Category Archives: 2023 the year of disconnection.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S : ARE OUR LIVES GOING TO BE RULED BY ALGORITHMS.

20 Saturday May 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Communication., Dehumanization., Democracy, Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Disconnection., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Humanity., Imagination., IS DATA DESTORYING THE WORLD?, Modern Day Democracy., Our Common Values., Purpose of life., Reality., Social Media Regulation., State of the world, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Tracking apps., Unanswered Questions., Universal values., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What is shaping our world., What Needs to change in the World

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

( Ten minute read) 

I am sure that unless you have being living on another planet it is becoming more and more obvious that the manner you live your life is being manipulate and influence by technologies.

So its worth pausing to ask why the use of AI for algorithm-informed decision is desirable, and hence worth our collective effort to think through and get right.

A huge amount of our lives – from what appears in our social media feeds to what route our sat-nav tells us to take – is influenced by algorithms. Email knows where to go thanks to algorithms. Smartphone apps are nothing but algorithms. Computer and video games are algorithmic storytelling.  Online dating and book-recommendation and travel websites would not function without algorithms.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is naught but algorithms.

The material people see on social media is brought to them by algorithms. In fact, everything people see and do on the web is a product of algorithms. Algorithms are also at play, with most financial transactions today accomplished by algorithms. Algorithms help gadgets respond to voice commands, recognize faces, sort photos and build and drive cars. Hacking, cyberattacks and cryptographic code-breaking exploit algorithms.

Algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything.

Self-learning and self-programming algorithms are now emerging, so it is possible that in the future algorithms will write many if not most algorithms.

Yes they can save lives, make things easier and conquer chaos, but when it comes both the commercial/ social world, there are many good reasons to question the use of Algorithms.

Why? 

They can put too much control in the hands of corporations and governments, perpetuate bias, create filter bubbles, cut choices, creativity and serendipity, while exploiting not just of you, but the very resources of our planet for short-term profits, destroying what left of democracy societies, turning warfare into face recognition, stimulating inequality, invading our private lives, determining our futures without any legal restrictions or transparency, or recourse.

The rapid evolution of AI and AI agents embedded in systems and devices in the Internet of Things will lead to hyper-stalking, influencing and shaping of voters, and hyper-personalized ads, and will create new ways to misrepresent reality and perpetuate falsehoods.

———

As they are self learning, the problem is who or what is creating them, who owns these algorithms and what if there should be any controls in their usage.

Lets ask some questions that need to be ask now not later concerning them. 

1) The outcomes the algorithm intended to make possible (and whether they are ethical)

2) The algorithm’s function.

3) The algorithm’s limitations and biases.

4) The actions that will be taken to mitigate the algorithm’s limitations and biases.

5) The layer of accountability and transparency that will be put in place around it.

There is no debate about the need for algorithms in scientific research – such as discovering new drugs to tackle new or old diseases/ pandemics, space travel, etc. 

Out side of these needs the promise of AI is that we could have evidence-based decision making in the field:

Helping frontline workers make more informed decisions in the moments when it matters most, based on an intelligent analysis of what is known to work. If used thoughtfully and with care, algorithms could provide evidence-based policymaking, but they will fail to achieve much if poor decisions are taken at the front.

However, it’s all well and good for politicians and policymakers to use evidence at a macro level when designing a policy but the real effectiveness of each public sector organisation is now the sum total of thousands of little decisions made by algorithms each and every day.

First (to repeat a point made above), with new technologies we may need to set a higher bar initially in order to build confidence and test the real risks and benefits before we adopt a more relaxed approach. Put simply, we need time to see in what ways using AI is, in fact, the same or different to traditional decision making processes.

The second concerns accountability. For reasons that may not be entirely rational, we tend to prefer a human-made decision. The process that a person follows in their head may be flawed and biased, but we feel we have a point of accountability and recourse which does not exist (at least not automatically) with a machine.

The third is that some forms of algorithmic decision making could end up being truly game-changing in terms of the complexity of the decision making process. Just as some financial analysts eventually failed to understand the CDOs they had collectively created before 2008, it might be too hard to trace back how a given decision was reached when unlimited amounts of data contribute to its output.

The fourth is the potential scale at which decisions could be deployed. One of the chief benefits of technology is its ability to roll out solutions at massive scale. By the same trait it can also cause damage at scale.

 In all of this it’s important to remember that while progress isn’t guaranteed transformational progress on a global scale normally takes time, generations even, to achieve but we pulled it off in less than a decade and spent another decade pushing the limits of what was possible with a computer and an Internet connection and, unfortunately, we are beginning running into limits pretty quickly such as.

No one wants to accept that the incredible technological ride we’ve enjoyed for the past half-century is coming to an end, but unless algorithms are found that can provide a shortcut around this rate of growth, we have to look beyond the classical computer if we are to maintain our current pace of technological progress.

A silicon computer chip is a physical material, so it is governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, and engineering.

After miniaturizing the transistor on an integrated circuit to a nanoscopic scale, transistors just can’t keep getting smaller every two years. With billions of electronic components etched into a solid, square wafer of silicon no more than 2 inches wide, you could count the number of atoms that make up the individual transistors.

So the era of classical computing is coming to an end, with scientists anticipating the arrival of quantum computing designing ambitious quantum algorithms that tackle maths greatest challenges an Algorithm for everything.

———–

Algorithms may be deployed without any human oversight leading to actions that could cause harm and which lack any accountability.

The issues the public sector deals with tend to be messy and complicated, requiring ethical judgements as well as quantitative assessments. Those decisions in turn can have significant impacts on individuals’ lives. We should therefore primarily be aiming for intelligent use of algorithm-informed decision making by humans.

If we are to have a ‘human in the loop’, it’s not ok for the public sector to become littered with algorithmic black boxes whose operations are essentially unknowable to those expected to use them.

As with all ‘smart’ new technologies, we need to ensure algorithmic decision making tools are not deployed in dumb processes, or create any expectation that we diminish the professionalism with which they are used.

Algorithms could help remove or reduce the impact of these flaws.

So where are we.

At the moment modern algorithms are some of the most important solutions to problems currently powering the world’s most widely used systems.

Here are a few. They form the foundation on which data structures and more advanced algorithms are built.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is a great place to start, since it helped turn Google into the internet giant it is today.

The PageRank algorithm so thoroughly established Google’s dominance as the only search engine that mattered that the word Google officially became a verb less than eight years after the company was founded. Even though PageRank is now only one of about 200 measures Google uses to rank a web page for a given query, this algorithm is still an essential driving force behind its search engine.

The Key Exchange Encryption algorithm does the seemingly impo

Backpropagation through a neural network is one of the most important algorithms invented in the last 50 years.

Neural networks operate by feeding input data into a network of nodes which have connections to the next layer of nodes, and different weights associated with these connections which determines whether to pass the information it receives through that connection to the next layer of nodes. When the information passed through the various so-called “hidden” layers of the network and comes to the output layer, these are usually different choices about what the neural network believes the input was. If it was fed an image of a dog, it might have the options dog, cat, mouse, and human infant. It will have a probability for each of these and the highest probability is chosen as the answer.

Without backpropagation, deep-learning neural networks wouldn’t work, and without these neural networks, we wouldn’t have the rapid advances in artificial intelligence that we’ve seen in the last decade.

Routing Protocol Algorithm (LSRPA) are the two most essential algorithms we use every day as they efficiently route data.

The two most widely used by the Internet, the Distance-Vector Routing Protocol Algorithm (DVRPA) and the Link-State traffic between the billions of connected networks that make up the Internet.

Compression is everywhere, and it is essential to the efficient transmission and storage of information.

Its made possible by establishing a single, shared mathematical secret between two parties, who don’t even know each other, and is used to encrypt the data as well as decrypt it, all over a public network and without anyone else being able to figure out the secret.

Searches and Sorts are a special form of algorithm in that there are many very different techniques used to sort a data set or to search for a specific value within one, and no single one is better than another all of the time. The quicksort algorithm might be better than the merge sort algorithm if memory is a factor, but if memory is not an issue, merge sort can sometimes be faster;

One of the most widely used algorithms in the world, but in that 20 minutes in 1959, Dijkstra enabled everything from GPS routing on our phones, to signal routing through telecommunication networks, and any number of time-sensitive logistics challenges like shipping a package across country. As a search algorithm, Dijkstra’s Shortest Path stands out more than the others just for the enormity of the technology that relies on it.

——–

At the moment there are relatively few instances where algorithms should be deployed without any human oversight or ability to intervene before the action resulting from the algorithm is initiated.

The assumptions on which an algorithm is based may be broadly correct, but in areas of any complexity (and which public sector contexts aren’t complex?) they will at best be incomplete.

Why?

Because the code of algorithms may be unviewable in systems that are proprietary or outsourced.

Even if viewable, the code may be essentially uncheckable if it’s highly complex; where the code continuously changes based on live data; or where the use of neural networks means that there is no single ‘point of decision making’ to view.

Virtually all algorithms contain some limitations and biases, based on the limitations and biases of the data on which they are trained.

 Though there is currently much debate about the biases and limitations of artificial intelligence, there are well known biases and limitations in human reasoning, too. The entire field of behavioural science exists precisely because humans are not perfectly rational creatures but have predictable biases in their thinking.

Some are calling this the Age of Algorithms and predicting that the future of algorithms is tied to machine learning and deep learning that will get better and better at an ever-faster pace. There is something on the other side of the classical-post-classical divide, it’s likely to be far more massive than it looks from over here, and any prediction about what we’ll find once we pass through it is as good as anyone else’s.

It is entirely possible that before we see any of this, humanity will end up bombing itself into a new dark age that takes thousands of years to recover from.

The entire field of theoretical computer science is all about trying to find the most efficient algorithm for a given problem. The essential job of a theoretical computer scientist is to find efficient algorithms for problems and the most difficult of these problems aren’t just academic; they are at the very core of some of the most challenging real world scenarios that play out every day.

Quantum computing is a subject that a lot of people, myself included, have gotten wrong in the past and there are those who caution against putting too much faith in a quantum computer’s ability to free us from the computational dead end we’re stuck in.

The most critical of these is the problem of optimization:

How do we find the best solution to a problem when we have a seemingly infinite number of possible solutions?

While it can be fun to speculate about specific advances, what will ultimately matter much more than any one advance will be the synergies produced by these different advances working together.

Synergies are famously greater than the sum of their parts, but what does that mean when your parts are blockchain, 5G networks, quantum computers, and advanced artificial intelligence?

DNA computing, however, harnesses these amino acids’ ability to build and assemble itself into long strands of DNA.

It’s why we can say that quantum computing won’t just be transformative, humanity is genuinely approaching nothing short of a technological event horizon.

Quantum computers will only give you a single output, either a value or a resulting quantum state, so their utility solving problems with exponential or factorial time complexity will depend entirely on the algorithm used.

One inefficient algorithm could have kneecapped the Internet before it really got going.

It is now oblivious that there is no going back.

The question now is there anyway of curtailing their power.

This can now only be achieved with the creation of an open source platform where the users control their data rather than it being used and mined.  (The uses can sell their data if the want.)

This platform must be owned by the public, and compete against the existing platforms like face book, twitter, what’s App, etc,   protected by an algorithm that protects the common values of all our lives – the truth. 

Of course it could be designed by using existing algorithms which would defeat its purpose. 

It would be an open net-work of people a kind of planetary mind that has to always be funding biosphere-friendly activities.

A safe harbour perhaps called the New horizon.   A digital United nations where the voices of cooperation could be heard.   

So if by any chance there is a human genius designer out there that could make such a platform he might change the future of all our digitalized lives for the better.   

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com  

 

 

Advertisement

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS THIS A NIVE QUESTION. IS IT IN NATO INTEREST TO ALLOW THE UK TO SUPPLY CRUISE MISSILES TO THE UKRAIN.

