Technological innovation in the last couple of decades has brought fame and huge wealth to the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Often feted as geniuses, they are the faces behind the gadgets and media that so many of us depend upon.

Sometimes they are controversial. Sometimes the level of their influence is criticised.

But they also benefit from a common mythology which elevates their status. That myth is the belief that executive “visionaries” leading vast corporations are the engines which power essential breakthroughs too ambitious or futuristic for sluggish public institutions.

For there are many who consider the private sector to be far better equipped than the public sector to solve major challenges. We see such ideology embodied in ventures like OpenAI. This successful company was founded on the premise that while artificial intelligence is too consequential to be left to corporations alone, the public sector is simply incapable of keeping up.

The approach is linked to a political philosophy which champions the idea of pioneering entrepreneurs as figureheads who advance civilisation through sheer individual brilliance and determination.

In reality, however, most modern technological building blocks – like car batteries, space rockets, the internet, smart phones, and GPS – emerged from publicly funded research. They were not the inspired work of corporate masters of the universe.

And my work suggests a further disconnect: that the profit motive seen across Silicon Valley (and beyond) frequently impedes innovation rather than improving it.

For example, attempts to profit from the COVID vaccine had a detrimental impact on global access to the medicine. Or consider how recent ventures into space tourism seem to prioritise experiences for extremely wealthy people over less lucrative but more scientifically valuable missions.

More broadly, the thirst for profit means intellectual property restrictions tend to restrict collaboration between (and even within) companies. There is also evidence that short-term shareholder demands distort real innovation in favour of financial reward.

Allowing executives focused on profits to set technological agendas can incur public costs too. It’s expensive dealing with the hazardous low-earth orbit debris caused by space tourism, or the complex regulatory negotiations involved in protecting human rights around AI.

So there is a clear tension between the demands of profit and long-term technological progress. And this partly explains why major historical innovations emerged from public sector institutions which are relatively insulated from short-term financial pressures. Market forces alone rarely achieve transformative breakthroughs like space programs or the creation of the internet.

Excessive corporate dominance has other dimming effects. Research scientists seem to dedicate valuable time towards chasing funding influenced by business interests. They are also increasingly incentivised to go into the profitable private sector.

Here those scientists’ and engineers’ talents may be directed at helping advertisers to better keep hold of our attention. Or they may be tasked with finding ways for corporations to make more money from our personal data.

Projects which might address climate change, public health or global inequality are less likely to be the focus.

Likewise, research suggests that university laboratories are moving towards a “science for profit” model through industry partnerships.

Digital destiny

But true scientific innovation needs institutions and people guided by principles that go beyond financial incentives. And fortunately, there are places which support them.

“Open knowledge institutions” and platform cooperatives are focused on innovation for the collective good rather than individual glory. Governments could do much more to support and invest in these kinds of organisations.

If they do, the coming decades could see the development of healthier innovation ecosystems which go beyond corporations and their executive rule. They would create an environment of cooperation rather than competition, for genuine social benefit.

There will still be a place for the quirky “genius” of Musk and Zuckerberg and their fellow Silicon Valley billionaires. But relying on their bloated corporations to design and dominate technological innovation is a mistake.

For real discovery and progress cannot rely on the minds and motives of a few famous men. It involves investing in institutions which are rooted in democracy and sustainability – not just because it is more ethical, but because in the the long term, it will be much more effective.

Peter Bloom, Professor of Management, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ruled Turkey for the last 21 years. In the first few terms of his rule, Turkey experienced significant economic growth and a reduction in inequality. This was widely believed to be a reason for Erdoğan’s long-term popularity.

However, inflation hit a 24-year high of 85.5% in November 2022, creating speculation that economic instability would count against Erdoğan in the 2023 general election.

Despite this, in the first round of the election Erdoğan attracted 49.5% of the vote. Some argued that what Erdoğan calls his “great achievements” in science and technology were a significant reason for his continued popularity.

In the weeks before the first round, Erdoğan made a flurry of announcements about his “great achievements” and upcoming projects. He unveiled plans for Turkey to send its first astronaut to the International Space Station by the end of the year. The Teknofest Aerospace and Technology Festival was held to showcase many of these projects to the public. Erdoğan also showed off Turkey’s new multipurpose amphibious assault ship and a new Turkish armed drone, capable of taking off from aircraft carriers.

Erdoğan clearly hoped that these announcements would boost his popularity, by creating an image of Turkey becoming a world leader in science and technology. Erdoğan’s government also oversaw the country’s Black Sea natural gas pipeline project, an attempt to make Turkey energy independent. And more than £55 billion had been invested in the national defence industry as part of a plan to make Turkey a world leader in defence products.

Creating Turkey’s own car

Although the car industry has had an important role in Turkey’s economy, it has been dominated by foreign car companies. But the idea of having a national car brand has had a long history. In 1961 the military government attempted to develop the first Turkish car, Devrim, as a symbol of modern Turkey, but it was not very successful. This desire for a Turkish national car was even made into a popular film.

In 2017, Erdoğan invited six business groups to produce a 100% domestic and national car by 2023, a year that marked the 100th anniversary of Turkey’s republic as well as being an election year.

