News Updates

6/29/18 – Rising sea levels driven primarily by climate change put more than 300,000 homes in the contiguous United States at risk of chronic flooding within the next 30 years, the lifespan of a typical mortgage, according to a new study and an interactive map tool for viewing threat levels of particular communities. Some of the actions proposed to mitigate the risks align with recommendations recently advanced by a decision-sciences expert in Issues for making the soon-to-be-reauthorized National Flood Insurance Program more cost-effective, more equitable, and more appealing to property owners.

6/ 28/18 – Potent new diseases may be only an airplane-ride from becoming a pandemic, but a deep read in the Atlantic says the world is not prepared. In addition to posing immense medical needs, the next pandemic will raise unprecedented communications challenges in providing people with accurate and credible information—to offset an almost-certain deluge of erroneous blasts via social media—and in Issues a technology innovator has called for developing a volunteer corps of scientists and communicators to help handle the job.

6/25/18 – Roaming the waters off California, a 51-foot-long “unmanned undersea vehicle”—essentially a submarine that can operate for months at a time with little or no contact with human operators—is undergoing tests ahead of possible deployment by the US Navy. And it won’t be alone. Various types of drone seagoing vehicles are being groomed for both underwater and surface applications, an analyst said in Issues, though a variety of technical and policy questions must be resolved.

6/18/18 – Amid concerns about the impact of robots on the workplace, an economic analyst described in Issues his study of first principles: what skills do robots have or may soon acquire, and what jobs can robots with those skills perform. The conclusion: robots and advanced information technologies can likely handle 80% of current jobs. Emerging ideas on how society can respond range from big, such as a government-funded universal basic income, to small, such as employer-funded lifelong learning accounts that enable workers to take short paid leaves to gain new skills.

6/17/18 – The University of New Hampshire has become the first flagship state school in the United States to adopt an admissions test that may make it easier for students from China to enroll, bringing along the more than $45,000 they will pay for tuition and housing each year. But recruiting more higher-paying foreign students, along with a number of other actions that schools are taking to offset decreasing state aid, is shortsighted, two academic scholars say in Issues, and they propose alternative measures that would give universities some breathing room.

6/12/18 – The technology giant Google will not develop artificial intelligence (AI) for use in weapons or other applications “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” its chief executive has announced in setting forth a set of principles to guide the company’s work in the field. The move aligns with a recent exploration by two scholars in Issues of whether and how AI should be regulated. They suggested that banning “fully autonomous weapons that operate entirely independent of human input” makes sense, while also calling for an interlocking oversight system for making decisions about “many if not all so-called smart technologies.”

6/10/18 – More countries and private companies are pursuing activities in space, an analyst recently noted in Issues. But in actions that would seemingly push even this expanded envelope, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering “a range of options” to privatize the International Space Station, including having a global team of corporations take over operations and run it as a commercial space lab, or even splitting it into components, some of which could be “de-orbited,” to make private management easier.

6/5/18 – Coal is in the news for reasons seemingly at odds. In Issues recently, a longtime analyst showed that coal has declined as an energy source over the past century primarily because of technology innovation, social forces, and price decreases of other forms of energy. Yet the Trump administration has announced plans to stop the closure of struggling coal mines putatively to protect national security, while also cutting the tax that coal companies pay to help miners with the deadly disease black lung, even as new research reveals that more miners have the disease than previously thought.

6/4/18 – Immigrants outpace US residents in forming new start-up companies, especially in technical fields, as observers have documented in Issues (here) and elsewhere (here). But in what some groups see as a shortsighted move (here and here), the Trump administration wants to end an Obama-era program that lets young foreign entrepreneurs remain in the United States for up to five years to manage start-ups they had created. More promising, some experts argue, would be to streamline the federal system for bringing in immigrants with technological and entrepreneurial prowess, and Issues has explored ways to make this happen.

6/1/18 – In a challenge to her political party, a young conservative says that addressing environmental challenges, including climate change, must become a priority. But, she adds, solutions will require “trusting businesses to do what is best for their bottom line and for the ecosystem without government intervention.” In this vein, a scholar of conservative thought has broadly examined in Issues why “conservatives are critical of policy-relevant science in climate and other domains,” and he said that if solutions are to be realized, “they must be compatible with individual liberty and democratic institutions, and cannot rely on coercive or unaccountable bureaucratic administration.”