technical demands continue to grow, which is eventually pushing the boundaries of technology and the way it influences us.

Improved Quality of Life

We have reached a point where it is difficult to imagine life without technology. It has considerably changed the quality of life. By seeping into every aspect of our life, technology has changed the way we behave and operate. From communication and transport to healthcare and connectivity, technology has enhanced our lives for the better. The best part is that it is ever-evolving by facilitating more advanced features. For instance, we have come far from traditional audio calls to instant messaging and facetime. Not to forget, technology has come to rescue during the pandemic. When the world was in lockdown mode, video calling and putting out words on the internet has paved the way for connecting with each other. Technology helped us stay together by living apart. Whilst the pandemic was fading away, work from home situation was possible only due to technology which further rolled the wheels of economy.

Since the dotcom boom, over time, the world is increasingly getting access to the internet. It is disrupting many lives and the way they interact with their daily matters. It all started with industrial automation which made work easy and efficient, further it penetrated into every aspect of life. Ever since it is changing every dimension of life.

Downsides to Consider

Though technology has changed things up, there are some downsides to consider. There are some pros and cons of technology. Privacy is the foremost concern that technology has brought forth. Digital technology means that enormous quantities of data are being collected and stored. This includes private information with regards to individuals and organizations. It is a challenging task to keep this information safe and secure. A single mistake or voluntary breach of data means that the private information landing into the hands of hackers, terrorists, etc.

On the other hand, real-life contact has been diminishing away since the advent of technology. People tend to meet and greet online rather than interacting in-person. This ultimately results in isolation and a sense of disconnect from society. Several studies have suggested that lesser interaction with the society has further brought forth various kinds of mental health issues such as depression and social anxiety.

With a slew of benefits of technology, there are some other downsides to consider such as job insecurity due to increasing automation, addiction to gadgets, less experience to life events, etc.

Positive and Negative Impact of Technology On Modern Businesses

There are so many pros of technology. Technology is continuously redefining the way organizations conduct their businesses by being more visible over the internet, accessible to customers. It is dramatically enhancing internal modus operandi as well as services they offer. Strategies concerning the execution of digital technologies have gained some ground of immense popularity over the last decade owing to the perks that businesses have been privileged to enjoy as a result of adapting to such technologies. By incorporating digital solutions, avant-garde tools and technologies, organizations have seamlessly managed processes, expedited production cycles and have been able to offer high quality products and improved customer experience whilst cutting down cost and boosting productivity and profitability. Technology has made organizations competitive with its sweeping impact.

Positive and negative impacts are two sides of the same coin. Face to face communication is decreased due to the availability of audio and video calls. This influences decision making and can lead to misunderstanding. Also, organizational data is sensitive. If someone hacks into the system, it can lead to irreparable loss. Dependency is another issue which can hamper productivity.

If you're eager to gain the skills required to work in a challenging, rewarding, and dynamic IT role - we've got your back! Discover the endless opportunities through this innovative Post Graduate Program in Full Stack Web Development course designed by our partners at Caltech CTME. Enroll today!

Conclusion

While technology has certainly increased our standard of living in numerous ways, it has also brought a whole host of new challenges and dangers that must be addressed. Our lives are now more interconnected than ever, yet this can come at the cost of our privacy and security. Cybersecurity threats are now commonplace and can cause serious disruption to our lives, while issues such as cyberstalking, sexting, and cyberbullying have all become issues that must be addressed by responsible adults and children alike.

Technology has changed our lives in countless ways, from the way we communicate with each other to the way we watch TV. As technology advances, more and more of our daily lives are being impacted.

If you are looking to enhance your software development skills, we would recommend you to check Simplilearn's Post Graduate Program in Full Stack Web Development in collaboration with Caltech CTME. This course can help you hone the right technological skills and make you job-ready.

If you have any questions or queries, feel free to post them in the comments section below. Our team will get back to you at the earliest.

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Has Technology Improved Our Lives? | Simplilearn

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Necessity is the mother of invention. Technologies and societies are inseparable. Advanced and modern technology come to the rescue to fulfill our changing needs. Read more!

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Space Exploration could save humanity from disasters (Climate Change, Overpopulation) on Earth, by moving portions or even the entirety of humanity to other areas such as Mars.

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ETtech

San Francisco: Billionaire Elon Musk on Monday said his space venture SpaceX aims to build over 1,000 Starships to transport life to Mars.

The Tesla CEO stated that making life multiplanetary will help backup the ecosystems on Earth. He added that apart from humans no other species can transport life to Mars.

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Referring to Biblical patriarch Noah who built an Ark that survived the great flood on Earth, Musk said his Starship models will be "modern Noah's Arks", that can save "life from a calamity on Earth".

"Making life multiplanetary expands the scope & scale of consciousness. It also enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth," he tweeted.

"Humanity is life's steward, as no other species can transport life to Mars. We can't let them down," he added.

Making life multiplanetary expands the scope & scale of consciousness. It also enables us to backup the biosphere... https://t.co/UBmVbPG0gU
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 1654428585000

When a user asked Musk "what's the plan", he replied: "Build 1000+ Starships to transport life to Mars. Basically, (very) modern Noah's Arks."

SpaceX is developing Starship to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and beyond. The vehicle consists of two elements: a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship.

Starship and Super Heavy are both designed to be completely and rapidly reusable, and both will be powered by SpaceX's new Raptor engine -- 33 for Super Heavy and six for Starship.

