( A two-minute read – the first of a series that looks at our World Organisations.)
If we take a selfie of the world looking back over the last ten years can we be proud of what we have achieved.
Where better to start than with the United Nations our main World Organisation.
The former Prime Minister of Portugal, Antonio Guterres until recently was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, he is now the new United Nations Secretary General, after a third security council secret ballot on Monday.
The United Nations has saved millions of lives and boosted health and education across the world. But it is bloated, undemocratic – and very expensive.
There are about 1,200 country offices of the UN around the world.
There are 100 countries with more than 10 UN country offices in each country.
Half of the United Nations money goes for the operational expenses of these office, leaving what is actually a minuscule amount of money for programming or key activities. Even accounting for inflation, annual UN expenditure is 40 times higher than it was in the early 1950s. Its regular budget, which is agreed every two years and goes to pay for the cost of administering the UN – including mouth-watering daily allowances which result in many of its bureaucrats being far better paid than American civil servants – has more than doubled over the past two decades to $5.4bn.
But that is just a small portion of the total spend.
Peacekeeping costs another $9bn a year, with 120,000 peacekeepers deployed mostly in Africa. Some missions have lasted more than a decade. And then there are the voluntary contributions from individual governments that go to fund a large part of disaster relief, development work and agencies such as UNICEF. They have risen sixfold over the past 25 years to $28.8bn. And yet even at that level, some agencies are warning that they are operating on the brink of bankruptcy.
The organisation now encompasses 17 specialised agencies, 14 funds and a secretariat with 17 departments employing 41,000 people.
As the UN marks the 70th anniversary of its founding this autumn, those imperfections – and how the UN addresses them – have come to the fore as the organisation struggles to define its role in the 21st century.
It has become overly bureaucratic and slow in the way it dealt with development issues.
What that tells you is that modern management and modern strategic planning is late coming to the UN.
The UN’s taste for setting goals at the expense of delivering results failed the poorest and most vulnerable.
Cooperation between organisations has been hindered by competition for funding, mission creep. The organisation has grown so big that at times it is working against itself. It is so fragmented that each agency has its own IT system. About one-third of the UN operations in 60 countries had a budget of less than $2m per agency.
However the UN cannot be ignored. Neither can the UN’s huge logistical capabilities, such as the World Food Programme’s airlifts, be matched by any private organisation.
The United Nations of today is hugely different from the United Nations 70 years ago, and therefore it is very important the United Nations changes and adapts itself to changing circumstances.
What we have now is another multiplication of targets and goals which are an extraordinarily comprehensive assessment of what’s needed to be done but there’s no operational clarity around them. Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to monitor it? Who’s accountable for it?
There seem little point in saying anything to the UN about what they should be doing, as it is out of date gossip shop, with no responsibility. Where is the conversation happening which says that, in 2016 and beyond, what is the United Nations there for?”
What should be the core activities of the UN that should receive a significant proportion of the regular funding of the UN?” In the context of what’s happening today, a few million is not going to make any difference. ( See previous posts on 0.05% Aid Commission)
But the bigger obstacle to reform perhaps comes from the UN members states themselves. Which raises what many consider the real obstacle to remaking the UN for the 21st century – that its most powerful body is still locked in 1945.
The five permanent members, the victors over Germany and Japan, hold the whip hand through vetoes.
For all the noise from the US, Britain and France in particular about modernising the UN, they show no willingness to give up the power they wield sometimes in ways governed entirely by political interest.
Since 1982, the US has used its security council veto to block resolutions critical of Israel 35 times. The total number of resolutions blocked by other permanent members over the same period is 27. More recently, Russia and China have used their vetoes to block UN intervention in Syria.
There is little doubt the Mr Antonio Guterres with or without Artificial Intelligence is going to have a lot more refugees on his hands.
The United Nations is an organization of sovereign States, which voluntarily join the UN to work for world peace. There are six main organs of the United Nations—the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Trusteeship Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat.
It’s time to break up the Organisation into specific separate Units and to do away with the veto powers that elected him.
John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955. The notion of intelligent automata, as friend or foe, dates back to ancient times.
You might think with the state of the world we live in that this is some what a naive subject. If you are like me, when it comes to Algorithms I have little or no understanding other than they are beginning to reshape my living life.
Ironically, in the age of the internet and unparalleled access to information, the most critical questions are out-of-bounds.
While the web has broken down the boundaries between different nations, so you can read a blog by anybody, anywhere in the world, on the other hand all our laws and governments remain in national boundaries. Outside of that we have very limited amount of effective governance, collaboration and co-operation and understanding.
Moreover, while we are clearly pretty good at producing knowledge, using this knowledge – that is separating the wheat from the chaff and integrating this together into something useful – is a big problem particularly in fields such as global sustainability.
One of the things we ought not to do is to press full steam ahead on building super intelligence without giving thought to the potential risks. Even if the odds of a super intelligence arising are very long, perhaps it’s irresponsible to take the chance.
As far as I am aware there are no current regulation or laws governing the use of AI. It is penetrating all nooks and nannies, de-privatizing us, turning us into points at job interviews, with algorithm replaced the loan officer.
They are fundamentally reshape the nature of work.
So what will happen when a computer becomes capable of independently devising ways to achieve goals, it would very likely be capable of introspection—and thus able to modify its software and make itself more intelligent. In short order, such a computer would be able to design its own hardware avoiding any laws, ethics, or any human morality.
A case in kind is in the area of autonomous weapon systems ie Drones.
While I am fully aware that the world faces many problems that could be solved by Artificial Intelligence we must before it’s too late give AI a set of values. And not just any values, but those that are in the best interest of humanity. This is the essential task of our age and since humans will never fully agree on anything, we’ll sometimes need it to decide for us—to make the best decisions for humanity as a whole.
