Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- According to the Hamilton Project’s Jobs Gap calculator, at the current pace of jobs growth, the US economy will not achieve 2008 levels of employment until 2020.
- On April 15 the US Supreme Court heard arguments on whether patents owned by Myriad Genetics, Inc. on genes linked to breast cancer are valid; Australia’s highest court is considering the legitimacy of similar patents. Should the courts decide that isolated human genes cannot be patented, academic research involving the genes would be facilitated but incentives for industrial research could be significantly altered.
- Technology Review writes about the emerging malware industrial complex. Increasingly, vulnerabilities in computer systems are being identified and acquired by governments and defense contractors, in a global build out of cyberspace warfare capacities.
- Debate is growing over whether fully autonomous combat robots are permissible — though their advantages may make them hard to set aside.
- Linguists have identified two dozen “ultraconserved” words that have survived relatively unchanged across myriad language groups for 15,000 years. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers posits the existence of an ancient “proto-Eurasiatic” language.