Monthly Archives: February 2020

THE BEADY SAY’S: WE ARE NOW LOOKING AT A CHOICE OF CANDIDATES DISASTERS. FROM NATURAL TO FINANCIAL TO A PANDEMIC ALL CREATED BY MAN.

28 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., CORONA VIRUS., Denial of Death., Disasters., Disconnection., Donald Trump., Evolution, Human values., Humanity., Life., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders

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Twenty minutes read.

I suppose it is fair to say that when it comes to biological factors that tear thought entire species, humans can’t take all the credit.

History has shown that a pandemic now and then can be a good thing, at least for the survivors.

THE CURRENT CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK IN PROGRESS HAS THE POTENTIAL TO ALTER HOW SOCIETIES FUNCTION. TAXING INFRASTRUCTURES WELL BEYOND THEIR TOLERANCES.

A disease that kills 80/90% of all people on earth could and will tip us to an unrecoverable social and technological crash.

But real disasters aren’t lone events born of simple, soluble problems, and they don’t end when the credits roll. Nor are they necessarily a question of scale.

The line that divides an incident from a disaster is defined by a society’s preparedness and capacity to deal with the aftermath.

For good or ill, the technology and unprecedented control over life and death we have will likely allow future disasters to unfold along lines unique in world history.

Do we who are in the know care?

Other than verbal diarrhoea it seems not so.

So here a few disasters to look forward too.

Genetic Manipulation Gone Wrong.

Our genetic ambitions will outpace our safeguards.

Put simply, we can now wipe out entire species with a single mistake. Bioethical standards tend to lag behind technology, and who can say what a less ethical party might attempt?

Coronal Mass Ejection or bursts of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s corona.

They follow a cycle, like pandemics albeit a far more regular one (the conditions are ripe every 11 years or so) [source: NASA]. They also cause variable but potentially ruinous damage, and their destructive scales depend, in part, upon humans’ connectedness.

We’ve been lucky so far.

Such an event could last a few weeks. But a quick about-face would prove impossible if, as some people fear, the CME’s ground current cooks all the transformers. In that case, the risks of social breakdown and mass starvation become quite real.

Peak Phosphorus.

There’s a theoretical limit to how many people the planet can support? It’s mainly limited by available solar radiation, but there are other limits we would reach well before that one.

Our bodies need phosphorus to move energy around and to build cells and DNA. But our demand will likely outstrip our known supply within 30 to 40 years. Currently, a large amount of phosphorus is lost in human and animal waste. Much of what remains end’s up in the trash or washes away as farm runoff.

The push for biofuel options will only deepen the crisis. Everything has its limit — even the bounty of the earth.

The Thermohaline Circulation Shuts Down.

The melting poles.

As the resultant freshwater spreads across the North Atlantic Ocean, it shuts down a looping global current vital to global climate called the thermohaline circulation (THC).

But push past that point, and forcing factors, or environmental processes that affect climate, take over. This could create feedbacks that will alter climates for decades or centuries to come.

Whether such a shutdown will occur because of climate change remains unclear, but the bulk of data says the THC will more likely experience a slowdown. In the unlikely worst case, however, the effects of a mini-ice age combined with other climate change stresses could be nothing short of seismic.

The Cascadia Superquake.

An earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater.

In 2011 the 9.0-magnitude Tohoku quake and resultant tsunami killed 18,000 people, triggered the Fukushima meltdown and caused more than $200 billion in damages. All this happened in a region prepared for quakes, just not ones of such scale.

A Killer Asteroid.

Take Apophis, an apartment-building-size asteroid due to kiss our atmosphere in 2029 and possibly smack right into us on its 2036 return trip.  If it does it will pack the wallop of a 300-megaton atom bomb, to say nothing of the ensuing fires, disruption of solar energy and famine.

Global Economic Collapse.

Economists still struggle to unravel collapses that already occurred.

This one might already be happing as we watch the out brake of CORONAVIRUS        in China spread it seems likely that problems will only worsen under global climate change scenarios or energy-asset depletion.

All we can really say, as we watch China prop up its ailing stock market and the European Union struggle to define a set of economic policies suited to the diverse needs of its member states, is that indicators look more than a little dodgy..

The Singularity.

This is my favourite the steely grip of self-improving superintelligence born of human hubris. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

On one hand, it’s hard to imagine we’d be so foolish as to create a Frankenstein’s monster without a fail-safe. But do you know what’s not hard to imagine? That some garage hackers or industrialists, driven by rivalry, revenue or (Asimov help us) fetish, will sit nose-to-breadboard until they’ve created artificial intelligence or some weird imitation of it

Even ignoring the risk that superintelligent machines will rise, self-improve and decide a femtosecond later to eliminate humans, we’ll still face one of the most transformative moments in social and psychological history. Because however, it shakes out, it’ll be something we’re not prepared for, and that alone will make it a disaster.

World War III.

The reasons are deeply enmeshed: Food and water insecurity, climate change, financial crises, infectious diseases and profound social instability.

Add rising nationalism, weaponising technology, Donal Dump, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, South Sudan, the international order that has been thrown into turmoil. Multilateralism and its constraints are under siege, challenged by more transactional, zero-sum politics.

A paralysed United Nations who’s collective accountability, including the International Criminal Court, are ignored and disparaged.

Dubious territorial claims by major powers like China and Russia, Japanese militarization and a pinch of terrorist pseudo-states, and a fearsome picture begins to emerge.

President Donald Trump’s contempt for traditional allies and Europe’s struggles with Brexit and nativism, leaders across the world are probing and prodding to see how far they can go.

Socially or ecologically, there is growing concern among experts that change today occurs at a rate that far outstrips our ability to cope with it.

The international order as we know it is unravelling, with no clear sense of what will come in its wake. The danger may well lie less in the ultimate destination than in the process of getting there.

Moreover, in a world characterized by ever-growing connectedness, it’s unlikely that some types of disasters — economic, political, ecological and epidemiological — will remain geographically confined.

The same globalization and mass communication that transform the world may just as easily doom it if we’re not careful, and perhaps even if we are.

Anyone will ensure that nobody will remember the Internet.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S OK. WITH THE CORONA-VIRUS LETS TRY AND PUT WHERE WE ALL LIVE AND HAVE LIVED EARTH INTO PERSPECTIVE.

27 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Evolution, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations.

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Twenty minutes read. 

Most of us struggle with seeing things from a different perspective but our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.

So the purpose of this post is an attempt to take the complexity of the world and simplify it into some sort of graphic that will either help you understand it or motivate you to do something differently.

Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. There is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future.

When one considers our world from a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

The state of the world today with Social media and profit-seeking algorithms is one of distrust. There are things that are certain in this world and there are lots of uncertainty attached to many things. Sometimes the only way to understand the world at its extremes is to put it in terms we use every day.

The fact is that at least two of the world’s largest powers have been at war with each other more than 50% of the time since about 1500. 

The only problem we have here is us and therefore we cannot kill our way to a solution.

The Earth is about 3.5 million times larger than a human.

If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.

Here’s what we’ve got.

We see our earth as big, and in a relative way, it is.

There are about 7 billion people currently on Earth.  Over its existence, around 106 billion people have lived on Earth.

It exists on a blue dot, 24,901 miles in circumference that is over 4 1/2 billion years old, weighing in a 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds (or 5,974,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms)

(Since Earth is too big to be placed on a scale, scientists use mathematics and the laws of gravity to figure out Earth’s weight.)

It has a solid iron ball in the middle that is 1,500 miles wide. 

It makes up about 0.0003% of the total mass of our solar system.

75% of the Earth is covered in water only 2.5 per cent of it is fresh essential for producing food, clothing, and computers, moving our waste stream, and keeping us and the environment healthy.

About 321 billion gallons per day of surface water is used by humans.

Humans who are just 0.01% of all life have destroyed 83% of wild mammals.

Plants overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world’s biomass.

It takes light a little over 8 light-minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth and it can circle our planet about seven and a half times in a single second.

Our closest star is Proxima Centauri at a distance of four light-years.

The Milky Way itself is about 100,000 light-years across and is home to about 400 billion stars.

(A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!)

According to the Big bang theory which happened about 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the universe came into existence at the same time.

So anything can serve as a symbol as long as it refers to something beyond itself.

In our daily activities to give such things more than a passing glance.

However, our planet only seems large until we take a look at the rest of the cosmos around us.

Where do start? Its age., its place in the cosmic, or it’s future.

“Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite.

We’re visual creatures.

So perhaps a sense of scale might help.

Let’s start with a few comparisons

Life on Earth first emerged about 600 million years and we are the first generations whose decisions will determine for good or ill the future of human life on this planet, and we seem stuck in a way of thinking that is obsolete in a globalized world of growing populations. The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing.

To our brains, a million, billion, and trillion all seem like large, vague numbers. 

Today (January 2020) Bill Gates fortune amounts to around $108,5 billion around 0.5% of the GDP of the United States. By the time I complete this post, $1436400 amount will be added to his net worth and is predicted to hit the trillion mark by the age of 86.

If you are one of the so-called “rich” and you were lucky enough to make a million dollars per year, it would take you almost 80,000 YEARS to catch up. 