How, then, do we program those values into our (potential) super intelligences? What sort of mathematics can define them? These are a few of the problems.
We’re basically telling a god how we’d like to be treated. How to proceed?
It’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction,” Hawking and others wrote in a recent article.” But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.
There is no doubting in many ways, AI innovations could simply help scientists to do their jobs more efficiently – thereby cutting the crippling time lag between science and society. They would have the insight and patience (measured in picoseconds) to solve the outstanding problems of nanotechnology and spaceflight; they would improve the human condition and let us upload our consciousness into an immortal digital form.
Algorithms that ‘learn’ from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.
Indeed if humanity has to leave earth there will be a need for such machines.
For example, could machine learning algorithms delve deep into the previous five assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, based on research published since the last report, provide rudimentary conclusions of the sixth report?
Potential future uses of AI programs like AlphaGo could include improving smartphone assistants such as Apple’s Siri, medical diagnostics, and possibly even working with human scientists in research.
AI could have many benefits, such as helping to aid the eradication of war, disease and poverty.
But if we want unlimited intelligence, we had better figure out how to align computers with human needs before the intelligence of machines exceed that of humans—a moment that futurists call the singularity. It is vital that humans programme robots to understand the “full spectrum of human values”, because the stakes are very high. After all, if we develop an artificial intelligence that doesn’t share the best human values, it will mean we weren’t smart enough to control their own creations.
Technology is take on increasingly personal roles in people’s daily lives, and will learn human habits and predict people’s needs. Anyone with an iPhone is probably familiar with Apple’s digital assistant Siri.
For example, AI could make it easier for the company to deliver targeted advertising, which some users already find unpalatable. And AI-based image recognition software could make it harder for users to maintain anonymity online.
If we look at current state of affairs a 2013 study by Oxford University estimated that Artificial Intelligence could take over nearly half of all jobs in the United States in the near future. Automation has become an increasingly common sight the number of robots in factories across the world rose by 225,000 last year, and will rise even further in the coming years – and it is not just in manufacturing.
AI is only getting better, as computational intelligence techniques keep on improving, becoming more accurate and faster due to giant leaps in processor speeds.
Perhaps we should first ask, does science need disrupting? Yes.
Access to reliable knowledge – the academic literature – is becoming a fundamental bottleneck for humanity. There are now over 50 million research papers and this is growing at a rate of over one million a year. Over 70,000 papers have been published on a single protein – the tumor suppressor p53.
How can any academic keep up? And how can anyone outside of academia make sense of it all – the public, policy makers, business people, doctors or teachers? Well, most academics struggle and the public can’t – most research is locked behind pay walls.
With techniques like deep learning (Deep learning,” that allow a computer to do things such as recognize patterns from massive amounts of data. For example, in June 2012, Google created a neural network of 16,000 computers that trained itself to recognize a cat by looking at millions of cat images. For a computer to recognize a picture of a cat, the machine has no volition, no sense of what cat-ness is or what else is happening in the picture, and none of the countless other insights that humans have.) laying the groundwork for computers that can automatically increase their understanding of the world around them.
However possessing human like intelligence remains a long way off and what is called the singularity,” when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence is still in the realms of science fiction.
That said Stephen Hawking has warned that because people would be unable to compete with an advanced AI, it “could spell the end of the human race.”
AI misunderstand what computers are doing when we say they’re thinking or getting smart.
Considering that the singularity may be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity, not enough research is being devoted to understanding its impacts.
In some areas, AI is no more advanced than a toddler.
Yet, when asked, many AI researchers admit that the day when machines rival human intelligence will ultimately come. The question is, are people ready for it?
Regardless of how artificial intelligence develops in the years ahead, almost all pundits agree that the world will forever change as a result of advances in AI.
The AI genie has already been released from the bottle and there is no way to get it back in.
No one is suggesting that anything like super intelligence exists now. In fact, we still have nothing approaching a general-purpose artificial intelligence or even a clear path to how it could be achieved. Recent advances in AI, from automated assistants such as Apple’s Siri to Google’s driverless cars, also reveal the technology’s severe limitations.
The problem is that a true AI would give any one of these companies( Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, you name them) an unbelievable advantage.
For example, Google has the Google app, available for Android phones or iPhones, which bills itself as providing “the information you want, when you need it.
Google now can show traffic information during your daily commute, or give you shopping list reminders while you’re at the store. You can ask the app questions, such as “should I wear a sweater tomorrow?” and it will give you the weather forecast. Given how much personal data from users Google stores in the form of emails, search histories and cloud storage, the company’s deep investments in artificial intelligence may seem disconcerting.
Advances in technology will push more and more companies to favour capital over labour, they will leave the majority behind.
That may be about to change. Here below are five ways AI looks set to disrupt science.
The short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
After all, AI systems aren’t consumers and consumers are the sine qua non of economic growth. Hairdressers are judged to be less likely to be out of a job in 20 years than economists.
Perhaps the problem is in the description ( Artificial Intelligence) AI intelligence will not necessarily lead to sentience.
But what if intelligent machines are really just a new branch on the tree of evolution that has led us from the original Protists to where we are today?”
A species to be aided in its evolutionary process by another species called us.
The idea that computers will eventually develop the ability to speak and think with a conscious.
It’s a race between technology and education.
The mindset of the government and people have not adjusted to view the future, even though technology is exploding this decade into a world of the Internet of Things and the propulsion into artificial intelligence.
No one gains if the world’s Intelligence ends up in the hands of a few.
As artificial intelligence becomes a much more “dominant” force in future it will poses “commercial and ethical questions”
What, after all, is an android but a puppet with a computer program pulling its strings?
When I tell my phone I’m hungry and feel like eating Chinese it raises a really interesting question: Who is Siri working for? Is Siri working for me? Is it Siri’s job to find me the best Chinese meal or is Siri working for Apple and trying to get as much money as possible for Apple by auctioning the fact that they have a hungry consumer attached to it and desperate for food? The ethical debate is about who does AI work for.”
