A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
By Avery Koop
By 2025, the world’s population will reach over 8.1 billion people.
Most of that population growth will be concentrated in cities across Africa and Asia. To help paint a detailed picture, this map uses data from the United Nations to rank the top 20 fastest growing cities in the world in terms of average annual growth rate from 2020 to 2025.
Continue reading… “Ranked: The World’s Fastest Growing Cities”America’s population may be shrinking. That’s mostly because of Covid, but it’s also part of longer-term trends in fertility that show no signs of abating. These trends, which are worldwide, have already caused major economic dislocation and are likely to continue to do so.
First, some data. From 1936 to 1956, the U.S. fertility rate rose from 1.8 to 3.2. At the peak of the baby boom, the average woman in the U.S. was having at least three children who survived until adulthood. (A rate of 2.1 is considered replacement level, holding the population steady over time.)
The result was a huge generation that not only transformed American culture, but also created a market and labor pool for would-be entrepreneurs and growing corporations. From the 1960s through the mid-1980s, net domestic investment by private businessesaveraged 5.4% of GDP each year. One dollar of every $20 spent in the U.S. economy was directed toward expanding the size and scope of private enterprise.
Continue reading… “The economic consequences of a smaller nation are more dire, and more wide-ranging, than commonly believed”South Korea is bracing for a momentous demographic shift that could be a bellwether of how other countries around the world will deal with aging populations in the decades to come.
By CHUNG MIN LEE, KATHRYN BOTTO
How long can South Korea retain its global economic and technological competitiveness? Will the country maintain credible deterrence and defense postures well into the future? Are existing socioeconomic inequalities likely to worsen with worsening demographic trends? These questions lie at the heart of South Korea’s demographic trajectory.
South Korea’s ability to comprehensively address its demographic transition will affect every facet of its well-being, international image, national security, and even potential post-unification dynamics. This compendium examines various dimensions of South Korean society and the country’s geopolitical influence in light of its unprecedented demographic changes, which are already underway.
Continue reading… “Demographics and the Future of South Korea” 
India now has 38,756 officially-recognised start-ups –– with 27 unicorns, eight of which achieved this status in 2020 –– and is the third-largest tech start-up hub globally.
Entrepreneurs today are utilising the unprecedented advances from technology, operating on the demands of our demography, and inadvertently steering citizen welfare.
Five years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Start-Up India initiative, we are witnessing a golden chapter in the history of Indian entrepreneurship.
India now has 38,756 officially-recognised start-ups –– with 27 unicorns, eight of which achieved this status in 2020 –– and is the third-largest tech start-up hub globally.
According to Praxis Global Alliance, start-ups are growing at an average rate of 12–15% annually. Start-ups have raised $63 billion between 2016–20 in funding, $20 billion of which was raised in 2019 over 1,854 deals. Investments in start-ups are growing incrementally each year ($12 billion, $25.2 billion, $26.3 billion, and $34 billion invested in the last four years, respectively), with $16.7 billion till May 2020. Start-Up India kickstarted an entrepreneurship revolution. Several policy interventions were since announced, giving the entrepreneurial ecosystem a much-needed launchpad. The overhaul of the digital payments ecosystem is being led by State innovation, with Aadhaar, Jan Dhan, UPI, and India Stack. The Atal Innovation Mission, Niti Aayog, has built an ecosystem of 8,800 tinkering labs, 4,000 mentors and over two-and-a-half million students, and acted as a conduit for over 3,500 innovations while supporting 1,500 start-ups.
Continue reading… “India is in the middle of a much-needed start-up revolution”
According to LinkedIn, start-ups seek key job skills like programming proficiency and data analysis.
Learning some new technology could go a long way in landing a new job.
As the coronavirus pandemic forces companies to shift parts of their business online, employers are searching for candidates who are proficient in tech or can learn quickly. Among the top 50 start-ups in the United States, in fact, the five most in-demand skills are all tech-related.
That’s according to new data from LinkedIn, which analyzed the skill sets of recent hires at across the country’s top start-ups, which include familiar names like food-delivery app DoorDash and bedding company Brooklinen. Overwhelmingly, the findings show, employers hired job seekers with data savvy, programming acumen, and strength in sales and marketing.
“When you receive 150 applications for one opening, employers care ever more about quality and about qualifications,” Julia Pollak, labor economist at ZipRecuiter, told Grow in October. “If you can take some time and invest in a certification or some online qualification, that can make you more competitive in the future.”
Here are the five most in-demand skills in America’s top 50 start-ups.
Continue reading… “The 5 most in-demand skills at America’s top start-ups, according to LinkedIn”
Top strategic technology trends for the enterprise
Operational resiliency is key as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to change how companies will do business next year.
There are nine top strategic technology trends that businesses should plan for in 2021 as the pandemic continues, according to Gartner’s analysts. Their findings were presented on Monday at the virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas conference, which runs through Thursday.
