≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHY IS ENGLAND IN SUCH A MESS?
The grim reality for Britain as it faces up to 2024 is that no other major power on Earth stands quite as close to its own dissolution.
Given its recent record, perhaps this should not be a surprise..
In 2016, when the country chose to rip up its long-term foreign policy by leaving the European Union, achieving the rare feat of erecting an economic border with its largest trading partner and with a part of itself, Northern Ireland, while adding fuel to the fire of Scottish independence for good measure.
And if this wasn’t enough, it then spectacularly failed in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, combining one of the worst death rates in the developed world with one of the worst economic recessions.
If you ask the question why is this the sorry state of England?
The answer is that it has never put its people before profit – Mrs Thatcher – privatisation.
It seems to me that Britain’s existential threat is not simply the result of poor governance—an undeniable reality—but of something much deeper: the manifestation of something close to a spiritual crisis.
At the heart of Britain’s crisis is a crisis of identity. Put simply, no other major power is quite as conflicted about whether it is even a nation to begin with, let alone what it takes to act like one.
The United Kingdom is more than Britain and the British.
Some of its citizens believe themselves to be British, while others say they are not British at all; others say they are British and another nationality—Scottish or Welsh, say. In Northern Ireland it is even more complicated, with some describing themselves as only British while others say they are only Irish.
Brexit—an apparent spasm of English nationalism that has broken the social contract holding Britain’s union of nations together, revealing the country’s true nature as an unequal union, of the English, by the English, for the English.
If anything, Brexit revealed the scale of the problem that was already there. An anachronistic country, one destined to break up into its old component parts.
We tend to think of the world’s most powerful nations as unshakable actors on the world stage, but of course they are not. Yet the truth is that the Englishness of Brexit only matters if people see themselves as something other than British.
One of the problems in Britain is that the loss of faith in the country is now so pervasive that it is hard to know whether it can be rebuilt.
It seems to me that if Britain is to survive, it has to believe that there is such a thing as Britain and act as though that is the case.
Outside the European Union, Britain’s collective experience becomes more national by definition. Its economy diverges from the EU, with separate trading relationships, tariffs, standards, and products. It will have its own British immigration system, border checks, and citizenship.
Britain is bottom of the 14 nations for biodiversity, having lost more wildlife than any other G7 country and been shown to be one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet.
Its vital memories are dying. To survive, it must be more than empty pomp, singing a slave song in support of its rugby team or a national anthem that glorifies a king rather than a country.
This reflects a widespread cultural indifference to its mixed population and is a staggering reality as possibly mental handicap in solving its problems.
London houses more than 8 million citizens who communicate via different languages. It is estimated that more than 300 languages are spoken in the city.
The UK has an unwritten out of date constitution. Instead, it is largely written in different documents but has never been brought together.
All human comments apricated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Once we pass a certain threshold, physics takes over.
We have had summit after summit and we still unable to except the consequences.
Why?
Because we put money before people.
Scientists have and are warning that Earth is exceeding its “safe operating space for humanity” in six of nine key measurements of its health.
Earth’s climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrient and air pollution and ‘novel’ chemicals – human-made compounds like microplastics and nuclear waste – are all out of whack, and the planet is losing resilience.
Once a tipping point is crossed it will be irrelevant as who contributed or who did not.
The 2015 UN Paris Agreement set a target to cap the global temperature rise to 1.5°C.
However, the current reality on the ground paints a worrisome picture, with governments not able or unwilling to comprehend the consequences.
The truth is that we live in a world that is incapable of any mean full collective action, in order to avert the coming decades of uncertainty and fragility.
The magnitude of the challenge calls for bold collective actions.
The Covid crisis and the war in Ukraine have combined to shake up the global economic and social system and increase uncertainty, bringing lower growth and triggering higher inflation.
As a result we see countries roiling back on their commitments to achieve net zero carbon admissions.
If damaging tipping cascades can occur and global climate tipping points cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization.
Experts don’t agree on exactly where the limits are, it’s more likely that we’re burnt toast.
—————–
These include the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise, the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which billions of people depend for food, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.
They don’t exist in isolation, they are all intermingle.
This sets Earth on course to cross multiple dangerous tipping points that will be disastrous for people across the world.
To maintain liveable conditions on Earth and enable stable societies, we must do everything possible to prevent crossing tipping points.
These boundaries “determine the fate of the planet, with the consequences impossible to predict.
No amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us.
Perhaps its beyond our collective intelligence to drive any tangible action on key global issues.
Unfortunately we are still yonks away from any global understanding of just what is a risk.
Take the UK Environment Act that became law during the UK’s hosting of the COP26 summit in Glasgow is totally ignored when granting hundreds new offshore oil licences, or opening a coal mine in Wales.
Rishi Sunak said: We’re choosing to power up Britain from Britain so that tyrants like Putin can never again use energy as a weapon to blackmail us. And just the other day announcing sweeping U-turns that could have catastrophic effects on our climate is one thing.
Delaying the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the UK from 2030 to 2035, more than anything sounded like an admission of the government’s failure to implement climate policy in a way that brings people with them while showing the benefits of a more sustainable future.
You dont need to be Climate Scientist to understand that we need to change our approach to the climate problem.
Take the Oceans.
Covering more than 70% of Earth’s surface. The heat-holding capacity of the ocean is mammoth.
Every year about 134 million atomic bombs of heat is being trapped by the ocean.
The effects of ocean warming include sea level rise due to thermal expansion, coral bleaching, accelerated melting of Earth’s major ice sheets, intensified hurricanes*, and changes in ocean health and Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing ice. lost completely, both ice sheets contain enough water to raise sea level by 66 meters (217 feet).
How much heat is that?
Ninety percent of global warming is occurring in the ocean. with most of the added energy stored at the surface.
Scientists have calculated it is the equivalent energy of more than 25bn Hiroshima atomic bombs.
The atmosphere has held on to about 2% of the extra heat caused by global heating since 2006.
Oceans are a vital climate regulator. It is not a free service. Adding that heat has come with ocean acidification, rising sea levels and changes in the frequency of extreme weather.
The first thing to understand is, nowhere or anyone on the planet is going to be spared the impact of climate change.
Here are a few facts.
The Antarctica is losing 151 billion tonnes of ice per year, roughly equivalent in weight to the rock that makes Mount Everest,
More than 200 million people in the world will live below the tideline by the end of this century if levels continue to rise.
Wild fires devastated roughly 30 million acres of land from 2018-2020.
83 of 252 natural World Heritage sites are at risk.
A chilling number of Earth’s other denizens, including 40 percent of all amphibians known to science (about 3,200 species) is under threat.
Each year, more than 12 million hectares of land are lost to desertification.
The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is estimated to have lost half its corals since the 1990s as a sustained rise in ocean temperatures bleached them white and made them uninviting to its colonising organisms.
Plastic production and use is forecast to double over the next 20 years, and quadruple by the early 2050s, warns the Heinrich Böll Foundation, despite the fact that greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and methane, are released at every stage of plastic’s lifecycle – from the extraction and refinery of oil to the manufacturing process and end-of-life disposal and incineration.
