Smart Cities

Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050 https://t.co/foQ40FuZXW via @singularityhub

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 15, 2019

Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050

Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms ........ Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate. ...... the UAE has invested record sums in its Vision 2021 plan, while sub-initiatives like Smart Dubai 2021 charge ahead with AI-geared government services, driverless car networks, and desalination plants. ...... A trailblazer of smart governance, Estonia has leveraged blockchain, AI, and ultra-high connection speeds to build a new generation of technological statecraft. And city states like Singapore have used complex computational models to optimize everything from rainwater capture networks to urban planning, down to the routing of its ocean breeze. ......... today, your car remains an unused asset about 95 percent of the time. ....... Beyond sheer land, a 90 percent driverless car penetration rate could result in $447 billion of projected savings and productivity gains. ....... Cars-as-a-Service (CaaS) business model, urban sprawl will enable the flourishing of megacities on an unprecedented scale. ........ Using Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) for low power consumption, Huawei has recently launched a smart parking network in Shanghai that finds nearby parking spots for users on the go, allowing passengers to book and pay via smartphone in record time. ...... 5G networks .... smart rivers that communicate details of environmental pollution, to IoT and AI-geared drones in agriculture. ....... smart city strategies across blockchain, biometrics, AI, and cloud computing. ........ Alibaba plans to embed seamless mobile payments (through AliPay) into the fabric of daily life, as Tencent takes charge of communications and Huawei works on hardware and 5G buildout (not to mention its signature smartphones). ......... One of the most advanced city states on the planet, Singapore joins Dubai in envisioning a future of flying vehicles and optimized airway traffic flow. ....... air rights to flying car structures built above motorways and skyscrapers. ....... your sky courts, your sky gardens, even your private terraces to your condo [become] landing platform[s] for your own personalized drone. ...... one of our greatest priorities becomes smart city governance. ....... In just over 10 years, the UN forecasts that around 43 cities will house over 10 million residents each. ....... Public sector infrastructure and services will soon be hosted on servers, detached from land and physical form. And municipal governments will face the scale of city states, propelled by an upward trend in sovereign urban hubs that run almost entirely on their own. ........ e-Estonia. ....... Hosting every digitizable government function on the cloud, Estonia could run its government almost entirely on a server. ....... Starting in the 1990s, Estonia’s government has covered the nation with ultra-high-speed data connectivity, laying down tremendous amounts of fiber-optic cable. By 2007, citizens could vote from their living rooms. ......... every stage of the legislative process is available to citizens online, including plans for civil engineering projects. ....... Citizens’ healthcare registry is run on the blockchain, allowing patients to own and access their own health data from anywhere in the world—X-rays, digital prescriptions, medical case notes—all the while tracking who has access. ....... i-Voting, civil courts, land registries, banking, taxes, and countless e-facilities allow citizens to access almost any government service with an electronic ID and personal PIN online. ........ perhaps Estonia’s most revolutionary breakthrough is its recently introduced e-citizenship. ....... we’ve seen thriving village startup ecosystems and e-commerce hotbeds take off throughout China’s countryside, resulting in the mass movement and meteoric rise of ‘Taobao Villages.’ ....... Within the next year, Dubai aims to become the first city powered entirely by the blockchain ....... With a similar mind to Dubai, multiple Chinese smart city pilots are quickly following suit........ One of the most resourceful, visionary megacities on the planet, Singapore has embedded advanced computational models and high-tech solutions in everything from urban planning to construction of its housing units. ......... Even in the realm of feeding its citizens, Singapore is fast becoming a champion of vertical farming. It opened the world’s first commercial vertical farm over six years ago, aiming to feed the entire island nation with a fraction of the land use.

