Unlike most social scientists, economists publish papers whose main conclusions are normative, not just positive. That is, we explicitly recommend policies, rather than just predict the consequences that follow from choices. Moral philosophers are the main other academics who explicitly focus on making recommendations. Compared to philosophers, economists’ approach is more standardized and structured, allowing more specific recommendations.

I see two rather different ways to think about what economists do when we recommend policies:

1. Morals – We enter into a larger conversation about what actions are right. As language let humans enforce social norms, we evolved strong moral feelings and a rich practice of arguing about forbidden and required actions. While for our ancestors such discussion was often a prelude to concrete group action, today we more often argue about morals without specific coordination in mind. Economists mainly join this larger argument about what actions are right, and only incidentally induce specific people to take specific actions.
2. Deals – Groups of all sizes, from families to planets have conflicts that can be resolved at least in part via deals, both implicit and explicit. Finding and making such deals can be aided by neutral outside advisors, especially advisors who can suggest changes that might benefit all conflicting parties. Economists have a reputation for developing analytical tools useful for making suggestions about parts of deals. Economists mainly develop such suggestions for deal components, and only incidentally join larger conversations about morality.

My closest colleagues seem to mostly take a morals view, but many of my students like a deals view. I think I see a correlation whereby academics who lean toward a sci/tech style tend to favor a deals view, while those who lean toward a humanities style tend to favor a morals view. Sci/tech styles tend more toward math, precision, and local incremental contributions toward specific things and plans, while humanities styles tend more toward bigger pictures, wider-ranging applications, broader interpretations, and joining larger conversations.

In sum, how you think about economic recommendations may depend on whether your thinking leans near or far. It seems deals are near, while morals are far, and sci/tech folks lean near, while humanities folks lean far. Precise formal analysis is more near, while flexible more-metaphorical discussion is more far. Particular suggestions for particular conflicts of particular groups is more near, while general more accessible discussion about what choices tend to be good or bad is more far.

We care more about the future when happy:

We conduct a random-assignment experiment to investigate whether positive affect impacts time preference, where time preference denotes a preference for present over future utility. Our result indicates that, compared to neutral affect, mild positive affect significantly reduces time preference over money. … Happier respondents are [also] less likely to agree with the “live for today” statement than are less happy respondents. This holds even after controlling for covariates that have been shown to be related to happiness … High cognitive load increases time preference and … individuals with greater cognitive skills, as measured by IQ tests, exhibit lower time preference. (more)

This is predicted by near-far analysis, since happy is far, and the future matters more in far mode. This matters for finance today, as whatever sets discount rates, sets prices:

“All price-dividend variation corresponds to discount-rate variation.” … When it comes to broad price aggregates, such as stocks in general or land in general, price changes basically reflect crazily-changing [discount rate] values. (more)

The Pandora of movies. Films by Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation are clips pieced together by a computer algorithm.

Indie movie makers can be a strange bunch, pushing the envelope of their craft and often losing us along the way. In any case, if you’re going to produce something unintelligible anyway, why not let a computer do it? Eve Sussmam and the Rufus Corporation did just that. She and lead actor Jeff Wood traveled to the Kazakhstan border of the Caspian Sea for two years of filming. But instead of a movie with a beginning, middle and end, they shot 3,000 individual and unrelated clips. To the clips they added 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music, mixed it all together and put it in a computer. A program on her Mac G5 tower, known at Rufus as the “serendipity machine,” then splices the bits together to create a final product.

As you might imagine, the resultant film doesn’t always make sense. But that’s part of the fun! As the Rufus Corporation writes on their website, “The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes.”

It’s a clever experiment even if some viewers end up wanting to gouge their eyes out after a sitting. And there is some method to their madness. The film, titled “whiteonwhite:algorithnoir,” is centered on a geophysicist named Holz (played by Wood) who’s stuck in a gloomy, 1970’s-looking city operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Distinct scenes such as wire tapped conversations or a job interview for Mr. Holz are (hopefully) woven together by distinct voiceovers and dialogues. When the scenes and audio are entered into the computer they’re tagged with keywords. The program then pieces them together in a way similar to Pandora’s stringing together of like music. If a clip is tagged “white,” the computer will randomly select from tens of other clips also having the “white” tag. The final product is intended to be a kind of “dystopian futuropolis.” What that means, however, changes with each viewing as no two runs are the same.

