Monthly Archives: March 2017

In Brief

Elon Musk is never shy about making grand announcements and declaring his ambitious plans, especially when theyre anchored in his vision for a more sustainable future. His latestpromise is to help South Australia createa solar farm that will address the their energy issues in just one hundreddays orhell do the work for free.

In South Australia, energy prices continue to surge, andlocal companies remain unable to meet public energy demand mostly due to environmental concerns. Last year, storms led to a state-wide blackout that shut down operations for numerous ports and public transportation, as well as disrupting business operations in the fifth most populous state in the country.

To that end, co-founder of SolarCity (and Musks cousin) Lyndon Rive says theyre capable of installing 100 to 300 megawatt per hour battery storage, which could solve South Australias energy issues. And while Rivedoesnt have 300 MWh sitting there ready to go, he told AFR that he can certainly get them.

After making this statement, Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, tweeted Lyndon and Musk if they were indeed serious about the offer.

Musk replied:

On Cannon-Brookes end, he asked for seven days to sort out politics and funding, at which point he also requested that the Tesla CEO send an approximate quote on how much a 100MW battery farm at mates rates would cost.

According to Musk, it would cost $250 per kWh to produce over 100MWh. Hes confident that Tesla could get the system installed and working within one hundred days of signing a contract.

Assuming that Cannon-Brookes can indeed secure the paperwork needed to get the project underway, Tesla certainlyhas a reputationwhen it comes to delivering on its promises. Last year, Tesla took on a similar project in California: a 80MW farm that was completed in just 90 days that provided grid-scale power in response to possible power shortages.

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Musk Just Promised To Solve This Country's Energy Crisis in 100 Days or It's Free - Futurism

In Brief

True to the sprit of humanitys early settlers, cultivating the land will probably be the best way to provide food for the Red Planets early colonists. But just how possible is it to plant seeds from Earth and grow them as Martian crops? To figure this out, the International Potato Center (CIP) yes, its a real institution launched an initiative last February called the Potatoes on Mars Project.

The effort is reminiscent of the scene from the movie The Martian in whichMatt Damons character plants potatoes to survive on Mars. Turns out, the sci-fi film may actually have been onto something. The CIP worked in tandem with NASAs Ames Research Center (NASA ARC) to discover if potatoes could be grown under Mars atmospheric conditions.

A tuber was planted in a CubeSat-contained environment that was especially designed by engineers from the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima. Soil taken from the Pampas de La Joya Desert in southern Peru, described as the most Mars-like soil found on Earth, was placed inside a hermetically sealed container that was installed in the satellite. To simulate the radiation found on Mars surface, the researchers used an LED. They built controls to alter the temperature to reflect Mars day and night cycles, as well as for adjusting air pressure, oxygen, and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, a month after the first tuber was planted, preliminary results have been positive.It was a pleasant surprise to see that potatoes weve bred to tolerate abiotic stress were able to produce tubers in this soil, said CIPs potato breeder Walter Amoros.

However, the CIPs experiment does more than just let us know that the Earths first Martian colonists may be snacking on potatoes when they reach the Red Planetin the next decade or so. It also helped us figure out if potatoes could survive in extreme conditions on Earth.This [research] could have a direct technological benefit on Earth and a direct biological benefit on Earth, says Chris McKay of NASA ARCin a press release.

By proving that potatoes can be cultivated under the harshest environments on Earth, the study could help the estimatedone in nine people on the planet suffering from chronic undernourishment. That problem is likely to get worse considering modern stressors on our environment. The results indicate that our efforts to breed varieties with high potential for strengthening food security in areas that are affected, or will be affected, by climate change are working, said Amoros.

All in all, potatoes may turn out to bea super food both in space and here on Earth.

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Scientists: Potatoes Can Grow on Mars - Futurism

For those not familiar with this old idiom, it means its less costly to avoid problems from ever happening in the first place, than it is to fix problems once they do. It also happens to be the entire logic behind the invention of the vaccine, and it is my belief that universal basic income has the same potential.

The savings provided by vaccines are staggering to the point of almost being beyond comprehension. The human suffering avoided through vaccinations are immeasurable, but the economic benefits are not, and in fact have been measured. Lets start with polio.

We estimate that the United States invested approximately US dollars 35 billionin polio vaccines between 1955 and 2005 The historical and future investments translate into over 1.7 billion vaccinations that prevent approximately 1.1 million cases of paralytic polio and over 160,000 deaths. Due to treatment cost savings, the investment implies net benefits of approximately US dollars 180billion, even without incorporating the intangible costs of suffering and death and of averted fear. Retrospectively, the U.S. investment in polio vaccination represents a highly valuable, cost-saving public health program.

