Pfizer partnering with Ido Bachelet on DNA nanorobots
OUTRAGED HUMAN
“No, no it’s not science fiction; it’s already happening,” said Ido Bachelet to a somewhat incredulous audience member








https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzLTWU2EqP4 Ido Bachelet - Moonshot Thinking


... when they cause too much damage by mistake...

or intentionally...


5:12

study your biology and activate targeted medication when necessary.


5:36

We also know how to remote-control these robots, using magnetic fields.

5:40

Furthermore, we can control them, as you saw in the clip, with a joystick,

5:43

directing them to a specific part of the body,

5:46

and then activating them with the push of a button.

5:49

We have also connected this joystick to the internet.

5:51

Our robots have a IP address,

5:54

so you can connect with them from afar and activate them online.



6:01

Imagine that in a couple of years,

6:03

your doctor will be able to sit at home with his smartphone,

6:05

and instead of playing "Candy Crush"

6:08

he will connect with the robots inside of you,

6:11

activate a certain medication and possibly even save you, just in time.

AND IMAGINE THAT YOU WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW IT, YOU WOULDN'T BE TOLD ABOUT IT.

AND THAT IN ORDER TO IMPLANT/INJECT IT, YOU WOULD BE TOLD THAT THERE IS A DREADFUL PANDEMIC, AND AT EVERY STEP YOU WOULD BE FORCED TO TAKE IT AS A NECESSARY "VACCINATION." AND A “PCR TEST”.

BY YOUR GOVERNMENT, THE AIRLINES, THE EMPLOYER, THE WAITER AT THE RESTAURANT, THE FDA, THE EMA, THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION...

AND YET IMAGINE THAT MANY PEOPLE WOULD DIE FROM IT, AND THEY WOULD BE YOUR RELATIVES AND FRIENDS.

BUT YOU WOULD BE THE ONE WHO WOULD HAVE TO PROVE THAT IT WAS BECAUSE OF IT.

IMAGINE BEING SURROUNDED BY CENSORSHIP, BEING RIDICULED, HAVING YOUR RIGHTS TO DO YOUR JOB, MOVE AROUND, OR EVEN SPEAK THE TRUTH AT ALL TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU....

ISN’T THIS A BRIGHT FURTURE AND A FANTASTIC REALITY?

ARE YOU AGAINST SCIENCE? AGAINST PROGRESS? AGAINST PREVENTING DISEASES?



https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/05/pfizer-partnering-with-ido-bachelet-on.html

Pfizer is cooperating with the DNA robot laboratory managed by Prof. Ido Bachelet at Bar-Ilan University. Bachelet has developed a method of producing innovative DNA molecules with characteristics that can be used to "program" them to reach specific locations in the body and carry out pre-programmed operations there in response to stimulation from the body. This cooperation was revealed in a lecture by Pfizer president of worldwide research and development (WRD), portfolio strategy and investment committee chairman, and executive VP Mikael Dolstein at the IATI Biomed Conference in Tel Aviv being concluded today.

Research will focus on the possibility that the robots will deliver the medical proteins to designated tissue.

Bachelet came to Bar-Ilan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) several years ago. At a Tedmed event held two years ago, he explained, "In order to make a nanometric robot, we first of all create a selected DNA sequence, and then fold it using a process called DNA origami. With this method, a person can give a command to a computer, which folds the DNA molecule as needed.

"The result is that a DNA sequence can be made in the form of a clam, for example, and containing a drug. The DNA molecule, however, contains a code activated upon encountering certain materials in the body. For example, the clam can be designed to change its shape and release the drug only when it meets a cancer cell or the right tissue.

"In addition, the molecules can receive signals from each other, and can theoretically change their shape according to signals from the body, and can be pre-programmed to attach themselves to one another. In the future, it will be possible to combine each such molecule with a miniature antenna. When the antenna receives an external signal, it will make a small change in the molecule that will make it open or close, and dissipate or connect itself to another molecule."



In a brief talk, Bachelet said DNA nanobots will soon be tried in a critically ill leukemia patient. The patient, who has been given roughly six months to live, will receive an injection of DNA nanobots designed to interact with and destroy leukemia cells—while causing virtually zero collateral damage in healthy tissue.

According to Bachelet, his team have successfully tested their method in cell cultures and animals and written two papers on the subject, one in Science and one in Nature.

