Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the United States has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. Now that the youngest Millennials are adults, how do they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before them?
In general, they’re better educated – a factor tied to employment and financial well-being – but there is a sharp divide between the economic fortunes of those who have a college education and those who don’t.
As a futurist, I’m often asked about the future of jobs. It is a concern for policy-makers, employers and the general population alike. What I realized, however, is that no one cares about losing the job itself. What they are worried about is how they will make a living in a future where they have become obsolete.
And yes, the fear of artificial intelligence (AI) is real. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates AI can automate 50% of all paid tasks today. Our primitive machine learning AI can easily complete repetitive human tasks better than any human could, including recognizing speech, context, shapes, and images. These narrow AI can also complete tasks like navigating an unpredictable field of obstacles, play an instrument, analyze large amounts of unorganized data and more. In 2021, AI will safely complete repetitive tasks with random components, like driving vehicles on crowded streets better than any human driver.
The speed at which AI is improving is astounding. The smart software is improving at an exponential rate since our software engineers use older versions of AI to help them program AI software updates.
In fact, developments in AI is so impressive and there is so much money invested by major well-known multinationals right now that most AI experts expect a human-level AI to emerge before the year 2040.
What will happen to the job market between now and the year 2040?
Your health depends on many factors, such as the quality of food you eat, what you put on your body, what you breathe, what chemicals you are exposed to, how much exercise you get every day, and more. While there is a considerable amount of control that comes with each of these factors, there can also be an unfortunate lack of it — depending on where you live.
I live in the beautiful northwestern city, Boise, the capital of the state of Idaho. In the last few years, Boise has been listed as one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. But that’s not all it’s known for. The City of Trees sits in the Treasure Valley, surrounded by mountains that offer skiing excursions, thousands of hiking routes of all levels, and rivers and lakes where you can go boating, kayaking, floating, swimming, and fishing.
The food culture is incredible. Local restaurants seem to pop up everyday, many prioritizing local and ethical sourcing, some fully vegan or vegetarian, and almost all serving high-quality, delicious foods that residents will not only enjoy but will feel great after eating.
These are just a few factors that make Boise a great home for its residents, not only for entertainment and happiness, but for their health as well.
Unfortunately, not every city in the U.S. is as wholesome and thriving as Boise. Where Boise has rivers and lakes, other towns have toxic water that cannot be played in and requires extensive treatment to be drinkable. Where Boise has many opportunities for hiking, biking, and walking, other cities don’t have access to trails or safe places to do them. Where Boise has high-quality restaurants and grocery stores, other towns have food deserts and only fast food options.
Most American states spend more on their prisons than they do on education – and California is the worst, investing $64,642 per prisoner compared to $11,495 per student – a $53,146 difference in spending priorities
The reasons include an incarceration rate that has tripled over the past three decades, the higher cost of caring for people in prisons 24 hours a day, and the higher number of workers required to operate a prison
New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island round out the top states spending more on prisons
The U.S. spends more on prisons and jails than it does on educating children – and 15 states spend at least $27,000 more per prisoner than they do per student, according to a new report.
The transportation data firm INRIX Research released on Tuesday its annual rankings of the most congested cities in the world.
Cities were ranked based on delays caused by congestion, adjusted for each city’s population.
Moscow was named the most congested city in the world for the second year in a row, and Europe had more cities in the top 20 than any other continent.
The transportation data firm INRIX Research released on Tuesday its annual rankings of the most congested cities in the world.
The company measured the amount of time lost per capita in 2018 due to the difference between traffic at the busiest and least busy commuting times each day. Cities were ranked based on delays caused by congestion, adjusted for each city’s population.
Moscow was named the most congested city in the world for the second year in a row, and Europe had more cities in the top-20 than any other continent.
Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect is the highest paying certification of 2019, paying an average salary of $139,529.
Certifications in virtualization and cloud computing pay an average salary of $127,494 this year, up from $112,955 in 2018, a 12.8% increase in just one year.
Five of the top 15 highest paying certifications of 2019 are for cybersecurity expertise, and they pay an average of $115,867.
