Solving the World’s Problems – R&D – The Next Moonshot

Prolog:

“Instead of trying to make fossil fuels so expensive that no one wants them – which will never work  – we should make green energy so cheap everybody will shift to it."   Bjorn Lomborg

“Mark Twain once listened to the complaints of an old riverboat pilot who was having trouble making the switch from sail to steam. The old pilot wanted no part of the newfangled steam contraptions. "Maybe so," replied Twain, "but when it's steamboat time, you steam." --- Today is space time and man is going to explore it.” Charles F. Ducander - Practical Values of Space Exploration presented to the 86th Congress on July 5, 1960. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19911/19911-h/19911-h.htm

This report was a call for investment into the new Space frontier but as the following quote highlights, many people question these types of investments:

"What do sputniks give to a person like me?" a Russian workman complained in a letter which Pravda published on its front page. "So much money is spent on sputniks it makes people gasp. If there were no sputniks the Government could cut the cost of cloth for an overcoat in half and put a few electric flatirons in the stores. Rockets, rockets, rockets. Who needs them now?"

When you are hungry, it is hard to set aside your seed corn for next year’s crops but if you do not, you will be satisfied in the short term but starve in the long term. 

For anyone interested in solving some of the world’s hardest problems, I would encourage you to read this report written in 1960. Consider the challenges the engineers and scientists faced in 1960, consider what was predicted and what benefits space technology has brought to the world. This report shows how space technology was a game changer for our world. I believe we are poised for a similar game changer in the next 10 to 15 years in solving some of the world’s greatest problems. 

The report begins:

“The United States has not embarked upon its formidable program of space exploration in order to make or perpetuate a gigantic astronautic boondoggle. There are good reasons, hard reasons for this program. But, in essence, they all boil down to the fact that the program is expected to produce a number of highly valuable payoffs. It not only is expected to do so, it is doing so right now.

….

Practical uses such as those just listed mean the taxpayer is more than getting his money's worth from American space exploration—and getting a sizable chunk of it today.

Nevertheless, if we can depend on the history of scientific adventure and progress, on its consistent tendencies of the past, then we can be reasonably sure that the greatest, finest benefits to come from our ventures into space are yet unseen.

These are the unpredictable values, the ones which none of us has yet thought of.

Inevitably they lag behind the basic research discoveries needed to make them possible, and often the discoveries are slow to be put to work after they are made. Investors, even governments, are human, and before they invest in something they normally want to know: What good is it?

We can be sure that many American taxpayers of the future will be asking "what good is it?" in regard to various phases of the space program.

There was an occasion when the great Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, was asked this question concerning one of his classic discoveries in electromagnetism. Maxwell replied: "What good is a baby?"

Now, as then, it takes time for new knowledge to develop and become useful after its conception and birth.”

Solving the World’s Problems – R&D – The Next Moonshot

Bjorn Lomborg gave a talk “From Feel-Good to High-Yield Good: How to Improve Philanthropy and Aid” at LongNow.org.

https://longnow.org/seminars/02017/mar/13/feel-good-high-yield-good-how-improve-philanthropy-and-aid/

Bjorn Lomborg is author of Prioritizing the World (02014), Cool It (02007), and The Skeptical Environmentalist (02001).

4:20 minutes into the talk, he asks the question: How do you get people to focus on a problem? His answer:

·        use crying babies,

·        Cute animals,

·        Good PR [Author's Note: Think dumping ice water on your head.]

His talk is a call to improve philanthropy and aid.

“Bjorn Lomborg does cost/benefit analysis on global good. There are surprises when you examine what are the highest-yield targets in the domains of health, poverty, education, reduced violence, gender equality, climate change, biodiversity, and good governance. Reducing trade restrictions floats to the top: $1 spent yields $2,000 of good for everyone. Contraception for women is close behind, with a whole array of benefits. For health go after tuberculosis, malaria, and child malnutrition. For climate change, phase out fossil fuel subsidies and invest in energy research. For biodiversity, focus especially on saving coral reefs.

Most aid and philanthropy decisions are made based on persuasive sounding narratives, and we relish taking part in those stories, even if the actual results are mixed. But the results of the most pragmatic approach, built on statistics and economic analysis rather than narrative, can be stunning.”

In his talk, he highlights, 309 million women are victims of violence against women and cost $4.3 trillion. Every month, 280 million children are being beaten and in 25% of the cases, the beatings only stop when the instrument being used for the beating breaks. For more information on this topic see:

https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus/conflictandviolence

“Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, break new ground in estimating the global costs of violence and conflict in an Assessment Paper for the Post-2015 Consensus. The paper shows that the costs of collective, interpersonal violence, harsh child discipline, intimate partner violence and sexual abuse represent 11% of worldwide GDP. Interestingly, the types of violence that are most costly to society are ones that tend to attract less attention, in both development spending and public imagination. Violence in the home is 6.5 times more costly than homicide, and 50 times more costly than civil war.”