The six business groups and the ministry of science, technology and industry formed Türkiye’s Automobile Joint Venture Group (Togg) in 2019, aiming to build the first fully Turkish-made car, which was also going to be an electric vehicle. Togg received the highest support package believed to have been given to any automotive firm in Europe and North America (about £2.8 billion).

Despite the extensive financial support and hype, the Togg car could not be “100% domestic and national” because domestic suppliers didn’t have the capacity to make the key parts. Crucial complex and expensive components, such as the battery, had to be imported.

In the end, only 51% of the Togg car was domestically sourced. This led to a change in the way it was described, rather than a “100% domestic and national” car Erdoğan began calling it “the car of Türkiye” and claimed the product as a Turkish industrial win.

Social costs

With political economists Gabor Scheiring and Tamas Gerocs I have been investigating the implications of the policies related to Turkey’s car industry on social and economic development. Policy interventions that led to the development of Togg and Erdoğan’s other “achievements” came at the expense of workers. Changes during the Erdoğan years made subcontracting legal for big firms, resulting in more insecure and low-paid employment.

The number of unionised workers in the car industry dropped from 68% to just 17% between 2003-23. Labour rights abuses were reported in Togg’s plant.

Most people in Turkey are unable to afford to buy a new average car, let alone the Togg car, which will be sold for Turkish lira 953,000 (£38,500). This is about 112 times the minimum wage. More than 70% of workers in Turkey earn the minimum wage or less.

Togg received extensive public support despite its inability to keep the promise of a 100% Turkish car and deteriorating working conditions. In a survey, 94% of the population supported the initiative and this support was primarily based on nationalist and patriotic grounds, such as “helping one’s own country”.

The car was portrayed as a major success that would add “success to Turkey’s list of ongoing achievements”. Erdoğan described Togg as the “shared pride of Türkiye and 85 million people”. The businesses involved in Togg were declared “brave fellows”.

Even supporters of the opposition were in favour of Togg and criticised opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu for not showing enough support for such an important initiative.

Rallying nationalist support

It is no surprise that Erdoğan’s “great achievements” were at the centre of his election campaign. Just days before the first round, Erdoğan drove around in the first Togg car to get media coverage. He said the car “will hit the roads of Europe with all of its models” soon and the Europeans “will say ‘crazy Turks’ are coming”.

The government has created an understanding that every Turk must work “hard to elevate the country to the level of developed civilizations”. Low pay and insecure employment are the sacrifices workers must make for their country to reach this goal. Those who die in work accidents such as the mining disaster in Soma are called martyrs.

However, without being able to turn around the economy, Erdoğan’s projection of Turkish success and place in the world would seem to have been a winner.

Merve Sancak, Lecturer in Political Economy, Loughborough University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Silicon solar cells are an established technology for the generation of electricity from the sun. But they take a lot of energy to produce, are rigid and can be fragile.

However, a new class of solar cell is matching their performance. And what’s more, it can now be printed out using special inks and wrapped flexibly around uneven surfaces.

We have developed the world’s first rollable and fully printable solar cell made from
perovskite, a material that is much less expensive to produce than silicon. If we can also improve their efficiency, this points to the possibility of making cheaper solar cells on a much greater scale than ever before.

Scientists at Swansea University have pioneered a printable and rollable solar cell. Swansea University, Author provided

The silicon solar cells that are so recognisable to us have a significant limitation. If enough were made to cover our needs, we could run out of the materials to make them by 2050. So, we need something new and lots of it. The perovskite solar cell is emerging to fill that gap.

Perovskite is a crystal structure made with inorganic and organic components, named after Lev Perovski, a Russian mineral expert of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Perovskite solar cells first appeared in research labs in 2012 and caught the attention of researchers due to two factors: their ability to convert sunlight into electricity, and the potential for creating them from a combination of inks.

In research labs, using highly controlled production methods in environments where oxygen and water are completely removed, perovskite solar cells can now match the electricity generation of silicon solar cells. This is a remarkable achievement.

But cheap perovskite solar cells that do away with silicon have yet to be manufactured on a commercial scale. So what if these materials could be produced using the same sorts of processes we use for printing ordinary packaging?

My colleagues and I recently demonstrated that a roll of plastic film can be loaded into a printing press, and working perovskite solar cells emerge at the other end. However, it’s not quite as simple as pouring ink into your desktop printer.

For one thing, scientists have found that to achieve record efficiencies, the semiconductor and perovskite layers in this new form of solar cell must be extremely thin – between 50 and 500 nanometres (about 500 times smaller than a human hair).

Also, the inks used to print them had required highly toxic solvents. But, after many years of effort, we have now formulated inks without toxic solvents that are compatible with the slot-die coating process – an established industrial technique originally used for the production of photographic film.

How our solar cell works

The printed perovskite layer generates free electrons from the energy provided by light hitting it. The semiconductor then prevents the perovskite re-absorbing these electrons with a good power conversion efficiency (the ratio of optical power in to electrical power out).

One problem remained: how to extract the electrical charge. In the past, this had been achieved by heating gold in a vacuum until it evaporated, and catching the vapour on the perovskite solar cell to form electrodes.

