Humans VERSUS Artificial Intelligence

“What’s the core competence of human beings?” Fareed Zakaria’s brutally simple question to OpenAI boss Sam Altman boiled down an hour-long discussion over the future of technology to its essence: in a world racing to develop the first artificial general intelligence, what does humanity still excel at when a machine comes along that is effectively smarter in every way?

No one on the World Economic Forum’s panel, Altman included, had a convincing answer for the CNN journalist moderating the panel in Davos on Thursday.

“I admit it does feel different this time. General purpose cognition feels so close to what we all treasure about humanity that it does feel different,” conceded the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, before venturing into a prediction.

“We [humans] will make decisions about what should happen in the world,” said Altman.  READ MORE...

CHINA Leading EV Exporter GLOBALLY

There's a new king of the global auto market. The global shift to electric cars, signified by companies like Tesla and BYD, has helped China's carmakers potentially reach two important milestones, unseating once-dominant players and unnerving legacy automakers in Europe, Japan and the U.S.

Chinese carmakers exported 3.83 million passenger cars in 2023, a 62% increase from the year before, the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) estimated during a press conference on Tuesday. That would mark the first time its exports have surpassed those of Japan—Japanese carmakers exported 3.5 million cars between January and November, according to Reuters. The CPCA estimated that 5.26 million vehicles in total were exported from China, compared to 4.3 million from Japan.

Chinese brands also outsold foreign carmakers inside China, taking 52% of the domestic market, up 4.6 percentage points from the year before.     READ MORE...

China to Build Humanoid Robots by 2025

The country aims to produce its first humanoid robots by 2025, according to a blueprint laid out by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The government will nurture more young companies focused on the field, set industry standards, develop talent and deepen international cooperation.

Shares of Chinese robotics companies surged after the policy guidance, which adds another dimension to a technological race between the world’s two biggest economies in chips and hardware. US companies such as Tesla Inc. and Boston Dynamics have so far enjoyed an edge in the technology.  READ MORE...

World's Fastest Growing Cities

In this article, we will be taking a look at the 15 fastest growing cities in the world economically. If you want to skip our detailed analysis of emerging economies you can move directly to the 5 Fastest Growing Cities in the World Economically.

According to a report by the International Monetary Fund, the global growth rate is expected to fall to 3% in 2023 and 2024 from an expected 3.5% in 2022. The report suggests that rising inflation rates have contributed to the current state of the global economy. 

As per the current data, the global headline inflation rate is expected to fall from 6.8% in 2023 to 5.2% in 2024. Moreover, world trade growth is expected to decline from 5.2% in 2022 to 2.0% in 2023.

However, the future of the global economy is not as bleak as it may seem right now. The report suggests that 2024 may be slightly better for the world. The world trade rate is expected to rise to 3.7% in 2024. 

Emerging economies are expected to experience significant growth by the end of 2023 and 2024, at 4.0% and 4.1%, respectively. Particularly, emerging economies in Asia are expected to experience the highest growth globally and global growth is on track to rise to 5.3% in 2023 and 5.0% in 2024.

BRICS May Drive Future Economic Growth
Brazil, Russia, India, and China first grouped to form BRIC in 2006. In 2011, South Africa joined the group, which led the cluster to be renamed to the BRICS. These economies were grouped as expectations of high economic growth dominated the prospects for each country. 

You can take a look at some countries that are expected to experience significant economic growth.

On January 1 2024, BRICS is set to welcome new members formally. These include Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. On August 23, Forbes reported how the new arrangement between the BRICS countries could be a political move to attain energy dominance. 

As per the report, the arrangement immensely benefits China. Saudi Arabia, a major oil supplier to China, will benefit the country by the Riyadh-Teheran détente. The new treaty between Iran and Saudia Arabia promises trade and friendship between the two countries.  READ MORE...

Two Legged Robots with AI Brains

When Fourier Intelligence unveiled its lanky, jet-black humanoid robot GR-1 at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai in July, it instantly stole the show.

While the global technology community has been fixated on artificial intelligence (AI) software since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November, the Chinese-made GR-1 - said to be capable of walking on two legs at a speed of 5km an hour while carrying a 50kg load - reminded people of the potential of bipedal robots, which are being pursued by global companies from Tesla to Xiaomi.