Every time you open a new social media site you can create completely new rules of the road and I think we’ll move beyond some of the things we have today.
One of the big challenges will be preserving those existing identities while creating a global culture.
We need a global culture to be able to talk about refugees and finance and tackle issues like global warming and science, and cure cancer. For these huge challenges we need to use the web to work as a whole planet, like one team.
What will make a massive difference is if we manage to design democratic, and scientific and collaborative systems which allow us to function as a planet.”
David Levy believes that, in the 2050 age, human and robots can be able to marriages with each other and it will be legal activity in many countries. But that’s was only a someone’s opinion, not a theory based or any legal law.
Why most AI are Female’s ? “.
What is hard is imagining how we humans will fit into a robot-filled future.
Finally, there is no end to the ways that humans can productively work with one another if they are no longer driven by the conflicts of scarcity. Perhaps we will learn to love our robots.
An after thought. 6/Oct/ 2016.
There is extraordinary potential for AI in the future.
But it’s not the future that I wish to address rather the present.
AI is already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people’s everyday lives. AI and decision -support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see.
The results or impact is hard to see. It is critical to find rigorous ways to make them visible and accountable. We need to know when automated decisions are materially affecting our lives, and if necessary , to contest them.
This won’t be achievable by the United Nations, or National Governments.
Will there be enough good jobs to keep the global economy growing?
This is not the same as acting as a food stuff, where the existence of an earlier species acts as the food or fuel that allows those higher up the chain to exist and evolve.
selective breeding (unnatural selection), where human intervention is used to provide a characteristic,
the first option [is the] the evolution of some very clever tools, weapons, and body parts that become an integral part of the human species tree; or the second option … a new branch on the tree of evolution; or the third option an extension of the human branch.”
The greatest worry is the number of jobs that artificial intelligence systems are poised to take over.
Most of the best jobs that will emerge will require close collaboration between humans and computers.
As some professions become obsolete, more knowledge may not lead to higher pay either, because everyone will be bidding for the same work, which could drive wages down.
such as the promise of a guaranteed income to ensure people do not fall into the cracks. Others argue that a negative income tax would be better because it incentivises work.
Is there hope for resolution or are we looking at another 10 years, or more, of conflict?
These days with hyper communication we have become desensitized to the suffering of others. We are moved only for a fleeting moment by pictures of children dying or starving but feel totally helpless to contribute to any resolutions.
What we call the “Syrian conflict” is today really the conglomeration of micro-conflicts for which solutions cannot be found in the halls of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
As it stands, Putin has taken the initiative on Syria, with the West slowly coming to terms with the fact that Assad is the lesser of two evils compared with ISIL, and that he still has some role to play in the war against ISIL.
Assad’s future is Putin’s ace card in the game over Ukraine, and he will continue to support Assad until he is able to get some serious concessions over sanctions and Crimea.
The one thing that is probably working in Syria’s favour is the weariness of all its neighbours of the conflict and the negative impact it is having on them, including the endless flow of refugees. An estimate that 3.8 million refugees, half of them children, have crossed the border to find safety in other countries.
In the long-term:
No one knows how Syria’s war will end.
If it does end there is one thing for sure there will have to be transitional period and the guarantees that must be provided by the regionals to secure a buy-in from all components of the Syrian society.
What is clear is that international divisions over the greatest crisis of the 21st century is contributed to its severity and longevity.
There is no doubt that the posturing and face-saving exercises of the USA and Russia, including growing hostility in host countries and fortress Europe are slowing down the process of reaching any solution.
The United States and its Western allies seem to be trying to salvage whatever they can of their rapidly diminishing influence.
The latest Russian military initiative should have a very significant psychological effect. For the first time since the crisis started, military operations and arming of factions won’t be justified by the need to “push Assad to the negotiating table”.
Debates over whether or not Assad should be part of a transition process miss the point – the conflict is well beyond being solved by his removal.
This means thinking differently both about how we see the conflict and its solution.
Any solution that does not reflect the realities of life inside Syria today and the ecologies of violence that have taken root during the past four years cannot be taken seriously when moving forward.
Both US and Russia’s vision to end the conflict in Syria are divorced from realities.
Assad is not going to voluntarily give up power. Refugees in neighbouring countries will not return home as long as their country is in ruins.
The US and Russian approaches to dealing with the Syrian conflict are a study in contrasts.
The United States’ failed “train and equip” programme has become the butt of jokes in the Middle East.
Putin’s approach is to do all he can to protect the Assad regime. (Russia has vetoed United Nations Security Council resolutions targeting the Syrian government.)
Putin has invested in Assad’s survival, and it is naive to assume that he will be willing to abandon him unless the cost of propping him up dramatically increases.
It is equally unlikely that Russia, Iran and the Assad regime will devote resources to defeating ISIL.
The West looks at the Syrian conflict through three lenses:
First, the security threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL); second, the influx of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees into Europe; and third, there was little public support for another intervention in the Middle East and there is no clear Arab demand for intervention. In the end western countries are doing very little Diplomatic. All Diplomatic efforts to end or contain the war have gone nowhere with Isis casting a long shadow over the future of Syria in recent months.
Western governments were still dazzled by the speed and drama of the early Arab spring and paralysing by the cold war-style battle lines that split the UN’s top table.
In western capitals counter-terrorism efforts have trumped all other aspects of the crisis.
Neither defeating the jihadis nor forcing Assad to come to the negotiating table now look like realistic prospects.Syria’s bloody stalemate thus seems destined to continue indefinitely“The violent grind is just going to go on and on,”
Talking with Assad will neither defeat ISIL nor achieve a political solution.