We share the Earth with an estimated 1 quadrillion ants. Insects outweigh us by a factor of 17.

For every human, there are about one million ants and the total weight termites are more than the weight of all the humans in the world. They alone make up 10% of all animal biomass and 95% of soil and insect biomass in tropical regions.­ Colonies of multi-drug resistant EBSL E. coli

Bacteria were one of the first life forms to appear on Earth, about 3.8 billion years ago, and they will most likely survive long after humans are gone.

The number of bacteria on our planet is estimated to be five million trillion trillion – that’s a five with 30 zeroes after it.

All the bacteria on Earth combined are about 1,166 times more massive than all the humans. For every human walking over the face of the planet. 

Bacteria are the huddled masses of the microbial world, performing tasks that include everything from causing diseases to fixing nitrogen in the soil.

The number of bacteria makes the globe’s human population look downright puny.

Because the number of bacteria is so large, events that would occur once in 10 billion years in the laboratory would occur every second somewhere on the Earth.

We may have been underestimating our own humanness for the past several decades when it comes to Bacteria. The average human has over 100 trillion microbes in and on their body microbial cells outnumber human cells in your body by a ratio of around 10:1.

Our modus operandi was to kill them, rather than synchronize with them.

Bills and coins are the best way to transfer bacteria between people worldwide; 

The debate over the microbiome will rage on, as the fear of the invisible and little understood will drive the masses in the short-term.

It is a fact that bacteria live in a whole series of worlds which stretch our imagination, be it the clouds in the sky, an Antarctic ice flow, a 100 degree C hot sulphur spring, 10 km down at the bottom of the sea, 1500 m below the surface of the earth in solid rock, in a rotting peach, in the roots of plants, the stomachs of animals and even your mouth, bacteria can be found there.

The vast majority of life is land-based and a large chunk – an eighth – is bacteria buried deep below the surface but bacteria also now found circling the Earth in the most upper layers of our atmosphere.

Recent findings on animal-bacteria interactions will likely require biologists to significantly alter their view of the fundamental nature of the entire biosphere.

“And that’s the way it is.”

My preference would be to avoid mentioning any ratio at all – you don’t need to it convey the importance of the microbiome. 

Some 70 per cent of the global consumption of the drugs are used in animal and fish farming and to spray on crops.

Antibiotics in the environment do not do any good, they only contribute to risks which we are now witnessing with the Coronavirus. A rapidly spreading virus that is establishing itself across the world through international travel, trade and tourism.

We are now living in a bacterial world, and it’s impacting us more than

previously thought.  No matter what process you think you are studying, you

must look for and consider a major role for bacteria. 

The World Bank has estimated that drug-resistant infections could cost the world economy $1 trillion every year after 2030.

By 2050 costing the world around $100 trillion in lost output: more than the size of the current world economy, and roughly equivalent to the world losing the output of the UK economy every year, for 35 years not to mention killing an extra 10 million people across the world every year.

Back to earth.

This is what a quadrillion looks like written out: 1,000,000,000,000,000.

If it survives us it has 6.5 billion years before the sun (which is 92,960,000 miles away) about 109 times larger than the earth. That means you could fit around 1.3 million earth’s inside the sun which is actually considered a dwarf star — By contrast, UY Scuti is the largest star we humans are aware of; it is a hypergiant around 1.7 billion miles in diameter. UY Scuti is around 5 billion times larger than our sun.

Its no wonder we a pixel.

The diameter of our solar system is around 5,580,000,000,000 miles — that is, about five and a half trillion miles across.  Expanding outward from here, we have to start talking about things in terms of light-years, as the scale is just too massive to discuss in miles. (One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km).

Our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter of which since the dawn of man we have observed the equivalent of the top of rubber on a pencil.

This is about one 24-millionth of the entire night sky visible from earth.

The diameter of the observable universe is estimated at about 28 billion parsecs (93 billion light-years).

Ok, the numbers are pretty hard to comprehend even when you know what each unit represents. To even think of how long 10 trillion kilometres might be, let alone 93 billion times that distance, can cause your brain to hurt.

Earth, in turn, is nothing more than a molecule in the incomprehensibly vast cosmic ocean. 

Without a global jurisdiction, no government can enforce any kind of coherent rights doctrine, particularly in the face of borderless problems like terrorism or environmental crisis. 

It is up to the people of earth to dissolve the strains between each-other in an equitable, harmonious way. 

The planet you were born on is dying.

We’re on a timeline that leaves little space for politicians to gamble. This is a world that requires nations, corporations and individuals to think not in terms of quarterly reports or midterm elections, but in decades.

For transformative change to be possible, we sometimes need marginalized peoples to speak out, in a loud voice, against the status quo.

The guardians for future generations, representing the children of 2050, can be that voice that says we are spending too much on conflict and too little on peace.

Thus  as Irving John Good said, “The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultra-intelligent machine.” 

“The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

If I took a personal guess the way we are going there will be no need for such an intelligent machine as there will be nothing to be intelligent with. 

ALL HUMAN COMMENTS APPRECIATED. ALL LIKE CLICKS AND ABUSE CHUCKED IN THE BIN. 

 

 

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WILL THE WORLD EVER BE ABLE TO ACT AS ONE?

26 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Climate Change., Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Environment, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, Human values., Humanity., Life., Our Common Values., Reality., Robot citizenship., Sustaniability, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The cloud., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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Twenty-five minute read.

If humanity stopped fighting and competing against one another; if we bound together in a common cause, we could accomplish spectacular things.

Not true.

We would basically become mindless drones of no culture because it’d all just be one culture with no distinct forms.

If this were to become a reality, Ummm how would govern it.

China’s premier Wen Jiabao put forward the following equation in a speech: “Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth.”

How wrong he was, however, by 2025 there will be 1 trillion networked devices worldwide in the consumer and industrial sectors combined.

He should have said, “Internet + Internet of Things = Becoming what we do not think? Because people are truly not that intelligent.

In our houses cars and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.

Intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities.

Coffee pots that talk to alarm clocks. Thermostats that talk to motion sensors. Factory machines that talk to the power grid and to boxes of raw material.

We might be seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before? This intelligence once locked in our devices will flow into the universe of physical objects.

We are already struggling to name this emerging phenomenon.

Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols.

Others are calling it the Sensor Revolution.

I call it the Programmable Profitable in a World of profit-seeking algorithms.

It’s the fact that once we get enough of these objects onto our networks, they’re no longer one-off novelties or data sources but instead become a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance in the era of the cloud and apps and the walled garden— of Google, Apple, etc, which connotes a peer-to-peer system in which each node will not be equally empowered.

These connected objects will act more like a swarm of drones, a distributed legion of bots, far-flung and sometimes even hidden from view but nevertheless coordinated as if they were a single giant machine, relying on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention.

So the world will act as one. Or will it?

Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a design­able environment, a playground for coders and engineers.

It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical putting intelligence from the cloud into everything we touch.

Call it “smart exploration.” 

The rises of the smartphone have supplied us with a natural way to communicate with those smart objects. So far they include watches, heart rate monitors, and even some new Nike shoes. Smartphone making payments to merchants wirelessly instead of swiping a card, and some billboards are using the protocol to beam content to passersby who ask for it. As a way to sell more products and services—particularly Big Data–style analysis—to their large corporate customers.

The yoking together of two or more smart objects—is the trickiest, because it represents the vertiginous shift from analysis, the mere harvesting of helpful data, to real automation.

In my view no matter how thoroughly we might use data to fine-tune our lives and businesses, it’s scary to take any decisions out of human hands.

It can be hard to imagine the automation you might someday want or even need, in your daily life. There are all sorts of adjustments you make over the course of any given day that is reducible to simple if-then relationships.

Facebook, which has famously described the underlying data it owns as a social graph—the knowledge of who is connected to whom and how.

Would you want to automate all of these relationships?

A world where every one of us would have a sensor on us. “Presence” tags—low-energy radio IDs that sit on our keychains or belt loops and announce our location, verify our identity.

This is the principle behind Square Wallet and a number of other nascent payment systems, including ones from PayPal and Google. (When you walk into a participating store today, Square can let the cashier know you’re there; you pay simply by giving your name.)

A tracking tool that monitors not just your pet’s movements, but your movements.

GPS reliably know our location within 100 feet, give or take, and that knowledge has and is transforming our lives immeasurably: turn-by-turn driving directions, local restaurant recommendations, location-based dating apps, and so on.

With presence technology, Google has already the potential to know our location absolutely, down to a foot or even a few inches. That means knowing not merely which bar your friend is at but which couch she’s sitting on if you walk through the door.

It means receiving a coupon for a grocery item on the endcap at the moment you walk by.

Think about a liquor cabinet that auto-populated your shopping list based on the levels in the bottles—but also locked automatically if your stock portfolio dropped more than 3 per cent.

Think about a home medical monitoring system that didn’t just feedback data from diabetic patients but adjusted the treatment regimen as the data demanded.

Think about how much more intelligent your sprinklers could be if they responded to the weather report as well as to historical patterns of soil moisture and rainfall.