Contemporary cancer therapies involving invasive surgery and blasts of drugs can be as painful and damaging to the body as the disease itself. If Bachelet's approach proves successful in humans, and is backed by more research in the coming years, the team’s work could signal a transformational moment in cancer treatment.

If this treatment works this will be a medical breakthrough and can be used for many other diseases by delivering drugs more effectively without causing side effects.

2012 Video with answers from George Church, Ido Bachelet and Shawn Douglas on the medical DNA double helix clamshell nanobucket nanobot



George Church indicates the smart DNA nanobot has applications beyond nanomedicine. Applications where there is any need for programmable and targeted release or interaction at the cellular or near molecular scale.

2014 Geek Time Presentation from Ido Bachelet



“AND THE LAST THING I AM GOING TO SCHOW YOU IS… PANDEMIC.

SO, WE ARE REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT PANDEMICS… ESPECIALLY INFLUENZA PANDEMICS.

SO THE BEST WAY TO AVOID PANDEMICS OR TO HANDLE PANDEMICS, IS SIMPLY TO KNOW WHERE THE VIRUS IS AND NOT TO BE THERE…

IT SOUNDS STUPID, BUT IT IS ACTUALLY THE CASE…

IF YOU COULD IDENTIFY WHERE THE VIRUS IS IN REAL TIME AND YOU CAN CONTAIN THAT AREA, YOU WOULD STOP THE PANDEMIC, YOU WOULD STOP THE DISEASE… OK?


SO, WHAT WE DEVELOPED IS A SENSOR… COMPOSED OF CARBON NANOTUBES FUNCTIONALIZED WITH ALL KIND OF THINGS… THE SENSOR IS EXTREMELY SENSITIVE… WE’VE BUILT THIS APPLICATION… THEY SEND THEIR GPS COORDINATES TO OUR SERVER SO WE CAN SORT OF RECONSTRUCT A REAL MAP…

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS AND UNDESTOOND WHAT BIONICS IS ALL ABOUT…

At the British Friends of Bar-Ilan University's event in Otto Uomo October 2014 Professor Ido Bachelet announced the beginning of the human treatment with nanomedicine. He indicates DNA nanobots can currently identify cells in humans with 12 different types of cancer tumors.

A human patient with late stage leukemia will be given DNA nanobot treatment. Without the DNA nanobot treatment the patient would be expected to die in the summer of 2015. Based upon animal trials they expect to remove the cancer within one month.

Within 1 or 2 years they hope to have spinal cord repair working in animals and then shortly thereafter in humans. This is working in tissue cultures.

Previously Ido Bachelet and Shawn Douglas have published work on DNA nanobots in the journal Nature and other respected science publications.

One Trillion 50 nanometer nanobots in a syringe will be injected into people to perform cellular surgery.

The DNA nanobots have been tuned to not cause an immune response.
They have been adjusted for different kinds of medical procedures. Procedures can be quick or ones that last many days.


Medicine or treatment released based upon molecular sensing - Only targeted cells are treated

Ido's daughter has a leg disease which requires frequent surgery. He is hoping his DNA nanobots will make the type of surgery she needs relatively trivial - a simple injection at a doctor's office.

We can control powerful drugs that were already developed

Effective drugs that were withdrawn from the market for excessive toxicity can be combined with DNA nanobots for effective delivery. The tiny molecular computers of the DNA nanobots can provide molecular selective control for powerful medicines that were already developed.

Using DNA origami and molecular programming, they are reality. These nanobots can seek and kill cancer cells, mimic social insect behaviors, carry out logical operators like a computer in a living animal, and they can be controlled from an Xbox. Ido Bachelet from the bio-design lab at Bar Ilan University explains this technology and how it will change medicine in the near future.

Ido Bachelet earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was a postdoctoral fellow at M.I.T. and Harvard University. He is currently an assistant professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Nano-Center at Bar Ilan University, Israel, the founder of several biotech companies, and a composer of music for piano and molecules.


Researchers have injected various kinds of DNA nanobots into cockroaches. Because the nanobots are labelled with fluorescent markers, the researchers can follow them and analyse how different robot combinations affect where substances are delivered. The team says the accuracy of delivery and control of the nanobots is equivalent to a computer system.

This is the development of the vision of nanomedicine.
This is the realization of the power of DNA nanotechnology.
This is programmable dna nanotechnology.

The DNA nanotechnology cannot perform atomically precise chemistry (yet), but having control of the DNA combined with advanced synthetic biology and control of proteins and nanoparticles is clearly developing into very interesting capabilities.