For Fourier, a Shanghai-based start-up, GR-1 was an unlikely triumph.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

"It is an unprecedented attempt by us - we barely had any reference when it came to the technology," Alex Gu, founder and chief executive of Fourier, said in a recent interview with the South China Morning Post in the Chinese financial capital.

Fourier's focus has not always been on humanoid robots. Named after the 19th-century French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier, the company was originally set up in 2015 in Shanghai's tech hub Zhangjiang with the aim of developing rehabilitation robotics.

The firm's current products include a smart exercise bike, a wireless robotic glove and a series of computer-guided contraptions that help users restore movement in their arms and legs.

But just like many of his peers, 42-year-old Gu, a mechanical engineering graduate from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, had long dreamed about creating his own humanoid robot.  READ MORE...

THINGS Poor People WASTE Their Money On

Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the world, has a reputation for his simple yet profound financial wisdom.

POOR PEOPLE WASTE THEIR MONEY ON THE FOLLOWING:

Neglecting Personal Development
According to Buffett, the best investment one can make is in oneself. Enhancing skills and education can boost earning potential significantly. Knowledge and abilities are assets that no one can take away from you.

Relying on Credit Cards
Credit cards can be convenient, but high interest rates can quickly overshadow any benefits if you don’t pay the full balance monthly. Buffett advises against needless spending that could lead to credit card debt.

Frequenting Bars and Pubs
Spending on social activities like drinking at bars can add up. Opting for more affordable social gatherings, like home get-togethers, can help save significantly.

Chasing the Latest Technology
New gadgets may be tempting, but often, last year’s model serves just as well. Buffett himself has a history of sticking to functional rather than flashy tech. It’s important to assess if the latest upgrades genuinely provide added value for the price.

Overspending on Clothes
Buffett, along with other billionaires, leans towards simplicity in his wardrobe. Choosing classic, durable clothes over flashy, expensive brands can result in significant savings.

Buying New Cars
Cars are notorious for their rapid depreciation. Buffett recommends buying pre-owned cars and holding onto them for as long as they’re reliable, instead of falling for the allure of the new models.

Unused Gym Memberships
Buffett promotes an active lifestyle but cautions against unused gym memberships. Free or low-cost fitness routines can be just as effective if regularly practiced.

Unnecessary Subscription Services
Subscription services, if not carefully monitored, can become a financial drain. Review these regularly and cancel those that don’t provide value.

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Reverse Aging

Harvard researchers found a “chemical cocktail” that helped reverse aging in mice within a week by rejuvenating old cells within muscles, tissues, and some organs.

Aging and longevity expert David Sinclair, who is a researcher in the department of genetics and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School, announced the findings on Twitter.

The results, published in the journal Aging this month, underscore aging as a process that can be reversed versus something inevitable. It adds to the growing interest in aging medicine, as people spend upwards of $100,000 per year at longevity clinics in the quest for the fountain of youth. CEO Bryan Johnson is known for his $2-million-a-year reverse-aging protocol.

“We’ve previously shown age reversal is possible using gene therapy to turn on embryonic genes,” Sinclair tweeted in a thread with over 1 million engagements. “Now we show it’s possible with chemical cocktails, a step towards affordable whole-body rejuvenation.”

In research over the course of three years, Sinclair and his team at Harvard observed mice taking six “chemical cocktails” that can reverse key hallmarks of aging by rejuvenating senescent or older, deteriorating cells “without erasing cellular identity,” according to the study.  READ MORE...

Finding Unexpected Galaxies

The James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding galaxies that shouldn’t exist, a scientist has warned.

Six of the earliest and most massive galaxies that Nasa’s breakthrough telescope has seen so far appear to be bigger and more mature than they should be given where they are in the universe, researchers have warned.

The new findings build on previous research where scientists reported that despite coming from the very beginnings of the universe, the galaxies were as mature as our own Milky Way.

Now a new paper has appeared to confirm those findings, by “stress testing” the galaxies to better understand how they formed.

It suggests that, if scientists have not made a mistake, we may be missing some fundamental information about the universe.

“If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory,” said Mike Boylan-Kolchin, from the University.of Texas at Austin, and the author of a new paper examining the unsual galaxies. “We’ll require something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology. One of the most extreme possibilities is that the universe was expanding faster shortly after the Big Bang than we predict, which might require new forces and particles.”