It does not stop just there think about applications on top of these connected objects.

This means not just tying together the behaviour of two or more objects—like the sprinkler and the moisture sensor—but creating complex interrelationships that also tie in outside data sources and analytics. 

Plugged into that information, your system wouldn’t just know how much water is in the soil it could predict how much there will be, based on whether it’s going to rain or the sun will be baking hot that day.

It means walking through an art museum and having your phone interpret the paintings as you pause in front of them.

This simple link—between a tag on us and a tag in the world—stands to become the culmination of the location revolution, delivering on all the promises it hasn’t quite fulfilled yet. A simple link—between a tag on us and a tag in the world—will complete the location revolution.

The treasure that it digs up could be considerable.

This is obviously true for retailers:

It’s a future where the intelligence once locked in our devices will now flow into the universe of physical objects. Users and developers can share their simple if-then apps and, in the case of more complex relationships, make money off of apps, just like in the mobile marketplaces.

Processing it all in the cloud in a language unheard of.

On Google Maps, you can now navigate inside certain airports and stores, with Wi-Fi triangulation helping out your GPS. 

And according to a mobile couponing firm called Koupon Media, some 80 per cent of customers who buy gas at one major convenience-store chain never walk inside the store, so presence-based coupons could make a huge impact on the bottom line.

But it’s also true for our everyday lives. Have you ever lost an object in your house and dreamed that you could just type a search for it, as you would for a wayward document on your hard drive? With location stickers, that seemingly impossible desire has become a reality:

A startup called StickNFind Technologies already sells these quarter-sized devices for $25 apiece.

Think about a thermostat app pulling in readings from any other device on that platform—motion sensors that might say which room you’re in, presence tags that identify individual family members (with different temperature preferences)—as well as outside data sources like weather or variable power price.

An even more natural category for apps is security. It locks itself up, shuts down the lights and thermostat, and activates an alarm system complete with siren, flashing lights, and auto-notifications, and notifications with an on-call platoon of off-duty cops all coordinated through the Smart­Things.

This, finally, is the Programmable World, the point at which the full power of developers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists are brought to bear on the realm of physical objects—improving it, customizing it, and groping toward new business plans for it that we haven’t dreamed of yet. Indeed, it will marshal all the forces that made the Internet so transformational and put them to work on virtually everything around us.

However, there are obviously some pitfalls lurking in this future of connected objects.

As a sanity check.

Our fears about malicious hackers preying on our email and bank accounts via the cloud might pale in comparison to how we’ll feel about those same miscreants pwning our garage doors and bathroom light fixtures.

The mysterious Stuxnet and Flame exploits have raised the issue of industrial security in the era of connected devices.

Vanity Fair recently detailed nightmare scenarios in which hackers could hit connected objects, from our high tech cars (university researchers have figured out how to exploit an OnStar-type system to cause havoc in a vehicle) to our utility “smart meters” (which collect patterns of energy use that can reveal a great deal about our activities at home) to even our pacemakers.

The idea of animating the inanimate, of compelling the physical world to do our bidding, has been a staple of science fiction for half a century or more.

No, the main existential threat to the Programmable World is the considerably more mundane issue of power. Every sensor still needs a power source, which in most cases right now means a battery; low-energy protocols allow those batteries to last a long time, even a few years, but eventually, they’ll need to be replaced.

Just as with social networking, the privacy concerns of a sensor-­connected world will be fast outweighed by the strange pleasures of residing in a hyperconnected world.

A bigger concern, perhaps, is simple privacy. Just because we’ve finally warmed up to oversharing in the virtual world doesn’t mean we’ll be comfortable doing the same in the physical world, as all our interactions with objects capture more and more data about where we are and what we’re doing. iStock_000049614472Medium1

What’s coming is ubiquitous connectivity that will accelerate how people collaborate, share, learn, gather, do business, and exchange knowledge.

THE BEADY EYE SAYS: BEFORE ENGLAND LEAVES THE EU ON WTO TERMS IT IS NOT TIME TO CALL A SPADE A SPADE

23 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by in Brexit v EU - Negotiations.

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Fifteen-minute read.

The world cannot wait and will not wait for the fog of geopolitical and geo-economic uncertainty of England’s departure from the EU to lift.

If countries concentrate on immediate geostrategic advantage and fail to reimagine or adapt mechanisms for coordination during this unsettled period, opportunities for action on key priorities that we all face may slip away.

Powerful economic, demographic and technological forces are shaping a new
balance of power.

The result is an unsettled geopolitical landscape—one in which states are increasingly viewing opportunities and challenges through unilateral lenses.

Geopolitical and geo-economic uncertainty—do not abide by sovereignty.

Geopolitical and geo-economic uncertainty—technology governance framework and
cyber insecurity all pose significant risk.

Two-thirds of the global population owns a mobile device.

While digital technology is bringing tremendous economic and societal benefits to much of the global population, issues such as unequal access to the internet, the lack of a global technology governance framework and cyber insecurity all pose significant risk.

Coordinated, multistakeholder action is needed.

So I often wonder when one hears the rhetoric coming out of England is it just me that understands that it was England that voted to leave the EU and not the other way around the EU to leave England.

It makes no sense once you have the chance to look at the society from a distance.

Yes the UK is now not a member of the EU club, and no-one now understands what the UK is.

However, there is no such thing as a free lunch, multilateralism is turning into unilateralism, equality into hegemony, sovereignty into dependency and recognition into xenophobic immigration to foreigners, the “other” into disrespect for the dignity of other nations.

Having travelled extensively anyone who loathes an entire country or people is not worth listening to.

“Make America Great Again” “Take back control.”

With leading politicians spouting such nonsense both of these slogans are a realistic reflection of two culture in disarray.

The English have too many hang-ups, empire fantasies, a mixture of both inferiority and superiority complexes.

There is this reality disconnect that it can do better out of the EU because we’re bold and British. When in fact it is a screwed up country, with problems on so many levels, including wealth unbalances, that now seems willing to tank its economy and reduce England even more to a tiny island nation with barely any industry and nothing to offer the world except delusions of grandeur, visa points, for as long as it stays United.

How much pull on the world stage do you think this little island is going to have once Scotland goes its own way and then – inevitably – Ireland becomes one?

The Kingdom of England & Wales, oh boy.

Right now, England is in the wilderness and could be looking at a perpetual state of economic insecurity for some years to come.

It isn’t the EU’s doing.

Oh, sure, far-right leaders like Farage will work their supporters into a real lather over the “undemocratic” EU, but it’s all just cover.

The trivialisation of matters of national and international importance lend a kind of surreal quality to what are real questions requiring real solutions.

All the old certainties about Britain, its general pragmatism and tolerance, its inclusiveness and diversity, its compromise and common sense, are gone.

The problem now is that the common good could be lost in the pointless trading of abuse and insult before any new trade talks or deal takes place.

What’s at stake is a whole way of life, and internationalism rejected, not to mention the inward investment of around 5 billion a year by the EU into the UK or for that matter the whopping 927 billion euro- worth of the Euro-denominated contracts a day, representing 3/4 of the global market.

Which raises the question, should the UK still have such an important role when it will be no longer be covered by EU rules?

Sad.

Perhaps the EU is better off shot of the spoilt, belligerent British (English) and now has at least some chance of succeeding.

Apart from immigration one of the main arguments to leave was that the EU is undemocratic.

As the saying goes “One should not throw stones in a glasshouse”

How democratic is a Royal Monarchy?

How democratic is the ‘first past the post system’, where politicians can win with a minority vote?

The effect is that the UK in the main elects a series of parliamentary dictatorships in which a group supported by less than half the electorate gets to impose its policies and choices for the period of the government more-or-less unimpeded.

How democratic is it to buy the votes of the DUP for 1 billion pounds?

How democratic is it that the DUP, with only 300.000 votes gained 10 seats, while for example, the LibDems gained 12 seats with 2.3 million votes?

How democratic is the second house of parliament in the UK the so-called house of lords? Many in this house sit there not by merit but because of the great or great, great, great, grandparents were land or slave owners during the days of colonial plunder.

Brexit has now afforded the Tories a spurious ‘will of the people’ rationale for a number of profoundly undemocratic measures whose sole purpose is to consolidate power in their hands before damaging effects are too palpable to be denied and the public mood swings against.

Brexit is, in other words, a coup.

On the other hand the EU, by creating a level of governance, a voice of authority and a court of justice above the nation-state, has in fact supported and encouraged minority groups to express their identity against the nation-state.

A great vision never fully realised.

Imperfect, but like democracy, so much better than all of the alternatives.

Until UK politicians understand that the EU model is based on seeking negotiated agreement between groups with different priorities and ideological inclinations rather than magnifying a small percentage advantage of the largest minority into the unchallengeable ‘will of the people’, they will always be at odds.

Pretty much every country in Europe has internal tensions and secessionists of one sort or another.

Just how ironic is the latest Tories slogan “Connectivity.”

On an Island called by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion.

Even the differences between north and south England loom large.

There is a bit of a problem here, that sings a slavery song at International Rugby matches, its called an identity crisis. Everything that has happened since the recent general election, culturally, politically and economically points to the country needing a major reboot.

