Automated vehicles dont have human operators to communicate their driving intentions to pedestrians at intersections. My teams research on pedestrians perceptions of safety shows their trust of traffic lights tends to override their fear of self-driving cars. This suggests one way to help pedestrians trust and safely interact with autonomous vehicles may be to link the cars driving behavior to traffic lights.

In a recent study by my team at the University of Michigan, we focused on communication via a vehicles driving behavior to study how people might react to self-driving cars in different situations. We set up a virtual-reality simulator that let people experience street intersections and make choices about whether to cross the street. In different simulations, self-driving cars acted either more or less like an aggressive driver. In some cases there was a traffic light controlling the intersection.

In the more aggressive mode, the car would stop abruptly at the last possible second to let the pedestrian cross. In the less aggressive mode, it would begin braking earlier, indicating to pedestrians that it would stop for them. Aggressive driving reduced pedestrians trust in the autonomous vehicle and made them less likely to cross the street.

However, this was true only when there was no traffic light. When there was a light, pedestrians focused on the traffic light and usually crossed the street regardless whether the car was driving aggressively. This indicates that pedestrians trust of traffic lights outweighs any concerns about how self-driving cars behave.

Introducing autonomous vehicles might be one way to make roads more safe. Drivers and pedestrians often use nonverbal communication to negotiate safe passage at crosswalks, though, and cars without drivers cant communicate in the same way. This could in turn make pedestrians and other road users less safe, especially since autonomous vehicles arent yet designed to communicate with systems that make streets safer, such as traffic lights.

Some researchers have tried to find ways for self-driving cars to communicate with pedestrians. They have tried to use parts that cars already have, such as headlights, or add new ones, such as LED signs on the vehicle.

However, unless every car does it the same way, this strategy wont work. For example, unless automakers agreed on how headlights should communicate certain messages or the government set rules, it would be impossible to make sure pedestrians understood the message. The same holds for new technology like LED message boards on cars. There would need to be a standard set of messages all pedestrians could understand without learning multiple systems.

Even if the vehicles communicated in the same way, several cars approaching an intersection and making independent decisions about stopping could cause confusion. Imagine three to five autonomous vehicles approaching a crosswalk, each displaying its own message. The pedestrian would need to read each of these messages, on moving cars, before deciding whether to cross.

Our results suggest a better approach would be to have the car communicate directly with the traffic signal, for two reasons.

First, pedestrians already look to and understand current traffic lights.

Second, a car can tell what a traffic light is doing much sooner by checking in over a wireless network than by waiting until its camera can see the light.

This technology is still being developed, and scholars at Michigans Mcity mobility research center and elsewhere are studying problems like how to send and prioritize messages between cars and signals. It might effectively put self-driving cars under traffic lights control, with ways to adapt to current conditions. For example, a traffic light might tell approaching cars that it was about to turn red, giving them more time to stop. On a slippery road, a car might ask the light to stay green a few seconds longer so an abrupt stop isnt necessary.

To make this real, engineers and policymakers would need to work together on developing technologies and setting rules. Each would have to better understand what the other does. At the same time, they would need to understand that not every solution works in every region or society. For example, the best way for traffic lights and self-driving cars to communicate in Detroit might not work in Mumbai, where roads and driving practices are far different.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: WikimediaImages from Pixabay

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Linking Self-Driving Cars to Traffic Signals Might Help Pedestrians Give Them the Green Light - Singularity Hub

One death in Steven Soderberghs terrifyingly prescient masterpiece, Contagion, stayed with me: Kate Winslets Dr. Erin Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer who chased down people with a terrifying viral infection in an effort to warn those who might be at risk and reconstruct the viruss rampage through an unknowing society.

For most of us, Mears was probably our first introduction to contact tracing, a technique thats crossed centuries as a tour-de-force in battling outbreaks. The core idea is simple, if laborious, detective work: manually seek out those infected, interrogate their movements through the world, and follow up with every single person who might have been in contact with the infected individual.

