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David Jackson, USA TODAY 2:17 p.m. EST February 3, 2015
President Obama(Photo: Alex Wong, Getty Images)
President Obama met Tuesday with supporters who have benefited from the health care law, and mocked congressional Republicans for again trying to repeal it.
"My understanding is the House of Representatives has scheduled yet another vote today to take health care away from the folks sitting around this table," Obama said. "I don't know if it's the 55th or the 60th time that they are taking this vote, but I've asked this question before: Why is it this would be at the top of their agenda?"
Republicans who made health care a major issue in last year's congressional elections say the new law has led to higher insurance premiums and canceled policies. Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., said her sister and brother-in-law work in a medical practice that is being hurt by new health care regulations.
"Doctors who are in a teaching hospital where she is are talking about no longer being able to teach or practice because of the burdens we're placing on them," she said.
The president's White House event featured 10 people who had written Obama letters about their positive experiences with the health care law. Some writers talked about being able to buy affordable insurance; others cited preventive exams that led to early detection of breast cancer and a brain tumor.
Health are "is not some political, ideological battle, it's about people," Obama said, noting that repeal would take insurance away from some of the people at the meeting.
"The notion that we would play politics with the lives of folks who are out there working hard every single day -- trying to make ends meet, trying to look after their families -- makes absolutely no sense," Obama said.
Obama has vowed to veto the House bill, though previous efforts to repeal the health care law have stalled in the Senate.
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Nasdaq-listed Cognizant's December 2014 quarter (fourth quarter for the company) not only beat Street expectations, but also surpassed the firm's forecast. The chief executive, Francisco D'Souza, tells Shivani Shinde Nadhe health care and digital practices will drive growth. Excerpts:
The fourth-quarter numbers have come as a big surprise. Was there a one-off impact?
The numbers were ahead of what we had expected. We have been saying for some time our clients are going through the most profound technology changes we have seen in our lifetime. At the same time, the economies of the world remain volatile. Clients have to deal with this, but they want to invest in new technologies. Over four-five years, Cognizant has been investing in capabilities that address this dual band. We see strong demand for such services. I think Cognizant is well positioned on both sides of the band.
You have given an ambitious growth forecast of 19 per cent for 2015. What are the key drivers?
Digital is an important part of that growth. The second is traditional services that continue to grow and we see clients pushing hard on traditional services as these help drive efficiency and also allow them to invest in new technology. The third is the TriZetto acquisition and the opportunities it is creating.
With TriZetto, you are betting big on health care. Given the regulatory changes, do you think this could be a risk?
Health care is a big market opportunity. It accounts for 19 per cent of the GDP spends in the US. Depending on the other parts of the world, the figures look the same. Hence, health care is an important part of the global economy. Significant disruption is occurring in this sector and there is a demand for end-to-end solutions to help drive client efficiency and the ability to grow.
TriZetto (a healthcare IT solutions company) has 250,000 care providers. They give us a strong platform. The TriZetto acquisition gives us an opportunity to change the dynamics of the healthcare sector and contribute to improve the life of millions of people. But then, we have had good organic growth across portfolios.
Your peers have been investing in start-ups to gain foothold in new technologies. What has been Cognizant's strategy?
We have dedicated presence in Silicon valley and other such start-up hotbeds. We constantly talk to start-ups, engage with them, and bring them to clients. Our approach has thus far been not to make financial investment in start-ups. I don't rule it out completely. My goal is not to be a passive financial investor in the start-up eco-system, but to have an operational relationship with the most promising start-ups that are relevant to our clients. Instead of making financial investment, I would bring to them capabilities, skill and networking that Cognizant has.
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RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) Nearly five years after President Barack Obama signed his health care overhaul into law, its fate is yet again in the hands of the Supreme Court.
This time it's not just the White House and Democrats who have reason to be anxious. Republican lawmakers and governors won't escape the political fallout if the court invalidates insurance subsidies worth billions of dollars to people in more than 30 states.
Obama's law offers subsidized private insurance to people who don't have access to it on the job. Without financial assistance with their premiums, millions of those consumers would drop coverage.
And disruptions in the affected states don't end there. If droves of healthy people bail out of HealthCare.gov, residents buying individual policies outside the government market would face a jump in premiums. That's because self-pay customers are in the same insurance pool as the subsidized ones.
