There is no doubt that climate change is a complex subject and is challenging us in ways we’ve never seen before.
Based on what scientists understand, the changes we are seeing today are far more rapid than anything that has occurred in our planet’s history.
How best to depict the climate emergency is down to the media to ensure that the images publish accurately and appropriately convey the climate crisis that we face.
To address Climate Change with or without an agreement is going to cost trillions.
when trying to depict what cannot always be seen.showing the direct impact of environmental issues on people’s daily lives as well as trying to indicate the scale of the impact,the effect of the reporting and how we perceive the risks. to unearth photography beyond the usual keywords of climate change, heatwave and floods.
The problem is: No one, No country, No government, No Organisation, No economy, wants to pay for it. T
THIS ISSUE IS CRITICAL IF WE ARE TO ACHIEVE ANYTHING WORTHWHILE.
Everyone is, however, paying lip service to the problem.
Delay action will drastically increase the costs of taking action, but no one ever talks about how the funding required can be achieved.
Why?
Because the costs will not be shared evenly.
The trillions have to come from somewhere.
The world’s most powerful institutions are still engaged in a game of lethal procrastination that threatens to speed up global ecological collapse and sow chaos throughout human civilization in the decades to come.
The world’s biggest asset managers remain heavily invested in climate-polluting industries ― and do little if anything to convince those companies to change.
Forceful engagement with the companies in these sectors to hasten their transition to low carbon technologies must occur.
A Bloomberg New Energy Finance chart shows investments in new solar, wind and other non-hydroelectric power projects dropping from 2017 to 2018. (Photo: Bloomberg New Energy Finance)
Clearly, it’s not enough.
At this juncture, to meet the growing demand for green and social investments we need to have a dual focus on maximizing the potential of our current financial instruments, while also creating space for the next wave of innovations for sustainable growth.
We all know that there is already technology that exits, or that are coming on stream to tackle the problem head-on. Not in thirty years from now.
This blog as I am sure are others have been posting a solution that addresses the fair spreading of the costs worldwide.
( See: 0.05% World Aid commission)
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The problem with the above question is where to start.
Around the world, democracies are distrusted by a majority of their citizens.
As a result, it is creating space for the rise of authoritarian-populist forces or other forms of independent representation.
Without trust we are diminishing our capacity to meet complex, long-term challenges, reducing support for evidence-based public policies and promotes risk aversion in government.
This lack of trust is and will translate into a lack of action.
I suppose that there is no one simple explanation for what drives or undermines political trust but there can be no doubt that social media with the growing worldwide inequality is contributing to spreading distrust. and forming barriers of political engagement.
This is set to get worse with profit-seeking algorithms.
So what is it about citizens, such as their educational background, class, location, country or cohort of birth, that makes them trusting or not?
In general, the strongest predictors of distrust continue to be attitudinal and are connected to negativity about politics which is being influenced more and more by technological algorithms of prediction and recommendation.
What would it be that makes citizens feel that their vote could deliver value?
Most interventions tend to focus on dealing with issues of social disadvantage through education, labour market activation, public participation, improved representation, place-based service delivery and other forms of empowerment.
By offering more participation or consultation we are turning politics into a tokenistic exercise, generating more cynicism and negativity among citizens, who are turning to Populism.
The term populism can designate either democratic or authoritarian movements. Populism is typically critical of political representation and anything that mediates the relation between the people and their leader or government.
Populism usually combines elements of the left and the right, opposing large business and financial interests but also frequently being hostile to established socialist and labour parties.
In its contemporary understanding, however, populism is most often associated with an authoritarian form of politics.
Populist politics, following this definition.
It revolves around a charismatic leader who appeals to and claims to embody the will of the people in order to consolidate his own power. In this personalized form of politics, political parties lose their importance, and elections serve to confirm the leader’s authority rather than to reflect the different allegiances of the people.
Depending on one’s view of populism, a populist economic program can, therefore, signify either a platform that promotes the interest of common citizens and the country as a whole or a platform that seeks to redistribute wealth to gain popularity, without regard to the consequences for the country.
In Europe, we are seeing the rise of the Swiss People’s Party, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Swedish Democrats, the Danish People’s Party, the Northern League in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Victor Orban in Hungary, and Greece’s Golden Dawn and of course the Brexit party in the UK.
Elsewhere in the world one has to only look at Donald Trump, Dufeele in the Philippines.
The question of what’s fueling this populist?
It’s nothing new.
Most of us are now live in two increasingly separate worlds one wants to eliminate health care, shred the social safety net, and cut taxes on the rich—benefit the winners from globalization and work against the economic interests of the working class.
They others want revenge and this revenge is —not of the economically insecure, but of the cultural left-behinds.
So are groups like the those mentioned above, just groups of nativist, putting their nation first?
The answer is obvious. No. They’re looking backwards.
However, that is not the case, because if populism was truly driven by economic fears, populist candidates should be drawing votes from those who are suffering the most: unskilled workers, the unemployed, those with lower levels of education, and less advantaged groups in cities and urban centres.
Because economic issues have declined in importance to voters, like cultural issues—around women’s rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, and gay rights—climate change – have risen to the fore, along with the anti-immigrant sentiment, authoritarianism, mistrust of global national governance, and right-wing ideological self-placement.
The rise of populist parties reflects, above all, a reaction against a wide range of rapid cultural changes that seem to be eroding the basic values and customs of Western societies.
So a populist leader is forced to be in a permanent campaign to convince his people that he is not established and will never be. Magnify the political divide. Ultimately he ignores complicated democratic systems and is therefore viewed with suspicion…
What if anything can be done?
The importance of beliefs can only be tackled through discussion of the role of mass media in influencing public trust.
The power of mass media is not easy to reconcile with the empirical evidence of experimental social psychology research which demonstrates that people with strong beliefs and values often remain unpersuaded even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Positive economic growth does not necessarily increase political trust, but negative economic growth and prolonged economic crises.
Rather, economic development and social modernisation in advanced industrial democracies have encouraged new types of engaged, questioning and assertive publics, for whom strong economic performance no longer automatically leads to increased trust.
There is only one answer to this question.
It is greater political accountability of MPs and political parties to their electorates and members.
Providing performance data will not work because it leads to government officials trying to manipulate the way citizens judge their performance. Positive data is given prominence, less helpful data sometimes hidden.
There is one thing for sure because trust cut across racial and ethnic lines any solution to the puzzle of political trust can not be achieved without our engagement.
