Sunday, 16 July 2017

Accidental War and Youth Employment



Youth unemployment is a huge problem. Even in here where the overall unemployment rate is 3.8%, the rate for under 25 is over 9%. It is running something like 13% in Australia, 15% in Russia and in excess of 35% in most of southern Europe.  Even over 50% is some areas. These are official figures. I suspect real rates are higher.

It is important for young people to develop skills that will be in demand. My suggestion: anything to do with virtual reality and artificial intelligence.  While robots may take away many jobs in the near and medium future, there will be many jobs created. For example, machine behavioral engineers who will teach robots how to behave like humans.

Another important field will be computer security. In the late 70s, during the presidential term of Jimmy Carter, America was within 7 minutes of launching a nuclear strike on the USSR.  A Soviet nuclear missile launch had been “detected” and by the time it was determined to be a detection error, the clock was seven minutes of launch deadline. The launching has to occur before the enemy destroys the missiles being launched and it appeared that the Soviet ones were only seven minutes from USA soil. In 2010, 50 Minute Man missiles suddenly became invisible to monitoring. It was not known if someone had launched them or had blocked the monitoring so that they could launch them. It was not known if the system had been hacked. The missiles are launched with a short computer code. They don’t care who sends the code nor from where; they just read the code and go. These extreme examples point out the need for white hat computer hackers who can protect vital systems.


No comments :

Post a Comment