Health insurers spent millions to defeat the law as it was being debated. But the industry told the court last month that the subsidies are a key to making the insurance overhaul work. Withdrawing them would "make the situation worse than it was before" Congress passed the Affordable Care Act.
The debate over "Obamacare" was messy enough when just politics and ideology were involved. It gets really dicey with the well-being of millions of people in the balance. "It is not simply a function of law or ideology; there are practical impacts on high numbers of people," said Republican Mike Leavitt, a former federal health secretary.
The legal issues involve the leeway accorded to federal agencies in applying complex legislation. Opponents argue that the precise wording of the law only allows subsidies in states that have set up their own insurance markets, or exchanges. That would leave out most beneficiaries, who live in states where the federal government runs the exchanges. The administration and Democratic lawmakers who wrote the law say Congress' clear intent was to provide subsidies to people in every state.
While predicting a victory, the White House has not prepared consumers for the consequences of a reversal. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell repeatedly said that "nothing has changed," even as other supporters of the law grew alarmed when the Supreme Court unexpectedly took the case. Burwell has dodged questions about contingency planning.
With oral arguments set for March 4 and a decision expected early in the summer, here's what's at stake:
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In Focus: Bethany Dill
Bethany Dill is a senior fine arts, art history and marketing major from Long Island, NY. She currently has a prestigious internship at the Metropolitan Muse...
By: Hofstra University
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David Cameron was among MPs who took the historic step today of approving what critics have called "three parent babies" in order to prevent devastating inherited diseases.
The MPs voted for a change in the law that means Britain is set to be the first country in the world to permit mitochondrial donation, which involves conceiving IVF babies with DNA from three different people.
But, speaking shortly before the vote, the Prime Minister insisted there was no question of "playing God".
The move to amend the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which forbids IVF treatments that affect inherited "germline" DNA in eggs and sperm, was carried by 382 votes to 128.
Labour leader Ed Miliband and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg also exercised their free vote to support the decision.
If the House of Lords ratifies the change - which seems likely - the first baby conceived with the procedure could be born by the end of next year.
The child would have "nuclear" DNA determining individual traits such as facial features and personality from its two parents, plus a tiny amount of mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) from an anonymous woman donor.
Research has shown that mitochondrial donation could potentially help almost 2,500 women of reproductive age in the UK.
All are at risk of transmitting harmful DNA mutations in the mitochondria, tiny rod-like power plants in cells, onto their children and future generations.
Mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) is only involved in metabolism and makes up just 0.1% of a person's genetic code.
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TIME Ideas health Three-Parent IVF Deserves a Chance in the U.S. All new fertility methods sound crazy at first
In a historic vote that rocked the world of fertility medicine Tuesday, British lawmakers approved the use of a controversial IVF practice that would take genetic material from three people to create a single embryo.
The promising technique, which involves replacing the defective cellular material of a womans eggs with that from a healthy donor, aims to prevent patients from passing down crippling genetic diseases to their offspring. It also might hold the key to other groundbreaking applications, such as extending womens fertility by rehabilitating old eggs.
The decision is inspiring because members of Parliament chose science over a firestorm of often ill-informed debate questioning whether weve gone too far in experimenting with genetic engineering. Hopefully, they will motivate the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which held public hearings on the topic last year but declined to move forward with human trials citing lack of safety data, to follow suit. New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that more than 12,000 women in the U. S. of childbearing age risk passing down such mitochondrial diseases, which have been linked to everything from poor growth, blindness, neurological problems and heart and kidney problems.
The world is right to be cautious about this latest mind-boggling advance in reproductive medicine. It does sound like science fiction: If youre a woman who suffers from a mutation in her mitochondrial DNAthe part of our cells that generate energyscientists can take your egg, extract the nucleusthe part containing your most important genetic instructions, such as hair and eye colorand insert it into a new egg that has been provided by another woman. (The nucleus would have already been removed from the donor egg.) This newly renovated egg is then fertilized by your partners sperm and implanted into your uterus. You carry on with your pregnancy, just like billions of women before you. (Another version of the technique switches out the nucleus of a newly fertilized egg.)
Have we pushed the boundaries too far in innovative baby-making? Think back to when critics charged that the inventors of in-vitro fertilization recklessly played God by daring to combine a sperm and an egg in a lab to create Louise Brown in 1978. Now some 5 million of the worlds babies have been conceived via IVF. But its one thing to get used to combining reproductive parts in a lab; its a lot less comfortable to imagine tinkering with those parts beforehand. In an open letter to the U.K. Parliament, Paul Knoepfler, stem cell and developmental biology researcher at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, warned that supporters could well find themselves on the wrong side of history with horrible consequences.
