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