Its tedious. Its dangerous. Yet as a method, contact tracing has been wielded as a powerful weapon from typhoid fever to the 1918 flu pandemic, and more recently, from AIDS to SARS and the first Asian country responders to Covid-19.

Theres a reason contact tracing has survived the test of time: it works. Thanks to epic efforts at hunting down people with Covid-19which, in turn, was in part thanks to widespread testingSouth Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Indias Kerala district have emerged as success stories in their battle against a new foe, nipping new infections in the bud and dramatically reducing hospitalizations and deaths. Even Wuhan, under stringent autocratic surveillance from the central Chinese government, was lauded by the WHO as a positive responderthough their method of giving individuals a green, yellow, or red light as they return to society may give democratic countries uncomfortable chills.

But heres the thing: contact tracing has always teetered on the line between individual freedom and the good of the general public; the stigmatization of a viral scarlet letter versus keeping others safe; the price of health data sharing versus societal responsibility.

Today, thanks to the mini tracking devices in our pockets called smartphones, its easier than ever to bring an effective method for controlling outbreaks into the digital realm. Some epidemiologists even argue that due to the highly infectious nature of SARS-Cov-2, traditional analog methods are both too dangerous and too slow; digital contact tracing is the only way to go. In a technocratic world where we rely on our gadgets every day for news, maps, health tracking, and communication, not using the digital tools we have to update a century-long method almost seems silly.

The good news is that western societies dont have to start from scratch. One reason why Asias democratic countries quickly responded to Covid-19 is because they all suffered through the 2003 SARS epidemic. They learned their lesson and were the first to implement digital contact tracing, with both successes and hiccups along the way.

Its time to learn from them.

There are multiple ways contact tracing helps limit the reach of a virus, but its power is mainly felt at the beginning and tapering ends of a pandemic.

Take South Korea. The countrys enormously effective testing regime in January was an exemplary highlight of how contact tracing can plug the viral gush at the beginning of an outbreak. While they reported the first Covid-19 case in the US, South Korea rapidly ordered medical companies to develop and roll out testing kits aggressively, allowing health workers to track cases and keep infections containeda rollout arguably more effective than in the US, which has since seen its cases explode in numbers. These data resources then powered Corona 100m, an app that alerts users of diagnosed Covid-19 cases within 100 meters of their prior locations. The apps been downloaded over one million times to overwhelming positive reviews.

Perhaps the gold medal in digital contact tracing goes to Singapore. Backed by widespread testing, citizens were encouraged to download a Bluetooth-based app called TraceTogether, which anonymizes a users phone ID but stores similarly encrypted IDs from people he or she has been in contact with. If a person gets sick, those stored ID will be used to alert previous contacts. According to TraceTogethers official website, part of the Singapore Government Agency, roughly one million citizens have voluntarily signed up for the service.

The US has missed the boat on stemming Covid-19 from entering the country. However, digital contact tracing also comes in handy as were considering reopening our languishing economy. Serology tests, which look for antibodies that (in theory) render people immune will help assess when its mostly safe to return to work.

But before herd immunity becomes widespread or a working vaccine is easily accessible to most, contact tracing will become a key component of squashing new infection sparks before they flare up. California and Massachusetts are just two states looking to hire an army of contact tracers as part of their bid to reopen the economy.

Its perhaps not surprising that two giant tech companies, Apple and Google, announced last week a team-up to explore digital contact tracing in the land of the free.

An immediate response Ive heard is that it wont work here. After all, the narrative goes, even democratic Asian countries have a different social contract with their governments. Theyre focused more on society than on the independent selfa Confucius-esque philosophy thats slapped onto most East Asian citizens. Western countries such as the UK have tried similar approaches before: in 2011, Cambridge Universitys FluPhone app was supposed to track the spread of flu on a population level, yet fewer than one percent of people in Cambridge adopted it.

