( WACHING TIME 38 MINUTES)
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02 Thursday May 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection, Uncategorized
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( WACHING TIME 38 MINUTES)
ALL HUMAN COMMENTS APPRICIATED.
21 Sunday Apr 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection, FEAR, Israel and Palestine, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Ukraine., Uncategorized
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S ARE OUR LIVES GOVERENED BY FEAR? THE FLIP SIDE OF HOPE.
( Twenty minute read)
How much of our lives is governed by fear?
Fear is an ancient and conserved response that served humans well enough before the advent of civilisation, but it has become distorted in modern societies where primordial fears can readily transform into phobias.
Fear is part instinct, part learned, part taught. Some fears are instinctive: Pain, for example, causes fear because of its implications for survival. Other fears are learned and also partly imagined. Imagined threats cause paralysis. Real threats, on the other hand, cause frenzy.
For instance social media is now fanning, the flames of fear and disseminating misinformation quickly and widely with fake news.
It’s hard to fully understand the way fear shapes our world without addressing its relationship to anger.
And anger is important for those who profit from fear because anger generates action.
People are more vulnerable when they’re in an angered state. When we’re angry, we don’t pay attention to the details of complex messages, the more one person expresses anger, the more others express anger, and then it becomes a kind of spiral where the anger is ratcheted up and up.
Many bemoan online when social media platforms seemingly descend into ranting and abuse but a great deal of the anger we find when perusing our devices isn’t organic, it’s engineered – for profit.
Provoking anger is rapidly becoming the standard for many online operations.
Why?
Because fidelity of the source is taken by social media sites and search engines as key factors for their Automated Decision Making (ADM) systems to classify content.
In their defence, social media platforms are between a rock and a hard place because of their need to balance free speech against repression of damaging or hateful material.
It works because in our algorithmically driven culture the popularity of any given content is no longer driven by the number of eyeballs that see it, but by the level of engagement it generates.
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Fear sharpens the mind, which is why fear is used in campaigns, whether it’s public health, whether it’s to change people’s attitude to things like climate change.
Fear can steel resolve to do something.
After the second World War and the horrors that the world experienced, democratic countries became defensive. In other words, they saw fear as an important tool for making sure that these kinds of perversions never happened again, but in the process of doing that, fear actually became too important as a component. It started to eclipse the very values that it was supposed to be protecting- “enculturated” in fear – NATO.
But that’s not the whole story.
We can now register a fear with new characteristics in the fear taxonomy, and we could call it global fear.
.For example during COVID too much fear created apathy leading to disinterest and distrust.
What’s needed is a better public understanding of the role these emotions play in our lives, and a clearer appreciation that when emotions are manipulated, even good intentions can have disastrous consequences.
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Fear and anger are dominating our world right now, but are we being manipulated for profit?
Fear and anger abound – in our politics, in our social discourse, and in our expectations for the future.
When fear is pervasive in a system — and it’s pervasive in all of our systems — what that means is that we lose dynamism, we lose innovation. Fears put a stranglehold on our life force. Fear paralyzes us. Fear diminishes us. And the more we conquer our fears, the more meaningful our life becomes.
Fear and anger have been monetised, the result of deliberate manipulation by commercial and political interests.
The antidote for our current malaise isn’t simply to suppress our emotional extremes. In fact, both fear and anger can help positive social change by fostering a thirst for justice and even revolution.
The difficulty for people today is empathising or imaginatively trying to situate themselves in the future … It’s very, very difficult.
The growing fear-based discourse around climate change, for example, and the use of fear-laden expressions and words often backfires on those who deploy them. When someone like [UN Secretary-General] António Guterres uses the term ‘global boiling’ the problem is a lot of people in their daily lives are not experiencing a climate crisis, they don’t experience excessive heat, they don’t have wildfires on their doorstep. They just switch off.
While we tend to equate fear-based leadership with totalitarianism or populism, there are many instances in democratic countries where politics is coloured by the use of fear as a blunt tool of coercion.
More people realise that we’re living in a vicious cycle, where manufactured fear fuels anger and anger in turn blinds us to the recognition that our fear is misplaced. Take the discourse around “illegal” immigration.
As George Orwell’s warnings 1984 to the world which are now coming true as we move into an age of totalitarian Ai dictatorial -an age in which freedom of thought will be a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.
Totalitarianism relies on mass support so we need more people to realize what is at stake and start seeing all around us by taking the smart phone out of our ears.