Musk earlier said that Mars settlement and deep space exploration will see reduced costs due to its reusability.

NASA also sees considerable promise in Starship. The US space agency selected the vehicle to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis programme, which aims to put astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

However, the Starship programme has not yet been given a green signal by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The FAA, last week, delayed the completion of its environmental review of the Starship by another two weeks to June 13.

While SpaceX has conducted a number of high-altitude test flights of Starship prototypes at Starbase site in South Texas, its plan to launch the system's first-ever orbital test mission needs approval from the FAA and a host of other regulatory bodies.

Stay on top of technology and startup news that matters. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for the latest and must-read tech news, delivered straight to your inbox.

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Musk aims to build Starships akin to Noah's Ark to transport life to Mars

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Musk stated that making life multiplanetary will help backup the ecosystems on Earth.

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This article talks about a study predicting that Earth will reach 2 degrees of warming in the 2040s which scientists predict to be the critical point where we will see severe effects of climate change such as high amounts of wildfires.

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A recent study, built to enable local action, highlights the severe climate impacts resulting from a 2°C temperature rise.

This summer, the headlines have been dominated with reports of extreme weather: from raging wildfires in Canada to perilous floods in India, Japan, and the Eastern US; intense heat waves have scorched Spain, China, the US, and Mexico, culminating in the hottest day ever recorded on our planet.

A recent study conducted by scientists at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute (BAERI) and NASA Ames Research Center provides a thorough examination of how these extreme events will worsen as our planet's temperature creeps upwards, and where these events are more likely to clash and combine in ways that significantly impact people's lives and livelihoods.

The study uses a publicly available NASA dataset, the NASA Earth eXchange - Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP), that can "zoom in" on projected changes to a local scale, allowing any community in the world to start preparing today.

The study looked at a world where warming exceeds two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. It focused on the geographic patterns of projected changes to key climate variables, including changes to air temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, solar radiation, and wind speed. Two degrees of warming is widely considered to be a critical threshold above which Earth will witness the dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change. According to the study, two degrees of warming is expected to occur sometime in the 2040s, though variation exists across projections from different climate models.

Climate variables don't act in isolation. "We wanted to study how these individual climate variables are projected to change and what their combined impacts could mean for people around the world. The changes in one variable can compound the effects of another. We need to look at them together to understand the real impact on human lives," said Taejin Park, a researcher at BAERI and the first author on the paper.

The researchers paid special attention to two climate impact indicators: the first is heat stress or the combined effects of temperature and humidity on the human body. They found most regions of the world will experience higher heat stress in the 2040s compared to the 1950-1979 baseline, while equatorial countries will suffer more from a greater number of days considered extreme (e.g., a month of additional extreme heat stress days for countries in Eastern Africa).

The study also examined fire weather, another climate impact indicator. It showed a global increase in extreme fire weather, which is measured by combining the variables of temperature, rainfall, humidity, wind, and more into a fire weather index, or FWI. The researchers noted exceptional fire weather increases in the Amazon (+4.3 FWI), central and western North America (+3.3 FWI), and the Mediterranean (+3.7 FWI).

"The escalating impacts of all the climate extremes studied could cause significant damage to communities and economies from fires, floods, landslides, and crop failures that may result," said Ramakrishna Nemani, senior scientist at BAERI and co-author of the study. Floods and droughts in particular are likely to become "more frequent, more intense, longer, or all three."
Creating Unique Climate Insights Using Big Data
The NEX-GDDP dataset used for this research provides global, daily climate projections out to the year 2100. To create this dataset, the team took projections generated by the world's leading climate models and used advanced statistical techniques to "downscale" them, a process that significantly improves spatial resolution.

Raw climate model projections give global, daily results for areas of about 120 by 120 miles (200 by 200 kilometers). The NEX-GDDP dataset zooms in to about 15 by 15 miles (25 by 25 kilometers), a resolution that could help leaders develop targeted climate adaptation and mitigation plans.

Downscaling processes often merge daily projections into monthly averages, but keeping the day-to-day data is important for capturing extreme events. If merged into a monthly average, Park explained, a few days projected to be dangerously hot and humid could get lost in the numbers, concealing the risk for human lives.

The conclusions of the study indicate the urgent need for decision-makers to understand the compounding climate impacts projected for their regions. The uniquely regional scale of the NEX-GDDP data can help local leaders develop climate adaptation and mitigation plans specific to their communities. "Data holds value only when it guides action, and the true value of NEX-GDDP is in its potential to drive positive change at a meaningful scale globally," said Bridget Thrasher who led the development of NEX-GDDP data and is co-author of the study. The team is keen to make their data accessible to global communities and local decision-makers to enable positive real-world changes.

Reference: "What Does Global Land Climate Look Like at 2°C Warming?" by Taejin Park, Hirofumi Hashimoto, Weile Wang, Bridget Thrasher, Andrew R. Michaelis, Tsengdar Lee, Ian G. Brosnan and Ramakrishna R. Nemani, 20 December 2022, Earth's Future.
DOI: 10.1029/2022EF003330

As of today, you can download the study's fire weather data here-heat stress and other indicators will be available soon-and the authors are currently working to incorporate all of the study's data into NASA's interactive Earth Information Center.