12 Friday May 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., RUSSIA/ UKRAINE/ US/ NATO/ EU

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

( Three minute read) 

My understanding of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is that it is a defence pack, a collective security system with its independent member states agreeing to defend each other against attacks by third parties. An intergovernmental military alliance between 31 member states – 29 European and two North American. Established in the aftermath of World War II, which Finland joined recently, as a result of the Ukraine/ Russian war. 

(An armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.)

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty stated that an attack on one signatory would be regarded as an attack on the rest, and this article was first invoked in 2001 in response to the terrorist September 11 attacks against the U.S.

Its member states and their individual sovereignty is unaffected by participation in the alliance.  There is no collective responsibility for a NATO member of any kind when it comes to supply military/ weapons to whatever side of a war it chooses, even if in doing so it could provoke an attack that jeopardies all member getting involvement in a bigger war.

Surely this needs to change 

The US and other countries of NATO have been unwilling to supply long range missiles to the Ukraine in case strikes into Russia lead to escalation.

The United Kingdom has delivered multiple “Storm Shadow” cruise missiles to Ukraine.

This is not the first time Britain has gone further than the US in the weaponry it has been prepared to send to Ukraine.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is understood to have received assurances from President Volodymyr Zelensky that the missiles will not be used for anything other than defensive purposes. It is understood that the UK would allow the missiles to be used to destroy President Vladimir Putin’s supply lines and as part of the counter-offensive to take back Russian occupied territory, including Crimea.

<p>Putin has said that ‘no defense systems’ will be able to defend the Satan-2 </p>

THIS IS A WAR AND IN A WAR ASSURANCES AND CONDITIONS RE USING ANYTHING ARE MEANLESS.

In providing weapons to Ukraine that could help them strike within Russian territory is the UK inviting a missile from Russia with love. One does not need much imagination the results if this were to happen.

There is no dispute that Putin’s penchant for brandishing Russia’s arsenal reflects weakness and insecurity. And that is not a good trait in the leader of a nuclear superpower. (Russia’s 6,000-warhead arsenal is the only thing that makes it a superpower.) The United Kingdom within six minutes, even from a distance of 1,600 miles would be wiped of the map. No defence systems will be able to withstand it.

The challenge for the NATO allies now is maintaining the support Ukraine needs for its survival while making clear Putin has a way out of the crisis, rather than climbing up the escalation ladder to the point where it takes on a logic of its own.

In my view there was “no need or sense in mirroring Putin’s reckless nuclear threats, which should be universally condemned”

However, how Putin views the domestic consequences of his backing down – something over which the west has no control is now becoming paramount as to how this war is going to come to a closure or expand. 

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

Contact; bobdillon33@gmail.com 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS OUR BIOLOGICAL REASONING BEING REPLACED BY DIGITAL REASONING.

03 Wednesday May 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship.

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

(Ten minute read)

We all know that massive changes need to be made to the way we all live on the planet, due to climate change.

However most of us are not aware of the effects that artificial intelligence in having on our lives.

This post looks at our changing understanding of ourselves, due digitalized reasoning, which is turning us into digitalized

citizens, relying more on and more on digitalized reasoning for all aspects of living.

Does it help us understand what is going on? Or to work out what we can do about it?

It could be said that the climate is beyond our control,  but AI remains within the realms of control.

Is this true?

It is true that the human race is in grave danger of stupidity re climate change which if not addressed globally could cause our extinction.

We know that using technology alone will not solve climate change, but it is necessary to gather information about what is happing to the planet, while our lives are monitored in minute detail by algorithms for profit.

There are many reasons why this is happing and the consequences of it will be far reaching and perhaps as dangerous if not more than what the climate is and will be bringing.

——–

While biology reasoning usually starts with an observation leading to a logical problem-solving with deductive conclusions

usually reliable, provided the premises are true.

Digital AI reasoning on the other hand is a cycle rather than any logically straight line.

It is the result of one go-round becomes feedback that improves the next round of question asking to ask machine

learning, with all programs and algorithms learning the result instantly.

Example  One Drone to the next. One high-frequency trade to the next. One bank loan to the next. One human to the next.

Another words.

Digital Reasoning, is combining artificial intelligence and machine learning with all the biases program’s in the code in the first place without any supervision oversight, or global regulation

It combined volumes of data in real-time to remove the propose a hypothesis, to make a new hypothesis without conclusively prove that it’s correct.  An iterative process of inductive reasoning extracts a likely (but not certain) premise from specific and limited observations. There is data, and then conclusions are drawn from the data; this is called inductive logic/ reasoning. 

Inductive reasoning does not guarantee that the conclusion will be true.

In inductive inference, we go from the specific to the general. We make many observations, discern a pattern, make a generalization, and infer an explanation or a theory.

In other words, there is nothing that makes a guess ‘educated’ other than the learning program.

The differences between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning.

Deductive reasoning is a top-down approach, while inductive reasoning is a bottom-up approach.

Inductive reasoning is used in a number of different ways, each serving a different purpose:

We use inductive reasoning in everyday life to build our understanding of the world.

Inductive reasoning, or inductive logic, is a type of reasoning that involves drawing a general conclusion from a set of specific observations. Some people think of inductive reasoning as “bottom-up” logic the  one logic exercise we do nearly every day, though we’re scarcely aware of it. We take tiny things we’ve seen or read and draw general principles from them—an act known as inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning also underpins the scientific method: scientists gather data through observation and experiment, make hypotheses based on that data, and then test those theories further. That middle step—making hypotheses—is an inductive inference, and they wouldn’t get very far without it.

Inductive reasoning is also called a hypothesis-generating approach, because you start with specific observations and build toward a theory. It’s an exploratory method that’s often applied before deductive research.

Finally, despite the potential for weak conclusions, an inductive argument is also the main type of reasoning in academic life.

Deductive reasoning is a logical approach where you progress from general ideas to specific conclusions. It’s often contrasted with inductive reasoning, where you start with specific observations and form general conclusions.

Deductive reasoning is used to reach a logical and true conclusion. In deductive reasoning, you’ll often make an argument for a certain idea. You make an inference, or come to a conclusion, by applying different premises. Due to its reliance on inference, deductive reasoning is at high risk for research biases, particularly confirmation bias and other types of cognitive bias like belief bias.

In deductive reasoning, you start with general ideas and work toward specific conclusions through inferences. Based on theories, you form a hypothesis. Using empirical observations, you test that hypothesis using inferential statistics and form a conclusion.

In practice, most research projects involve both inductive and deductive methods.

However it can be tempting to seek out or prefer information that supports your inferences or ideas, with inbuilt bias creeping into  research. Patients have a better chance of surviving, banks can ensure their employees are meeting the highest standards of conduct, and law enforcement can protect the most vulnerable citizens in our society.

However, there are important distinctions that separate these two pathways to a logical conclusion of what Digitized reasoning is going to do or replace human reasoning.

First there is no debate that Computers have done amazing calculations for us, but they have never solved a hard problem on their own.

The problem is the communication barrier between the language of humans and the language of computers.

A programmer can code in all the rules, or axioms, and then ask if a particular conjecture follows those rules. The computer then does all the work. Does it  explain its work.  No. 

All that calculating happens within the machine, and to human eyes it would look like a long string of 0s and 1s. It’s impossible to scan the proof and follow the reasoning, because it looks like a pile of random data. “No human will ever look at that proof and be able to say, ‘I get it.’ They operate in a kind of black box and just spit out an answer.

 Machine proofs may not be as mysterious as they appear.  Maybe they should be made to explain. 

I can see it becoming standard practice that if you want your paper/ codes/ algorithm to be accepted, you have to get it past an automatic checker – re transparency because efforts at the forefront of the field today aim to blend learning with reasoning.

After all, if the machines continue to improve, and they have access to vast amounts of data, they should become very good at doing the fun parts, too. “They will learn how to do their own prompts.”

company will enable customers to spot risks before they happen, maximize the scalability of supervision teams, and uncover strategic insights from large

The Limits of Reason.

Neural networks are able to develop an artificial style of intuition, leverage communications data to spot risks before they happen, and identify new insights to drive fresh growth initiatives, creating a large divide between firms investing to harvest data-driven insights and leverage data to manage risk, and those who are falling behind.

This will bear out in earnings and share prices in the years to come.

The challenge of automating reasoning in computer proofs as a subset of a much bigger field:

Natural language processing, which involves pattern recognition in the usage of words and sentences. (Pattern recognition is also the driving idea behind computer vision, the object of Szegedy’s previous project at Google.)

Like other groups, his team wants theorem provers that can find and explain useful proofs. He envisions a future in which theorem provers replace human referees at major journals.

Josef Urban thinks that the marriage of deductive and inductive reasoning required for proofs can be achieved through this kind of combined approach. His group has built theorem provers guided by machine learning tools, which allow computers to learn on their own through experience. Over the last few years, they’ve explored the use of neural networks — layers of computations that help machines process information through a rough approximation of our brain’s neuronal activity. In July, his group reported on new conjectures generated by a neural network trained on theorem-proving data.

Harris disagrees. He doesn’t think computer provers are necessary, or that they will inevitably “make human mathematicians obsolete.” If computer scientists are ever able to program a kind of synthetic intuition, he says, it still won’t rival that of humans.

“Even if computers understand, they don’t understand in a human way.”

I say the current Ukraine Russian war is the labourite of AI reasoning this war with all its consequence is telling us that AI should never be allowed near nuclear weapons or….dangerous pathogens.

An inductive argument is one that reasons in the opposite direction from deduction.

Given some specific cases, what can be inferred about the underlying general rule?

The reasoning process follows the same steps as in deduction.

The difference is the conclusions: an inductive argument is not a proof, but rather a probalistic inference.

When scholars use statistical evidence to test a hypothesis, they are using inductive logic.

The main objective of statistics is to test a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a falsifiable claim that requires verification.

  • Most progress in science, engineering, medicine, and technology is the result of hypothesis testing.

When a computer uses statistical evidence to test a hypothesis it’s assumption may or may not be true. To prove something is correct, we first need to take reciprocal of it and then try to prove that reciprocal is wrong which ultimately proves something is correct.

Finally this post has been written or generated by a human reasoning, that see the dangers of losing that reasoning to Digital reasoning of Enterprise Spock.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S . THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY MUST BE BROUGHT TO HEAL WITH NEW LAWS TO REDUCE CONSUMPTION.

25 Tuesday Apr 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., Advertising, Advertising industry,  Attention economy, Capitalism, CO2 emissions, Cry for help., Desensitization., Environment, How to do it., Human values., Modern day life., Profiteering., State of the world, Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Universal values., VALUES, What is shaping our world., Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S . THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY MUST BE BROUGHT TO HEAL WITH NEW LAWS TO REDUCE CONSUMPTION.

( Seven minute read)

It is crystal clear that consumption is a major donator to the problems of both the environment and all of us are now facing. There is consistent evidence that exposure to marketing for unhealthy commodities – for example advertising for alcohol or food and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar – is associated with consumption, including among children and young people.

To confront the climate emergency, the amount we consume needs to drop dramatically. Yet every day we’re told by the advertising industry to consume more.

The purpose of advertising is to boost revenue, gain an advantage over competitors, and build brand awareness, so it latch on to what ever is topical – Climate change – Energy – Sustainability – Cost of living etc.

Now with technology it has billion-dollar persuasion machines, promoting not quality of life but rather quantity of stuff.

It’s woven into our personal communications whenever we use social media platforms. In public spaces, where we have little choice over where we look, adverts are invasive, appearing without our consent, with the trend towards digital billboards only exposes us ever more.

Its so prevalent as to be invisible but with an effect no less insidious than air pollution.

We all have a role to play — from making sustainable choices to help safeguard the ocean and our environment, to urging world and business leaders to take the urgent, widespread, and ambitious action needed to tackle climate change and protect the planet.

———

This is an industry capable of quickly shifting global public opinion, with the power to change hearts, minds and behaviour resulting in action, potentially on a global scale and also with profound and rapid effect.

It must be made to take responsibility for consumption, instead of continuing to drive the high carbon lifestyles and hyper-consumption that is killing us.

