The Prosperity of Vice: A Worried View of Economics (MIT Press)

The technology of gene modification is far more advanced, and application of cutting edge gene excision and incision techniques makes gain-of-function work potentially far easier, and more dangerous.

50 grand challenges for the 21st Century

The two governments that were taking the lead on dual-use research of concern issues UK and US are both preoccupied now with very different problems and new leadership. And the WHO was the lead global agency — it is facing a major leadership change. So we have no guidance regarding how governments are likely to view these issues. But many common infections are becoming more difficult to treat because bacteria are becoming resistant to the drugs available.

Drug-resistant infection — or antimicrobial resistance — is a very serious health threat to us all. Already it results in around , deaths a year globally. Within a generation it could be 10 million; it could mean we can no longer safely carry out not only complex, lifesaving treatments such as chemotherapy and organ transplants but also more routine operations like caesareans and hip replacements.

More needs to be done to improve our ability to diagnose, treat and prevent drug resistant infections and to speed up development of new antibiotics to replace those no longer effective in protecting us against deadly infections. However, the gains of these new technologies are being captured by a minority of the population both domestically and internationally. One outcome is human migration which is not only political but also economic and social. The other is the more frequent outbreaks of diseases, epidemics and pandemics such as ebola, MARS and Zika. In a world where there is a sentiment against movement of goods and people, how can developing societies adapt to increasing inequalities and build systems of governance to ensure human security?

Pardis Sabeti, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard University The recent Ebola and Zika epidemics exposed our global vulnerabilities to deadly microbial threats and highlighted the need for proactive measures in advance of outbreaks and swift action during them. At the same time it shows our ability to prevent, diagnose, and treat deadly infectious diseases through new technologies. It is a time of great potential for devastation or advancement for one of the greatest challenges of our lifetimes.

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Robert Sparrow, adjunct professor, Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University What does justice require of wealthy Northern states when confronted by mass migration from increasingly impoverished Southern countries as a result of accelerating climate change? As technological developments increasingly drive social change, how can democratic societies empower ordinary people to have a say in the decisions that shape the technological trajectories that will in turn determine what the future looks like?

How can the public have meaningful input into the character of the algorithms that will increasingly determine both the nature of their relationships with other people on social media and their access to various important social goods? How can we prevent an underwater arms race involving autonomous submersibles over the coming decades? How can we ensure that questions about meaning and values, and not just calculations of risks and benefits, are addressed in decisions about human genome editing? Eric Topol, Scripps Transatlantic Science Institute Our major challenge is related to our new capability of digitizing human beings.

But the problem is that this generates many terabytes of data, which includes real-time streaming of key metrics like blood pressure.

Aggregating and processing the data, derived from many sources, with algorithms and artificial intelligence particularly deep learning is a daunting task. Mike Turner, Head of Infection and Immunobiology at Wellcome Trust Infectious disease outbreaks are a growing threat to health and prosperity in our modern world. Vast amounts of international travel, increasing urbanisation and a changing climates means that viruses can cross borders and spread around the globe faster than ever before.

Recent outbreaks like Sars, Ebola and Zika have all shown how unprepared the world is to deal with epidemics. To stand any chance of tackling this threat, we need new vaccines, stronger healthcare systems and a better coordinated global response. The WHO also needs to be much better funded and have the mandate to respond swiftly and effectively when diseases do begin to spread. Only by investing, coordinating and working together can we expect to prepare the world for the next inevitable epidemic.

Gavin Yamey, professor of the practice of global health, Duke University Global Health Institute I believe one of the most urgent global issues that we face in and beyond, and one that we are woefully ill-prepared for, is the threat of epidemics and pandemics. We have three enormous gaps in the global system of preparedness. First, many countries have weak national systems for detecting and responding to outbreaks. Second, we have too few vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics for emerging infectious diseases with outbreak potential.

Closing these three gaps is one of the most urgent global priorities if we are to avert a potential world catastrophe. Cities are places where infrastructure gets locked in for decades, if not centuries, but city planners must make investments now in a world where technology is changing rapidly where people live, work and play, and how they access buildings, transport, energy and waste management.

The fastest growth is happening in thousands of secondary cities where mayors and city managers are not well schooled in technical urban planning.

Often, these secondary cities must collaborate with each other to deliver services effectively across boundaries within larger metropolitan areas. Carey King, assistant director, University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute We need a discussion as to what political leaders, business leaders, and citizens think is an appropriate distribution of wealth across the entire population.

This focuses on the real question how many people have what, independent of the size of the economy, though the two are linked instead of discussing how to shape policies and taxes to achieve an unspecified growth target independent of wealth distribution. Trump, Brexit, and Le Pen are representations that people understand growth only for the elite in the West is no longer tenable.

An issue that has not received enough attention in the media and popular understanding is that the Earth is finite and this fact will have real world physical, economic, social, and political implications.

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Neoclassical economics ignores this obvious fact, yet it is used to guide most policy eg, economic projections and scenarios , including that for climate change mitigation. Thus, we are using an economic theory that is simply incapable and inapplicable for informing an unprecedented transformation of the economy. We are already grappling with this problem across our developing member countries and with deteriorating river or surface water quality, lack of sufficient ground water sources and increasing dependence on sea water as a supply source, we have to bring in innovations in water management.

Treatment technology, water aquifer mapping, recycling and reuse of wastewater, etc. ADB is working with a large number of utilities to address these issues and as we engage on a long term basis with many cities and utilities, we will be actively exploring opportunities to bring in value for money propositions so that the utility benefits in the long term. We are also connecting with industry leaders to understand market trends so that we can bring the best to our developing member countries.