At least 155 million people, 2.3 times as many as live in the UK, were pushed into acute food insecurity in 2020 due to extreme weather.
During the past 20 years there has been a 53·7% increase in heat-related mortality in people older than 65 years.
The amount of sea ice five years old or above dropped from 30% to 2%.
Climate change is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases.
Between 1990 and 2015, the richest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for more than twice as much carbon emissions as the poorest 50% of humanity.
Electric cars may emit zero tailpipe emissions, but they still have a sizeable carbon footprint from their manufacturing process. One manufacturer’s electric SUV has to drive anywhere between 29,000 miles (47,000km) and 90,000 miles (146,000km) – depending on whether it is recharged with wind power or a ‘global energy’ mix that includes electricity generated from fossil fuels – before its greenhouse gas emissions are lower than the petrol model.
Take planting trees would require 1.6 billion hectares of new forests.
The Jet Stream.
The jet stream is a large band of strong winds between five to seven miles above the Earth’s surface, blowing from west to east. The North Atlantic jet stream are likely to have drastic weather-related consequences for societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
As it flows overhead, it causes changes in the wind and pressure at that level and affects things nearer the surface such as areas of high and low pressure, shaping the weather.
Variations in the jet stream can have severe societal implications, such as floods and droughts, due to its impacts on weather patterns and so, in terms of thinking about the future, we can now begin to use the past as a sort of a prologue.
Natural variability has thus far masked the effect of human-caused warming on mid-latitude atmospheric dynamics across annual and longer timescales.
Continued warming could cause significant deviations from the norm. Such migration could render the jet stream significantly different within a matter of decades, with huge implications on the types of weather that people might experience at a given place, with trickle-down effects affecting national economies and societies.
The jet stream accounts for between 10% and 50% of variance in annual precipitation and temperature in both regions. However, little is known about how the jet stream varied during the past, or how it might change in the future.
The jet stream could migrate outside of the range of natural variability by as early as the year 2060 under unabated greenhouse gas emissions.
Heat waves are a silent and invisible killer.
We all know what is needed – clean energy.
There is no reason that governments could not make repayable grants available to their populations, to install green energy – such as solar – wind turbines – tidal.
Once installed and the grant re payed, the energy produced should be owned by the house hold , village, factory, our community, who would have free energy, with any surplus suppling the Grid. At a lower cost than other forms of carbon dioxide removal.
Until we listen to what the natural world has to tell us about our place in it, not the other way around, will we be able to take any mean full action.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
Because CAPITALISM turns everything into a product including us.
Global warming is rooted in an economic system that has a parasitold relationship with the Earth upon which we live.
Capitalism is simply incompatible with social justice and living in harmony with the Earth, so it has to be changed, and changed quickly. The clock is ticking.
We are entering a new era of profound challenge ― and free market capitalism cannot dig us out.
Economies that rely on the power of markets, don’t even recognize the problem as they’re too focused on short-term profits to take account of longer-term issues like climate change and environmental destruction.
Trusting that the free market capitalist dynamics will get us to net Zero, that of course is not going to happen.
The question now is the relationship between policy, mass movement and how radical we need to go to save the planet.
——————
Capitalism as a system is highly exploitative of both people and planet. It is driven by a desperate need for profit and accumulation. It is apparent that left on its own, our economic system will continue to destroy the basis for life on this planet until it is too late.
Why?
Because capitalism allows to much wriggle room, impeding effective action. As long as our economy chases after profit it will seek ways to circumvent any regulation.
If adequate policies had been adopted 30 years ago, we would be well on the way to achieving a zero-carbon economy at a very low cost. The fact that we did not is, in part, capitalism’s fault.
Merely regulating the private sector rather than making deep inroads into socialising capital and businesses.
Private property doesn’t remove the profit motive from the economy, it only seeks to constrain it in various ways.
State-led investment is fine, but on its own it does not particularly challenge capitalism as a socio-economic system. Indeed at its worst it props it up and helps overcome aspects of capitalism’s inherent instability. Venture capitalists financing brilliant technological breakthroughs have been matched by industry lobby groups successfully arguing against required regulations or carbon taxes.
All developed economies should commit to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
And zero must mean zero, with no pretence that we can continue burning large quantities of fossil fuels in the late twenty-first century, balanced by equally large quantities of carbon capture and storage.
Once clear prices and regulations are in place, market competition and the profit motive will drive innovation, and economies of scale and learning-curve effects will force down the costs of zero-carbon technologies. And if we do not unleash that power, we will almost certainly fail to contain climate change.
We consistently hear the need to rapidly phase out all fossil fuels.
“A green industrial revolution expanding public, democratic ownership as far as necessary for the transformation”
“As far as necessary”. What is meant by that, only time will tell.
It is in the ambiguity of such phrases that you can read anything you like.
It could be read to mean a radical nationalisation plan which takes energy, transport, logistics, retail and all the other sectors that are heavy carbon emitters into public ownership to introduce plans to reduce their carbon footprint.
Or
It could mean a far more modest limited plan of taking bankrupt industries into temporary public ownership in order to ‘green’ them.
——————-
How to square the circle of the increasing need for socialised and democratic global solutions in a world of nation states and jealously guarded private property?
This is where a serious fight against climate change that tries to get to the root of the problem of capitalism is going to clash head-on with our political and legal system.
Of course if you see climate change from a revolutionary perspective then you rip up those capitalist laws that are protecting the ill-gotten gains of the rich who are plundering our natural environment until we are on the brink of social collapse.
The question is going to be both the interpretation of “as far as necessary” and also the political will to drive through the changes that will be necessary to start to plan our economy.
————
People are increasingly feeling the effects of rapid climate change. Cities boil in more than 120-degree heat, California burns and the Arctic thaws, thousands dyeing.
Meanwhile, biodiversity loss is reaching terrifying levels, with animals going extinct at about 1,000 times the natural rate. In addition, as societies, we’re facing increased inequality, unemployment and soaring personal debt levels.
Faced with these interconnected crises, “It can be safely said that no widely applicable economic models have been developed specifically for the upcoming era.”
In other words, we are at an ecological crunch point and we don’t have the economic tools to deal with it.
We are past this discussion of should we have capitalism or should we have something else.
Do we aim for more consumption or do we aim for liveable environments in the future?
All these changes require concerted political action.
There must be a comprehensive vision and closely coordinated plans. Otherwise a rapid system level transformation towards global sustainability goals is inconceivable.
People are starting to genuinely worry about their future security and looking for collective action.
These kind of things might actually start to matter quite a bit more than caring about a new iPhone.
Sovereign governments cannot run out of money, thus debunking the argument that economies cannot afford to make the transformations needed to address climate change.
Humanity has lost the battle against climate change.
If we are to be honest we can’t blame climate change anything but ourselves.
All actions now need will have an effect on how the world goes into any future of adaptation.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
One of the greatest problem in tackling climate change is every thing has been turned into a product to be sold. including climate change.