If we were to introduce new laws restricting marketing agencies from taking work from clients who aren’t actively reducing their own contributions to climate change, earning money from high carbon clients, the sort of companies from whom the investment community is increasingly divesting; promoting unnecessary and over-consumption, these companies  would eventually be forced to match their green advertising slogans with real green investment.

The questions for the advertising industry would become what are our obligations to tackle climate change i.e. how might we have contributed to climate change and how do we stop doing so, and what are our opportunities i.e. where can we make a positive contribution to the issue?

What other than laws will forced  it to rethink their strategies so the industry will go through a transition period, to discover a purpose beyond profit?

In fact, many would argue that the move to “doing well by doing good” will only become truly mainstream when the corporate social responsibility agenda and the growth agenda become one and the same.

There is no reason that governments could not introduce restricted areas and venues where the advertising of consumption is not allowed.

Buses covered in advertising at London's Piccadilly CircusA billboard advert in Manchester

For example:  Sporting events, Natural Reserves/ Public Park’s, Billboards and bus stops, Out door digital advertising.

We could stop television programming being sponsored by consumption  – Eat now.

Of course in a free society, businesses have the right to advertise their wares, and individual citizens are not the helpless brainless automatons that advertising industry’s considers them to be.

All advertising plays a crucial role in brand competition, drives product innovation, and fuels economic growth but would we not rather see community ads and art than have multi-billion companies putting logos and images everywhere?

If they are allowed to get the message out, the public has a right to reply to those ads.

We don’t want our city’s children bombarded with animated advertising on TV screens in the street.

Critically, the more that people prioritise materialistic values and goals, the less they embrace positive attitudes towards the environment – and the more likely they are to behave in damaging ways. If you think this is a fanciful aim, then you might need to think again with the state the world is in.

We’re in a place where major behaviour change is required.

To question the legitimacy of corporate outdoor adverting and draw attention to the impact they can have on social issues, mental health, wellbeing, the climate, and the communication of public space where governments are too inert/broke/ill-intentioned/in thrall to vested interests to take effective action.

Business leaders must increasingly look beyond short-term profitability to address the pressing need to reduce emissions.

——

.The advertising industry is in a very different place to where it was a year ago.

Where, how, and when you advertise will constantly change with the times. That’s one thing we can count on.

Culture has always defined marketing and brand marketers have a lot of power to dictate.

The rise of the internet, computers, and mobile devices only provided more platforms for video ads to appear. It’s probably still going to be one of the most important advertising trends in the next 5 years.

We have our hands on the levers of behaviour change, but in an era in which attention is often only ever partial, puncturing the collective consumer inertia with a complex message is no easy feat.

We spend every day thinking of ways to change people’s behaviours,

These skills are the ones needed more than ever by the world to halt the human causes of climate change.

——–

Advertising has always evolved with the technology at hand. This includes tracking of clicked links, customer behaviour, purchase history, survey responses, and more.

Marketers can then use that information to create custom messages or content that’ll match the target audiences’ interests.

Finding out which people to show a particular ad to and the right time to show them is crucial in the world of smartphones

Next step, profit.

——-

In a cut-throat and viciously competitive market, pioneering new technology can have a major impact on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Another big use of mobile advertising is through games.

A lot of mobile games are created with the format of being able to purchase resources with real-world money.

This means that ads will now be geared towards targeting real people through emails and other registered user data. With more information available, marketers can provide customers with a better offer that’ll most likely translate into sales.

Social advertising is the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms for advertising potentials.

The format itself is undergoing rapid transformation because most people watch for content and not for production quality.

Data collection and cookies naturally have poor public perception, often being viewed as encroaching on private information and stealing data, with ads following consumers around the internet.

Now, these apps aren’t just for sending messages and emoji cause it’s also a place to find advertisements relevant to users.

As the climate crisis bites

————

We need new metrics and measurement tools – and new bonus and remuneration systems to underpin our value systems, not just legislation against high-carbon advertising, focusing on fossil fuel companies, petrol- and diesel-engine cars and aviation.

Because, marketing has been transformed by digital speed, relevance and reach of advertising campaigns.

Because, overconsumption in general, encouraged by advertising, has a climate and ecological impact.

Because, programmatic advertising uses AI to automatically buy ads that can target audiences more specifically. ( Programmatic advertising is a combination of big data processing, technical skills, and automation.)

Because, advertising works by getting under your radar, introducing new ideas without bothering your conscious mind.

Because, contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising where site content and keywords are analyzed in real time to determine their suitability for a brand’s message.

Because, children are now at the mercy of so-called “surveillance advertising”. It is estimated that by the time a child turns 13, ad-tech firms would have gathered 72m data points on them. The more data collected from an early age, the easier it is for advertisers to turn young children into consumer targets.

A transformation of marketing is underway as we spend more time on our mobiles, tablets and laptops. The real-time conversations brands have with people as they interact with websites and mobile apps has changed the nature of marketing

We know that advertising is a key engine of the economy. There are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans.

There’s a long way to go and a lot to be done. The ad business, with strategy tools and processes that were for the most part developed in the 60s to accommodate the advent of commercial TV, is a lot closer to where it started the journey than where it needs to get to.

Let’s create a movement and band together to save the planet in a non-branded or political way.

New checks and balances need to accommodate the natural concerns of councils and residents around climate, air pollution, environmental light pollution, the “attention economy”, mental health and the dominance of non-consensual adverts in public spaces.

I’m sure most advertisers and agencies would rather work on solving this global crisis, and if we can use just 5% of the industry’s time toward this initiative.

It isn’t clickbait that is needed but a genuine concern for the fate of the planet or a cynical hunch that doing the right thing will drive growth and profit – if the improved behaviour is real.

I believe that would lead to greater satisfaction, retention and more.

Break the Silence and comment.

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

Contact; bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

16 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Politics

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

Tags

, , ,

( Twenty-six minute read)

We have heard all of this over and over, but it is impossible to get serious about climate change, because it has been turned into a product to be traded.

The very words Climate Change, Global warming, Biodiversity, Sea levels, Natural disasters, Droughts, Melting  ice, the list goes on and on as a result they are falling on deaf ears. For example  “sustainable development”: a phrase at which many people quietly glaze over and switch off.  Or “Global warming” is another of those deceptive phrases. It doesn’t sound that threatening.

So if words like “climate change” and “global warming” have become a turn-off for most ordinary people, maybe we should change the words.  Perhaps we should talk instead about what those things actually mean:

Killer weather, a world under water, and a mortgaged future.

We have been told for over three decades of the dangers of allowing the planet to warm.

We all know this and we know that it’s urgent. The world listened, but it didn’t hear. The world listened, but it didn’t act strongly enough. It hasn’t been enough to change our behaviours on a scale great enough to stop climate change.

As a result, climate change is a problem that is here, now. Nobody is safe. And it is getting worse faster and faster, till one tipping point is reached causing a rolling coaster of from here to eternity.

There are many tipping points to choose from.

Here is mind. The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover melts.

This is a feedback loop with teeth.

Back in the 50s it was more than ten meters thick, reflecting as much as 3% of the sun’s incoming light back into space.

That light is now heating the Oceans of the Arctic and the Antarctic, both becoming the fastest places on Earth with rising temperatures. Which means a greater and greater release of permafrost carbon and methane, 20 times stronger than Co2.

The Arctic permafrost contains as much methane as all the Earth’s cattle could create over the next six centuries.

If released this fart would push the Earth into an irreversible tipping point at which point the sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with the global temperatures 5/6 degrees Celsius higher. At that point civilisation would be over.

One would think that such a scenario would be sufficient to make all of us pay attention but not so.

Why?

A big part of the reason is our own evolution. The same behaviours that once helped us survive are, today, working against us.

We lack the collective will to address climate change, because of the way our brains have evolved. We have evolved to pay attention to immediate threats. We overestimate threats that are less likely but easier to remember, like terrorism, and underestimate more complex threats, like climate change. Too much information can confuse our brains, leading us to inaction or poor choices that can place us in harm’s way.

Our brains evolved to filter information rapidly and focus on what is most immediately essential to our survival and reproduction.

In our modern reality it’s causing errors in rational decision-making, known as cognitive biases. “Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival make it difficult to address complex, long-term challenges that now threaten our existence, like climate change.

  • Hyperbolic discounting. This is our perception that the present is more important than the future. Throughout most of our evolution it was more advantageous to focus on what might kill us or eat us now, not later. This bias now impedes our ability to take action to address more distant-feeling, slower and complex challenges. While we may understand what needs to be done to address climate change, it’s hard for us to see how the sacrifices required for generations existing beyond this short time span are worth it.

Families carry water during a drought in Ethiopia; temperature rise already has altered weather and water systems in profound ways (Credit: Creative Commons)

  • To address the issue of climate change it requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities.
  • The larger the group, the more challenging it gets.

The future value is the value of it at some time in the future. The farther into the future we look, the fuzzier our view, but there will be no future unless we invest trillions and trillions into sustainability.

On a warming planet, no one is safe.

The air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all rely on biodiversity.

Unfortunately, we have created a world where an asset from a business perspective, has no value unless it can produce cash flows in the future. The difference in value between the future and the present is created by discounting the future back to the present using a discount factor, which is a function of time that is running out right in front of our eyes.

The world’s ecosystems are capital assets that up to now have escaped valuation and have therefore been mismanaged.

Now they are being bought by rich privateers, together with financial instruments and institutional arrangements that will allow individuals to capture the value of ecosystem assets.  For example, Sovereignty Wealth Funds.  They buy environmental protection, but only by liquidating natural capital (for example, prairies, forests, fisheries) to generate the funds; even “information” economies are built in proportion to such liquidation. The reinvestment in natural capital never equals the amount liquidated because of procedural inefficiency and profit-taking.

—–

The process of valuation in the short term might lead to profoundly favourable effects on the stock market, but the decision of how much to spend now to avert climate changes hinges on assessing how much it is worth to us now to prevent that future damage.

Since most of us would prefer money now, over money later, economists typically figure that we’re willing to spend only less than a dollar now to prevent a dollar’s worth of damage in a year, or in a decade.

The percentage less is called the “social discount rate.”

This implies that we either accept an assumption that many argue is economically unjustified (a near-zero social discount rate), or conclude that we should just accept climate change without much of a fight. (A third alternative is perhaps even less appealing to economists: accepting that their calculations simply can’t illuminate the question.)

We’re much happier to have good stuff now than later, so our short-term discount rate is high.

But we hardly distinguish between goods in the pretty far future and goods in the very far future, so our discount rate in the future is far lower to manage the essentials to life.

Now more than ever we must use the power of the law to fight those who would harm our communities, our climate, and the natural world we value so deeply.

We have an International criminal court, why not use it to fine this lot of polluters.

Peabody Energy

Company summary: Coal company
Based in: Missouri, United States
Founded: 1883
Emissions per capita: 2,231,818 tonnes – or, 449,057 return flights from London to Sydney.

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation

Company summary: Petroleum company
Based in: Kuwait City, Kuwait
Founded: 1980
Emissions per capita: 2,133,248 tonnes – or, 445,354 return flights from London to Sydney

ConocoPhillips

Company summary: Crude oil and natural gas
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1875
Emissions per capita: 1,464,423 tonnes – or, 305,725 return flights from London to Sydney

Chevron

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: California, United States
Founded: 1879
Emissions per capita: 900,218 tonnes – or, 187,936 return flights from London to Sydney

Saudi Aramco

Company summary: Petroleum and natural gas company
Based in: Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Founded: 1933
Emissions per capita: 750,126 tonnes – or, 150,930 return flights from London to Sydney

ExxonMobil

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1999
Emissions per capita: 559,412 tonnes – or, 116,787 return flights from London to Sydney

BP

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: London, United Kingdom
Founded: 1909
Emissions per capita: 485,306 tonnes – or, 97,647 return flights from London to Sydney

National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)

Company summary: Government-owned national oil and natural gas company
Based in: Tehran, Iran
Founded: 1948
Emissions per capita: 407,542 tonnes – or, 82,000 return flights from London to Sydney

Royal Dutch Shell

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: The Hague, Netherlands
Founded: 1907
Emissions per capita: 384,939 tonnes – or, 77,452 return flights from London to Sydney.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965. The worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.

