Daniel Fagella writes: Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence have led to fears of elimination of jobs or destruction of life as we know it. But are these fears legitimate? To help shed light on this, TechEmergence asked over 30 AI researchers on what they believe is the most likely AI-related risk. Here are their responses….
Read More about Just how scary is Artificial Intelligence? A survey among the experts
Colin Todhunter writes: Powerful corporations hold sway over a globalised system of food and agriculture from seed to plate. The narrative about farming has been shaped to benefit this handful of influential corporations. With major mergers within the agribusiness sector in the pipeline, power will be further consolidated and the situation is likely to worsen….
Read More about From the Green Revolution to GMOs: Living in the shadow of global agribusiness
India is reeling under a back-to-back drought, with 10 states declared affected and nearly 2,00,000 villages affected, and shredding the social fabric in affected areas. In this concluding part of our series on combating drought, we present examples where traditional methods for water harvesting have been successfully put to use by communities to drought-proof themselves….
Read More about Series: Combating drought – 3: Traditional methods to the rescue
David Anderson writes: About eight thousand years ago with the beginning of the bronze, iron, agricultural age we decided to pursue a life of separation and alienation from the planet. This dualistic mindset, further strengthened in the seventeenth century during the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, is at the root of the present crises….
Read More about The problem with the European Enlightenment and its Industrial Revolution
Ugo Bardi writes: Their oversized antlers were beneficial for Irish Elk males in sexual competition. However, the weight of the antlers was also a burden and it has been argued that it was perhaps the main reason that led to the extinction of this species. With humans, we may consider language to be the same. …
Read More about How the greatest technology ever developed backfired on us
Jeremy Leggett writes: A Saudi Prince talks of his nation’s “dangerous addiction” to oil. A Bloomberg guru talks of renewables “crushing” fossil fuels. Arguably the most successful entrepreneur ever turns the unveiling of an electric car into the most successful product launch in history. Plus much more that would have been unimaginable a year ago….
Read More about Like an epic novel: How the global energy transition unfolded this April
Transhumanity.net
Klaus Schwab writes: A technological revolution is fundamentally altering the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, its unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but the response to it must involve all stakeholders of the global polity….
Read More about ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’: What it means and how to respond
Mashable.com
George Dvorsky writes: Last year, SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk warned that Artificial Intelligence could “take over the world”. The day when machines become smarter than humans has never appeared closer— yet we seem no closer in grasping the implications of this epochal event. Indeed, we are clinging to some serious—and even dangerous—misconceptions about artificial intelligence….
Read More about Everything you know about Artificial Intelligence is wrong
Vidhyadhar Date writes: A developed country is not one where the poor drive cars, but one where the rich use public transport. Building more roads to reduce congestion is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. India has failed to learn from developed countries’ mistakes and is on a disastrous path of motorization….
Read More about Cars, Capitalism and India
Jayati Ghosh writes: Fascism in the 21st century does have some new features, which are also common to at least some of the countries that are currently experiencing it. They are largely related to the possibilities generated by new technologies, especially communication and surveillance technologies, which are increasingly being used by governments with fascist inclinations….
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Nityanand Jayaraman writes: A new report warns that India’s plans to import 12 nuclear reactors from ailing American equipment suppliers is financially fraught and irrelevant for India’s electricity needs. If built, the reactors will cost anywhere between Rs 6.3 lakh crore and Rs 11 lakh crore, thereby translating to unaffordable and obscenely high electricity tariffs….
Read More about Why is India importing US nuclear reactors that even the US doesn’t want?Juan Cole writes: In 2015 energy companies invested more in new renewables power plants than in fossil fuel plants for the first time in history. The majority of these plants were planned for developing countries, a sign that the technology is now viewed as less expensive. It is clear there is a secular trend upwards….
Read More about Video & Report: How renewable energy is already taking over the world
Pierce Nahigyan reports: Founded in 2014, WeFarm is a free, peer-to-peer service designed for farmers around the world. It enables farmers to share information with each other via SMS, or text messaging. WeFarm translates and connects queries from continent to continent, and has thus far provided more than 100,000 answers to its 43,000 registered farmers….
Read More about How WeFarm connects small farmers without the Internet
Wccftech.com
In the Union Budget, the government has decided to exempt the new-age cesses on electric and hybrid cars. But are these green cars really green? They do not pollute the areas that they are being used in because all they are doing is move the pollution from the point of movement to the source of electricity….
Read More about In spite of cool advertising, electric cars (also) damage the environment
Elanthemag.com
Virtually everything in our homes, everything in our stores, got there on a truck. Prior to that, 90 percent of those items were transported on a ship and/or a train. If trucks, trains, and ships stopped running, our global economy and way of life would stop too. Alice Friedemann’s new book examines precisely this prospect….
Read More about Bookshelf: When trucks stop running, so does civilization
Shail Shrestha writes at Local Futures: Technology transfer from the North to South has long been regarded as the path to a better life in less-developed regions of the world. But even the best and the most sustainable technology proposed in Paris would make Nepal less sustainable than it is today, leading us in the wrong direction….
Read More about The Paris Climate Talks: A Nepali View
My hypothesis—let’s call it the Technospheratu hypothesis—is that the technosphere, having risen up on top of and in opposition to Gaia and the biosphere, possesses a certain primitive emergent intelligence that allows it to grow in complexity and power and to dominate the biosphere to an ever-greater extent. Unlike Gaia, it is a parasite upon the biosphere….
Read More about Bookshelf: Shrinking the Technosphere by Dmitry Orlov
Ratan Tata at the Bangalore Aero Show, 2013. The Tata Group is a major player in both mining and defence manufacturing.
Rahul Varman writes: Bauxite or iron mines are opened up by grabbing people’s lands and homes against great resistance, and UAVs and other increasingly sophisticated weapons are used to quell this resistance. The corporate sector benefits both from the mining, as well as the demand for weapons, demand which is independent of the vagaries of the market system….
Read More about India’s rising Corporate-Military Complex: A critical appraisal
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Maywa Montenegro reports: Very few technologies merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter genetic material, efforts to do so have required months or even years of molecular tinkering. With CRISPR, precision and speed have soared….
Read More about CRISPR is coming, with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and natureJahnavi Sen reports: According to a new research paper by Radicka Anand, capital intensity of production has been increasing across industries in the last decade. This is true not only in capital intensive industries (or those industries whose capital intensity is higher than the median of the manufacturing sector), but also for labour intensive industries….
Read More about As automation increases in India, so does inequality