“Capitalism is incompatible with the fight against climate change” and greenwashing is a prime example of this.
Greenwashing delays or stops the action we need to move to better systems for people and the planet. A false eco-branded product or carbon offsetting may make us feel we’re doing well.
Carbon Credits. A way to try to make up for the pollution you cause, instead of trying to reduce it. Usually it’s done by paying others to reduce carbon emissions or take carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s greenwashing because it still means lots of carbon goes into the atmosphere.
When businesses use terms such as ” environmentally friendly ” and “green” they are often meaningless.
Greenwashing is the process of conveying a false impression or misleading information about how a company’s products are environmentally sound.
Greenwashing involves making an unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that a company’s products are environmentally friendly or have a greater positive environmental impact than they actually do.
Greenwashing is a PR tactic used to make a company or product appear environmentally friendly, without meaningfully reducing its environmental impact.
Performed through the use of environmental imagery, misleading labels, and hiding trade-offs, greenwashing is a play on the term “whitewashing,” which means using false information to intentionally hide wrongdoing, error, or an unpleasant situation in an attempt to make it seem less bad than it is.
Greenwashing is an attempt to capitalize on the growing demand for environmentally sound products, whether that means they are more natural, healthier, free of chemicals, recyclable, or less wasteful of natural resources.
More recently, some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters, such as conventional energy companies, have attempted to rebrand themselves as champions of the environment.
Products are greenwashed through a process of renaming, rebranding, or repackaging them. Greenwashed products might convey the idea that they’re more natural, wholesome, or free of chemicals than competing brands.
Of course, not all companies are involved in greenwashing. Some products are genuinely green.
How can it be curtailed.?
Packaging and advertising should explain the product’s green claims in plain language and readable type in close proximity to the claim.
An environmental marketing claim should specify whether it refers to the product, the packaging, or just a portion of the product or package.
A product’s marketing claim should not overstate, directly or by implication, an environmental attribute or benefit.
If a product claims a benefit compared with the competition, then the claim should be substantiated.
This can include use of terminology such as “eco-friendly” or “sustainable,” which are vague and not verifiable. Imagery of nature or wildlife can also connote environmental friendliness, even when the product is not green. Companies may also cherry-pick data from research to highlight green practices while obscuring others that are harmful. Such information can even come from biased research that the company funds or carries out itself.
Whether you are filling up at the pump, booking a flight or simply browsing supermarket shelves, you are being targeted by marketing campaigns trying to persuade you that everything is fine.
This is, in a nutshell, what greenwashing is and why it’s now everywhere.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS IT NOT TIME FOR THE IRISH RUBGY TEAM TO SING SOME ROUSING WORDS. SET TO SOME WONDERFUL UPLIFTING MUSIC.
( Seven minute read)
The RUBGY world cup is well on its way.
At the sports theatre we interpret and stage social life in ways that can help set the public agenda and that can change the life course of communities and individuals. Sports are not mere bread and circuses, but is also transformative.
Various sports in different cultures shape delicate and radically diverse life worlds.
It takes a special set of lenses, and interests, too, perhaps, to clarify the polyvalent capacities of sports.
This is structured around several questions.
First, how do we learn to cope with and learn from failure?
Losing is an essential part of sports. No one likes to lose and, yet, we all do.
Clearly, sports is a substantial aspect of the world we live in.
The business of sports is a $500-billion industry worldwide, and growing.
It could and should do more, far more, than just winning cups /medals.
———————
For anyone concerned with the symbolic dimension of social life, sports offer a laboratory par excellence, but also as the ludic modalities that beat the pulse of our civilizations.
Despite its universality, the world of sport is magnificently, yet often subtly, playful, and diverse. At the same time, sports’ ubiquitous presence in many of our lives is thoroughly mundane and a spectacle of ritual-like proportions. Again and again, sports, with their familiar seasonal patterns, are created and recreated as cultural systems gravitationally bound by our play to familiar symbols, myth, codes, and narratives.
I argue that we should flesh out the cultural structures of sports—their codes, myths, and narratives, as well as their modalities of play, games, fun, and sports themselves—with empirical data.
This will then allow us to show how empirically verifiable symbolic processes within and about sports shape social life.
It is always phatic to see any sport been used for political purposes but sport and politics are intricately intertwined. Like any other facet of life, Sport is inherently political.
Ireland is the only team participation in the world cup that does not sing its countries anthem ( Amhrán na bhFiann written by Peader Kearney and Patrick Heeney somewhere around 1909 or 1910.)
Are you wondering why?
Because Phil Coulter from Northern Ireland, was commissioned by the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) in 1995 to write a song for the national rugby team. He composed Ireland’s Call a piece of shit a song in order to appease the Unionists of Northern Ireland.
Unionists have long recoiled at Amhrán na bhFiann, an expression of Irish nationalism sung by republican rebels during the 1916 Rising.
With Brexit and demographic shifts in Northern Ireland putting a united Ireland – and the need to woo unionists – on the political agenda, of course this is a contentious issue because Amhrán na bhFiann speaks of Irish independence from the King.
This national anthem is God Save the king, that has nothing to offer to a country aspirations.
————
There is something about sport as a symbolic universe, a microcosm’s, cut off from but nested within the broader social universe that, to culturally oriented sociologists, makes it good fodder for thinking.
As aesthetic renditions of social life, sports twist and turn our myths and realities, at times predictable and sometimes surprisingly artistic, to hold our attention in their own reality, and make leaps of faith that not only change sporting identities, but our social being.
While sport is often regarded as an equaliser, it can only work this way if a conscious effort is made to ensure that all have equal access.
Sport is universal. It is an invaluable treasure that has the power to unite the world through emotion, even if we are apart, speak different languages, or come from different cultures.
To become a vehicle for peace, to achieve peace, it must be designed in a way to do so.
Narrow nationalism is unhealthy and contrary to the cause of world peace and tolerance.
Sports is mass first – mass participation is needed to build elite athletes, sport teams etc.
As so, to my mind sport, should always be above any political aspirations of a nation.
One of the most symbolic and important parts of the Olympic is the oath taken by the athletes, the coaches and the judges, underpinned by the idea the Games can bring fresh hope and encouragement to people around the world – both through the active appearance of athletes and through the power of sport.
In light of the difficulties the world is now facing perhaps its time that the singing of national anthems are replaced with a common song like- Always look on the bright side of life. Indeed it is precisely out of respect to preserving many of these things that give us life that I believe the time has come to consider the question.
Should the singing of national Anthems be replaced by a song that unifies us as equals, supporting the Greening of the earth.
Back to Ireland’s Call.
It’s a terrible tune, with banal lyrics.
After 114 years, we have different enemies, and I humbly propose it’s time we had a new anthem.
Most national teams in Ireland solely represent the Republic.
For example, both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have separate soccer teams.
Before the introduction of Ireland’s Call, only the national anthem was played for the Irish rugby team. Ireland’s national anthem, the Soldier’s Song, is like most national anthems around the world.
It has a militaristic theme with references to bullets and gunfire.