For every $1 billion weve spent on polio vaccines, weve avoided spending about $6 billion down the road. And thats purely the economic costs, not the personal costs. You might think our investment in fighting polio is perhaps as good as it gets, but its not.

Most vaccines recommended are cost-saving even if only direct medical costsand not lost lives and sufferingare considered. Our country, for example, saves $8.50 in direct medical costs for every dollar invested in diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccine. When the savings associated with work loss, death, and disability are factored in, the total savings increase to about $27 per dollar invested in DTaP vaccination. Every dollar our Nation spends on measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination generates about $13 in total savingsadding up to about $4 billion each year.

Just $1 spent on a single MMR shot can save $13 and a DTaP shot can save $27 that would otherwise have been spent on the costs of the full-blown diseases they protect against.

These vaccinations save us incredible amounts of money and suffering as a society, as long as we continue vaccinating ourselves. But what kind of savings are there to be found, when we go all-in and invest in a massive vaccine program so large, its aim is to entirely eradicate something?

Reported as eradicated from the face of the Earth in 1977, and in possibly one of the greatest understatements of all time, the eradication of smallpox by the U.S. proved to be a remarkably good economic investment.

A total of $32 million was spent by the United States over a 10-year period in the global campaign to eradicate smallpox. The entire $32 million has been recouped every 2 months since 1971 by saving the costs of the smallpox vaccine, administration, medical care, quarantine and other costs. According to General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates from a draft report, Infectious Diseases: Soundness of World Health Organization Estimates to Eradicate or Eliminate Seven Diseases, the cumulative savings from smallpox eradication for the United States is $17 billion. The draft report also estimates the real rate of return for the United States to be 46 percent per year since smallpox was eradicated.

We also didnt stop at eradicating it from within our own borders. We invested our money in the world.

It has since been calculated that the largest donor, the United States, saves the total of all its contributions every 26 days, making smallpox prevention through vaccination one of the most cost-beneficial health interventions of the time.

Even if we let these numbers sink in for a bit, its a huge challenge to fully appreciate because these savings are what we dont experience. We arent spending tens of billions of dollars that we otherwise would have. Had we not spent millions then, wed be spending billions on all of the effects of smallpox to this day and long into the future.

Try to imagine a world where we didnt eradicate smallpox. Aside from the obvious increases in our already sky-high health care costs and the deaths of over 100 million people, millions every year would be calling in sick to work to care for themselves or a loved one with smallpox. Businesses would be paying more for sick leave and losing millions of hours of productivity (estimated at $1 billion lost every year). Medical bankruptcies would likely be higher. Crime would likely be higher. The entire economy would suffer along with all of society.

But we didnt take that path. We chose instead to pay for an ounce of prevention in order to avoid paying for a pound of cure.

Unfortunately we cant see the effects of what we did, because we made them never happen with the ounce of prevention. Were saving what will eventually be trillions of dollars, and dont even give this incredible fact a second thought.

Not only is it hard to see the pounds weve avoided, but we also have a really hard time recognizing the pounds were paying for, because we consider them normal, just as smallpox would today still be normal if wed never chosen to eradicate it through mass vaccinations. It would just be an ugly fact of life like poverty.

What if poverty is like smallpox?

What if the realities of hunger and homelessness arent just facts of life, but examples of those costly pounds that we currently consider normal that we could just instead eradicate with an ounce of cure? How much would it cost to eradicate? How much could we save?

As Ive written about before, a report by the Chief Public Health Officer in Canada looked at this question of potential savings, and estimated that:

$1 invested in the early years saves between $3 and $9 in future spending on the health and criminal justice systems, as well as on social assistance.

Its rare to see this kind of return on investment. That is, outside of vaccinations. Thats the power of immunizations. Spending $1 on a vaccine for a kid can save $10, but also just giving the same kid $1 can save $9 some decades down the road too. How can this be? Because childhood poverty is hugely expensive.

Our results suggest that the costs to the United States associated with childhood poverty total about $500 billion per year, or the equivalent of nearly 4 percent of GDP. More specifically, we estimate that childhood poverty each year:

Reduces productivity and economic output by about 1.3 percent of GDP;

Raises the costs of crime by 1.3 percent of GDP; and

Raises health expenditures and reduces the value of health by 1.2 percent of GDP.