The top plastic polluting companies

Company Examples of products             Number of countries plastic was found in Pieces of plastic found
Coca-Cola       Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite                                            51                                              13,834
Pepsico            Pepsi, Lays, Doritos                                                  43                                              5,155
Nestlé              Nescafé, Kit Kat, Nestea                                           37                                              8,633
Unilever          Persil, Cornetto, Sunsilk                                            37                                              5,558
Mondeléz International  Oreo, Cadbury, Milka                                34                                                1,171
Mars              Mars bars, M&Ms, Snickers                                      32                                                  678
P&G              Tampax, Pantene, Ariel                                              29                                              3,535
Philip Morris International  Parliament, Merit, Marlboro               28                                                2,593
Colgate Palmolive  Colgate Palmolive                                           24                                              5,991
Colgate, Ajax, Palmolive
Perfetti          Mentos, Chupa Chups, Fruittella                             24                                                465

It’s important to remember that, as a consumer, you do have the power to change the future of these polluting companies. As more people switch to renewable energy, cut down on plastic, and live a little more sustainably, these polluting companies will have no choice but to change their habits to stay on trend.

Economists develop new methods to quantify the trade-off between spending now and spending later.

To figure out how much we should spend fighting climate change, economists have some questions for you:

The health of the planet may hinge on the answers.

Most economic analyses of climate change have concluded that we should be spending only small amounts to combat climate change now, ramping up slowly over time. This conclusion mystifies most climate scientists, who argue that immediate action is the only way to forestall dreadful consequences. And at the heart of the disagreement are these very questions, about the value of future generations’ welfare in monetary terms.

The worst consequences of climate change are likely to unfold only over decades or centuries — in other words, in our children’s or grandchildren’s or great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lifetimes, not ours.

The higher the price payed, also equates with a higher level of risk, which generates a higher discount and lowers the present value of any action.  The higher the level of risk is represented as beta in the capital asset pricing model, means a higher discount, which lowers the present value of  nature.

Discounting is the primary factor used in pricing a stream of tomorrow’s crises. .

By reiterating the importance of the world’s natural capital to the human prospect, the next step, is to focus on stabilizing the scale of human economy.  This requires taking on the advertising industry that is promoting consumption. It should be illegal to advertise any product that is not sustainable in their manufacture. Put restrictions on all advertising that is in contradiction to health of not just us, but the earth.  It has become a voracious top predator across the entire globe.

—

Biodiversity?

It is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms and all its interactions. Bio means living, and diversity is the variety of life on earth. It represents different relationships (like ecological, cultural, or evolutionary) between several types of organisms on this planet. All living beings on from human beings to the tiny creatures like microbes combined to form Biodiversity.

Starting with genes, then individual species, then communities of creatures and finally entire ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, where life interplays with the physical environment. These myriad interactions have made Earth habitable for billions of years.

Wildlife is not something you watch on television. The reality is that the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all ultimately rely on biodiversity.

It represents the knowledge learned by evolving species over millions of years about how to survive through the vastly varying environmental conditions Earth has experienced. We all interdependent with one another. Hence each species plays an essential role to boost ecosystem productivity.

Some examples are obvious: without plants there would be no oxygen and without bees to pollinate there would be no fruit or nuts.

Humans and our livestock now consume 25-40% of the planet’s entire “primary production”, i.e. the energy captured by plants on which all biodiversity depends.

The intricate jigsaw of life, constructed over hundreds of millions of years, has been thrown into disarray in the last 10,000 years by humans relocating species around the world. These invasive species can devastate ecosystems that have never developed defences – from rats devouring albatross chicks in their nests to snakehead fish decimating native species.

If money is a measure, the services provided by ecosystems are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars – double the world’s GDP. Biodiversity loss in Europe alone costs the continent about 3% of its GDP, or €450m (£400m), a year.

From an aesthetic point of view, every one of the millions of species is unique, a natural work of art that cannot be recreated once lost. “Each higher organism is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, a Bach fugue, or any other great work,”

The extinction rate of species is now thought to be about 1,000 times higher than before humans dominated the planet, which may be even faster than the losses after a giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago. The sixth mass extinction in geological history has already begun, according to some scientists.

The results are scary.

Humans can’t have power over nature in nature.

—–

Despite the fact that natural resources are limited and take millions of years in the formation, the human is exploiting them for their endless greed and comfort.

Species extinction provides a clear but narrow window on the destruction of biodiversity.

The huge global biodiversity losses now becoming apparent represent a crisis equalling – or quite possibly surpassing – climate change.

Billions of individual populations have been lost all over the planet, with the number of animals living on Earth having plunged by half since 1970. Abandoning the normally sober tone of scientific papers, researchers call the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation” representing a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”.

Humans may lack gills but that has not protected marine life. The situation is no better – and perhaps even less understood – in the two-thirds of the planet covered by oceans. Seafood is the critical source of protein for more than 2.5 billion people but rampant overfishing has caused catches to fall steadily since their peak in 1996 and now more than half the ocean is industrially fished.

Even much-loathed parasites are important. One-third could be wiped out by climate change, making them among the most threatened groups on Earth. But scientists warn this could destabilise ecosystems, unleashing unpredictable invasions of surviving parasites into new areas.

Today, 75% of the world’s food comes from just a dozen crops and five animal species, leaving supplies very vulnerable to pests or disease that can sweep through large areas of monocultures. Add in the falling yields expected from climate change, and the world’s growing global population faces a food problem.

Locating the tipping point that moves biodiversity loss into ecological collapse is an urgent priority. This being the only living world we are ever likely to know, let us join to make the most of it.

Could the loss of biodiversity be a greater threat to humanity than climate change?

Yes – nothing on Earth is experiencing more dramatic change at the hands of human activity.

Changes to the climate are reversible, even if that takes centuries or millennia.

That call is more urgent than ever. Our posterity is running out of chances.

But once species become extinct, particularly those unknown to science, there’s no going back. To put the matter as concisely as possible, biological diversity is unique in the evenness of its importance to both developed and developing countries is beyond any technical advances.

To spread technical capability where it is most needed, arrangements can be made to retain specimens within the countries of their origin while training nationals to assume leadership in systematics and the related scientific disciplines. Science is the best way to establish links with other cultures because it is concerned not with ideology but with nature and humanity’s relation to nature.

Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival now make it difficult to address long-term challenges that threaten our existence, like climate change.

It is already clear enough that the missing ingredient is political will.

For example

Recognising the power of small groups.

Humans are more likely to change behaviour when challenges are framed positively, instead of negatively. In other words, how we communicate about climate change influences how we respond.  To get people to act, we need to make the issue feel direct and personal by focusing the issue locally, pointing both to local impacts and local solutions: Like moving one’s city to 100% renewable energy.

The key is having a large-scale, organised effort – but one supported and understood by hundreds of smaller groups and communities.

It’s true that no other species has evolved to create such a large-scale problem – but no other species has evolved with such an extraordinary capacity to solve it, either.  If academia, business, government, and citizens act together toward this common goal, we can create a pollution-free energy system; form a prosperous, adaptable and resilient society; keep human, animal, and plant life flourishing; and create a better world for ourselves and generations to come.

We can’t undo the mistakes of the past. But this generation of political and business leaders, this generation of conscious citizens, can make things right. This generation can make the systemic changes that will stop the planet warming, help everyone adapt to the new conditions and create a world of peace, prosperity and equity.

The world is now experiencing the early effects of climate change.

The overall effect of inadequate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is creating a human rights catastrophe, and the costs of these climate change related disasters are already enormous. The Colorado river in the USA is drying up, the ice shelf is the Antarctic is melting, the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting five time faster. Somali is no the threshold of a Famine.

—–

If we don’t act, who will?

We have evolved to be able to stop human-induced climate change. Now we must act.

The risk that without intervention we could cross a threshold leading to runaway climate change. An inconvenient truth.

To save natural resources and to bring a change we have to change our habits that exploit our natural resources and directly or indirectly.

If you could ask one question of Global Leader.

What is the main motivation of your leadership?

Which competencies do you see as instrumental to develop in global leaders in order for them to thrive in this new world?

The key to multicultural leadership is in understanding the difference between intent and impact, as well as engaging in supportive interactions that cultivate a nurturing environment.

Sitting in Davis/ G20  ivory tower’s ONE cannot develop global mindset.

“The secret to success is sincerity. Learn to fake that, and you’ve got it made.”

Feel free to add your question.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT’S FAR TO LATE TO CONTROL AI.

01 Saturday Apr 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Artificial Intelligence., Dehumanization., Democracy., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disaster Capitalism., Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Purpose of life., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media Regulation., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Technology., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The metaverse., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, VIRTUAL REALITY., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT’S FAR TO LATE TO CONTROL AI.

( Six minute read)

Why?

Because the change is already taking place.

Because,  There are now more cell phones in the world than people. There were less than 7% of the world on online in 2000, today over half the global population has access to the internet.

Because, technology has already radically transformed our societies and our daily lives, from smartphones to social media and healthcare. Technology touches nearly everything we do.

Because, your voice, your image, your race, your shopping habits, your health, your movement’s, your viewing habits, your voting, your financial standing, your criminal record, your interests, your decision making, down to what you are eating, not forgetting your sex life is and has being harvest for free.

All can be and are being faked.

Because, virtual interactions offers enticing financial opportunities for big businesses and digitalized Governments.

——-

Excessive use of technology can do more harm than good, and we should bear this in mind before we rush into digitizing our lives.

When all areas of human activity get rapidly digitized, it’s easy to become desensitized to the importance of innovations and advancements for the overall progress of society. Though it may be tough to predict which advancements technology would bring next, some innovations are already changing our beliefs about the world around us.

The coming generations will be living in a mixture of reality and the metaverse. Using headsets to create a  3D avatar – a representation of themselves –  to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments. Perhaps when they go online shopping, they will be able too try on digital clothes first, and then order them to arrive in the real world.

A virtual economy of inequality.  Nowhere does the intersection of technology, enterprises and individuals hold greater opportunity than in the metaverse.

If it happens at all – will be fought among tech giants for the next decade, or maybe even longer.

———-

The Metaverse doesn’t exist – at least not yet, but there no way of predicting how people will react to it, or how it will be used.

( Everything transformed into line of code, augmenting reality by superimposing a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world. You have an experience while wearing another person’s body and you get to walk a mile in that person’s shoes.)

The next generation of the internet has the power to reshape the way that businesses and consumers engage, transact, socialize, work and learn together exploring the world on their own terms.

As of today, there isn’t anything that could legitimately be identified as a metaverse. The metaverse is essentially a massive, interconnected network of virtual spaces,

A better question might be:

What could become the metaverse?

Something that people would have considered magic just a few decades ago is now gaining popularity in business, gaming, and team building.

The combination of augmented, virtual and mixed reality – will play an important role.

The distinction between being offline and online will be much harder to delineate. So we either end up in a situation where it’s complete chaos and everyone’s allowed to do everything and you know, there’s racism, sexism, abuse and all that kind of stuff, or there’s incredibly tight moderation and no one’s allowed to do anything.

Wearable screens and gesture-based computing, other recent innovations, are predicted to soon substitute the usual PC and phone screens.

A red-haired woman wears the Oculus Quest 2 headset in white, holding two controllers

——-

Robots, another buzzword in today’s business world, have already replaced humans in some workplaces — robotic arms work at assembly or packing lines. Flying cars will soon address the issue of limited ground space and long traffic jams.

Clearly, technology by itself is neither good nor bad. It is only the way and extent to which we use it that matters.

It is indisputable that thanks to technology, we get a chance to live a life our predecessors could not even dream about.

But do all tech advancements bring sole good to our lives?

Or, maybe, the impact of tech innovations is quite ambiguous.

We are all at the mercy of machine learning algorithms, that are non transparent, non accountable, and non regulated.