We took a different approach, creating a carbon ink compatible with both the perovskite material and the slot-die coating process. The result is large volumes of flexible, rollable solar cells that come out of the printing press ready to generate power.

More work needed

Perovskite solar cells have demonstrated high performance in research labs, and have now been proven capable of making the leap to high-volume manufacturing. But the job is not quite done yet.

The 10% power conversion efficiency achieved by these rollable printed cells is useful, and higher than the first commercial silicon panels. But it lags behind the typical 17% conversion efficiency of domestic solar panels in use today.

We know there are further increases available by taking advantage of higher-performing perovskite chemistry.

There is an engineering challenge to overcome in order that high-volume, commercially produced perovskite solar panels can match the energy generation of silicon. Further improvements in the lifetime stability of perovskite solar cells are also required – through a combination of chemistry, device design, and other strategies such as protective coatings and laminated barrier films.

In short, research needs to focus on converting what’s happening in the labs into real-world devices. But the possibility of producing hundreds of thousands of square metres of flexible perovskite solar cells is now a step closer.

David Beynon, Senior Research Officer at the SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre, Swansea University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I’m senior correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari. Here’s what I’ve been following and what I’m watching out for in the days ahead.

The Big Issue

( RFE/RL ) – Russia successfully launched an Iranian satellite into space on August 9, in a move that has raised concerns in the West. U.S. officials fear that the satellite could be used by Moscow to boost its intelligence capabilities in Ukraine, which it invaded in February. There are also worries that the satellite will provide Iran “unprecedented capabilities” to monitor potential military targets in Israel, its archenemy, and other countries in the wider Middle East region.

Tehran has rejected those claims, saying Iran will have full control and operation over the satellite “from day one.” Iran has said the remote-sensing satellite will only be used for civilian purposes, including monitoring border areas, surveying water resources, and managing natural disasters.

Why It Matters: The satellite launch is the latest sign of the deepening ties between Iran and Russia. It came just weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran, where he and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged to work together against the West.

Both countries have been hit by Western sanctions and international isolation. Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s state space corporation Roskosmos, hailed the launch as an “important landmark” in cooperation between Moscow and Tehran. Iran’s Telecommunications Minister Issa Zarepour, who attended the launch in Kazakhstan, praised it as “historic” and “a turning point” in space cooperation between the countries.

The satellite launch has also put a spotlight on Iran’s space program. In recent years, Tehran has launched several satellites into low Earth orbit and announced plans to send astronauts into space. But Iran has also seen a succession of accidents and failed satellite launches in recent years.

John Krzyzaniak, a research analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said in June that Iranian satellites do not have advanced capabilities, but they represent “stepping stones to more sophisticated satellites that will be more useful and remain in orbit for longer periods.”

What’s Next: Russia’s successful launch of the Khayyam satellite, named after the 11th-century Persian poet and philosopher Omar Khayyam, could worsen tensions with the United States. Just last month, Washington claimed that Tehran was preparing to deliver hundreds of combat drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine.

“Russia deepening an alliance with Iran is something that the whole world should look at and see as a profound threat,” a State Department spokesperson was quoted as saying on August 9.

The United States has long expressed concerns over Iran’s space program, which has both a civilian and military component. The United States fears that Tehran could use the program to enhance its ballistic-missile capabilities.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2020 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

That is wrong, wrong, wrong.

The faster we put in solar panels and wind turbines, the more money we will save, to the tune of trillions of dollars. That is the conclusion of Oxford researchers on technological change.

Many writers on the infrastructural changes we need to make to fight the climate emergency have assumed that replacing old technology and infrastructure will cost a lot of money. This way of thinking imagines replacing coal plants or internal combustion automobiles with new, decarbonized infrastructure as like replacing concrete buildings with marble ones. They have therefore urged that we go slowly, so as to spread out the cost over decades without overburdening people living in any particular moment along the way.

There is another possibility, though. What if things like photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines are not like expensive marble, which you need gradually to quarry and slowly to bring in to replace cinder block walls in buildings? What if they are like computer chips compared to a phalanx of abacuses?

Moore’s law was put forward in 1965 by San Francisco-born engineer Gordon E. Moore, a founder of Intel. He said that the number of transistors per silicon chip doubles yearly. Actually, we have seen a doubling of computer chip capacity about every 18 months for the past 50 years. Moore’s Law has enabled computers to plummet in price while skyrocketing in computing power.

Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired, writes at his kk.org site that it is possible that Moore’s Law is not so much physical as social and economic, and it worked because the very assertion that silicon chip power would grow exponentially rather than serially gave permission to engineers and angel investors to try to make it so.

In that way, Moore’s Law would intersect with another well-known principle, Wright’s Law, put forward in 1936 by Theodore P. Wright on the basis of observations of the aviation industry. It predicts that the more we produce of a new technology and the more familiar we become with it, the more its costs fall. Wright found that for every doubling in the production of aircraft, the price fell 20 percent.

What if green technology such as solar panels is like silicon chips? Rebuilding all concrete buildings as marble ones is a serial activity, with the form of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 … etc. Improving computer chips in accordance with Moore’s Law is exponential, with the form of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024 . . . and so forth. You can see that getting to one million in the first series take 1 million steps. Just ballparking it, I’d say it only takes about 20 doublings to reach a million in the second series.

