Categories
Economics Technology

Is the future of food we eat is still a mystery ?

After celebrating the new year, I decided to give my wife a break and hence devour in one of her favourite restaurants. We went to a Japanese restaurant and ordered grilled meat Yakiniku, one of the full-fledged Japanese steak. When I asked the manager about the quality of the meat used in the steak, he conveyed to us that the restaurant uses meat only from sustainable sources. I smiled at him and started to think what would define the sustainability of food consumption, especially meat. I started to wonder how the food platter will look 20 years from now? In the modern era of culinary laboratories such as El Buli and fine dining chefs from Michelin’s, where we refine the science of gastronomy, should we be a little more sensitive about the methods of sustainable agriculture?

Let’s explore how as a human race, we have mastered the techniques of the production and consumption of food. If we take the case of arable land,  one-third of such land is used for agriculture and 70% of that land is used for growing only meat. Is this an efficient way to harness the productivity of nature? On the consumption side, we are doing a commendable job. The world’s population is predicted to hit 9Bn by 2050 and the food demand is expected to increase at least by 60% for cereals and 85% for meat (according to World Bank). How would we satiate this enormous appetite for food?

The post-world war agricultural development in developed countries and green revolution (not so sure whether we should call it a red revolution or green revolution), which encouraged the insensitive use of fertilisers and pesticides in agriculture, have contributed one-third of freshwater pollution with elements such as phosphorus and nitrogen. The insensitive usage of hybrid and GM crops has extinguished the local varieties resulting in soil degradation and sky rocketed sales for the Monsantoes and the Potashcorps of the world. The highly acclaimed “positive effects” of these changes are levelling off in terms of production and pests are getting increasingly resistant to disease. Taking into account the current production rates, our current agricultural output will not meet the projected demand of the world.

Moreover, it would be an amazing fact to note that around 50% of the antibiotics are used in the cultivation of crops and rearing of livestock, not on humans for which they were intended for. By the way, these antibiotics are not being used to fight diseases that spread among animals but to increase their weight, ensuring higher meat output. Interesting paradox !!!

Water stress and desertification that have been the results of global warming are reducing the amount of arable land available every year. Dramatic changes in the consumption patterns of protein rich food in emerging economies such as China and India are going to catalyse the slaughter of livestock day by day. Another interesting anomaly to note is that 20% of food produced or harvested is lost owing to insufficient processing, storage and transport. To give a perspective, every day around 4.4 million apples, 5.1 million potatoes, 2.8 million tomatoes and 1.6 million bananas are thrown as waste. This is not just a waste of produce, but also is a loss of the factors of production.

So how would future generations address these problems? It would be interesting when our kids get us bugs for a protein rich diet. Are we ready to accept the bugs instead of beef?

Even though Creative ideas like Lab-grown meat, 3D printed food on request and the meal in a pill are still in the labs with exorbitantly expensive bills, such technologies will be the way forward for coming generations.  The concoction of algae and living tissue from a livestock currently brews in a sugar scaffolding at a cost of US$32500 to make a piece of burger sized meat. Can the brew be a little cheaper on a larger scale? Something yet to be seen.

But another alternative that can be seen in future could be vertical farming. When the technology becomes more efficient, the current industrial and technology districts may alter it’s size and shape to semi-agricultural factories producing year round produce or carniculture through indoor farming. Even though we haven’t been able to perfect the formula for baby milk since last 200 years, we would be forced to perfect the formula for a meal in the pill if that could partly solve the instant food problem for the rich.

What would be the economic impact of these technologies?

The current consumption of meat is over 200 pounds per person per year in US. (In India, it is just around 6 pounds). It is estimated that around 200 gallons of water are consumed in the process of making a single pound of beef and around half of it is consumed in the process of making poultry. If there is a shift of the Non-vegans in developed economies to any of the alternate sources of protein, the process will have a huge impact on the economics of natural production of food.

If we consider the alternative to eating “cold-blooded bugs”, a change synonymous to the shift of our generation from incandescent bulbs to LEDs, the future food platter would be more sustainable and nutritious. The process of manufacturing bugs consumes so less energy and a lot less land considering the factors of production for other sources of food.

May future generations consider options such as having bugs instead of beef and a deeply learned computer controlled vertical farming, that reduce water usage through hydroponics, thus reducing greenhouse gases.

Hail the kids who would decide that for us !!

Categories
Fintech Technology

What is so common between a community of ants and a bitcoin ?

Over the weekend, I visited one of my friend’s home. I knew that the guy had some weird hobbies, but I never expected to see a living ant colony – a formicarium in his bedroom. A little curious I started to read on how ants colonise a locality and how we can measure the brain power of these little creatures?