Professor Boylan-Kolchin’s paper, ‘Stress testing ΛCDM with high-redshift galaxy candidates’, has been published in Nature Astronomy this week.

It suggests that the information from the JWST proposes a profound dilemma for scientists. The data indicates that there mighttbe somehitn wrong with the dark energy and cold dark matter paradigm, or ΛCDM, that has been guiding cosmology for decades.

Usually, galaxies convert around 10 per cent of their gas into stars. But the newly discovered galaxies would have to be converting almost the entirety of it into stars.

That is theoretically possible. But it is a departure from what scientists would ever have expected.  READ MORE...

Gas or Electric?

 FILE - A Tesla electric vehicle, left, sits in a charging station at a dealership, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, in Dedham, Mass. Shares of Tesla and Twitter have tumbled this week as investors deal with the fallout and potential legal issues surrounding Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his $44 billion bid to buy the social media platform. Of the two, Musk's electric vehicle company has fared worse, with its stock down almost 16% so far this week to $728. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

Hooray for electric vehicles. Someday, they’re going to help slash carbon emissions and get global warming under control.

Getting there, however, is not likely to be an effortless glide on gleaming blacktop. This is going to be a bumpy road, and the faster we go, the bumpier it’s going to get. Get ready to surround yourself with airbags. And get a helmet, maybe.


The Biden administration plans to tighten car-pollution standards in a way that's meant to dramatically speed the adoption of electric vehicles, or EVs. On April 12, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed new rules that would cut the allowable pollution from cars by more than half by 2032. 

The amount of pollution a car produces is directly related to the amount of fuel it burns. Since there's no way to boost the fuel efficiency of gas-powered cars by that much, the new rules will effectively force automakers to build way more EVs, and way fewer gas-powered cars, in order to comply.


The goal is laudable. The implementation, however, could be a multi-car pileup. The Biden administration is basically proposing the forced adoption of new technology on a scale unprecedented in the auto industry. The government has been tightening fuel-economy standards since the 1970s, but that has largely been a gradual process. Even then, unintended consequences have caused unforeseen problems.  READ MORE...

Another Great Depression On Its Way

‘The set-up will be more like 1929’: Cathie Wood just warned of another ‘Great Depression’ if the Fed keeps ignoring these signals — here are 3 safe haven sectors for proven protection

The U.S. Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates aggressively in an effort to bring inflation under control. According to Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood, this could have serious consequences.

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Wood compares the current situation to events that led up to the Great Depression.

“The Fed raised rates in 1929 to squelch financial speculation and then, in 1930, Congress passed Smoot-Hawley, putting 50%+ tariffs on more than 20,000 goods and pushing the global economy into the Great Depression,” Wood says. “If the Fed does not pivot, the set-up will be more like 1929.”

The super investor points out that the U.S. central bank is “ignoring deflationary signals.” At the same time, she warns that the Chips Act “could harm trade perhaps more than we understand.”

Of course, not all assets are created equal. Some — like the three listed below — might be able to perform well even if the Fed doesn’t soften its hawkish stance.

Real estate
It may seem counterintuitive to have real estate on this list. When the Fed raises its benchmark interest rates, mortgage rates tend to go up as well, so shouldn’t that be bad for the real estate market?  READ MORE...

Retiring on $2,300 each Month

Retirement is a time of frugality for many, since other than Social Security and pension payments, many folks don't have much money coming in. If you're not rooted to a specific location, you are free to move to where the living comes cheaply, like the 10 small towns on this list.

For this study, GOBankingRates considered small towns with populations of less than 30,000 where you can retire on a budget of $2,300 or less, using data from ApartmentList June 2022. 

We also used Sperling's Best to find the cost of living index for every city on the list and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2020 Consumer Expenditure Survey. 

We then added monthly housing, grocery and healthcare costs together to find where a person 65 and older could get by on the $2,300 budget.

Equally important was a city's livability score -- the cities on this list had to have a score of 65 or higher as sourced from AreaVibes. When all was said and done, three states dominated the list.   READ MORE...

Home Depot Attacks Biden Economics

Home Depot co-founder and billionaire businessman Bernie Marcus isn't sure he would be able to create the home improvement chain today if he tried given onerous regulations on small businesses and a challenging economic backdrop.