"This is the first time that biological therapy has been able to match how a computer processor works," says co-author Ido Bachelet of the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar Ilan University.

The team says it should be possible to scale up the computing power in the cockroach to that of an 8-bit computer, equivalent to a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 from the 1980s. Goni-Moreno agrees that this is feasible. "The mechanism seems easy to scale up so the complexity of the computations will soon become higher," he says.

An obvious benefit of this technology would be cancer treatments, because these must be cell-specific and current treatments are not well-targeted. But a treatment like this in mammals must overcome the immune response triggered when a foreign object enters the body.

Bachelet is confident that the team can enhance the robots' stability so that they can survive in mammals. "There is no reason why preliminary trials on humans can't start within five years," he says

Biological systems are collections of discrete molecular objects that move around and collide with each other. Cells carry out elaborate processes by precisely controlling these collisions, but developing artificial machines that can interface with and control such interactions remains a significant challenge. DNA is a natural substrate for computing and has been used to implement a diverse set of mathematical problems, logic circuits and robotics. The molecule also interfaces naturally with living systems, and different forms of DNA-based biocomputing have already been demonstrated. Here, we show that DNA origami can be used to fabricate nanoscale robots that are capable of dynamically interacting with each other in a living animal. The interactions generate logical outputs, which are relayed to switch molecular payloads on or off. As a proof of principle, we use the system to create architectures that emulate various logic gates (AND, OR, XOR, NAND, NOT, CNOT and a half adder). Following an ex vivo prototyping phase, we successfully used the DNA origami robots in living cockroaches (Blaberus discoidalis) to control a molecule that targets their cells.

Nature Nanotechnology - Universal computing by DNA origami robots in a living animal


44 pages of supplemental information

Ido Bachelet's moonshot to use nanorobotics for surgery has the potential to change lives globally. But who is the man behind the moonshot?

Ido graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a PhD in pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. Afterwards he did two postdocs; one in engineering at MIT and one in synthetic biology in the lab of George Church at the Wyss Institute at Harvard.

Now, his group at Bar-Ilan University designs and studies diverse technologies inspired by nature.

They will deliver enzymes that break down cells via programmable nanoparticles.
Delivering insulin to tell cells to grow and regenerate tissue at the desired location.
Surgery would be performed by putting the programmable nanoparticles into saline and injecting them into the body to seek out remove bad cells and grow new cells and perform other medical work.


Research group website is here.












SOLVE FOR DISEASE X?

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-pfizer-to-collaborate-on-bar-ilan-dna-robots-1001036703


Pfizer is cooperating with the DNA robot laboratory managed by Prof. Ido Bachelet at Bar-Ilan University. Bachelet has developed a method of producing innovative DNA molecules with characteristics that can be used to "program" them to reach specific locations in the body and carry out pre-programmed operations there in response to stimulation from the body. This cooperation was revealed in a lecture by Pfizer president of worldwide research and development (WRD), portfolio strategy and investment committee chairman, and executive VP Mikael Dolstein at the IATI Biomed Conference in Tel Aviv being concluded today.

Bar-Ilan Research & Development Co. CEO Orli Tori said, "This is Pfizer's first cooperative venture with someone in Israeli higher education. The technology is fairly new for a drug company, but Pfizer has agreed to take up the challenge and support this technology, in the hope that it will make a contribution to the company at the proper time.

"As in all of our research agreements, the company coming from the industry has the right to negotiate the acquisition of the technology at the end of the process." The financial volume of the deal was not disclosed, but most such agreements amount to several hundred thousand dollars at most. The medical sector in which cooperation will take place was also not disclosed,

but it appears that research will focus on the possibility that the robots will deliver the medical proteins to designated tissue.

Bachelet came to Bar-Ilan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) several years ago. At a Tedmed event held two years ago, he explained, "In order to make a nanometric robot, we first of all create a selected DNA sequence, and then fold it using a process called DNA origami. With this method, a person can give a command to a computer, which folds the DNA molecule as needed.

"The result is that a DNA sequence can be made in the form of a clam, for example, and containing a drug. The DNA molecule, however, contains a code activated upon encountering certain materials in the body. For example, the clam can be designed to change its shape and release the drug only when it meets a cancer cell or the right tissue.