Bollocks. Dont sell yourself short. FluPhone wasnt released during a pandemic. If Covid-19 has one silver lining, its how on average people in the West are just as willing to sacrifice personal freedoms and adopt strange new customs (face masks everywhere!) to keep themselves and others safe. (Outliers exist, but they exist in every country.)

However, societal norms aside, early lessons from digital contact tracing efforts show that there are serious problems that need ironing out, and for now, our phones wont completely replace human workers in tracing the pandemic.

The basic idea behind Google-Apples app is similar to TraceTogether: its Bluetooth-based, meaning that itll only work locally without logging your location data. For now its opt-in, in that you have to download the app on either iOS or Android. The companies stress that they wont collect personal or location data (though Google Maps certainly does unless youve opted out), and all phone ID codes will be encrypted, making it difficult to link to a particular person. The app will periodically check to see if its been recently in contact with someone diagnosed with Covid-19.

Theres obviously the problem of data privacy. According to Covid Watch, a similar community-based, open-sourced app that uses Bluetooth for tracking, at least 50 percent of a population will need to use it to make tracking effective, and if people are hesitant, itll fail.

Another pre-requisite is that we need massively wider testing, which is currently still mostly reserved for people with clear symptoms. The Covid Tracking Project reports that less than one percent of Americans have received the test, which means a tracing app based on Covid-19 positive data would be of little to no value. Others worry about the opposite, which is that a Bluetooth-based app could over-alert users. For example, the most common Bluetooth signals have a reach roughly five times more than the six feet apart social distancing guideline.

All of the above concerns are valid. Yet without implementing the app, theyre also theoretical. Whats clear from Singapores success story is that digital contact tracing by itself isnt yet enough to curb Covid-19. Health workers, for example, may need anonymized ID data to help track down potentially exposed individuals to encourage self-isolation or provide care. Without sufficient testing and social distancing, asymptomatic carriers will still unknowingly spread the disease.

Digital contact tracing may ignite every freedom, privacy, and independence fiber in your body in protest. Tech giants and government alike havent helped build a foundation of trust or respect for our private data. But without doubt, digitization is the way of the future: its a replacement for fallible human memory, which cant recall what you had for lunch two weeks ago, let alone everyone youve been in contact with. Its a safety guard for real-world equivalents of Dr. Mears, who risk their health and lives to warn you of health risks to yourself and others.

Since its invention, contact tracing has always towed the line between privacy and social service. With our actions and voices, were now helping lay the foundation of its digital future, not just for this pandemic but for all the ones to come.

Image Credit: StockSnap from Pixabay

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Contact Tracing Is the Next Step in the Covid-19 BattleBut How Will It Work in Western Countries? - Singularity Hub

Fifty years ago, on April 22, 1970, millions of people took to the streets in cities and towns across the United States, giving voice to an emerging consciousness of humanitys impact on Earth. Protesters shut down 5th Avenue in New York City, students in Boston staged a die-in at Logan airport, and demonstrators in Chicago called for an end to the internal combustion engine.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite hosted a half-hour Earth Day special, calling for the public to heed the unanimous voice of the scientists warning that halfway measures and business as usual cannot possibly pull us back from the edge of the precipice.

Today, Cronkites words are eerily familiar. Warnings of impending ecological crises are now commonplace. But are we prepared to heed the warnings? In 1970, the answer was yes. The same might just be true, once again, in 2020.

In 1970, the world was reaching the end of a post-war economic boom, associated with a rapid expansion of industry and manufacturing. Better living through chemistry, was radically changing the daily lives of many of the worlds inhabitants. Pesticides like DDT had saved thousands from malaria and other insect-borne diseases, while chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had expanded safe and reliable refrigeration around the world.

But dark clouds loomed on the horizon. As the air, water, and land became increasingly choked with industrial wastes, Rachel Carsons 1962 book Silent Spring sounded a clear warning about the poisonous effects of DDT and other synthetic compounds across the food chain.

Increasing ecological awareness was fueled by the social unrest of the civil rights and anti-war movements. The youth of the day created a counter-culture that openly questioned their parents notions of progress.