We all, b EU citizens, have a great opportunity now to construct a more positive vision of the relationships between independent sovereign nations and the citizens in those nations.

One size has never fit all people. Power has always created inequality and redistribution has always been the goal of philosophers for developed nations.

The one great result of globalisation is that increasing numbers of citizens around the globe are coming out of poverty. However, we seek to change social, political and environmental and economic outcomes we should not seek to change this outcome or the appreciation of diversity in London and Europe.

Do we simply want strong economies with strong social safety nets and redistribution for citizens and regions?  NO

The Europe we now have will not be able to survive in the risk-laden storms of the globalized world under threat from the Climate to technology.

The EU has to be more than a grim marriage sustained by the fear of the chaos that would be caused by its breakdown.

It has to be constructed on something more positive: a vision of rebuilding Europe bottom-up, creating a Europe of the citizen.  No one likes change and it is resisted until the need for change is internalised.

The evolution of the human organisation from wandering groups of 150 hunter-gatherers to the vast nation-states of today is simply not going to stop.

The EU is a manifestation of that process.

In a world that is rapidly moving to be dominated by four major platforms, Google Microsoft, Appel,

We got to grow up fast-moving to merit-based society that protects the values that are common to all of us, not Profit for profit sake.

It just indicates how difficult it is to see daylight.

I just feel sorry for all those who don’t have that option who are being stripped of their EU citizenship on the basis of a referendum campaign full of lies and bankrolled by the worst members of our society.

The only encouragement for the future is that most of those under 40 in England can already see the folly of Brexit and will eventually help to lead it back into Europe.

The forthcoming negotiations will be a war, the chaotic state of being that the European project was designed to prevent.

Perhaps all that is happening is that England is once again legitimising that “You can’t have a club where one member has special terms.”

The EU has been nothing but transparent and incredibly clear since England triggered A50.

It’s hardly their fault that, despite all the talk of how the EU referendum would finally put Tory EU divisions to bed, it’s done nothing but drive that wedge even deeper.

You can’t move forward as a nation until you have a better understanding of where you really are in the World.

Let’s hope we don’t pay too high a price finding out!.

Should the EU agree on a deal?  Yes. But not a piecemeal deal. The full monty or WTO.

These days ‘Fake news’ is called out and debunked quickly and thoroughly on social media.

“The EU is threatening sanctions to stop Britain undercutting the continent’s economy after Brexit…the bloc wants unprecedented safeguards after the UK leaves to preserve a “level playing field” and counter the “clear risks” of Britain slashing taxes or relaxing regulation. Brussels…wants…to enforce restrictions on taxation…and employment rights. …the EU negotiators highlight the risk of Britain ‘undermining Europe as an area of high social protection’…the UK is “likely to use tax to gain competitiveness” and note it is already a low-tax economy with a “large number of offshore entities”. …On employment and environmental standards, the EU negotiators highlight the risk of Britain “undermining Europe as an area of high social protection”.

Something is coming to England and it is not HS TWO.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S; HERE ARE THE BIG QUESTIONS THAT ARE YET TO COME WHEN IT COMES TO TECHNOLOGY.

19 Wednesday Feb 2020

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, Google it., Google Knowledge., Human values., Humanity., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., War, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders

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Thirty-minute read.

Who owns what?  What’s our purpose in life?  What are the values that we believe in? How do we think and make decisions?  What do we mean by work?  Can our work ever have true meaning unless it is to serve others?

What will help us all think deeply about the questions we need to ask and answer?

Climate change or technology.

However, for many of us, the answers to these questions differ in our working lives, compared with our personal lives, with family, friends and neighbours.

Were a ruling elite like Google to impose a command-and-control, fear-driven culture in which power is abused and the outcomes are social and economic misery for the vast majority?

Our reaction, if we are to go by what is now observable, will be So what? Now what?

MAKING sure companies compete fairly is a tricky business. The firms being regulated know far more about their business than those doing the regulating;

“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all of humankind.” Says Putin. “Whatever country comes to dominate this technology will be the “ruler of the world.”

His rhetoric is entirely appropriate. Automation and digitalization have already had a radical effect on international systems and structures.

Technology can easily be referred to as the scientific knowledge to the practical problems we are experiencing in the world today.

On the other hand, its core strategy is to gobble up market share with profit-seeking algorithms.

Our environments are all so full of technology to the point that most of the time we take it for granted.

So are we all becoming personified idiots?

Technology has a great impact on all the fundamental aspects of all our cultures including laws and how they are enforced, language, art, health care, mobility, education and religion.

The obvious problem with all of this is that countries will not own or be in control of the technologies.negative effects of technology

While we all sit back and accept the benefits technology it also brings manipulation on a  worldwide scale with our future in the hands of only a handful of corporations and the vast amount of people that are okay with that.

It’s hard to argue against innovation. It’s hard to argue against greater choice, more convenience and lower prices.

One way or the other it is also hard to underestimate the fundamentally different rules that Google /Amazon/ Facebook/ Apple/ Baidu play by.

Hiding behind forked rhetoric that the data they collect does no harm as it is anonymous.

You do not need to know who you are. It is enough to know what you consume, your habits, your tastes, and where you are, through the IP address, the GPS of the mobile, or your Google account. Your name, or your phone number, is not important to sell you things.

Blurring the borders of privacy. Replacing real-life communication.

And on top of it, violent games and videos killing empathy and bring destruction into an individual’s life. Plagiarism and cheating are increase while analysis and critical thinking decline, ending up in social isolation.

(We now have a new perverse sexual harassment of Cyber flashing which is not against any law. Why? Because our laws cannot keep up with the speed of change)

Commercial technology like Smartphones, I pads, Home Alexa/Echo and there like is about creating another consumer touchpoint for their robust ecosystem of e-commerce, services, and media taking advantage of less sophisticated consumers and trick them into consuming items for short-term satisfaction and long-term pain.

Originally created to serve faithfully to humanity, digital devices are revealing their harmful impact on our lives.

We should all be careful what we wish for.

There’s an argument made by big corporations for each country to charge corporations the lowest possible tax rate, to loosen environmental regulations down to zero, and to eliminate employee protections. All so that a country’s commodity producers can be the cheapest ones.

The voice market war has only just begun.

The contenders:

Amazon-Echo v Google-Alexa.amazon-echo-google-home

Once they figure out how to improve their recommendations and push more people to make regular household purchases via voice it will lead to an explosion in voice-based shopping.

Google already has one of the most valuable brands in the world.

Google maps have virtually no meaningful rival.  Gmail…Google basically controls our handheld existence.

Google controls your life, literally, even if it costs you to believe it.

Google trackers have been found on 75% of the top million websites.

When you search on Google, they keep your search history forever.

Google is a company that offers almost all its products for free because the money is earned by selling the data it collects with those products, to advertisers and companies.

Last year Google made over $161 billion in total revenues.

As it is the premier search engine in the U.S., Europe, and many developing countries Google has the tools to control much of the world.

That’s just Google then you have Amazon.

With around 225 million customers around the world, Amazon wants to deliver everything you want to your doorstep, including Foods anywhere in the world. ( 300 items a second) These days half of all product searches start on Amazon.

Our lust for cheap, discounted goods delivered to our doors promptly and efficiently has a price.

Amazon has done a lot of good for consumers by expanding choice, making shopping far more convenient and by delivering extraordinary product value.

Yet, we can’t–and shouldn’t–ignore the profound effect that Amazon is having on just about every corner of the retail world they set their sights on.

Amazon is selling its facial recognition technology, known as Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies.

First and foremost, Amazon isn’t required by its investors to make any real money.

For us the Great unwashed there’s always the opportunity to cut a corner, sacrifice lifestyle quality and suck it up as they race to grab a little more market share.

With their algorithms, they tell you what restaurants you have to eat in, choose your music, label your photos associating them with each family member or friend that appears in them, pay for your purchases, suggest the movies you should see, and the apps that may interest you.

When in fact the searches we do, what websites we visit, what products we look at, where are we, your medical history, your political beliefs, your associations with others your employment prospects, everything from the womb to the grave is collected and analyzed

Before I hear you calling me a hypocrite I also have used Amazon.

If this scenario prevails, would this be really the way information is supposed to be organized?

In short, does the fact that an algorithm is able to provide more relevant information than a human justify this scenario?

These big brands platforms are more powerful than governments. They’re wealthier. If they were countries, they would be pretty large economies. They’re multinational and the global financial situation allows them to ship money all over the world.

Can we do anything to make a difference?

We need to be supporting the development of an efficient circular economy.

Why?

Because sustainability is an unstoppable force.

Let’s not race to the bottom.

Country’s population size will become less important for national power as small countries that develop a significant edge in AI technology will move far above their weight.

Ultimately, however, winning and losing will not be determined by which country gains the most growth through AI. It will be determined by how the entire global community chooses to leverage AI — as a tool of war or as a tool of progress.

They can eliminate rules protecting clean water, air or consumer safety, but they will always find a way to be cheaper or more brutal than you.

We all assume that Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, are spying our activity and up to now advertiser is not interested in your name when they are it will be too late and the winner will be Inequality.