The above numbers are from 2007, and since then the child poverty rate has increased from 17% to 25%, so we can safely assume the hit to GDP has increased as well. Assuming a proportional increase, the 2015 loss to economic growth of child poverty could now be 5.6% of GDP, or $981 billion. And thats only child poverty, not adult poverty.

For the same reason its cheaper to just spend $10,000 on the homeless providing a home, than it is to instead spend $30,000 in medical and criminal justice system costs, it is cheaper to prevent people from ever living in poverty, than it is to pay the full costs of poverty. In addition to the costs of child poverty above, these full costs include a significant portion of the estimated $1.4 trillion spent on crime, the $2.7 trillion spent on health care, and the trillions of dollars spent on its many other effects every single year in the U.S.

These numbers are just economic costs. There are biological costs as well. Poverty even rewires our brains. The new study of epigenetics show us such biological costs can be paid spanning entire lives.

Coming of age in poverty may lead to permanent dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdalawhich, according to the researchers, has been associated with mood disorders including depression, anxiety, impulsive aggression and substance abuse.

Fortunately, the even newer study of neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons long thought to be impossible) shows us these effects also need not be permanent.

Chronic stress, predictably enough, decreases neurogenesis. As Christian Mirescu, one of Goulds post-docs, put it, When a brain is worried, its just thinking about survival. It isnt interested in investing in new cells for the future. On the other hand, enriched animal environmentsenclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitatlead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain.

Essentially, were recently learning that we can potentially reverse the long-term effects of poverty, if we eliminate it.

Poverty currently affects almost 50 million Americans, 18 million of whom are kids coming of age impoverished. To allow poverty to continue in the 21st century or to eradicate it is the same choice between an ounce or a pound as smallpox was in the 20th century, and outside of an experiment in Manitoba, weve been choosing a pound of poverty for pretty much all of recorded history.

As another saying goes, so far were being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Decades ago, we developed a vaccine for smallpox and we used it to eradicate smallpox.

Today, we may already have a vaccine for poverty. Its been tested, and the results are remarkable.

Its called universal basic income.

The idea is to give every citizen enough money to cover their basic needs like food and shelter, no strings attached. For the U.S. to guarantee these basic needs to assure no one would live in poverty would cost about $1,000 per adult and $300 per child every month.

For a significant portion of the population here in 2015, this is where the conversation can stop. Once the napkins are whipped out and its $3 trillion price tag is estimated, the idea can be hand-waved away as too expensive.But is it?

Remember how every $1 spent keeping a child out of poverty can save $3 to $9 as an adult? Well, that means if we started vaccinating kids with a basic income of $300 a month, we would not have to spend $900 to $2,700 a month on them as adults. This also means that when kids became adults, a basic income of $1,000 per month is a savings of up to $1,700 wed have otherwise spent. So why not start vaccinating our kids against poverty, and consider their basic incomes as adults a net savings?

What if we had hand-waved away the costs of eradicating smallpox as too expensive with napkin math? What if we today faced that same choice we did then? What if the price of smallpox eradication now was calculated on a napkin as being $3 trillion? What would we do? What should we do?

What if the discussion about smallpox eradication never included the reality the investment would be recouped every two months? What if no one talked about the 40% annual return on investment? What if we all kept pretending eradicating smallpox would just be too darn expensive and that its just one of those ugly facts of life we just have to deal with until we die?

A $3 trillion napkin-math price tag does not reflect a vaccines true value. The fact that its not even its true price tag doesnt even really matter (Note: its true price tag is more like $1 trillion after consolidation and elimination of many existing cash-replaceable federal programs) because even at $3 trillion instead of $1 trillion, its still an ounce instead of a pound.

Poverty is a disease. Its an illness that even doctors are beginning to recognize as something that requires the prescription of cash in order to successfully treat its many associated diseases:

I was treating their bodies, but not their social situations. And especially not their income, which seemed to be the biggest barrier to their health improving. The research evidence was pretty clear on this. Income, poverty, is intimately connected to my patients health. In fact, poverty is more important to my low-income patients than smoking, high cholesterol, high-blood pressure, obesity, salt, or soda pop. Poverty wreaks havoc on my patients bodies. A 17% increased risk of heart disease; more than 100% increased risk of diabetes; 60% higher rates of depression; higher rates of lung, oral, cervical cancer; higher rates of lung disease like asthma and emphysema It became pretty clear to me I was treating all of [my patients] health issues except for the most important onetheir poverty.Dr. Gary Bloch

We can do more than continually treat povertys many economically and physically expensive symptoms. We can eradicate it entirely with a social vaccine designed to immunize against it.