Before Irelands call Ulster players stood tall during the Soldier’s Song but kept their mouths firmly shut.
The beauty of the Irish rugby team is that there’s a lot of respect, uniting the best players from the four clubs/ providences of the country. Don’t tell me that in the above picture Irelands Ulster Captain Rory Best an Ulster farmer while handing off was thinking that he was representing the four provinces.
Not on your nelly he playing for Ireland.
(The “four proud provinces” refer to the four quarters of the island of Ireland.) are Ulster, Leinster, Munster, and Connacht. Each have a professional rugby clubs under the overall management of the IRFU (Irish Rugby Football Union).
I do not think Ireland’s Call fully personify the diversity and vibrancy of contemporary Ireland.
Wouldn’t it be great if it had a line or two from each of our national languages – Gaelic -English, aspirational, but also recognisable a song that even the tone deaf have a chance of singing effectively.
I’d point to Advance Australia Fair.
“Australians all let us rejoice / For we are young and free / We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil; Our home is girt by sea; Our land abounds in nature’s gifts / Of beauty rich and rare / In history’s page, let every stage / Advance Australia Fair”.
The message is all about sharing and working together, the tune’s unquestionably stirring, and it has that great refrain. It’s cheesy, but it’s top-quality cheese. No wonder the Aussies voted for Advance Australia Fair to replace God Save The Queen back in 1977.
La Marseillaise sounds marvellous, and brings a tear to the eye. In other words, it is does the job of a national anthem, which is rallying “les citoyens”, superbly.
Let’s overlook the fact that the lyrics are very gory, full of impure blood soaking fields and tigers mercilessly ripping their mother’s breast.
The English Anthem is not the bloodthirsty lyrics or boasts of empire that require replacement but the simple fact that no man should surely be truly glad at heart and ready to fight the foe, sporting or otherwise, when he has to sing of his desire to be the subject of a monarch and bellow his need to be reigned over for ever. How cringing is that?
To sing the praises of such a family simply because of an accident of their birth should be a subject of ridicule in a developed nation in the Western world. That an educated nation such as England can be so obsequious and genuflecting is surely a matter for shame.
It’s a wasted opportunity to celebrate what’s great about Ireland.
Even Sinn Féin has signalled openness to changing the flag and anthem.
——————
Trends in sports tend to mirror broader trends in society, such as shortening attention spans,
How is a sport evolving, for example, and what shape is it likely to take 20 years from now?
We might think about what it means to be a good team player in a virtual world, where online gaming participants team up virtually with other players they have never met or otherwise interacted with.
To finish I would like to say that I am neither a republican, nor an atheist nor an Irish nationalist.
I’m a patriot.
To quote George Orwell: “By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.”
We should have a competitive telethon to decide which of these options offer the best lyrics and tune to represent the Ireland for the next century or so. We would be in tune with our times.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Society is already wrestled with the consequences of genetic engineering, fiddling with genomes, but synthetic biology poses a number of practical risks.
68% of biodiversity has been lost since 1970, and the amount of human-made material including concrete, plastic and bricks now outweighs the total mass of biological matter on the planet.
The likely truth is that technology might be the only clear way out of future disasters given the terrifyingly short timescales involved.
Humans have been manipulating the genetic code for thousands of years, by selectively breeding plants and animals with desired characteristics.
As we have learned how to read and manipulate the genetic code, we have started to take genetic information from one organism and transfer it to another. This process we call genetic engineering, and it has enabled researchers to develop different varieties of plants and animals.
However for instance this technology could produce devastating biological weapons, or escape, mutate and cause unforeseeable damage to the ecosystem.
The ethical concern, rest not with the tool itself, but the hand that wields it.
In a rapidly changing world, that is facing major global challenges, the potential uses of synthetic biology are far reaching, and the impact of these uses could be profound.
From climate change to pandemics, synthetic biology can provide the tools to engineer biological processes that can deliver targeted, rapid and sustainable solutions. From monitoring and remediating environmental contamination, managing invasive pests and pathogens, reviving endangered species, and engineering resilience against climate change, to enabling new strategies to store data.
Humanity is already on the path to decoupling from natural systems – so if we want to avoid the worst scenarios of this trajectory, what might we do about it?
The ability to learn from and leverage technology that has already made the living world offers seemingly endless opportunities.
We use recombinant DNA technology already to have cells to synthesize medical antibodies, insulin, and other things like the hormone Epo. (a hormone produced by the kidney that promotes the formation of red blood cells by the bone marrow.)
Or.
In the future. A ‘self-healing’ paint that consists of microscopic organisms that could repair itself over the lifetime of a ship, and tanks or armoured vehicles that could wear a coat of organisms that self-heal and change their colour on command.
How far could it go?
The potential impact of this area of science is astonishing; From bacteria that could generate energy, to creating food without the need for large organisms we might instead genetically integrate ourselves with the biosphere, such that both human and natural are transformed, acting as biological arks into the future, or as a form of beautiful annihilation into a future weird ecology.
This is an area of research described as the design and construction of artificial biological entities that previously did not exist, or the redesign of existing natural biological systems.
Rather than seeking to preserve natural systems.
In the face of environmental collapse, humanity may need to turn to artificial replacements for nature – how might we avoid the most dystopian of these futures?
Can humanity leave nature behind?
Imagine a future where humans have transcended their current state to combine with technology – in the most extreme cases, evolving into uploaded digital beings.
_______________
The recent achievement of scientists in manufacturing the genome of a bacterium from off-the-shelf chemicals, and placing it in a related bacterium which is now happily reproducing under the control of the manmade DNA, holds fantastic promise.
A team of researchers in the United States and United Kingdom say they have created the world’s first synthetic human embryo-like structures from stem cells, bypassing the need for eggs and sperm. These embryo-like structures are at the very earliest stages of human development: They don’t have a beating heart or a brain, for example.
——————–
Humans do not need to insert themselves into controlling life processes in every corner of the world, down to the very strands of DNA, to force the Earth system to absorb the shocks of our presence. If the Earth is not to be irreversibly degraded and unbalanced, we need some equal and opposite pull in the direction of replenishing natural complexity.
If the metaphorical “umbilical cord” connecting human survival and the biosphere is well and truly cut.
The threat of an exclusively human-technological world would not be a dystopia to many.
If severe environmental degradation continues, a plausible path is one where humans will, through necessity, decouple from a biosphere that ceases to function.
It is no longer science fiction.
Because trillions of organisms are utilised as food and broken down to fuel human bodies.
Creating synthetic life that is useful to us will probably involve learning a lot more about what the code actually does.
For example, scientists have begun devising ways to synthesise “ecosystem services” – such as pollination or other natural processes that benefit human society.
The newly touted “metaverse”, for instance, promises a form of spatial, workplace and recreational departure from the “meat space” of the physical world: why visit a polluted forest or lake when you can access a near-perfect digital simulation of a clean one from your home?
If the human-biosphere umbilical cord is to be cut, it should leave mother Earth in peak health, and in service to both parties.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S A HYPOTHETICAL QUESTION: If you are asked to establish a new society what rules if any would you change?