The first Earth Day helped catalyze more than two decades of sweeping legislative changes, first at national levels, and then through multilateral institutions seeking to tackle global environmental problems.

The 1987 Montreal Protocol and 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced framework agreements to limit the accumulation of ozone-destroying CFCs, protect global biodiversity, and mitigate human impacts on the climate system. These agreements sought to balance economic growth with ecological and social justice.

Within a few years of the Rio Earth Summit, other powerful forces of globalization began to emerge. In 1995, the World Trade Organization was created, ushering in a new economic order that has exerted a profound impact on planet Earth and its inhabitants.

Since the mid-1990s, rapid expansion of trade in the new digital economy has stimulated development in some of the worlds poorest countries, lifting millions out of poverty, but also greatly increasing income inequality. At the same time, globalization has expanded the ecological footprint of the worlds wealthiest countries over supply chains stretching across the planet.

Today, 25 years into our new globalized era, we must reckon with the unintended consequences of progress, much as we did in 1970. Between 1945 and 1970, and again from 1995 to 2020, our societies have transformed through geopolitical shifts, economic expansion, and technological developments.

While the specifics are different, there can be no doubt that both periods left a strong imprint on planet Earth. But are we ready to tackle the profound challenge of redefining our relationship with Earth?

Ignorance is no longer an excuse for inaction; a half century of science has provided clear evidence of the ongoing deterioration of Earths biophysical systems. What we lack is determination and courage in the face of powerful oppositional forces.

Much as Carson did in the 1960s, we still struggle against vested economic and political interests intent on maintaining the status quo. We must also recognize that the problems are now embedded deeply into the fabric of societies; tackling climate change, for example, requires nothing short of re-imagining the global energy sector.

We face a daunting task, but there are signs of hope, particularly as we see a resurgence of youth movements willing to challenge our notions of progress. The first Earth Day protesters were overwhelmingly young; they didnt have a Greta Thunberg, but they did strike from school. And just as their message caught the attention of Walter Cronkite, at least some adults are listening now.

What will it take to move us from listening to action?

Perhaps the current COVID-19 pandemic could provide a trigger. Our relentless drive to move goods and people across the planet has been hijacked by a microscopic bundle of protein and RNA, inflicting significant human suffering and damage on the global economy.

The pandemic is, no doubt, a global health catastrophe. But the disruption of the status quo also presents an opportunity to question our core values and to re-examine our relationships with each other and with Earths natural systems. For COVID-19, as with our most complex environmental challenges, any viable solutions will require co-operation rather than isolation across borders.

The pandemic also demonstrates how societies can mobilize rapidly in the face of existential threats. While our current emergency response to COVID-19 has been reactive, rather than proactive, perhaps it need not have been entirely sowhy did we not learn from SARS, MERS, H1N1 and other global respiratory virus outbreaks?

Must we also wait for more dire impacts of climate change before taking action? Now is the time to mitigate environmental threats through proactive measures, developing the societal tools to maximize human well-being in a rapidly changing world.

The economic pain inflicted by COVID-19 should not limit our ability to take bold action. The environmental triumphs of the 1970s and 1980s occurred against a backdrop of significant economic uncertainty after the post-war boom.

When the current crisis passes, as it surely will, we must seize the opportunity to re-imagine, and to create, a different kind of future, much as the original Earth Day protesters did on April 22, 1970.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image credit: NASA

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Earth Day at 50: A Look to the Past Offers Hope for the Planet's Future - Singularity Hub

In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today.

Or at least, that's what we've been told by physicists for the past several decades.

But new theoretical physics research has recently revealed a possible window into the very early universe, showing that it may not be "very early" after all. Instead it may be just the latest iteration of a bang-bounce cycle that has been going on for well, at least once, and possibly forever.

Of course, before physicists decide to toss out the Big Bang in favor of a bang-bounce cycle, these theoretical predictions will need to survive an onslaught of observation tests.