Yet its important to understand that mitochondrial replacement isnt genetic engineering run amok, cautions Debra Mathews of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. The mitochondrial energy-making material of an egg accounts for a mere 37 genes, compared to the nucleus, which contains about 23,000 genes. No one is messing directly with genes, she says. Scientists are replacing damaged mitochondria with healthy mitochondria. Its a specific technology for a specific application. Were modifying eggs to avoid serious diseases. So far, researchers havent attempted a pregnancy using the technique, but a study published in 2012 in Nature found that resulting embryos appeared to develop normally with the nucleus intact and did not contain any of the mutated mitochondria from patients previous eggs. And scientists at Oregon Health and Science University transferred the mitochondria between rhesus-monkey eggs and created four healthy monkey babies.
Yet determining when a technology is safe is especially challenging in fertility medicine because the only way to find out is to create another human. The FDAs prudence is a welcome change from the early wild west days of reproductive medicine when many scientists implanted and prayed that their experiments wouldnt lead to the horrible consequences Knoepfler is warning against. So far, weve been incredibly lucky.
We dont want to risk holding up progress by being too cautious, especially when some 1,000 to 4,000 babies are estimated to be born every year with mitochondrial disease, according to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation.
Yet what should the threshold be? The FDA shut down other such research being done more than a decade ago. Scientists at several fertility clinics were responsible for 30 pregnancies from eggs that had been injected with donor cytoplasm that contained mitochondria. The kids havent been tracked over the long term, and its unknown whether the procedure contributed to two cases of chromosomal abnormalities that resulted in one miscarriage and one abortion. And researchers at New York Universitys Langone Medical Center tried a similar mitochondrial transfer technique using younger eggs for three women in their 40s suffering from age-related infertility. Although the embryos developed naturally, none got pregnant. A Chinese team later used the NYU method to achieve a triplet pregnancy, but the patient lost the entire pregnancy after she tried to abort one fetus to give the other two a better chance of survival.
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The House of Commons in the U.K. has now voted to permit mitochondrial DNA replacement, which enables babies to be born who have DNA from three people.
Mitochondria are the batteries of our cells that provide energy for cell division and growth. We get ours from our mothers genes. If there is a defect in a mothers mitochondria, it can have devastating consequences for her children, resulting in almost certain death. But, by extracting a mitochondrion from a healthy donor egg, scientists are now able to conduct a miniature organ transplant on the cellular level to create a healthy baby through in vitro fertilization. Such a baby has its parents genes, except for one small but crucial portion obtained from a donor.
The need for the procedure is real. Somewhere around 4,000 children per year in the United States are born with a type of mitochondrial disease. Many do not survive more than a few months. Mitochondrial transplants would help prevent these diseases. So why not use them?
Critics give three main reasons; safety; creating babies with three parents; and the danger of opening the door to more genetic engineering. None of these objections provides a convincing reason against trying to treat what are often lethal diseases.
Is the procedure safe? When it was first tried by my NYULMC colleague, Jamie Grifo, at NYULMC in 2003 he was widely denounced as doing something unsafe with an embryo. The FDA brought his work to a halt. Grifo said he had plenty of data in rodents to show the technique was safe but decided not to push against the FDAs opposition. So what is different now that makes safety less of an issue?
Now we have data from monkeys. Convincing data. The creation of healthy primates was shown in 2009. And we have data from the creation of human embryos. A team of scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Center and the Oregon Health & Science University proved in 2012 that the transplanted mitochondria made viable embryos. Safety is always an issue but the case for moving forward in the UK and the USA is strong.
Some say three parent babies are weird. It is true that a mitochondrion is taken from a donor but why this makes the donor in any way a parent is beyond me. If I give the battery from my car to a friend whose battery has died does that make me an owner of her car? And even if logic were stretched to say yes, it is not as if this is the first time we have seen babies with three parents. Sperm, egg, and embryo donation and surrogacynot to mention adoptionhave been around a long time without fracturing the nature of the family. This objection gets no traction.