An ant has only 250,000 brain cells. They use these connections so efficiently that they build complex nests and create rudimentary agriculture and public health systems. As far as humans are concerned at the age of 5, a human baby has over 1000 trillion neural connections. Over time, it refines itself and transforms the number of neural connections to just over 100 trillion just one tenth of the original quantum. The transformation of these neural connections is the basis of human intelligence.

What does that result in? Intelligence helps us to develop a social network. Have we exploited the power of our social networks yet? I would say we haven’t. Do we trust someone whom we meet on the internet or a social network? I would say considering a few exceptions (that often results in marriages), we do not. But the evolution of super-intelligence and the distributive ledger technologies will change the finance industry works in a few years.

When Satoshi Nakamura in 2008, introduced the concept of the blockchain technology and the corresponding distributive network, it was the personification of Sigmund Freud’s comment about the origin of civilisation – “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.” Here is the era of Super-intelligent block chains – Intelligence built by the intelligent to make decisions. This technology is currently a baby, born with unlimited possibilities to transform the way the business is done. The refinement of this intelligence will be a unicorn in the financial technology space.

I am not a programmer and I do not know how to code. I am a banker who used to run advisory portfolios for clients. I came across the term of blockchain technology, distributive ledger and bitcoin around 4 years back.  These technologies are synonymous to open source payment platforms unlike the closely guarded platforms of the banks and payment institutions. If one look at the evolution of the Blockchain technology – bitcoin, it is evolving just like the internet. There were initial comments about the internet that it is of no good other than to distribute porn. But the transformation that the internet brought to our lives is incomparable to any previous technologies.

So how does this work? I will give you an analogy for the block chain. Assume that you have a cake to be distributed among friends. In the old school, you give it to a friend and he may take a fair chunk of cake to get it distributed evenly. In the blockchain concept, you hire butlers. The butlers do not charge a chunk cake and since they are wearing the butler’s gloves, if they eat, you can see that on their gloves. The butler is rewarded if s/he distributes the cake in a fair manner and it is just a small piece of cake, unlike what your friend would take. Such butlers are called miners, a very funny word though in the block chain terminology.

When VISA processes around 18 billion dollar transactions a day, bitcoin, in its infancy, is processes around half a billion dollar transactions daily. But VISA charges around 3% for such transactions. Global remittances move around 800 billion dollars through the payment network and such establishments charge around 10% commission. The revolution of blockchain would trim such fat to less than 1%. Goldman Sachs has estimated the savings that blockchain technologies would bring – It is around a whopping 200 billion dollars.

So what are we expecting out of block chains?

Categories
Ethics Technology

Are we getting to the final frontier of science?

After the defeat of Lee Sedol by the AlphaGo, I have started losing sleep on the thoughts of the evolution of machine intelligence. I don’t think anybody should, but let us see whether the news is worth pondering.

The game Go is from China. It is a simple game with black and white stones on the board in which the players try to capture the opponent’s stones or surround empty space to make points of territory. Though the rules are simple, it is jaw-droppingly complex. As per the mathematicians, there are more positions in Go that there are atoms in the universe. Did you get the number? If not it is googol times complex than chess. Still, you did not get it, it is defined as 1 followed by 100 zeroes.

This game has been considered the most challenging classical games for artificial intelligence owing to the enormous space and difficulty of deriving the positions and the moves. This was an epic game in which a computer program defeated a professional human player, which was previously considered at least a decade away.

I think with the advent of this victory we are concurring to the dangers that Nick Bostrom the global authority on superintelligence, had his concerns on. According to him the development of superintelligence may pose an existential risk to humanity over the coming century. We would not be a match for the evolving machines. The cognitive performance of these machines would considerably exceed the capacity of all the mankind put together. Is there a way out from this catastrophe?

The superintelligence is a baby that is being conceived by the defeat of Lee Sedol, but it should not be the defeat of the humanity. As the guardians of the concept, the thought leaders has the moral responsibility to ensure an ethical application of science. I believe we as a mankind should drive science to reduce the existential risk of humanity and use the superintelligence to protect the humanity from the existential risks posed by nature or any other similar technologies.

A baby is never born criminal, it is the environment and the people who mould it are responsible for the behaviour. Will our generations venerate us for developing the ethical sense on machines or would they curse us for making a Frankenstein’s monster?

Categories
Economics Geopolitics

Is the defense spending a precursor to Economic Supremacy?

