( The very fact that I have to indicate how long it will take to read this post in order to enhance its chances of being read, is in itself an indictment of our lifestyle)
(4/6 minutes)
We are temporal beings – born into a world that existed before us with its religion and culture, its history already written, and to make sense of this world we engage in various pastimes to get by.
YOU COULD NOT BE BLAMED FOR THINKING WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN. YOU COULD PUT THE BLAME ON THE GREED OF CAPITALISM.
BUT NOT FOR MUCH LONGER.
The “economic problem” that had defined our species from the beginning is now in decline.
IT’S TIME TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE CAPITALISM as we know it will eventually need to be superseded with a post-scarcity system that is built around the new economic reality.
But what will that reality be?
Modern life is, for most of us, a kind of serfdom to mortgage, job and the constant assault to consume. Although we have more time and money than ever before, most of us have little sense of control over our own lives. It is all connected to the apathy that means fewer and fewer people vote. Politicians don’t listen to us anyway. Big business has all the power; religious extremism all the fear.
Certainly we can say that the pace of modern life, increased and supported by our technology in general and our personal electronics in particular, has resulted in a short attention span and an addiction to the influx of information.
A mind so conditioned has little opportunity to think critically, and even less chance to experience life deeply by being in the present moment. A complex life with complicated activities, relationships and commitments implies a reflexive busy-ness that supplants true thinking and feeling with knee-jerk reactions.
Modern Life today has become a series of spectacles to be viewed, not actions to be lived. We live in a world of many alarms, none of which sound our true concerns.
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.
The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.
We spend more time gazing at luminous screens, and clicking like buttons than voicing our concerns. Consequently, the void in quality leadership is filled ( as we have recently witness by the Election of Trump) by a charismatic or toxic leader can have disastrous results.
The science of robotics has exploded with revolutionary developments in the past few years and many more previously unimaginable breakthroughs are now on the immediate horizon.
Humanity may be on the verge of experiencing something comparable in effect to the Cambrian Explosion making it possible for machines “to replicate the performance of many of the perceptual parts of the brain,” including, fittingly enough, vision itself.
We are in the midst of a communication revolution on a par with the invention of writing or the printing press which is no doubt bring about a period of considerable turmoil and angst and the effects on economic output and human workers are certain to be profound.
The transformation of employment wrought by robots and digital communication is not restricted to manufacturing. One-half of existing jobs will be eliminated in the coming one or two decades, and there is no sector that will be immune to automation.
Just in case you think you will not be effected white-collar jobs are also on the digital chopping block.
No one in their right mind foresees any new employment sectors opening up that are or will be sufficient to swallow the displaced workers or the hundreds of millions of people entering the workforce across the planet. Not even close.
Even the prospect of ever-lower wages cannot compete with the gigantic promise of the new technologies.
These developments are going to pose direct and mortal challenges to both capitalism and democracy.
The revolutionary advances in technology are hardly a panacea; they only seem to promote ever-greater talk about the need to slash living standards and cut back on social services.
This is a supreme irony – at the exact moment far less human labour is necessary to produce more than enough to satisfy human wants and needs, the system that fostered that abundance is incapable of adapting to it.
The Internet has transformed our economies, our culture and politics, and our very way of life. The tragedy is while the declining system of Capitalism is evolving more into a decaying feudal order than providing the basis for an affluent society with social mobility we are accepting the transformation with the majority of us confused or distracted into silence.
We live in a ready-made world with ready-made values. The days of every action we take is a choice, decided upon by us and no one else are evaporating right in front of our eyes.
Many of us are manipulated into pursuing desires that are not ours. We are being willed towards fruitless endeavours by Artificial Intelligence and therefore excluded ourselves from creating a meaningful future for ourselves.
Once a pound a time these choices used to bring meaning (or not) to our life – and were the cornerstone of existentialism.
Rather than offloading the responsibility onto society or religion, each individual is solely responsible for making their life meaningful and living it authentically.
The question is are we really exercising choice or are our choices now being manipulated by malevolent Algorithms.
Existentialist philosophers teach us that we alone are responsible for creating a meaningful life in an absurd and unfair world, but is this Philosophy no longer true.
The meaning of our being must be tied up with time and our time is the revolution of technology which we accept blindly without any scrutiny or laws.
Mass culture creates a loss of individual significance, instead of engaging in authentic thought by forming our own opinions, most of us passively adopt the opinions constructed by the news.
The Truth is we have no other purpose than the one we set ourselves; no other destiny than the one we forge. Yet many of us remain in denial of our responsibilities, (No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success out of his life.) but on the other hand I hope that it helps to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes and futile expectations; in other words, they define him negatively, not positively.
As with capitalism, political democracy has hardly been experiencing a golden age of informed citizen participation and public service-minded leadership in recent years. The economic reality of extreme inequality and personal greed translates into increased corruption and cynicism in the political sphere, and that undermines effective self-government.
The United States is an extreme example, with money-drenched campaigns and abysmally low voter turnouts – especially among the poor, the young, and the dispossessed.
As the crisis deepens, however, people will return to the political realm, and it is an open question as to whether the system can respond with democratic and humane solutions. Those who greatly benefit from the status quo will likely battle against progressive change as if their lives depended on it. It could just as easily degenerate into propaganda, militarism, and tyranny. Everything rides on the outcome.
All fascist movements invariably played upon racism and chauvinism of one form or another, depending on the nation, to gee up support. It ranks among the ugliest and most shameful developments in history, and we see it re-emerging as the crisis deepens, even in nations where the scourge of fascism made that notion unthinkable for generations.
A strong commitment to reinvigorating democratic institutions, ending militarism, and guaranteeing all people a secure standard of living as the bulwark against fascism and the only way for humanity to proceed.
To end poverty would be a good place to begin. It was once commonly believed and still is by many, that great leaders were born, not made, by Twitter, Facebook or the internet.
What we consider the freedom of modern-day life is under attack from every
That is its job.
Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose.
Artificial intelligence are for the moment relatively benign.
The advent of big data and artificial intelligence is creating billions in value for business. What matters most, however, at least right now, is that we begin building a pathway for human and robot relationships.
It is time we created an independent, totally transparent World Institute to vet all technology that encroaches on our freedoms and values.
Man is not a purely physical system; our thinking, feeling and willing activities do not originate in our physical parts. So it will be impossible to introduce real human mentality into machines, and studying and developing machines will never reveal our real essence; on the contrary, they deviate our attention from it.
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trading freedom for security. Why?
we live an inauthentic life.
human beings have no particular purpose. It is only through our actions that we later start defining what our purpose in life is going to be. “Man is nothing other than his own project,”
humans deceive themselves into thinking that they are predestined to be what they are, shifting the responsibility of their actions onto others or onto a moral code. Reality exists only in action,
The problem is that the oppressed often don’t know they are oppressed; they view the world as one that cannot change, as “a natural situation”.“
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” “
stationary state” society, where economic growth was unnecessary, commercialism would be reduced, human nature would evolve, and all people could develop their talents and faculties as only the wealthy few could do in the impoverished past.
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