Watching the following trailer, I actually got a sense…um, I think…of a story.

Rufus Corporation says the movie was “inspired by Suprematist quests for transcendence, pure space and artistic higher ground.” I have no idea what that means but I hope they’ve achieved it. Beautiful things can happen when computers create art. And it’s only a matter of time before people attempt the same sort of thing with novel writing. Just watching the trailer, it’s hard to tell if the movie’s any good or not. I missed the showings at the Sundance Film Festival, but even so, they probably didn’t resemble the trailer anyway. And that’s okay, because that’s the whole point.

[image credits: Rufus Corporation and PRI via YouTube]
[video credit: PRI via YouTube]
image 1: whiteonwhite
image 2: Rufus
video: whiteonwhite

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The work of Gary Taubes, including his NYT article, Is Sugar a Toxin?, is having a rather profound effect in the dietary zeitgeist. And now this: Researchers say sugar should be regulated as a toxin:A spoonful of sugar might make the medicine go down. But it also makes blood pressure and cholesterol go up, along with your risk for liver failure, obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Sugar and other sweeteners are, in fact, so toxic to the human body that they should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide, according to a commentary in the current issue of the journal Nature by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

The researchers propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases.

Although the commentary might seem straight out of the Journal of Ideas That Will Never Fly, the researchers cite numerous studies and statistics to make their case that added sugar — or, more specifically, sucrose, an even mix of glucose and fructose found in high-fructose corn syrup and in table sugar made from sugar cane and sugar beets — has been as detrimental to society as alcohol and tobacco.Read the entire article.

It is not unreasonable to regard a cell as a machine that is constantly rebuilding itself - organelles and protein machinery are constantly torn down and replaced. It is also not unreasonable to regard tissue as a collection of cells that is constantly rebuilding itself: cells destroy themselves or are destroyed by watchdog systems, and new cells are created to replace them. This sort of thing happens rapidly indeed in some parts of the body, such as the blood and stomach lining, but there are portions of your nervous system where cells will never be replaced under normal circumstances - the cells you were born with are the very same cells you have now.

These long-lived cells are the most vulnerable to forms of age-related damage involving build up of metabolic waste products, and the related slow failure in the ability of cells to recycle their own damaged components. There is no fallback to replacing cells wholesale in this case, or at least not in our species, so long-lived cells must forge ahead and struggle to do their job no matter how damaged they are. The existence of these cells is a good argument for the need for in situ repair technologies, able to reverse damage and remove other hinderances in order to allow long-lived cells to regain their vigor and function - goals that are hard to attain with the present generation of cell replacement technologies emerging from the field of regenerative medicine.

Now consider this: it may be the case that some of the individual vital proteins in the machinery of long-lived cells are also never replaced. Some of your complex individual proteins, important cogs and gears in important cells, might be as old as you are. The very same sorts of concern about vulnerability surface here as well. Here is news of research in rats:

The scientists discovered that certain proteins, called extremely long-lived proteins (ELLPs), which are found on the surface of the nucleus of neurons, have a remarkably long lifespan. While the lifespan of most proteins totals two days or less, the Salk Institute researchers identified ELLPs in the rat brain that were as old as the organism. ... ELLPs make up the transport channels on the surface of the nucleus; gates that control what materials enter and exit. Their long lifespan might be an advantage if not for the wear-and-tear that these proteins experience over time. Unlike other proteins in the body, ELLPs are not replaced when they incur aberrant chemical modifications and other damage.

...

