Google’s Gboard keyboard for iOS and Android packs a bunch of useful features, but it’s not flexible enough to get me to switch from SwiftKey. However, it looks like the company is working on adding a ‘Smart Reply’ feature to the keyboard, and if it happens, it’ll probably do the trick and convert me.
Smart Reply is already available in certain Google apps, like Inbox, Gmail, and Allo. Now, 9to5Google has spotted code that details the inclusion of this feature in an upcoming version of Gboard for Android, which leads us to believe that, based on the contents of your screen, it’ll suggest contextually relevant phrases that you can use to reply with, just by tapping once instead of having to type.
Since it’s still sorta in the works, we can’t yet see what the feature will look in Gboard. But for reference, here’s how Smart Reply works in Gmail:
The blog noted that the feature is being built to work with a bunch of messaging apps, including Hangouts, Android Messages, Allo, Facebook Messenger and Messenger Lite, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Tencet.
I’m all for features that reduce the need to type, and allow you to operate apps with just one hand. I wrote last year about how Smart Reply in Gmail helped me respond to five times more emails than before; beyond just negating the need to type, it also slashed the amount of time I spent thinking about how to word my replies, and whether it’s okay to respond with a more concise message than usual (pro tip: it is).
I’d be glad to see Smart Reply come to Gboard, because I’ve got contacts on a bunch of different messaging services. It’d be great to see this support other tools like Telegram and Slack as well; I’ve got faith in Ray Kurzweil, the technologist responsible for building the tech for this feature over at Google.
The code for Smart Reply was first found in version 6.9 of Gboard for Android; it’s worth noting that the feature may not become available immediately, as Google may want to test it with some users before releasing it to everyone (a beta version version available to sideload from APKMirror didn’t show any Smart Reply-related options in the Settings). Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long before our keyboard can do our texting for us.
Excessive Salt Consumption Leads to Cognitive Impairment, MS Mouse Study Shows
New research shows how a high-salt diet leads to excessive levels of interleukin-17 (IL-17) in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, causing changes in endothelial cells that result in dementia.
These findings suggest that therapeutics targeting IL-17 may help halt the neurovascular damages of MS and other autoimmune diseases linked to high levels of IL-17.
Diets rich in sodium chloride are common among Americans, 90 percent of whom exceed the recommended 2,300 mg intake of salt per day. While such diets have been linked with an increased risk for cerebrovascular diseases and dementia, exactly how high levels of salt damage the brain remained unclear.
Eager to find out, researchers at New York’s Weill Cornell University fed mice a high-salt diet, either with 4 or 8 percent of salt, corresponding to a 8- to 16-fold increase in salt content compared to a normal mouse diet.
“Although estimating salt consumption at the population level is challenging, this diet is comparable to the high end of the spectrum of human salt consumption,” researchers wrote.
Mice were fed for eight, 12 or 24 weeks. Using magnetic resonance imaging, researchers discovered that such a diet led to significant reductions in cerebral blood flow (CBF) in the brain’s cortex (by 28%) and hippocampus (by 25%) — two areas responsible for learning and memory.
Moreover, in rodents fed a high-salt diet during 12 weeks, researchers detected dysfunctions in the endothelium — the thin membrane composed of endothelial cells that line all blood vessels. The endothelial cells also reduced the production of nitric oxide, a gas that relaxes blood vessels and increases blood flow.
The endothelium’s altered function seems to be an effect of the high-salt diet as researchers ruled out other sources of endothelium damage, such as vascular inflammation.
The team then tested if they could reverse the detrimental effects of a high-salt diet by feeding the mice a normal diet (with 0.5 percent salt). After 12 weeks of a high-salt diet, mice were then fed with a normal diet for another weeks.
When researchers looked again at the animals’ brains, they saw that both the cerebral blood flow and endothelial function returned to normal.
Mice fed only a high-salt diet had “profound alterations in cognitive function that involve multiple domains,” researchers wrote. These animals performed significantly worse in object recognition, a maze test and nest behavior. Returning to a normal diet rescued the animals’ performance to normal levels.
The team also investigated the molecular mechanisms underlying these impairments in cognition. They found that a high-salt diet triggered an increase in Th17 immune cells in the small intestine. That led to an increase in the release of interleukin 17 (IL-17), a pro-inflammatory factor.