Scientists have a really good picture of the very early universe, something we know and love as the Big Bang theory. In this model, a long time ago the universe was far smaller, far hotter and far denser than it is today. In that early inferno 13.8 billion years ago, all the elements that make us what we are were formed in the span of about a dozen minutes.

Even earlier, this thinking goes, at some point our entire universe all the stars, all the galaxies, all the everything was the size of a peach and had a temperature of over a quadrillion degrees.

Amazingly, this fantastical story holds up to all current observations. Astronomers have done everything from observing the leftover electromagnetic radiation from the young universe to measuring the abundance of the lightest elements and found that they all line up with what the Big Bang predicts. As far as we can tell, this is an accurate portrait of our early universe.

But as good as it is, we know that the Big Bang picture is not complete there's a puzzle piece missing, and that piece is the earliest moments of the universe itself.

That's a pretty big piece.

Related: From Big Bang to present: Snapshots of our universe through time

The problem is that the physics that we use to understand the early universe (a wonderfully complicated mishmash of general relativity and high-energy particle physics) can take us only so far before breaking down. As we try to push deeper and deeper into the first moments of our cosmos, the math gets harder and harder to solve, all the way to the point where it just quits.

The main sign that we have terrain yet to be explored is the presence of a "singularity," or a point of infinite density, at the beginning of the Big Bang. Taken at face value, this tells us that at one point, the universe was crammed into an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point. This is obviously absurd, and what it really tells us is that we need new physics to solve this problem our current toolkit just isn't good enough.

Related: 8 ways you can see Einstein's theory of relativity in real life

To save the day we need some new physics, something that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies. And that's exactly what string theory claims to be: a model of physics that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies. Which means that string theory claims it can explain the earliest moments of the universe.

One of the earliest string theory notions is the "ekpyrotic" universe, which comes from the Greek word for "conflagration," or fire. In this scenario, what we know as the Big Bang was sparked by something else happening before it the Big Bang was not a beginning, but one part of a larger process.

Extending the ekpyrotic concept has led to a theory, again motivated by string theory, called cyclic cosmology. I suppose that, technically, the idea of the universe continually repeating itself is thousands of years old and predates physics, but string theory gave the idea firm mathematical grounding. The cyclic universe goes about exactly as you might imagine, continually bouncing between big bangs and big crunches, potentially for eternity back in time and for eternity into the future.

As cool as this sounds, early versions of the cyclic model had difficulty matching observations which is a major deal when you're trying to do science and not just telling stories around the campfire.

The main hurdle was agreeing with our observations of the cosmic microwave background, the fossil light leftover from when the universe was only 380,000 years old. While we can't see directly past that wall of light, if you start theoretically tinkering with the physics of the infant cosmos, you affect that afterglow light pattern.

And so, it seemed that a cyclic universe was a neat but incorrect idea.

But the ekpyrotic torch has been kept lit over the years, and a paper published in January to the arXiv database has explored the wrinkles in the mathematics and uncovered some previously missed opportunities. The physicists, Robert Brandenberger and Ziwei Wang of McGill University in Canada, found that in the moment of the "bounce," when our universe shrinks to an incredibly small point and returns to a Big Bang state, it's possible to line everything up to get the proper observationally tested result.

In other words, the complicated (and, admittedly, poorly understood) physics of this critical epoch may indeed allow for a radically revised view of our time and place in the cosmos.

But to fully test this model, we'll have to wait for a new generation of cosmology experiments, so let's wait to break out the ekpyrotic champagne.

Paul M. Sutteris an astrophysicist atSUNYStony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host ofAsk a SpacemanandSpace Radio, and author ofYour Place in the Universe.

Originally published on Live Science.

Originally posted here:

What happened before the Big Bang? - Space.com

The lockdown has not rattled me. I have always had a self-imposed quarantine, says poet-novelist Vinod Kumar Shukla, over the phone, discussing his choice of lifestyle that requires minimum social interaction. Not a recluse in the true sense of the word, Sahitya Akademi Award winner (1999) for Hindi literature, 83-year-old Shukla, is content without meeting people for days together. He lives with his family in his home in Raipur in Chhattisgarh.