Instead, the US, Europe, and their regional allies should talk to his Russian and Iranian sponsors while increasing military pressure on the ground to deny them and Assad a military victory in Syria.
The UN’s possible role in the peace process in Syria is a joke.
Perhaps if we stopped selling arms the world would be a more peaceful place. As I have said there is a need for a series of difficulties to be overcome before the necessary forces can be raised to end the war.
Our world is quickly becoming a desolate island, a screen that we hold six inches in front of our noses, and it’s a hard pill to swallow.
Because of this, we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with reality, we lose touch with each other. We seem to have forgotten the basic tenets of empathy.
We have become such a technology-based society, that we have forgotten how to feel. We have forgotten how to relate. We have forgotten how to connect among other humans, let alone with other sentient animals.
We seem to have forgotten what it feels like to be in someone else’s, or some other animal’s, proverbial shoes.
Here in lies one of the major problems.
Some time ago, (some) humans stopped showing empathy, and started killing indiscriminately — people, and other animals. We kill each other over political differences, racial differences, religious differences, and resources. We kill animals for “research,” or for competition and sport, or for a token.
In a world where there is so much doom and gloom about the state of our environment it’s no surprising that the world has lost 10% of its wilderness areas in the past 20 years. The growth of our modern civilisation, spurred on by technological innovations, has been underpinned by the exploitation of the natural environment. Today, a large fraction of the Earth, once swathed in wilderness, is now monopolised by humans. Although the direct causes of wildlife loss are clear enough, what’s less obvious is why many people seemingly don’t care. Society’s ongoing destruction of the environment can be put down to the fact that not enough people value nature and wilderness any more.
Expanding human demands on land, sea and fresh water, along with the impacts of climate change, have made the conservation and management of wild areas and wild animals a top priority.
For some species, our time to see them is rapidly running out.
The richer we are and the more we consume, the more self-centred and careless of the lives of others we appear to become
Human attitudes towards wild nature and wildlife have, historically, been ambivalent.
It seems to me that there are currently two main approaches to wildlife management.
One: The wise use approach aims to accommodate humanity’s continuous use of wild nature as a resource for food, timber, and other raw materials, as well as for recreation.
Two: The preservationists, whose goal is to protect pristine nature, not to use it, carefully or otherwise. Wild places should be allowed to develop on their own with as little interference from humans as possible.
Neither work:
For years we’ve been told that people cannot afford to care about the natural world until they become rich; that only economic growth can save the biosphere, that civilisation marches towards enlightenment about our impacts on the living planet. The results suggest the opposite.
There is only one way to protect what is left.
Protected areas, like national parks and wildlife refuges, are the cornerstones of global conservation efforts.
We must pay for it. Either by buying the land or paying the locals to maintain it.
Why is it so difficult to persuade people to care about our wonderful planet, the world that gave rise to us and upon which we wholly depend?
Because we lack empathy. Empathy is defined as: the capacity to understand or feel what another being (a human or non-human animal) is experiencing from within the other being’s frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.
Without it we all have different values that give rise to conflicts or dilemmas.
The way in which these different values are prioritized will determine policy of conservation in the future.
For instance, there may be a conflict between sustaining certain human livelihoods and preserving a particular species, or there may be a dilemma between the protection of wild nature and animal welfare.
The question, then, is how we should address such dilemmas and disagreements. The first thing to note, in trying to answer this question, is that the rich anglophone countries are anomalous. The more we consume, the less we feel.
Our erroneous belief that we are more concerned about man-made climate change than the people of other nations informs the sentiment, often voiced by the press and politicians, that there’s no point in acting if the rest of the world won’t play its part.
Our refusal to stop pumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is pure selfishness. The more harm we do, the less concerned about it we become. And the more hyper consumerism destroys relationships, communities and the physical fabric of the Earth, the more we try to fill the void in our lives by buying more stuff.
In modern debates about wildlife, however, other values have become increasingly important. We don’t know exactly how ecosystems will respond to climate change but you may rest assured that with rising sea levels nature will be the last to be rescued.
Sustaining interest in this great but slow-burning crisis is a challenge no one seems to have mastered. Only when the crisis causes or exacerbates an acute disaster – such as the floods – is there a flicker of anxiety, but that quickly dies away.
So the perennially low-level of concern, which flickers upwards momentarily when disaster strikes, then slumps back into the customary stupor, is an almost inevitable result of a society that has become restructured around shopping, fashion, celebrity and an obsession with money.
It’s hard to understand how anyone could imagine that economic growth is a formula for protecting the planet.
How we break the circle and wake people out of this dream world is the question that all those who love the living planet should address.
Just look at the United Nations:
For the first time in UN history, candidates seeking to replace the organisation’s secretary-general have held a live debate, presenting the case for their candidacy and taking questions from UN member states on key global issues.
All previous secretary-generals were chosen behind closed doors by the UN’s permanent five members: the US, China, Russia, France and Britain.
This remains so: The permanent five UN Security Council members still fix “who is going to be selected behind closed doors. Don’t think for a moment that the permanent members are going give up powers they won after World War II readily. Hand-picking the UN secretary-general is still one of their trump cards.
The possibility of the United Nations getting an energetic idealist to shake up the world body by streamline archaic UN systems, to stand up to the big powers and do more to end wars, and fight poverty is as remote as ever. It will remain both bloated and overstretched with its staff more interested in winning promotions than fighting malaria, climate change and regulating poverty or stopping wars, not to mention protecting what’s left of nature.
So long as it has to beg for funds it will remain a worthless gossip shop. ( See previous posts)
There will be no easy answers.
As Leonard Da Vinci said,
” Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Empathy is about being we-focused rather than I-focused and understanding that, collectively, we are better off when we step outside of our silos. As a leader, you must emphasize value, not just transactions; people, not just processes.
An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images is rendering us manic information addicts.
Every single minute on the planet, YouTube users upload 400 hours of video and Tinder users swipe profiles over a million times.