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Earth on the Brink: New Climate Projections Detail Future Risks for Many People Worldwide

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A recent study, built to enable local action, highlights the severe climate impacts resulting from a 2°C temperature rise. This summer, the headlines have been dominated with reports of extreme weather: from raging wildfires in Canada to perilous floods in India, Japan, and the Eastern US; intense

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This article shows that AI may not be the problem of the future but rather how it is used by humans. AI is much easier to fix and a lot less biased than their human counterparts which could lead it to be more beneficial than dangerous. I believed that we are still in transition 10 but after reading this article, I think that AI will change the way humans interact with each other more than we realize.

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The question whether artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk has received increased attention of late, with many sounding the alarm on AI's imminent threat. For example, the Future of Life Institute recently published an open letter calling for a pause on AI research and development, and the Center for AI Safety posted an open statement comparing the threat posed by AI to that of nuclear bombs and suggesting drastic measures to reign in technology. These letters received wide public attention, partially because their signatories include notable technology proponents and leaders of prominent artificial intelligence-based companies.

A cynic might suggest that these public warnings serve as good PR for the technology, calling attention to the potential dangers while also signaling how remarkable and useful it is ("We built a technology so powerful that we even worry it might be too good and require safeguards!") and helping the creators shape government regulation concerning future uses.

Here we offer a less cynical but still noteworthy concern, which is that these outsized warnings about technology's existential threats serve as a red herring. Although the fears raised around AI's capacity to spread misinformation, foster unemployment, and outpace human intelligence are well founded (and we strongly advocate for taking these risks seriously), we worry these public letters distract from human beings' current proficiency at carrying out the threats attributed to technology. In reality, humans are the clear and present risk that is underscored by the AI advances.

We realize that this view requires clarity. Typical discourse asks people to take a simple binary position. ("Are you on the side of more regulation of AI, or the side that says it is far from being a real threat?") We argue that AI can become a modern-day imminent danger, yet that at this point it is actually the best tool to mitigate a far bigger threat to humanity: human decision-making. Currently, to protect the world from large-scale threats (climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, etc.), we believe the best approach involves humans working with AI to improve decision-making in domains as critical as those concerning life and death.

As one example, take the spread of misinformation, which the Future of Life Institute letter highlights in asking, " Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?" Undoubtedly the spread of misinformation by AI-propagated systems is concerning, especially given the unparalleled scale of content that AI can generate. But as recent research reveals, humans are far more responsible for spreading misinformation than technology. In a study of how true and false news spreads on Twitter, researchers analyzed 126,000 stories tweeted by millions of people between 2006 and 2017 and found that false news spreads faster than true news, and that "false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it" (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral 2018). In fact, some notable signatories of the letter have themselves contributed to spreading false conspiracy theories and misleading information.

A threat even more dire than misinformation is the "risk of extinction from AI" that the Center for AI Safety highlights in its open statement. Yet, in terms of whether machines or humans are more likely to initiate extinction-level events such as nuclear war, humans still seem to have the upper hand. In recent empirical work that analyzes the decision processes employed by senior leaders in war-game scenarios involving weapons of mass destruction, humans showed alarming tendency to err on the side of initiating catastrophic attacks. These simulations, if implemented in reality, would pose much graver risks to humanity than machine-driven ones. Our exploration of the use of AI in critical decision-making has shown AI's superiority to human decisions in nearly all scenarios. In most cases, the AI makes the choice that humans do not make at first-but then, upon more careful consideration and deliberation, change their minds and do make, realizing it was the correct decision all along.

Instances where machine intelligence is better than humans

As a sobering reminder of the human-AI risk comparison, we highlight several domains where current machine intelligence seems already to challenge the performance of humans: With regard to traffic safety, while much attention is given to every accident perpetuated by autonomous cars, the reality is that reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the General Services Administration suggest that out of over six million accidents annually (with 42,939 fatal incidents), 98 percent are due to human error, and self-driving cars are estimated to reduce this proportion by 76 percent.

Similarly, in the domain of medical diagnosis, a meta-analysis of articles published across 20 years of research shows that in various domains (e.g., brain tumors) machine performance is increasingly becoming superior to that of human doctors.

Recently, AI has won competitions for creativity in art and advertising, surpassing human performance in art authentication and, in legal contexts, correcting wrongful convictions made by humans (resulting from false identification) and shortening trial times by over 20 percent.

Finally, it is noteworthy that current research by the corresponding author investigates the possibility of using " digital twin" -a reasoned and composed machine-based decision tool that replicates the key stakeholder's thinking under minimally biased conditions-to aid leaders in choices related to critical decisions (namely, nuclear and climate-related critical decisions).

Other, more quotidian concerns raised about AI apply far more to human beings than to machines. Consider algorithmic bias, the phenomenon whereby algorithms involved in hiring decisions, medical diagnoses, or image detection produce outcomes that unfairly disadvantage a particular social group. For example, when Amazon implemented an algorithmic recruiting tool to score new applicants' resumes, the algorithm systematically rated female applicants worse than men, in large part because the algorithm was trained on resumes submitted over the previous 10 years that were disproportionately male. In other words, an algorithm trained on human bias will reproduce this bias.

Unlike humans, however, algorithmic bias can be readily deprogrammed, or as economist Sendhil Mullainathan puts it, "Biased algorithms are easier to fix than biased people." Mullainathan and colleagues' research showed that an algorithm used by UnitedHealth to score patients' health risks systematically underscored black patients relative to white patients because it measured illness in terms of health care costs (which are systematically lower for black versus white individuals, given that society spends less on black patients) (Obermeyer et al. 2019).

