Who Will Win the Race for AI?

Date: 23-01-2019
Source: Foreign Policy BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI

China and the United States are leading the pack—and the laggards face grave dangers.

The race to develop artificial intelligence (AI) is gathering momentum, and as the United States and China pull ahead, other countries, especially in the developing world, are lagging far behind. If they don’t catch up, their economic and political prospects will be grim.

For those countries at the back of the pack, the economic challenges will be hard enough: In an automated world, there will be far less demand for the unskilled labor they’ve typically provided. But the political dangers will be equally daunting. AI already makes it possible to hack human beings—to collect data about individuals and then use it to decipher, predict, and manipulate their desires. For example, reporting by a number of newspapers revealed that Cambridge Analytica had done just that with American voters’ Facebook data.

All countries, regardless of whether they are tech superpowers or not, will feel the effects of the AI revolution. But there’s an added challenge for those left behind in the race. To hack humans, governments and corporations need access to enormous amounts of information about real-life human behavior, which makes data perhaps the most important resource in the world. But most of the world’s data is mined by the United States, China, and companies based there.

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Welche Megatrends auf die Wirtschaft zukommen

Ansichtssache, Jakob Pallinger, 22. Jänner 2019, 14:00  derstandard.at

Neue Technologien und deren Anwendung krempeln die Unternehmenslandschaft um – und bieten Chancen für Anleger

https://derstandard.at/2000093191187/Wie-disruptive-Trends-im-Wirtschaftsleben-umruehren

Es war ein ungewöhnlicherr Tag für eine Kongressanhörung. Außerhalb des Kapitols in Washington hatten die Temperaturen des Sommers neue Rekorde erreicht, Hitzewellen und Dürren zerstörten die Ernte der Landwirte. Im Inneren des Gebäudes machte sich James Hansen für seine Rede bereit. „Wir gehen mit 99-prozentiger Sicherheit davon aus, dass es in den vergangenen drei Jahrzehnten zu einem Trend der Erderwärmung kam“, sagte der Klimawissenschafter mit ruhiger Stimme. Mit großer Gewissheit seien die vom Menschen verursachten Treibhausgase dafür verantwortlich.

Österreichische Mentalität passt nicht zur Roboterzukunft

Leopold Stefan, 22. Jänner 2019, 12:00 derstandad.at

Die heimische Wirtschaft schneidet bei der Anwendung künstlicher Intelligenz schlecht ab. Eine aktuelle Studie erklärt die Gründe

Zuerst sind sie nützliche Helferlein, dann übernehmen sie unseren Job, am Ende revoltieren sie und versklaven die Menschheit: Etliche Science-Fiction-Geschichten erzählen den Aufstieg intelligenter Maschinen als totale Transformation der Gesellschaft. Wer mit solchen Bildern im Kopf auf heutige Anwendungen künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) in Unternehmen blickt, wird enttäuscht beziehungsweise beruhigt sein. Derzeit etwa wertet intelligente Software Messdaten aus Trinkwasser aus, justiert Fabrikroboterarme anhand von Sensordaten in Echtzeit oder durchforstet Personendatenbanken nach empfänglichen Kandidaten für einen persönlichen Anruf vom Kundenberater. All das verbessert die Profitmarge, ist aber noch keine komplette Transformation.

Trump Doesn’t Like Traveling. That’s Bad for Diplomacy.

Date: 21-01-2019
Source: Foreign Affairs By James H. Lebovic and Elizabeth N. Saunders

The Importance of Presidential Jet-Setting

One of U.S. President Donald Trump’s few consistent views is that the United States must replace grand, multilateral bargains with more favorable bilateral deals. As he said of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a 2016 speech, “We need bilateral trade deals. We do not need to enter into another massive international agreement that ties us up and binds us down.” But two years into Trump’s presidency, the results are underwhelming. A deal with China has proved elusive. Trump’s new agreement with Canada and Mexico amounts to little more than a rebranded NAFTA. A grand bargain with North Korea still seems unlikely, notwithstanding the announcement on Friday of a second summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea are fraying, and relations with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are little better than they were two years ago, despite Trump’s efforts to cultivate personal relationships with those countries’ leaders. The art of the deal has fallen flat.

The Xi Jinping Slowdown

Date: 22-01-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal By The Editorial Board

China’s weakest growth in 30 years shows the logic of a trade deal.