( Eighteen minute read)
This might be a far flung proposition, but as we watch democracy diminishing around the world, replaced with tyranny, driven by social media lies and profit seeking algorithms, combined with climate change, we presently, live in societies that range from completely dysfunctional to marginally functional.
We cannot just fight back, mitigate harms and regulate retrospectively.
We must build a vision for a more positive future, where technology is shaped and harnessed as a force for good.
Why?
Because by imagining the future we want to see, we stand a better chance of reaching it.
Because we are now living in fragile times. One tipping point in climate change could trigger all the rest or Vladimir Putin’s current war in Ukraine could end in nuclear annihilation.
——————
History has a way of sticking around, teaching us how far we’ve come and illustrating how human nature has both changed and managed to stay the same all at once, but the coming age of technology changes and climate changes is going to change how history is made.
Even in the most advanced of our societies, immense problems threaten to overwhelm the citizenry in the decades ahead.
We have to place as much importance on political, social, economic, demographic and environmental trends as technological ones.
Most notably, technological,climate change, because either of these two mega-forces will precipitate, if not effectively countered in the near term will plunge the planet into a global war.
————–
We need to learn how to think in order to survive, and that is what we should do, and to do that, to learn how to think.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a difficult lesson in just how susceptible our world is today to human and economic turmoil, it has also – perhaps for the first time in history – necessitated global collaboration, data transparency and speed at the highest levels of government in order to minimize an immediate threat to human life.
We need to create a society that attempts to do so, in the experimental laboratory that is the earth.
Or we may not do so, fail to learn, and vanish: Our choice.
———————
Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we’d all be doomed, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence.
Our thoughts, and the deeds that follow our thoughts, can make us greater than we have ever been, or they can destroy us utterly.
What is the ideal social and political structure for a modern society, if you had the ability to start from scratch?
Let’s take a look.
The trouble with anarchy, is that it is inherently unstable – humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.
The same phenomenon of spontaneous rule construction when people had collectively to manage common resources such as common land, fisheries, or water for irrigation.
These rules aren’t just invented by rulers and imposed from the top down – instead, they often arise, unbidden, from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactions.
Our relationship with rules does seem to be unique to humans hardwired into our DNA. In fact, our species’ ability to latch onto, and enforce, arbitrary rules is crucial to our success as a species.
One danger is that rules can develop their own momentum: And then there’s “rule-creep”:
Rules just keep being added and extended, so that our individual liberty is increasingly curtailed. Planning restrictions, safety regulations and risk assessments can seem to accumulate endlessly and may extend their reach far beyond any initial intention.
The biggest ways in which the world will change are not isolated technological advancements, but rather a paradigm shift resulting from the progression to an abundance-based, sustainable society that has been re-engineered from the ground up.
Individuals, and societies, face a continual battle over rules – and we must be cautious about their purpose.
Rules, like good policing, rely on our consent.
And those that don’t have our consent can become the instruments of tyranny. So perhaps the best advice is mostly to follow rules, but always to ask why.
—————-
What is the ideal social and political structure for a modern society, if you had the ability to start from scratch?
The first question you may ask yourself is, where do I even start, to create a new society.
What the purpose of your society will be, you’ll want to write your society’s constitution.
The society’s name, the structure of the society, the levels of membership and what each level means,
In a healthy society, money serves the economy and economy serves the people, so we need to make sure that what follows capitalism is human-centred and not oppressive.
Here is my blue print for present day.
Harness digital technologies to improve lives and reorient technology towards more social ends;
Empower citizens to take more control over their lives, and to use their collective knowledge and skills to positive effect;
Make government more accountable and transparent;
Foster and promote alternatives to the dominant technological and business models — alternatives which are open and collaborative rather than closed and competitive;
Use technology to create a more environmentally sustainable society.
A future technological society run by AI.
No distinction between race or sex.
No Government, the AI organise everything.
No exchange, all goods and services FREELY ACCESSED by everyone.
No Classes, no one can subjugate another as a class, wealth structure would be abolished.
No nation states, all states will be geographical areas freely accessed by the peoples of the world.
No property ownership the materials (land, fuel, transport systems, factories, machinery, technology etc) freely accessible for people to satisfy their needs.
No wages, people can freely take form what they and society produces.
All financial institutions Banks, Building societies, Insurance, Assurance buildings, automatically turned over to the people and their use decided upon by the people, whether for accommodation or local amenities etc.
All decisions within society are made by the people whether local or global as we have the technology to inform all those it concerns and everyone is accountable to the AI Cloud. Accordingly, people would be responsible for the outcome of their decisions.
(John Dalberg-Acton), so no matter the apparent knowledge, etc., there can be no ultimate trust, only verifiable trust. And for all to receive, all must contribute.
All leaders would have a limited term, say two years.
Who fills which role and their respective duties within the society will be decided amongst the four people chosen and approved by the AI cloud, which should be clearly defined in a new constitution.
AI only task would be to review the decisions made by the people and if it found a decision to be potentially harmful, to put that decision on hold for a period not exceeding one year. At the end of the set period, the people would vote again, and the second vote would be binding, not subject to any further appeal.
These would be a president, a vice president, a treasurer, and a secretary with social media accounts ratifying outline for how to make amendments to the constitution.
But “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”
Accordingly, all who comprise a society, are of age, and not disqualified owing to acts they committed or illness that affects their comprehension, should be able to decide directly (i.e. by means of internet or similar connection) on the issues that may affect them, and to decide on the budget that would be required, and to approve of the managers that would supervise the implementation of those decisions (a different manager for each project, so as not to consolidate power in one person).
They would then allocate resources (funds, people) to present to the people all available information on the topic pertaining to the people’s decision.
Good decisions would benefit them. Bad decisions would tend to encourage them to become more informed about the topics that they decided, as well as to consider the possibly adverse outcomes of their decisions before they made such decisions.
Engineering biology, machine learning and the sharing economy would be establish a framework for decentralising the healthcare continuum, moving it from institutions to the individual.
“Je pense, donc je suis” (René Descartes) is indeed existential, because we think.
——————-
Technologies may one day offer us the opportunity to live healthily well beyond 100 years, enhance our intellectual and physical abilities and control our emotions. Technology may also enable us to become producers of our own products, track what we think and guide our decision-making.
The questions are as evolution continues, as it will there are many.
How will we safeguard the instincts that help us survive?
How will hard-fought-for values such as tolerance, individuality and freedom of choice evolve?
Who will control the ecosystem of data and technology that influence our decisions and what accountability mechanisms will be available to us?
What would changes brought about by such emerging technologies really mean for the real ‘us’?
If in the future we can enhance ourselves “on demand”, it raises the question whether advancements to our capabilities are a means to an end or whether they are ends in and of themselves?
What will drive and motivate us if we can enhance ourselves and if choices are made for us?
Will we still feel needed and in what way?
If for the first time in our species’ history we can actively influence our evolutionary process, what will happen if not everyone has access to these technologies or if some decide to “opt out”?