Lastly some say mitochondrial transplants cross a bright ethical line. Changing genes in the lungs of people with immune disease or in the eyes of people with macular degeneration may fix the broken body part but, critics point out, the change is not passed on to future generations. When you change the mitochondria in an egg with a transplant, you make a change that is inherited by every single offspring of any child created from that egg. That is called germline engineering. Germline engineering of mitochondria moves beyond using genetic engineering to fix our body parts into directly engineering the traits of our children. It is a road that could lead, the critics warn, to eugenics.
Well, thats where they are wrong. Transplanting mitochondria is not going to be the method used to create enhanced babies. Traits like height, intelligence, strength, balance, and vision dont reside in the battery part of our cells.
We may well want to draw the line at genetic engineering aimed at making superbabies but all that is involved with mitochondria transplants is trying to prevent dead or very disabled ones. The latter goal is noble, laudable and ought to be praised not condemned.
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Is It Ethical to Create Babies From Three DNA Sources? Absolutely
The coral reefs of the world are in serious danger. A recent scientific report on corals in the Caribbean Sea, for instance, found that coral cover declined from 34.8 percent to 16.3 percent from 1970 to 2012.
One of the chief threats to corals is climate change. Not only do warmer waters stress the species, leading to bleaching events like the one pictured above. Climate change provides a double blow to corals because it also brings on ocean acidification, driven by increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (caused by the burning of fossil fuels) dissolved in seawater. As sea waters acidify, corals have a harder time producing calcium carbonate, which is crucial to reef formation.
Thats why, in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology now tentatively propose something that they admit is extremely novel in conservation circles. Namely, they suggest that humans may need to intervene in the breeding of corals so as to assist their evolution.
Such anthropogenically enhanced corals may survive better, the researchers suggest, in a world of warming and acidifying seas. Moreover, this environmental engineering may be necessary as a last-ditch effort since, to be blunt, climate change is proceeding so fast with so much change already locked in that there may be no other choice.
So what are they planning to do? This isgenetic alteration, to be sure evolution always is but it isnot what we typically think of as genetic engineering.Although the development of GMO corals might be contemplated in extremis at a future time, we advocate less drastic approaches, notes the study.
Theyre not proposing Frankenstein coral, stressesNancy Knowlton, a marine scientist at the Smithsonian Institution who edited the paper.
Rather, assisted evolution entails a series of strategies that are perhaps best likened to the domestic breeding of anything from dogs to cows to pigeons to change their attributes. Charles Darwin called it artificial selection, as opposed to natural selection, which usually plays out over much longer periods of time.
For corals, heres how it might work. The researchers propose a number of strategies,some affecting corals and some affecting the communities of microbes that live with them in a symbiotic relationship.
For instance, scientists might identify strains of the appropriately namedSymbiodinium tiny microbes that live inside corals and are essentialto reef growth that are more resistant to temperatures. Then they could introduce this strain into corals in the wild that are struggling.
Yet anotherproposal, meanwhile, is actually guiding the evolution of Symbiodinium in the lab by using x-rays or chemicals that would lead the organisms to evolve and adapt more quickly.
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Coral reefs are in such bad shape that scientists may have to speed up their evolution
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Fast Facts Gene therapy may effectively treat glioma, a deadly form of brain cancer, but getting the right genes to cancer cells in the brain is difficult. For the first time, Johns Hopkins researchers used biodegradable nanoparticles to kill brain cancer cells in animals and lengthen their survival. The nanoparticles are filled with genes for an enzyme that turns a compound into a potent killer of cancer cells.
VIDEO: Programming Cancer Cells to Self-Destruct
Newswise Despite improvements in the past few decades with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, a predictably curative treatment for glioma does not yet exist. New insights into specific gene mutations that arise in this often deadly form of brain cancer have pointed to the potential of gene therapy, but its very difficult to effectively deliver toxic or missing genes to cancer cells in the brain. Now, Johns Hopkins researchers report they have used nanoparticles to successfully deliver a new therapy to glioma cells in the brains of rats, prolonging their lives. A draft of the study appeared this week on the website of the journal ACS Nano.
Previous research on mice found that nanoparticles carrying genes can be taken up by brain cancer cells, and the genes can then be turned on. However, this is the first time these biodegradable nanoparticles have effectively killed brain cancer cells and extended survival in animals.
For their studies, the Johns Hopkins team designed and tested a variety of nanoparticles made from different polymers, or plastics. When they found a good candidate that could deliver genes to rat brain cancer cells, they filled the nanoparticles with DNA encoding an enzyme, herpes simplex virus type 1 thymidine kinase (HSVtk), which turns a compound with little effect into a potent therapy that kills brain cancer cells. When combined with the compound, called ganciclovir, these loaded nanoparticles were 100 percent effective at killing glioma cells grown in laboratory dishes.