Oxford University’s Eric Beinhocker, J. Doyne Farmer, and Cameron Hepburn report at Bloomberg about a paper by Farmer and François Lafondade at Sciencedirect that makes exactly this astonishing claim.

In the paper, the authors point out,

“The first commercial nuclear power plant opened in 1956 and the first practical use of solar photovoltaics was as a power supply for the Vanguard I satellite in 1958. The cost of electricity generated by nuclear power is highly variable, but has generally increased by a factor of two or three during the period shown here. In contrast, a watt of solar photovoltaic capacity cost $256 in 1956 (Perlin, 1999) (about $1910 in 2013 dollars) vs. $0.82 in 2013, dropping in price by a factor of about 2330. Since 1980 photovoltaic modules have decreased in cost at an average rate of about 10% per year.”

The Bloomberg article points out that the solar panels’ 10% annual price drop is what one would expect if advances in this technology were following Moore’s Law.

In contrast, fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal and natural gas provide no similar cost savings or increased power over time. They note,

“Interestingly, fossil fuels don’t follow such cost improvement curves (despite receiving far more in subsidies — $447 billion worldwide for fossil fuels versus $128 billion for renewables, according to the latest figures). We’ve analyzed more than 140 years of data on oil, coal and natural gas and found that their inflation-adjusted costs are roughly the same as they were in the late 19th century,”

So here is the astounding conclusion of the authors: If we transition as rapidly as possible to wind and solar, we will actually save trillions of dollars. We’ll be dumping a technology with fixed costs and fixed yields, and moving to technologies that get 2000 times cheaper over half a century.

Not only has the cost per watt of photovoltaic solar technology fallen like a meteor, efficiency has also improved, if less rapidly.

This site at Lafayette University observes, “In 1955, Hoffman Electronics-Semiconductor Division introduced photovoltaic products with only a 2% efficiency, with an energy cost of $1,785/Watt (USD).” The efficiency of real-world panels now ranges up to 25%, and in laboratory settings 44% has been achieved. Residential solar now costs less than $3 per watt and falling.

Going big into solar in 2021 is like buying Apple stock in 1980 at $22 a share and then enjoying the ride for the next decades. (And this tidy profit at the stock market would just be an economic expression of the operation of Moore’s Law).

And if Wright’s Law operates on the new technology of the electric vehicle, as we manufacture more and more of them (Germany now has a million on the road), we could see dramatic price reductions. Again, the same downward price curve cannot be expected regarding gasoline vehicles.

—–

Bonus Video:

DW Planet A: “How solar energy got so cheap, and why it’s not everywhere (yet)”

For people who would like to learn more about Islam, The Conversation is publishing a series of articles, available on our website or as six emails delivered every other day, written by Senior Religion and Ethics Editor Kalpana Jain. Over the past few years she has commissioned dozens of articles on Islam written by academics. These articles draw from that archive and have been checked for accuracy by religion scholars.

In the previous installment of this series, you learned about the different Muslim sects and the interesting ways they mix in the United States. This article will take you through the historical contributions of Islam and its influence on other faiths across geographical regions.

Your understanding of Islam is perhaps incomplete without a deeper appreciation of its cultural and intellectual history. History books in the U.S. can give an incomplete picture about the richness of its past, so many students may fail to appreciate the importance of this history.

Islamic scholars contributed to early developments in astronomy, medicine and mathematics. Their work was crucial to Renaissance scientists who built on some of the existing scholarship.

For example, the 11th-century astronomer al-Qabisi, one in a line of famous Islamic astronomers, helped formulate a critique of the then-prevalent notion that the Earth was at the center of the universe. As scholar of Middle Eastern studies Stephennie Mulder writes, that model later informed the view of Nicholas Copernicus, a Renaissance astronomer.

Important works of mathematics were written by Islamic scholars, including substantial contributions to algebra and a commentary on the fourth-century B.C. Greek mathematician Euclid that was later translated into Latin. An early description of surgery to remove cataracts was written by Islamic ophthalmologists in the year 1010.

Many of these scholars were based in Mosul in modern-day Iraq, a city that was occupied by the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. Mosul was a key center on the Silk Road – a network of trade routes – which also contributed to its rich diversity of people and traditions. As Mulder notes, “The city was home to a diverse group of people: Arabs and Kurds, Yazidis, Jews and Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, Sufis and dozens of saints holy to many faiths.”

Among the Islamic State’s destruction of architectural sites in Mosul was the tomb of the Prophet Jonah, a figure revered by all three Abrahamic faiths. Jews venerate Jonah as a symbol of repentance. In the Islamic faith, Jonah, also known as Yūnus, is seen to be an exemplary model for human behavior. In the Christian faith, Jonah’s story appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Influence of Islam was seen in the cultural history of many countries. Scholar Kishwar Rizvi explains that in medieval Spain, for example, the troubadour poets who were known for their lyrical poetry “borrowed their lyrical beauty from Arabic.” Until the 15th century, as Rizvi says, Arabic was the courtly language of southern Spain.

