It is an open secret in the semiconductor industry that the end of the so-called Moore's law is imminent, or may already be here, but it has been hard to find public data to support it as no semiconductor vendor wants to acknowledge it, although it is being »
During the weekend, there was much hype on the internet about OpenAI's latest research project: a "bot" that can play the popular Dota 2 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_2] computer game. I quote from OpenAI's announcement [https://blog.openai.com/dota-2/]: > »
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision [https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634] for Facebook as the future platform for "building global community" across the whole world in both the political and the private sphere. Zuckerberg's plans for the future deserves some critical analysis: »
First, the global GDP growth numbers: I have turned to the World Bank's Global Economic Prospects [http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/842861463605615468/Global-Economic-Prospects-June-2016-Divergences-and-risks.pdf] , published in June. The outlook has now turned even more gloomy with most numbers being revised down from January's report. The world& »
The technological singularity scenario [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity] anticipates an exponential improvement in technology, especially artificial intelligence, which would create superhuman intelligence and transform the world into a science fiction-like society. It is debated whether such a trend can currently be observed. An introduction to the debate »
The cashless society has been in vogue lately. There seems to be a strong underlying current in society wanting to transform the way money changes hands. If there is an easy prediction to make, it would be that the days of physical cash are numbered. The process has been going »
It is customary to see the news reporting being dominated by bad news. Every day, we tune into the message of a world slipping into chaos. This is one of the big contradictions facing an analytical mind trying to understand the world by reading up on it. The world might »
The bleak projection of future oil use in a previous post [https://www.obsfuture.com/2016/01/12/an-alternative-interpretation-of-the-recent-drop-in-oil-prices/] made me look more into what was actually agreed upon at the landmark Paris meeting on December 12th 2015. The full text [http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09. »
These days, crude oil [http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CL1:COM] is trading at close to $30 per barrel, which is an extremely low price in historical perspective. The price is so low that it threatens the entire US shale oil industry and leads to massive fiscal deficits in other »
A year has passed and it is time to summarize 2015 from the financial markets point of view and look ahead at 2016. If you follow the financial news, analyses and predictions abound, for example, Bloomberg's 2015: The Year in Money [http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-the-year-in-money/] or »
This week, the Federal Reserve raised the main policy interest rate from essentially 0% to 0.25%, which ended an era of zero interest rate policy ("ZIRP") in the United States. There already appears to be a name for this event: the lift-off, presumably meant to evoke images »