China’s President Xi Jinping

The logic behind a U.S.-China trade deal grew even more persuasive with Monday’s report that the Chinese economy grew by 6.6% last year, its slowest rate since 1990.

Fourth-quarter growth was even slower at 6.4%, and the real growth rate may be lower still given the unreliability of China’s official statistics. Cement production is down, business confidence is faltering, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.9%, and consumer spending has weakened.

President Trump’s tariffs are only part of the economic explanation. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to slow the pace of economic reform has made the economy more vulnerable to such an outside shock. China’s growth has been built in part on dangerous levels of debt, an unsustainable internal migration from poor rural areas to cities, and state-owned enterprises that distort business decisions to goose official GDP data.

A Growth Debate for Germany

Date: 22-01-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal By The Editorial Board

The main center-right party’s new leader weighs tax reform.

Annegret Kramp Karrenbauer

Now that Europe’s economy shows signs of slowing, the question will be what to do about it. One hopeful development is that tax reform may be back on the table in Germany, the eurozone’s largest and most important economy.

The debate comes courtesy of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the new leader of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, the country’s main center-right party. In an interview with the Welt newspaper last week, she suggested Berlin cut taxes on businesses and individuals before an economic downturn gets worse. “It would make more sense to provide this relief from the beginning [of a downturn] and not wait for growth to weaken more.”

Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer is right that there’s ample scope to reduce Germany’s oppressive tax burden. The government’s revenue grab each year equals 38% of GDP. The top marginal corporate rate is around 33%. Its second-highest personal income-tax rate of 42% kicks in at €55,000 of income.

On the personal side, there’s also scope to accelerate the scheduled elimination of the “solidarity surcharge” introduced to fund reconstruction in East Germany. Berlin also desperately needs to reform the so-called cold progression by which a complex formula imposes steeply progressive rates on each marginal euro a middle-class taxpayer earns.

The Shrinking of the Political Middle—and What It Means

Date: 21-01-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal By Greg Ip

As the far right and far left gain strength, countries find it increasingly difficult to get things done—both domestically and globally

In the past two years, the world has been rocked first by the rise of right-wing populists and now by a re-energized left. Both are products of a deeper-seated, destabilizing trend: the hollowing out of the political middle.

The shrinking center has hamstrung governments’ ability to act, as Britain’s Brexit chaos and the U.S.-government shutdown have demonstrated. It also erodes the international cooperation needed to confront common challenges such as on immigration, trade and the climate.

It’s a threat in particular to the global business leaders meeting in Davos this week. They’re the biggest beneficiaries of the market-friendly policies and global openness that centrist parties champion. They increasingly must deal with insurgents on the left and right with little in common except a mistrust of globalization,big banks and big tech.

The ‘Hybrid’ Skills That Tomorrow’s Jobs Will Require

Date: 21-01-2019
Source: The Wall Street Journal

Jobs that tap both technical and creative thinking will be likely to pay well—and resist automation

Jobs that require once-unrelated skills are forecast to grow faster than overall employment.

Left brain, meet right brain. Go forth and prosper.

That could be the new formula for a successful career.

Here’s why. The human brain, that extraordinary computer, is divided into two hemispheres, each responsible for different skill sets. The left brain is popularly associated with logic and analytic thought; the right, with intuition and creativity.

But many of the good jobs of the future, according to some employment experts, will require being good at using both sides of the brain.

To some extent, that future is already here. Jobs that tap both technical and creative thinking include mobile-app developers and bioinformaticians, and represent some of the fastest-growing and highest-paying occupations, according to a new report from Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-market analytics firm in Boston.

A Weakening Global Expansion Amid Growing Risks

By Gita Gopinath, IMF Blog

While global growth in 2018 remained close to postcrisis highs, the global expansion is weakening and at a rate that is somewhat faster than expected. This update of the World Economic Outlook (WEO) projects global growth at 3.5 percent in 2019 and 3.6 percent in 2020, 0.2 and 0.1 percentage point below last October’s projections.

The downward revisions are modest; however, we believe the risks to more significant downward corrections are rising. While financial markets in advanced economies appeared to be decoupled from trade tensions for much of 2018, the two have become intertwined more recently, tightening financial conditions and escalating the risks to global growth.

The global expansion is weakening and at a rate that is somewhat faster than expected.

Where Millionaires are the Wealthiest

https://www.statista.com/chart/16685/country-with-most-millionaires/