Friday, March 14, 2014

2035

The end of poverty (or specifically poor nations- only 10 will be left and they cant be helped).  

This prediction from the richest man in the world- the 76 Billion dollar man. The message- the world has never been a better place for me (of course) and you (???).  

The interesting thing is that his parents bought him an encyclopedia and his knowledge of the world proceeded in an alphabetical order (why?).

There is only one fly in  the ointment: "20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don't think people have that in their mental model." 

This is actually the problem, people are able to visualize this. We will all be replaced by robots that Microsoft may or may not be able to build.
...

"We're on this rising tide that's not recognized. It's overwhelming how prosperity is spread around the world," the ex-Microsoft CEO who is the world's richest man said in a conversation at the American Enterprise Institute.

Here's more on his prediction that there will be almost no poor countries by 2035:

Today 45 countries that are still in that low-income category. And what I'm saying is that, by 2035, there should be less than 10, and they'll mostly be either places like North Korea, where you have a political system that basically creates poverty, or land-locked African countries where the geography, the disease burden, the disparate ethnicities mean that they haven't been able to bring together a government that in terms of education, infrastructure, health does even the most minimum things for them.

He says people tend to be irrationally pessimistic: The Steven Pinker example, one of my favorite books of all time, is that if you ask people, "Is this one of the most violent eras in history?" they will say yes. Overwhelmingly, Americans say yes. Well, it's overwhelmingly the least violent era in history. And so what it means is your disgust with violence actually increases, and that's partly why we take steps and why within our own society and the world at large it's come down so dramatically.

And here's more on the world getting better in ways not captured by economic data: You know, buying encyclopedias, you know, I bought it — my parents bought a World Book. I read it. You know, I had to learn the world alphabetically. Very weird way to learn things. You know, now, every kid who has Internet access has Wikipedia. And so whether it's in the area of technology or medicine or various things, you're — there's a lot of a qualitative nature that's not captured in those things. So whether the gross number goes up or not, the rate of improvement in livelihood, you know, I think will be very rapid in the future.



regards

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