However, once identified, the researchers could easily modify this feature of the algorithm to produce risk scores that were relatively unbiased. Other work has shown that algorithms can produce less racially biased outcomes (and more effective public safety outcomes) than human judges in terms of decisions of whether or not to grant bail to defendants awaiting trial (Kleinberg et al. 2018). As biased as algorithms can be, their biases appear less ingrained and more pliable than those of humans. Compounded by recent work showing that, in hiring and lending contexts, managers reject biased algorithms in favor of more biased humans, the suggestion that humans should remain at the helm of those functions is, at best, questionable (Cowgill, Dell'Acqua, and Matz 2020).

Finally, consider the threat to cybersecurity. Although commentators have warned that large language models added tools to the arsenal of hackers by democratizing cybercrime, most high-profile information leaks and hacks to date are ushered in by human beings with no reliance on AI (i.e., a disgruntled employee who knows the systems' flaws and perpetrates an attack by remembering key passwords, or bad programmers who effectively enable future attacks by making wrong assumptions on their software use-cases-such as "no one would create a password that is 1,000,000 characters long" leading to a classical buffer overflow hack). In fact, AI is often the last bastion of defense against those hacks, identifying complex human coding mistakes early-on and correcting those.

Recently, national guardsman Jack Teixeira, who exposed highly classified material in an online chat group, did not require sophisticated technology to access sensitive documents-he was granted top secret clearance from the Pentagon. Further, a recent study conducted by IBM indicates that 95 percent of security breaches were caused by human errors such as biting on phishing scams or downloading malware. If anything, the most concerning cybersecurity risk currently posed by AI results from its increased reliance on human trained code, which is flawed. AI takes hackable human codes and uses them to generate new codes, spreading these human-generated errors further. The only concerning current cybersecurity attacks by AI involve AI that simulates human communication to dupe humans into revealing key information. Cybersecurity may represent a case in which technology is more likely to be the solution rather than the problem, with research indicating, for example, that humans working with AI outperform humans alone in detecting machine-manipulated media such as deepfakes (Groh et al. 2021).

Even when technology contributes to unwanted outcomes, humans are often the ones pressing the buttons. Consider the effect of AI on unemployment. The Future of Life Institute letter raises concerns that AI will eliminate jobs, yet whether or not to eliminate jobs is a choice that humans ultimately make. Just because AI can perform the jobs of, say, customer service representatives does not mean that companies should outsource these jobs to bots. In fact, research indicates that many customers would prefer to talk to a human than to a bot, even if it means waiting in a queue. Along similar lines, increasingly common statements that AI-based systems-like "the Internet," "social media," or the set of interconnected online functions referred to as "The Algorithm"-are destroying mental health, causing political polarization, or threatening democracy neglect an obvious fact: These systems are populated and run by human beings. Blaming technology lets people off the hook.

Although expressions of concern toward AI are invaluable in matching the excitement around new technology with caution, outsized news cycles around the threats of technology can distract from the threats of human beings. Recent research indicates that humans have a "finite pool of attention" such that "when we pay more attention to one threat, our attention to other threats decreases" (Sisco MR et al. 2023). So, as we contend with the rise of AI and its concomitant harms to privacy, human survival, and our relationship with truth itself, we must equally pay attention to the humans who are already well equipped to perpetrate these harms without the assistance of machines. Specifically, it has not escaped our notice that when engaging in a conversation about the risks of AI, the benchmark is often "is AI perfect in handling this task" (making critical decisions, or guiding a self-driving car), rather than "is it better than humans." The answer to the latter question in many cases, is that yes, AI can mitigate the risks to humanity.

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If you worry about humanity, you should be more scared of humans than of AI

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Advances in artificial intelligence have prompted extensive public concern about its capacity to contribute to the spread of misinformation, bias, and cybersecurity breaches-and its potential existential threat to humanity. But, if anything, AI can aid human beings in making decisions aimed at improving social equality, safety, productivity-and mitigate some existential threats.

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The amount of carbon released into the air has skyrocketed within the past 100 years. This graph really puts it into perspective of how much carbon we release.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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The rate of change since the mid-20th century is unprecedented over millennia.

Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 800,000 years, there have been eight cycles of ice ages and warmer periods, with the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era - and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth's orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Luthi, D., et al.. 2008; Etheridge, D.M., et al. 2010; Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.) Find out more about ice cores (external site).

The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun's energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Do scientists agree on climate change?

Yes, the vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists - 97 percent - agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change.

detailed answer

Earth-orbiting satellites and new technologies have helped scientists see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate all over the world. These data, collected over many years, reveal the signs and patterns of a changing climate.

Scientists demonstrated the heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases in the mid-19th century. Many of the science instruments NASA uses to study our climate focus on how these gases affect the movement of infrared radiation through the atmosphere. From the measured impacts of increases in these gases, there is no question that increased greenhouse gas levels warm Earth in response.

"Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that Earth's climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the average rate of warming after an ice age. Carbon dioxide from human activities is increasing about 250 times faster than it did from natural sources after the last Ice Age.

References

References
Header image shows clouds imitating mountains as the sun sets after midnight as seen from Denali's backcountry Unit 13 on June 14, 2019. Credit: NPS/Emily Mesner

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Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. How do we know it's happening? Here's the evidence.