Anti-establishment, might having faith in “plain talkers” and “ordinary people” as opposed to the “corrupt establishment” of business, government, academia, and media but without formal rules there can be no good democratic practice.
Here I may be forgiven for indulging in some wishful thinking and believing that, despite the current shortage of inspirational leadership in the West, trust in democratic principles and values that transcend national boundaries will remain strong and shared by a large number of ordinary people across the world.
The good news for political parties that take up the cause of democratic reform is that the citizenry is ready to take up the challenge.
Finding what is the equilibrium point between political trust and distrust requires reducing inequality because political attitudes are shaped by more than people’s pocketbooks.
In effect, political parties are each a product of the world view of their membership or of their directing minds. Their attitudes, carriage or expression are often indicative of the groups’ underlying body of beliefs, catechism or affirmation of faith.
The chattering class will continue to wallow in their own cynical self-assurance, and the best and most principled among us will remain reticent to enter to the moral minefield of public life.
At the heart of this faulty ontology remains the myth of the autonomous self, the pipe dream that our identity is a “blank slate” that WE choose regardless of the desires and influences of others.
Dogmatism and doctrinaire ideology may seem no longer attractive or realistic political attributes. But democracy will continue to mean a change of government from time to time as if oscillating between two sides with opposing philosophies rigidly applied.
The democratic tradition of alternating governments, evolving policies, pragmatic choices, etc theoretically presents us with some choice with regard to the management of our economic and other affairs.
Being so vulnerable to purely political decisions surely honesty is required.
Perhaps it is time to remove politics from decisions that require long term solutions andset them in law, like reducing Carbon emmission, before we see civil unrest, and migration on a massive scale.
Why should this be done:
Because elections are for political parties to be in office for the short term – five years if not re-elected.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Everyone sees the world in different ways however the greatest innovations of man are found in the most simple things:
Starting with Fire, Language, Tools, and Wheel writing has been the sole reason that mankind has been able to accumulate knowledge.
Since then the use of our inventions have taken us a long way, they’ve allowed us to land on the moon, travel over oceans, and even eliminate major health threats with various medicines.
You could not be blamed for asking what was actually gained by landing on the moon — a handful of rocks and a game of low-gravity golf — was of virtually no value and yet the act of the journey was invaluable beyond all measure as it personified our continuing evolution.
The same is true with technology today.
The development of it is mind-blowing but its application is almost entirely mindless – profit-seeking algorithms and weaponized drones.
Setting aside why do we exist and what is the purpose of life? (These are hard questions that demand answers) it is what we have not achieved that will be judged by future generations.
Karl Marx once famously observed that capitalism carried within it the seeds of its own destruction but he was wrong. It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s people.
The human race ended the 20th century in pretty good shape, at least comparatively speaking.
The first half of the 1900s was almost certainly the most bloody and brutal phase of humanity’s existence.
Now we have all the information in the world yet it has made us only more ideological and more ignorant; we have access to limitless opinions yet we seek to criminalise those who don’t agree with us. We are so advanced and yet so backward, so cynical and yet so stupid, that we can no longer even agree on what constitutes a fact.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Consider the internet itself, probably the most revolutionary invention in the history of humankind. Its potential to share information thus to accelerate the advancement of science and keep the world running in the event of a catastrophic disaster — the purpose for which it was first intended — is all but limitless.
And what do we use it for most? Porn.
Consider the smartphone, the match to the powder keg of the worldwide web. Almost everyone in every half-developed part of the world, even people living on the streets, has a device more powerful than supercomputers that once took up whole buildings. We can access virtually any image, any idea, any information from anywhere in the world.
And what do we overwhelmingly use it for? Taking pictures of ourselves.
Let’s look at medical technology — the smartest minds on the planet developing machines and medicines that keep the average person today alive for longer than was once ever dreamt of.
And what is the result?
We are fatter and lazier than ever, resulting in spiralling hospital costs that will send most Western governments broke in a matter of decades. It was once said that the only two certainties in life were death and taxes and yet now we are defying death and there aren’t enough taxes to pay for it.
We are too dumb to even know when to die.
It may well be impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, but over millions of years of evolution, we’ve picked up some less than ideal characteristics.
Why? Because of greed.
It will take the efforts of several scientific disciplines and sophisticated technology, probably over many years, to discover the underlying nature of our mental faculties, their neurological basis, and their development over time.
And it’s fair to say that we have little idea of what we’ll evolve to in the future, but there is one thing for certain, evolution is about adapting to your environment – Weaponized drones, Climate change, Algorithms.
Algorithms that are feeding Social media, are stripping us of a collective understanding of what is going on in the world.
People like to blame fake news on Facebook, and that is true enough.
But the far greater truth is far worse than that. Neither fake news nor Facebook emerged like Athena fully-formed from nothing. They were made by us. By us and for us and of us.
While the positive uses for technology are endless I marvel as I read Asimov to see the way in which he foresaw the ethical conundrum in which we now find ourselves embroiled.
Of course, when they (the future generations) look at our achievements the one thing they will not be able to comprehend is why we have not been able to stop killing each other.
Weaponized drones are now more acceptable than land mines, cluster bombs, or chemical weapons.
It might be argued that this would be a way of sparing human beings who could stay comfortably at home and let our intelligent machines do the fighting for us. If some of them were destroyed — well, they are only machines. This approach to warfare would be particularly useful if we had such machines and the enemy didn’t.
Just like those tried at Nuremberg who attempted to wash their hands of mass killings we have now developed weaponized drones to kill, with a Punches Pilot immunity, that is violating all existing international law.
So humans through the use of technology may eventually reach a point where they can force evolution upon themselves.
Perhaps the result (if we are not already wiped out by Nuclear or a Weather bomb) will be that we’re no longer subject to the driving force of evolution – but unnatural selection by drones.
Now the question is, how accurate is this statement?
Is technological progress actually taking us backwards?
Are we advancing ourselves to death? At what point do many deaths become too many deaths?
This is the first problem with technology.
If it is accurate, we’re already screwed.
Of course, none of this is important given the glacial pace of evolutionary change, we probably won’t have to worry about that for thousands of years.
Wrong.
We’ve come to believe that, with enough information, human behaviour is predictable.
But number-crunching algorithms are leading us perilously wrong. There’s something unsettling in the idea that, amid the vagaries of choice, chance, and circumstance, mathematics can tell us something about what it is to be human.
Who we are together, as a collective entity?
Despite the grand promises of Big Data, uncertainty remains so abundant that specific human lives remain boundlessly unpredictable. The more data that are collected, cross-referenced, and searched for correlations, the easier it becomes to reach false conclusions.