Other experiments showed that endothelial dysfunction and reduction in nitric oxide production were a consequence of the increased release of IL-17.
They finally pinpointed a molecule called ROCK as the one responsible for shutting down the production of nitric oxide. Il-17 suppressed nitric oxide production via ROCK. Using a ROCK inhibitor called Y27632, researchers were able to improve the neurovascular and cognitive dysfunction induced by a high-salt diet.
“The IL-17-ROCK pathway is an exciting target for future research in the causes of cognitive impairment,” Giuseppe Faraco, the study’s first author, said in a press release. “It appears to counteract the cerebrovascular and cognitive effects of a high-salt diet, and it also may benefit people with diseases and conditions associated with elevated IL-17 levels, such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and other autoimmune diseases.”
In their article, the team concluded: “While these findings highlight the key role of cerebral endothelial function in brain health, they also unveil a previously undescribed gut–brain axis whereby dietary habits compromise the brain microvasculature, leading to altered brain function and cognitive impairment.”
Animal protection group urges B.C. vet association to ban cat declawing
This Aug. 3, 2011 handout photo shows a black cat. (Seth Casteel / The Canadian Press)
The Canadian Press Published Thursday, January 18, 2018 11:05AM EST
VANCOUVER – The society that protects animal welfare in British Columbia is looking to the leadership of Nova Scotia’s veterinarians as it calls for a ban on feline declawing.
The B.C. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wants the province’s college of veterinarians to declare declawing unethical — similar to a ban announced by the Nova Scotia Veterinary Medical Association last month.
The society says it has been on record for nearly two decades as opposed to medically unnecessary procedures such as declawing, tail docking, ear cropping and devocalization.
Emilia Gordon, the society’s senior animal health manager, says veterinarians in B.C. care strongly about animal welfare and would welcome an opportunity to lead the way on the issue.
Nova Scotia was the first Canadian province to ban declawing, but a news release from the society says the practice is already prohibited in Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Brazil, the United Kingdom, many parts of Europe and some cities in California.
Gordon says studies show declawed cats are at higher risk for biting and aggression, are more likely to have trouble using the litter box, and have a significantly increased chance of back pain.
Novel hypothesis on why animals diversified on Earth
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK
Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. A biological innovation may have been key.
Life on Earth was dominated by microbes for roughly 4 billion years when multicellular life suddenly – then in the form of animals in robust ecosystems – made a vigorous entry. Why animals diversified so late and so dramatically has remained unresolved and is a matter of hot debate.
The diversification of animals occurred over a geologically short period of time and is known as the Cambrian explosion. Many geologists have assumed that the Cambrian explosion was triggered by an increase of atmospheric oxygen.
However, a causal relationship between the Cambrian explosion and increasing atmospheric oxygen lacks convincing evidence.
Indeed, research over the last years weaken the support for a correlation between the Cambrian explosion and increasing atmospheric oxygen. For example, dramatic changes in atmospheric oxygen are noted both before and after the Cambrian, but not specifically when animal diversification took off.
Simple animals are furthermore noted to require surprisingly low oxygen levels, which would have been met well before the Cambrian.
“A heated hunt for the geochemical evidence that oxygen increased when animals diversified goes on but, after decades of discussion, it seems worthwhile to consider the development of multicellularity also from other angles”, says geobiologist Emma Hammarlund, PhD and researcher at the division for translational cancer research at Lund University and guest researcher at the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the University of Southern Denmark.
In order to understand more about the conditions for multicellular life, Emma Hammarlund contacted tumor biologist, Professor Sven Påhlman at the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Lund University, who has explored the importance of low oxygen concentrations, or so-called hypoxia, in the tumor setting for nearly two decades.
“I wanted to learn what tumor scientists observe on a daily basis, in terms of tissue growth and how it relates to oxygen. Tumours are after all, and unfortunately, successful versions of multicellularity”, explains Emma Hammarlund.
The team, including also tumor biologist Dr. Kristoffer von Stedingk at Lund University’s Paediatrics division, tackled the historic question of why animals developed so late and dramatically with novel clues from the field of tumour biology.
Specifically, they tested whether the same molecular tools exploited by many tumors – to maintain stem cell properties – could also be relevant to the success of animals in the Cambrian explosion.