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This article by BigThink by Adam Frank talks about how covid might have been the wake up call the world needed for minimizing human effects on climate change.

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The future of humanity: can we avert disaster?

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Climate change and artificial intelligence pose substantial — and possibly existential — problems for humanity to solve. Can we?

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Climate change is one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threat to humanity currently. But we already have the solutions we need to solve it, it's just the matter of implementing them.

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3 We can adapt and be more resilient, but there are limits

Our planet and its people are resilient - but some of the impacts are simply hitting too quickly and too forcefully to adapt in time. The longer we delay taking action, the fewer options we have.

This is crucial because according to the IPCC, around 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change. The climate crisis is a daily reality for so many people.

Since 2008, over 20 million people per year have been internally displaced by weather-related extreme events. While communities, governments and businesses around the world are working on solutions to adapt to our warming world, progress is still uneven and insufficient.

4 We already have all the solutions we need

There is some really great news in the report too: we already have affordable solutions to limit warming to 1.5°C. Around 20 countries are living proof that it's possible to reduce emissions, and clean energy is cheaper than ever before - in the last decade, the cost of solar energy and lithium-ion batteries (used for energy storage) decreased by a massive 85%, while wind energy costs dropped by 55%. There has been exponential growth too - like with the roll-out of electric vehicles, which has increased 100 fold.

The best thing about all these solutions? They can also benefit lives, livelihoods and nature, allowing us to build our societies and economies in a more sustainable way.

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IPCC Climate Report: 6 key findings about the climate crisis

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The latest science on the state of our climate has been laid out in a powerful new report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Sixth Assessment Report shows how climate change is altering our planet and highlights the many solutions that governments, businesses, cities and individuals can, and must, take to tackle it.

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Global Temperature Increase By Over 2 Degrees Celsius

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Global Temperature Increase By Over 2 Degrees Celsius

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This article states that by 2050 efforts to keep climate change under 2 degrees Celsius will have failed. This is largely due to the fact that 54% of global energy needs are filled by oil and natural gas. Though renewable energy is on the rise fossil fuels remain the lifeblood of our lives and will likely continue to be so.

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Exxon Mobil predicts global temperature increase over 2 degrees Celsius by 2050

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ExxonMobil is investing more money to increase oil and gas production than any other company in the United States, according to its website.

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How can we continue to live past this crisis if it is what is killing us? Climate change is such a significant issue that continues to be under political debate when it shouldn't be-- there needs to be change done before change will no longer be effective.

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Maui residents confront toxic risks after deadly wildfires

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As climate change fuels wildfires across the country, many officials are encountering risks that they didn’t know existed a few years ago.

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This is showing that the climate change and the weird extreme weather we are getting isn't a coincidence, and the events are speeding up.

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The run of extreme weather events around the world seems to be never-ending. After the northern summer of extreme heat and disastrous fires, we've seen more exceptional autumn weather over Europe with record-breaking heat in the UK.

Meanwhile, record-breaking rain and intense flash floods struck Greece before the same storm devastated Libya, with thousands dead.

Almost 20% of Africa is estimated to be in drought, and drought conditions are returning to parts of Australia. To top it off, we've seen several hurricanes intensify unusually quickly in the Atlantic.

We know climate change underpins some of the more extreme weather we're seeing. But is it also pushing these extreme events to happen faster?

The answer? Generally, yes. Here's how.

Flash droughts

We usually think of droughts as slowly evolving extreme events which take months to form.

But that's no longer a given. We've seen some recent droughts develop unexpectedly quickly, giving rise to the phrase " flash drought ".

How does this happen? It's when a lack of rainfall in a region combines with high temperatures and sunny conditions with low humidity. When these conditions are in place, it increases how much moisture the atmosphere is trying to pull from the land through evaporation. The end result: faster drying-out of the ground.

Flash droughts tend to be short, so they don't tend to cause the major water shortages or dry river beds we've seen during long droughts in parts of Australia and South Africa, for example. But they can cause real problems for farmers. Farmers in parts of eastern Australia are already grappling with the sudden return of drought after three years of rainy La Niña conditions.

As we continue to warm the planet, we'll see more flash droughts and more intense ones. That's because dry conditions will more often coincide with higher temperatures as relative humidity falls across many land regions.

Flash floods and extreme rainfall

Climate change can cause increased rainfall variability. Some parts of the world will get a lot wetter, on average, while others will get drier, increasing the variation in rainfall between different regions. For Australia, most locations are generally expected to have intensified downpours of rain, as well as intensified droughts. So we might be saying more often "it doesn't rain, it pours!".

We're seeing exceptionally extreme rainfall in many recent events. The recent floods that submerged villages in Greece came from a sudden downpour of over 500 millimetres in a single day. Hong Kong was hit last week by the heaviest rains in 140 years, flooding subway stations and turning streets into rivers.

But why does it happen so quickly?

Sudden extreme rains fall when we have very moist air coupled with a weather system that forces air to rise.

We've long known human-caused climate change is increasing how much moisture the air can hold generally, rising by about 7% per degree of global warming. That means storms now have the potential to hold and dump more water.

Notably, the impact of climate change on rain-bearing weather systems can vary by region, which makes the picture more complicated. That means, for instance, climate change may lead to more extreme rain in some places, while other places may only see an intensification in really short extreme rain events and not for longer timescales.

