TheGoodFuture Blog (Futurist Gerd Leonhard)

“Tackling climate change will transform the labor market. With the right policies in place, more than 24 million green jobs could be created globally by 2030, according to the International Labor Organization. But finding people to fill those roles quickly won’t be easy. One 2022 LinkedIn survey found that listings for green jobs have grown at an annual pace of 8% since 2015, while green talent grew only 6% each year over the same period.”

Meet the Climate Quitters
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-01-05/how-to-quit-your-job-to-fight-climate-change
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“In other words, at least among those with early access to the robot cabs, the power users are picking Waymo because it eliminates humans from the equation. In some cases, I can understand that — Karp mentioned that she feels safe falling asleep in the back of a Waymo because there’s not a human stranger in the vehicle with her — but it strikes me as broadly dystopian. We fret about how smartphones broke society and about how social skills have been stunted by months of pandemic-induced isolation. But now we want to eliminate our fellow humans from the very basic act of commuting?”

My dystopian ride in SF's fully driverless cars
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/riding-san-francisco-driverless-car-17683611.php
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“But AI is being boosted by massive public investment as well. Such financing should be governed for the common good, not in the interest of the few. We need a digital architecture that shares the rewards of collective value creation more equitably. The era of light-touch self-regulation must end. When we allow market fundamentalism to prevail, the state and taxpayers are condemned to come to the rescue after the fact (as we have seen in the context of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic), usually at great financial cost and with long-lasting social scarring. Worse, with AI, we do not even know if an ex post intervention will be enough. As The Economist recently pointed out, AI developers themselves are often surprised by the power of their creations.”

AI in the Common Interest | by Gabriela Ramos & Mariana Mazzucato - Project Syndicate
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethical-ai-requires-state-regulatory-frameworks-capacity-building-by-gabriela-ramos-and-mariana-mazzucato-2022-12
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“Musk was once the actual inspiration for the cinematic Iron Man: He was believed by many to be a superhero capable of creating electric cars, sending rockets to Mars, and delivering the future to all of us. Now he’s the thrashing, bullheaded avatar of Big Tech in the 2020s: unfathomably rich and powerful but also lodged in the mud, amplifying toxicity and discord, and at distinct risk of entering a sustained decline.

Or take Elizabeth Holmes, whose unicorn start-up Theranos was once a darling of Silicon Valley, and who was sentenced in November to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors about her company’s technology, which never worked. Or Sam Bankman-Fried, the erstwhile crypto wunderkind and champion of effective altruists who was embraced by the Democratic Party, and who promised to help usher in the age of cryptocurrency with his exchange, FTX, and to work to improve the lives of future humans everywhere. He ends the year bankrupt, out on bond, and accused of multiple counts of fraud. Customers may never get back the money they entrusted to Bankman-Fried’s collapsed exchange. So perhaps it’s not just Big Tech but the very model that engendered it—in which a visionary is entrusted with millions to invent the future, with scant oversight—that has hit a wall.”

The End of the Silicon Valley Myth
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/big-tech-fall-twitter-meta-amazon/672598/
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“The bluster did accomplish what the company’s metaverse was built to do in the first place, though: distract us from the fact that Facebook’s user growth has slowed to a crawl, that the platform is losing ground to TikTok, and that it’s mired in controversy and moderation woes. With each passing day, Facebook’s metaverse aspirations look more like a Hail Mary fantasy, a beleaguered CEO’s escape attempt to a 3-D virtual world where he might leave behind the misery of his dull 2-D version.”

The End of the Silicon Valley Myth
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/big-tech-fall-twitter-meta-amazon/672598/
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“This approach, which has gained traction in recent years, can enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown while improving social outcomes. It frees up energy and materials for low- and middle-income countries in which growth might still be needed for development. Degrowth is a purposeful strategy to stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow.”

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x
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“To tackle rising food prices and help citizens choose healthy and sustainable diets, I propose that we price foods according to their health and environmental impact.

Our diets, with their large portions of meat and dairy, are major risk factors for heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer, and are associated with one in five premature deaths. These diets are also major drivers of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution. What we eat now determines what environment we will leave for future generations.”

It’s time to price in the true costs of the food we eat | Prospect Magazine
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/its-time-to-price-in-the-true-costs-of-the-food-we-eat
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“Facing a future that is unpredictable, we can’t know precisely what competencies future generations will need. But we do know that they will experience an era characterised by climate crisis, economic volatility and the encroachment of automation into many sectors. These challenges should refocus attention towards the specifically human capabilities that young people will need to thrive: creativity, collaboration, resilience and problem-solving.”

It’s time to counter political short-termism with an 'OBR' for future skills - Prospect Magazine
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/its-time-to-counter-political-short-termism-with-an-obr-for-future-skills
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“In their work on scarcity, US academics Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan noted that time scarcity has the effect of capturing decisionmakers in “firefighting traps” where they focus on the urgent at the expense of what is more important over the long term.

If the human mind plays a part, then so too does our (unwritten) constitution, which prioritises today’s taxpayers while lacking the mechanisms to bind us to long-term commitments. Policy “solutions” to long-term challenges regularly end up passing along costs to younger or future generations, often in the form of government debt. It is bias towards the present such as this that prompted the philosopher Roman Krznaric to talk of “the tyranny of the now”.

If it feels like we are staggering from crisis to crisis, it is not by accident or quirk of the system, but because our model incentivises governments to kick the can down the road on the big issues of our era—from deep demographic shifts to food insecurity.”

Minister for the future: Introduction | Prospect Magazine
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/minister-for-the-future-introduction
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