Cells with stem cell properties are vital for all multicellular life in order to regenerate tissue. For example, cells in the wall of human small intestine are replaced every 2-4 days, through the division of stem cells.
“Hypoxia is generally seen as a threat, but we forget that oxygen shortage in precise periods and settings also is a prerequisite for multicellular life. Our stem cells are the ones that form new tissue, and they are extremely sensitive to oxygen. The stem cells therefore have various systems for dealing with the effects of both oxygen and oxygen shortage, which is clear in the case of tumors”, explains Sven Påhlman.
By studying the ability of tumor cells to imitate the properties of stem cells, Sven Påhlman’s team have observed how tumor cells can high-jack specific mechanisms that evade the effects of high oxygen on stem cell depletion. As a consequence, the tumor cells are able to maintain stem cell properties, despite being surrounded by the high oxygen concentrations that are present in the body.
This same ability, according to the authors, is one of the keys that also made animals so successful.
“The ability to construct stem cell properties despite high oxygen levels, so called ‘pseudohypoxia’, is present also in our normal vertebrate tissue. Therefore, we flip the perspective on the oxic setting: While low oxygen is generally unproblematic for animal cells, the oxic settings pose a fundamental challenge for complex multicellularity. Without additional tools, the oxic setting makes tissue-specific stem cells mature too early”, says Sven Påhlman.
The new hypothesis holds that the dramatic diversification of animals resulted from a revolution within the animals’ own biology, rather than in the surrounding chemistry on Earth’s surface.
A view that fits with other geobiological observations, such that environments with ‘enough’ oxygen have been present on Earth since long before the Cambrian explosion.
The hypothesis also has implications for how animals may have varying capacities to live in oxygenated environments, and perhaps even for how we see cancer as an evolutionary consequence of our ability to live in oxygenated niches.
Taking an evolutionary approach is unusual for cancer researchers, even though the development of tumors is generally seen as an evolutionary process.
Similarly, geobiological research rarely apply the cellular perspective. But having combined their expertise, both Emma Hammarlund and Sven Påhlman are surprised that we have not previously wondered about our paradoxical ability to renew tissue in the oxic setting.
“Surely, many people who would intuitively disagree. But once you flip the perspective on the oxic niche and start to consider it as challenging for stem cell properties and tissue renewal, then puzzling observations from distant fields starts to fit together. And you can’t turn back”, concludes Sven Påhlman.
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Title of article
‘Refined control of cell stemness allowed animals to evolve in the oxic realm’ by Emma U. Hammarlund, Kristoffer von Stedingk and Sven Påhlman
The Cambrian explosion is a generic term for the event in the history of the Earth when animal species first started to diversify. From here on, animal fossils start to appear in the rock record and the Eon of visible life (Phanerozoic) begins on our planet. The diversification is pronounced in the time period known as the Cambrian, beginning at 543 million years ago, even if the process stretched over a longer period. During the Cambrian explosion, most of the animal groups (phyla) developed and the diversity of species increased dramatically over a few tens of millions of years, which is a short period in the context of geological time.
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
Janice Eng, a UBC professor and director of Rehabilitation Research Program with Vancouver Coastal Health, spoke to CBC about a new VCH pilot program for stroke prevention.
The program pairs patients with “stroke coaches” to help prevent secondary strokes.
“We send people home to try to get back to their normal activities, which may have been very sedentary, their diet may have been terrible and they may not have been taking their medication,” said Eng.
Tracking a thought’s fleeting trip through the brain
Why people sometimes say things before they think
January 17, 2018
Repeating a word: as the brain receives (yellow), interpretes (red), and responds (blue) within a second, the prefrontal cortex (red) coordinates all areas of the brain involved. (video credit: Avgusta Shestyuk/UC Berkeley).
Recording the electrical activity of neurons directly from the surface of the brain, using electrocorticograhy (ECoG)*, neuroscientists were able to track the flow of thought across the brain in real time for the first time. They showed clearly how the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain coordinates activity to help us act in response to a perception.
Here’s what they found.
For a simple task, such as repeating a word seen or heard:
The visual and auditory cortices react first to perceive the word. The prefrontal cortex then kicks in to interpret the meaning, followed by activation of the motor cortex (preparing for a response). During the half-second between stimulus and response, the prefrontal cortex remains active to coordinate all the other brain areas.