The exchange between Islam and other Abrahamic faiths extended to architecture. The famous 12th-century Palatine Chapel in Sicily takes some of its architectural style from the Fatimids, the Shiite rulers of Egypt between the 10th and 12th centuries.

“Such exchanges were common, thanks to the mobility of people as well as ideas,” writes Rizvi.

Understanding the rich history of Islamic art can help counter many presumptions about Islam today. In explaining how different religious views were accommodated within Islam, scholar Ana Silkatcheva points to a 19th-century tile from Iran depicting a crucified Jesus surrounded by the Twelve Apostles.

“In Islamic understanding, Jesus was a prophet, granted the same respect as Muhammad, but did not die on the cross,” Silkatcheva said. “This is evidently a tile made for or by the Christian community in Persia under Islamic rule.”

Art history can be revealing to many Muslims as well. For most Muslims, the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is considered to be forbidden. However, Silkatcheva writes about a 17th-century manuscript folio that depicts the prophet, suggesting that visual depictions of the prophet were acceptable in the past.

Rizvi offers a reminder from the poetry of 13th-century Muslim mystic Rumi that sums up this belief in peaceful coexistence:

“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity.”

This article was reviewed for accuracy by Jessica Marglin, Associate Professor of Religion at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Fact: The Dutch painter Rembrandt collected miniature paintings from the Mughals, a Muslim dynasty that ruled the Indian subcontinent for over 300 years. Silks from the Safavid empire (the Iranian dynasty from the 16th to 18th century) were so popular that Polish kings had their coats of arms woven in Isfahan.
– From an article written by Kishwar Rizvi, Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University.

In the next issue: Why women wear the headscarf

You can read all six articles in this Understanding Islam series on TheConversation.com, or we can deliver them straight to your inbox if you sign up for our email newsletter course.

Articles from The Conversation in this edition:**

• What’s missing in the teaching of Islam

• On Yom Kippur, remembering Mosul’s rich and diverse past

• No god but God: A breathtaking exhibition bringing Islamic art out of the shadows

Further Reading and Resources:

• “The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi’is and the Architecture of Coexistence,” by Stephennie Mulder: Scholar Stephennie Mulder’s book on Islamic architecture goes beyond Islam’s sectarian history to reveal a past marked by cooperation and accommodation.

• “Close Encounters in Medieval Provence: Spain’s Role in the Birth of Troubadour Poetry,” by María Rosa Menocal.

• “Mathematics and Islamic Art,” by Lesley Jones: Jones’ journal articles explores Islamic mathematics’ influences in art.

• “How Islam changed medicine,” by Azeem Majeed, professor of primary care at Imperial College Faculty of Medicine in London.

Kalpana Jain, Senior Religion + Ethics Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Guillén is the Zandman Professor in International Management at the Wharton School of Penn and an expert on global market trends. This book has eight chapters, a conclusion, and a Postscript on the impact of COVID-19 on trends in 2030. This book acts as a roadmap to navigate the next decade, since today’s world will change by 2030. The world is changing so fast that folks are nervous about what the future has in store for all of us. One of the biggest changes by 2030 will be technological ones, such as 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnologies.

Technology will generate creative solutions but also create problems, e.g., as a result of autonomous vehicle technology about three million truck drivers may lose their jobs. Autonomous vehicles have a bright future since a computer can adapt to road and traffic conditions, and figure out a complex trip. A single robot in the manufacturing section can displace five to six workers. By 2030 there will be more robotic arms than human ones, more computers than human beings, and more sensors than eyes. Artificial intelligence (AI) can perform tasks that human brains do, such as make decisions, recognize speech, and utilize visual perception.

Today, it takes about a decade of higher education and years of training to become a first-rate surgeon. Yet in 2016, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) used its own intelligence, tools, and vision to stitch together the small intestine of a small pig. It did a better job than human surgeons who had the same task. The robot’s stitches were more consistent and less resistant to leaks than the sutures of the human surgeons. And an added bonus: robots are neither temperamental nor judgmental.

New 3D printers can create a three-dimensional figure or object by printing very thin sheets in sequence. They then stack them on top of each other to create a three-dimensional shape. By using only the exact amount of material needed to make a dental piece or human replacement tissue, waste is reduced. Less carbon will be put into the atmosphere as fewer goods are made with less material. The clincher is this: companies will need much less shipping as mini-factories and printer farms are constructed that are closer to customers. Companies are learning to manufacture items to real-time demand, instead of storing their supplies in warehouses since freight transportation makes up 25% of all carbon emissions in affluent nations.

Cities can use 3-D printed seawalls to counter flooding and storm surge. The company, Branch Technologies, uses Cellular Fabrication (C-FABTM), that is, industrial robots, complex algorithms, and freeform, extrusion technology that allows material to become solid in free space. This same company is perfecting a new construction product that’s stronger, lighter, faster on-site and with ten times greater design freedom using a waste-free process. This company built the largest 3-D structure in the world, viz., a bandshell at a park in Nashville. China uses 3-D printing to print entire homes that may aid in recovering from natural disasters like earthquakes and cyclones.