The fundamental defining feature of aging is an overall decline in the functional capacity of various organs such as the heart and the brain. This decline results from deterioration of the homeostasis, or internal stability, within the constituent cells of those organs. Recent research in several laboratories has linked breakdown of protein homeostasis to declining cell function. ... Most cells, but not neurons, combat functional deterioration of their protein components through the process of protein turnover, in which the potentially impaired parts of the proteins are replaced with new functional copies. Our results also suggest that nuclear pore deterioration might be a general aging mechanism leading to age-related defects in nuclear function, such as the loss of youthful gene expression programs.

Given how much longer humans live in comparison to rats, it may be that there are no proteins in the human body that never turn over. But I wouldn't be surprised to find that the situation for old humans is exactly the same as described above for old rats.

STED microscopy of dendritic and axonal structures in the somatosensory cortex of a mouse, with neurons labeled by enhanced yellow fluorescent protein (credit: Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry)

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany led by Stefan Hell have imaged living neurons at less than 70 nanometers for the first time.

The scientists used optogenetics to insert an extra gene that generates a yellow glow in mice brains, then used the Stimulated Emission Depletion (STED) microscopy technique developed by Hell to view synapses in neurons through a glass-sealed window in the skull.

Ref.: Sebastian Berning et al., Nanoscopy in a living mouse brain, Science, 2012 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1215369]

Witha PogoPlug NAS box, a few antennae, flash memory and some batteries, and you've got a cheap, disposable F-BOMB with which to collect data on adversaries.

Attach a camera to a drone, fly the drone around the back of the house, locate the bad guys. Robotic UAVs are being used for surveillance by everyone from the military to local law enforcement to emergency personnel. But if you think about it, drones are kind of big and really noisy, not the ideal tool for spying on someone. Their data gathering capabilities are limited too and they’re really expensive. What about a computer, small and durable enough for you to toss over a fence or inconspicuously attach to a car? Equipped with Wi-Fi cracking software or GPS, it could infiltrate someone’s computer or track someone’s location without them knowing.

Allow me to drop the F-BOMB. The Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors, that is. Invented by Brandon O’Connor as an alternative to high-tech and costly spy devices, the F-BOMB is made so cheaply with off-the-shelf parts that you’ll feel perfectly okay with losing one or two. Very convenient when it’s sitting in the backyard of a drug lord hideout.

Before building the F-BOMB, O’Connor challenged himself with several constraints. He wanted multiple wireless radios, USB capability for expansion (add GPS for example), battery life that lasted hours to days, a size small enough that it won’t be found by the “bad guys with guns,” as he calls them, and do all this without spending thousands or even hundreds of dollars.

The key addition was the PogoPlug. The PogoPlug is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box, a data storage device through which people can share information over the Internet. It runs on Linux which makes it pretty user-friendly, according to O’Connor. Normally the boxes cost about $150, which would have made the F-BOMB too expensive for O’Connor’s purposes, but the company is having a hard time selling the devices. PogoPlug’s misfortune becomes O’Connor’s advantage as he can now purchase them for just $25 on Amazon.com. And that’s the most expensive bit of hardware. Add the antennae, eight gigabytes worth of flash memory and a plastic casting that’s 3D-printed and you’ve got a little spying computer you can build for under $49. Four D batteries will provide power for 30-plus hours.

Aside from being cheap and reproducible, building a monitoring device with commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, components from Amazon or craigslist means when the bad guys find it in their backyard they won’t be able to trace it to you. Were the F-BOMB to require any kind of made-to-order, a determined person could find the manufacture, start asking questions.

O’Connor talked about the F-BOMB (“because one time I worked for DARPA and they love terrible acronyms”) at ShmooCon 2012. As you’ll see in the video, he’s nothing if not enthusiastic.

The F-BOMB won an award from DARPA’s Cyber Fast Track program. The title of the project is “Reticle: Leaderless Command and Control,” which kind of makes me wonder what else he’s developing. As Forbes reports, O’Connor was tight-lipped about what DARPA might do with the technology.