So we have an open letter from those on High in the Tec world,  advocating that the brakes should be applied to the creation of new tech that generates falsehood’s. You dont have to be a Tech genius to know that this is not going to happen.

My advice is.

To protect oneself.

Every person should have a secret verification word in order to authenticate the caller and a symbol to be used in all texts and emails, that if not present in any communication received or sent,  marks it as False.

——–

All of which begs the question: just why is the 21st century so dystopian?

A few years ago, you might have thought: this is just a phase. It’ll pass. But it’s not. If anything, it’s getting worse, and it feels like it’s here to stay.

When I say “it”, or “dystopia,” you might wonder exactly, precisely what I mean. What I mean is very simple though. How many crises do we face? More than I can easily count. Let’s try to list them all, though we’ll run out of sanity and room before we finish, for sure. Finances? Total crisis, incomes falling around the world, debt levels soaring. Infrastructure? Mega-crisis, unless you think the infrastructure we have survives this century, let alone this decade. Social systems? Everywhere from France to Britain to America — crisis. People’s…minds? Crisis, especially in young people, depression and anxiety and suicide rates soaring. Then there are the big ones: climate change and mass extinction, not to mention politics , which has taken a notably…fascist…turn, again.

All of this is what scholars have begun to call The age of Polycrises.  And in it, the better question isn’t: “what’s in crisis?

It’s: what isn’t?

Like I said, the list above is a mere brief beginning. Migration and refugees? Another one. Peace and democracy? Yup, in crisis.

How about upward mobility? Check. Faith and confidence in institutions? Super crisis. Take a look at any element of society or the world, and chances are, it’s in crisis. How about inequality? Shocking levels of crisis.

This is why the 21st century feels so dystopian.

It’s not really a “feeling,” though that’s the way it’s often made out to be by media. It’s an empirical reality. Scholars have begun to conceptualize the 21st century as a “Polycrisis” for a reason, which is that the dystopia is real.

So when media, bigwigs, wannabe intellectuals and so forth, make all this out to be exaggeration, hyperbole, imply that you are the fainting Victorian bride in the room, because, hey, Tucker!! Everything’s Great!!…they’re completely wrong. And that needs to be said. It’s a form of denialism at this point, because…

The next part is about cause and effect. We need, as a civilization and a world, to figure out what’s causing all this, so we can begin to undo it. But if all we do is deny it…then, my friends, our gooses are well and cooked.  It’s fascism on a dying planet, in different bitter and poisonous flavours, maybe.

ITS NOW AGI. ( Artificial General Intelligence) Already it is transforming every walk of life.

AI is not a futuristic vision, but rather something that is here today and being integrated with and deployed into a variety of sectors.

There are numerous examples where AI already is making an impact on the world and augmenting human capabilities in significant ways. This includes fields such as finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities, digital education, decision making, democracy’s.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to make decisions, often using real-time data. They are unlike passive machines that are capable only of mechanical or predetermined responses. Using sensors, digital data, or remote inputs, they combine information from a variety of different sources, analyse the material instantly, and act on the insights derived from those data. With massive improvements in storage systems, processing speeds, and analytic techniques, they are capable of tremendous sophistication in analysis and decision making.

———-

These software systems “make decisions which normally require [a] human level of expertise” and help people anticipate problems or deal with issues as they come up. As such, they operate in an intentional, intelligent, and adaptive manner

AI generally is undertaken in conjunction with machine learning and data analytics. Machine learning takes data and looks for underlying trends. If it spots something that is relevant for a practical problem, software designers can take that knowledge and use it to analyse specific issues. All that is required are data that are sufficiently robust that algorithms can discern useful patterns. Data can come in the form of digital information, satellite imagery, visual information, text, or unstructured data.

AI systems have the ability to learn and adapt as they make decisions. In the transportation area, for example, semi-autonomous vehicles have tools that let drivers and vehicles know about upcoming congestion, potholes, highway construction, or other possible traffic impediments. Vehicles can take advantage of the experience of other vehicles on the road, without human involvement, and the entire corpus of their achieved “experience” is immediately and fully transferable to other similarly configured vehicles. Their advanced algorithms, sensors, and cameras incorporate experience in current operations, and use dashboards and visual displays to present information in real time so human drivers are able to make sense of ongoing traffic and vehicular conditions. And in the case of fully autonomous vehicles, advanced systems can completely control the car or truck, and make all the navigational decisions.

If we don’t want to end up as deglazed digital citizens here’s what should be done.

  • Regulate broad AI principles rather than specific algorithms,
  • Take bias complaints seriously so AI does not replicate historic injustice, unfairness, or discrimination in data or algorithms,
  • Maintain mechanisms for human oversight and control, and
  • Penalize malicious AI behaviour and promote cybersecurity.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE: WHAT YOUR NOT BEING TOLD ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE RESULTING MONETIZATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES.

28 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., Monetization of nature, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE: WHAT YOUR NOT BEING TOLD ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE RESULTING MONETIZATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES.

Tags

, , , ,

( Seven minute read)

Some things we can mitigate, some we can’t. Some things we can adapt to, some we cannot.

The question of how (or whether) we respond to climate change ultimately is a matter for policymakers to decide, but politics cannot (and should not) be separated from good science.  And so on, and so on. We’ve heard them all.

As CLIMATE CHANGE  impacts grow in frequency and severity, they will—and in many cases already have—create crises for people and nature around the world. If unchecked, these impacts will spread and worsen with more animal extinction and biodiversity loss, water shortages, and displaced communities.

Climate change is one of the most contentious issues facing society today.

Over the past several decades, we have seen not only increasing environmental degradation, but also the erosion of the concepts of the public good and collective responsibility to preserve nature.

In embracing the monetary valuation of nature as a strategy for mobilizing support for environmental conservation, environmentalists are resigning themselves to a political status quo that can only comprehend value in terms of money and markets.

By viewing ecosystems and their services through a pecuniary lens, monetization profoundly changes our relationship with nature, and, if taken to the point of commodification, can subject the fragility of nature’s balance to the destructive logic and volatility of markets.

Even though the trend toward the privatization of public goods has been pervasive over the past decades, we should not acquiesce so easily in allowing the privatization of the most basic public good of all—nature itself.

We must meet the grave environmental challenges of the twenty-first century with boldness and prudence, using the precautionary principle, along with the principles of fairness and democracy, to set boundaries that human action must not transgress.

Some argue that monetization, by revealing the economic contribution of nature and its services, can heighten public awareness and bolster conservation efforts. Others go beyond such broad conceptual calculations and seek to establish tradable prices for ecosystem services, claiming that markets can achieve what politics has not. Such an approach collapses nature’s complex functions into a set of commodities stripped from their social, cultural, and ecological context.

Although the path from valuation to commodification is not inevitable, it is indeed a slippery slope.

Do nature’s services need a monetary value?

Do conservation policy need an economic motive to get sufficient attention from policymakers and the public?

One approach seeks to monetize the value of nature simply in order to reveal its immense economic contribution to society.

Monetization is only meaningful and effective if there are markets to set prices for the ecosystem services in question. Markets for such commodified ecosystem services, they argue, can protect conservation policy from the vagaries of political will. Roll back bureaucratic red tape, and let the market work its magic to save nature.

The line between valuation and commodification, although clear in theory, becomes blurred in practice.

The monetization of any resource can cause long term problems for people.

To be sure, valuation alone does not inevitably entail the risks to the preservation of nature intrinsic to commodification. Nevertheless, it changes how we see and relate to nature and can inadvertently pave the way for the privatization of ecosystem services that the advocates of valuation often oppose.

Environmentalists, business leaders, and policymakers have all sought to make environmental protection an economic rather than just a political issue. The introduction of “no net loss” policies, which allow economic development to proceed as long as the net acreage of a specific type of ecosystem is maintained, has effected a paradigm shift in environmental policymaking. However, offsetting ignores how unique and interconnected biodiversity is, and it overlooks the importance of nature for local communities and the ways they suffer when their ecosystems are damaged. Land-use policies based on whether a company can pay for an offset, and not on what local communities and humanity need to survive, undermine basic rights and democratic principles

National economic accounts such as GDP remain blind to the services of nature. Such accounts likewise fail to distinguish between constructive and destructive economic activity with respect to human and ecological well-being. Needless to say, a deeper understanding and greater awareness of the relationship of society to nature is always welcome, but the rigor and usefulness of GDP-level information remains questionable.

Delineating an individual ecosystem from the complex fabric of nature poses numerous significant challenges. For example, the provision of oxygen for humans and animals to breathe is an ecosystem service of global scale.

But how do we value the contribution of individual sub-systems like a single forest to this global service?

We could all still breathe if one forest is cut down, but not if all forests were cut down.

Embarking upon the path of valuation also changes the way we see and understand nature.

The value of the whole ecosystem to society is more than the sum of its monetized parts:

Reducing its value to mere monetary terms, even if it were technically practical, strips away its cultural and spiritual value. A bad policy can be replaced, but the holistic functions of nature cannot.

Through disaggregation, each service can be rendered into a discrete monetizable “package” so that it can have its own market and its own price. Such an approach tilts policymaking in favour of the interests of the economically powerful. The least powerful actors—often local communities, indigenous peoples, women, small-scale farmers, etc.—get pushed to the margins, their voices ignored.

In order to prevent monetization from slipping into commodification, we must revisit one of the hallowed principles of environmental policy: the precautionary principle. It states that when an action or policy could pose a substantial risk to the environment, a very high burden of justification should fall on those seeking to take such an action. Like the classical mantra of medical ethics, the precautionary principle insists upon first doing no harm.

What if one of those billionaires manipulates the market by withholding or restricting the free flow of water?

71% of Earth’s surface is water.

There are 326 million trillion gallons of it on and in the planet.  96.5% of the water is ocean water, and just 3.5% is fresh water.  Of that 3%, 69% of that water is locked up in glaciers.  Another 30% of that freshwater is underground and usually requires costly extraction.  That leaves 114 million billion gallons of readily accessible freshwater, not necessarily drinkable water, but water nonetheless.  That sounds like enough, but it represents just 1% of the Earth’s water for every man, woman, child, and animal on the planet.  That 1% of the water has to also serve every agricultural and industrial need on the planet.  In most cases, it also needs to be filtered and treated before it is safely consumable.

So, though there is plenty of water on the planet, not very much of it is drinkable.  Not very much of it is accessible, and the distribution methods are easily manipulated, legislated, and monetized.  That’s never good for the common man.  Nestle Water, for instance, extracted 36 million gallons of water from a national forest in California in 2015 to sell as bottled water, even as Californians were ordered to cut their water use because of a historic drought in the state.

Farmers, hedge funds, and municipalities alike can now hedge against — or bet on — future water.

While that may seem innocuous enough, the cost disparity probably gets passed on to the cities and individual consumers. It’s easy to imagine how many ways the monetization of water as a commodity is a dangerous first step in government and corporate overreach and intrusion. Mega-banks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water.

Wealthy tycoons such as former President George H.W. Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world.

Complicit governments are legislating your rights to access and accumulate Earth’s free-flowing resources. It falls from the sky onto your property, but it is owned by someone else the minute it touches the Earth.

Water rights are conveyed as real property interests using the same formalities as real estate, but in most cases, everyone is tapped into the same source.  If fracking, mining, or industrial operations pollute that source, they spoil it for everyone.  So, merely having access to a water source is not enough.

The fact is that water is being restricted, legislated, and monetized more every year, and the rich are grabbing up the rights as fast as they can.

During periods of drought, when water levels are already low, it is easy to imagine how one person’s control over a large water area can lead to huge profits.  This is why the super-wealthy are snapping up water, water contracts, water rights, and governments letting them do so all over the world.  Two billion people now live in nations plagued by water problems, and almost two-thirds of the world could face water shortages in just four years.  Even on a planet covered and steeped with water, water is a resource.  As a resource, it can be monetized and controlled, and you could be denied or deprived of access to it.

Whatever you choose to call it, the most important thing is that we act to stop it.

If it is not the capitalization and exploitation of the resources of our planet  with climate change will continue.