Winner of Mathrubhumi Book of The Year Award 2020, Shukla sent his acceptance speech, a warm recollection of a time when he had visited the University of Calicut two decades ago for a seminar on Hindi. The letter was read out at the event in Thiruvananthapuram, in February this year. However, he kept away.

I have my own method of social interaction. Writing for me is talking with people. Reading is about knowing them. I dont need to meet people. I find all of them in the books I read and write, says Shukla, who first stepped out of his village Rajnandgaon (in former Madhya Pradesh) when he was 18, to make a rail journey.

Though I have travelled a lot, even outside India, it has only been for literature. Even going to my neighbours house is like making a pilgrimage. According to me, remaining local will make you global. As a writer, I learn everything sitting at my desk. I watch my wife, observe her and I know about womankind, he adds. Shukla writes daily and reads for seven to eight hours a day and, to him, the lockdown has made no difference.

I dont find this forced isolation of the lockdown strange, says writer and former bureaucrat NS Madhavan who signed off from Twitter last August to concentrate on his writing. I took a sabbatical from social life and it has paid off. I find the constant buzz in my head has gone. Yet, Madhavan adds that he loves to travel as it gives him the material for his writing.

Ceramic artist Priya Sundaravalli chose a sequestered life, away from the city, in Auroville, Puducherry 18 years ago on her return from the US. The lockdown has not made a big difference to her way of life, which is one of little social interaction. Priya says shes not one to catch up with friends very often. Virtual connectivity is adequate.

Surprisingly, as a teenager, Priya did not have this temperament. She recalls being a part of cooking parties and sleepovers in the US, but also remembers a niggling sense of inadequacy; of something missing. I am trying to find wholesomeness in my days, she says, explaining that the milestones of her day are routine things like drawing kolam, making a good breakfast and such.

Being close to the wilderness, places untouched by human beings, gives her joy and was a reason to relocate to Auroville, a commune that leads a secluded lifestyle.

Priya spends large parts of her day at the potters wheel in her studio. When you get into the zone of creativity, you experience a singularity with the creative process. Time, space, tiredness and physical needs drop off.

What doctors say

Kochi-based jazz musician Salim Nair too spends long hours in his home office, developing software and making music. I am uncomfortable with large crowds and become acutely aware of how I must handle people when I meet them, says Salim. When he relocated, eight years ago, to Kochi from the US, he was very conscious of the fact that he needed seclusion and built his house accordingly. I like to observe people rather than mingle with them, says Salim, who lives off the virtual online community he has built in the past 10 years.

Does isolation fire his creativity? I find my productivity increased if theres another person actively working with me, but it depends on the person, says Salim. In the lockdown, he has been streaming live from his FB page SalimNairband. Not dictated by deadlines, he follows his pace.

One of the countrys leading abstractionists, Achuthan Kudallur says he cannot paint when there is another individual around. Seclusion and solitude are important for his creativity. Having recovered from a recent fall, which meant bed rest, he has adjusted to the lockdown, calling his state a quarantine within a quarantine. Kudallur savours the quietness of his home in Neelankarai and its proximity to the sea. I love the sea and my solitude. The current upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has robbed him of the mood to paint. But when inspiration strikes, he says, his art will reflect the colours and structures of the pandemic.

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What creative introverts can teach us about the joys of social distancing - The Hindu

Netflix is all set to release a brand new addition to the iconic 'Ghost in the Shell' franchise. 'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' is a new 3D CGI animated series that continues the story of the franchise with new technologies and world-ending threats.Directed by Shinji Aramaki and franchise veteran Kenji Kamiyama, 'SAC_2045' looks like it might just be a worthy addition to the franchise. It features the return of beloved franchise characters Major Motoko Kusanagi (Atsuko Tanaka), Akio Ohtsuka as Batou, Kichi Yamadera as Togusa, Yutaka Nakano as Ishikawa, Toru Ohkawa as Saito and more.