Future of Cities Part 2 - Visions of the Future

Future of Smart Cities - Part 1

Each week alone, an estimated 1.3 million people move into cities ...... By 2040, about two-thirds of the world’s population will be concentrated in urban centers. Over the decades ahead, 90 percent of this urban population growth is predicted to flourish across Asia and Africa. ....... As data becomes the gold of the 21st century, centralized databases and hyper-connected infrastructures will enable everything from sentient cities that respond to data inputs in real time, to smart public services that revolutionize modern governance. ....... As 5G connection speeds, IoT-linked devices and sophisticated city AIs give birth to trillion-sensor economies, low latencies will soon allow vehicles to talk to each other and infrastructure systems to self-correct......... China’s Nanjing .... Hangzhou, home to e-commerce giant Alibaba, has now launched a “City Brain” project, aiming to build out one of the most data-responsive cities on the planet. ..... “the City Brain can detect accidents within a second” allowing police to “arrive at [any] site [within] 5 minutes” across an urban area of over 3,000 square miles. ....... Yet aside from self-monitoring cities and urban AI ‘brains,’ what if infrastructure could heal itself on-demand. Forget sensors, connectivity and AI — enter materials science. ....... The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates a $542.6 billion backlog needed for U.S. infrastructure repairs alone.....And as I’ve often said, the world’s most expensive problems are the world’s most profitable opportunities. ........ bio-concrete that can repair its own cracks. ...... Mixed in with calcium lactate, the key ingredients of this novel ‘bio-concrete’ are minute capsules of limestone-producing bacteria distributed throughout any concrete structure. Only when the concrete cracks, letting in air and moisture, does the bacteria awaken. ....... “What makes this limestone-producing bacteria so special is that they are able to survive in concrete for more than 200 years and come into play when the concrete is damaged. ........ The implications of self-healing materials are staggering, offering us resilient structures both on earth and in space........ Some have even posited graphene’s use in the construction of 30 km tall buildings. ........ nano- and micro-materials are ushering in a new era of smart, super-strong and self-charging buildings. ........ Revolutionizing structural flexibility, carbon nanotubes are already dramatically increasing the strength-to-weight ratio of skyscrapers. ...... the creation of commercializable solar power-generating windows. ...... silicon nanoparticles to capture everyday light flowing through our windows. Little solar cells at the edges of windows then harvest this energy for ready use. ..... Leading the pack of China’s 500 smart city pilots, Xiong’an New Area (near Beijing) aims to become a thriving economic zone powered by 100 percent clean electricity.

Ray Kurzweil

""We won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)"......... The Law of Accelerating Returns also explains exponential advancement of life (biology) on this planet. Looking at biological evolution on Earth, the first step was the emergence of DNA, which provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Then, the evolution of cells, tissues, organs and a multitude of species that ultimately combined rational thought with an opposable appendage (i.e., the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology. The first technological steps — sharp edges, fire, the wheel — took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. ..... By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the 19th century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first 20 years of the 20th century, we saw more advancement than in all of the 19th century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years' time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a decade ago, and didn't exist at all two decades before that. As these exponential developments continue, we will begin to unlock unfathomably productive capabilities and begin to understand how to solve the world's most challenging problems.

There has never been a more exciting time to be alive."

Gene Editing (@Wadhwa)

Secondary structure image for CRISPR-DR6 (RF01319). Nucleotide colouring indicates sequence conservation between the members of this family, with the red end of the spectrum labelling highest conservation. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gene Editing Is Now Cheap and Easy—and No One Is Prepared for the Consequences

Scientists — and countries — with less noble intentions could again try to build a race of superhumans...... The DNA of every single organism — every plant, every animal, every bacterium — is now fair game for genetic manipulation. We are entering an age of backyard synthetic biology that should worry everybody. And it is coming about because of CRISPRs: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats....... CRISPRs use an RNA molecule as a guide to the DNA target. To set up a CRISPR editing capability, a lab only needs to order an RNA fragment (costing about $10) and purchase off-the-shelf chemicals and enzymes for $30 or less........... Because CRISPR is cheap and easy to use, it has both revolutionized and democratized genetic research. Hundreds, if not thousands, of labs are now experimenting with CRISPR-based editing projects...... changing the human germ line is incredibly risky without much better knowledge of how our DNA actually works...... until recently, scientists thought that much of our genetic material was useless and served no purpose. They called it “junk” DNA...... research is emerging showing that junk DNA plays a key role in regulating genetic expression .....

What if a well-intentioned researcher develops a cure for one of these diseases and shares it with thousands of sufferers before realizing that the cure is far worse than the disease and that the side effects are painful — or even deadly — and easily spread from person to person?

..... in the hands of evil biohackers, these powerful and simple tools are a cause for alarm.

A smart biohacker could alter the influenza genome, for example, to make it more potent, setting off an epidemic that kills hundreds of millions of people.

Though a nuclear weapon can cause tremendous long-lasting damage, the ultimate biological doomsday machine is bacteria, because they can spread so quickly and quietly........ No one is prepared for an era when editing DNA is as easy as editing a Microsoft Word document. The government does not have any regulations on editing human DNA. The ethical concerns have not been fleshed out. There is no centralized risk-management inventory, listing which labs are doing what with CRISPR. It’s all rather terrifying...... the stakes in the case of CRISPR are so high that I believe a blanket moratorium is the only course..... such a moratorium could be as effective as the global moratorium on the cloning of humans has been: at the least, scientists such as those who engineered the human embryos in China would become international pariahs rather than being celebrated for publishing papers in prestigious publications.