Here is link to the Copenhagen Consensus flyer, The Smartest Targets For The World, which is shared with the audience at Dr. Lomborg’s talks.

https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/post2015brochure_m.pdf

Working in the telecom, I was interested in this section

https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus/infrastructure

“Within the focus area of ICT infrastructure goals the target that has the best benefit-cost ratio (robust to both methodologies of assessing benefits) is:

• Increase mobile broadband penetration around three-fold in developing regions of the world which would return $17 for every dollar spent. 
• We also believe, given the economic tradeoffs, the following are valuable targets within this focus area:
• Increase Global Fixed broadband penetration around three-fold which would return $21 for every dollar spent
• And if, universal broadband penetration goals are to be considered, we believe that mobile broadband seems the most cost effective solution which would return $15 for every dollar spent (and $29 according to the second methodology for benefits calculation).”

The 2014 GLOBAL R&D FUNDING FORECAST Battelle and R&D Magazine www.battelle.org is an interesting report. It provides the following information about R&D around the world and in the US.

https://www.battelle.org/media/global-r-d-funding-forecast

• U.S. largest R&D $465B - 2.8% of U.S. GDP - $16.6T PPP (2014)
• World R&D $1.6T - GDP 1.8% of GDP - $88.7 T (2014)
• Life science industry includes biopharmaceuticals (85% of all expenditures), medical instruments and devices, animal/ agricultural bioscience and commercial research and testing.

o  U.S. life science R&D ($92.6B) - 46% of the global total ($201.3B)

o  U.S. 3.2 billion prescriptions per year, $350 billion per year. Eric Topol

o  The size of the illegal U.S. drug market $200B - $750B per year

§ https://247wallst.com/economy/2014/05/31/sex-drugs-could-add-800-billion-to-u-s-gdp/

· The information and communications technologies (ICT) industry provides hardware, software and services that make up the modern information age, spanning semiconductors, telecommunications, productivity or security software, computers, tablets and gaming.

o  U.S. ICT R&D ($146.5B) - global total ($257.3B)

o  US Wireless Service Revenue - ~$190B

o  Apple $182B in Revenue in 2014

This report aligns with the reports found at https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus/scienceandtechnology which states: “Encourage developing countries to increase their ratios of R&D spending to GDP to 0.5%, and emerging countries to raise their ratios to 1.5%, both of which will have a global return of $3 back on every dollar spent.”

I support investment in R&D because it is one of the key tools to solve world problems.

JFK stated: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

In Masayoshi Son Keynote at MWC 2017

https://www.mobileworldlive.com/mwc17-videos/keynote-1-mobile-the-next-element-masayoshi-son/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIEfPlvnLFw

He then talked about the following

“But this, in the next 30 years, the number of transistors on this chip is going to be a million times more. If you have a million times more binary systems, I think they well be smarter than us.”

The occurrence of the singularity by 2047 is a prediction that’s broadly in line with Ray Kurzweil’s, Google’s director of Engineering, estimate. Kurzweil has been criticized for saying that he expects the singularity to occur around 2045, but some of his predictions about technology so far have been roughly in line with what we’ve seen on the ground, and if you flick through the virtual pages of this site you’ll see we’re already up to some crazy stuff so 2045 could be pessimistic." 

Masa talked about this report below in his talk – 23 minutes into his talk. Personally, what I eat is probably putting me at the most risk :).  Still an interesting report. 

https://www.oodaloop.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/12-Risks-Report.pdf

https://www.ft.com/content/260e3168-b177-11e4-831b-00144feab7de

“Since the dawn of civilisation people have speculated about apocalyptic bangs and whimpers that could wipe us out. Now a team from Oxford university’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Global Challenges Foundation has come up with the first serious scientific assessment of the gravest risks we face.

The authors do not attempt to pull their 12 together and come up with an overall probability of civilisation ending within the next 100 years but Stuart Armstrong of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute says: “Putting the risk of extinction below 5 per cent would be wildly overconfident.”

My 16 year old nephew asked if we should be afraid that the robots will take over (Terminator World). I told him we should be more afraid of the Wall-E World - Technology Making Us Helpless and Lazy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1BQPV-iCkU

I want to work for “A Baymax World” of Collaboration with Technology - Flying Around With Your Robot Friend - Taking Out the Bad Guys!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40MqveftZzs&list=PLG8LXbsNgfBpvOXkQfb0x0QuMe1vwzSIm&index=6

May we of 2017 work on the hard problems of the world because that will “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Epilog

Byron Reese, in the book Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War wrote.

“In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences published a six-hundred-page report called “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” It contained this observation: “Economic studies conducted even before the information-technology revolution have shown that as much as 85 percent of measured growth in U.S. income per capita was due to technological change.” The report also cited a mid-1950s report that found 85 percent of economic growth was attributed to technological change in the period 1890 to 1950. Taken together, those findings suggest that almost all economic growth in the last 120-plus years was from technology.

I find this very easy to accept. And after accepting it, I apply it to the future and project that technological advance— and the economic growth it promotes— is poised to proceed at an astonishingly faster pace. If the rate of technological advance is increasing dramatically— and I know of no one outside of a mental institution who disputes that— then it follows that economic growth will increase dramatically as well. In fact, we are already seeing this. As Gregg Easterbrook notes in his book Sonic Boom, “In 2001, global average per-capita economic production was $ 5,000; by 2008, the average was $ 8,000, a 60 percent increase in less than a decade.”