I am quite sure you will not agree. But you will agree to the fact that the empire that had the strongest military always ruled the world both economically and politically and thus achieved the world domination. If one scroll back through the pages of history,  British defence share of government expenditures during the 17th, 18th and 19th century were up to 75 % of GDP, never dropping below 55 %. The predecessors for British were the Dutch who had even larger numbers to boast.

If you look at the spending pattern of US on defence, it was less than 1% during the Renaissance, grew to around 12% of GDP during the Civil War of the 1860s, 22% during World War I and culminated to staggering 41% during the WWII –  the time of the universal call by Uncle Sam for the Armageddon. Even today, U.S. military accounts for a staggering 40% of global military spending. More of a fact, US annual spending on the military is higher than the next 13 nations combined. To give you a perspective the constitutional democracies build by the people, for the people (I am not so sure about that) and of the people, as the Uncle Sam says, the allies of US account for over 80% of military spending of the world. Wow, that’s quite a large number!

But have you really thought why this country and its allies alone are spending so much money on defence? At least for a few of us, when we speak of value, the ‘Dollar’ term creeps in. Why are we speaking so much about the Dollar?

Even though there are over 180 currencies in the world, the cost of crude, an investment made by IMF, the debt of countries and even the Big Mac Index is always measured in Dollars. If we look at global forex transactions, there is a 44% chance that one of the currencies in the transaction is the greenback and hence it enjoys the status of world reserve currency. Are we reading about completely unrelated topics?

Not really. This insatiable “recall” / “demand” / “a belief” in dollars has handed the U.S. government a virtually unlimited credit card and a perfected money minting machinery. U.S., with a debt of about $60 trillion, is currently the world’s biggest debtor nation. Due to dollar’s role at the centre of the international monetary system, US has the largest domestic debt securities market ($30 trillion) which is more than double the size of the next largest domestic market Japan ($1 trillion). The defence superiority also enables the country to forge international economic and military partnerships, a trend which points to the country’s strategic clout. This is what the US achieves by retaining its first rank in the defence and military spending, which otherwise would be difficult to maintain in competition for a global superpower. Although China is trying hard to crack to this by making its presence felt, Grand Old Uncle knows that Military prowess and economic prosperity are not zero-sum games. Although “democratic countries” know that they have the potential to realise $1.30 of extra private spending over a period of 5 years for each $1.00 reduction in defence spending (study by Mercatus Center), will our Grand Old Uncle change its military and geopolitical strategy in Emerging markets for such a silly gain?

Let’s wait and see how Uncle tames the dragon… !!!

Categories
Ethics Technology

The emergence of a trusted Leviathan

Leviathan is a term coined for the sea monster in the Tanakh or the Old Testament. It is a word that is used contextually for the sea monster. You may be thinking what it has to do in an era of the technologies that emerge even before the predecessor makes its presence. Though the term was coined out by the seafarers, the term came to my attention after reading the book written by Thomas Hobbs. His argument for the necessity of absolute sovereignty emerged in the politically unstable years after the Civil Wars of England, which underlined the existence of unseen Leviathan for a stable society to prevail and equal justice for the equal imposition of taxes.

Yesterday morning I was surprised to see a buzz on my phone. I thought I had kept a reminder and just tried to switch it off. It didn’t go off.  I was surprised to understand that it was an alert regarding my upcoming flight that had been preponed by 45 minutes. I was little curious. I checked my mail box and I had accidentally deleted the mail that had come from the booking agency. I called up the agency to confirm and it was confirmed. Wow ! I appreciated the effort Google has done for me. I felt happy and relieved.

On the flight, I started to think about the technology that we are depending on. The phone has been so intelligent to know exactly what we do and where we are and more than that why we are where we are? Isn’t that intrusion of personal life knowingly or unknowingly or can I term it as an information slavery?

The decline of mobile hardware as we had seen with Motorola and Nokia and the emergence of data and IoT(Internet of Things) giants such as Google and Apple IOS, may transform the political landscape too. The news of Apple steam rolling FBI to protect the data privacy laws is still a controversial topic to discuss. But I believe that we have come to an era in which the private enterprises could stand against even the Uncle Sam. But are we acknowledging that there is no data privacy for us when we indiscriminately use our Facebook and Whatsapp?

I look forward to an era in which the borders may vanish and world political powers will be dislodged with the emergence of super data powers. The unequal taxation and the borders will go off-limits and the world would shift to a data constitution, and indirectly a data citizenship. You never know it may be soon that you enlist with super data powers and pay tax so that your civic and social rights are guaranteed!

Am I getting to the society of Hobbesian philosophical system which had its origins in the fear? Hope not.