"I don't think so," Marcus — a well-known proponent of free market capitalism and small businesses — said on a new edition of Yahoo Finance Presents. "I think if we had the regulations that we have today, Home Depot would be a chain of 12 stores. I just don't think we could have grown."

Marcus also had some choice words for politicians, the Biden administration, and notably the occupier of the Oval Office.

"Most of the people in Washington never ran a business," added Marcus, who is also the new author of Kick Up Some Dust: Lessons on Thinking Big, Giving Back, and Doing It Yourself. "You have a president that never worked a day in his life — never worked a day in his life. What the hell does he know about economics? But he sure spouts about it a lot."  READ MORE...

Russia's Economy is Withering

Russia's isolation from the west is a disaster for the long-term health of its economy, experts told Insider.

Trade isolation limits what Russia can import, making production more expensive.

Russia's situation will also greatly decrease its status as an energy superpower.

Russia's resilience in the face of sanctions surprised experts in the early months of the war in Ukraine, but there are growing signs that deepening isolation will result in a withered economy for years to come, and a greatly diminished standing as an energy superpower.

Since absorbing the early blows of western sanctions, Russia has largely retaliated by shutting out the west, trading exclusively with "friendly" countries, and shoring up partnerships with nations that can stomach doing business with a pariah state.  READ MORE...

Our Government Spending

In 2021, the government spent $6.82 trillion.

Like households, the federal government must live within the confines of a budget. However, those confines are much, much larger than the spending limits of the average household — or any household, for that matter.

How large? The federal government is projected to spend $5.7 trillion in 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If you’re wondering where that money comes from and where it goes, here’s what you need to know about the federal budget and how it impacts you.
NOTE: Our government spent $1.1 Trillion than expected...

How the Federal Budget Process Works
If you think staying on top of your household budget is tedious, consider the process the federal government must go through each year. Actually, the process takes more than a year. The U.S. government doesn’t budget for the calendar year starting on Jan. 1 but rather a fiscal year starting on Oct. 1 and going through Sept. 30 of the following year. The process for creating the budget begins a year and a half before the fiscal year begins.

Step 1: Government agencies start compiling their spending proposals in the spring (1 1/2 years before the fiscal year begins) to submit to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Step 2: Using the agencies’ request, the OMB and president create a budget request that typically is submitted to Congress by the first Monday in February.

Step 3: The House of Representatives and Senate budget committees draft budget resolutions. Then a House-Senate conference committee resolves the differences between the two resolutions to create one budget resolution that both the House and Senate are supposed to approve by April 15.   READ MORE...

In 2021, the federal government collected $4.05 trillion in revenue.
In 2021, the federal government spent $6.82 trillion.

Deficit: ($2.77) trillion

SOURCE:  Datalab

COVID PANDEMIC
The U.S. government spent at least $5.2 trillion to combat the covid-19 crisis. It stands as one of the most expensive, ambitious experiments in U.S. history. And it succeeded.

A final phase of that assistance could begin this week, when the Treasury Department starts a $110 billion program of child tax credit payments for millions of Americans. Those benefits are set to run through the end of the year.

But even that program will run out, assuming it is not renewed. And policymakers will be undertaking an equally uncertain experiment by letting most other covid-19 relief aid run its course. Businesses and households that were able to navigate the coronavirus pandemic with large levels of government aid will soon test their ability to forge ahead on their own.

Previous attempts to let pandemic-related benefits expire were met with last-minute extensions, as economic updates remained dismal and hardship remained prominent. But the White House appears ready to let the training wheels come off this year as positive indicators pile up.  READ MORE...

Live Without Working

Almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job, and they aren’t looking for one either. One-third of all working-age men. That’s almost 30 million people!

How do they live? What are they doing for money? To me, this is one of the great mysteries of our time.

I’m certainly not the first person to make note of this shocking statistic. You’ve heard people bemoaning this "labor participation rate," which is simply the number of working-age men (usually counted as ages 16 to 64) who are working or are seeking work, as a percentage of the overall labor force.

It’s true that the pandemic, which of course produced a number of factors that made working more difficult never mind dangerous, pushed the labor participation rate to a record low. 

But the fact that millions of American males have not been working precedes COVID-19 by decades. In fact, the participation rate for men peaked at 87.4% in October 1949 and has been dropping steadily ever since. It now stands at 67.7%.  READ MORE