Each day, there are literally billions of Facebook “likes.”
Online Social media outlets are now publish exponentially more material than they once did, churning out articles at a rapid-fire pace, adding new details to the news every few minutes.
Blogs, Facebook feeds, Tumblr accounts, tweets, and propaganda outlets repurpose, borrow, and add topspin to the same output.
We are guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy.
We all distracted by a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego.
Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. We are all close to helpless.
Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.
The modest mastery of our practical lives is what fulfilled us for tens of thousands of years — until technology and capitalism decided it was entirely dispensable.
By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact.
We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.
GPS, for example, has led to our not even seeing, let alone remembering, the details of our environment, to our not developing the accumulated memories that give us a sense of place and control over what we once called ordinary life.
New technology has seized control of around one-third young adults’ waking hours.
The result is yet to be seen and we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, in wars, movement of people, erosion of democracy, surveillance and where to find the truth.
As we are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise and this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness.
The amount of time we spend cruising vastly outweighs the time we may ever get to spend with the objects of our desire. Virtual living is creating a mental climate that will be maddeningly hard to manage.
Beyond mere doing, there is also being;
We are becoming each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.
We hide our vulnerabilities, airbrushing our flaws and quirks; we project our fantasies onto the images before us.
Why is any of this important.
Take the smart phone for example.
When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in his or her private zone, you don’t.
They are robbing us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.
The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade.
Once you disappeared down a rabbit hole, but the smart phone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing.
Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives. All the hazards of real human interaction are being banished.
Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance.
These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.
The smart phone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist.
We are reducing our human contacts into a world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. A Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered way that makes integration of cultures impossible. This, evolutionary psychologists will attest, is fatal. An entire universe of intimate responses is flattened to a single, distant swipe.
Walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in. Or lunch where the first to person to use their phone pays the whole bill?
Here to the frazzled digital generation if they believe that $3 billion of Mark Zuckerberg Facebook profits will put an end to Disease.
Who does he think he is fooling. Facebook is a Disease.
On March 25, 2017, European leaders will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the EU’s founding document.
It will be a fraught celebration. So what deal can the UK expect from the negotiations?. Can it have a special relationship.
At the moment the most likely option for the UK is to be unable to forge a deal better than it had when it was a member. ( No Shangaan Agreement or the Euro.)
At the moment there is a lot of verbal in the media fueled by Politicians on both sides.
Here is some clarity.
Negotiations could lead to an orderly transition or a much more unpredictable process, buffeted by political pressure, volatile markets and the clash of national interests.
One way or the other. Britain will also have to renegotiate or reconform a web of EU-negotiated free trade deals with dozens of countries that anchor the UK in world commerce but are not automatically inherited if it leaves.
It means that the Uk Government would have to do three acts simultaneous: negotiate a new deal with Brussels, win a series of major bilateral trade deals around the world, and revise its own governance as EU law recedes.
EU-related law makes up at least a sixth of the UK statute book. That excludes 12,295 EU regulations with direct effect — hundreds of thousands of pages of law, on everything from bank and consumer rules to food standards, which cease to apply the moment Britain leaves.
Because Britain’s initial accession into the EU’s gives Brussels law supremacy over British law the UK will have to repeal the 1972 Act. So the negotiation would not just concern divorce, the technical parting of ways and the settling of old bills.
As a result it would also have to re-engineer the world’s biggest single market, setting new terms of access and legislating to “renationalise” volumes of law rooted in the EU.
The scrapping of EU law will result in an avalanche of new legislation in every corner of Whitehall.
On the EU side the UK will be negotiating with the commission, with 27 member states, with the European Parliament, national parliaments, with their electorates and each will have a veto over the conditions.
There are a lot of veto players here.
They’ll be herding cats to get these actors to agree.
It is quite obvious while leaving the EU is Britain’s choice, the UK cannot dictate the exit terms.
If the European Union is to survive it will not be in a position to offer the Uk a deal that encourages other nations to follow suit with referendums of their own – or demand tailor-made deals of their own. It would trigger a domino effect as the bloc without Britain becomes less attractive to liberal, rich northern states such as Denmark and the Netherlands, where demands are growing for copy-cat plebiscites.
It would seem more than reasonable to say that any agreement that bestows favours that are not enjoyed by all the remaining EU members will result in the breakup of the European Union as a whole.
If the UK was able to achieve full, free access to the EU market, whilst not having to pay into the EU coffers, and not allowing free movement of people, it does beg the question – exactly what do you get for European Union membership?
So without violating the sacrosanct EU principle that free movement of people is essential for countries that want to join its common market the EU conditions will be brutal to discourage other states from following suit.
The idea of an ongoing relationship with the EU is therefore not acceptable.
The truth is if the UK leaves the EU it is basically cut off the continent.
BRITAIN could be sued for millions by disgruntled EU states if it begins negotiating trade deals with other countries before leaving the European Union.
On top of all this any negotiations will have to be conducted with an UK government that has a leader with a mandate from the people not appointed by 300 odd conservative Mps.
“If the European Council or Parliament rejects the final agreement we’re back to square one.”
The UK will find itself in exactly the same position we started out from. Wanting to leave but with no agreement with the EU.
Extending any talks beyond two years requires unanimity.
The EU could offer Britain temporary curbs on immigration up to seven years in return for access to the single market. Britain would be expected to continue paying into the EU budget, although probably less than now, and would not have a say in single-market rules.
Predicting EU member countries’ reactions to any deal is premature.
If you were to be asked this question the answer might not be as obvious as you think.
You might say for example: Climate Change, Wars /ISIS, Inequality, Fresh Water, Nuclear Weapons, Donald Trump, Drugs, the list is endless.
All of these are reversible if we applied an ounce of collective world intelligence.
