Weekly Selection

Why supply chains can’t meet demand. What might derail the post-pandemic economic rally? Bankruptcies, cyber threats and underestimating the environmental time bomb. Climate tipping points and their cascading consequences contribute to the latter. AI and robotics have made autonomous lethal weapons a reality and their application in the realm of social media has transformed how we interact and who has the power to influence us.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“It’s sort of like supply chain run amok. In a race to get to the lowest cost, I have concentrated my risk. We are at the logical conclusion of all that.” (Willy C. Shih, an international trade expert at Harvard Business School, quoted in the article of the week)

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Peter Goodman, How the World Ran Out of Everything
(The New York Times, 1 June 2021)
This article does a great job at explaining why the current global shortage of many goods (from electronics to lumber to clothing) reflects the disruption of the pandemic combining with decades of companies limiting their inventories. The latter is caused by the “Just-In-Time manufacturing” principle, first put in place by Toyota about 50 years ago. At that time, it amounted to no less than a revolution in the business world. The problem? It left businesses unprepared and lacking in resilience in the face of whatever trouble inevitably emerged, and from there it all cascades (reads in 7-8 min).
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Silja Baller, What will a post-pandemic economy look like? Here’s what chief economists expect
(World Economic Forum, 1 June 2021)
This is a ‘consensus’ view expressed in the WEF’s most-recent Chief Economists Survey. It shows that a majority expect a recovery of global GDP to its pre-COVID-19 level by the first half of 2022. Some ‘convictions’ expressed in the report (whose full version is available HERE): (1) Chief economists see the largest risk of scarring from a delayed wave of bankruptcies; (2) They expect internationally the largest conflict potential to arise from cyberattacks; (3) A significant number believe that 2050 is not ambitious enough for net-zero targets (in terms of climate transition) (reads in 5-6 min).
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Damian Carrington, Climate tipping points could topple like dominoes, warn scientists
(The Guardian, 3 June 2021)
Potentially catastrophic but plausible. For years, scientists have warned about the significant risk of cascading events even at 2°C of heating, with severe long-term effects. New research shows that ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect (tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts). Some large ice sheets in Antarctica are thought to already have passed their tipping points, making large sea-level rises in coming centuries inevitable (reads in 6-7 min).
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Joe Hernandez, A Military Drone with a Mind of its Own was Used In Combat, U.N. Says
(NPR, 1 June 2021)
The UN just reported that for the first time ever military-grade autonomous drones that can fly themselves to a specific location, pick their own targets and kill without the assistance of a remote human operator, have been used on the battlefield (last year in Libya). The Turkish drone can be operated both autonomously and manually and uses “machine learning” and “real-time image processing” against its targets. Put simply, this means that the idea of a “killer robot” has moved from fantasy to reality (reads in just under 3-4 min).
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