Our most read post last month was by @wadhwa about the consequences of cheap gene editing. http://t.co/JyqKUY6EwT pic.twitter.com/MpLeKJWmRy

— Singularity Hub (@singularityhub) October 5, 2015

Related articles

• Why There's an Urgent Need for a Moratorium on Gene Editing
• UK scientists seek licence to genetically modify human embryos
• Chinese Researchers successful in Editing DNA!
• Scientists apply for license to modify human embryos
• Human Embryos Are a Final Frontier of Science
• UK scientists seek permission to edit the genes of human embryos
• Genetically Modifying Human Embryos Could Be A "Game-Changer" For Basic Research, Scientists Say
• Why DNA editing needs to stop
• Scientists Apply For License To Modify Human Embryos
• Why there's an urgent need for a moratorium on gene editing

Vivek Wadhwa: The Smartest Dude In Silicon Valley

Vivek Wadhwa, me saying you are the smartest dude in Silicon Valley...

Posted by Paramendra Kumar Bhagat on Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Robotic Surgery

Singularity might or might not happen, but what will happen along the way is pretty amazing.

Inequality Deserves A Political Solution

Technology is not the villain. It is technology's job to enhance productivity, and it has. It is the job of politics to bring about a fairer distribution of that wealth. And it has not. Technology is neutral.

Technology and Inequality

in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—reputed to be the largest in the country—has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall. ...... The poverty rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is around 19 percent ..... “You have people begging in the street on University Avenue [Palo Alto’s main street],” says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and at Singularity University, an education corporation in Moffett Field with ties to the elites in Silicon Valley. “It’s like what you see in India,” adds Wadhwa, who was born in Delhi. “Silicon Valley is a look at the future we’re creating, and it’s really disturbing.” Many of those made rich by the recent technology boom, he adds, don’t seem to care about “the mess they’re creating.” ....... people are stoning buses transporting Google employees to work from their homes in San Francisco. ...... inflation-adjusted wages for low- and middle-income workers have been flat or declining since the late 1970s in the United States, even as its economy has grown. ..... the richest 1 percent of the population had 34 percent of the accumulated wealth; the top 0.1 percent had some 15 percent. ..... the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of income growth from 2009 to 2012, if capital gains are included. ...... The top 10 percent now accounts for 48 percent of national income; the top 1 percent makes almost 20 percent and the top 0.1 makes nearly 9 percent. ..... Wage inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world” ..... About 70 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners are corporate executives ..... “Above a certain level, it is very hard to find in the data any link between pay and performance.” ...... Privately held wealth in some European countries is now about 500 to 600 percent of annual national income, a level approaching that of the early 1900s. ...... Piketty describes it as the world of Jane Austen, in which people’s lives and fates are determined by their inheritance and not their talents or professional achievements. ...... Income inequality hinders economic opportunity and innovation. ...... the belief that technological progress will lead to “the triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism” is, writes Piketty, “largely illusory.” ...... Brynjolfsson talks of advanced robots and the vast potential of artificial intelligence. While Piketty warns against a return to a world where inherited wealth determines social and political fates, Brynjolfsson worries that a growing share of the workforce could be left behind even as digital technologies increase overall income. ......... Central to Brynjolfsson’s argument is the idea that innovation is rapidly accelerating as trends in computing and networking advance at an exponential rate. Largely as a result of these advances, productivity and GDP continue to increase. But while “the pie is increasing,” he says, not everyone is benefiting. ....... the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck, and dramatically increasing their rewards. ......... As machines increasingly substitute for labor and building a business becomes less capital-intensive—you don’t need a printing plant to produce an online news site, or large investments to create an app—the biggest economic winners will not be those owning conventional capital but, instead, those with the ideas behind innovative new products and successful business models. .......... the small elite that “innovate and create.” ...... demand for highly skilled workers rises, while workers with less education and expertise fall behind. .......... The gap between median earnings for people with a high school diploma and those with a college degree was $17,411 for men and $12,887 for women in 1979; by 2012 it had risen to $34,969 and $23,280. ...... Automation and digital technologies have reduced the need for many production, sales, administrative, and clerical jobs, while demand has increased for low-pay jobs that can’t be automated, such as those in cleaning services and restaurants. The result has been what Autor describes as a “barbell-shaped” job market, with strong demand at the high and low ends and a “hollowing out” of the middle. And despite the increase in demand for workers in service jobs, there is an ample supply of people who need the work and can do these tasks. Hence wages for these jobs dropped throughout much of the 2000s, further worsening income inequality. ....... productivity growth is not in fact accelerating, nor is such growth concentrated in computer-intensive sectors. ..... changes wrought by digital technologies are transforming the economy, but the pace of that change is not necessarily increasing. He says that’s because progress in robotics, artificial intelligence, and such high-profile technologies as Google’s driverless car are happening more slowly than some people may think. ....... “You would be actually pretty hard pressed to find a robot in your day-to-day life” ........ many tasks that people are particularly good at, such as recognizing objects and dealing with suddenly changing environments, will remain difficult or expensive to automate for decades to come. ...... the market for middle-skill jobs may be stabilizing and the earning disparity between low- and high-skill jobs leveling off, albeit “at a very high level.” What’s more, many middle-skill workers could flourish as they increasingly learn to use digital technologies in their jobs. ...... “We have a very skill-driven economy without a very skilled workforce,” Autor says. “If you have the high skills—and that’s a big if—you can make a fortune.” ....... “We used to be a classic middle-class economy. But that’s all gone. There’s no longer a middle class. The economy is bifurcated and there’s nothing in the middle.” ..... “It didn’t happen suddenly, but in 2014 everyone has woken up to it.” ..... Though California’s economy—the world’s eighth-largest—is strong in many sectors, the state has the highest poverty rate in the country ..... there has been no net increase in jobs in Silicon Valley since 1998; digital technologies inevitably mean you can generate billions of dollars from a low employment base. ........ “Piketty says the best predictor of access to universities is parents’ income,” says Miner. “In California, it’s the zip code.” ...... the income gaps between those with different levels of education “account for a good share of the inequality ....... “we know what the solution is. It’s equalizing access to high-quality education. The problem is that we just pay lip service to it.” ..... (Local governments, using property taxes, supply an average of 44 percent of the funding for elementary and secondary schools in the United States, helping to fuel the disparity in educational investments between poor and rich communities.) ...... “If you’re born into a poor neighborhood, you don’t have access to a high-quality preschool, a high-quality primary school, and a high-quality secondary school. And then you’re simply not in position to go to college.” .......... the tax cuts made by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s jump-started the growth of income inequality seen today in Britain and the United States. ...... increasingly progressive taxes, including a global wealth tax, could begin to close the economic gap. ........ The most obvious policy recommendations point to education, including, as social scientists are increasingly learning, pre-kindergarten and other early education programs. ....... differences in educational achievement are now associated more closely with family income than they are with factors that have been more important in the past, including race and ethnic background. And researchers have shown that those differences in achievement levels are already set by the time children enter kindergarten. ........ Inequality in education is not only hurting the chances of poor children to get ahead, says David Grusky. It is also affecting the supply of high-skill labor. By stifling opportunities for countless talented individuals, it artificially restricts the potential pool of those with technological expertise. ...... asking whether technology causes inequality is the wrong question. ...... it makes no sense to blame technology, just as it makes no sense to blame the rich. It is our institutions, including but not only our schools, that need to change. The reforms that experts recommend are numerous and varied, ranging from a higher minimum wage to stronger job protections to modifications of our tax policy. ...... we need improved corporate governance and oversight to more closely tie compensation to executive productivity...... an elite class of the super-rich can both warp our political process and erode our sense of fairness.