Will the absence of failure in an “enhanced” society hold civilization back and will “unenhanced” humans thus be needed to ensure disruptive progress?
How will emerging technologies interact with the value systems of traditional religions?
If in the future technologies merge with the body, it could become almost impossible to disconnect from networks.
People themselves would then be part of the “internet of things”.
Will the benefits of technology such as remote medical care, for example, offset the cost in the loss of intimacy associated with personal care?
For which benefits are we prepared to give up control over our bodies and to whom?
What areas of our lives will we expect to remain private and will we continue to need private spaces?
In addition, we now can receive real-time feedback about what and who is best for us through tracking and matching tools, which tend to ignore the contradictory nature of the human mind.
Will our decisions come to be based mostly on our intuition, on data analytics, or on peers’ recommendations?
Will we have “thought-police”, reinforcing the power of a few, or will civil society use technologies to place extra checks on decision-makers?
Will we trust each other or, instead, trust what data might tell us about each other?
Finally a plan for what should happen to your assets if your society were to dissolve.
—————–
By 2025, quantum computing will have outgrown its infancy, and a first generation of commercial devices will be able tackle meaningful, real-world problems
.The roll-out of 5G creates markets that we only imagine – like self-driving bots, along with a mobility-as-a-service economy – and others we can’t imagine, enabling next generations to invent thriving markets and prosperous causes.
Technology that accelerates our ability to rapidly sample, digitalize and interpret microbiome data will transform our understanding of how pathogens spread but history will be our judge
So far despite the heroic resolve and resiliency on a country by country basis, as a world we have underperformed.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE: TAKE’S A LOOK AT THE CURRENT STATE OF ENGLAND.
( Fifteen minute read)
This is a country lurching from one crisis to another, a country is crying out for hope. A country that no longer works.
We tend to think of the world’s most powerful nations as unshakable actors on the world stage, but of course they are not.
The grim reality for Britain as it faces up to 2024 is that no other major power on earth stands quite as close to its own dissolution.
Given its recent record, perhaps this should not be a surprise.
By leaving the European Union, achieving the rare feat of erecting an economic border with its largest trading partner and with a part of itself, Northern Ireland, while adding fuel to the fire of Scottish independence for good measure. And if this wasn’t enough, it then spectacularly failed in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, combining one of the worst death rates in the developed world with one of the worst economic recessions.
Reaping the rewards of the Maggie Thatcher years, the United Kingdom is being confronted with huge problems it can no longer wish away.
A victim of modern privatised capitalism’s, increasing fondness for stripping out, squeezing down, and chasing dividends, it has ignored the needs of its people for the sake of GDP.
From the divisive 2016 Brexit referendum and the years long turmoil of leaving the E.U. (the world’s largest trading bloc – one that is seven times larger than the UK by population), England is now losing its wealth through a stupid gamble based on a pack of lies.
To the COVID-19 pandemic in which the U.K. suffered the worst per capita death toll in Western Europe it was then hit by multiple blows in the span of just a few months.
The downfall of Boris Johnson following a series of scandals that engulfed his government, on July 7; the death of the country’s longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, on Sept. 8; the crashing of the British pound two weeks later, after then Prime Minister Liz Truss unveiled a package of unfunded tax cuts for the superrich; and, finally, the collapse of yet another Conservative government on Oct. 20.
One only has to look, to see more and more appeals for help. From charitable organisation, from the NHS, to RSPCA to the RNI, to Schools, to foodbanks, to see that it is plunging deeper into crisis by the day, with a government missing in action.
It is against this bleak backdrop that virtually everyone—from political analysts to pollsters and even most voters—expects that Starmer will become the U.K.’s 58th Prime Minister when the country holds its next general election by January 2025.
In the mean time Sunak (whose reported $837 million net worth makes him the richest-ever occupant of Downing Street) is Prime Minister without a peoples mandate.
As the U.K.’s latest leader, Rishi Sunak, emerged unelected by the people to replacement to Truss.
The fifth Prime Minister in just over six years.
A prime minister who has done more than any other person in Britain to enable division and stupidity, while life in the U.K. is becoming less hopeful, more expensive, and, increasingly, shorter.
Rishi Sunak was asked what “levelling up” actually means, he simply laughed.
There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn.
There is something much deeper wrong.
It is the country itself that is now creeping out shamefacedly from its empire/ industrialist days into the light, wondering what, exactly, is wrong with it.
At the heart of Britain’s crisis is a crisis of identity. Put simply, no other major power is quite as conflicted about whether it is even a nation to begin with, let alone what it takes to act like one.
With the passing of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, it is now one of the rare states in the Western world whose name is not simply the nation it represents: The United Kingdom is more than Britain and the British. Some of its citizens believe themselves to be British, while others say they are not British at all.
For many, the root of Britain’s existential crisis today is Brexit—an apparent spasm of English nationalism that has broken the social contract holding Britain’s union of nations together, revealing the country’s true nature as an unequal union, of the English, by the English, for the English.
Although Brexit was carried by a majority of the U.K. as a whole, it was opposed by two of its constituent parts, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It was the votes of England, its dominant nation, that carried the day.
Yet the truth is that the Englishness of Brexit only matters if people see themselves as something other than British.
The great British bake off, run badly, staffed by people who don’t care enough.
It has grown lazy and complacent, unable to act with speed and purpose.
The state had stopped paying attention to the basics of government, whether that was the development of its economy, the protection of its borders, or the defence of the realm.
Instead, it had become guilty of a failed elite groupthink that had allowed separatism to flourish, wealth to concentrate in London and its surrounding areas, and the political elite to ignore the public mood.
In its scramble to survive, it forgot who it was, now destine to break up into its old component parts.
The U.K., is currently projected to be the G-7’s worst economic performer this year, is on track to become poorer than post-Communist Poland by the end of the decade.
Inflation, which reached a 41-year high in October, has barely eased. The worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation has led to crippling labour strikes, prompting hundreds of thousands of workers—among them doctors, nurses, train drivers, and teachers—to walk out in demand of better pay in the past year.
The cost of living crisis didn’t suddenly materialise in 2022. The living crisis is nothing new for millions of people who have lived in fear of hunger and homelessness for 12 years.
From 2010, a decade of austerity saw £37bn slashed from the welfare system. Food banks became a shameful fact of life. Wages have continued to stagnate and access to stable, even halfway affordable housing has become increasingly chimerical.
The most up-to-date figures show that 13 million people were living in relative poverty in 2020-21, with another seven million living in a state of perpetual “financial fear” At least 320,000 people are currently homeless in the UK.
As everyday costs continue to detach from reality, pressure has ratcheted up to new extremes.
Even the proposed solutions have their own built-in traps and inadequacies. It might mean being forced into predatory loans to make increasingly frayed ends meet, or living in a home with a more costly pre-payment energy meter. It might mean a lack of access to stable credit, or even a bank account.
If budgeting was torturous before, then it is becoming borderline impossible in the current climate. This is doubly true for those with existing debts with hidden tax costing some of the poorest people an estimated additional £430 a year.