So what does all this mean and what are we all going to do about it when we’ve stopped talking about it?

Once you start to connect all the invisible dots together the impact on society will, in the end, be down to the people that use the technology they have to be responsible for it and if they use it irresponsibly they have to be held accountable.

A Footnote:

For me, there is little point in Jeff Bezos setting up an Earth fund when Amazon is one of the biggest promoters of pollution. Pretending to be a do-gooder.

The brown box doesn’t begin to address the larger issue: Each year in the United States alone thrown paper in the trash that represents approximately 640 million trees or roughly 915,000 acres of forest land.

Amazon ships an average of 608 million packages each year, which equates to (an estimated) 1,600,000 packages a day.

Then when we talk about energy consumption, we’re talking about the sources of energy that generate our power: oil, coal, natural gas and alternatives like solar, wind, hydropower and biofuels.

How much electricity they use and the bill is, god only knows, so its no wonder that they have contracts with oil and gas companies.

Now consider that people conduct over 1,6 billion searches per day, and you get a massive energy footprint of roughly 12.5 million watts.

Is e-commerce reducing or increasing our carbon footprint?

Google’s worldwide operations, collectively worldwide use about 2.26 million megawatt-hours per year to power its global data centre operations, which is equivalent to the power necessary to sustain 200,000 homes.

In 2018 Google generated 39.12 billion dollars earnings out of which it paid 243 Million a day in electricity.

This is only an educated guess.

The link between global warming and energy demands is obvious. Surely both of these players should be investing in Green energy.

There’s a deafening silence from pundits and elites and columnists and politicians on our joint self-destruction.

They are simply going on pretending it isn’t happening.

We don’t, as societies or cultures, value learning or knowledge or magnanimity or great and noble things, anymore.

The average person has become a tiny microcosm of the aspirations and norms of elites. We’re the only people on earth who thwart our own social progress, over and over again — and cheer about it.

We are caught in a death spiral now. A vicious cycle from which there is probably no escape. The average person is too poor to fund the very things — the only things — which can offer him a better life:

The result is that a whole society grows poorer and poorer.

Unable to invest in themselves or one another, people’s only real way out is to fight each other for self-preservation, by taking away their neighbour’s rights, privileges, and opportunities — instead of being able to give any new ones to anyone.

Though it’s too late to escape for them, let us hope our governments regulate their algorithms for profit sake.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME WARS AND BATTLES HAVE HAD A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON THE COURSE OF HISTORY.

18 Tuesday Feb 2020

Posted by in Afghan War., Technology v Humanity, War., What Needs to change in the World

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(Thirty-five-minute read) 

” Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” John F. Kennedy

If you ask Google how many wars have they been in the world.

Here is the answer:

” Early humans could have fought wars that went unnoticed. Sources range from 100,000 to 300,000 WARS.”

Then if you look at wikipedia.org and ask how many are current wars, on top of the list of the 40 active conflicts/ wars around the world at the moment, the Afghanistan conflict is number one, because of the letter A. 

You could not be blamed for wondering that after so many wars why it is in these modern days of interconnectivity other than the insanity of one or more leaders that causes wars. The boundary between rational and non-rational is fuzzy. There must exist incentives for conflict and some barriers to the ability to reach an enforceable bargain. 

The ideological change is both the most common cause of conflict and the root of most wars, but there is rarely only one cause of dispute.

Not only do we go to war we supply arms to the potential adversity. 

War is a better-known word in England that Afghanistan.

(According to Wikipedia,) The Kingdom of England has fought conflicts in 171 of the world’s 193 countries that are currently UN member states, or nine out of ten of all countries. So it is not surprising to learn that the British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the late 1830s. 

You could say England has been at war from the Battle of Edgehill (October 1642) 

What do you define as a war? What do you define as the UK?

Take the nicely named Troubles in Northern Ireland – 30 years.

(The leftover of the Irish War of Independence 2 years has its origins in the 12th century when England invaded to create its first colony.)

As with all wars once they start the original reasons are eventually forgotten in the devastation inflicted. 

World war one started in 1914 after four years it left over 15 million people dead and set the stage for World war two six short years.

The Holocaust alone resulted in over 11 million people killed, 6 million of which were Jewish. Somewhere between 22 and 26 million men died in battle during the war. In the final act of the war, between 70,000 and 80,000 Japanese were killed when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years and 5 months.

The Falklands 10-week. 

The Gulf War six months was a war waged by coalition forces from 35 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait arising from oil pricing and production disputes.

The ongoing war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict with Israel established in 1948 continues to the present day on various levels.

Or the ongoing Al-Qaeda insurgency in Yemen now 22 years.

So here is what I have learned about the Afghan wars.

During the nineteenth century, two large European empires vied for dominance in Central Asia. In what was called the “Great Game,” the Russian Empire moved south while the British Empire moved north from its so-called crown jewel, colonial India.

Their interests collided in Afghanistan, resulting in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839 to 1842.

This resulted in a series of unsuccessful wars for the British to control Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Turkey. The British lost at all four wars — the First Anglo-Saxon War (1838), the First Anglo-Sikh War (1843), the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848) and the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878) — resulting in Russia taking control of several Khanates including Bukhara.

Following this great victory over the British, Afghanistan maintained its independence and continued to play the two European powers off of each other for three more decades.

Soviet-Afghan War.

Afghanistan is not called the “graveyard of empires” for nothing.

The Soviet-Afghan War lasted over nine years, from December 1979 to February 1989. Insurgent groups are known collectively as the mujahideen, as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a guerrilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government, mostly in the countryside. The mujahideen groups were backed primarily by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, making it a Cold War proxy war. Between 562,000 and 2,000,000 civilians were killed and millions of Afghans fled the country as refugees, mostly to Pakistan and Iran.

More than nine years of direct involvement and occupation.

On April 27, 1978, a Soviet-supported communist government took over the country with the first Soviet deployment into Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. They had President Amin put to death because he was talking to the Yanks and installed their own leader, President Babrak Karmal.

The Soviets resorted to using napalm, poison gas and helicopter gunships against the Mujahideen – but they experienced exactly the same military scenario the Americans had done in Vietnam. 

In the years that followed, more than 870,000 Afghans were killed, three million were maimed or wounded, a million were internally displaced and over five million were forced to flee the country.

It became a source of embarrassment for the Soviet Union as the Mujahideen (a guerilla force on a holy mission for Allah) would come down from the mountains in the summer with US-supplied Stinger missiles and after around 13,000 Soviet troops were killed the Russian had had enough with the country becoming one of the poorest nations in the world. 

By 1982 some 2.8 million Afghans had sought asylum in Pakistan, and another 1.5 million had fled to Iran. The Soviets suffered some 15,000 dead and many more injured. 1988 the Soviet Union signed an accord with the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and agreed to withdraw its troops.

Mikhail Gorbachev took the U.S.S.R. out of Afghanistan.

Men start growing beads and destroy all non-islamic idols and statues- al-Qaid. 

By the end of the 1980s, the Mujahideen was at war with itself in Afghanistan with hard-line Taliban fighters. The word Taliban means “students”

By 1982, the Mujahideen controlled 75% of Afghanistan despite fighting the might of the world’s second most powerful military power.

On 25 April 1992, a civil war had ignited between three, later five or six, mujahideen armies, which escalated into another full-blown conflict. By mid-1994, Kabul’s original population of two million had dropped to 500,000. In 1995–96, the new militia Taliban, supported by Pakistan and ISI, had grown to be the strongest force.

On September 2001 the 9/11 terrorist attack which the USA believed that Osama Bin Laden head of al-Qaida was the behind the attacks. The United States began bombing Afghanistan and 10 years later kill Osama.

As of August 2016, about 104,000 people have been killed in the war in Afghanistan since 2001, more than 31,000 being civilians.

With the rising of ISIS in Afghanistan, the country was plunged into a new humanitarian emergency and Afghans into a new internally displacement and the refugee crisis.

Since invading in 2001, the United States has poured more than $117 billion into Afghanistan.

The war has enjoyed bipartisan support from the beginning. Bush launched it. Obama began his administration approving a “surge” of 30,000 troops for what he called the “good war.”  

The United States went into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks to get bin Laden, quash Al Qaeda and punish the Taliban for harbouring them. Bin Laden is dead; Al Qaeda has metastasized across the region; the Taliban have been hunted for 16 years.

Now there is no clear vision of where we’re headed.

A blank check to wage war anywhere, any time, for any length, 

To me it is quite clear with Trump “where we’re headed”—to more years of endless war without victory, wasting more lives ensnared in a war with no exit. 

So the situation isn’t complicated:

The origins of opium date as far back at 3400 B.C

There is enough opium production in Afghanistan (something the US was never truly capable of controlling or suppressing.) to ensure that the current war ends in a dream-like state and armed nation-building does not work.

Forty years might seem a long time but its nothing compared to wars back in the days when wars lasted from anything up to 700 years.

So here are few brewing for the future. 

The U.S.A. vs. Iran.

Why? 

Because of Donal Trump re-election. His inability to learn from Vietnam or Afghan that military power will mean little when drawing into a decades-long guerrilla war with factions of the Iranian regime.