Related articles

• Technology and Inequality - MIT Technology Review
• Technology and Inequality
• Technology and Inequality
• 10 secrets of Silicon Valley that every entrepreneur should know, by Ellen Petry Leanse
• Israel's Most Important Source of Capital: California
• What ever happened to Google's lease for a huge government airfield in Mountain View?
• Silicon Valley's Diversity Problem - NYTimes.com

Kurzweil Has Found A Home

Singularity: I Am Not Convinced

Singularity is not a concept I have bought into. But anyone who proposes it is a bold thinker. And in attempts at singularity many great things will happen. I want those great things.

Google’s New Director Of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus. ..... Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts. “If you write a blog post, you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating some meaningful sentences.” For now, search engines have brute-force algorithms that pick out key words in popular pages and hope that the results, on average, will yield the best information. ...... “semantic” search parses the meaning and intentions behind words. Semantic search aims to solve the ‘hotdog’ problem, as explained by Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, “Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.” ..... Google has access to the “things you read, what you write, in your emails or blog posts, and so on, even your conversations, what you hear, what you say.” .... Google can combine the personalized recommendations of a friend (who often know us better than we know ourselves) with the sum of all human knowledge, creating a sort of super best friend. ....... Kurzweil was quick to dispel the myth he was given “unlimited” funds, but humbly suggests that Google is giving him “sufficient resources for a very important project.”

Related articles

• Google's Director Of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, Is Building Your 'Cybernetic Friend'
• Google's New Director Of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, Is Building Your 'Cybernetic Friend'
• Ray Kurzweil Says He'll Get 'Unlimited Resources' to Work on AI at Google
• Google Is Really Three Companies, All On A Roll
• Ray Kurzweil, Google meld minds
• By Hiring Kurzweil, Google Just Killed The Singularity
• Futurist Ray Kurzweil to Join Google
• WATCH: Google's New Director Of Engineering Is Planning To Change The Future Of Humanity
• Ray Kurzweil's Top 5 Reasons to Be Optimistic for 2013
• Ray Kurzweil Teams Up With Google to Tackle Artificial Intelligence