1 Bumper profits for Alphabet, Amazon (Martin Farrer
in The Guardian) A slew of large tech companies including Google parent
Alphabet and Amazon have reported better than expected bumper profits,
promising to boost the Nasdaq index to fresh highs.
The tech-heavy index already pushed to a new record
on Thursday of 6,048.94, a rise of 0.39%, thanks to strong results from PayPal
and Comcast. But after-the-bell figures from the industry’s giants looked set
to take it even higher.
With shares already buoyant on the hopes of huge
corporate tax cuts by the Trump administration, the impressive earnings helped
Wall Street brush aside any concerns about a possible US government shutdown
amid continued congressional wrangling.
The record-breaking run is likely to continue next
week when the market will hear from Apple and Facebook. Alphabet’s profit beat
Wall Street estimates and rose 29% to $5.43bn, a performance that analysts
called exceptional for a company so large.
Like its arch-rival Facebook, Google has
aggressively shifted the focus of its business to mobile advertising. The two
companies accounted for 99% of the industry growth in digital advertising in
2016, demonstrating market power that some advertisers complain amounts to a
duopoly.
Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, said
net income rose 41% in the first quarter of the year. Retail and
cloud-computing sales led the way, boosted by fees from its Prime shopping club
and media streaming services, along with growing advertising revenue.
Shares rose 3.9% to $954 in after-hours trading,
adding nearly $3bn to the personal fortune of founder and chief executive Jeff
Bezos. His wealth is now estimated at $79bn, making him the world’s third
richest person ahead of Warren Buffett on $74bn, according to Bloomberg. Bezos
is $8.3bn behind Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who is in top spot with a
fortune put at $87.3bn.
2 The rise of inequality (Yuval Noah Harari on BBC) In
the 19th and 20th Centuries, something changed. Equality became a dominant
value in human culture, almost all over the world. It was partly down to the
rise of new ideologies such as humanism, liberalism and socialism.
But it was also about technological and economic
change - which was connected to those new ideologies, of course. But now that's
changing again. The best armies today require a small number of highly
professional soldiers using very high-tech kit. Factories, too, are
increasingly automated.
This is one reason why we might - in the
not-too-distant future - see the creation of the most unequal societies that
have ever existed in human history. And there are other reasons to fear such a
future. With rapid improvements in biotechnology and bioengineering, we may
reach a point where, for the first time in history, economic inequality becomes
biological inequality.
Until now, humans had control of the world outside
them. They could control the rivers, forests, animals and plants. But they had
very little control of the world inside them. They couldn't cheat death. There
are two main ways to upgrade humans. Either you change something in their
biological structure by changing their DNA. Or, the more radical way, you
combine organic and inorganic parts - perhaps directly connecting brains and
computers.
In the past, the nobility tried to convince the
masses that they were superior to everyone else and so should hold power. In
the future I am describing, they really will be superior to the masses. And
because they will be better than us, it will make sense to cede power and
decision-making to them.
We might also find that the rise of artificial
intelligence - and not just automation - will mean that huge numbers of people,
in all kinds of jobs, simply lose their economic usefulness. The two processes
together - human enhancement and the rise of AI - may result in the separation
of humankind into a very small class of super-humans and a massive underclass
of "useless" people.
Once you lose your economic importance, the state
loses at least some of the incentive to invest in your health, education and
welfare. It's very dangerous to be redundant.
There is one more possible step on the road to
previously unimaginable inequality. In the short-term, authority might shift to
a small elite that owns and controls the master algorithms and the data that
feeds them. In the longer term, however, authority could shift completely from
humans to the algorithms. Once AI is smarter than us, all humanity could be
made redundant.
3 Why going to university is still worth it (Goh Eng
yeow in Straits Times) Is going to college still worthwhile? I would still give
an unequivocal "yes", even though I agree that not all university
degrees will fatten the wallet.
In my view, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are big
exceptions to the rule. For most of us who have been to university, not only
does a degree provide an important stepping stone to a good career, but also it
lays the framework for a life-long learning process.
True, many of us took courses at university which
did not quite equip us with the skills for the jobs we were subsequently hired
to do. But the rigorous training received enabled us to do well in our chosen
careers. In my case, I studied physics in university. But I have spent most of
my working life as a financial writer dealing with subjects which have nothing
in common with physics.
It was at university that I was taught simple ways
to solve even the most complicated physics problems. It is a philosophy I find
useful in helping me make sense of the bewildering complexities of the
financial landscape I write about.
Moreover, a university degree should not be viewed
as an end in itself. Future generations will live longer because of the rapid
advances in medical technologies. Given that, working till the current
retirement age of 62 may not be viable anymore because this would mean the
number of years we spend in retirement would far exceed the time we spend
working - and we may find ourselves running out of money in our advanced years.
Life can no longer be split up into merely three
stages - education, career and retirement. Working long past 62 will be the
norm, rather than the exception. In that case, we may end up with six or seven
phases in our lives, working in a certain job for some years, then returning to
education to learn new skills before picking up another job, and taking time
off to pursue other activities such as starting a family.
Given such scenarios, a person may find himself
doing more than one university degree in his lifetime - a basic one which
offers him thinking skills, as well as many subsequent post-graduate courses to
give him the skills necessary to perform his job. The trick is to keep finding
work which robots cannot do.
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