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(7) Failure to appreciate the urgency. Until very late in the story, nobody fully realized what was at stake. Only as the king was staring into the bloodied face of the young pleading man does the extent of the tragedy sink in. Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral imperative. The sooner we start a focused research program, the sooner we will get results. It matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather than in 24 years: a population greater than that of Canada would die as a result. In this matter, time equals life, at a rate of approximately 70 lives per minute. With the meter ticking at such a furious rate, we should stop faffing about.
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
nickbostrom.com
In a manufacturing laggard such as the United Kingdom, the real value of manufacturing output is currently two and a half times what it was at the end of the Second World War. This expanded output is produced by less than one-tenth of the British workforce, compared with the one-third of employees who worked in manufacturing as recently as 1960.4 None the less, the productivity gains do not mean it is easy for a country like Britain to further expand its manufacturing sector. This is because many machine-based tasks are most efficiently undertaken by the kind of low-skilled, cheap workers that rich countries are short of. And that is precisely where the opportunities lie for emerging nations. Their manufacturing is nothing like as efficient as it is in advanced economies, but nor does it need to be because poor countries can throw highly motivated, cut-price, fresh-off-the-farm labour at the task.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
as long as she lives in a society that values the commercial potential of milk and the health of its human citizens over the feelings of cows, she’d best write up her research proposal so as to appeal to those assumptions. For example, she might write that ‘Depression leads to a decrease in milk production. If we understand the mental world of dairy cows, we could develop psychiatric medication that will improve their mood, thus raising milk production by up to 10 per cent. I estimate that there is a global annual market of $250 million for bovine psychiatric medications.’
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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