It might be true that in large groups, the natural variability among human beings cancels, however, if we end up with algorithms setting thresholds extremely unlikely outcomes are bound to arise eventually.
The gift is not a technology to enable us to realise evolution for the cruel being it is, but giving mankind the intelligence and tools to exclude ourselves from the other species on the planet and take a step back to interpret for ourselves where we as a race are going?
Leaving the brutality of evolution behind is not a gift given to us by evolution.
We have evolved to the point whereby we stand on the threshold of controlling our genetic and ultimately evolutionary destiny. Unfortunately, the problem with humans is, whenever we encounter a problem we have evolved to the point where we think that we can overcome it with technology.
Advances in technology, medicine and culture mean it isn’t just the fittest who get to pass their genes on to the next generation.
External aids could be entirely responsible for our survival.
All of this relies on earth’s natural resources which are supposedly gonna be gone by 2050!
The problems in this world are manmade therefore man can solve them.
The sad truth is that we have Governments and World Organisations that pay lip service when the real debate is a knowledge- and research-based exchange of argument and counterargument that should be focused at the analysis of a specific question, our survival.
Passion and competition, yes, but, more than anything else, debate is an exercise in critical thinking! The human brain, being a machine striving for maximum efficiency, typically remembers where information is stored, rather than the information itself.
Technology has already affected the way our memory works.
AI. After all, natural evolution wouldn’t be able to mould and program devices to a point of sophistication that may lead to sentience, but we may be able to and maybe at that point even though its not natural, it is an evolution born of natural origins and most likely would go on to create newer better versions of itself.
In theory, humans are exercising their judgement in the process, but in reality, the computer system is viewed as too “smart” to be second-guessed by a human being.
So . . . what do we need to be more afraid of?
Robots with a compulsion to out-think humans? or humans that are afraid to second-guess the robots?
We must confront an urgent problem related to technology: the automation of “pre-emptive violence” – front-loaded with a bias to kill, with little impetus to contradict that bias.
At present drones are the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.
So are we at the peak of human evolution?
Certainly not. Certainly not as long as there are humans, there will be human evolution.
We are not even close to the peak of evolution.
Just look at wthat werecently found > The Higgs Boson, Mapped the Human Genome, Cloned a sheep, built the International Space Station, discovery the Double Helix Structure of DNA, Split the Atom, invented the Internet, we’re revisiting the theories of Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
We have Created Nuclear Weapons, the Periodic Table of the Elements, Created the Internet Developed Vaccines, Created Music, Created Photography, Flight, Electronic Devices, Traveled to the Moon, Eradicated Small Pox, Created the Television, Discovered Mathematics, Invented the Printing Press, The Phone, Discovery and Control of Electricity, Cars, Invented Zero, Created of United Nations, Discovered World is Round.
AND STILL, WE ARE UNABLE TO ACT TOGETHER.
Why?
Because you know the downfall of civilisation has really passed the point of no return when even a rich white guy can’t get anything done.
Humans are the only organism that can alter their environment to suit them (instead of the other way around)
Finally, people must take into account that nature will commence exerting its own controls LONG BEFORE the human race has reached the point where it can step off the evolutionary treadmill.
With our increasing reliance on technology – and in particular machinery – to do our dirty (but muscle-enhancing) work. The less each generation depends on physical strength, the more likely it is that the whole species will grow weaker to the point of stagnation.
As evolution relies on the survival of the fittest, evolution itself will evolve everything else in all our lives will be transitory and every other artificial intelligent goodwill application will become visionary.
Only when we’ll be able to repair and augment our children’s DNA. Then we really will have triumphed over evolution. Race” will no longer be an issue. Perhaps we will stop killing each other.
Yet we’ve got our problems. A lot of them but the very things we invented to sustain us will destroy us.
The exact nature of our evolutionary relationships with the planet and AI will be the subject of debate for the foreseeable future.
It doesn’t matter if we’re uncovering evidence for climate change or deciding whether a drug has an effect: the concept is identical.
By setting an arbitrary threshold, and agreeing that anything beyond that point gives you grounds for suspicion with greed this is the evolutionary path we are setting our selves.
Mentally the world appears to be de-evolving with smartphones and social media platforms.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
The beady eye is far from the first voice to ask this question and it certainly will not be the last.
We might even come to “question whether we still have free will.
There is no doubting that the social web has created amazing opportunities to learn, discover, connect, but its downside as it penetrates our daily lives is becoming more and more prevalent in the creation of our future lives and the societies we live in.
If the public discussion is shifting increasingly to online fora, and those fora are having more and more influence over democracy it becomes increasingly important to apply principles to them.
Honest political debate is essential for the health of a democracy.
If discussions of import move into space where they can be readily censored, then we will simply no longer live in a society with a free exchange of ideas, because the playing field will always be tilted.
One only has to look at how social media platforms are amplifying what is wrong with the world.
While we all reveal a huge amount of personal information online we are losing the ability to determine honest facts that democracy depends.
Basically, companies that run social media platforms are monopolies or near-monopolies in their areas of operation, and the only way we can achieve the desired outcomes is through clear, effective legal regulations.
We can’t always control how others use their platforms but we can apply the same regulations that govern all other forms of Media.
The public cannot rely on these company’s self-regulation, because self-regulation raises more questions than it answers.
The fact is that the formation of a platform takes place in a vacuum, whereas the formation of any competitors do not, so they cannot be considered parallels in any way.
If we take companies like Facebook and Google they both derive most of their revenue from advertising. They essentially constitute a duopoly because they have access to the best data about individuals. Every memory, picture, emoji, song, video, link, gripe, fear, hope, want, dream and bad political opinion posted is mined and monetized as data.
As a result of their algorithms, they are creating and reinforcing divided and insular online communities that do not interact with people or information with which they disagreed.
At the end of the day, how Facebook and Google conduct their businesses undermines privacy and raises questions about ethical behaviour in the uses of our information and their role in society.
The Internet is a “utility” like water or electricity. It is essential to modern life, not an optional subscription service.
Determining how to regulate Facebook or any other platform may first require some kind of definition of what it is.
Facebook brags about connecting us to our family and friends — but it also about directly influencing the outcomes of elections across the globe.
It sits on top of industries including journalism, where it, together with Google, essentially controls the distribution channels for online news and, in effect, the way people discover information about politics, government and society.
They ( Google, Facebook, Twitter,etc) have figured out how to take advantage of this dynamic to distribute false information about political candidates and hot-button political issues in order to drive up traffic and advertising revenue.