"In addition, the molecules can receive signals from each other, and can theoretically change their shape according to signals from the body, and can be pre-programmed to attach themselves to one another. In the future, it will be possible to combine each such molecule with a miniature antenna.

When the antenna receives an external signal, it will make a small change in the molecule that will make it open or close, and dissipate or connect itself to another molecule."

Tori adds, "What is special about the robots is that they open and close according to signals from the surroundings, and that makes it possible to manage the disease. The robot exposes the drug to the target site according to biological signs within the body. For example were we to develop a product for diabetes, although that is not the purpose of this cooperation, it would be possible to develop a robot that would release insulin only when it sensed a rise in the blood sugar level."

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 14, 2015

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/03/ido-bachelet-dna-nanobots-summary-with.html

Disadvantages

1. Designing of nanorobot is very costly and complicated

2. Stray field might be created from electrical systems which can trigger bioelectric based molecular recognition system in biology

3. Electrical nanorobots remain vulnerable to electrical interference from other sources like radiofrequency or electric fields, electromagnetic pulse and stray fields from other in-vivo electronic devices.

4. Nanorobots are difficult to design, and customize

5. These are capable of molecular level destruction of human body thus it can cause terrible effect in terrorism field. Terrorist may make usage of nanorobots as a tool for torturing opponent community

6. Other possible threat associated with nanorobots is privacy issue.

As it dealt with designing of miniature form of devices, there are risks for snooping than that exist already.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200718043030/https://pharmascope.org/ijrps/article/download/2523/5031]

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150911233849/http://www.nanosafe.org/home/liblocal/docs/Nanosafe%202014/Session%201/PL1%20-%20Fran%C3%A7ois%20TARDIF.pdf]

NANOROBOTS:

SOCIETAL CONCERNS: INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM, TRANSHUMANISM!!!

http://immortality-roadmap.com/nanorisk.pdf










http://jddtonline.info/index.php/jddt/article/download/891/533

There are several drawbacks with this technology like toxicity, contamination. Sometime human body generates strong immune response against them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051218111931/http://teknologiskfremsyn.dk:80/download/58.pdf


“Nanotubes can be highly toxic”

Fifteen percent of the rats treated with carbon nanotubes suffocated to death within twenty-four hours due to clumping of the nanotubes that obstructed the bronchial passageways.








Toxicity- the issue of toxicity of nanoparticles was raised as an area in which more research is needed, particularly in terms of whether the regulatory system is sufficient.




…

And it's injected into people, soldiers, children, even infants…

Thank you Zz for this link.



Pfizer partnering with Ido Bachelet on DNA nano robots.

“No, no it’s not science fiction; it’s already happening,” said Ido Bachelet to a somewhat incredulous audience member, displaying a test tube in which he says just one drop contains approximately 1,000 billiard robots.

https://outraged.substack.com/p/pfizer-partnering-with-ido-bachelet?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=1087020&post_id=143153580&utm_campaign=956088&isFreemail=true&r=1sq9d8&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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https://telegra.ph/Pfizer-partnering-with-Ido-Bachelet-on-DNA-nanorobots-04-03

Mistakes Were Made
CJ Hopkins


Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes.

Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.”

Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.


Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”


And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.


Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.


And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again…



And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS”…


And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …


And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”


And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council”…



Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us…


…and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

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https://telegra.ph/Mistakes-Were-Made-03-20

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans. The goal of AI is to create systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.

There are two main types of AI: narrow or weak AI and general or strong AI.

Narrow or Weak AI: This type of AI is designed and trained for a particular task. It is limited to the specific function it was created for and does not possess the broad range of abilities that a human brain has. Examples include voice assistants, image recognition software, and recommendation systems.

General or Strong AI: This is a more advanced form of AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks, similar to human intelligence. General AI has the ability to adapt and perform tasks in diverse domains, but as of now, it remains largely theoretical and has not been achieved.

AI can be further categorized into different approaches and techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. Machine learning, in particular, is a subset of AI that focuses on developing algorithms that allow systems to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed.

AI has numerous applications across various industries, including healthcare, finance, education, transportation, and more. As technology continues to advance, AI is expected to play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of automation and intelligent decision-making. However, ethical considerations and the responsible development of AI are crucial to ensure its positive impact on society.

Computer types


There are various types of computers designed for different purposes, and they can be categorized based on their size, performance, and intended use. Here are some common types of computers:

Personal Computers (PCs):
Desktops: Traditional computers that consist of a separate monitor, keyboard, and processing unit.
Laptops: Portable computers with an integrated screen and keyboard, designed for on-the-go use.
Workstations: High-performance computers optimized for tasks such as graphic design, video editing, and scientific applications.