I can assure you, the super-wealthy are not buying up the water around the planet for altruistic purposes.  They are doing so because they see a profit from it.  Freshwater first then fresh air.

—–

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOW A PRODUCT AND NET ZERO A SLOGAN.

There is now no stopping sea levels rising.  A two meter rise would displace more than 2% of the world’s population and cut world food production/ supply by 25%. The rate of carbon emissions are the highest they’ve been in 66 million years and the amount of warming in the coming decades is expected to be 250 times greater than the average warming during the past century.

The rate of ocean acidification is the highest it has been in 300 million years!

Warming surface waters may be contributing to slowing ocean currents.

The warming climate is contributing to rising populations of insect / pests.

To mitigate the effects of climate change is going to cost quadrillions.

We are on course to match the worst extinction of earth species both on land and in the oceans.

We at a point where money will not suffice to make a difference.

There’s no consensus on global warming.

Many species are approaching—or have already reached—the limit of where they can go to find hospitable climates. In the polar regions, animals like polar bears that live on polar ice are now struggling to survive as that ice melts.

From straining agricultural systems to making regions less habitable, climate change is affecting people everywhere.

Climate change also exacerbates the threat of human-caused conflict resulting from a scarcity of resources like food and water that are less reliable as growing seasons change and seasons become less predictable. Around the globe, many of the poorest nations are being impacted first and most severely by climate change, even though they have contributed far less to the increase in carbon emissions that has caused the warming in the first place.

Higher temperatures are affecting the length of seasons and in some places, are already crossing safe levels for ecosystems and humans.

Now more than ever in order to enable a just transition to a low-carbon economy, gender and equality, human rights, and food security, with links to climate change we must use the power of the law to fight those who would harm our communities, our climate, and the natural world we value so deeply.

Recently, many countries have focused on mainstreaming net zero emissions targets: 138 states have now made a net zero pledge.

However, targets in all climate-related national laws and policies are currently far from the pledges made in NDCs (Simply put, an NDC, or Nationally Determined Contribution, is a climate action plan to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts) and from enabling global warming to be limited to below 2 °C.

For NDCs to work, they need to be widely understood and used by businesses, civil society, academia and ordinary citizens. Each has roles to play, which is why many governments invite different constituencies to take part in defining NDC priorities.

For many reasons, including a lack of adequate finance, capacity and, in some cases, insufficient political commitment combined with the pandemic-related economic downturn is expected to constrain implementation.

For developing countries, moving forward depends on developed countries realizing their commitment to provide $100 billion in climate finance to developing countries. Dedicating half of this amount to adaptation, would help close significant financing shortfalls for vital measures to protect lives and livelihoods. Rapid policy developments are required to achieve this goal.

Climate change legislation is less a politically partisan issue than is commonly assumed:

Everyone is a climate actor and can be part of the change that needs to happen.

If we can slow or stop deforestation and manage natural land so that it is healthy, we could achieve up to one third of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C (3.6°C).

We must as a planet commit ourselves to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The truth, however, is that even if we do successfully reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, we will still have to address harmful climate impacts, and so the solution to climate change must also include measures to adapt to the impacts of global warming.

We need to increase renewable energy at least nine-fold from where it is today. This cannot be achieved without a major shift to renewable energy.

There is not a hard and fast deadline on climate action vs. inaction. There is no definitive line of demarcation that we can protect against; instead it is a matter of minimizing the effects of climate change.

We need to begin reducing carbon emissions RIGHT NOW to give our planet and our population the future that is least impacted.

The low carbon economy that we need to create will also give us cleaner air, better energy choices, new jobs and may even save us money. Likewise, many of the natural solutions that we need to adapt to even today’s climate change impacts benefit all of us: cleaner air and water, more natural recreation opportunities and jobs.

Nature, like climate, may be approaching irreversible tipping points where changes push systems into completely new states, even as more than half the global GDP depends on the planet’s natural systems.

For climate, the world has a clear net zero emissions goal.

But what’s the goal for nature? It hardly takes a genius to see things aren’t going well in the world or for our civilization.

When we actually look at the state of our civilization — in factual, empirical terms — the results are…well, you’ll be able to judge for yourself in just a moment.

Progress has flatlined and ground to a halt.

Living standards are declining in 90% of countries.

Each generation now does worse than the one before it,

Democracy’s in steep decline around the globe

The points above may in truth be small fry, compared to this one.

We are running out of our most basic, critical, fundamental resources.

People are more pessimistic now than at any point during the last century.

Anxiety, rage, anger, and despair are the defining sentiments of now — along with maybe the numbness of endlessly scrolling some algorithmically generated infotainment feed.

I could go on. But it’s hardly necessary. All the above are facts. They aren’t opinions, speculations, or even conclusions. They’re empirical truths about our civilization.

Each of the points above is its own crisis, and each one of them would be bad enough for any age, challenging, threatening, arduous enough.

But all of them, together, at once? That’s something new. They are painting a caricature without really thinking about the state of life as it is now. 

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmailcom

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING THIS IS WHERE THE WORLD IS GOING.

02 Thursday Mar 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Climate Change.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING THIS IS WHERE THE WORLD IS GOING.

Tags

, , , ,

( Thirty five minute read)

We all want to know the future.New Scientist Default Image

Unfortunately, the future isn’t talking. It’s just coming, like it or not being able to see the future might not play to our advantage.

Let’s not kid ourselves: Everything we think we know now is just an approximation to something we haven’t yet found out.

To imagine and think about the future, is a risky task that frequently ends up in an incomplete, subjective, sometimes vacuous exercise that, normally, faces a number of heated discussions.

Thinking about the future requires imagination and also rigour so we must guard against the temptation to choose a favourite future and prepare for it alone.

In a world where shocks like pandemics and extreme weather events owing to climate change, social unrest and political polarization are expected to be more frequent, we cannot afford to be caught off guard again.

Let’s look at some of the areas that are and will cause everything from wars to radical changes.

—–

Every day, we use a wide variety of automated systems that collect and process data. Such “algorithmic processing” is ubiquitous and often beneficial, underpinning many of the products and services we use in everyday life.

This is why we now need to thoroughly understand what’s at stake and what we can (and cannot) do … today.

Otherwise it is an ill wind for the next 60/100 years.

But what does the future hold for ordinary mortals, and how will we adapt to it?

We have been searching the universe for signs that we are not alone. So far, we have found nothing.

Given our genome and the physiological, anatomical and mental landscapes it conjures, what could Homo sapiens really become – and what is forever beyond our reach?

It’s hard to know what to fear the most.

Even our own existence is no longer certain.

Threats loom from many possible directions: a giant asteroid strike, global warming, a new plague, or nanomachines going rogue and turning everything into grey goo or the dreaded self inflicted nuclear wipe out.   However we look at it, the future appears bleak.

Where is all of this leading us?

What we do now set the foundations for a future.

The chaos theory taught us that the future behaviour of any physical system is extraordinarily sensitive to small changes – the flap of a butterfly’s wings can set off a hurricane, as the saying goes.

Computers simulations of future reality of a world are already producing ever more accurate predictions of what is to come, showing us that we are under immense stress, environmentally, economically and politically instabilities.

There is no God that’s is going to change the direction we on or save humanity from self destruction, its in our hands

—–

ENGERY: FUSION POWER.

We already live in a world powered by nuclear fusion. Unfortunately the reactor is 150 million kilometres away and we haven’t worked out an efficient way to tap it directly. So we burn its fossilised energy – coal, oil and gas – which is slowly boiling the planet alive, like a frog in a pan of water.

Fusion would largely free us from fossil fuels, delivering clean and extremely cheap energy in almost unlimited quantities.

Or would it? Fusion power would certainly be cleaner than burning fossil fuels, but it …Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations.

Sadly it won’t help in our battle to lessen the effects of climate change.

Why?

Because there’s huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades. Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century.

—–

THE INTERNET/ ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE/ SELF LEARNING ALGORITHMS/ROBOTS.

Billions of dollars continue to be funnelled into AI research. And stunning advances are being made but at what future cost.

Are we at the point in time at which machine intelligence starts to take off, and a new more intelligent species starts to inhabit Earth?

Synthetic life would make the point in a way the wider world could not ignore. Moreover, creating it in the lab would prove that the origin of life is a relatively low hurdle, increasing the odds that we might find life.

POWER.

Neither physical strength nor access to capital are sufficient for economic success. Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge. The internet has eliminated “middlemen” in most industries, removing a great deal of corruption but replacing it with profit seeking Algorithms that are widely used increasing the inequality gaps.

——

WARS.

Personnel with the 175th Cyberspace Operations Group conduct cyber operations at Warfield Air National Guard Base, Middle River, Maryland, US, 2017

What does future warfare look like?

It’s here already.

Up goes digital technology, artificial intelligence and cyber. Down goes the money for more traditional hardware and troop numbers.

The present war in the Ukraine is the laboratory for machine learning decision killing, with autonomy in weapons systems –  precision guided munitions. (Autonomous weapon system: A weapon system that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator.) This includes human-supervised autonomous weapon systems that are designed to allow human operators to override operation of the weapon system, but can select and engage targets without further human input after activation.

(AI)-enabled lethal autonomous weapons in Ukraine, might make new types of autonomous weapons desirable.

There is still no internationally agreed upon definition of autonomous weapons or lethal autonomous weapons.

‘Fire and forget’ 

Many of the aspects of a major conflict between the West and say, Russia or China, have already been developed, rehearsed and deployed.

—-

A triptych image showing from left to right: a firefighter in front of a fire; dry, cracked ground; and a hurricane near Florida, U.S.

CLIMATE CHANGE.

Global climate change is not a future problem with some of the changes now irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities.

Climate models predict that Earth’s global average temperature will rise an additional 4° C (7.2° F) during the 21st Century if greenhouse gas levels continue to rise at present levels. A warmer average global temperature will cause the water cycle to “speed up” due to a higher rate of evaporation. Which means we are looking at a future with much more rain and snow, and a higher risk of flooding to some regions. Changes in precipitation will not be evenly distributed.

Over the past 100 years, mountain glaciers in all areas of the world have decreased in size and so has the amount of permafrost in the Arctic. Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster, too. The amount of sea ice (frozen seawater) floating in the Arctic Ocean and around Antarctica is expected to decrease. Already the summer thickness of sea ice in the Arctic is about half of what it was in 1950. Arctic sea ice is melting more rapidly than the Antarctic sea ice. Melting ice may lead to changes in ocean circulation, too. Although there is some uncertainty about the amount of melt, summer in the Arctic Ocean will likely be ice-free by the end of the century.

Abrupt changes are also possible as the climate warms.

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound.

The consequences of any of them are so severe, and the fact that we cannot retreat from them once they’ve been set in motion is so problematic, that we must keep them in mind when evaluating the overall risks associated with climate change.

—–

IMMIGRANT’S /REFUGEE’S

History—particularly migration history—has shown time and again, that large population movements are often a result of single, hard-to-predict events such as large economic or political shocks.

Imagining migration’s future is urgent, especially now, when we are witnessing the highest movement of people in modern history, which is presented in a political context with strong populist and nationalist overtones, peppered with growing inequality in and between countries; in addition to an environmental crisis and a growing interconnection and proliferation of information that is usually deliberately distorted.

In today’s acts rests the seed of what we will harvest tomorrow. What we do today with and for the migrants will define not only their future but also ours.

We will always struggle to anticipate key changes in migration flows but that it’s more important to set up systems that can deal with different alternative outcomes and adjust flexibly. Most Western countries no longer openly support or defend the universality of human rights. Most countries apply “multilateralism à la carte”, that is, they participate only in multilateral agreements that strictly benefit their national interest.

Migration control systems collapsed because the international community failed to develop multilateral migration governance regimes. The international protection system has ended up being irrelevant. Many people are moving, the number of displaced people has increased dramatically as well as the number of refugees – The Trojan horses.

Immigration isn’t a new phenomenon, but with the effects of the future climate the scale and variety of countries from which people are moving will be greater than ever.