A social vaccine can be defined as, actions that address social determinants and social inequities in society, which act as a precursor to the public health problem being addressed. While the social vaccine cannot be specific to any disease or problem, it can be adapted as an intervention for any public health response. The aim of the social vaccine is to promote equity and social justice that will inoculate the society through action on social determinants of health.

Basic income is a tested social vaccine. Its been found to increase equity and general welfare. It has been found to reduce hospitalizations by 8.5% in just a few years through reduced stress and work injuries. Its been found to increase birth weights through increased maternal nutrition. Its been found to decrease crime rates by 40% and reduce malnourishment by 30%. Intrinsic motivation is cultivated. Students do better in school. Bargaining positions increase. Economic activity increases. Entrepreneurs are born.

With experiment after experiment, from smaller unconditional cash transfers to full-on basic incomes, the results point in positive directions across multiple measures when incomes are unconditionally increased.

Universal basic income is a social vaccine for the disease ofpoverty.

We can keep spending trillions every year to treat this disease and its many symptoms, or we can choose to eradicate poverty as we did smallpox through a mass social vaccination program known as basic income.

It costs real money for us to look the other way on poverty. Unlike smallpox and other diseases we can vaccinate ourselves against, the costs of poverty can be more invisible. We dont get bills in the mail from Poverty, Inc. telling us each month how much we owe, but we still pay these bills because they are included in our many other bills.

When we pay $10,000 in taxes instead of $7,000 because of welfare and health care, thats in large part a $3,000 poverty bill. When we pay $500 a month instead $400 on our private health insurance premiums, thats a $100 poverty bill. When we pay $50 on a shirt instead of $45 because of theft, thats a $5 poverty bill. When were taxed a percentage of our homes to pay for prisons, thats a poverty bill. What other examples can you think of personally? What might we all be spending on poverty every day?

These poverty bills are all around us, but were just not seeing them as they are. And lets not ignore the lack of opportunity bills either.

If just one Einstein right now is working 60 hours a week in two jobs just to survive, instead of propelling the entire world forward with another General Theory of Relativity that loss is truly incalculable. How can we measure the costs of lost innovation? Of businesses never started? Of visions never realized?

These are the full costs of not implementing universal basic income, and they will only increase as technology reduces our need for work as long as we continue requiring the little work thats left in exchange for income.

These are the full costs of being penny-wise and pound-foolish by not socially vaccinating ourselves against poverty.

These are the full costs of continuing to opt for a pound of cure instead of an ounce of prevention.

So now, let us consider a new question.

Is the question for us to answer in the 21st century, Can we afford basic income?

Or is the question, Can we not afford basic income?

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Could Universal Basic Income Be the 'Social Vaccine' of the 21st Century? - Futurism

The Cars of the Future

The cars of the future will run on renewable energy. Or, at the very least, will be hybrids. At the annual Geneva International Motor Show, the world was given a preview of the some of the most futuristic cars (or car concepts) in the works. Weve already shared the details onSedric, Volkswagens autonomous lounge on wheels,and Pop.Up, Airbus and Italdesigns car-drone hybrid, but here are five others from the total of 118 that are just as impressive.

Hyundais FE (short for Future Eco) Fuel Cell, slated for 2018, aims to be the future of SUVs. It will run on Hyundais improved hydrogen fuel cell technology and is a zero-emission vehicle, promising 30 percent greater energy density than the Tucson Fuel Cell. This futuristic-looking SUV is designed with a clean, flowing look thats inspired by water, according to Hyundai. On the inside, it has internal air humidifiers that can recycle some of its water emissions within the cabins atmosphere. Plus, it has a trunk that can stow and charge an electric scooter.

This onesa comeback concept. Initially unveiled by Bentley at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show, the EXP 12 Speed 6e is probably one of the fanciest EV concepts out there. Thats to be expected with British manufacturer Bentley, of course. This elegant two-seater has a better battery than its predecessor, cameras for side mirrors, and no roof making it perfect for a grand touring experience.

Heres another luxurious-looking sedan. Though not an electric car, the 2018 Lexus LS 500h makes the case for a hybrid large sedan, which is cleaner but packs the same powertrain found in the 2018 LC 500h sports coupe. It can run on pure electric power for a considerable distance.

Theres the regular Zoe, and then theres the E-Sport. Both are EVs from Renault, but the E-Sport is built to wow your racing genes. It has 460 bhp courtesy of its monstrous 450 kg battery, boosting this four-wheel drive EVs performance. To keep its weight down to 1,400 kg (3,086 lb), the E-Sport has a carbonfiber body. This working concept is intended to maintain Renaults commitment to the ongoing development of electric vehicles.