Servers:
File Servers: Manage and store files for a network of computers.
Web Servers: Host websites and web applications.
Database Servers: Handle database-related tasks for applications.

Mainframes:
Powerful, large-scale computers designed for handling complex computing tasks and serving multiple users simultaneously.

Supercomputers:
Extremely powerful computers used for scientific and engineering calculations, weather modeling, and other complex simulations.

Embedded Computers:
Integrated into other devices or systems, such as cars, appliances, industrial machines, and medical devices.

Smartphones and Tablets:
Mobile devices that combine computing power with communication capabilities.

Gaming Consoles:
Specialized computers designed for playing video games.

Wearable Computers:
Devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers that are worn on the body.

Quantum Computers:
Experimental computers that use the principles of quantum mechanics for processing information.

Single-Board Computers:
Compact computers with all components, including CPU, memory, and I/O, integrated onto a single circuit board (e.g., Raspberry Pi).

Microcontrollers:
Embedded computers with a microprocessor, memory, and input/output peripherals, commonly used in electronic devices and appliances.

Cloud Computers:
Virtualized computing resources accessed over the internet, providing scalable and on-demand services.

These are just a few examples, and advancements in technology may lead to the development of new types of computers in the future. Each type of computer serves specific purposes and is designed to meet the requirements of particular applications.

Neuromorphic Computers:
Designed to mimic the structure and function of the human brain, these computers aim to perform tasks related to artificial intelligence and machine learning more efficiently.

HPC (High-Performance Computing) Clusters:
Groups of interconnected computers that work together to solve complex computational problems, often used in scientific research and simulations.

Network Computers:
Computers optimized for network tasks, often used in data communication and network management.

Rugged Computers:
Built to withstand harsh environmental conditions, such as extreme temperatures, moisture, and vibrations. Commonly used in military applications and outdoor fieldwork.

Kiosks:
Computers designed for public use, often with specialized software for specific tasks like information retrieval, ticket purchasing, or self-checkout.

Thin Clients:
Lightweight computers that rely on a central server for processing and storage, commonly used in environments where centralized management is preferred.

Digital Signal Processors (DSPs):
Specialized microprocessors designed for efficient processing of signals in applications like audio and video processing.

AI Accelerators:
Hardware specifically designed to accelerate artificial intelligence workloads, often used in conjunction with traditional CPUs and GPUs.

Robotics Controllers:
Computers that control the operation of robots, providing the necessary computational power for tasks like sensing, decision-making, and motion control.

Bioinformatics Servers:
Computers used for processing and analyzing biological data, such as DNA sequences and protein structures.

POS (Point of Sale) Systems:
Computers used in retail environments for processing transactions, managing inventory, and tracking sales.

Educational Computers:
Computers designed for educational purposes, often with features tailored to support learning and skill development in students.

The field of computing is diverse, and specialized computers continue to be developed to meet the demands of specific industries and applications. Advances in technology often lead to the creation of new types of computers with improved capabilities and functionalities.

Robotic Bs Human

“Zionism is Not Judaism”, “Insane Megalomania”: The Zionist Cause Is a Dark Reversal of the Real Destiny of Israel — A True Story

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***

During the Summer of 1975 I worked as a volunteer on a Kibbutz in Northern Israel, close to the border with Lebanon. As a recent organic farming exponent in the UK, I wanted to explore how this unique socioeconomic experiment on the land was working.

Although my stay in Israel was relatively short, it was an intense and meaningful experience. One which, as you will see as this story unfolds, throws a highly prescient light on the current catastrophe.

There were maybe two hundred residents of the kibbutz, named ‘Rosh Ha Nikra’.

One rose early and went to work on the land, coming back for a common breakfast at 9.a.m. It was too hot to work later in the mornings so one returned to the fields late afternoon to put in another session.

At its inception, the basis of this community was carved out of a desert. Only an intense commitment to establishing an enduring self-sufficient village could turn the sour, salty land into something capable of growing sufficient food to provide for its occupants and a trading income.

By the time I visited, there was already a thriving rural economy in operation, growing and exporting avocado pears and dairy products. Houses and land are integrated as a cooperative in the kibbutz movement, with no private ownership.