We can safely say, though, that in most parts of the world, we're seeing more intense storms and sudden extreme rainfall. Sudden dumps of rain drive flash floods.

More moisture in the air helps fuel more intense convection, where warm air masses rise and form clouds. In turn, this can trigger efficient, quick and intense dumps of rain from thunderstorms.

These short-duration rain events can be much larger than you'd expect from the 7% increase in moisture per degree of warming.

Read more: Think storms are getting worse? Rapid rain bursts in Sydney have become at least 40% more intense in 2 decades

Flash cyclones? Hurricanes are intensifying faster

Last month, Hurricane Idalia caused major flooding in Florida. As we write, Hurricane Lee is approaching the US.

Both tropical storms had something odd about them - unusually rapid intensification. That is, they got much stronger in a short period of time.

Usually, this process might increase wind speeds by about 50 kilometres per hour over a 24-hour period for a hurricane - also known as tropical cyclones and typhoons. But Lee's wind speeds increased by 129km/h over that period. US meteorological expert Marshall Shepherd has dubbed the phenomenon "hyperintensification", which could put major population centres at risk.

Rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones are strong and can be very hazardous, but they aren't very common. To trigger them, you need a combination of very high sea surface temperatures, moist air and wind speeds that don't change much with height.

While still uncommon, rapid intensification is potentially getting more frequent as we heat the planet. This is because oceans have taken up so much of the heat and there's more moisture in the air. There's much more still to learn here.

Australia's El Niño summer in a warming world

Spring and summer in Australia are likely to be warmer and drier than usual. This is due to the El Niño climate cycle predicted for the Pacific Ocean. If, as predicted, we also get a positive Indian Ocean Dipole event, this can heighten the hotter, drier weather brought by El Niño. After three wet La Niña years, this is likely to be a marked shift.

Read more: When the Indian Ocean and El Niño join forces, things can get hot and dry

If it arrives as expected, El Niño would lower the risk of tropical cyclones for northern Australia and reduce chances of heavy rain across most of the continent.

But for farmers, it may help trigger flash droughts. Prevailing warm and dry conditions may rapidly dry the land and reduce crop yields and slow livestock growth.

Drier surfaces coupled with grass growth from the wet years could worsen fire risk. Grass can dry out much faster than shrubs or trees, and grass fires can start and spread very rapidly.

Climate change loads the dice for extreme weather. And as we're now seeing, these extremes aren't just more intense - they can happen remarkably fast.

Read more: 'Flash droughts' can dry out soil in weeks. New research shows what they look like in Australia

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Faster disaster: climate change fuels 'flash droughts', intense downpours and storms

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We all know climate change makes extreme weather more likely. But it's also loading the dice for quick-forming drought, sudden and intense rainfall and fast-forming tropical storms.

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There are huge long term, irreversible effects that climate change has imposed on the entire world. Soon enough the damage of climate change will last forever, and probably continue to exponentially increase.

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What are the long-term effects of climate change?

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Scientists have predicted that long-term effects of climate change will include a decrease in sea ice and an increase in permafrost thawing, an increase in heat waves and heavy precipitation, and decreased water resources in semi-arid regions.Below are some of the regional impacts of global change forecast by the Intergovernmental

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Our Trajectory

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

The potential future effects of global climate change include more frequent wildfires, longer periods of drought in some regions, and an increase in the wind intensity and rainfall from tropical cyclones. Credit: left - Mike McMillan/USFS, center - Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, right - NASA.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth's climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

" The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change - modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

Read more

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

What's the difference between climate change and global warming?

"Global warming" refers to the long-term warming of the planet. "Climate change" encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

detailed answer

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

" The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future." ²

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Future Effects in the U.S.

U.S. Regional Effects

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

detailed answer

Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity, which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.

Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.

Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region's economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.

Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.

Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

References
References
Header image shows cracked mud stretches across sections of the Panamint Valley. Credit: NPS/Kurt Moses; A degree of concern thermometer image credit: Pixabay/geralt

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Long-term effects of global climate change in the United States.

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Three Years Later: How the Pandemic Changed Us | Duke Today

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Since her father's death from COVID-19 in 2021, Alexy Hernandez's days have become emotional minefields. Any small thing can be a gut punch, reminding her of what's lost. Perhaps it's a football highlight, since she and her father, Josue, shared a love of the sport.

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AI is a very dangerous tool and so far very few laws to limit the use and making of ai exist so seeing companies work with the government may be good for stopping the possible misuse of AI or it could mean the weaponization of AI from our gov. Hopefully they make the right choice. If AIs work become indistinguishable from ours then having ways to tell them apart is necessary.

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Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, speaks during a news conference in May in Taipei, Taiwan. (Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images)

Eight tech companies, including Salesforce and Nvidia, are signing on to the White House's voluntary artificial intelligence pledge, joining a roster of prominent firms that have agreed to mitigate the risks of AI, as Washington policymakers continue to debate new regulation of the emerging technology.
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Fifteen of the most influential companies in the United States have now taken the commitments, which include a promise to develop technology to identify AI-generated images and a vow to share data about safety with the government and academics.

New participants include IBM, data-mining company Palantir and Stability, the maker of text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, underscoring the expansion of the pledge beyond AI heavyweights such as Microsoft and Meta and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

The new inclusions are another signal of the White House's continued interest in AI issues, following summits with tech executives and civil rights advocates. Work is also underway on an AI executive order, and President Biden supports efforts in Congress led by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer to pass AI legislation, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the White House's work on AI.