The GT by Mercedes-AMG is another high-performance hybrid car concept. The renowned car manufacturer is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a concept car that has a Formula 1-derived 805-hp hybrid powertrain.With the Mercedes-AMG GT concept, we are giving a preview of our third completely autonomously developed sports car, Tobias Moers, chairman of Mercedes-AMG, said during the unveiling. With our AMG GT concept, that means a combination of an ultramodern V8 petrol engine and a high-performance electric motor.

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Five of the Most Futuristic Cars Unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show - Futurism

Giving Machines a Voice

Last year, Google successfully gave a machine the ability to generate human-like speech through its voice synthesis program called WaveNet. Powered by Googles DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) deep neural network, WaveNet produced synthetic speech using given texts. Now, Chinese internet search company Baidu has developed the most advanced speech synthesis program ever, and its called Deep Voice.

Developed in Baidus AI research lab based in Silicon Valley, Deep Voice presents a big breakthrough in speech synthesis technology by largely doing away with the behind-the-scenes fine-tuning typically necessary for suchprograms. As such, Deep Voice can learn how to talk in a matter of a few hours and with virtually no help from humans.

Deep Voice uses a relatively simple method: through deep-learning techniques, Deep Voice broke down texts into phonemes which is sound at its smallest perceptually distinct units. A speech synthesis network then reproduced these sounds. The need for any fine-tuning was greatly reduced because every stage of the process relied on deep-learning techniques all researches needed to dowas train the algorithm.

For the audio synthesis model, we implement a variant of WaveNet that requires fewer parameters and trains faster than the original, the Baidu researchers wrote in a study published online. By using a neural network for each component, our system is simpler and more flexible than traditional text-to-speech systems, where each component requires laborious feature engineering and extensive domain expertise.

Text-to-speech systems arent entirely new. Theyre present in many of the worlds modern gadgets and devices.From simpler ones like talking clocks and answering systems in phones to more complex versions, like those in navigation apps. These, however, have been made using large databases of speech recordings. As such, the speech generated by these traditional text-to-speech systems dont flowas seamless as actual human speech.

Baidus work on Deep Voice is a step towards achieving human-like speech synthesis in real time, without using pre-recorded responses. Baidus Deep Voice puts together phonemes in such a way that it sounds like actual human speech. We optimize inference to faster-than-real-time speeds, showing that these techniques can be applied to generate audio in real-time in a streaming fashion, their researchers said.

However, there are still certain variables that their new system cannot yet control: the stresses on phonemes and the duration and natural frequency of each sound. Once perfected, control of these variables would allow Baidu to change the voice of the speaker and, possibly, the emotions conveyed by a word.

At the very least, this would be computationally demanding, limiting just how much Deep Voice can be used in real-time speech synthesis in the real world. As thethe Baidu researchersexplained:

In the future, better synthesized speech systems can be used to improvethe assistant features found in smartphones and smart home devices. At the very least, it wouldmake talking to your devices feel more real.

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A Groundbreaking New AI Taught Itself to Speak in Just a Few Hours - Futurism

In Brief

Airbus, a company best known for building airplanes, has partnered with the car company Italdesign and unveiled their car-drone hybrid called Pop.Up.

Unlike typical flying car concepts, the Pop.Up features a modular set-up that will allow it to operate both on ground and in the air. A drivable passenger capsule, about the size of a smart car, can attach to a giant quadcopter that will lift it into the air, giving passengers the option to travel through the traffic or above it.

The plan is for the Pop.Up to be controlled by Artificial Intelligence so that passengerscan summon the vehicle on demand via an app. Airbus sees this as the most efficient way to ferry passengers. It would also the first fully electric, zero-emission vehicle system designed specifically to relieve traffic congestion, which is expectedto increase by 2030.

This vehicle is design to meet the needs of the future, explained Italdesign CEO Jrg Astalosch in a press release.

Today, automobiles are part of a much wider eco-system: if you want to design the urban vehicle of the future, the traditional car cannot alone be the solution for megacities, Astalosch said. In the next years ground transportation will move to the next level and from being shared, connected and autonomous it will also go multimodal and moving into the third dimension.

Whilethe Pop.Up is still in the concept stage, Italdesign and Airbus argue that it is the most feasible concept car to date. If the companiess hopes come to fruition, it wont be long before wesee their vehicle on our roads and in the skies.

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Airbus Has Revealed Its Flying Car-Drone Hybrid - Futurism