Future Imperfect #37: Drifting from Roddenberry’s vision
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been reading about nationalism’s affect on space missions, rethinking pharmaceutical R&D, populism’s negative impact, and some progress (yay!) on job retraining. Oh, and yet more chaos in Syria.
If this is your first time here, be sure to follow the FI publication to get this newsletter in your inbox each week. Also don’t forget to forward this along to your futurist friends, and send me your feedback!
Drifting from Roddenberry’s vision
In How We Get to Next, James O'Malley discusses the impact of rising nationalism on space cooperation. In some ways, overlapping interests are preserving cooperation in space:
Mariel Borowitz studies international cooperation on climate data, which is collected by satellites. She said there are political barriers to cooperation in her field — but the advantages are evident: “The value of data is in its use — the more widely you make data available, the greater the return the government gets on its investment,” she argued.
Another example of international cooperation is the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee — which counts 12 different space agencies as members. Given that low Earth orbit is increasingly crowded, debris is clearly an issue that impacts everyone — so cooperation, even among potential adversaries, is important.
But such cooperation is by no means guaranteed beyond the short-term:
The continued rise of China and the role of space prestige in its national mythos is perhaps the biggest challenge to the existing, peaceful coexistence in space. In 2003, in an example of “self-sufficiency” as it ascends to superpower status, China became the third nation to blast an astronaut — or “taikonaut” — into orbit.
Space is only a small part of this story, of course — China is already becoming more assertive in terrestrial politics, making big investments in Africa and staking out its defense claims in the South China Sea. Could this point toward the future militarization of space? Will we look back on today as a golden era of peaceful cooperation, one replaced by a new Cold War?
Why does this matter? Somehow we’ve made it decades without offensive militarization, and conflict, in space—but will it last? My pessimistic side feels like we’re not far from seeing “Rods from God” or similar weapons put into space. But maybe, just maybe, we’ll figure out reasonable norms for governments when it comes to interstellar behavior.
Reworking the pharma pipeline
In Nature Magazine, Amy Maxmen looks into an emerging organization who is learning that the conventional wisdom around drug development, and how expensive it can be, need not always apply.
The [Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi)] is an unlikely success story in the expensive, challenging field of drug development. In just over a decade, the group has earned approval for six treatments, tackling sleeping sickness, malaria, Chagas’ disease and a form of leishmaniasis called kala-azar. And it has put another 26 drugs into development. It has done this with US$290 million — about one-quarter of what a typical pharmaceutical company would spend to develop just one drug.
The model for its success is the product development partnership (PDP), a style of non-profit organization that became popular in the early 2000s. PDPs keep costs down through collaboration — with universities, governments and the pharmaceutical industry. And because the diseases they target typically affect the world’s poorest people, and so are neglected by for-profit companies, the DNDi and groups like it face little competitive pressure. They also have lower hurdles to prove that their drugs vastly improve lives…
For more than three decades, economists at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development in Boston, Massachusetts, have collected proprietary data from pharmaceutical companies, and used it to calculate the average cost of developing a new drug. The most recent estimate is $1.4 billion. This is used to justify exorbitant drug prices — companies must recoup their investments.
But many don’t think it has to cost that much. Even the chief executive of London-based pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, Andrew Witty, has called billion-dollar estimates “one of the great myths of the industry”. He attributed the huge sums to spending too much time on failures. Drug candidates can be killed as a result of safety concerns, poor efficacy or profitability worries, and he argued that companies could save money by dropping bad leads sooner. Others say that the figure is inflated by large and excessive trials done to prove that a new drug works just slightly better than an existing one.
Why does this matter? If you haven’t heard the furor over the rise of drug prices from EpiPen to Daraprim, it’s worth looking into. These price hikes are justified on the basis of skyrocketing R&D costs; however, if DNDi can prove that a lower cost is feasible, then these pharma companies haven’t a leg to stand on.
Populism as global contagion
From Brexit to Trump and beyond, the theme of 2016 is populism. In BRINK this week, edited by my colleague at Atlantic Media Strategies Brock N Meeks, the topic is explored in the context of the risk it poses to all nations.
Caroline Atkinson, head of Google’s global public policy team and former White House deputy national security advisor for international economics…cited the 2008 financial crisis as the genesis of the recent populist surge.
“The typical man with a full-time job in the U.S. at the middle of the income distribution who had a year-round job earned less in 2014 than some similarly situated man did four decades earlier,” Atkinson said. “[Even] after all the remarkable recovery we’ve had … there’s still 12 percent of [Americans] who have mortgages [that] are underwater. I mean, [it’s] no wonder they’re angry.”…
It’s no surprise, then, that Trump and his supporters have attacked the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“People have associated things like TPP and the [World Trade Organization] with somehow giving up our national sovereignty,” said David Wessel, director of the Brookings Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. “If people don’t have confidence that [leaders are] actually going to serve their national interest, then you get this” kind of populism.
Why does this matter? It’s easy to discount the benefits of international trade, because we can’t peer into an alternate timeline still hampered by overreaching protectionism and international tariffs, among other things.
Take, for example, Cornwall’s Brexit vote to Leave the European Union, despite the fact that relies heavily on E.U. subsidies. It’s easy to shout and clamor for autonomy, until you realize that it’s a lot harder to do than putting a slogan on the side of a bus. The “establishment” that supported Remain was doing so for a reason!
I don’t know what the cure for populism is, but I do hope we discover it soon. I think most of us would be better off without four years of Trump (or Le Pen, or Wilders) to better learn about its costs.
Progress on job retraining
When millions around the country, and the world, are stuck in industries that are trending obsolete, they need all the help they can get to retrain for a new career. Thus, it’s promising to see news that the U.S. Department of Education is helping low-income students to attend coding bootcamps.
Over the last few years, coding bootcamps have emerged as an alternative way to access the skills you need to get into the tech industry, without needing to attend a traditional college or university. The caveat is that these programs can be pretty expensive, averaging about $11,000 per student, according to Course Report, a database of information and reviews on coding bootcamps. Some bootcamps do offer financial assistance to students, but until now, applying for federal financial aid was not an option…
The experiment’s goals entail testing additional ways for people to affordably access education that has been shown to lead to good jobs, “but that fall outside the current financial aid system” and “promote and measure college access, affordability, and student outcomes,” according to the fact sheet. In the first year, about 1,500 students will be eligible for $5 million in Pell Grants, which can go toward paying for classes.
Why does this matter? In a previous Future Imperfect, I talked about how far the United States trails other countries in terms of money spent on job retraining. Coding bootcamps aren’t perfect, and the article rightly notes that some have had their efficacy questioned. But I’m firmly of the belief that something is better than nothing, especially when it comes to getting people into jobs that we know will be relevant for 10–20 years to come.
“Just admit that you’re freaked out by my robot hand!”
Today’s sci-fi short, Tears of Steel. “In an apocalyptic future, a group of soldiers and scientists takes refuge in Amsterdam to try to stop an army of robots that threatens the planet.”
GIF of the Week: The latest in traffic control technology
Like Future Imperfect? Click that recommend button below so others can find it too! And send me feedback at lasky.joshua@gmail.com.