We then evaluated the system in rats with glioma and found that by using a method called intracranial convection-enhanced delivery, our nanoparticles could penetrate completely throughout the tumor following a single injection, says Jordan Green, Ph.D, associate professor of biomedical engineering and ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins. When combined with systemic administration of ganciclovir, rats with malignant glioma lived significantly longer than rats that did not receive this treatment. (Intracranial convection-enhanced delivery uses a pressure gradient to enhance diffusion throughout the tumor.)
In addition to revealing that biodegradable polymeric nanoparticles represent a promising mode of gene delivery for glioma, the findings show that nonviral DNA delivery of HSVtk combined with administration of ganciclovir has potent antitumor effects. To date, this type of system has only been used in humans with viral methods of gene delivery, of which the safety profiles are still heavily in debate, says Betty Tyler, associate professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Additional studies are needed to see if these nanoparticles could also effectively deliver other antitumor genes for the treatment of brain tumors as well as systemic cancers.
Green also noted that additional safety and efficacy studies are needed before the treatment makes its way to the clinic. It also is unknown what the ideal gene combinations are that should be delivered using this nanoparticle delivery system, he says. We will move forward by evaluating this technology in additional brain cancer animal models.
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New Nanoparticle Gene Therapy Strategy Effectively Treats Deadly Brain Cancer in Rats
Longboat Key, FL (PRWEB) February 04, 2015
This February and March, the Longboat Key Center for the Arts (LBKCA), a division of Ringling College of Art and Design, will debut FUTURESHIFT, a series of seminars led by renowned futurist, international keynote speaker, and best selling author David Houle. These workshops will not only allow participants to engage with David in an intimate and highly interactive setting, but also network with other executives and thinkers throughout the day as they explore the rapidly changing industries of marketing and healthcare.
FUTURESHIFT will expose participants to the current and emerging trends in each industry, highlighting both the disruptive forces of change and the need-to-know opportunities and challenges to shape business strategy over the next decade.
According to David, At a time of deep and rapid transformational change with both great opportunity and great risk for businesses we must face the future. As a business owner or leader, can you afford not to attend? I am confident that you will come away with a number of ideas on how to lead and live in the next 5-10 years.
The first seminar in the new series, Brand Shift: The Future of Brands and Marketing, will unveil the forces and mega-trends that will shape the global future of marketing and inform brand managers and strategists how to most effectively market their brand between now and 2020. During a time of unprecedented change in technology and content sharing, Davids insights prove invaluable to business leaders, entrepreneurs, and brand managers looking to stay relevant. Participants will leave with a solid foundation upon which to build their strategy for the next decade. For more information, go to http://www.ringling.edu/lbkca.
The second seminar, The New Health Age: The Future of Health Care and Medicine, will educate the individual about the ever-changing trends that are reshaping the health care landscape and deliver strategies to keeping personal and business health care costs down. Attendees will enjoy a comprehensive overview of the recent changes and future trends to consider while making crucial decisions about health care. For more information, go to http://www.ringling.edu/lbkca.
David Houle is a futurist, thinker, and speaker who spent more than 20 years in media and entertainment. He is consistently ranked as one of the top futurist keynote speakers in the world today and has written six books, including the Amazon best seller Brand Shift, which was selected by an international marketing organization as one of the top 20 marketing books published worldwide in 2014. His book, The New Health Age was reviewed by Mehmet OZ, M.D. as a succinct primer on how we got here and where we should be taking the health of the nation.
In addition to his publications, David has delivered over 400 speeches on six continents in twelve countries. He coined the term Shift Age to aptly describe this period in time when rapidly changing rate of technology has disrupted the comfortable approaches to marketing and healthcare that we have relied on for years. David will be delivering the keynote speech at the upcoming Sarasota Chamber of Commerce Annual Kick-Off Breakfast at Polo Grill on Friday, February 13. He currently serves as the Futurist in Residence at Ringling College of Art and Design.
LBKCA Event Details:
Brand Shift: The Future of Brands and Marketing February 27, 2015 8:30 3:30
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6. Handheld technology
Beyonce takes a selfie Photo: Beyonce.com
If you thought the art of taking a perfect selfie was only practiced by the Instagram generation, think again.