Nanotechnologies can go a long way in arresting climate change. The clothing industry accounts for circa eight % of total carbon emissions. Nanotechnologies can design particles as small as one billionth of an inch manufacturing cheaper, stronger, and more environmentally friendly materials that are programable, i.e., material endowed with the capability of changing their shape, conductivity, density, or optical properties in response to sensors. Researchers have discovered a material that tightens in cold weather to provide warmth and yet provides relief from heat in summer. We now have nanomedicine. We can deliver drugs to cancerous cells with enormous precision. Nanotechnologies can detect ovarian cancer when the disease is affecting one hundred cells. Nanorobots are able to be programmed to transport molecular payloads and cause on-site tumor blood supply blockages that can lead to tissue death and shrink the tumor.

Women in the US, Europe, and East Asia are having fewer children yet there’s a baby boom in Africa. Its population of 1.3 billion people will grow to 2 billion by 2038. One might surmise that Africa couldn’t survive such a growth in population, but that’s not the case. The landmass of Africa is humongous, i.e., about as big as India, China, Japan, the US plus Western and Eastern Europe combined. Will Africa be able to feed its increased population? The World Bank says that by 2030 Africa’s agriculture may well become a trillion-dollar sector, thus transforming the entire global economy.

Though today Africa imports food, its positioned to become an agricultural and industrial revolution. It must cultivate 500 million acres of land that’s about the size of Mexico, while greatly improving productivity by growing and processing a vegetable named cassava the third chief source of carbohydrates after rice and maize in the developing world. Over 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa use cassava for their daily dietary needs since it contains less sugar than wheat.

This is a remarkable book, one that I cannot do justice to in a short article. The author has certainly done his homework in writing this book, e.g., it contains 27 pages of notes that enlighten the reader. I have difficulty praising this book too highly.

To assess that question objectively in this unsettled moment, it’s necessary to examine on a day-to-day basis how the two contemporary superpowers handled the Covid-19 crisis, and ask the question: Who has proved better at combating the deadliest disease of modern times, President Donald Trump or President Xi Jinping? It’s chastening to note that whereas China under Xi has suppressed the latest coronavirus at the human cost of three lives per million population, the U.S. under Trump is still struggling to overpower it, having already sacrificed 145 of every million Americans.

In the afterglow of Trump’s December 16, 2019, touting of a partial trade deal with China (after a lengthy trade war), a Sino-American exchange took place. George Gao, director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC), spoke with his American counterpart, Robert Redfield, on January 3rd, alerting him to the arrival of an as-yet-unidentified, pneumonia-inducing virus in the city of Wuhan (news of which the Chinese government would for crucial days withhold domestically). Redfield then briefed Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar on that conversation.

Ever since, the trajectories of the policies followed by Beijing and Washington have diverged by 180 degrees. Mind you, the potential prize for the winner of the contest for killer of the super-virus is the World Leadership Trophy.

Attacked by a Virulent Virus, China Fights Back

China’s National Health Commission (NHC), which had dispatched a team of experts to Wuhan on December 31st, informed the World Health Organization (WHO) that cases of pneumonia of an unknown sort had been detected in that city, linked to human exposure at a 1,000-stall wholesale seafood market, selling fish and other animals, dead and alive. With that, the Chinese scientists faced two separate challenges: to isolate the pathogen causing the disease in order to set out its genome sequencing and to determine whether or not there was human-to-human transmission of the virus.

On January 3rd, the NHC centralized all testing related to the mysterious disease and, two days later, in conjunction with experts in infectious diseases caused by pathogens that jump from animals to humans, completed the sequencing of the genome of the virus. It became accessible worldwide that January 7th. And on January 10th and 11th, the WHO issued guidance notices to all its member states about collecting samples from any patients who might show symptoms of the disease, listing stringent precautions to avoid the risk of human-to-human transmission.

On January 14th, Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of the WHO’s emerging diseases unit, offered a mixed message on the situation. She told reporters that there had, so far, been only the most limited kinds of human transmission between family members in China. Nonetheless, she added, the possibility of wider human-to-human transmission should not be regarded as “surprising” given the similarity of the new virus to the ones in the earlier SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreaks. However, Reuters and China’s Xinhua News Agency also quoted her as saying that there had been only the most limited human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus so far, mainly among small clusters of family members and that “it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission.”

On January 16th, scientists at the German Center for Infection Research in Berlin developed a new laboratory test to detect the novel coronavirus. This offered the possibility of diagnosing suspected cases quickly. The WHO publicized it as a guideline for diagnostic detection. The leaders of many countries adopted it, but not President Trump who, in America First-style, demanded a test produced by U.S. scientists. Only on February 29th, however, would the Food and Drug Administration allow laboratories and hospitals to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process. That was four weeks after the WHO had started distributing its effective test globally.

On January 19th that China’s National Health Commission confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. On that day, it publicly confirmed the first cases of person-to-person transmission. Headed by a cabinet minister, the NHC classified the novel coronavirus as a category B infectious disease under the country’s 1989 Law on Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases (revised in 2004 and 2013). This law allows the upgrading of an infectious disease to category A subject to the decision of the cabinet. Under that classification, medical institutions are authorized to treat patients in isolation in designated places and take necessary preventive measures to discover and deal with their close contacts.