How are you supposed to plan against the future when ends never quite seem to meet?
What is happing?
For example. Under Starmer, Labour’s policies for nationalizing public utilities have been side-lined by pledges to deliver the highest sustained economic growth in the G-7.
Decades of underinvestment have taken their toll on the UK. Major infrastructure projects, from broadband to sewers, were put on hold, leading to massive issues nationwide.
————-
The UK has endured a “lost decade” of productivity.
The UK is home to an ageing population. According to the latest statistics from Age UK, there are now nearly 12 million people aged over 65 in Britain.
What is certain is that it need to channel the surplus of money more effectively towards sustainable asset classes that deliver both economic and social returns, and to correct decades of underinvestment.
Its politicians, its business and banking leaders need to collaboratively join the dots.
Against this background what we see are two worthless new aircraft carriers, a highspeed railway costing trillions, as the government prepares to finalise a £24.5bn deal to build Hinkley C, the country’s first new nuclear plant for a generation. (A fifth more expensive than in France, a third more than the US and more than twice the projected costs in China or Korea.) Despite this, nuclear power continues to form a key plank of the UK government’s “portfolio” approach to decarbonisation.
It’s hardly news that life in the UK is becoming untenable.
As the days grow darker, so too does the mood in the UK as it head’s into yet another punishing winter.
Most people in the UK will see their quality of life deteriorate in the short term.
———
Benefit spending is constantly in the news but how much do we really know about where the benefits money goes in the UK?
£159bn was spent on benefits – an increase of 1.1% on the previous year. That is 23% of all public spending. With 20.3 million families receiving some kind of benefit (64% of all families), about 8.7 million of them pensioners. For 9.6 million families, benefits make up more than half of their income (30% of all families), around 5.3 million of them pensioners.
The UK is home to an ageing population. According to the latest statistics from Age UK, there are now nearly 12 million people aged over 65 in Britain[
The NHS started in 1948 and now employs over 1.5 million people. This makes it the biggest employer in the UK, in Europe, and 5th biggest in the World.
The wage bill for the NHS makes up a substantial proportion of its budget. In 2021/22, the total cost of NHS staff was £66.2 billion which amounted to 45.2 per cent of the NHS budget.
Day-to-day spending on the NHS will rise by 3.8% between 2021/22 and 2024/25, reaching a total of £166bn (in today’s prices) by 2024/25. The capital budget to cover NHS infrastructure costs will reach £10.5bn in 2024/25 (in today’s prices), in line with the REAL Centre’s projection of what is needed over this period. With a population of 67 million, that is about £2700 each.
So here is a few radical suggestion.
England the country – not the football team – it needs to take a look at itself.
Scrap first past to post voting. Replace it Proportional Representation to reflect its multi cultural population. In doing so place the Monarchy on a historical footing paying for its self from its own wealth. This requires a written constitution.
The central problem is this:
With a separate Scottish Parliament, Scottish voters can elect lawmakers to the British Parliament in Westminster, whose votes decide policies that only apply in England. English voters, meanwhile, have no say over policies decided by the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, even though the money used to pay for these policies is raised by the British government. This structural problem has no solution, either, because to create anEnglish parliament on a similar footing to the Scottish one would mean that the most important person in the country would no longer be the British prime minister, but whoever ran the new English assembly.
Scrap the Benefit Society and charge a fees for hospital attendance while Introducing a Universal basic income for £1,600 a month for all those with citizenship earning less than living wage.
With such an income they are no longer entitled to benefits, must look after their own health and education. A UBI would directly alleviate poverty and boost millions of people’s wellbeing: the potential benefits are just too large to ignore.
No one should ever be facing poverty, having to choose between heating and eating.
Some serious consideration of reform is vital to how millions of National Lottery and public money is spent on sport which should be funded by income of Football worth trillions.
This is the time to be talking about constitutional change in order to use money and investment as a force for good not profit. Integrate the action of individual agents, such as businesses, industries, banks and hedge funds, from the ground up because with technology these systems are suddenly become wildly unpredictable, exhibiting extreme fluctuations.
It all points to governments worldwide and how they have bought into the idea that economic growth can be perpetuated for ever. But that isn’t strictly realistic without action.
For instance:
The green energy transition will affect every aspect of life. Armed Forces often have a strong influence on governments across the world and therefore if they act, governments are more likely to act. British military activity are responsible for approximately 50% of all UK government emissions, it plays a fundamental role in helping the country reach net zero by 2050 at the latest. Climate change is important, but the time scales being talked about (2050, or even 2030) are seen as distant – important, but not urgent when urgent is something faced today, tomorrow. The solution is to make the important urgent, and this is beginning to happen.
————
England is so deep in places that its secrets remain hidden.
Does the future of the United Kingdom—a political entity only 100 years old—really matter?
After all, the state that exists today is the product of Irish secession in 1921.
One of the problems in Britain is that the loss of faith in the country is now so pervasive that it is hard to know whether it can be rebuilt.
The union is not only being questioned by Welsh, Irish, and Scottish nationalists, but also, now, by the once-unionist middle classes in England for whom Brexit has broken a bit of the faith they had in Britain. Some simply no longer believe it’s worth saving.
The Republic of Ireland in recent years must also acknowledge the uncomfortable challenge it presents to British unionism.
And this is not just because it too is wealthy and settled, but because, in the imaginative sense, it knows who it is. Its national myths and stories might be just as bogus as any other country’s, but it believes them and promotes them through symbols and ceremonies. It is, in effect, a deeply conservative state that promotes a cohesive nationalism in a way the British state simply does not.
For Ireland, this success carries its own challenge as it seeks to subsume Northern Ireland and its million-strong British Protestant population, who do not share these national stories.
Look after the people first and GDP growth will follow.
It seems to me that if Britain is to survive, it has to believe that there is such a thing as Britain and act as though that is the case.
At root, Brexit was an assertion of nation—the British nation—but one mostly made by the English.
Here in lies its essential paradox. It is a revolution that has the potential to accelerate the breakup of the nation by revealing its Englishness, but also one that carries within it the potential to slowly rebuild a sense ofBritishnessby creating a new national distinctiveness from the other: Europe.
Outside the European Union, Britain’s collective experience becomes more national by definition.
It is for this reason that Brexit makes Scottish independence more likely in the short term, but more complicated in the long term, because it would mean imposing a hard border across the island of Britain that would not have been necessary had the U.K. remained in the EU.
In time, Brexit might prove to be the thing that finally breaks the union, or a shock that started the long, painful rebuilding process.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains an unusual country, but its vital memories are dying.
To survive, it must be more than empty pomp.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Right now, the state of the safety field is far behind the soaring investment in making AI systems more powerful, more capable, and more dangerous.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to replace human decision-making will inevitably create new risks whose consequences are unforeseeable.
The more you put in, the more you get out.
That’s what drives the breathless energy that pervades so much of AI right now.
Consequences of these capabilities and systems–both intended and unintended–are significant, and growth in sensing technology will have far-reaching implications for our social norms and systems.