Climate change is just one piece of evidence of this fact. Technological improvements, while potentially important in reducing per capita impact, are not sufficient to make us sustainable unless we also stop growth in human numbers and reduce average consumption, while simultaneously lessening the gap between the richest and the poorest people on the planet. Sustainability is a term that is not well understood and is misused, but the reality is that any activity that is not sustainable will stop. So far, non-renewable resources are what are primarily driving our economic engine.

But by definition, non-renewables are being depleted and for the most part will stop being economically available in this century. So we must plan rapidly for the day when humanity can live using just renewable resources, while maintaining the biodiversity that makes the planet habitable. In truth, sustainability is the ultimate environmental issue, the ultimate health issue, and the ultimate human rights issue. Strategies that help to bring about changes in societal behaviour, including reproductive behavior, are critically important in achieving sustainability.

Use of entertainment media is a key component of such strategies, since a large share of humanity consume entertainment mass media during free time. For that reason, Population Media Center utilises long-running serialised dramas in various countries to create characters that gradually evolve into positive role models for the audience to bring about changes in social norms on a broad array of critical issues. Attached are three documents that describe this work and its effects. Globally speaking there is still a lot of people — 1.

There is going to be a lot of rising demand from regions like Africa. One of the big challenges of deploying new energy technologies, particularly these intermittent renewables like wind and solar, is the impact they have on the system. It used to be that in the summer it was a really quiet time for the grid operator compared to the winter, but now they are having this peak in generation in summer due to solar energy when demand is low.

They are having to juggle this as we cannot store electricity in large quantities yet. This is a new way of operating for them. With the sort of changes we are seeing in energy systems around the world, cheaper and better storage is going to be a big part of the solution. When it comes to heating for somewhere like the UK, you might need storage that lasts several months. You get a lot of energy generated in the summer and you might need it in the winter to heat homes.

This is an area that is really ripe for innovation and we are really only at the start of deploying and trailing those.

It is a critical part of this new system we are trying to create. When non-authoritative information ranks too high in our search results, we develop scalable, automated approaches to fix the problems, rather than manually removing these one-by-one. We recently made improvements to our algorithm that will help surface more high quality, credible content on the web.

While we provide the portal for users to find information, we depend on content creators and distributors to apply journalistic discipline to what they are creating. The scale of popular social networks has democratized publishing, which effectively lets anyone — regardless of their intentions or qualifications — produce content that can appear journalistic. I do see a need in the market to develop standards, perhaps from an organization like Nielsen.

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Facebook and others are working on this, too. Eddie Copeland, director of government Innovation at Nesta, a UK charity that has looked at the future of democracy in the digital world Rather than waiting for politicians to make decisions and then we all argue over whether what they say reflects reality, we could have tools that engage people much earlier in the process so they can be involved in formulating ideas and drafting legislation, following the course of how ideas go from concept to becoming laws and how effective they are in reality.

It might just give you a fighting chance of making people feel part of a system rather than observing it from the outside. Nonny de la Pena, virtual reality journalist and CEO of Emblematic Group Call me idealistic, but I really believe if you have an informed global citizenry, then people are going to make better decisions. People may not be looking at traditional media for their solutions.

I think for audiences, VR is a totally different type of story. There is nothing in print or radio or broadcast that can let you walk around in actual space. That kind of effort, of making those kinds of pieces, is going to get easier and easier. Now your body can engage. Now when I go to the movies, I find the frames so artificial — I can see the box. I see the square. When I put on a headset, I see the world. The fact that audiences are going to be engaged with this kind of storytelling make sit a very important opportunity for journalism to embrace.

Ben Fletcher, senior software engineer at IBM Watson Research who worked on a project to build an AI fact checker We got a lot of feedback that people did not want to be told what was true or not. At the heart of what they want, was actually the ability to see all sides and make the decision for themselves. A major issue most people face, without knowing it, is the bubble they live in. If they were shown views outside that bubble they would be much more open to talking about them. Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine The major new challenge in reporting news is the new shape of truth.

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Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact. All those counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people. The only way a fact becomes accepted as true is to be networked with other facts consider to be true. Like in Science, all truth is provisional, although some is more provisional than others.

The Truth is really a network of truths, and each of these true facts is probabilistic. Philippe Le Corre and Alain Sepulchre: China's Offensive in Europe, Brookings Institution, Alessandra Russo, The Untranslatable Image: Vincent Normand, Psychoacoustic Tarab: Nicolas Lainez , ed. Alain Touraine , Society as Utopia. Oxford University Press, Wolf, Michaela and Alexandra Fukari eds. Emmanuelle Saada, Law in the Time of Catastrophe. Alain Testart , What is a gift? Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3, Stanford University Press, A Worried View of Economics.

David Cameron announced to some ridicule in that the UK will begin to measure its progress not by economic growth alone, but by how happy its people are. But beyond the cynicism surely lies a valid question: Are wealthier societies happier or safer? In The Prosperity of Vice: A Worried View of Economics, Daniel Cohen presents a fascinating — and gloomy — account of why they are not. Citing recent empirical work, Cohen argues that international trade in fact makes it easier for belligerent nations to diversify their sources of supply during a conflict.

Growth increases the competition for raw materials, and so heightens rather than eases hostilities. European prosperity and technological innovation were driven by fierce competition amongst rival nations, but a competition that would ultimately end in disaster: Again, no such luck. Citing now relatively familiar evidence, Cohen argues that societies do not become any happier as they get richer.