On January 20th, after chairing a cabinet meeting, Premier Li Keqiang first spoke of the necessity of controlling a coronavirus epidemic, demanding that all Communist Party and government units address the situation. While endorsing Li’s call, President Xi Jinping stressed “the importance of informing the public to safeguard social stability.” As one high-level Communist Party committee typically stated in a posting on WeChat, “Whoever deliberately delays or conceals reporting for the sake of their own interests will be forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame.”

All this happened on the eve of the week-long Chinese New Year holiday, a time when hundreds of millions of people return to their homes for celebrations. On January 22nd, three days before the New Year, the authorities suspended all rail and air links out of Wuhan.

The next day, the central government imposed a complete lockdown on that bustling city of 11 million and other large urban centers in the province of Hubei. Residents were forbidden to leave their homes, while food and other supplies were to be delivered by neighborhood committees. This set a precedent for similar measures in other cities, as in the coming weeks many areas across China imposed such “closed management” situations on communities. Up to 760 million people were subjected to travel curbs of one sort or another, while the economy was reduced to 40%-50% of its normal capacity.

During a meeting with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Beijing on January 29th, President Xi assured him that he had personally overseen and directed the response to the viral outbreak and the prevention and control measures that went with it. On January 30th, with the novel coronavirus having spread to 17 countries including the United States, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a “global health emergency.” On February 11th, it labeled the disease caused by the latest coronavirus, which can culminate in death-inducing pneumonia, Covid-19.

Meanwhile, in Trumpland…

On January 29th, President Trump officially inaugurated a task force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to monitor, contain, and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus while also keeping Americans informed on the matter.

Azar and the Centers for Disease Control Prevention’s Robert Redfield had already been involved in protecting Americans from the deadly virus. On January 7th, Redfield had established the CDC’s Covid-19 Incident Management System and, on the 21st, he activated its emergency response structure. On that very day, the first lab-confirmed coronavirus case was reported in Olympia, Washington. (Earlier ones would later be detected.) The president noted the news with a tweet: “It’s one person coming in from China and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

Inside the White House, Trump’s national trade adviser, Peter Navarro addressed a warning memo to the National Security Council stating that the present “lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” He estimated that such a pandemic could kill half-a-million people and deliver a $5.7 trillion hit to the economy.

Two days later, in response to these developments, all Trump did was ban the arrival of non-US citizens who had recently traveled to China. From then on, he repeatedly touted this as evidence that he had acted early. Azar’s plan to set up surveillance in five cities at the cost of $100 million fell through when, on February 21st, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that problems with the kits to test for Covid-19 were still unresolved.

In the absence of meaningful testing, the number of cases in the U.S. looked small. “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted on the 24th. “CDC & World Health [Organization] have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” He ignored Navarro’s memo of the previous day and its warning that “there is an increasing probability of a full-blown Covid-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”

Instead, on February 25th, at a news conference in New Delhi during his trip to India, the president haughtily claimed that a vaccine for Covid-19 would soon be available. “Now they have it, they have studied it, they know very much, in fact, we’re very close to a vaccine,” he said confidently.

That same day, in a CDC briefing in Washington, Nancy Messonnier described the situation this way: “Ultimately, we expect we will see [the infected] community spread in this country… [and] disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need to start thinking about now.” That led to a staggering 1,031 point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which infuriated Trump. He promptly urged Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, to go on television and preach confidence. Accordingly, Kudlow told CNBC, “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”

On his return to Washington on February 26th, Trump replaced Azar as the head of the coronavirus task force with Vice President Mike Pence, and charged him with disseminating positive messages in order to steady a jittery stock market. The next day, the grievance-laden president complained that the media were doing all they could “to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible.”

Meanwhile, Back in the Middle Kingdom

On February 10th, Chinese President Xi visited a hospital in Beijing where he held a video call with health workers in Wuhan. Coverage of it and his temperature being taken by a doctor filled the front page of the official newspaper, the People’s Daily. By then, Communist Party chiefs in Wuhan and Hubei province had been “replaced” because of their poor initial response to the coronavirus.

In Wuhan, an extra 60,000 hospital beds for Covid-19 patients were created within a month by converting 16 exhibition halls and sports venues into field hospitals and constructing two brand new hospitals as well. On February 23rd, Xi teleconferenced with 170,000 local officials, describing the pandemic as the hardest public-health emergency to contain since the founding of the People’s Republic. He noted that the situation remained grim and complex, while Hubei Province and significant parts of the rest of the country (as well as the economy) had been shut down.

The highest priority was given to the production of personal protective equipment. According to an official March 6th press briefing, production of protective clothing had jumped from less than 20,000 pieces daily to 500,000 pieces daily. The output of specialist N95 masks shot up eightfold to 1.6 million and ordinary masks totaled 100 million.

During a trip to Wuhan four days later, Xi praised front-line medical workers, military officers, soldiers, community workers, police officers, officials, and volunteers fighting the pandemic, as well as patients and residents in the locked-down city. The epidemic had by then caused 3,000 deaths. On March 9th, however, daily new cases in Wuhan had already dropped to 19 from thousands a day a month earlier. All the makeshift hospitals were closed. Nonetheless, Xi warned that prevention-and-control work required constant vigilance.

When 114 countries reported coronavirus cases to the World Health Organization on March 11th, it declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic.

