Humanity's Biggest Challenge

A slide presentation called The continued economic decline of the west has made the rounds in the last few weeks. You can also watch the presentation on video at MIT Tech TV.

Has the age of 2% annual growth in jobs and salary levels come to an end in the West? Will the jobs drain to the East quicken? Are policymakers leading us away from the precipice or towards it?

Often contrarian, Jon Moynihan's lecture draws on his decades of experience at high levels of business and government, together with calculations and analysis never seen before, to ask: is the continued economic decline of the West inevitable? And what, if anything, can we do to stop it?

... Filmed in 2012, Jon Moynihan, Chairman of PA Consulting Group, speaks at the London School of Economics showing how previous speeches in 2009 at the MIT Alumni Association ‘View from the Top’ event, London and the MIT Club of Germany Symposium, Frankfurt have correctly forecast the persistent downtown in Western economies.

Moynihan's lecture is overly long, tedious and generally unenlightening. In the "potential solutions" section, you can find the Ray Kurzweil Technological Singularity slide on page 81

You can view the presentation, watch the video, and ponder the meaning of it all on your own, but right there on page 89, standing all by itself and sticking out like a sore thumb, we find this remarkable slide.

You can also ponder the meaning of Humanity's Biggest Challenge on your own. In the context of Moynihan's presentation, I have only one comment to make about this slide.

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then

Bonus Video — The Singularity Is Near

 

Comments

[notdavenotcohen]

great post by Dave as usual - that presentation indeed is very long and not much new material beyond generalities of declining West and acsending East

reminder to those that think their comments are not going thru dave's moderation

i put up a mirror site and copy-paste DOTE posts to it

i will continue doing so for three months and if nobody comments in the meantime will stop thereafter

if you feel like you have something to say relevant to the post and don't see your comment going thru you can copy your comment to the mirror site

[Ben]

Moynihan wants "us" to consider applying science and engineering to social problems without "economic" concerns, in order to move from complexity (resource acquisition, production, and consumption) towards simplicity (efficient use of materials, less babies, et cetera). That ain't gonna happen Jack, and we all know why, especially Mr. Moynihan. However, he's a prominent individual, and optimism is de rigueur among his class.

*pulls out big bottle of Ciroc & chugs after watching The Singularity Is Near trailer*

[Wanooski]

Those singularity people are total freaks. And they're practically genocidal, ever gotten into conversation with one and ask what about those that don't want/can't afford to be a part of it? They basically write them off as luddites that will just be left to die essentially. And they all have utter contempt for ecological issues.

[Nat]

Here's my response to the singularity people: I want to breathe fresh air, drink clean water, eat unadulterated food, enjoy being a part of nature, grow old and die. Deal with it.

[Gretchen]

I read Kurzweil's book, The Singularity is Near, after a coworker recommended it to me. He loved the ideas presented in the book, especially the biotech ones having to do with living forever as a part machine/mind controlled entity.
I came away from that book shuddering, sure that a nightmarish scifi future is now for real in store for us, or rather what is left of us after the Great Depopulation.
It doesn't surprise me that education will be a tool used to spread ideas. Bill Gates is the big money behind the current faked demise of American education. No need for teachers, smaller class sizes, books and materials etc. anymore, just pack the kids in, plug them into a screen and "educate" them. They are already calling teachers "facilitators".

[Ken Barrows]

I read Kurzweil's book, too. And I just finished "Physics of the Future" by Michio Kaku. He seems to have written the book recently but says commodity prices have generally fallen for the last 150 years. Of course, like Kurzweil, there's no net energy analysis on all these elaborate schemes. Kaku, though, seems to admit, that fusion better work or his utopia isn't happening.

[Ben]

This is pretty interesting Dave:

http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?d=ww2010.book2.next

The link is about "Singularity". The section dealing with algorithms is pretty damn interesting.

[Brett]

Have we invented new things with modern technology or simply made them either cheaper and/or smaller? My phone has a dual core CPU, a camera, 16GB SD card, etc...

But other than more memory, and more pixels, and more transistors for less money, what have we invented that is NEW? Nano technology and all this crazy talk about somehow outsmarting billions of years of biology is made believable to most people that watch that clip because what? CGI?