Data gathering is not inherently negative, it’s a matter of how transparent companies are in gathering information and the choices they make about how the data is used.
Because of the growing ubiquity of algorithms in society which are raising a number of fundamental questions concerning governance of data, transparency of algorithms, legal and ethical frameworks for automated algorithmic decision-making and the societal impacts of algorithmic automation itself we are now in a rush to regulate ( in ignorance) of their impact, which current law and regulation cannot deal with adequately.
However AI technology can provide sufficient transparency in explaining how AI decisions are made.
Transparency ex post can often be achieved through retrospective analysis of the technology’s operations, and will be sufficient if the main goal is to compensate victims of incorrect decisions.
Ex ante transparency is more challenging, and can limit the use of some AI technologies such as neural networks. It should only be demanded by regulation where the AI presents risks to fundamental rights, or where society needs reassuring that the technology can safely be used.
One thing we’re definitely not doing:
Understanding them better, and as we develop more powerful systems, that fact will go from an academic puzzle to a huge, existential question. If anything, as the systems get bigger, interpretability — the work of understanding what’s going on inside AI models, and making sure they’re pursuing our goals rather than their own — gets harder.
We’re now at the point where powerful AI systems can be genuinely scary to interact with.
Ai poses some wider concerns including data monopolies, the challenge to democracy, public participation and maintaining the public interest. Given the speed of development in the field, it’s long past time to move beyond a reactive mode, one where we only address AI’s downsides once they’re clear and present.
There is enormous opportunity for positive social impact from the rise of algorithms and machine learning. But this requires a licence to operate from the public, based on trustworthiness.
The very concept of fairness as an ethical value has not yet been sufficiently explored. Any regulations should ensure that systems adhering to them, are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. However, there is currently no specific regulation on AI and algorithmic decision-making in place.
Decisions concerning AI at a societal level should not be in the hands of “unelected tech leaders”.
We can’t only think about today’s systems, but where the entire enterprise is headed.
Most AI systems to day are black box models, which are systems that are viewed only in terms of their inputs and outputs. Scientists do not attempt to decipher the “black box,” or the opaque processes that the system undertakes, as long as they receive the outputs they are looking for.
With a Quantum self learning systems it would be possible to build brains that could reproduce themselves on an assembly line and which would be conscious of their existence.
———————–
This particular mad science might kill us all.
Here’s why.
At present this Ai — called deep learning — started significantly outperforming other approaches to computer vision, language, translation, prediction, generation, and countless other issues.
The shift is about as subtle as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, as neural network-based AI systems that smashed every other competing technique on everything from computer vision to translation to chess.
No one has yet discovered the limits of this principle, even though major tech companies now regularly do eye-popping multimillion-dollar training runs for their systems.
It’s not simply what they can do, but where they’re going.
With deep learning, improving systems doesn’t necessarily involve or require understanding what they’re doing. Often, a small tweak will improve performance substantially, but the engineers designing the systems don’t know why.
Intelligent agency is an extremely powerful force, and creating agents much more intelligent than us is playing with fire — especially given that if their objectives are problematic, such agents would plausibly have instrumental incentives to seek power over humans. We can’t pinpoint the exact reasons for our preferences, emotions, and desires at any given moment.
Current language models remain limited.
They lack “common sense” in many domains, still make basic mistakes about the world a child wouldn’t make, and will assert false things unhesitatingly. But the fact that they’re limited at the moment is no reason to be reassured.
As hard as that will likely prove, getting AI systems to behave themselves outwardly may be much easier than getting them to actually pursue our goals and not lie to us about their capabilities and intentions.
What makes it different from other powerful, emerging technologies like biotechnology, which could trigger terrible pandemics, or nuclear weapons, which could destroy the world?
The difference is that these tools, as destructive as they can be, are largely within our control.
If they cause catastrophe, it will be because we deliberately chose to use them, or failed to prevent their misuse by malign or careless human beings.
But AI is dangerous precisely because the day could come when it is no longer in our control at all. The result will be highly-capable, non-human agents actively working to gain and maintain power over their environment —agents in anadversarialrelationship with humans who don’t want them to succeed.
Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them. … There would be plenty to do in trying, say, to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.
So a powerful AI system that is trying to do something, while having goals that aren’t precisely the goals we intended it to have, may do that something in a manner that is unfathomably destructive. This is not because it hates humans and wants us to die, but because it didn’t care and was willing to, say, poison the entire atmosphere, or unleash a plague, if that happened to be the best way to do the things it was trying to do.
But while divides remain over what to expect from AI — and even many leading experts are highly uncertain — there’s a growing consensus that things could go really, really badly.
It’s worth pausing on that for a moment.
Nearly half of the smartest people working on AI believe there is a 1 in 10 chance or greater that their life’s work could end up contributing to the annihilation of humanity.
It’s not legal for a tech company to build a nuclear weapon on its own. But private companies are building systems that they themselves acknowledge will likely become much more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
For me, the moment of realization — that this is something different, this is unlike emerging technologies we’ve seen before — came from talking with GPT-3, telling it to answer the questions as an extremely intelligent and thoughtful person, and watching its responses immediately improve in quality.
The challenges are here, and it’s just not clear if we’ll solve them in time.
One only has to look at the above photo. A “wake-up call”
Speed is really important here.
“I don’t think ever in the history of human endeavour has there been as fundamental potential technological change as is presented by artificial intelligence,” Biden said at a news conference earlier this month. “It is staggering. It is staggering.” He does a lot of that.
If one acts too slowly, we are going to be behind by the time to take action, and any actions are going to be leapfrogged by the technology.
“My administration is committed to safeguarding Americans’ rights and safety while protecting privacy, to addressing bias and misinformation, to making sure AI systems are safe before they are released,”
This is Hog wash.
If government’s don’t step in, who will fill their place? Ai of course.
Even if these narrower issues are solved, all political contexts run the risk of unlawfully exploiting AI surveillance technology to obtain certain political objectives.
All countries with a population of at least 250,000 are using some form of AI surveillance systems to monitor their citizens. “Some autocratic governments – for example, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia – are exploiting AI technology for mass surveillance purposes.
One way of looking at the issue is not simply to focus on the surveillance technology, but “the export of authoritarianism.
One way to try to ensure continued political survival is to look to technology to enact repressive policies, and suppress the population from expressing things that would challenge a state.
AI will be the key to military superiority, investing in AI is a way to ensure and maintain dominance and power in the future.
There are plenty of problems with surveillance, but it may also be a fact of life going forward—and something people will need to get used to. Within a world where your data is everywhere, devices listen to your words, cameras monitor your face and GPS systems know your whereabouts, ubiquitous organizational tracking may be inevitable.
But like so many things, it’s not the what, it’s the how.
If tracking is occurring as a gotcha strategy—in which the goal is to catch people misbehaving or punish them—the relationships with employees and the culture will pay steep prices.
Ultimately, we need to do what’s right—not just what’s possible—by using our values as a guide, the use of technologies.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
bobdillon33blog 