For a particularly hard task, like determining the antonym of a word:
During the time the brain takes several seconds to respond, the prefrontal cortex recruits other areas of the brain — probably including memory networks (not tracked). The prefrontal cortex then hands off to the motor cortex to generate a spoken response.
In both cases, the brain begins to prepare the motor areas to respond very early (during initial stimulus presentation) — suggesting that we get ready to respond even before we know what the response will be.
“This might explain why people sometimes say things before they think,” said Avgusta Shestyuk, a senior researcher in UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and lead author of a paper reporting the results in the current issue of Nature Human Behavior.
For a more difficult task, like saying a word that is the opposite of another word, people’s brains required 2–3 seconds to detect (yellow), interpret and search for an answer (red), and respond (blue) — with sustained prefrontal lobe activity (red) coordinating all areas of the brain involved. (video credit: Avgusta Shestyuk/UC Berkeley).
The research backs up what neuroscientists have pieced together over the past decades from studies in monkeys and humans.
“These very selective studies have found that the frontal cortex is the orchestrator, linking things together for a final output,” said co-author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience and a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at UCSF. “Here we have eight different experiments, some where the patients have to talk and others where they have to push a button, where some are visual and others auditory, and all found a universal signature of activity centered in the prefrontal lobe that links perception and action. It’s the glue of cognition.”
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, California Pacific Medical Center, and Stanford University were also involved. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
* Other neuroscientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephelography (EEG) to record activity in the thinking brain. The UC Berkeley scientists instead employed a much more precise technique, electrocorticograhy (ECoG), which records from several hundred electrodes placed on the brain surface and detects activity in the thin outer region, the cortex, where thinking occurs. ECoG provides better time resolution than fMRI and better spatial resolution than EEG, but requires access to epilepsy patients undergoing highly invasive surgery involving opening the skull to pinpoint the location of seizures. The new study employed 16 epilepsy patients who agreed to participate in experiments while undergoing epilepsy surgery at UC San Francisco and California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Stanford University in Palo Alto and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Once the electrodes were placed on the brains of each patient, the researchers conducted a series of eight tasks that included visual and auditory stimuli. The tasks ranged from simple, such as repeating a word or identifying the gender of a face or a voice, to complex, such as determining a facial emotion, uttering the antonym of a word, or assessing whether an adjective describes the patient’s personality.
Abstract of Persistent neuronal activity in human prefrontal cortex links perception and action
How do humans flexibly respond to changing environmental demands on a subsecond temporal scale? Extensive research has highlighted the key role of the prefrontal cortex in flexible decision-making and adaptive behaviour, yet the core mechanisms that translate sensory information into behaviour remain undefined. Using direct human cortical recordings, we investigated the temporal and spatial evolution of neuronal activity (indexed by the broadband gamma signal) in 16 participants while they performed a broad range of self-paced cognitive tasks. Here we describe a robust domain- and modality-independent pattern of persistent stimulus-to-response neural activation that encodes stimulus features and predicts motor output on a trial-by-trial basis with near-perfect accuracy. Observed across a distributed network of brain areas, this persistent neural activation is centred in the prefrontal cortex and is required for successful response implementation, providing a functional substrate for domain-general transformation of perception into action, critical for flexible behaviour.
You might have visualized a world with super-intelligent robots but later dismissed the idea. Well, this may eventually come to pass with the push for singularity becoming real as Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son predicting this occurrence by 2047.
The announcement was made during the Future Investment Initiative hosted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where the launch of a robot kid-Sophia was also unveiled. The friendly robot wowed the audience with its super wits.
“I predict 30 years from now, wewill have a 10 billion population of smart robots,” said Son. Softbank has further invested £75billion ($100billion) to develop chips with high IQ levels and in companies working on artificial intelligence that will be achieved in the next five years.
Source: Google
Singularity refers to a period in future where artificial intelligence overshadows the combined human intelligence. It seems that Son is foreseeing a revolution in the tech world as he focuses on pushing for advanced machine learning robots. This may also lead to more sentient robots than humans.