Egypt vs. Ethiopia.

Why?

Because the Ethiopia Blue Nile dam is 60% completed…

Iran vs. Saudi Arabia.

Why?

Because the collapse of Lebanon, the Arab Spring, the Yemen civil war, and the Qatari blockade are all significant global geopolitical events spawned by tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two nations are already engaged in numerous proxy wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and as time goes on this list is only set to grow in size. 

North Korea vs. the U.S.A.

Why?

Because North Korea operates as a military dictatorship,

Russia vs. NATO.

Why?

Because Nato needs to justify its existence. 

The Irish have always been noted for a complete disregard for time.

Venezuelan Civil War.
 
Why?
 
Because it is safe to say things are not going too well in Venezuela.

South China Sea War.

Why?

Because it is home to 10% of the world’s fisheries and tens of billions of barrels of oil.

Amazon Apps ves Humanity 

Why?

Because we were too lazy and gave away all of our data. 

Climate War.

Why?

Because this could very well be the catalyst to end all wars. 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHY IS THE TRUTH UNDER ATTACK AS NEVER BEFORE?

14 Friday Feb 2020

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Communication., Dehumanization., Disconnection., Fake News., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Post - truth politics., Social Media, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truthfulness., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Thirty-minute read)

 

It is widely assumed by the general public that humanity is “progressing” and that we are better both physically and mentally than our predecessors were. Of course, this is true for some of us but for 6 billion of us on 2$ a day I doubt they would agree.

A person’s conception of truth is deeply intertwined with their conception of reality and truth isn’t actually divorced from reality. Science is dependent on truthfulness.

Few of us these day’s has the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth, but can we or should we trust the source?

As the saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

In a world where facts are under siege, credentialed sources are proving more important than ever.

We are getting our news from platforms, run by Facebook, Google, Twitter, Messanger,  etc including other social media sites and search engines, but can we place our trust in those platforms.

The profession of undermining truth has been in existence for decades. For much of recorded history, the truth was rooted in scholasticism now it’s rooted in a capitalist haze where political correctness and social justice including warfare have descended from the ivory tower of the rich infiltrating tech, business, healthcare, and governments.

The quest for facts these days is now governed by disinterested Google algorithms that trade us, accuracy for efficiency, creating a “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.

It seems that we accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.

As a result, humankind is losing mental capacity to know the truth and we are living in an era of rationality inequality.

For example, voters act on issues that don’t affect them personally and are under no pressure to inform themselves or defend their positions.

People vote as if rooting for sports teams, encouraged by the media, which treat politics as a horse race, encouraging zero-sum competition rather than a clarification of character and policy.

So what is happening?

History is littered with the bending or inverting of truth by people in power has long been consequential, so the recent prominence of “fake news.”  is not a new development. The belief that fake news is displacing the truth itself needs to be examined for its truth.

The implication is that we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own.

“Social media.”

Not long ago many intellectuals deplored the lack of democratic access to mass media.

Now a few media corporations, in cahoots with the government, “manufactured consent” with their oligopoly over the means of production and dissemination of ideas.

We used to say, freedom of the press belongs to those who own, one no longer true.

Social Media with it’s like algorithms are now fueling, accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that can be weaponized: since everyone reviles these bigotries, they can be used to demonize adversaries, which in turn spreads a terror of being demonized. It has become the place where one can express heterodox opinions without fear of being silenced or fired.

A network of pluralistic ignorance enforced by denunciation mobs.

So when it comes to intolerant repression of non-leftist ideas, don’t blame the Millennials or the iGens because unregulated Social Media is now blazing out of control abetted in part by government subsidies and lack of will to regulate.

People gravitating to people who are like them.

Social media held out the promise of giving a voice to the people, unfortunately, is making us dumber.

It is true to say that the network dynamics of social media are still poorly understood, but they do not yet host the mechanisms of vetting and reviewing that are necessary for true beliefs to bubble up to prominence from the turbid pools of self-presentation, group solidarity, and pluralistic ignorance.

We project the best sides of our lives through social media but revile real vulnerability.

So we are living in a post-truth world” true?

If your answer is “yes” then the answer is “no” because you’ve just evaluated the statement in an evidentiary manner, so evidence still matters and facts still matter.

But humans are fundamentally irrational – No.

If humans were truly irrational, who specified the benchmark of rationality against which humans don’t measure up? How did they conduct the comparison? Why should we believe them? Indeed, how could we understand them?

We did not evolve with the truth-augmenting technologies that have been invented in recent millennia and centuries, such as writing, quantitative datasets, scientific methodology, and specialized expertise. We evolved with the reality of the thought of what is true.

We don’t believe in reason; we use reason but as soon as you try to argue that we should believe things by any route other than reason, you’ve lost the argument, because you’ve appealed to reason.

That is why a defence of reason is unnecessary, perhaps even impossible. The very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason.

This is the point where it gets somewhat complicated.

We build mental models of the world around us that allow us to explain, predict, and control things to our advantage.

Algorithms know this by monitoring our lives and consultancy firms that specialize in defending products from tobacco to industrial chemicals that harm the public (that have and are with us since the dawn of Capitalism) are manipulating the market place for profit while ensuring that the truth stays buried.

So our reasoning is contaminated by false news.

Social media is a major source of these falsehoods coupled with peculiarities in human behaviour on social media, make it easy for fake news to spread. Twitter, Facebook you name them.

“Political” fake news spread three times faster than other kinds, and the top 1 per cent of retweeted fake news regularly diffused to at least 1,000 people and sometimes as many as 100,000.

Out of all of the news you see reported, how much of it do you believe is made up or fake news?

Around 40% with 70% per cent more likely than true news to receive a retweet.

While the political repercussions of fake news are quite obvious, the phenomenon it depends on how the information is presented and how rationality is defined.

The powers of inference for example.

Rational inference, scepticism, and debate are in our nature but set against false news that is normalizing the production of alternative facts are a project long in the making.

Politicians—two in particular—lies a lot. But politicians have always lied. They say that in war, truth is the first casualty, and that can be true of political war as well.

THERE’S A TON OF MISINFORMATION OUT THERE, AND WE’RE NOT OKAY LETTING IT GO UNCHECKED.

Why is the truth important?

We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally.

Spreading disinformation here, hiding evidence of harm there, undermining authorities evidence can change people’s minds. Internet discussion groups, in which these ideas harden and grow more extreme in the absence of critical engagement.

Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change.

Forecasting is no longer the dark art of pundits, gurus, it is big data and everyday fact-checking with Google has and is been revolutionized.

When people are confronted with their own ignorance of the facts, they become more epistemically humble about their opinions.

Unwelcome news is automatically rebranded fake news.

In the end, we are mere mortals but has the day of rationality-promoting norms and institutions passed?

The causes are complex, but it’s exhausting to live in a society where asking for help equals failure.

“Life before Google.”

Nothing can reverse the damage that has been done during our own generation, and some of this regression in truthfulness in the last 50 years is a paradoxical byproduct of the fantastic progress, we have made inequality.

From climate breakdown to air and water pollution, Co2 emissions, natural disasters,  the spread of the coronavirus virus, ongoing wars, our media watchdogs that don’t know what they are watching only using them to boost their viewing ratings.

Something important about the way we conceive of truth in our daily lives is needed if we are to tackle the difficulty assessing the reliability of the information that we find on the internet.

To achieve this these platforms with profit-seeking algorithms need to put their money where their mouths are.

Considering the technological boom are humans becoming smarter or more stupid?

The art of creating scientific disinformation is now at a new level of the tricks reanalysing results to reach different conclusions and hiring people prepared to rig methodologies to produce funders’ desired result.

The truth of history constitutes its whole value.

Enriching a favoured few at the expense of the great majority of mankind will be the last lie. The inconvenient truths will inevitably come to light.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

The films served to both promote products and a vision of America undergirded by chemicals and synthetic materials. We learn the industry was proud to produce insecticides, PCBs, vinyl and other materials and toxins later identified as environmental toxins.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS THE CLASS SYSTEM GOING TO BE EVENTUALLY REPLACED BY BIOLOGICAL STATUS

11 Tuesday Feb 2020

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Biotechnology., Cellular Biology, Climate Change., Dehumanization., Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Genetics., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Life., Nanotechnology, Natural selection., Our Common Values., Reality., Robot citizenship., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Fifteen-minute read) 

We may die out as a species for one reason or another, but evolution is inevitable so there will be a change in the future. We are not done evolving yet, so it begs the question of what could Homo sapiens really become – and what is forever beyond our reach?

We were fish once, and now we eat fish for dinner!

Humankind has come a long way from a single cell floating in the ocean waters, we have managed to become the multi-cellular wonders of nature that we are today.

However, evolution doesn’t have a direction, it’s confined are of this ecosystem called Earth which decides in the long run which direction if any it goes in. 

Skull D2700 discovered in 2001 at Dmanisi in Georgia is held by museum staff as they prepare it for an exhibition in Netherlands

Future humans might be very different from people today but not in the way science fiction movies would lead you to think.