Protecting our community is more important than maximizing their profits.
They are given protections that no one can sue them for any reason — that is Google and Facebook nither are responsible for the fake news that appears on their sites.
They are completely shielded from any responsibility for the content that appears on their service.
Changes to legal protection (which has been interpreted by judges to provide a safe harbour for online platforms even when they pay to distribute others’ content and decline the option to impose editorial oversight) would likely be devastating to online platforms like Google and Facebook and would transform the way people interact across the entire internet.
However, with legal protection, sites like these could be held responsible for libellous comments posted by readers, Google could lose lawsuits over potentially false or defamatory information surfacing in search results, and Facebook could be sued for any potentially libellous comment made by anyone on its platform against any other person.
The legal bills to defend against libel and defamation claims would be enormous.
We all need protection and the ability to request platforms to provide us with control over online information by making it accessible and removable at an individual’s request.
The government, on the other hand, has a regulatory intent to protect citizens from content that is obscene or violent.
Should Facebook and their like be regulated?
A question that is never going to end.
However, until we recognize that there is no fool-proof safeguard to keep horrific content away from the eyes of children we rely on huge fines to the detriment of us all.
Till then with all internet platforms deflecting criticism, social media will be more psychologically damaging than anyone expected.
We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people.
It is beyond comprehension that we tolerate the present position.
Or is it? When you see the below.
Would you ever be prepared to use a nuclear weapon?
This question is increasingly put to politicians as some kind of virility test.
The subtext is that to be a credible political leader, you must be willing to use an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction.
We should be baulking at the casual way in which political discourse on this topic has developed which is politically unacceptable and morally despicable.
If a mainstream politician unblinkingly said that they would use chemical weapons against civilians there would be uproar. If a self-proclaimed candidate for prime minister boasted that they would commit war crimes, it would be a national scandal. Nuclear weapons should be seen no differently.
It’s time that nuclear advocates spelt out the reality of what their position means.
The human race is so good at speaking, it’s lost the art of listening.
It might be easy to brush away the febrile atmosphere online as a nasty byproduct of free expression: I don’t want Facebook having everyone’s verified identities. I do want their platform and other platforms to be held responsible legally for content that is false, racest, hateful, rightwing fascist propaganda.
I do know that if the big platforms, as they already do in part, forced some verifiable information to back up use, we could tame this wild west with legal requirements
I’ll give up on the consensus-building when I can open a platform knowing who to hold legally responsible.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We all know that new data-driven technology is transforming our society.
Our digital society is creating new and profound challenges and carry significant ethical risks to us all.
To be human means that you are persuadable in every single moment.
If you need any evidence of this you don’t have to look any further than the current impeachment hearing in the USA and England with its general election.
The troubling influence algorithms have on how we make decisions are now treating the foundations of our Societies.
Algorithms are now usually a component in a broader decision- making process involving human decision-makers. Far from being neutral and all-knowing decision tools, complex algorithms are shaped by humans, who are, for all intents and purposes, imperfect.
Determining the meaning of sensory input is one of the most constantly ongoing, and important, functions of any brain. By refining our awareness, we transform existence into beauty, thinking into philosophy.
Our increasing reliance on artificial intelligence is destroying the meaning of life.
Few of us understand them or the implications they are having or will have. .
They are taking the creativity away from the decision-making process for instance.
They could turn us humans into mush-minded creatures who can’t be bothered to make our own choices.
What if the new algorithm rated my friend and another woman as a 90% match, would that mean he would simply trust the algorithm and go straight for a proposal of marriage?
Important parts of our lives are being run by AI without sufficient scrutiny.
Self-learning systems are not autonomous systems however they could lead to a Master Algorithm that could match Einstein’s theory of relativity in its world-transformative power.
Algorithms are changing our relationship with each other, with doctors, police, politics, work, health care.
They are at work where ever you look. When you do a web search, machine learning chooses the results you get. Interactive processing allowing the software to learn automatically from patterns. Algorithms are not only being used just to make a profit but life-changing decisions, from your Credit rating, how your will and who you will vote for.
With machine learning, you are programming a computer to learn by itself.
Amazon uses them to recommend products; Netflix uses them to recommend movies; Facebook and Twitter use them to choose which posts to show you.
Pretty much everything that happens online involves machine learning.
So are we putting to much trust in smart systems that learn from data?
The systems are only as good as the data it learns from.
Their goal is to provide software that can reason on input and explain on output by becoming classifiers and predictors.
Alexa – Google is an example. Like most machine-learning algorithms, Google not only analyses our behaviour: it shapes it. This goes round and round until one viewpoint dominates people’s thinking. It will control the information its algorithm pays attention to and the secretive nature of algorithms means people cannot scrutinise the decisions they make.
Since much of the data that is feed into AI’s is imperfect and bias the decision processes built on top of the Ai’s need to be made open to scrutiny.
Why?
Because Algorithms learn differently than us. They look at things differently.
It might enhance the speed, precision and effectiveness of human efforts but in the long run, it will replace our decision making.
They are also moving into areas where the benefits to those applying them may not be matched by the benefits to those subject to their ‘decisions’— We have to demand to know what kind of influence these algorithms have over us.
Google is an algorithm that we are all familiar with, but it is far from being the only algorithmic decision-making tool to influencing our daily lives.
What can be done to combat their growing influence?
Governments should play their part in the algorithms revolution in two ways
Governments should produce, publish, and maintain a list of where algorithms with significant impacts are being used.
The index to the internet should be a public instrument, owned and controlled by the public. It should be a public utility. It should be an index, pure and simple – not a tracking device or a mechanism of manipulation, put the control of algorithms back into the hands of the people that are affected by them.
Government oversight of such algorithms, where they are used by the
public sector, and to co-ordinate departments’ approaches to the development and
deployment of algorithms and partnerships with the private sector.
Governments should offer significant rewards for societies that can find the right combination of market-driven innovation and regulation to maximise the benefits of data-driven technology and minimise the harms.
We must subsequently make decisions that require value judgements and trade-offs between competing values.
New functions and actors, such as third party auditors, may also be required to independently verify claims made by organisations about how their algorithms operate.
Many of the most consequential algorithms currently being used in the public and private domains are complex and opaque, making it hard to attribute accountability to their actions.
Humans are often trusted to make these trade-offs without having to explicitly state how much weight they have put on different considerations. Algorithms are different. They are programmed to make trade-offs according to unambiguous rules.
The ethical questions in relation to bias in algorithmic decision-making vary depending on the context.