But we can venture a few guesses. The platform can be attached to a quadcopter and dropped onto a roof. It can be hidden inside a carbon monoxide casing, or any other imaginative cover container such as a box of stale Triscuits that you’re pretty sure no one’s going to touch. As I mentioned before, Wifi-cracking software will allow you to eavesdrop on a person’s computer, and you can track someone with a GPS module. And if you’re more in the business of science than spying, you can add temperature or humidity sensors to collect data for meteorological research.

O’Connor has a security and software consultancy called Malice Afterthought. He learned about such things teaching at cybersecurity schools for the military as well as working in the security devisions of VeriSign and Sun Microsystems. The website describes him as “dreamer and mad scientist capable of making even the most challenging tasks into reality.” Being that he kind of runs the consultancy himself, he probably wrote the description himself, which is kind of weird. Anyway, he certainly has created a little security monster in the F-BOMB. Effin’ cool.

[image credits: Forbes and Wired]
[video credit: USSJoin via YouTube]
image 1: F-BOMB
image 2: F-BOMB
video: F-BOMB

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An advance in the methodologies of nerve repair: "scientists believe a new procedure to repair severed nerves could result in patients recovering in days or weeks, rather than months or years. The team used a cellular mechanism similar to that used by many invertebrates to repair damage to nerve axons. ... We have developed a procedure which can repair severed nerves within minutes so that the behavior they control can be partially restored within days and often largely restored within two to four weeks. If further developed in clinical trials this approach would be a great advance on current procedures that usually imperfectly restore lost function within months at best. ... nerve axons of invertebrates which have been severed from their cell body do not degenerate within days, as happens with mammals, but can survive for months, or even years. The severed proximal nerve axon in invertebrates can also reconnect with its surviving distal nerve axon to produce much quicker and much better restoration of behaviour than occurs in mammals. ... Severed invertebrate nerve axons can reconnect proximal and distal ends of severed nerve axons within seven days, allowing a rate of behavioural recovery that is far superior to mammals. In mammals the severed distal axonal stump degenerates within three days and it can take nerve growths from proximal axonal stumps months or years to regenerate and restore use of muscles or sensory areas, often with less accuracy and with much less function being restored. ... The team described their success in applying this process to rats ... The team were able to repair severed sciatic nerves in the upper thigh, with results showing the rats were able to use their limb within a week and had much function restored within 2 to 4 weeks."

Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-02/w-npr020112.php

To what degree does nuclear DNA damage contribute to aging? That remains a debated question. Here, researchers show that, at least in immune cells, there are perhaps more forms of large DNA damage than thought in the old: "researchers compared the DNA of identical (monozygotic) twins of different age. They could show that structural modifications of the DNA, where large or small DNA segments change direction, are duplicated or completely lost are more common in older people. The results may in part explain why the immune system is impaired with age. During a person's life, continuous alterations in the cells' DNA occur. The alterations can be changes to the individual building blocks of the DNA but more common are rearrangements where large DNA segments change place or direction, or are duplicated or completely lost. ... The results showed that large rearrangements were only present in the group older than 60 years. The most common rearrangement was that a DNA region, for instance a part of a chromosome, had been lost in some of the blood cells. ... Rearrangements were also found in the younger age group. The changes were smaller and less complex but the researchers could also in this case show that the number of rearrangements correlated with age. ... We were surprised to find that as many as 3.5 percent of healthy individuals older than 60 years carry such large genetic alterations. We believe that what we see today is only the tip of the iceberg and that this type of acquired genetic variation might be much more common. ... The researchers believe that the increased number of cells with DNA alterations among elderly can have a role in the senescence of the immune system. If the genetic alterations lead to an increased growth of the cells that have acquired them, these cells will increase in number in relation to other white blood cells. The consequence might be a reduced diversity among the white blood cells and thereby an impaired immune system." Compare that with the other explanations for reduced diversity that involve persistent and pervasive viruses like CMV.

Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-02/uu-itr012612.php

I recently suggested that a big part of what management consulting sells is status, to cow firm opponents into submission, and that this helps explain why consulting firms use so many inexperienced recent grads of elite colleges. JustMe commented:

There are basically three things available to graduates of elite colleges that other students, no matter how hard they work, have little or no access to: elite consulting jobs, investment banking, and corporate law.

