Four For Friday | Mar 22, 2024
LF115 | Failing fertility, NEOM's hubris, actuarial environmental angst & swarm robots
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week. Enjoy!
Bye, Bye, Babies
Fertility is falling globally. Two thirds of the global population lives in countries with fertility rates below-replacement levels, and Europe is facing a reduction of one fifth of its population by 2050. This article suggests this will impact (at least) seven areas of the economy:
Childcare and Education - lower demand and enrolment
Healthcare and Pediatric Services - lower demand
Real Estate and Housing - changed demand, smaller homes
Automotive - small vehicles
Consumer Goods - lower demand, especially food and beverages for children
Entertainment and Media - change in viewer mix and content choice
Financial Services and Insurance - lower demand for college loans, life insurance
Saudi Arabia’s ‘unhinged’ plans for NEOM
A wry takedown of Saudi’s increasingly florrid plans for its cities in the desert. The projects make up for in breathless ambition and CGI what they lack in practicality…
The ‘Beach Club’ (below) ‘resembles the tip of a Star Wars Imperial Destroyer.’ You, dear reader, can make your own mind up…
When the bean counters start to worry…
A we’re-not-messing-about report by a generally conservative bunch, the UK-based Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, suggesting that most of the models about climate change are wrong, failing to account for worst-case scenarios. As a result…
We have left it too late to tackle climate change incrementally. It now requires transformational change and a dramatic acceleration of progress.
A growing threat is the approach of ‘tipping points’ – thresholds which, once crossed, trigger irreversible changes, such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet. Some tipping point thresholds have already been reached, while others are getting closer as global warming continues.
The report identifies an interconnected, systems approach to tracking the impacts of global warming on real impacts to the economy and society at large.
Swarm, collective intelligence for robots
New robot tech - cutely named Loopy - uses bottom-up intelligence to self-organize to reach its goal. This kind of independent acting, self-organising robot intelligence could be useful for environmental clean up (or terrifying assassins armed with deadly weapons…)
The development of Loopy aims to unleash the power of bottom-up collective 'intelligence' in robots, allowing them to find new solutions independently when faced with unforeseen situations.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen
Swarms of precisely controlled and personalized robotic action seems to be making some practical sense now. It's how the human touch is done that matters so much.