For example, High-frequency trading is an algorithm-fueled method of buying and selling stocks – among other things.
The fact that while the problematic implications of many algorithms have been exposed, we may have only just begun to skim the surface.
Improving transparency, however, is no easy task.
Companies with algorithmic products would lose their competitive edge if they were forced to make their algorithms public.
Transparency is not enough. In fact, because algorithms are quite complicated.
This is a simple matter.
What is required is a means of certification as to whether an algorithm is safe or fair to use.
Who knows, an algorithmic slider could, one day, form part of our daily lexicon. But, in the meantime, algorithms need to be managed; ensuring those with the power to shape our lives do so with some code of conduct.
In the end, all technology revolutions are propelled not just by discovery, but also by business and societal need. We pursue these new possibilities not because we can, but because we must.
As I have already said “To be human means that you are pursuable in every single moment”
This morning without any action on my part through the post I am in receipt of an Amazon prime video card.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The degree of choice on the web can be overwhelming, but who, exactly, is making the “Choice”
Has The web has been highjacked by Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Social Media and their like?
Why?
Besause they are absorbing their users’ personal data and feeding greedy algrithms who in the end are disempowered by isolation from the wider web.
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Greedy algorithms can be characterized as being ‘short-sighted’, and also as ‘non-recoverable’. The choice made by a greedy algorithm may depend on choices made so far, but not on future choices or all the solutions to the subproblem.
It is important, however, to note that the greedy algorithm can be used as a selection algorithm to prioritize options within a search, or branch-and-bound algorithm. They iteratively make one greedy choice after another, reducing each given problem into a smaller one.
They can make commitments to certain choices too early which prevent them from finding the best overall solution later.
Without any accountability, they are drastically changing the ways we conduct our daily lives.
There are a few variations to the greedy algorithm:
Pure greedy algorithms.
Orthogonal greedy algorithms.
Relaxed greedy algorithms.
It’s no wonder that Berners-Lee isn’t particularly pleased with the way things have gone with his creation.
With Social networks, slowly algorithms are growing more and more powerful and their predictions growing more accurate. It won’t be long before we could see living, breathing, as the choices of a greedy algorithm.
In other words, a greedy algorithm never reconsiders its choices.
The web is cleaving into the haves and have-nots of news readership. Wealthy readers will pay to opt-out of advertising; less privileged readers will have to stick with news that’s ad-supported.
For example, take Google, one of the leaders in using big data and algorithms to support human decision-making. Google has developed both a hiring algorithm and a retention algorithm it analyzes candidates against this profile to make hiring decisions.
Algorithms to develop lists of “flight risks” — that is, people who are likely to leave their jobs soon.
Amazon’s Choice” algorithm, which leverages a machine learning model to discern what products a customer most likely wants. Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants are drastically changing the ways consumers encounter products.
Customers are no longer putting themselves in front of physical products before purchasing them.
As more users are turning to voice ordering through the Amazon Alexa platform and its competitors we are losing control over our personal data.
Hopefully, Amazon’s algorithms are capable of remaining unbiased.
(We can make whatever choice seems best at the moment and then solve the subproblems that arise later.)
On top of all of this, we have all become blind to the damage that the internet can do to even a well-functioning democracy. Brexit/ USA.
It might be true that around the world, social media is making it easier for people to have a voice in government — to discuss issues, organize around causes, and hold leaders accountable, but these governments are winning elections by false news, echo chambers where people only see viewpoints they agree with — further driving us apart.
Social media can distort policymakers’ perception of public opinion.
If there’s one fundamental truth about social media’s impact on democracy it’s that it amplifies human intent — both good and bad.
Unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium, it’s being used in unforeseen ways with societal repercussions that were never anticipated.
So it is inevitable that Facebook to influence public sentiment — essentially using social media as an information weapon.
Some 87% of governments around the world have a presence on Facebook.
And they’re listening — and responding — to what they hear.
Misinformation campaigns are not amateur operations.
Increasingly the web will become profoundly useless unless we demand the Web we want from Governments and the Monomorphic platforms that dominate it today.
We are all part of the web so what we endorse must be questioned as to the transparency as to where the information comes from in the first place.
Today the bulk of people who are or not doing this are isolated from each other by Apps.
The like button is not a public metric for the popularity of content. It is a flattener of credibility.
There is no point waking in the morning with Alexa telling you what to do, where to go and what it has bought and who to vote for.
Even if social media could be cured of its outrage -enhancing effects it is undermining democracy.
Even though we have unprecedented access to all that was ever written and digitized we are less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity becoming more and more misguided.
The Web is now a global experiment that will test the very foundation of our global communities
There can not be self -governance for the web.
Fake news, Racism, Pornographic content and unfounded crap should be removed by not allowing anything to be posted without a traceable verified name or source.
Are you sure you want to post this? It is your choice and your choice alone.
Perhaps its time we all franchise our data as we are entering into a continuous partnership so both parties need to be confident it’s the right fit. It’s all a choice. Just do something about it- YOU CAN, what is true technology integration?
How we are going to learn content is one of the ways forward.
In fact, everywhere we look we are starting to be presented with more choices.
Resolve to avoid false comparisons on the web is not possible so the future of the web is all about choice but it is important to understand the paradox of choice.
Choice without education or choice with education.
you ultimately do have to choose. so be the difference that
makes the difference.
Events change our perception and our perspective changes
with experience but at least let our choices about Our lives
which are constantly in flux be our choices.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The concept of “time” is a weird one and it is getting weirder.
Isn’t it possible that kazillions of years ago, there wasn’t anything at all, not even time?
Of course, this is the question that defies an answer, as it requires the answer to what time is.
There is no other concept that captures the imagination more than the idea of time travel – the ability to travel to any point in the past or future.
But the future is constantly being transformed into the past with the present only lasting for a fleeting moment. Everything that you are doing right now is quickly moving into the past, which means we continue to move through time.
Time has direction, always advances. Time has an order, one thing after another. Time has duration, a quantifiable period between events. Time has a privileged present, only now is real. Time seems to be the universal background through which all events proceed, such that order can be sequenced and durations measured.
You cannot literally see or touch time, but you can see its effects.
Up to now, this appears to be true.
Then along came Quantum Mathematics.
Quantum Mathematics says our choice in the present moment affected what had already happened in the past…. Quantum effects mimic not only instantaneous action-at-a-distance but also, influences future actions on past events, even after these events have been irrevocably recorded.
Reality does not exist unless we are looking at it.
So matter is a derivative from consciousness.
Another words the present can only be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.