Obsessed with technological singularity
According to Son, the AI-driven gadgets will have an IQ 10,000 timeshigherthan that of man which is between 100 and 200.Currently, Mensa recruits members with an IQ of 130 and above. Furthermore, the CEO of Softbank is optimistic about singularity as he sees it as a venue that presents an enormous opportunity. This implies that no matter the technological advancements been pushed humans will always remain upfront when it comes to imagination.
Softbank already has its own robot dubbed ‘Pepper’ with the ability to detect and interpret human emotion. Commenting on what the future will look like, Mr. Son said, “Thirty years from now, they (mankind) are going to learn by themselves, they are maybe going to laugh at you and us.”
The tech giant is also driven by the notion of the brain having no limit and expansion of its activities. “If you have to envision, 10 years or 30 years later, at least some humans will have a better imagination than them,” claimed Son.
Well, Mr.Son isn’t the only one thrilled by the shift to AI as companies such as Microsoft and Google heavily investing in the technology. Apart from being a technological advancement, integration of AI will bring more wealth as envisioned by Mark Cuban.
Humankind is under threat
Despite the staunch support for singularity by the likes of Mr.Son, there are those opposed to the idea. This includes technology experts Bill gates, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, and physicist Stephen Hawkins who foresee the threat imposed by a singularity. Musk goes a step further to counteract the shift to humanoid gadgets by investing in technology that uplifts human survival.
To some extent, the scenario of having robots replacing humans is not farfetched as singularity will definitely lead to the loss of many jobs. As of now, there are humanoid robots that are brilliant than humans in various fields.
Source: The Cryptosphere
The prediction “game” on when machine learning shall overpass human intelligence has also presented the opportunity for experts to give their contribution. Mr. Son’s prediction comes close to that of Google’s engineer Ray Kurzweil who sees this taking place by 2045. Kurzwell is convinced in an environment where artificial intelligence is super smart and will replicate in higher IQ levels among people.
Acquisition of AI firms
In the push for singularity, the founder of Softbank boughtUK based company- ARM– some time back with the aim of linking AI chips to the infrastructure. The move will aid the company to spearhead the paradigm shift, that is, singularity. So far Softbank has invested in Fetch Robotics, Honda and IBM Watson.
If you’re worried about the future and where technology might lead us, 2017 didn’t help. The warnings kept rolling in about potential job lossesfrom automation and machine learning. More than 375 million of uswill need to completely change occupations to avoid being replaced by robots, a recent report estimated. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence keeps getting smarter: The world got its first robot citizen, another robot learned to do backflips, and DeepMind’s AI has mastered chess.
It doesn’t need to be so frightening, says Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly is known for spotting and promoting trends and innovations such as open-source software and web 2.0. In his new book WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, published by Penguin Random House in October, the tech thinker and writer envisions a future in which people, particularly tech and financial executives, make smart, conscientious decisions to harness technology for good.
“WTF,” most commonly called upon as an expletive, but also an expression of astonishment, addresses the “profound sense of unease and even dismay” that many people experience when confronted with advanced technology, O’Reilly writes.
With the right choices, machines doesn’t have to put humans out of jobs. Rather, they could create work—and joy— for us. O’Reilly is keen to stress this ideal future, where AI brings us unimaginable delights and higher standards of livings, can only be achieved if we radically change how we view our economy and capitalist system.
“We are at a very dangerous moment in history,” O’Reilly warns. While some of his Silicon Valley neighbors believe we are on a steady march towards singularity, where machine and human brains melt into one force, O’Reilly has a reminder that nations can fail, civilizations can collapse, and technology can go backwards. Climate change, wealth inequality, intergenerational inequality, astronomical CEO pay, and the constant pursuit of corporate profits are all pitfalls that technology could exacerbate. It’s getting harder and harder to solve the problems we have created, he says.
For all its warnings, WTF is defiantly optimistic, and in some places surprisingly almost Marxist. It’s light on practical steps to achieve these idealistic goals, though they include more progressive taxes on financial investments and a “radical” shake up of the education system. However, there is a genuine plea for action, or at least thought, on building a better future. O’Reilly is inquisitive, sourcing ideas and thoughts from across history and disciplines, while the book is littered with quotes from literature, and by historical figures, entrepreneurs, economists, and friends in high places.
Quartz spoke to O’Reilly in London about technology’s role in building a better society. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Quartz: You’ve been in publishing for decades. Why did you decide this would be your first book for a general audience?