Here are a few examples of when art inadvertently predicted the future.
5. Big Brother
George Orwell's 1984 Photo: Penguin/AP
OK, so the selfie may not have been predicted in ancient times, but George Orwell knew exactly what was going on back in 1949.
Big Brother is watching you, wrote the India-born author in his dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four.
His vision of a surveillance society in which governments monitor and keep tabs on what we are doing is a reality today.
Big Brother on the big screen
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6 futurist predictions about technology that actually came true
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Futurists and thought leaders are coming together to share their insights at the first ever Face the Future conference May 4 6 in Albuquerque.
The three-day event is designed for business leaders, CEOs, executives and entrepreneurs, and will cover topics that include robotics, education, technology, healthcare, media, privacy, finance, the workplace, big data, cybersecurity, branding and travel.
In todays digital environment, were facing an unprecedented rate of change, explained Face the Future event co-producer David Houle, also known as the CEOs futurist. This event will take us into the future to get a look at the catalysts propelling us into a new age of accelerated transformation and what it all means in terms of visionary leadership, strategic planning and implementation.
In addition to Houle, other conference keynote speakers include Gerd Leonhard, host of Switzerlands The Future Show; Edie Weiner, author of Future Think; J.O. McFalls, cybersecurity expert; and Ann Rhoades, president of People Ink, Jet Blue board member and former executive at Southwest Airlines.
Altogether, 28 national and global futurists and thought leaders will participate in 12 main stage events and 16 breakout sessions. After-hour events include presenters vying for cash prizes as they pitch their futuristic concepts; entrepreneurs competing for $20,000 in funding with three-minute pitches to Venture Capitalists; an evening of New Mexican food and entertainment at Civic Plaza and Future Crawl, an opportunity for attendees to visit several innovative downtown Albuquerque businesses to meet with the principals and directors personally.
What were creating is an opportunity to create collisions, said Albuquerque Mayor Richard J. Berry. We want people to meet, exchange ideas and information, and create the next big idea or opportunity.
The event is being produced with the support of the City of Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau and Heritage Hotels and Resorts. Sponsors to date include US Bank, Entrega, Blueliner Marketing, Soothe and Meddle.
Registration is now open at http://facethefuturenow.com/registration. Individual prices start at $595, and group discounts are available.
Organizations interested in sponsoring the conference can visit http://facethefuturenow.com/sponsorship-opportunities.
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It's 2015. But sometimes it feels like our futuristic dreams are stuck in the 1950s and 60s. And there's actually a good reason for that.
The period between 1958 and 1963 might be described as a Golden Age of American Futurism, if not the Golden Age of American Futurism. Bookended by the founding of NASA in 1958 and the end of The Jetsons in 1963, these few years were filled with some of the wildest techno-utopian dreams that American futurists had to offer. It also happens to be the exact timespan for the greatest futuristic comic strip to ever grace the Sunday funnies: Closer Than We Think.
Jetpacks, meal pills, flying cars they were all there, beautifully illustrated by Arthur Radebaugh, a commercial artist based in Detroit best known for his work in the auto industry. Radebaugh would help influence countless Baby Boomers and shape their expectations for the future. The influence of Closer Than We Think can still be felt today.
How many of these visions of the future are we still waiting on?
Cars have made tremendous strides in fuel efficiency over the past half century. But we're still waiting for this sunray sedan a solar-powered car that was promised from no less an authority than a vice president at Chrysler.
People of the 1950s and 60s seemed to be obsessed with protecting their homes from the weather. Even if it meant literally living in a bubble, like this suburban utopia, which was protected from the elements by a giant, glass dome.
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Are we hurtling towards technological dystopia, or a futuristic fantasy world in which our hardware and software innovations provide a human experience that excels in almost every way compared to that which we know today? Thats the basic question at the heart of Peter Nowaks Humans 3.0 , a survey of our technical development, which incorporates some futurism peering forward along the path leading to a potential Kurzweilean Singularity. Nowak deftly guides us to a complex, credible and positive conclusion throughout his book-length inquiry, but I still cant help but wonder if some of the answers he provides along the journey come too readily.