It suggests that we are living in a holographic-type of universe with no time.
Time is now a prime conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics.
In quantum language, they say energy disperses and objects equilibrate, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
Therefore the backdrop for the steady growth of entanglement throughout the universe is, of course, time itself.
So is time irreducible, fundamental, an ultimate descriptor of bedrock reality?
Apparently not.
Or is it our subjective sense of flowing time, generated by our brains that evolved for other purposes, an illusion?
Why am I relevant or an Illusion? Time may not be what time seems, so are giving false importance to the present moment?
Is time really a second picture, then change really. Its an illusion, because there’s nothing that’s changing; it’s all just there — past, present, future.
Quantum physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time and many assert that time is an illusion.
We all have the illusions, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn’t yet exist, and that things are changing.
But all I’m ever aware of is my brain state right now.
I’m looking at you; you’re nodding your head. Without that change, we wouldn’t have any notion of time.” Change is real, but time is not.
Confused yet?
At the deepest foundations of nature, time is not a primitive, irreducible element or concept required to construct reality but what reality depends on what time is.
Time is like space, in that every event has its own coordinates, or address, in space-time.
Time is tenseless, all points equally “real,” so that future and past are no less real than the present.
When you try to discuss time in the context of the universe, you need the simple idea that you isolate part of the universe and call it your clock, and time evolution is only about the relationship between some parts of the universe and that thing you called your clock.”
If the new line of quantum research is correct, then the story of time’s arrow begins with the quantum mechanical idea that, deep down, nature is inherently uncertain.
But how can a single piece of matter exist and express itself in multiple states, without any physical properties other than time?
There is no “true” state of the particle; the probabilities are the only reality that can be ascribed to it. (A particle is a minute fragment or quantity of matter.)
Quantum uncertainty then gives rise to entanglement, the putative source of the arrow of time this could replace human uncertainty in the old classical proofs as the true source of the arrow of time. The system as a whole is in a pure state, but the state of each individual particle is “mixed” with that of its acquaintance. The two could travel light-years apart, and the spin of each would remain correlated with that of the other.
Entanglement.
The essence of relativity is that there is no absolute time, no absolute space everything is relative. Absolutely nothing existed but we are all bound by time and space.
To be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere at all.
Because no observer has knowledge of a distant event, or the simultaneity of different events until they are unambiguously in that observer’s past something else exists.
Something that exists outside of time and space. Invisible but needs an environment to exist in, but what?
Some kind of untranscendence is essential.
Is this possible?
No observer has ever witnessed nothing if it had, there would still be absolutely nothing now.
Time by itself doesn’t do anything. Why would anything just “show up”
Therefore absolutely nothing existed. Why? Because, if absolutely nothing ever existed, there would still be absolutely nothing!
What did exist?
No gravity, no dark matter, no atoms, not a particle of anything. No air at all. No dust at all. No light at all.No elements, No molecules.
A “wave” of potentials, that does not take up a part of space, expressing itself in the form of multiple possibilities collapsing into one single path.
A void.
Because the beginning must have been able to exist without depending on anything else.
Something has no beginning. The eternal something is eternal. It has always existed independent of another. More importantly, It alone has always existed. If this something has any needs it can fulfil those needs for itself.
But how does it choose which path, out of multiple possibilities, it will take?
Eternal something must choose to change things.
What does that mean?
It means that no event can take place without the say-so of the Eternal something.
There is nothing in existence that can arbitrarily, by chance, influence it to produce something else.
Chance does not even exist. Chance itself cannot be produced by chance.
Chance is a force that must be produced by the Eternal something, or it does not exist.
It would have to be produced by the will of the Eternal something and to produce Something Else — out of nothing — requires an incredible amount of power.
So there was always a time when there was something in existence.
Time cannot exist without space, and likewise, space cannot exist without time so the universe as a whole is in a pure state.
Time emerges out of something more fundamental — something nontemporal, something altogether different.
But time is not transparent with no material substance that can be measured or observed. It has no end or beginning, it’s eternal and therefore does not exist.
We cannot and will not ever establish the reality of the awaiting future as time’s arrow is not steered by human ignorance.
According to the quantum mathetics, a“wave” is a wave until it is “measured” or “observed.” as with a spin or for that matter anything else.
If we look at the most recent pictures from Hubble which has helped to refine estimates of the universe’s age down to roughly 13.75 billion years, we are looking at light emitted some 13 billion years in the past.
This is calculated by the constant speed of light to convert time to distance.
Time = distance / speed. = 299,792,458 metres per second.
Is this true?
As we never observed the velocity of light in vacuum propagating at a different velocity it is deemed to be right and the mainstream scientific community carried on believing in the fallacy that the speed of light is always constant.
But according to Quantum light from any observer’s perspective cannot always be measured to be constant.
Therefore the time interval between two events is not equal for all observers.
Since we cannot travel at relativistic speeds at or close to the speed of light, we have no points of reference to compare the nature of light to.
Because the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time (to an outside observer this is flawed.) it is causing time dilation.
This conversion factor is not constant,
The best we can say is that the invariance of the speed of light is dependant on the nature of space-time. Its planet-bound behaviour must be different than light emitted in other parts of the known universe.
It is simply a conversion factor between space and time.
Our concept of motion only comes from gravity and friction and acceleration, not time.
If we were made up of nothing but photons of light, how would that being see the universe?
The being would see everything at a standstill, nothing would be moving not even light itself nor time.
Where do the property of ‘mass’ come from?
If we manage to discover the above we will discover where time comes from because the source light is travelling at our speed, no matter how fast you go.
Back to the beginning.
The beginning must have the ability to produce something other than itself.
The arrow of time does not seem to follow from the underlying laws of physics, which work the same going forward in time as in reverse. This is one aspect of time’s arrow that remains unsolved. The nature of time itself or why it seems different (both perceptually and in the equations of quantum mechanics) is outside the three dimensions of space.
Sometimes you have to have the idea at the right time.
Even what we perceive as solid objects all are manifestations of wave energy forms entanglement, with information becoming increasingly diffuse, but it never disappears completely. Like all energy consciousness is never gained or lost, it simply changes form.
The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations between the void and consciousness energy.
It is known that outer extremities of the universe are expanding technically faster than the speed of light.
Technology may end up creating a new race…cloning, other forms of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc but avoid is avoid.
This is bound to be of massive interest to any future societies for nothing matters … only humans make it so.
We don’t live in the universe, we are part of it.
Every molecule we move, everyone we touch, every penny we spend impacts others.