Project Management Professional (PMP®) certifications increased in value by 18.6%, jumping from a median salary of $114,473 in 2018 to $135,798 in 2019.
The 2019 survey’s findings regarding the most lucrative IT certifications are summarized in the article, 15 Top-Paying IT Certifications for 2019. The study is global in scope, with the top 15 certifications reflecting U.S. market demand and salary levels. A certification had to have at least 100 survey responses to ensure that the data was statistically valid, and the certification exam has to be currently available.
IBM Research has a long history of inventing the future, so the big tech company’s researchers take their predictions seriously. Today they are revealing their annual “5 in 5” predictions, which detail five innovations that will change our lives in the next five years.
IBM will talk about the predictions at its Think 2019 event in San Francisco on Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time.
The unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.0% in January 2019, while the labor force participation rate hit its highest mark since 2013. Overall, the report indicated that the U.S. labor market is still chugging along.
And some jobs are growing faster than others. Construction and extraction jobs are in high demand in the U.S., along with installation, maintenance, and repair services. Production jobs are also quickly developing, as are mathematical and technology-focused occupations.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and projections from the government-backed Projections Managing Partnership (PMP), we mapped out the top jobs by growth rate (as opposed to plentifulness).
These are the fastest-growing jobs in each state. Titles edited for clarity.
Your online profile is less a reflection of you than a caricature.
Whether you like it or not, commercial and public actors tend to trust the string of 1s and 0s that represent you more than the story you tell them. When filing a credit application at a bank or being recruited for a job, your social network, credit-card history, and postal address can be viewed as immutable facts more credible than your opinion.
But your online profile is not always built on facts. It is shaped by technology companies and advertisers who make key decisions based on their interpretation of seemingly benign data points: what movies you choose to watch, the time of day you tweet, or how long you take to click on a cat video.
As the new year begins gaining steam, there is ostensibly a piece of good news on the cyber front. Major cyberattacks have been in a lull in recent months, and still are.
The good tidings are fleeting, however. Attacks typically come in waves. The next one is due, and 2019 will be the worst year yet — a sad reality as companies increasingly pursue digitization to drive efficiency and simultaneously move into the “target zone” of cyberattacks.
This bad news is compounded by the harsh reality that there are not nearly enough cybersecurity pros to properly respond to all the threats.
To figure out how autonomous vehicles should respond during potentially fatal collisions, a group of scientists set out to learn what decisions human drivers would make.
The first time Azim Shariff met Iyad Rahwan—the first real time, after communicating with him by phone and e-mail—was in a driverless car. It was November, 2012, and Rahwan, a thirty-four-year-old professor of computing and information science, was researching artificial intelligence at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a university in Abu Dhabi. He was eager to explore how concepts within psychology—including social networks and collective reasoning—might inform machine learning, but there were few psychologists working in the U.A.E. Shariff, a thirty-one-year-old with wild hair and expressive eyebrows, was teaching psychology at New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi; he guesses that he was one of four research psychologists in the region at the time, an estimate that Rahwan told me “doesn’t sound like an exaggeration.” Rahwan cold-e-mailed Shariff and invited him to visit his research group.
Spoiler alert: It’s simply not the case that families with kids have disappeared from urban America.
Look around a hip neighborhood in Lower Manhattan or downtown San Francisco, and you’ll see lots of young people, and Baby Boomers whose kids have left the nest. There are also some stylish moms (or nannies) pushing tots in strollers. But you won’t see many traditional nuclear families with school-age children.
There’s a growing consensus that our cities are becoming “childless.” This past October, Axios ran a story on the ”great family exodus,” showing data that the share of families with children under the age of 20 has fallen in 53 large cities across the country. As far as I can tell, the phrase “childless cities” was first advanced in 2013 by Joel Kotkin in an essay of that title for City Journal.
Several factors are said to be pushing families with kids out of cities: the expensiveness of city living; the lagging performance of urban versus suburban public schools; and the preference of immigrant families for the suburbs over urban locations. But just how childless are our cities, really?