If you were honest with ourselves you would have no option but to point the finger at us as the greatest threat to the world.
It’s difficult to think of a problem in today’s world that it doesn’t either cause or compound by humanity. This is our greatest challenge: learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment.
Here are two of the greatest threats:
The Smartphone and AI.
With more than 1 billion users worldwide and 2.5 million apps — and counting — available across Google and Apple’s digital marketplaces, smartphones are impacting day-to-day life in some surprising ways.
The smartphone’s role in shaping human interaction is far-reaching,whose functionality is constantly evolving and is now a pocket-size PC. The device seems to have limitless potential. The majority of Internet traffic (60 percent) now comes from mobile devices.
Smartphones are affecting how the brain processes information. Google, fields more than 1 billion search queries per day — is changing how the brain catalogs knowledge. Smartphones have become a kind of “external memory source.”
We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.
Information is so rapid and up-to-the-minute. … Ten years ago, we’d all be crowding around a television to hear what’s happening, and now we have our phones.
There’s no longer an excuse for stupidity.
Future generations will have different priorities about what they choose to remember. Smartphones will become more than just a device in our pockets but something closer to a digital extension of ourselves.
The threat to the world is not that machines are taking over. It’s that they’re helping us to be more human, helping us to connect with each other regardless of geography.
60 percent of users don’t go more than an hour without checking their phone.
36 percent of smart phone users would rather give up their TV than their smart phone.
There are more than 125 million people in the Middle East region are online, and more than 53 million actively use social networks.
The widespread use of smartphones was a defining factor in the development of the spread of Arab Spring both in how protesters shared information with one another and how events were documented by legions of impromptu citizen journalists.
Now combine the Smartphone with the impotence of global governance combined with the lack of Inspirational leaders there is an ever growing pool of evidence that we are all becoming dependent on AI-powered assistance intelligence (without a conscience or any long-term planning.)
As AI advances, it will embed itself even deeper into our social fabric, shaping everything from how we do business to how we receive medical care.
It will become so commonplace that we will dependent on it. The technology may pit us against our own human nature:
What happens to risk, or the humanistic notion of what is true, when everything is based on everyone else? When our digitized advisors aggregate, average, and assuage, are we even autonomous beings anymore?
Political positions, financial decisions, attitudes toward social justice—our biggest decisions are often fueled by poor logic and misinformation. In the best circumstances, artificial intelligence could save us from ourselves, by helping us understand each other, see the world more clearly, and collectively make better decisions.
However if we do not acknowledge and take on board people’s valid concerns with AI we risk seeing the potential benefits of these technologies lost under a mountain of fear and negativity.
We need our out of date United Nations to have a mature, informed and inclusive world meeting about the future of automation and the potential impact of new technologies in order to ensure that this new power is used responsibly in the economic and moral sense.
At the moment there is no proper regulation around the use of AI.
Of course the UN is incapable of holding such a meeting so perhaps it is time for a new Institution called World Click (for example) to bring the whole of technology under a world umbrella.
If we care about the world we live in, we should think long and hard about the interfaces, rules, and policies that will govern artificial intelligence and our new way of life.
It would be easy enough for the people who design AI systems, motivated by greed, self-interest, or politics, to train computers to manipulate our lives in subtle and insidious ways, essentially lying to us through the algorithms that guide our thinking.
The coming tidal wave of decision support threatens to give very few people a phenomenal amount of suggestive power over a great many people—the kind of power that is hard to trace and almost impossible to stop.
Every day, Capitalism and the free market is moving into a digital age which is run more and more by algorithms that will only make those that own them richer while the world is about get poorer and poorer due to Climate change.
What is the alternative? Is there an alternative?
Global governance failure is the most interconnected of the global risks—it has a direct connection with 75% of the all the risks covered in this blog.
Of course the next threat Climate Change has the potential to wipe most of us of the face of the earth.
Changes in climate and weather patterns worldwide are converging with social trends, shifting populations, land use change, and increasingly impaired water infrastructure to dramatically make life worse for those across the globe.
Climate change poses several challenges to water management strategies including extreme events, dwindling water supply, and the increasingly incorrect assumption that the past will accurately predict future conditions.
Simply put Climate change “is the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family. It like AI has the capacity to change the way all of us live.
In much the same way great powers have fought wars over land and oil, we could see battles for the control of freshwater supplies.
Next Inequality.
The growing disparity in the wealth inside countries and among countries is a challenge the world has faced for centuries.
At the end of the 9/11 era, politics is driving the global economy, while economics drives geopolitics. All of this is playing out against a volatile G-Zero backdrop of global leadership in short supply.
Chronic fiscal imbalances are going to emerge as one of the greatest global risk over the next decade.
Moving On. Fresh Water/ Food.
The potential for food crises in poor countries due to Climate change will cause governments collapse. Sustaining growth will be one of the century’s big challenge.
An estimated 4bn to 5bn people in the world suffer from strained access to clean water, with the Middle East in particular likely to be a hotspot for struggles around water supply. Agriculture already accounts for on average 70pc of total water consumption and, according to the World Bank, we would need to ramp up food production by 50pc by 2030 to meet the needs of the world’s population.
Not forgetting Energy.
Satisfying ever-growing energy demand in a sustainable way has become the world’s biggest challenge.”
On top of all that we live today under the threat of global terrorism….Cyber is probably the threat least known, most ignored…and eventually…could be the most catastrophic….
Then we have, the spread of nuclear weapons, and selling of arms.
A potential Donald Trump presidency could be more dangerous to the world’s economy than the rising tide of global terrorism. The greatest risk to global stability over the next 20 years may be the nature of America itself.
If you have got this far I am sure like me you are saying so what. We fucked no matter what we do.
Not so.
We are on the threshold of a new revolution maybe without a leader but thanks to Technology we have the Smartphone that if called upon could be turned into World people’s power to demand change.