From an everyday point of view, our minds perceive that an object should behave like a wave or a particle, quite independently of how it is measured.
It has nothing to do with the question of “Why are we here?”, as one person has suggested, it’s more a case of “Where are we going?”
Unfortunately one would have to outlive the universe to witness it.
Particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing.
If we could change the past, it would create an infinite number of paradoxes.
The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories lost in time.
It is only when one unifies the concepts of science and spirituality that one begins to see the real nature of the universe. It is this consciousness and through the interference pattern of energy waves that gives rise to us, all that we perceive and that which we do not.
Has anyone travelled in the future?
Astronauts can travel a few nanoseconds into the future.
Think about that for a moment, the observer caused the wave function, which generates an interference pattern.
If we are, to be honest with ourselves, we had better think twice before dismissing the possibility that the void had a visitor called time.
Imagine going back in time 3000 years and encountering people convinced that the world is really a flat disc. When you hear this you tell them that they are mistaken, that the world is really round. But you become quite embarrassed when they ask you to prove it to them and you find that you can not.
After all, their experience conforms to the idea that the earth is really flat.
Its time to stop.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Never mind standing on the moon here are some depressing reality about your planet Earth.
We live in a world of trillions of living organisms and billions of humans and few millions of other species.
There are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.
There are nearly 210 million orphans in the world.
More than 500 million small arms and light weapons are in circulation around the world.
There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.
Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.
Genocide and other mass murders killed more people in the 20th century than all wars combined.
AND THAT JUST FOR OPENERS.
35% of the world’s people live in countries in which basic political rights and civil liberties are denied (such as freedom of speech, religion, press, fair trials, democratic political processes, etc).
Over 100 million people live in slums.
1 billion people – 1/3rd of the world’s labour force, are unemployed or underemployed.
Cows earns more than 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people.
An estimated 27 million people are enslaved around the world, including an estimated 20 million people held in bonded labour (forced to work in order to pay off a debt, also known as ‘debt bondage’).
At least 700,000 people annually, and up to 2 million, mostly women and children, are victims of human trafficking worldwide (a modern form of slavery — bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions)..
About 246 million, or 1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labor
3 billion of the world’s people (one-half) live in ‘poverty’ (living on less than $2 per day). 1.3 billion people live in ‘absolute’ or ‘extreme poverty’ (living on less than $1 per day). Both in rich countries and poor, a staggering 30-50% of all food produced rots away uneaten.
By 2025, at least 3.5 billion people or nearly 2/3rd’s of the world’s population will face water scarcity. More than 2.2 million people, mostly children, die each year from water related diseases.
The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57% (2.7 billion people) The top 5% of the world’s people earn more income than the bottom 80%. One fourth of humanity lives without electricity.
The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.
The combined wealth of the world’s richest 300 individuals is equal to the total annual income of 45% of the world’s population.
The world’s 3 wealthiest families have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 600 million of the world’s people. The wealthiest one-fifth of the world’s population receive an average income that is 75 times greater than the poorest one-fifth.
Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.
Between 10 and 20 percent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years.
Almost a quarter of the world’s mammal species will face extinction within 30 years. Up to 47% of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction.
60% of the world’s coral reefs, which contain up to one-fourth of all marine species, could be lost in the next 20-40 years.
Land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe.
An estimated 40-80 million people have been forcibly evicted and displaced from their lands to make way for the construction of large dams,
Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years.
While we witness the horrific events that are occurring within our society and world today now with a blink of an eye, our world is constantly changing, for the good, but also for the worst.
With technology, we are losing sight of what is important.
We have begun to categorize people based on how they act, what they wear, their political party, their skin color, where they live and so many other factors.
We are always forgetting ourselves until someone wakes up to remind us of who we really are. Humans?
The world was always beautiful. It’s only becoming lesser and lesser.
There is only this world, only this single reality, and its shared by everybody, everyday… Not created.
Were economically and morally bankrupt.
THIS IS THE WORLD WE LIVE IN.
The world has no one society. Surely its time we started to vote with our eyes not our ears.
The holy grail that humanity has been looking for in the past millennia the long-awaited immortal human being might be around the corner in not the so distant future.
Yonks ago I read a book ” Denial of Death”.
Ever since when asked the question, what year were you born? I have replied, ” I was not born I was created”
Perhaps it’s true: Without a soul, we are just collections of atoms that are little software programmes made up of code.
Think about it.
For the first time in history with technologically enabled genetics (Crisp gene editing), we are well on the way to making biology a programmable medium.
Is it even within the realm of possibility?
Can it be done?
It may happen in about 20 years.
(It’s important to note that radical life extension does not imply immortality. No matter how advanced our medical technologies get, people will always be subject to traumatic deaths and other unforeseen accidents.)
Life extension is definitely a growth industry.
Just look to work being done in regenerative medicine, cellular biology, and genetics.
If you could zoom in and look at the DNA on the tip of one of your chromosomes, what would you see?
You might expect to find genes, or perhaps some DNA sequences involved in gene regulation. Instead, what you’d actually find is a single sequence –TTAGGG – repeated over and over again, hundreds or even thousands of times.
Repetitive regions at the very ends of chromosomes are called telomeres, and they’re found in a wide range of eukaryotic species, from human beings to unicellular protists. Telomeres act as caps that protect the internal regions of the chromosomes, and they’re worn down a small amount in each round of DNA replication.
Telomeres which are bit like the plastic coating found at the tips of shoelaces.
The three main purposes of telomeres are as follows:
They help arrange each of the 46 chromosomes present in the nucleus of the cell
They form a protective cap at the ends of chromosomes
They ensure correct replication of chromosomes during cell division
Humans age when their telomeres get shorter and shorter, and thus their cells lose the ability to reproduce but planarian worms are able to stop the shortening of their telomeres, then we might be able to apply this same method to human beings.
This enzyme is most active during the developmental stages of life and can be found in most sexually reproducing organisms. Unfortunately, this enzyme ceases to exist after the developmental stages and as humans age, their telomeres begin to shorten again.
So if we are able to understand and decode how exactly these telomeres work we can ——– exist forever
So much for science.
If there was a way to become immortal, it hardly would be available to the entire population. It will probably be only available to a few and if there is an unforeseen breakthrough that will make it available for everyone on Earth, it will not be paradise.
If immortality and regenerative health technology are only available to a few, there will be a separation of humans between rich immortal gods—the 1-per cent—and the rest of us, poor mortals.
If it’s available for everyone, there will have to be a prohibition of reproduction to avoid overpopulation and the destruction of the planet.