The White House meeting comes a day before Schumer is scheduled to meet with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a host of other technologists and civil liberties advocates about the Senate's plans to regulate AI. IBM and Palantir are expected to attend both the White House meeting and the summit with Schumer.

Schumer's AI meeting will include top labor and civil rights advocates

Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, on Tuesday afternoon plans to meet with representatives from several of the companies, including Photoshop maker Adobe, AI platform Cohere and ScaleAI, which provides data services to companies including OpenAI. The conversation is expected to primarily focus on AI benefits and risks, and cover much of the same ground as the AI summit that the White House hosted with the chief executives of other large tech companies in July, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"The President has been clear: harness the benefits of AI, manage the risks, and move fast - very fast," Zients said in a statement. "And we are doing just that by partnering with the private sector and pulling every lever we have to get this done."

The commitments will apply to the next system released by each of the companies, the administration official said.

Dana Rao, Adobe's executive vice president and general counsel, called the commitments an "important step" in collaboration between the government and industry.

"With a rapidly evolving technology, it is critical to have thoughtful and deep conversations between the industry and the government to ensure AI legislation and regulation supports innovation while providing essential safeguards for society and the public," Rao said in a blog post.

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Nvidia, Palantir and more companies join White House AI pledge

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The commitments include a promise to develop technology to identify AI-generated images and a vow to share data about safety with the government and academics.

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The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023

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The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023: TIME's list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.

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Download PDF

Six prominent thinkers reflect on how the pandemic has changed the world

Daniel Susskind

In March 2020, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, an influential figure in British intellectual life, described the COVID-19 catastrophe as "the nearest we have to a revelation for atheists."

At the time I thought the comparison was apt. It captured the biblical sense of shock that many of us felt in the face of such a sudden, extreme, and swiftly accelerating crisis. We "have been coasting along for more than half a century," he remarked, and all at once "we are facing the fragility and vulnerability of the human situation."

Now, a few months on, Rabbi Sacks' comparison with revelation still seems fitting, but for a different reason, and one that matters for thinking about a world after COVID-19.

This crisis is alarming, in part, because it has several new and unfamiliar features. A global medical emergency caused by a virus we still do not fully understand. A self-inflicted economic catastrophe as a necessary policy response to contain its spread.

And yet as time has passed, it has also become clear that much of what is most distressing about this crisis is not new at all. Striking variations in COVID-19 infections and outcomes appear to reflect existing economic inequalities. Remarkable mismatches between the social value of what "key workers" do and the low wages they receive follow from the familiar failure of the market to value adequately what really matters.

The happy embrace of disinformation and misinformation about the virus was to be expected, given a decade of rising populism and declining faith in experts. And the absence of a properly coordinated international response ought to have come as no surprise, given the celebration of "my country first" global politics in recent years.

The crisis then is a revelation in a far more literal sense-it is focusing our collective attention on the many injustices and weaknesses that already exist in how we live together. If people were blind to these faults before, it is hard not to see them now.

What will the world look like after COVID-19? Many of the problems we will face in the next decade will simply be more extreme versions of those that we already confront today. The world will only look significantly different this time if, as we emerge from this crisis, we decide to take action to resolve these problems and bring about fundamental change.

James Manyika

The world after COVID-19 is unlikely to return to the world that was. Many trends already underway in the global economy are being accelerated by the impact of the pandemic.

This is especially true of the digital economy, with the rise of digital behavior such as remote working and learning, telemedicine, and delivery services. Other structural changes may also accelerate, including regionalization of supply chains and a further explosion of cross-border data flows.

The future of work has arrived faster, along with its challenges-many of them potentially multiplied-such as income polarization, worker vulnerability, more gig work, and the need for workers to adapt to occupational transitions. This acceleration is the result not only of technological advances but also of new considerations for health and safety, and economies and labor markets will take time to recover and will likely emerge changed.

With the amplification of these trends, the realities of this crisis have triggered reconsideration of several beliefs, with possible effects on long-term choices for the economy and society. These effects range from attitudes about efficiency versus resilience, the future of capitalism, densification of economic activity and living, industrial policy, our approach to problems that affect us all and call for global and collective action-such as pandemics and climate change-to the role of government and institutions.

Over the past two decades, in advanced economies, responsibility has generally shifted from institutions to individuals. Yet health systems are being tested and often found wanting, while benefits from paid sick leave to universal basic income are getting a second look. There is potential for a long-term shift in how institutions support people, through safety nets and a more inclusive social contract.

As history has shown, choices made during crises can shape the world for decades to come. What will remain critical is the need for collective action to build economies that deliver inclusive economic growth, prosperity, and safety for all.

Jean Saldanha

In The Pandemic Is a Portal, Indian author Arundhati Roy writes, "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next."

The way multilateralism operates will have to change to reflect this very different world. The COVID-19 pandemic has been testing the limits of global cooperation. Support for developing economies in particular remains inadequate. They were hit early by the global economic downturn, including through record capital outflows and tightening financial conditions. Facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, these economies are experiencing unprecedented pressure on their already limited fiscal capacity to tackle urgent public health and social needs.

Choices made now will have far-reaching consequences. Reliance on more of the same is untenable and ignores the scale of human suffering unleashed by the pandemic.