To stop Profit for Profit’s sake, To stop arms trading, To stop CO2 emissions, To stop Wars, to create if not a fair world at least a transparent justice first world before we contaminate the rest of the universe.
The fact is if a million smartphones were to campaign on a daily basis change could be achieved. Of all the threats to human society they have the silent power to unite the little consensus that there is left amongst us all.
This decision by the European Commission has implications far beyond Europe Union it opens the hornet’s nest of Capitalism.
The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws and up-end the international tax system in the process. Every company in Ireland and across Europe is suddenly at risk of being subjected to taxes under laws that never existed.
The Unelected European Commission has ruled that two tax rulings issued by the Irish tax administration on the tax treatment of Apple’s corporate profits represent illegal state aid under EU law.
Brussels has no power over corporation tax rates, which member states have always been able to set themselves. The commissioner is trying to make sure the single market function is maintained and member states do not win business at the cost of others’ tax base. In practice such rulings destroy fair market competition and undermine the tax sovereignty of democratic states.
So why should Ireland take any notice.
Other than it is a huge sum – more than the €12.9bn annual government spending on the Irish health service and nearly one-third of Ireland’s total government tax revenue in 2015, which was €45.6bn.
It is also the equivalent of €2,830 for every one of Ireland’s 4.6 million population.
It is a potential windfall – but one that the Government does not want.
Under EU rules it would mean that – as it is a once-off payment – it would have to be used to pay down debt, rather than used to fund extra Government spending.
There is little point in the EU enforcing Ireland to issue Apple with a tax bill in order to recoup EU financial Aid.
So are we looking at Cowboy Capitalism.
We all know that the world economy needs to be fundamentally reformed and if let alone it will not right it’s self.
In light of the technological revolution which is going to make most of us unemployable, structural changes are needed to the soul less of systems, one in which the fortune of one individual is most often possible at the expense of another.
The real question is:
How can the tendency of modern-day capitalism ( which is producing high levels of inequality and unsustainable uses of limited resources) be rethought.
Simply put Capitalism ultimate goal is profit. I got mine so fuck you! approach to life.
Trickle down economics is a joke. Capitalism has produced a society which no longer focuses on cooperation but on individual gain at any cost. We live in a society that now prides profit over prudence, compulsively over compassion, technology over tactility. And not too far away Trump over truth.
Global economic rules allow jobs to be offshore and capital to be reallocated in ways that do not benefit the vast majority of people.
Division and fear are sown by our world media . Compliance and desperation are reaped. And as always , there’s a profit.
Soon we will have a generation that does not know anything that does not come out of a smart phone, the God that will make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers, European Union’s, etc.
The most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world. Owned by Apple.
We all know that it cannot remain the same and the core responsibility of democratic nations is to provide the ground rules. But should these rules be about how should technology best be deployed to serve human needs.
European feudalism failed a long time ago and now it seems that the European Union is also on the verge of failure.
Free enterprise and the market have led to private capitalism’s accumulation.
Capitalism’s problems are so deep that they are almost intractable, and benefits of private enterprise and markets against those of public enterprises and government planning have become blurred.
Giving that the European Union now has the apparatus to play a central role in the economy of its member has this decision reinforced an excessive concentration of power in politics and culture moving the EU to a state form of Capitalism which England recently voted to leave.
Once England it is outside the EU, Britain would have even more leeway than Ireland or other European Countries to offer special deals to multinationals in the hope they would invest in the UK.
That said, such moves could leave Britain looking more and more like a tax haven, and could hamper the willingness of other countries to trade openly with the UK.
With the way the Technological Revolution is going I would say FUNDAMENTAL REFORM IS NEEDED.
The thought that technology is innately progressive and all-powerful so it can solve capitalism’s problems for us by leaving firms and wealthy investors alone to do as they wish will ultimately leads all of us to greater insecurity.
The sheer trickery of Apple’s tax arrangements renders their claims to corporate social responsibility risible, and the economic harm caused by these arrangements is also enormous.
The evidence points in one direction Capitalism is the wrong economic system for the material world that is emerging.
It’s time to redesign.
There is only one way of resetting the elite-driven international capitalism.
All profit for profit sake should be caped with a world aid commission of 0.05%. ( See previous posts)
( A Beady eye though less than twenty-second read)
Technoference:
A smart phone is a modern-day distraction that is so common, it’s hardly noticed any more, demanding our attention multiple times a day.
We are becoming irrevocably immersed in our digital lives, prioritizing the virtual world over anything else.
We are losing the personal touch, losing the art of conversation.
You can measure romance by the number of words you can type per minute.
Relationships only seem to be real once you make it Facebook official.
There Is no doubt that those dedicated to their smartphones put up a barrier between people. Compulsively carry our smartphones with you wherever you go can make you a very boring person.
You need to set some boundaries for your smart phone usage.
It is not some magic self-defense tool capable of protecting you from all that is evil in the world.
By allowing technology to interfere with or interrupt conversations, activities, and time with romantic partners – even when unintentional or for brief moments – individuals may be sending implicit messages about what they value most, leading to conflict and negative outcomes in personal life and relationships.’
We can let these devices overrule our entire lives if we allow it.
Social networking doesn’t count as socializing.
Anger can be too easily impulsively shot out in an email or text.
You don’t receive smiles, hugs, laughter or touch or the sound of voices. See each other, hear each other and touch each other. And that can never be conveyed over technology of any kind.
The mystery of getting to know someone is gone. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but the fact that it’s a forgotten practice is a little sad.
The percentage of phones dropped into toilets has risen dramatically over the years. That’s a scientific fact.
Put your damn phone down and look people in the eye. Have a conversation. Don’t worry about what you are missing on Twitter. It will still be there when you are done socializing with actual humans.