If that happens, imagine the consequences of denying ourselves the possibility of having new people on Earth.
What would the point of immortality be? There would be no purpose. Profoundly boring to live forever. We would risk being tired of literally everything — including life itself?
And that by consequence, we should not even attempt it.
It is the prospect of our demise that gives richness and joy and anguish to each measure of our human experience,
There are many other serious implications for radical life extension.
But given what’s at stake, it’s an issue that’s certainly worth considering.
The future could very well extend our levels of engagement to even new heights (for better or worse).
The future, it would seem, will be anything but dull.
As now one has ever seen soul and immortality is found in the soul, not in the body (yet).
The good news is anyone reading this will not live long enough to know.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Advanced technology no longer stands apart from society; it is becoming deeply infused in our personal and professional lives.
Perhaps as much as any advance, facial recognition raises a critical question: what role do we want this type of technology to play in everyday society?
The issues relating to facial recognition go well beyond questions of bias themselves, raising critical questions about our fundamental freedoms.
You might not think it but we are in the midst of a facial recognition technology race.
Imagine a government tracking everywhere you walked over the past month without your permission or knowledge.
Imagine a database of everyone who attended a political rally that constitutes the very essence of free speech.
Imagine the stores of a shopping mall using facial recognition to share information with each other about each shelf that you browse and the product you buy, without asking you first.
Imagine an inability to protest your government. What if health insurance providers can track how often you eat at Burger King.
There is no shortage of tragic scenarios when such technology becomes ingrained in our society. It has vast potential to enslave society.
There could be dire consequences for citizens around the world.
So will facial recognition become part of everyday life?
This technology is actively being tested all around the world and it will only keep improving.
Presently smartphones utilize sensors and accelerometers to track our every behaviour, understanding exactly when we wake up in the morning, where our offices are, where we shop for groceries, what our interests are and how we spend our time.
We are willingly giving up our personal information that these “free” services offer, then turn around and sell for profit, all for a split-second hit of dopamine when someone “likes” a picture we post on Facebook.
Facial recognition surveillance is powerful not only because it is highly accurate, but also because of how discreet the set up is. You don’t realize when it’s surveilling you or your family. It runs in the shadows creating no noises, you don’t’ walk through any detectors, you don’t sign anything, and you don’t press your fingertips against a pad.
It just happens.
Increasingly it will define the decade ahead.
It can’t be left to tech companies to limit the way government agencies use facial recognition and other technology. Facial recognition technology raises issues that go to the heart of fundamental human rights.
Protections like privacy and freedom of expression.
So let me ask you.
Should law enforcement use of facial recognition be subject to human oversight and controls, including restrictions on the use of unaided facial recognition technology as evidence of an individual’s guilt or innocence of a crime?
Similarly, should we ensure there are civilian oversight and accountability for the use of facial recognition as part of governmental national security technology practices?
What types of legal measures can prevent the use of facial recognition for racial profiling and other violations of rights while still permitting the beneficial uses of the technology?
Should the use of facial recognition by public authorities or others be subject to minimum performance levels on accuracy?
Should the law require that retailers post visible notice of their use of facial recognition technology in public spaces?
Should the law require that companies obtain prior consent before collecting individuals’ images for facial recognition? If so, in what situations and places should this apply? And what is the appropriate way to ask for and obtain such consent?
Should we ensure that individuals have the right to know what photos have been collected and stored that have been identified with their names and faces?
Should we create processes that afford legal rights to individuals who believe they have been misidentified by a facial recognition system?
The questions listed above – and no doubt others – will become important public policy issues around the world, requiring active engagement by governments, academics, tech companies and civil society internationally.
Issues relating to facial recognition go well beyond the borders of Countries.
Given the global nature of the technology itself, there likely will also be a growing need for interaction and even coordination between national regulators across borders.
The need for government leadership does not absolve technology companies of our own ethical responsibilities.
The future is not simple. We, therefore, need a principled approach for facial recognition technology, embodied in law, that outlasts a single administration or the important political issues of a moment.
As in so many times in the past, we need to ensure that new inventions serve our democratic freedoms pursuant to the rule of law. Given the global sweep of this technology, we’ll need to address these issues internationally, in no small part by working with and relying upon many other respected voices. We will all need to work together, and we look forward to doing our part.
It’s apparent that other new technologies will raise similar issues in the future.
This makes it even more important that we use this moment to get the direction right.
Public authorities may rely on flawed or biased technological approaches to decide who to track, investigate or even arrest for a crime.
Governments may monitor the exercise of political and other public activities in ways that conflict with longstanding expectations in democratic societies, chilling citizens’ willingness to turn out for political events and undermining our core freedoms of assembly and expression.
Similarly, companies may use facial recognition to make decisions without human intervention that affect our eligibility for credit, jobs or purchases.
All these scenarios raise important questions of privacy, free speech, freedom of association and even life and liberty.
If we don’t stop or regulate it now, it will be more difficult to reel in after it’s already deployed on every lamppost.
The government needs to play an important role in regulating facial recognition technology.
As a general principle, it seems more sensible to ask an elected government to regulate companies than to ask unelected companies to regulate such a government.
After all, even if one or several tech companies alter their practices, problems will remain if others do not. There will always be debates about the details, and the details matter greatly.
The surveillance data can be deeper and more extensive than any of us understand, “trade a little of your privacy and we’ll keep you safer” motto.
You could say that education is the crux to this resistance and once society recognizes the overwhelming benefits offered as a result of facial recognition we will be able to move past the mental hurdles.
But the ability to use the cloud to connect all this data and facial recognition technology with live cameras that capture images of people’s faces and seek to identify them – in more places and in real-time will lead to a gender and racial bias developing because some facial recognition technology will not like you at the moment of recognition.
Facial recognition will require the public and private sectors alike to step up – and to act as the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.
It seems especially important to pursue thoughtful government regulation of facial recognition technology, given its broad societal ramifications and potential for abuse.
Today’s advanced facial recognition in the 21st century comes along with deep learning.
The algorithm compares different facial features as against an image encompassed within a database. It calculates facial parameters such as mouth, nose, eyes, lips and their relative intensity.
So smile. You might see what is under the – A human.
We’re Being Blinded to the Danger of Facial Recognition. A perpetual lineup.
If we don’t implement legal restrictions on face recognition, the future looks
like a Chinese-style surveillance state, one that violates our right to privacy,
our right to anonymity in public, and our right to free speech.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
It’s all a choice. Just do something about it- YOU CAN, what is true technology integration? 
bobdillon33blog 