“Investing in Desert Greening” — Discussion with Dennis Bushnell, chief
scientist, NASA Langley; Carl Hodges, founder, Seawater Foundation, and
Hazel Henderson, president, Ethical Markets Media; Ethical Markets
Transforming Finance Series 2014
In this program, Hazel Henderson and NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell discuss the new alarms raised by Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Space-Ex and Tesla’s founder Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking that intelligent machines like IBM’s Watson may soon outsmart humans. These computer pioneers believe this could pose existential danger to human civilization – because they may not share human values and may cause us great harm. Bushnell cites all the areas where computers are already smarter and more efficient than humans: in law, medicine, accounting and will be needed in NASA’s space program. Henderson worries about the societal impacts as ever more sectors of modern economies are digitized, now displacing white collar jobs beyond earlier manufacturing automation since the 1960s. While futurists envisioned “leisure societies,” shorter work weeks, guaranteed basic incomes and flowering of culture, art and human potentials – what we got was unemployment, stagnant wages and longer work hours.
In this program, Hazel Henderson and NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell explore the advance of automation as ever more sectors of industrial societies are digitized: from manufacturing to retailing, accounting, healthcare, education, legal services and even finance. Driverless vehicles will end jobs in trucking, taxis, which offer millions of entry-level opportunities. Fly-by-wire airplanes have caused the deskilling of pilots, some of whom have been confused when computerized navigation systems have failed – causing crashes. Can computerized systems be programmed with human values: empathy, compassion and ethics? Can a driverless car pass an ethical test of judgment: swerving to avoid hitting a group of people at the expense of colliding with a single person? Bushnell points out how much more efficient computers are at many tasks than humans. Henderson looks at the macro-effects: how can economies maintain aggregate demand to buy all the new productivity’s goods and services? How can people obtain purchasing power if not from jobs? They discuss alternatives emerging: worker-owned companies, cooperative enterprises and guaranteed basic incomes now enacted in Brazil, Mexico and proposed in Switzerland, Europe and the USA.
In this program, Hazel Henderson and NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell explore all the current issues swirling around the Internet, now the de facto “infostructure” undergirding our global economy — just as rails and roads were the infrastructure of previous centuries.
They discuss key questions, now that the Internet hosts businesses, finance, social media, news and “fake news “empowering individuals, innovation, entrepreneurs, as well as cybercriminals, jihadis, cryptocurrencies, money laundering, with software and malware that can damage physical power plants! As Internet governance changes, is it robust enough for all the new bandwidth users, from video to the so-called “internet of things. All in this fast-paced discussion.
In this program, Hazel Henderson and NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell review all the issues around the increasing global shift from polluting fossil fuels and their effect on climate to economies. They discuss today’s harvesting of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and oceans, as well as the cost savings from more efficient buildings, batteries electric vehicles and charging stations, smarter cities and urban design, public transport and the future of decentralized energy, especially in developing countries. Both Henderson and Bushnell agree that there is ample renewable energy from our Sun for all existing and foreseen human societies’ needs. The issues concern the politics of incumbent interests and the re-design of green infrastructure so as to utilize and scale up all our existing renewable technologies now available, as tracked in the Green Transition Scoreboard ®.
In this program, Hazel Henderson and NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell continue their exploration of the massive global potential in shifting over-investments in food and agriculture dependent on the planet’s 3% of freshwater to the other halt of the plant kingdom: the 10,000 salt-loving (halophyte) plants that can fill human food and fuel needs for the foreseeable future. These crops grown with saltwater: e.g. nutritious quinoa grains in health foods and tasty salt-tolerant rice in Chinese markets are grown in 22 countries. This can expand to feed growing populations, relieve pressure on freshwater and provide food and fuels from the Earth’s 40% of degraded and desert lands. Halophyte plants require no fertilizers or pesticides and capture CO2, all to help accelerate the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources, cleaner, knowledge-richer economies. Today, investors can capitalize on cheap unused land, cheap water, cheap plants and free sunshine! This is a paradigm problem and due to her-behavior of financial markets.
In this program, Hazel Henderson explores with NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell the exploding use of social media and addictive behaviors of users leading to loss of privacy, autonomy and jobs. They discuss all these issues of psychographic targeting of groups using big, data and proprietary algorithms, which are sold to data brokers and advertisers. They review the new efforts to protect users and voters, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, attempting to curb the misuse of user’s private information with heavy fines. They look at the other problems including government surveillance and toxic content: hate speech, biased algorithms, terrorist recruiting sites, Russian trolling and its influence on US and European elections. Many proposals for how individuals can protect themselves are also discussed, even though this burden must also be shared by the corporations and government agencies as well.