Combining knowledge of our past with current trends, we are entering a new phase in human evolutionary history—one that makes the future less predictable and more interesting than ever before.

SO THE FIRST THING TO APPRECIATE IS THAT:

Evolution and natural selection are not the same things.

Evolution refers to the relationship between a species (a breeding population) and its ever-changing environment. Evolution does not concern what individuals may think it is the gradual genetic change of a species over time.

Natural selection is the phenomenon that rewards certain advantageous traits and punishes others through better or worse survival or reproduction. Medical science and public health measures have enabled the developed world to escape most natural selection.  

Right now most of us are the sacrificial generation.

In nature, natural selection is the most powerful evolutionary force, but other factors may take over when technology grants a second chance to those who would have died. 

Consequently, even with a complete lack of natural selection, it doesn’t mean that humans will not evolve. It is a selective force that clearly has shaped human evolution in recent centuries and may still be doing so today with the Coronavirus.

 With the Viruses, natural selection may not be “over for humans.”

This set aside we are more than likely going to have to adapt to climate change’s, to technologies like Biotechnology involving living systems and organisms to develop or make products.

Technology is already affecting the way our memory works and humans may eventually reach a point where they can force evolution upon themselves through the use of technology.Will our descendants be cyborgs? © Daniel Haug/Getty

We now have genetic samples of complete genomes from humans around the world, and with geneticists are getting a better understanding of genetic variation and how it’s structured in a human population environmental factors are no longer the driving force for evolutionary change.

We’ve all heard of designer babies, perhaps in the future, it may be seen as unethical not to change certain genes.

The human race will one day split into two separate species one more advanced than the other.

Races, as normally understood, would still be a thing, but with two separate species that will probably still call themselves human, even if they are technically different from those before them.

Of course, we don’t know this for sure but consider it’s not really a biological question anymore, it’s a technological question it is not beyond conceptuality that humans will not evolve into a single, ubiquitous ethnic group.

However, there is also a risk that current society collapses and some new society arises with ideas of eugenesy or breading races of superhumans and slaves.

One species with hi-tech machine implants, growable limbs and cameras for eyes even with different facial features and skin colour and external aids entirely responsible for survival.

A collective thought consciousness. Thought could be converted into instant gratification, and consequences to misusing it controlled by AI.

Computers will punish you! 

The human brain, being a machine striving for maximum efficiency, typically remembers where information is stored, rather than the information itself but as technology becomes more and more advanced, our brains will adapt in order to maximize efficiency – perhaps to the detriment of our memory.

Nanomachines would be part of the human form.

People could download their being into a computer system and be a part of the AI collective.

We will no longer operate within the confines of survival of the fittest. 

There is still going to be selection but artificial selection, so its no surprise that much technological advancement is currently aimed at the human body.

Up to now, sexual selection has defined evolutionary paths.

This will become less and less with gene editing with many of our internal functions becoming obsolete and what we might see is differentiation along lines where people live.

And what about space?

If humans do end up colonising Mars, what would we evolve to look like?

With the lower gravity, the muscles of our bodies could change the structure. Should we spend too long as galactic explorers, it’s likely that we’d eventually lose most of our muscle mass?

“What once use to be a magic flute will become a water carrier.”

So if we survive climate change humans will not evolve just for reproduction.

Whether it is genetically enhanced humans, bionic men, or uploaded beings, technology and its advancement with our decisions will shape the future of Earth and its inhabitants, including ourselves.

It will certainly be shaping human development. Bio to Artificial transmission with no inoculations.

Google Brain / Health or Microsoft Health vaults.

However, the future might be a lot slower than we think. It will take thousands of years for us to develop technologies that allow us to colonize the solar system.

If we do manage to move to other worlds, it’s likely that we’ll need to adapt to them using a combination of genetic engineering and technology.

All these changes may mean that Homo sapiens will speciate, or evolve into multiple new species. It will mean that our progeny have survived, even if they are nothing like us.

If we consumed most of the planet’s resources in doing so that is not evolution; that is the road to extinction.

CNBC Tech: Apple Watch 2

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE LOOK’S AT POPULISM. WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?

08 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Communication., Democracy, Digital age., Disconnection., Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media, Technology, The common good., The far-right., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Politics

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(Eighteen-minute read)

The word came from the “prairie populists”, a 1890s movement of US farmers who supported more robust regulation of capitalism.

“But no one is clear what it is.”

We can’t really talk about populism without talking about our conflicting conceptions of democracy – and the question of what it truly means for citizens to be sovereign.

So is it an ideologically portable way of looking at politics as a forum for opposition between “people” and “elites”?

Or is it simply part of what it means to do politics?

Or is it a lens for looking at our politics?

Or a mode of talking about politics, rather than a set of beliefs?

Or is it an emerging political movement driven by technology, spread by social media, the smartphone and ruled by algorithms.

There is one thing for certain populism is inherent to democracy.

So it would be in the first place a massive mistake, considering the hollow, undemocratic mess we are in, with algorithms making decisions about our collective fate – outside the reach of politics, to ignore its power.

If one looks at the state of liberal democracy today it is becoming more and more a sham.  A nice-sounding set of universal principles that, in practice, end up functioning as smokescreens to normalise the exploitations and inequities of our capitalist system.

Nothing can stay depoliticised forever. The questions of populism would have little urgency were it not for the widespread agreement about the shortcomings of the political status quo: About the abyss between the shining ideals of equality and responsive government implied by our talk about democracy and the tarnished reality of life on the ground.

Populism is supposed to explain: Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orbán’s takeover of Hungary, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, even Putin.

However, neither Trump nor Brexit should be regarded primarily as populist phenomena.

His election and Brexit shows that every status quo – however sturdy – is only temporary, and can always be challenged by a movement that seeks to replace it with something new.

Populists consider themselves as victims of economic exploitation, anti-austerity movements – such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Occupy these movements are obviously animated by a sense of opposition.

From this perspective, populism is just another word for real politics.

On the other hand, what most people knew about these parties, at first, was that they were openly nativist and racist. They talked about “real” citizens of their countries, and fixated on the issue of national and ethnic “purity,” demonising immigrants and minorities.

But I say that there are no real populists in politics – just people, attitudes and movements that the political centre misunderstands and fears.

The question of populism, then, is always the question of what kind of democracy we want.

The only inherent connection between rightwing and leftwing populist movements is that both embrace the same fundamental truth about democracy: that it is an ever-shifting contest over how the default “we” of politics is defined and redefined, of which no one definition can be guaranteed to last.

When populism appears in the media, which it does more and more often now, it is typically presented without explanation, as if everyone can already define it.

It sounded less alarming than “extreme right” or “radical right”.

It will always live in the shadow of the muddled media and political discourse and there can no longer be any doubt that we are going through a populist moment, so which type of populist you want to be.

A liberal democracy populism that is forced by rightwing populism to make good on its promises of equality. That needs to reacquaint with the need to construct a democratic “we” – a people – around their demand to protect liberal institutions and procedures, in opposition to radical rightwing parties who are happy to see them discarded.

Liberal democracy, in this context, has almost nothing to do with contemporary distinctions between left and right. It refers, instead, to the idea that government should facilitate pluralistic coexistence by balancing the never fully attainable ideal of popular sovereignty with institutions that enshrine the rule of law and civil rights, which cannot easily be overturned by a political majority.

or

A populism that can never be disentangled from the concept’s pejorative baggage.  An ideology runs the risk of making effective and worthwhile political strategies seem irresponsible, even dangerously promoting nativisms and short term gains.

Obviously, there are leftwing and rightwing populisms both are motivated not by passion for populism’s core ideas, but by other ideological factors best described as a fuzzy blanket to camouflage nastier nativism.

We are now living through a time when familiar webs connecting citizens, ideologies and political parties are, if not falling apart, at least beginning to loosen and shift and old theories of populism that defined it specifically as rightwing, racist or anti-immigrant is insufficiently wide to describe these new developments in populist politics.

It seems to me that Populists deal in “simplicity,” in “glib, facile solutions” while liberal leaders have been “oblivious” to the sufferings of their people.

So why are the traditional parties of the left in the western world being defeated?

Because the other side doesn’t play fair any more with conflict an inescapable and defining feature of political life.

The juvenile incapacity of both to bring their preferences to the political arena and engage in the complex give-and-take of rational compromise is with Social Media now fraught with a political examination and association accusation and assassination.

With the impersonal forces, of “globalisation” and “technological change voters are deciding that mainstream political parties have done nothing for their static incomes or disappearing jobs or sense of national decline these past two decades.

The “many, not the few.”

Populism is a new, consensus-smashing thing that is now secondary to nativism. Ultimately, they are disputes about which types of politics make us suspicious, and why.

To conclude that the two camps are simply talking past each other would be to miss the extent to which they are in agreement –and what, taken together, they tell us about the current political moment.

We can never know exactly where democracy is going to take us – not this time, nor the next, nor the time after that, but political parties must come to terms that the elephant in the room is that we no longer vote once every five years we vote on Social media ever five minutes.

Unless politics is not achievable, or rewarding, it obviously is sowing the long-term seeds for discontent.

It’s great to see politicians with Twitter accounts but there’s only so much you can do with that. Online participation in local decision-making is possible.

