Scientific and technological advances bring rewards and new kinds of pressure to society and the economy. In a discussion on Radio 1, Sergei Kalashnikov, a former labor minister and head of the Labor and Social Policy department at RANEPA, shared his views on what a big shift to driverless cars could mean for the workforce in Russia.
Kalashnikov pointed out that drivers are a massive part of the economy. He noted that in the near future driverless vehicles could leave around 17 million drivers without work. The central question, he suggested, is whether those workers can reconfigure their careers into fields like programming, neurobiology, biophysics, or nuclear science. He argued that choices made in youth shape what is possible later, implying that such transitions may be very difficult for many people.
He warned that neither industry nor people are fully prepared for rapid, large-scale changes.
In 2023 Russia saw the creation of an innovative neuromorphic chip that points to a new direction in smart technology. The chip is hardware ready and can be paired with a neuromorphic camera that can observe and analyze millions of events per second through a pulsed neural network. It can, for example, count grains of sand falling from an hourglass, all while consuming far less energy than traditional systems. This development signals progress toward ultra-efficient, intelligent devices and raises questions about how such technology might be applied across industries. [citation: socialbites.ca]
Earlier reports noted AI’s capacity to forecast rare diseases, illustrating the growing potential of artificial intelligence in health and science. [citation: socialbites.ca]