I do think we’re all kind of in this big, worldwide reality television game and it will seemed like terrible unlucky to be dead on Facebook.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE: ANSWERS A READER’S CONCERN RE: Humanity is turning into an Algorithm
( Five minute Read)
Following the theme of my last post (Humanity is turning into an Algorithm) this question has been asked by one reader:
There must be a way out of this.
Let’s look and see if there is a way.
We have set in motion a ‘runaway train’ of success.
The Internet/ the Web/ Wifi/ A world run by Algorithms.
All have and continue to be crucial in the spread of great innovations, the rise of world wealth, and even the dissemination of democratic concepts and ethical values and the defeat of oppressive regimes.
However in the world leadership terms it has led to an unrealistic evaluative process that consistently sets aside long-term problems and consequences in order to try to achieve some short-term successes, so as to survive reelection in two, four or six-year cycles.
With a knock effect on our other great strength : World Capitalism:
It might be the most successful economic system possible, but has also become one of shorter and shorter cycles of evaluation. CEOs, companies, stocks, profits and debits change at an ever more accelerated pace in response to the demands of stockholders and the market.
And hopefully on to our World Leaders that may recognize that they are not addressing the real problems, but they rationalize their actions with the argument that they must first politically survive in order to later address the hard problems and sacrifices. Of course, they usually don’t ever actually get around to addressing the fundamental problems later, either because they don’t make it through the initial crisis or because, even later, they are not willing to risk sacrificing their own position (or “career”) with needed measures that usually require tough sacrifices by the population.
As a result all our World Organisations are suffering from a similar disease, combined with being unable to act due to lack of financing.
The result is a growing burden of multiple long-term problems in the decades to come. I am sure I don’t have to list them.
Thus, our brilliant communication, information, and transport systems, which will be remembered as the hallmark of our age, are also a point of great fragility.
It will be short-term thinking and decision-making that is the most universal factor leading to collapse of Society as a whole.
“It’s the economy stupid” and “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” have become the mantras of contemporary democracy. The latter is a sure recipe for collapse.
Today there are few, if any, refuges against international crises of any kind.
Any really helpful response will involved political change to redefine the very nature [of] leadership and its roles and institutions.
So imagine a world without the Internet.
A world without the World Wide Web, Facebook, Twitter or even e-mail. A YouTube that serves up over 100 million videos per day.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a set of circumstances that could cause the Internet to collapse. It would require destruction on such a widespread scale that the loss of the Internet would probably be the least of our worries.
It’s impossible to predict how each government would react; however, it’s not hard to imagine a series of events that could escalate into a conflict.
Rarely can societies in crisis conceive of such great structural changes (and often those might not be accepted by various interest groups). So, the situation just deteriorates at the same, or even at an accelerated, rate.
Much depends on the smooth functioning of the World Wide Web – banking, the financial markets, shopping, shipping, entertainment, medicine, along with so many other facets of the economy and daily life.
Assuming world leaders could maintain order and resist the urge to blow each other up, other problems would surface.
Unfortunately it is us that is driving the ever-shortening cycle of evaluation of political leaders, our explicit promotion of such short-term egocentric values.
We are losing sight of real values because they are being molded by Algorithms on our behalf by Facebook/ Google/ Microsoft/ Apple etc.
Our ability to think and make decisions for ourselves is being manipulated (as they have being and always will be) not by ourselves but by technology called AI that is leading us down the road to technology deserts. With personal data becoming the oil in the machine.
So is the Information Superhighway headed towards a dead-end?
Or is the Internet is destined to collapse under its own weight.
I can say, in general, that the answer to our problems—or at least the first steps—do not lie in the direction of specific economic or political actions.
Rather it must begin with ideology—with a change in general expectations.
What we can hope for is that with a somewhat more controlled level of growth, and with longer-term preparations for change, we can keep responding to the inevitable smaller crises, as they arise, and continue to postpone until later and later the (perhaps ultimately inevitable) end of our civilization.
We need to begin thinking in terms of longer periods, and slower processes, for judging success.
Such an ideology of long-term thinking and lower expectations — a change in world “attitude”— seems to me to be the only way out of the 21st century giant and precarious “bubble” that now is Western civilization.
No society can sustain unlimited growth – none ever has.
So my answer to my readers ( Humanity is turning into an Algorithm) question is yes there is a way out.
The Internet is not unbreakable:
Well apart from every teenager screaming because they can’t log on to Facebook, it all comes down to how much we personally use the Internet and what for.
We are living in an increasingly hyper connected world but if the next great social media shift truly is from centralized, profile-based social networks to decentralized feeds, distributed profiles, and private messaging perhaps we as consumers could start buying locally, enriching our local towns and shops.
We’d could look for local services and sustain local economies by trading within our immediate areas. The political fallout following the collapse of the Internet would not be so devastating.
On the other hand perhaps we would suffer a world-wide recession, stock markets would collapse, millions of businesses go bust and millions of people lose their jobs?
Life without the internet would force people to turn back to grass-roots and socialise and communicate on a very basic level.
A Facebook collapse would be less manageable: Experts estimate one-third of the world’s population will be affected by myopia – nearsightedness.
The eyes are useless when the mind is blind. In one year alone, its estimated that a minimum of €100 billion in VAT fraud are committed online in the European Union alone. Millions of personal data are stolen from everyday citizens, which are then used online to create fraudulent identities.
As I have said there is a need for a series of difficulties to be overcome before the necessary forces can be raised to end the war.
The smartphone’s role in shaping human interaction is far-reaching,whose functionality is constantly evolving and is now a pocket-size PC. The device seems to have limitless potential. The majority of Internet traffic (60 percent) now comes from mobile devices.
In one year alone, its estimated that a minimum of €100 billion in VAT fraud are committed online in the European Union alone. Millions of personal data are stolen from everyday citizens, which are then used online to create fraudulent identities.
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