It is set in 2045 and draws inspiration from Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology', which predicts that human and machine intelligence would merge into a Singularity by that year. It looks like the show will present an interesting perspective on the future of the human race, a theme that's been predominant in the franchise as a whole. The series will also be introducing some interesting new villains, the so-called "post-humans" who threaten the delicate global balance.

In terms of story and philosophical themes, 'SAC_2045' does sound like it might be exactly what fans of the franchise want. However, there's also the artwork to be taken into account.

This isn't the first time 'Ghost in the Shell' has played around with 3D animation but Netflix does have a pretty shaky track record with CG-animated shows (we're looking at you 'Saint Seiya'). That said, we've seen the art for the show in trailers and it looks like it does work pretty well for the series.There's a lot of expectations riding on 'SAC_2045'. Whether it can live up to them or not is something we'll have to wait and see.

Here's the official synopsis for the new ONA series: "In 2045, the world has been thrown into a state of systematic 'sustainable war', but the threat of human extinction at the hands of AI hasn't yet pervaded the public consciousness. Former members of Public Security Section 9, including full-body cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi, are working as hired mercenaries when mysterious beings known as 'post-humans' begin to emerge. The worlds superpowers are trying to come to grips with the threat, and so Section 9 is reorganized."

'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' will drop on Netflix on April 23.

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'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' Preview: Will the new series step up to franchise standards or crash and burn - MEAWW

Economy April 22, 2020 Manisha Mirchandani Director of Strategy at Atlantic 57

A man walking around in a factory. The outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan in January highlighted the pitfalls of China as the dominant global manufacturer of record.

Photo: Loic Venance / AFP via Getty Images

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The global spread of COVID-19 has sparked a clarion call to diversify supply chains away from China. But its singularity as a manufacturing location will make it hard to find alternatives.

The outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan in January highlighted the pitfalls of China as the dominant global manufacturer of record. A delay in orders from Chinese factories was inevitable, given the scale of dependency on Wuhan alone. According to Dun & Bradstreet, a business intelligence company, 51,000 companies have one or more direct suppliers in Wuhan, while 5 million companies have one or more tier-two suppliers in the region. The data suggests that its not just Southeast Asia that is dependent on Chinese suppliers the problem appears to be much more widespread.

Another survey by the Institute for Supply Management captures the magnitude of the outbreak for global manufacturers: More than half (57%) of companies are experiencing longer lead times for tier-1 China-sourced components, while 44% are simply unprepared to address continued supply disruptions from China. A case in point the technology giant Apple was one of the first major global companies to inform investors that it would miss Q1 revenue projections, in part due to delays in production by its China-based assembly plants. Of late, Apple had begun to move some production activities to Vietnam and India, but the company remains reliant on Chinese assembly plants to power its inventory.

The spread of the coronavirus has made one thing clear across the technology, automotive, electronics, pharmaceutical, medical equipment and consumer goods sectors, nearly all supply chains lead back to China as the preeminent global provider of intermediate materials and components. Recognizing the risk that a dependency on China poses to national industries, some governments are offering manufacturers incentives to exit China and ease the pain of diversification. Japan is putting $2.2 billion of its COVID-19 economic stimulus package into supporting its manufacturers shift production outside of China. Theres also mounting public pressure in some countries, such as the United States, to move essential production of pharmaceuticals and medical equipment out of China and closer to home.

Indeed, the pandemic might accelerate pre-existing plans to reduce supply chain dependency on China. Alongside rising labor costs, the ratcheting of trade tensions between China and the U.S. had already pushed brands to re-evaluate their single-source strategies. More than 80% of fashion brands said they already planned to reduce sourcing from China, according to a July 2019 U.S. Fashion Industry Association report. Ensuring more resilience in supply chains is also likely to be a future expectation of investors, who will now be looking at the ability of companies to hedge risk in the event of continued outbreaks or other Black Swan events. The chairman of Wistron Corp, an iPhone assembler, told analysts that the company would locate 50% of its capacity outside of China by 2021. Simply put, the coronavirus has accelerated trends that have been evident for some time pertaining to Chinas manufacturing stature.