The idea that you have to learn a foreign language to make yourself understood in your own country is no longer a probability.

We now have immigration from everywhere in the world.

Very few people have issues with genuinely high skilled migrants coming over to work as doctors or scientists. The anxieties are always around mass immigration of low skilled labour (and in particularly about those from diametrically opposed cultures with completely different norms and values). As for the ageing populations thing, replacing your population with younger migrants from different cultures does technically solve the ageing population problem but then you end up with a completely different culture and country…

What ever you think, it’s becoming more difficult to do the old-style identity politics where you found a particular group and did what they wanted.  Effectively assimilating people from the Muslim world looks to be a particular difficult.

Nearly all nations are mongrels

—-

EDUCATION.

By imagining alternative futures for education we can better think through the outcomes, develop agile and responsive systems
and plan for future shocks .We have already integrated much of our life into our smartphones, watches and digital personal
assistants in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
The underlying question is: to what extent are our current spaces, people, time and technology in schooling helping or hindering
our vision?
It would involve re-envisioning the spaces where learning takes place. Schools could disappear altogether.
ALGORITHMIC SYSTEMS.

Brute force algorithm: This is the most common type in which we devise a solution by exploring all the possible scenarios.

Greedy algorithm: In this, we make a decision by considering the local (immediate) best option and assume it as a global optimal.

Divide and conquer algorithm: This type of algorithm will divide the main problem into sub-problems and then would solve them individually.

Backtracking algorithm: This is a modified form of Brute Force in which we backtrack to the previous decision to obtain the desired goal.

Randomized algorithm: As the name suggests, in this algorithm, we make random choices or select randomly generated numbers.

Dynamic programming algorithm: This is an advanced algorithm in which we remember the choices we made in the past and apply them in future scenarios.

Recursive algorithm: This follows a loop, in which we follow a pattern of the possible cases to obtain a solution.

90.72% of people in the world cell phone owners. Algorithms are everywhere.
Algorithmic systems, particularly modern Machine Learning (ML) approaches, pose significant risks if deployed and managed
without due care. They can amplify harmful biases that lead to discriminatory decisions or unfair outcomes that reinforce
inequalities.
They can be used to mislead consumers and distort competition. Further, the opaque and complex nature by which
they collect and process large volumes of personal data can put people’s privacy rights in jeopardy. 
Now more than ever it is vital that we understand and articulate the nature and severity of these risks.
Those procuring and/or using algorithms often know little about their origins and limitations
There is a lack of visibility and transparency in algorithmic processing, which can undermine accountability.
They are already being woven into many digital products and services.
Algorithmic processing is already leading to society-wide harms making automated decisions that can potentially vary the cost of,
or even deny an individual’s access to, a product, service, opportunity or benefit.  
For example, using live facial recognition at a stadium on matchday could impact rights relating to
freedom of assembly, or track an individual’s behaviour online, which may infringe their right to privacy.
At the moment there is very little transparently in providing information about how and where algorithmic processing takes place
or how they are deployed, such as the protocols and procedures that govern there use, whether they are overseen by a human
operator, and whether there are any mechanisms through which people can seek redress. The number of players involved in
algorithmic supply chains is leading to confusion over who is accountable for their proper development and use.
As the number of use cases for algorithmic processing grows, so too will the number of questions concerning the impact of
algorithmic processing on society.
Already there are many gaps in our knowledge of this technology, with myths and misconceptions commonplace.
They are the TikTok erosion of human values for profit, that will become the full individual personalization of content and
pedagogy (enabled by cutting-edge technology, using body information, facial expressions or neural signals) for commercial
platforms to rival Government’s.  
——
BIOENGINEERING.  
In a world of mounting inequalities, the question of who benefits and misses out from bioengineering advances looms large. 
Unfortunately, we don’t have space here to talk about all the effects in the future concerning Bioengineering. 
Artificial organs or limbs, the genetic synthesis of new organisms, gene editing, the computerized simulation of surgery, medical imaging technology and tissue/organ regeneration.
Like any other technology, bioengineering has damaging potential, whether it be through misuse, weaponization or accidents.
This risk can create significant threats with large potential consequences to public health, privacy or to environmental safety.
Foreseeing the impacts of bioengineering technologies is urgently needed.
All these issues have implications for academics, policymakers and the general public and range from neuronal probes for human enhancement to carbon sequestration.
These issues will not unfold in isolation:
Biotechnological discoveries are increasingly facilitated by automated and roboticides, private ‘cloud labs’.
The effects on biodiversity and ecosystems have not been fully studied.
Protein engineering and machine learning, leading to the creation of novel compounds within the industry (e.g. new catalysts for un-natural reactions) and medical applications (e.g. selectively destroying damaged tissue which is key for some diseases).
These newly created proteins have the potential to be used as weapons due to their high lethality.
Healthcare is facing a tug of war between democratization and elite therapies.
Plant strains which sequester carbon more effectively, rapidly and can even aid solar photovoltaics (the production of electricity from light) and light-sustained biomanufacturing.
Due to political unrest and the spread of fake news, citizens are scared about this approach and protest against it.
These issues will shape the future of bioengineering and must shape modern discussions about its political, societal and economic impact. This is now a very complicated question with no foreseeable answer.

To answer we have to think about how we got here in the first place. Of course “The herd” might not want to think about something like this.

DEMOCRACY.                                                                  ———–

Our democracy is in crisis. Many institutions of our government are dysfunctional and getting worse.

Our politics have become alarmingly acrimonious;

Technology is enriching some and leaving the vast majority behind.

Democracy, has never been without profound flaws, cannot be taken for granted. Trust in political institutions – including the electoral process itself – are at an all-time low. Societies the world over are experiencing a strong backlash to a system of government that has largely been the hallmark of developed nations for generations

We don’t know where it’s heading as politicians are now basically middlemen to Social media which is changing the way people viewed their political leaders as under constant pressure promoted by populist as a result all decomacies are now “flawed” and exposed to the vulnerability of pure democracy to the tyranny of the majority

We don’t know how serious it is.  So, what’s going on?

What’s behind the erosion of a political system that’s guided the world’s most developed economies for decades?

GREED.

As a result government’s are becoming more and more soulless, in failing to talk about the things that mattered to people.

With political parties running away from talking about the issues that matter to people.

When people feel threatened, either physically – by terrorism, say – or economically, they tend to be more receptive to authoritarian populist appeals and more willing to give up certain freedoms. When people are saying they can’t stomach any more immigration, when they don’t know if they’re going to be able to retire or what kind of jobs their kids are going to get, the political elite needs to listen and adapt or things are going to unravel.

Some may argue that this is because governments no longer feel like they are “of the people, by the people, for the people.

Maybe we are going to have some shocking lessons about the durability of democracy.

Non-democratic states have many forms, like China’s meritocratic system – in which government officials are not elected by the public, but appointed and promoted according to their competence and performance – should not be dismissed outright.

A democratic system can live with corruption because corrupt leaders can be voted out of power, at least in theory. But in a meritocratic system, corruption is an existential threat. Elections are a safety valve that isn’t available in China so the government is not subject to the electoral cycle and can focus on its policies while the West has tried to export democracy not only at the point of a gun, but also by imposing legislation. The whole idea is wrong in principle because democracy is not ours to dispense.

The US and Western Europe have we hope  abandoned most of their ambitions for regime change around the world.

So looking inwards may be no bad thing. If the West wants to promote democracy then they should do it by example.

How do we reconcile that with democracy millions of citizens?

Hence, the knowledge revolution should bring a shift to direct democracy, but those who benefit from the current structure are fighting this transition. This is the source of much angst around the world, including the current wave of popular protests.

Smaller political entities should find the evolution toward direct democracy easier to achieve than big, sprawling governments.
Today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable, and/or try to control knowledge, which is difficult.

Each individual’s share of sovereignty, and therefore their freedom, diminishes as the social contract includes more people.

So, other things being equal, smaller countries would be freer and more democratic than larger ones.

I’m not sure we can. It worked pretty well for a long time but maybe, as population grows.

FINALLY THE LANDS WE NOW INHABIT COULD DISSAPEAR IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE.  
Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, some 150 million people are now living on land
that will be below the high-tide line by mid-century. Defensive measures can go only so far. We know that it’s coming.

The math is catching up to us – the amount of Co2 – the number of refugees / immigrants, the inequality gap, the numbers dying in wars~ natural disasters, the erosion of democracy, trust.

We need to know in plain English and without hype or hysteria of  technologies ,social media, or selective algorithms news, only then will we begin to understand what’s coming and how to begin preparing yourself.

impossible to know everything about a quantum system such as an atom.

President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people – and said he was forced to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities.

Putin is increasingly presenting the war as a make-or-break moment in Russian history – and saying that he believes the very future of Russia and its people is in peril. “In today’s conditions, when all the leading NATO countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin said.

completely unaware of the relentless pressure that’s building right now.

wasn’t always the United States. Nothing requires it to remain so. At some point, it will develop into something else.

THE COST OF THINGS.

Globalization vs. Regionalization, US-centric vs China-centric.

Modern Western economies have become knowledge based.

Technology and political trends are aligning against mega-powers like the US and China.

The West is beset with widening wealth gaps, shrinking middle classes and fractured societies.

There is only one country that has got it right Norway.

This small Scandinavian country of 5 million people does things differently.

It has the lowest income inequality in the world, helped by a mix of policies that support education and innovation. It also channels the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, which manages its oil and gas revenues, into long-term economic planning.

Norway does not have a statutory minimum wage, but 70% of its workers are covered by collective agreements which specify wage floors. Furthermore, 54% of paid workers are members of unions. The government has prioritised education as a means to diversify its economy and foster higher and more inclusive growth.

The Norwegian state heavily subsidies childcare, capping fees and using means-testing so that places are affordable, although some parents report difficulty in finding an available place. Norway has provided for 49 weeks of parental leave at full pay (or 59 weeks at 80% of earnings). Additionally, mothers and fathers must take at least 14 weeks off each after the birth of a child.

Currently some 98% of its energy comes from renewable sources, mainly hydropower.

While Norway is more fortunate than most, it does offer some valuable lessons to policy-makers from other parts of the world.

A Roman Catholic priest officiates mass on the first day of trading at the Philippine Stock Exchange in Manila (Credit: Getty Images)

TOMORROW’S GODS.  

Religions never do really die.

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also oddly blind to that reality.

When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a religion dies, it becomes a myth, and its claim to sacred truth expires. If you believe your faith has arrived at ultimate truth, you might reject the idea that it will change at all. But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held our beliefs may be today, they are likely in time to be transformed or transferred as they pass to our descendants – or simply to fade away.

As our civilisation and its technologies become increasingly complex, could entirely new forms of worship emerge?

We might expect the form that religion takes to follow the function it plays in a particular society –  that different societies will invent the particular gods they need.

The future of religion is that it has no future.

Perhaps with the march of science it  is leading to the “disenchantment” of society so supernatural answers to the big questions will be no longer felt to be needed. We also need to be careful when interpreting what people mean by “no religion”. “Nones” may be disinterested in organised religion, but that doesn’t mean they are militantly atheist. Accordingly, there are very many ways of being an unbeliever. The acid test, as true for neopagans as for transhumanists, is whether people make significant changes to their lives consistent with their stated faith.

People have started constructing faiths of their own. Consider the “Witnesses of Climatology”, a fledgling “religion” invented to foster greater commitment to action on climate change.

In fact, recognition is a complex issue worldwide, particularly since there is no widely accepted definition of religion even in academic circles.

A supercomputer is turned on and asked: is there a God? Now there is, comes the reply.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin. Please keep comments respectful. Use plain English for our global readership and avoid using phrasing that could be misinterpreted as offensive.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYES: OPEN LETTER TO THE IRISH RUBGY FOOTBALL UNION.

28 Tuesday Feb 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYES: OPEN LETTER TO THE IRISH RUBGY FOOTBALL UNION.

Tags

 

 

Dear Sirs

I have watched the Irish International team represent Ireland from the days of Jacky Kyle to Toni O’Reilly to the present day with pride to be Irish.