Kids from elite colleges aren’t much smarter or harder working than those from the next tier, who are cheaper to hire. But elite grads do have much more polish, shine, etc. – in a word, status. If this helps explain an elite school focus in management consulting, can it also help explain a similar focus in investment banking and corporate law?

Corporate law seems easier. If, as I suggested, our inherited sense of who will tend to win a contest in coalition politics uses certain standard status markers, then the status of one’s corporate lawyers can influence attitudes about who will win a court case. So having a high status lawyer can help get folks within an organization to support standing firm, cow lower status opponents into backing down, and influence the verdict of a judge or jury.

For investment banking, a lot of that is about getting folks with deep pockets to open their wallets to back new ventures. The more it seems that important folks associated with a venture are high status, the more others may be willing to affiliate with that venture as customers, suppliers, investors, compliant regulators, etc. So there should be a big premium on having the key person who represents a venture to potential investors be high status.

I remember Bryan Caplan once suggesting that successful real estate agents tend to be the sort of people who were popular in high school, and that house buyers (especially women) prefer to affiliate with a locally popular person as they enter a new community. Investment banking could be similar, but on higher status scale.

The newly discovered "super-Earth" planet is depicted in this artist's conception, showing the host star as part of a triple-star system (credit: Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Carnegie Institution)

An international team of scientists has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star — the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it, the scientists say.

With an orbital period of about 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times that of the Earth, the planet orbits within the star’s “habitable zone,” where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.

The researchers found evidence of at least one and possibly two or three additional planets orbiting the star, which is about 22 light years from Earth.

The team includes UC Santa Cruz astronomers Steven Vogt and Eugenio Rivera and was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Their work will be published by Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This diagram shows the orbits of the detected planets around the host star (GJ 667C) in relation to the habitable zone (credit: Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Carnegie Institution)

The host star, called GJ 667C, is a member of a triple-star system (GJ 667AB) and has a different makeup than our sun, with a much lower abundance of elements heavier than helium, such as iron, carbon, and silicon. This discovery indicates that potentially habitable planets can occur in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star. The other two stars in the triple-star system are a pair of orange K dwarfs, with a concentration of heavy elements only 25 percent that of our sun’s. Such elements are the building blocks of terrestrial planets, so it was thought to be less likely for metal-depleted star systems to have an abundance of low-mass planets.

“This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy,” said Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. “The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets.”

Best candidate to support liquid water and life

The planet (GJ 667Cc) has an orbital period of 28.15 days and a minimum mass of 4.5 times that of Earth. It receives 90 percent of the light that Earth receives. However, because most of its incoming light is in the infrared, a higher percentage of this incoming energy should be absorbed by the planet. When both these effects are taken into account, the planet is expected to absorb about the same amount of energy from its star that the Earth absorbs from the sun.

“This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it,” Anglada-Escudé said.

The team found that the system might also contain a gas-giant planet and an additional super-Earth with an orbital period of 75 days. However, further observations are needed to confirm these two possibilities.

“With the advent of a new generation of instruments, researchers will be able to survey many M dwarf stars for similar planets and eventually look for spectroscopic signatures of life in one of these worlds,” said Anglada-Escudé, who was with Carnegie when he conducted the research, but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen.

Ref.: Guillem Anglada-Escudé, et al., A planetary system around the nearby M dwarf GJ 667C with at least one super-Earth in its habitable zone, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2012; [arXiv:1202.0446v1]

super-Earth

iRobot's mobile robotics platform Ava (credit: iRobot)

iRobot Corp. has announced plans to invest $6 million in InTouch Health, a telemedicine company operating in 80 hospitals around the world, possibly building on iRobot’s Ava, a tablet-compatible telepresence robot.

One of NASA's twin Grail spacecraft has returned its first unique picture of the far side of the moon, an image that shows shadowed craters at the moon's south pole. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

A gravity-mapping spacecraft orbiting the moon has beamed home its first video of the lunar far side, a view people on Earth never see.