A fitting UN-led reform agenda must include the IMF in addressing the structural problems that have driven debt vulnerability across developing economies. Such an agenda must shift development finance away from market-friendly reforms and incentives for private investment. It must abandon the dogma of austerity. Furthermore, rich countries must finally meet their official development assistance commitments.

Power imbalances in global institutions must also be corrected to give fair recognition to the needs and rights of the two-thirds of the world's population who reside in the Global South.

If the international community fails to respond decisively now, the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement will be fatally derailed. A new multilateralism-in which reform of the Bretton Woods institutions will play a key role-is needed now and must be based on a vision of development that puts human rights, gender equality, and climate at its center.

Sharan Burrow

The world after the first wave of COVID-19 must be more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. Today, we live in a world in which inequality between and within countries has grown as a result of businesses' race to the bottom and working poverty among a vast portion of the global workforce. Too many countries suffered the external shocks of COVID-19 without universal social protection, robust public health systems, a plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, or a sustainable real economy with quality jobs.

The Bretton Woods conference occurred while a war was still raging and helped formed the basis of a postwar social contract. Similarly, we need to craft an ambitious reconstruction plan while working to end the pandemic. International support is a matter of collective survival and an investment in the future of health, the global economy, and multilateralism. The choice is ours, and the actions of the IMF and the multilateral system will be a deciding factor.

Our goal for recovery should be full employment and a new social contract. Public investment in the care economy, education, and low-carbon infrastructure can form the backbone of stimulus that reduces inequality. Wage policy, collective bargaining, and labor market regulation can revive demand and income while putting an end to a business model that allows companies to take no responsibility for their workers.

Debt should be addressed through a relief process focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and enduring economic growth for every country. Shortsighted fiscal consolidation hindered debt management and reduction after the global financial crisis and would again leave us even less able to deal with future health and economic crises.

Shared prosperity can be the fruit of a COVID-19 world marked by shared ambition and global solidarity.

Sergio Rebelo

COVID-19 will leave a lasting imprint on the world economy, causing permanent changes and teaching important lessons.

Virus screening is likely to become part of our life, just like security measures became ubiquitous after 9/11. It is important to invest in the infrastructure necessary to detect future viral outbreaks. This investment protects economies in case immunity to COVID-19 turns out to be temporary.

Many economies adopted versions of Germany's Kurzarbeit (short work) subsidy during the pandemic. This policy keeps workers employed at reduced hours and pay, with the government compensating some of the shortfall in wages. By keeping matches between firms and workers intact, the economy is better prepared for a quick recovery. It is important to improve the implementation of these policies and make them a permanent part of our economic recovery tool kit.

Remote work is likely to become more common. We had some evidence that working from home is at least as productive as working at the office. However, many companies were reluctant to embrace remote work. Now that many have tried it with good results, remote work might be here to stay.

The pandemic crisis has accelerated the pace of digital transformation, with further expansion in e-commerce and increases in the pace of adoption of telemedicine, videoconferencing, online teaching, and fintech.

Companies with international supply chains are dealing with shortages and bottlenecks. We are likely to see many of these companies reshore some of their production. Unfortunately, this trend will not create many jobs because most of the production is likely to be automated.

Governments will be bigger after playing the role of insurer and investor of last resort during the crisis. Public debt will balloon, creating financial challenges around the world.

The most important lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is the importance of working together on problems that affect the entire human race. We are much stronger united than divided.

Ian Bremmer

The global order was in flux well before the COVID-19 crisis. Coronavirus has accelerated three of the key geopolitical trends that will shape our next world order... which will await us on the other side of this pandemic.

The first trend is deglobalization; the logistic difficulties brought to light by the current crisis are already pointing to a shift away from global just-in-time supply chains. Yet as economic difficulties mount, the inevitable growth of nationalism and "my nation first" politics will push companies to localize business operations that favor national and regional supply chains.

The third trend, China's geopolitical rise, has been more than three decades in the making. But while China has successfully transformed itself into an economic and technological superpower, no one expected it to become a "soft power" superpower. This crisis can change that, if China's crisis diplomacy continues and the perception endures that Beijing has been far more effective than the rest of the world in its response to the outbreak.

Of course, just because China appears to be faring better doesn't mean it actually is. There's a reason people take Chinese numbers with a grain of salt. This general distrust was further fueled by the initial Chinese cover-up of the outbreak, which enabled its global spread. Donald Trump and his administration are leaning into this narrative as an election strategy and to deflect attention from their own handling of the pandemic. China won't take this lying down, making it increasingly likely that once the world emerges from the current pandemic, we will be plunged into a new cold war, this time between the United States and China.

New world order or not, some things just don't change.

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How Will the World Be Different After COVID-19 - IMF F&D

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Six prominent thinkers including Daniel Susskind, Ian Bremmer and Sharan Burrow reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world.

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We are still in Transition 10. Here´s one of the examples.

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We are still in Transition 10. Here´s one of the examples.

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Technology is affecting the world in a variety of ways and will continue to do so. There are ways it could be good or bad. However, 3D printing is capable of much more than just a fun activity. By allowing medical experts to help so many causes, it will impact our future. This technology also has the ability to protect the environment from the effects of climate change and so much more.

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6 Ways 3D Printing will Change the World

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or additive manufacturing, may not be making headlines like it was in 2013, but rest assured, the technology's only been spreading and advancing over the past four years. The implications of 3D printing 3D printing design are vast, and the technology has the potential to revolutionize our society.