“Let’s not just celebrate disruption, let’s start to identify the world that we want to build.”Tim O’Reilly: I could see the current tech backlash coming. There’s been a narrative that robots are going to take all the jobs and we’ll have a new Precariat [a social class suffering from an existence without predictability and job security]. I wanted to address the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who seem so tone deaf, policymakers, and of course the general public. I wanted to shape ideas and the story I felt I needed to tell was that the digital revolution is coming to the real world and it’s going to be messy but let’s not just celebrate the disruption, let’s start to identify the world that we want to build.
What does the disruption look like in that world?
I refute the idea that robots are going to take all the jobs. There’s plenty of work to be done, just look around. We have crumbling infrastructure, the looming specter of climate change, aging populations in the developed world who are going to need care, and government and healthcare systems that are stuck in the last century. There’s so much work to be done.
Early on in the book you warn that civilizations can fail and technology can go backwards. Is that a general warning or related to something specific you see in the world today?
“Climate change will either crush us as a society or we will rise to and it will allow us to transform our society.”I studied classics, so how nations fail has always been in the backdrop of my mind. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil talks about steady march towards the singularitybut on human timescales there’s big flat line periods, or downward spikes. It is possible for the world to go sideways, look at things like climate change and the anti-science, anti-progress, extractive, crony capitalism that is taking over governments around the world in the name of populism. We could end up in a very, very, dark time. There’s really two possibilities: eventually climate change is going to be little bit like the aftermath of World War II, something that will either crush us as a society or we will rise to and it will allow us to transform our society.
There’s a lot of ways things that could lead to a worse future, including climate change, politics, and inequality, but you still describe yourself as an optimist.
You have to believe that we can make things better. ‘Why It’s Up to Us’ is the most important part of the book’s title. I think it’s time for us to stop believing in the divine right of capital, that it’s only natural for companies to want to extract as much profit as possible from every unit of work to screw their customers if that will make them richer. Give me a break, that doesn’t work, it’s not sustainable.
(Christopher Michel)
At times the book is a scathing attack on companies and the quest for more market value, which you describe as a system controlled by algorithims. Who is to blame for that? The companies? The financial markets?
We have these companies that think it’s ok to be hostile to their customers. I have a way of explaining this, in two parts. The first is the idea that, in some sense, systems like Google and Facebook are already artificial intelligences, just not the way we normally think of AIs. These are digital intelligence that incorporates human intelligence. We click links that inform and teach the platforms. It’s an extended digital collective brain. If that’s true then our financial markets are also one of these AIs too.
Financial markets are algorithmic systems, and they have an objective function. Thirty or forty years ago, we told them optimize for share price, to treat people as a cost to be eliminated. Executive compensation was aligned to the idea of making the share price go up regardless of the cost, which discouraged investment in the real economy of things and people. The shareholder capitalism system that we built really needs some deep rethinking.
So what precisely should we do to build this better future?
We have to break the alignment between management compensation and shareholder value. You could legislate to cap how much executives can be paid in stock, for example, it could be no more than 10% of the amount you distribute to the entire company. I don’t know want the right number is.
“We should try and distinguish between gambling in the financial markets and true investment.”We could clearly do a lot more with tax rates. We should try and distinguish between gambling in the financial markets and true investment. Maybe you do that simply by figuring out the real time horizon of an investment. There’s some interesting ideas on this, such as loyalty shares and Eric Reis’s long-term stock exchange where you get more voting power the longer you hold a stock. Policymakers need to get a lot better at learning in real time about what works and what doesn’t.
You acknowledge that the book is very US-focused, so how does the rest of the world fit into your vision?
The demographics of the world would suggest the future is not in the US or Western Europe. The choices that are made in other parts of the world are probably more important. There’s positives and negatives to that because the US and Western Europe have been the bastions of democracy and certain way of doing things, so it may be that the 21st century will develop into a very different type of culture. I hope the young people of Africa and Asia, as they grow up into prosperity, learn from the things we got wrong and build a better society. Hopefully we can help by injecting some of those ideas into the people that will own the 21st century, because I think those people won’t be us.
This Aug. 3, 2011 handout photo shows a black cat. (Seth Casteel / The Canadian Press)
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