Being situated close to the Lebanese border had its disadvantages. Missiles were periodically launched into surrounding territory as unresolved hostilities flared-up intermittently on the border land. It was disconcerting to an outsider, but the Rosh Ha Nikra community was hardened to this reality and did not let it break their daily routines.

I am not Jewish, but have worked closely with Jewish colleagues in theatre and education projects based largely in the USA and Belgium. This led me to become interested in further exploring the background to the Israeli/Palestinian tensions that dog the peaceful functioning of the ‘two-state’ land division established in 1948.

In a break from the Kibbutz work schedule, I was fortuitously given the opportunity to meet a senior figure of the Israeli military in Haifa. A kind, thoughtful individual who was close to retirement.

Questioning him about his perspective on Israeli/Palestinian tensions, he responded in a way that threw a highly significant light on the reality. I recount here my memory of the deeply prescient contents of what he said:

“Israel is not a country. The word in Hebrew means ‘to strive with God’ (to work with God). It is a tribal aspiration, it is not a place. To give the name Israel to this area of land is a falsification. It comes from the Zionist belief that this country is the original homeland of the Jews. There is no historical evidence for this belief, it is a dangerous fixation. Zionism is not Judaism.”

At the time I was not fully aware of the ramifications of this reply; however it vividly endured in my mind from there on.

My host asked what places I intended to visit in Israel. Definitely Jerusalem, I replied. His response was quite firm “Go beyond Jerusalem into the West Bank; into Jordan. Experience this place where Jordanians and Palestinian refugees live and work together.”

I took his advice, initially boarding a bus to Jerusalem. It was here that I first experienced an uneasy tension between Palestinian and Jewish citizens.

It should be remembered that a number of holy sites in Jerusalem are places of worship for both Palestinians and Jews. The ancient claims of both parties to the rights of ‘ownership’ of these sites causes an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion to never be far from the surface. Over the years, many bloody incidents have flared-up out of this febrile tension.

Within deeper spiritual texts of old, bestowing imaginary religious powers on material objects and buildings, is considered a form of blasphemy of God, whose omniscient presence is recognised as a manifestation of infinite spirit, giving equal status to all races, colours, creeds and places. A manifestation of universal truth, not a proclamation about rights of ownership.

This reflects on just why associating ‘Israel’ with a material possession would completely distort the true significance the epithet ‘To strive with God’.

After exploring the impressive but austere architecture of old Jerusalem, I stepped into a colourful, creaking bus heading down into the ancient city of Jericho.

Immediately the atmosphere lifted. The bus and its occupants slowly weaved its way down a long twisting road into the fertile valley below, while Arabic songs wailed out from the radio and the air became perfumed by sweet incense. Arabic headdresses replaced the casual Westernised attire of most Israelis.

Outside, barren mountain slopes predominated, but in a number of places basic agricultural cultivations were in progress.

Upon arriving in Old Jericho, a hoard of young men exuberantly offered their services to show visitors the local sites. I duly accepted the services of a young man with a broad smile, a good approximation of the English language and a promise of full knowledge of the relics of this ancient city.

After a long day spent walking the ruins and rugged path ways, my guide asked me where I was staying. I don’t know, was my reply. Did he recommend anywhere?

No he didn’t, advising it was not a good idea to stay in a local hotel. Instead, he invited me to his family home and to attend a ceremony celebrating the birth of his brother’s first child. A raucous event of much fraternal dancing and singing into which I was fully integrated.

During more quiet moments my host told me about living in a form of Israeli police state. He admitted the tensions, but never spoke badly of the occupiers of his homeland, even praising Jewish agricultural achievements made on the barren hills East of Jerusalem.

I spent a further few days visiting local townships; mostly peaceful, but some of the larger market towns, like Nablus, widely patrolled by Israeli armed police clearly expecting trouble.

A few weeks later I left the country, with a strong impression left imprinted on my mind: on the kibbutz I was treated as a co-worker – and in Jordan I was treated as a brother. It was possible for me to see how these two quite different cultures could coexist in peace.

But this could only work if the Israeli population would adopt the wisdom of the military leader I met in Haifa; and the Palestinians echo the respect for Israeli workers shown by my young Jordanian friend. Such qualities, forming the foundation of humanitarian inter-cultural respect, are the best, and perhaps only, chance for lasting peace and unity.