The new video was captured by one of NASA’s twin Grail probes using a novel camera called MoonKAM, which will eventually be used by students on Earth to snap photos of the lunar surface as part of an educational project. The two spacecraft have been circling the moon since they arrived in orbit over the New Year.

Because the moon is tidally locked with Earth, it only presents one face to the planet’s surface (the near side). The side of the moon that faces away from Earth is the far side. Only robotic spacecraft and Apollo astronauts who orbited the moon in the 1960s and 1970s have seen the far side of the moon directly.

(Credit: Sandia National Laboratories )

Sandia National Laboratories researchers have built a prototype of a four-inch-long, small-caliber bullet capable of steering itself towards a laser-marked target located approximately 2,000 meters (1.2 miles) away.

Aided by little fins, the on-board guidance and control electronics use the information passed on by an optical sensor located in the nose to calculate the flight path.

Kissinger Lovotics robot (credit: Hooman Samani)

Artificial intelligence researcher Hooman Samani has invented the “Kissenger,” a small pair of lips stuck to a circular body that you can plug into your computer via a USB cord while you’re Skyping with your partner far across the world.

Simply kiss it and have your partner (human or robotic) do the same. The lips of the Kissenger will mold around yours, thereby simulating the feeling of a real, live human kiss.

Immunotherapy is a very broad and active field: there are a great many strategies presently under development, and in various stages of maturity. All aim at making the immune system do the heavy lifting of finding and destroying specific unwanted cells, cellular machinery, and other biochemicals in the body. This is actually the immune system's evolved purpose, more or less, and so adjusting it to destroy new targets without causing harmful side-effects is a plausible near term technology. Thus there are large segments of the life science community looking into immunotherapies for cancer, immunotherapies to destroy some of the harmful aggregates that build up between cells with age, and so forth.

One of the presentations given at last year's SENS5 conference was a look at turning the immune system against harmful aggregates of tau protein - as seen in Alzheimer's disease, for example, but which happens in all brains to some degree:

One of the perils of aging is the accumulation of various protein/peptide aggregates throughout the body, some of which are associated with toxicity. In several age-related disorders, aggregates of certain amino acid sequences are much more prominent than under normal conditions, and define the disease. Harnessing the immune system has emerged in recent years as a promising approach to treat these conditions. My laboratory has worked in this field targeting the amyloid-β peptide, the prion protein, the tau protein, and more recently the islet amyloid polypeptide. The focus of my talk will be on our tau immunotherapy studies. We have shown in tangle mouse models that active or passive immunizations clear pathological tau aggregates from the brain with associated functional benefits.

A thought to leave you with: the more we see the research community working on immunotherapies for age-related conditions, there more likely it becomes that significant investments will be made into reversing the decline of the immune system. The effectiveness of these therapies to a degree depends on the effectiveness of the immune system, and that progressively fails with age - having first generation therapies in the market will ensure that there exists a strong incentive to improve those therapies, and one of the most obvious ways to do that is to rejuvenate the immune system in elderly patients.

Contemporary biotechnologies, and especially emergent technologies, are taking art into wet yet nimble associations with science fiction, science fraction and science fact. Bioart and its subsets are working with genetics, cloning and hybridization, and its practitioners are “co-creators” alongside the gods, stirring up moral issues, and portraying the role of lab-technician, scalpel in hand.

The question of boosting the intelligence of animals other than humans, to the level of self-awareness and consciousness, is one that cannot be considered in isolation from the general process at work in the social and speculative movement known as Transhumanism.

Thousands of scientific studies have examined the possible genetic causes underlying brain/mind disorders such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, violence and criminality, and psychopathy. The more positive side of human behavior, with aspects such as altruism and empathy, has been studied much less – even though these are obviously much more valued from both transhumanist and typical humanist perspectives.

Are we on the verge of totally new social and economic paradigm brought about by the increasing power of computation in our machines?