By mid-March, the Chinese government and the Jack Ma Foundation, part of the giant corporate conglomerate Alibaba Group, had sent doctors and medical supplies to Belgium, Cambodia, France, Iran, Iraq, Italy, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, and the United States. The foundation announced that it would ship “20,000 testing kits, 100,000 masks and 1,000 protective suits and face shields” to every country in Africa and added that Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, would “take the lead in managing the logistics and distribution of these supplies to other African countries.”

Of the 89 countries that, by March 26th, had received emergency assistance from China to fight the pandemic, 28 were in Asia, 16 in Europe, 26 in Africa, nine in the Americas, and 10 in the South Pacific. Such medical supplies mainly included testing kits, masks, protective suits, thermometer guns, and ventilators. China also invited officials and experts from more than 100 countries to a video conference on Covid-19, while President Xi conducted 26 telephone conversations with 22 foreign leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, Spanish King Felipe VI, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and Donald Trump.

Trump Wakes Up

On March 13th, President Trump declared a national emergency, pledging to dramatically speed up coronavirus testing (which he disastrously failed to do). By then, he had chalked up a remarkable series of false claims and outright lies about the fast-spreading disease. Typically, on a visit to CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 6th, he had boasted of his “natural ability” to understand the subject of epidemiology.

On March 13th, he falsely announced that a Google website was being developed to help people find places to get Covid-19 tests, something Google’s officials turned out to know nothing about. The next day, he lined up executives from Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Roche Diagnostics, insisting that they would help expedite testing to stop the quick-spreading virus. In fact, little happened and the nation began to shut down. Public schools closed, sports leagues postponed or cut off their seasons, people began working from home in large numbers (as others by the millions simply lost their jobs), and supplies of hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and toilet paper disappeared from store shelves. A month on, very few of the president’s promises had materialized, while the disease had spread dramatically and deaths had begun to soar.

Asked about the shortage of testing kits and sites, which has left America lagging far behind South Korea and other countries in dealing with the still-spreading virus, Trump couldn’t have been clearer. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said. And yet, locked into his “Make America Great Again” bubble, until March 6th he blocked an offer from the Jack Ma Foundation to send 500,000 testing kits and one million masks to the U.S. to be distributed by the CDC.

By heeding the WHO’s battle cry of “test, test, test,” South Korea had managed to avoid the kinds of lockdowns implemented by China, many Western European countries, and some American cities. In a desperate phone call to President Moon Jae-in on March 24th, Trump begged him to rush test kits to the United States. In response, Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the South Korean equivalent of the CDC, agreed, but only at a level that would not diminish his own country’s testing capacity.

Soon after the arrival of 1,000 Chinese ventilators at John F. Kennedy International Airport on April 4th, much to the relief of a grateful Governor Andrew Cuomo, a tweet from Trump read, “USA STRONG!” His boast, however, sounded hollow, given the grim news that, between February 12th and March 11th, the Dow Jones index had dropped around 8,000 points from its historic peak, as national unemployment tripled from a low of 3.5% (with more to come).

To counter this, on April 9th, the Federal Reserve released business lending and other programs worth $2.3 trillion to steady a fast-sinking economy. It had already injected $500 billion dollars into the financial system in March, with plans for a further $1.5 trillion to come.

By March 27th, as the U.S. had gained the global status of number one in coronavirus cases, the president also signed into law the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed almost unanimously by Congress, to rush federal assistance to workers and businesses. It included the payment of $1,200 to most taxpayers; enhanced unemployment benefits; a $500 billion lending program for large companies, cities, and states; and a $367 billion fund for small businesses.

Despite all this, the country’s gross domestic product is expected to fall by at least 10.8% in the second quarter of 2020. China’s GDP contraction of 6.8% in the first quarter of the year was a historic drop. However, at 5.9%, the jobless rate in urban areas in March 2020 was down by 0.3% from the previous month.

Passing on the World Leadership Trophy?

The question that many experts on geopolitics are now pondering is this: Have their responses to Covid-19 shifted the balance of power between China and the U.S. in a way that will matter in a post-coronavirus world? Watching the chaos of Trump’s daily press conferences and his administration’s failure to stop the virus effectively proved an alarming reminder that rational people can plan for anything — except an irrational American president. After all, under his watch 746,459 Americans had contracted Covid-19, and 39,651 had died by mid-April. The comparable figures for China were 82,747 cases and 4,632 deaths.

Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, recently offered a pertinent historical parallel to consider. She cited the 1956 Suez crisis — Britain’s unsuccessful, if conspiratorial, alliance with France and Israel to militarily topple the nationalist regime of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser. It is now considered the sunset moment for Britain’s imperial power. In the present context, she speculated that the Covid-19 pandemic may prove to be a “Suez moment” for the United States.

Ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health experts, President Trump threatens to disastrously extend his coronavirus chronology from hell into an increasingly painful future by “reopening” the country too soon. By so doing, he will only accelerate the day when the World Leadership Trophy, held by America since 1946, is handed to the People’s Republic of China.

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World among many other books. His latest book is Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy (Oxford University Press).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Dilip Hiro

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

The hardest decisions of my career’ – Angela Merkel addresses German Parliament | DW News