Almost fifty years later, my reflections are not dimmed. However they have been dashed on the rocks of a terrible political deception which has now emerged as the catalyst for an ethnic cleansing nightmare that blows apart any opportunity for a peaceful resolution.

This is a conflict created by the dark spin doctors of the New World Order. It is part of a deadly and carefully planned chess game designed to wipe Palestine, Gaza and the Palestinian people off the map and free-up the country of Israel to become the Zionist capital of the world.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has publicly declared as much. For him and his fanatical Zionist colleagues, it is ‘God’s will’ that they should obliterate any and all opposition to the ‘chosen race’ achieving its ends.

The great majority of Jews I know – and I believe the one’s I don’t – are appalled by this utterly insane megalomania. They have seen through the distortions and lies that surround the supposed preordained right of total ‘possession’ of this ancient strip of land at the Eastern most point of the Mediterranean sea.

Those warm hearted brothers, sisters and elders who presently live in Israel, hold the key to the restoration of sanity.

I most ardently call upon them to show the courage and irrevocable determination to resist Netanyahu’s mass extermination plans.

Such resistance has the potential to catalyse a large ground swell of bottom-up support from around the world; but to do so – it must start from within Israel itself and embody:

Total non compliance with political orders.
A nationwide refusal to to be party to the murder of fellow human beings.
A solid rebuttal of the demands of military recruitment.
A ‘pro humanity’ expression of unequivocal solidarity with Palestinian brothers, sisters and children who share the same territory and know it as home; and whose fate it is to be subject to the view that they are ‘animals’ destined for the slaughter house.
No thinking, feeling, self-respecting Israelite could fall into line with such depravity.

Israel, as I learned, means ‘to strive with God’. A fine and liberating ideal. So if one is proud to be an Israeli citizen, one should know that this means to carry out actions that will be smiled upon by one’s Creator.

This is the true ideological goal of the tribe of Israel.

Anything else is a falsehood and must be recognised as that.

Not just for the sake of preventing an unimaginable tragedy for the people of Palestine and of Israel, but for all of humanity.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Julian Rose is an organic farmer, writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is author of four books of which the latest ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ is a clarion call to resist the despotic New World Order takeover of our lives. Do visit his website for further information www.julianrose.info

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is by Latuff, 2006 (Source: Looking out at the World from Canada)


https://www.globalresearch.ca/zionist-cause-dark-reversal-real-destiny-israel-true-story/5840693

The Age of Megathreats
Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

Goodbye to All That

Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


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With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

Hard Choices, Hard Landings

The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

Sticky Stagflation

In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

The Worst of All Possible Economies

When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

The Moment of Truth

In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.

The Age of Megathreats
Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

Goodbye to All That

Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


Subscribe to PS Digital now to read all the latest insights from Nouriel Roubini.

Digital subscribers enjoy access to every PS commentary, including those by Nouriel Roubini, plus our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content, including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More.

For a limited time, save $15 with the code ROUBINI15.

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With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

Hard Choices, Hard Landings

The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

Sticky Stagflation

In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

The Worst of All Possible Economies

When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

The Moment of Truth

In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.

The Velox robot developed by Pliant Energy Systems uses many modes of locomotion from the animal kingdom, a hyperbolic geometry that enables this robot to move through water as well as over land.

Their website is https://www.pliantenergy.com/robotics

…, future is coming:) I am so exited for it
#amazon #robotic #elon

Robotic Excavator. ????????

World's First Babies Born Using Robotic Sperm Injection

The babies were born to a Jordanian couple who had been struggling with infertility for years. The mother had a genetic mutation that made it difficult for her to conceive, and the father had a low sperm count.

Boston Dynamics is hard at work pushing the boundaries of modern robotics. I wouldn't worry about them taking over the world though, as you can see they're obviously too busy learning parkour!

#Tech #TechNews #Robots #RobotNews #FutureTech #News #SoMee #SoMeeSocial

The age-old philosophical question, “who let the dogs out?” has finally been solved. Thanks to the help of Ghost Robotics and the Australian military, soldiers can now control robot dogs with their minds.

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, yet it’s happening right now while half the planet focuses on Pedro Pascal’s impeccable performance on “Last of Us.” https://vigourtimes.com/creepy-robot-dogs-being-deployed-to-patrol-neighborhoods/

The robotics company 1x__tech has received an astounding $23M investment from OpenAI! ????

OpenAI is now making strides towards their initial objective of creating dexterous robots with human like capabilities, marking a significant step into the physical realm.