Organizational plasticity is key to these trends. “When we talk about the strategic technology trends, we actually have them grouped into three different themes, which is people centricity, location independence, and resilient delivery,” said Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner. “What we’re talking about with the trends is how do you leverage technology to gain the organizational plasticity that you need to form and reform into whatever’s going to be required as we emerge from this pandemic?”
IQ rates are dropping and we’re too stupid to figure out why.
An intelligence crisis could undermine our problem-solving capacities and dim the prospects of the global economy.
IQ rates are falling across Western Europe, and experts are scratching their heads as to why.May 22, 2019, 2:31 AM MDT
People are getting dumber. That’s not a judgment; it’s a global fact. In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline.
Though there are legitimate questions about the relationship between IQ and intelligence, and broad recognition that success depends as much on other virtues like grit, IQ tests in use throughout the world today really do seem to capture something meaningful and durable. Decades of research have shown that individual IQ scores predict things such as educational achievement and longevity. More broadly, the average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation.
And many cities aren’t ready for the onslaught.
First, there were boomtowns. Now, there are Zoom towns.
The coronavirus pandemic is leading to a new phenomenon: a migration to “gateway communities,” or small towns near major public lands and ski resorts as people’s jobs increasingly become remote-friendly. This is straining the towns’ resources and putting pressure on them to adapt.
A new paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association shows that populations in these communities were already growing before COVID-19 hit, leading to some problems traditionally thought of as urban issues, like lack of affordable housing, availability of public transit, congestion, and income inequality. And while COVID-19 has accelerated the friction, the study suggests that urban planners can help places adjust.
There has been a drastic increase in remote work since March, when the pandemic hit the U.S. Nearly 60% of employees are now working remotely full or part time, according to a recent Gallup poll. Nearly two-thirds of employees who have been working remotely would like to continue to do so, according to that same poll. That would seemingly give workers a lot more flexibility when it comes to where they call home.
Continue reading… “‘Zoom towns’ are exploding in the West”
Jason Ramshaw, Commercial Manager for Caterpillar Construction Digital & Technology, demonstrates the Cat Command remote control console to operate a 320 excavator at Caterpillar’s Construction Industries
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Question: How can a company like Caterpillar CAT.N try to counter a slump in sales of bulldozers and trucks during a pandemic that has made every human a potential disease vector?
Answer: Cut out human operators, perhaps?
Caterpillar’s autonomous driving technology, which can be bolted on to existing machines, is helping the U.S. heavy equipment maker mitigate the heavy impact of the coronavirus crisis on sales of its traditional workhorses.
With both small and large customers looking to protect their operations from future disruptions, demand has surged for machines that don’t require human operators on board.
Continue reading… “Caterpillar bets on self-driving machines impervious to pandemics”
Amid all the uncertainty brought on by COVID-19 over the past six months, one thing is assured: the pandemic has re-ordered real estate markets across the board on an unprecedented scale.
Some of this may be irreversible. Real estate’s re-sorting this time isn’t just based on markets crashing (the Great Recession), political turmoil (the 1979 oil embargo), or financial speculation (the first and second dot.com busts)—after which there’s generally confidence that overall consumer demand and buyer preferences will sooner or later snap back to normal.
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, more deep-seated, tectonic-sized questions beyond markets and interest rates are being asked this time around that no one really has the answers to yet—like will people feel safer living in the south and southwest where they can spend all year social distancing outside? What if companies let workers work remotely for the rest of their lives? Why go back to retail shopping when I’m already ordering everything online? What’s the point of living “downtown” if half of the restaurants, bars, and museums never open back up?
How these questions get answered will fundamentally re-order how Americans live in the “new” pandemic normal, and as a result will play a huge X-factor in which cities and states will experience growth, demand, and price appreciation over the next 3-5 years, and which ones will stagnate and lose out. More broadly for large metropolises like Washington, D.C., New York City, and Philadelphia, the answers risk slowing or even reversing a wave of gentrification and wildly profitable downtown revitalization that’s been accelerating since before the Great Recession.
I had the pleasure of talking with futurist and the managing partner of ChangeistScott Smith recently about some of the biggest macro trends everyone should be aware of today. While these trends had already begun prior to the coronavirus pandemic, in many ways, they accelerated as the world fought to deal with the pandemic and now as we begin to build our post-COVID-19 world. Here are the six future trends he believes everyone should be ready for.
Continue reading… “6 future trends everyone has to be ready for today”
CCS Insights published 100 tech predictions for the next few years, and the COVID-19 pandemic lurks behind many of them.
An ongoing health crisis and a global recession: even for the most attuned of analysts, the past months have brought in a load of unexpected events that have made the coming years especially difficult to envision.
Yet research firm CCS Insights has taken up the challenge and delivered a set of 100 tech predictions for the years 2021 and beyond. The exercise is an annual one for the company, which last year anticipated, among many other things, that the next decade could see the rise of deep fake detection technology, or the adoption of domestic robots in some households.
Continue reading… “10 tech predictions that could mean huge changes ahead”