Failing to practice what you preach has ethical and political costs. E-voting is the next step.

Here below is what they are voting on and its not Fifty Shades of Grey Popularism.

 

 

Capitalist greed has and is poisoning political life.

Unregulated Algorithms will ensure it continues to do so.  Combined with the new realities of the portability of populism’s ideological movements spread by social media it is no wonder that liberal democracy is crumbling around the world.

To keep up with algorithms and their lavishly detailed position papers, their leaders,  Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Mircosoft, and their inc have little personal sympathy any longer with the travails of working people.

We can only hope that the fear of populism on the left will enable the victory of populism of the right.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WE CAN NO LONGER BE CERTAIN ABOUT ANYTHING.

06 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Digital age., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human values., Life., Technology, The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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 Twenty four-minute read.   

We have no idea how the world will look in twenty years never mind fifty when most of this generation will be in their seventies but it is now becoming clear beyond any doubt that AI and its algorithms are drastically changing the world we live in both for the good and bad.

There is one thing for certain artificial intelligence will have and is having a more profound effect than electricity or fire. 

It will not just hack our lives our brains, it will hack or very existence.

It might well warn us about climate change, the coronavirus but it will as it is manipulate our needs and wants and beliefs. It will effectively be controlling people for both commercial and political purposes. 

Given the force of this technology to have any control left we need meaningful regulations, if not we might as well just surrender to the algorithm, which is becoming so complex that no one will understand them.

The reality is that most of us are giving rivers of free information to Big data to an extent that we will soon be unable to think for ourselves.

If we don’t get a grip by the time you reach the seventies your futures and the future of the next generations will be decided at random by nonelected platforms.  

If this is so, the decision-making process for us all become a thing of the past.

The outlook for Ai is both grim and exciting. 

Already we see data collected affecting elections, with our ability to know what is fake and what is true at the mercy of Social Media run by algorithms.  

We all know their faces: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Baidu in China, Twitter, Alibaba, to name a few who are already transforming the basic structure of life.

Taken together they form a global oligopoly.

These unregulated platforms are competing for dominance all with a conflict of interests. Hence their algorithms.

The chances of self introducing regulations that will affect or stop their development is pie in the sky. 

Its time we stopped thinking about AI in kind of scientific terms.

Why?

Because algorithms are making critical decisions about our lives and the tech-driven approach to governance is growing. Because any particular scenario will be far from what we think is true today and we are running out of time to do anything about it.

If we are to call a spade a spade there is no or little understanding as to how to regulate these emerging technologies.  Even if there were governments and world institutions that could do so they are largely unequipped to create and enforce any meaningful regulation for the public benefit.

 The problem is how does one regulate an Algorithm that learns. 

You might happy ceding all authority to algorithms and their owners if so you don’t have to do anything they will take care of everything.

If not algorithms are watching you right now to ensure that you do not read this post and if you do read this post they will use one of the most powerful tools in their arsenal of big data – split and divide – False News and repetition thereof for example. 

It won’t happen overnight since development cycles often take years but our collective past will become a less reliable guide and we will have to adapt to the unknown. 

Unfortunately teaching the unknown without mental balance is a disaster in waiting. 

It might be easy now to laugh at this but unless we make our voices heard instead of like clicks it will not be climate change that changes us but race bias that is already programmed into Tec world.

We’re starting to see money examples where these algorithms are prone to the kinds of biases and limitations that we see in human decision making and increasingly we are moving towards algorithms that are learning more and more from data.

 I say, learning from this data almost institutionalizes the biases.

Why?

Because they are trying to personalize the media they curate for us. They’re trying to find for us more and more of the kinds of content that we already consume.  

So what if anything can be done?

Even if we do eventually introduce regulations they will have little effect unless we find a way of sharing the benefits of AI.

The problem is that our institutions, our education models are not able to keep up with the developments in Artificial Intelligence. We are becoming more and more detached from and in decision making, contributing, and rewards.

So our governments are leaving it to the market, to the big Tec companies themselves.

If you are expecting some kind of warning when AI finally get smarter than us then think again.

I say our algorithms are hanging out with the wrong data, profit for profit sake. 

In reality, our electronic overlords are just getting started with the smartphone, the I.Pads, Alex etc taking control.  We have to think about other measures, like is there a social contribution, and what is the impact of this algorithm on society?

This requires transparency.

But how do you create transparency in a world that is getting so complex?

Here is my solution.

Pharmaceuticals are considered as the most highly regulated industries worldwide and every country has its own regulatory authority when it comes to the drug development process.

(World Health Organization (WHO), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), World Trade Organization (WTO), International Conference on Harmonization (ICH), World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are some of the international regulatory agencies and organizations which play essential role in all aspects of pharmaceutical regulations related to drug product registration, manufacturing, distribution, price control, marketing, research and development, and intellectual property protection.)

Why not put in place a new World Governing Body to test and control Al algorithms. To act as a guardian of our Basic Human Values.

If this is not done it will remain impossible to truly cooperate with an AI or a corporation until such entities have values in the same sense that we do.

So:

All Companies already using algorithms should be legally required to submit the software programs running their algorithms for audit, by an independent team to ensure that our human values are complied with.

This audit could be done by a United Nation’s programme that is agreed to world wide.

The audit process (Because algorithms are constantly evolving as they gather more data.) has to be somewhat continuous like every ten years similar to Control technique. We might also need an algorithm to monitor the auditing algorithm to ensure it is not contaminated while it goes through its refresh-cycle of the Algorithm it is auditing. 

Then they must be made transparent with a certification of acceptable behaviour.   

Transparency for end users actually is very basic.

It’s not like an end-user wants to know the inner details of every algorithm we use.

But we would actually benefit knowing what’s going on at the high level.

For example, what kinds of data are being used by the algorithms to make decisions?

Recommend transparency measures.

Keeping in mind that these algorithms are being deployed and used by humans, and for humans, anyone impacted by decisions made by algorithms should have the right to a description of the data used to train them, and details as to how that data was collected.

The public, have little understanding or access to information about how governments are using data, much of it collected quietly, to feed the algorithms that make decisions about everyday life. And, in an uncomfortable twist, the government agencies themselves often do not fully understand how algorithms influence their decisions.

Having more and more data alone will not solve the problems, gender bias, race bias.

Perhaps the notion of control may only be an illusion.

It won’t be long before they are latching on to life forms.  For example, there’s a type of machine learning algorithm known as neuro labs, and these are modelled on the human brain. What’s happening in these algorithms is they’ve taken lots of data, and they learn how to make decisions like humans have made.

I think this field hasn’t yet emerged.

Humans aren’t changing that much. But the algorithms, the way they’re created, the technological side of it, continues to change, continues to evolve. And trying to keep those things in sync seems to be the greatest challenge.

In a world where algorithms are deciding who gets what, how machine decisions are made, and how the two, can work together.

Because we are going to use these systems so much that we have to understand them at a deeper level, and we can’t be passive about it anymore because the consequences are very significant, whether we’re talking about a democracy or you know, I’m curating news stories for citizens, or we talking about use by doctors in medicine, or used in the courtroom, and so on.

It is going to be extremely important as we roll out algorithms in more and more important settings going forward we start understanding what drives trust in these machines. Understanding what are some socially important outcomes of interest, so that we order these algorithms against these socially important outcomes, like fairness and so on.

Given everything we know about the world and indeed the universe as a whole does anyone seriously believe that nationalism and popularism will help us with this technological problem. 

Let’s talk about what data are collected about us.

It is far too late to be talking about privacy that is what gets abused.

Let’s fight against everything that we can control that limits our freedom. Whether it’s an algorithm, hungry judge or greedy state backed the wrong econometric model…

We need to rethink how we do education, we have to rethink how we do regulation, and firms also need to stand up and do a better job of auditing and taking responsibility as well.

Of course, none of this will happen.

Humans are more likely to be divided between those who favour giving Algorithms and Ai significant authority to make decisions and those opposed to it with both justifying whichever position while Algorithmic logic drives greed and inequality to a point where we will lose control of transparency completely.

To stay relevant as Yuval Noha Harari says in his Book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century “we will need to be asking the questions -how am I where am I.”

There testing rarely go beyond technical measures which are causing society to become more polarized making it more unlikely that we can appreciate other viewpoints.

Just knowing that an algorithm made the decision would be a good place to start.

Was an algorithm used?

If so who does it belong to?

What kinds of data did the algorithm used?

Today, algorithms and artificial intelligence are creating a much more frightening world. High-frequency trading algorithms already rule the stock exchanges of the world.

Personally, I would neither overestimate nor underestimate the role and threat of algorithms. Behind every smart web service is some smarter web code.

So we need to make sure their design is not only informed by knowledge of the human users, but the knowledge of their design is also suitably conveyed to human users so we don’t eliminate the human from the loop completely.

If not they will become a black box, even to the engineer.

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems that are being exploited by profit-seeking algorithms. 

There’s so much data out there to be analyzed. And right now it’s just sitting there not doing anything. So maybe we can come up with a solution that will at least get us started on it.

It is a fascinating topic because there are so many variables involved.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.