Novak, a Canadian technology journalist with a decades-long career and impressive publishing history, has created in Humans 3.0 something akin to an anti-venom for the kind of fear-mongering technophobic portrayals of robot-controlled, despotic human futures that tend to pervade a lot of sci-fi texts, and that all too-often find their way into news media accounts of developments in AI, robotics and general computing. The book presents a view of techs progress that is much more in keeping with what you might find on blogs like this one, where the audience is more inclined to take for granted that innovation and technological advancement are by definition positive outcomes. But it specifically doesnt take that for granted, and instead sets about building a case, supported by interviews from subject matter experts around the world, as well as information gleaned from a strong collection of studies.
Towards the end of the book, Nowak acknowledges that he set out with an overall optimism about technology and its overall beneficial effects on human progress, but ultimately the positivity of the books message surprises even the author, by his own admission. And as was his goal, Novak has indeed made a case that supports that message, and one that indeed proves useful for the books apparent audience, which struck me as likely a more general reader with an interest in consumer tech, but lacking a deep and pervasive knowledge. The historical survey and scene-setting Novak offers is interesting and useful even if youre already familiar with much of what hes discussing, but its structured such that readers lacking deep context shouldnt ever find themselves lost.
Optimism, in a book that tackles this subject matter that isnt already aimed at the tech faithful comes across as refreshing, genuine and convincing in Humans 3.0 . That convincing bit, though, at times owes more to Novaks skill with prose than to the facts on hand. In these instances, the book can feel a little like the musings of a technofuturistic Dr. Paingloss: All is for the best, after all, in this, the best of all possible evolutions of human scientific and technological progress.
Consider, for instance, Novaks answer to the valid concern regarding what humans will do as robots assume responsibility for more of the labor that once provided them jobs. In lieu of numbers to offer reassurances of newly created roles and opportunities, Novak indeed points to the fact that while The Great Recession has resulted in what qualifies as a recovery according to many economic measures, it still hasnt seen employment rates rise along the lines weve seen with previous recoveries. Novak concludes that this is in part because companies are doubling productivity without resorting to traditional producers, embracing technological solutions in stead.
Humans will eventually get over this setback, which Novak characterizes as temporary, simply by coming up with new things for people to do. Theres a lack of jobs mostly because we arent yet creative enough to come up with new ones. Entrepreneurship as a blanket human enterprise then gets the nod as the eventual source of new, rewarding gigs for those whove seen their old ones disappear.
For me, this point is less well-made than the others Novak brings up. It seems more like hand-waving, especially given the rigor of the rest of the argument made in Humans 3.0 . Which isnt to say its not a valid theory: Rather, it just seems much more like educated guesswork than anything else presented. Likewise, when social media is used toward the end of the book as an example of how we might come to think of humanity as a universal extended family, I couldnt help but want for at least a discussion of how its use can also result in extreme alienation, such as in the most aggressive forms of online trolling and cyber-bullying.
These criticisms dont undermine Novaks larger argument, however, even if I am left more skeptical of the conclusions of Humans 3.0 than Novak himself. The book has a clear bent, but it doesnt make that a secret, nor does it feel as though its purposefully obfuscating anything in order to make its points. Its also an extremely easy and pleasant read, which has clearly been thoroughly researched and which expertly weaves in a good number of well-chosen first-hand sources.
If youre at all interested in Kurzweil, the Singularity, initiatives like Googles Calico or visionary technologists like Elon Musk, Humans 3.0 provides an accessible, enjoyable starting point that avoids some of the fawning and complexity of other futurist texts. Im still not convinced about the certainty of the coming techno utopia, but Im far less sure Ill wind up enslaved to unfeeling robotic overlords.
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Charlie Hebdo, Zero Tolerance, and Freedom of Speech
Like many around the globe, people in the arts are contemplating the complex issues of free speech after the tragic events at Charlie Hebdo. So Creative Time, MoMA PS1, and The Museum of Modern.
By: MoMAvideos
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Charlie Hebdo, Zero Tolerance, and Freedom of Speech - Video
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
A panel discusses the true story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them. Ed Ayers, President of the University of R...
By: US National Archives
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Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad - Video
FINANCIAL FREEDOM - 5 of 6 Biz Ownership
On this video we continue discussing the flipping of everything from cars; boats; houses; RV #39;s; domain names and businesses. Also, a brief look at difference types of businesses that are sometimes...
By: Khalif Sarahize
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Freedom (Bluesoil Deeper Prescribed Mix)
Freedom Bluesoil Deeper Prescribed Mix Donovan Blackwood Natural Essence Media Ltd Released on: 2013-10-18 Unknown: Donovan Blackwood Auto-generated by YouTube.
By: Various Artists - Topic
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