Yesterday as the top team in the world they played Italy with the same pride and commitment to achieve a win.

It is not the performance on the pitch that is the problem.

It is their shame of being unable to sing the Countries National Anthem, like any of the other team when playing away from home. 

Shoulder to shoulder Ireland’s Call was written by the Derry musician Phil Coulter in 1995 penned as a song to represent both the Republic and the North in place of Irish national anthem Amhrán na bhFiann.

In light of the new Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol and Political Declaration that sets out the framework for the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom and to reflect Northern Irelands non sitting Government’s ambition to conclude an ambitious, broad, deep and flexible free trade agreement with the EU.

Why not sing the countries national anthem Amhrán na bhFiann or at least change the expressing Shoulder to Shoulder to SHÚLRA – SHÚLRA. To reflect understanding the strength of the sacrifices that country people’s made to wearing of the green — and the privilege to wear it as the Irish Team.

Shoulder to Shoulder might well be the only song that recognises the fact that the Irish rugby team makes up the whole island, north and south but this expression Shoulder to shoulder originated in the late 1500s in the military, at first signifying troops in close formation. 

While recognising that the team is one of the only things to have persisted for over 150 years “in unity and in solidarity on this island”  time has now move on, but the history of a nation and its culture are written indelibly in its language.

 Ireland’s Call

Phil Coulter

Come the day and come the hour
Come the power and the glory
We have come to answer
Our Country’s call
From the four proud provinces of Ireland

Ireland, Ireland
Together standing tall
Shoulder to shoulder (replaced with  SHÚLRA – SHÚLRA.)
We’ll answer Ireland’s call

From the mighty Glens of Antrim
From the rugged hills of Galway
From the walls of Limerick
And Dublin Bay
From the four proud provinces of Ireland

Ireland, Ireland
Together standing tall
Shoulder to shoulder (replace with SHÚLRA – SHÚLRA)
We’ll answer Ireland’s call

Hearts of steel
And heads unbowing
Vowing never to be broken
We will fight, until
We can fight no more
From the four proud provinces of Ireland

Ireland, Ireland
Together standing tall
Shoulder to shoulder (replaced with SHÚLRA – SHÚLRA)
We’ll answer Ireland’s call.

From a musical point of view have a listen the Anthem below.  

 

Yours sincerely the Beady Eye.

THE BEADY EYE. PART THREE. WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT CULTURE COLLIDS THAT ARE SHAPING OUR WORLD?

26 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE. PART THREE. WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT CULTURE COLLIDS THAT ARE SHAPING OUR WORLD?

Tags

,

( Twenty minute read)

Let’s face it, stereotypes are common in this day in age, resulting in preconceived notions about people and their culture.

Whilst stereotypes can provide some sort of understanding of another’s culture, they are generally unhelpful and misleading, creating bad first impression that can lead to so many misunderstandings.

Oh, you’re Asian? Are you Chinese? if you are Asian, you are automatically Chinese.

You cannot distinguish one Chinese person from another they are all brainwashed.

Chinese are by far the most complicated individuals to understand, founded as an agriculture – based society formed on the Yellow river 5000 years ago.

Almost a century before Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus made voyages that kicked off the era of European colonialism, the Chinese admiral Zheng the greatest explorer that the world had never heard of, brought back maps that helped to develop European cartography. With his description of Japan setti a definite goal for Christopher Columbus in his journey in 1492.

The author Gavin Menzies even found success publishing “1421: The Year China Discovered the World,” a best-selling—claims that Zheng actually circumnavigated the globe in his sixth voyage discovered. Chinese ships had reached America 70 years before Columbus & had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan.

(Historians have rejected Menzies’ theories and assertions and have categorised his work as pseudohistory.) Whether it is or not, it is a fascinating read, suggesting that Marko Polo meet Zheng, who give him a map of the Americas, which he subsequently gave to the Vancian, who doctored it so Columbus would make the discover.

Anyway, recorded by Polo was widely used in the late 15th and the 16th centuries, during the age of the great European voyages of discovery and conquest. He was among the first Europeans to describe many of the advanced technologies found in China.

Like Menzies he is say to have been a bit of a fibber, as he never mention seeing the wall of China.

———–

If you’re doing any sort of analysis of China, it pays to remember that until relatively recently, China was an isolated country closed off, with little substantive contact with the rest of the world.

China was and still is a bit of an outcast of the world.

One of the oldest cultures in the world, known throughout the world by the middle of the 19th century. There were many other central Asian states that coexisted with the Chinese dynasties, different kingdoms, states, and empires all existing at the same time!

Including the Xiongnu, Tibetan Empire, Zunghars, Mongols, Manchus, and others.

Ranking as the eight oldest country in the world, with thousands of years, behind the Great Wall of history, its unbroken culture has spread itself over centuries, through out East Asia.

The Chinese population is now four times that of the United States. It is the fourth largest country in the world, with about 56 different ethnic groups, with over 300 languages, spoken, in 22 provinces, with the world’s longest continuously used written language.

People have lived in the area we know today as “China” for at least 1.7 million years.

 One in every five people in the world is Chinese. 

———–

The venue of the worlds oldest lifestyle, it is no wonder that they view foreigners as inferior, corrupt, decadent, disloyal, and volatile – the devils. You would too if you had to pass 1.4 billion other people and get to where you’re going. 

It is not a country of ping-pong players, full of bamboo eating Pandas, rather a country that will have 36 per cent of its mobile customer base on 5G by 2025.

You got to realise there are others live on this planet too!  China personify this.

However its fair to say, they (more than likely) view their imperial glory of the world in decline, disintegrating, having succumbed to materialism, and consumerism, has changed the stereotype.

Most of us have never been in China, but we all have met a Chinese in our lives, so stereotypes linger in the minds of those who have never been to China.

To understand them the most important influence on their way of life is Confucianism based on unequal relationships between people, diametrically opposed to British or American ideas.

Even with one child per family up to recent times collectivism is very strong in China where the extended family is seen as more important than the individual. Chinese traditionally believe that every person turns one year older on the New Year and, thus, that day is considered to be everyone’s birthday.

The bicycle is now the primary transportation for millions of Chinese.

—————-

In the last two posts we’ve already mentioned the role of Hollywood has had in reinforcing the stereotype – Russian and American, China it is no different, with movies casting Chinese actors, as glasses-wearing nerds and mathematic geniuses smoking opium, with kung Fu, small with slanted eyes with shaved forehead and long braid down the back, shovelling rice into their mouths with chopsticks, or eating cats and dogs and rats, openly urinating, grinding rhino horns for medicine, carving elephant trunks, running around under mile long dragon effigies, letting of thousands of lighting lanterns, while the woman shuffle around serving tea in traditional Hanfu and garments with binding feet (euphemistically called “golden lilies”) squashed toes, to a Emperor seated in the Forbidden City, surrounded by Eunuchs.  ( The Forbidden City was so named because commoners were forbidden to enter the city. Any commoner who saw the emperor was killed.)

(The dragon is typically seen as an evil creature in Western culture, it holds first place among the four greatest creatures in Chinese mythology, including the phoenix, tiger, and tortoise. It is typically associated with the emperor.)

Of course any self- respecting Chinese would be abhorred with the above image and rightfully justified to totally reject such an image.

In fact, stereotypes about Chinese food choices are so entrenched that many non-Chinese readily brought into the notion that the Coronavirus had been caused by the Chinese predilection for bat meat!

——————-

China is a country that is not founded and ruled by Anglo-Saxon people. This is a communist-led country, that dares to succeed economically and materially. However you would be a brave man to say this was achieved through democratic and liberal ideas of individual freedom and rights.

The Boxer Rebellion between 1898 and 1901 in northern China was against Christian missionaries, foreign diplomats, and technology by a secret group called the “Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists” (Yihequan or I-ho-ch’uan) so named because its members practiced weapon less martial arts as well as secret rituals. Westerns called it “shadow boxing” and the members “Boxers.”

All Chinese are masters of Martial arts have deep roots in Chinese cultural history; forming an important part of Chinese cultural identity.

The Taiping Rebellion is known as the bloodiest civil war in human history, and the largest conflict of the 19th century.

China and the West were in contact more than 1,500 years before European explorer Marco Polo arrived in China, before the formal opening of the Silk Road. ( Many people think the Silk Road is a real road from China to the West. Actually, the term “Silk Road” was invented by a German mapmaker who was making a map of Asia in 1877.)

Qin Shi Huang lived between 259-210BC and became the first emperor of a unified China. His tomb (200 times bigger than Egypt’s Valley of the Kings) .discovered in 1974 with his Terracotta Army, the Acrobats and the bronze sculptures, were inspired by ancient Greek sculptures and art.

The modern word “China” most likely derives from the name of the Qin (pronounced “chin”) dynasty.

———————

China was the first country in the world to use an iron plough.

Toilet paper was invented in China in the late 1300s they invented paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printing.

First to use stirrups.

By the fourth century B.C., the Chinese were drilling for natural gas and using it as a heat source, preceding Western natural gas drilling by about 2,300 years.

The Chinese were using the decimal system as early as the fourteenth century B.C., nearly 2,300 years before the first known use of the system in European mathematics. The Chinese were also the first to use a place for zero.

Chinese coins had holes in them to be carried easily.

The crossbow was invented and first used by the Chinese. They were also the first in the world to use chemical and gas weapons, 2,000 years before gas was used in Europe during WWI.

Tea was discovered by the Chinese along with  Gun power.

China’s Grand Canal is the world’s oldest and longest canal at 1,114 miles.

Suspension bridges were invented in China in 25 B.C, 1,800 years before such bridges were known in the West.

The Chinese were the first to invent the waterwheel to harness water in A.D. 31—1,200 years before the Europeans.

In A.D. 130, Zhang Heng, an astronomer and literary scholar, invented the first instrument for monitoring earthquakes. The machine could detect and indicate the direction of an earthquake.

In 1974, a group of farmers digging for a well in the Shaanxi province uncovered some bits of very old pottery. They discovered the tomb of Qin (259-210 B.C.) the first emperor who united China. The tomb contained thousands of amazing life-sized soldiers, horses, and chariots.

During the first half the twentieth century, Shanghai was the only port in the world to accept Jews fleeing the Holocaust without an entry visa.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games were estimated to cost a whopping $40 billion.

———–

To day:

China’s national flag was adopted in September 1949 and first flown in Tiananmen Square (the world’s largest public gathering place) on October 1, 1949, the day the People’s Republic of China was formed. The red in the flag symbolizes revolution. The large star symbolizes communism, and the little stars represent the Chinese people and their respective social classes.

Image of Chinese soldiers

The United States is increasingly using China as a “frame of reference.”

There’s probably an element of fear. China’s success threatens to undermine America’s globally dominant position.

China’s military strength has also improved greatly, and the US no longer can afford a war with China.

It’s saying US you can continue to be the No.1

With the drama of  balloons there’s a real schizophrenia going on about China in the US which leads to no coherent foreign policy objectives, when it comes to the second largest economy in the world..

Because their is now a profound shift in the global balance of military power is under way. It has the largest navy in the world, spending more on its armed forces than any country except the US with 1,000 warheads.

China is now fully committed to developing “intelligentised” warfare.

 Is China moving away from non-confrontation towards a more threatening stance?

The risk of war far exceeds any fool’s imagination.

Russia as its invasion of Ukraine nears its first anniversary and fresh concerns have arisen about the possibility that China may be getting ready to support Russia in the war effort.

China is probably the only external actor that could put effective diplomatic pressure on the Russian president. 

Democracy is not about letting people die in pursuit of profit. The understanding of democracy by Westerners has already been distorted.

I don’t know when the concept of democracy became the private property of Westerners.  

There is a saying.  Keep them in the dark and feed them Shit! 

In 1996, China produced 600,000 tons of mushrooms, making it the world’s leading producer, and it has 60% of the world’s mushroom varieties.

“Let China sleep, for when she awakes, she will shake the world.” – Napoleon

Unlike the United States.it is certain that China has no intention of policing the world.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com