But the reality is that a major manufacturing shift away from China is easier said than done. Even those companies that have diversified production are finding it hard to break free of Chinas pervasive influence. Anticipating a rise in tariffs from the U.S.-China trade war, video game producer Nintendo had shifted the manufacturing of its blockbuster gaming console to Vietnam in 2019. Still, there is a shortage of Switch consoles in stores today due to a lack of essential components flowing to the companys Vietnamese factories, as COVID-19 paused production by Chinese suppliers of component parts.

The global technology and consumer electronics sectors are especially reliant on Chinas infrastructure and specialized labor pool, neither of which will be easy to replicate. The Chinese government is already mobilizing resources to convince producers of Chinas unique merits as a manufacturing location. Zhengzhou, within Henan Province, has appointed officials to support Apples partner Foxconn in mitigating the disruptions caused by the coronavirus, while the Ministry of Finance is increasing credit support to the manufacturing sector. Further, the Chinese government is likely to channel stimulus efforts to develop the countrys high-tech manufacturing infrastructure, moving away from its low-value manufacturing base and accelerating its vision for a technology-driven services economy.

To this end, manufacturers are cognizant of the potential of China as a major consumer market for iPhones today and for advanced technologies such as robotics, autonomous vehicles and smart devices tomorrow. A flash poll by the Beijing-based U.S. Chamber of Commerce conducted in March shows that U.S. businesses are still bullish on Chinese consumers, despite the impact of the virus. The consumer sector had the most businesses reporting that they intend to maintain planned investments (46%), followed by the technology industry (43%).

As manufacturers examine their supply chains for a post-COVID 19 world, the imperative for greater supply chain resilience versus the attractiveness of China as a manufacturing location and tech-forward consumer market is the defining tension that they will need to navigate. The outcome is unlikely to be a clean break from China for most. Lower-value sectors, such as apparel, are most likely to expedite diversification. Indeed, many garment manufacturers have already diversified from China to the likes of Vietnam, Cambodia and Ethiopia on the basis of rising labor costs. It will be the higher-value technology and consumer electronics sectors where the countrys manufacturing prowess and consumer potential is the most pronounced that will find it hardest to turn away from Chinas distinctive allure.

URL: https://www.brinknews.com/coronavirus-global-supply-chain-reliance-china-manufacturers-economic-recession-risk/

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Reducing Global Supply Chain Reliance on China Won't Be Easy - BRINK

(CBS Local)Ken Liu is known around the world as one of the best short story writers in literature.

The award-winning author is back with a new book from Simon & Schuster called The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, which is a collection of sixteen of his best short stories from the last five years about science fiction, fantasy, and what it means to be human.

I have published 150 short stories by this point and I have one previous collection called The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. This is the second one and it combines some of my newer stories and the overall themes of how do we remain human in the face of cataclysmic change, said Liu in an interview with CBS Locals DJ Sixsmith. When I wrote these stories, I wasnt thinking of pandemics. What I try to focus on is the way technology is changing and defining what it means to be human and how do we react to that.

FULL INTERVIEW:

One of the topics that Liu honed in on is how technology has changed what it means to know something.

We think that we know something, but all we know how to do is look it up, said Liu. I was a practicing lawyer for many years and you cant actually draft anything from scratch anymore. You take a form and you modify it. I wanted to explore this idea of the externalization of our knowledge and our sense of identity. The way we put so much of it out into the digital world. A lot of the stories explore this concept of singularity, which is the idea that we become digital beings. What does that mean and how do you remain human in a world like that.

Lius book is available now wherever books are sold.

Watch all of DJ Sixsmiths interviews from The Sit-Down series here.

Go here to read the rest:

I Focus On The Way Technology Is Changing What It Means To Be Human: Author Ken Liu On The Hidden Girl And Other Stories - CBS Local Sports