With AI moving into the Physical world, algorithms are running more and more of life as we know it.
Combined they are evolving towards the same system, a form of oligarchical collectivism with manufactured fear. The strategy of fear is one of their most valuable tactics.
Don’t let it happen. Face recognition becoming a thought or face crime.
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You see the state of the world.
It is not important who is at war or with who, it’s the removal of freedoms and constant surveillance which is now conducted through the smartphones we carry around in our pockets, with every sound you make, every movement scrutinised.
The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence. Everything fades into mist. The past is erased, the erasure is forgotten and the lie comes truth.
No one can stand aside, dont let it happen it depends on you
It’s understandable that we may worry about world events but fear is hardwired in your brain, and for good reason.
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War is peace freedom is slavery.
Israel is as we watch becoming a Totalitarian State.
How does one witness the cruelty of indiscriminate bombing? We cannot physically or mentally feel another’s pain, but we can empathize with it. We tend to still think of war as great power competition or as the Second World War.
The USA vetoed Palestine becoming a full member of the United nations then approved more than $61bn worth of military assistance to help Ukraine in its desperate defence against Russia, as well as billions for other allies including Israel and Taiwan.
The $95bn in total funding includes roughly $61bn for Ukraine (with much of the funding going towards replenishing American munitions); $26bn for Israel; $8bn for US allies in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan; and $9bn in humanitarian assistance for civilians in war zones, such as Haiti, Sudan and Gaza, though the package also includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025. The US has so far sent Ukraine roughly $111bn in weapons, equipment, humanitarian assistance and other aid since the start of the war more than two years ago.
The Israel bill includes about $4.4bn to replenish depleted US supplies given to Israel; $4bn for missile defence, including the much-vaunted Iron Dome, and $1.2bn for the Iron Beam; and $3.5bn to help Israel buy weapons. There are also provisions to make it easier to supply Israel with US munitions held in other countries.
What is what.
If you can have all the information that’s out there, crunch it into some kind of algorithm, that you can then target discriminately, proportionately.
The idea that machines are going to replace humans in wars is fundamentally untrue.
We are seeing this to a certain extent right now, in Palestinian/Israel war with Ai deciding who and how to kill. Both wars are is very much a battle of machines and soldiers, a high technology-driven conflict.
Where you can attack, use some surgically precise weapons, take care of the problem, eliminate your opponent and then extract yourself from a situation, has actually turned into a quagmire with new super weapons, whether it be cyber information warfare or artificial intelligence everyone wants to be ahead of the curve, right?
However, this approach also overshadows political considerations, including the causes of conflicts, obscures the costs of conflict, and creates illusions of quick and easy victories—all of which has led to two decades of war in the twenty-first century.
One of the problems here is this idea that you can simply solve problems by targeting them with cruise missiles, is simply not the case.
The belief that technology can help prevent war by creating a deterrent, is an illusion.
Wars will never be able to solve the difficult and complex political and cultural problems on the ground. Weapons can help produce ceasefires, but they cannot themselves create long-lasting, established peace.
Essentially, the idea that science can produce technologically advanced weapons so horrible that no one will ever want to fight is farcical. If we are ever going to get rid of war military culture it must be understood that it does not exist in isolation.
Through the use of technology WE GOING TO CREATE WARS.
The rush to apply cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence to military systems is well under way. A new breed of techno-evangelists, many of whom stand to make billions if we go down the high tech path they are so aggressively promoting.
The application of science to unpick the supposedly immutable principles of warfare, making conflicts shorter and more humane, or eliminating the need for large-scale campaigns, found a home in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Such views reached their zenith with the advent of nuclear weapons and the logic of deterrence.
Importantly, technology-based approach emerges as a counter to the deterrence-based approach. Although nuclear weapons had made war unlikely, given the risks of mass casualties and devastation.
There is a need for much greater restraint in making assumptions as to what ends can be achieved militarily. Replacing people with machines on the battlefield, will not result in ‘clean’ conflicts.
Where there may be feelings of anger and betrayal, or even a sense of exhaustion, not uncovering the truth may lead to conspiracy or a turn to an engineering-infused idealism—that smarter systems will produce better results next time.
High-tech wars transfers the risk from soldiers to civilians.
It envisions the military drawing on US advanced technologies, such as AI, cyber resources, unmanned systems and machine learning to offset or create an overmatch of adversarial capabilities. Reducing the time that it takes from identifying a target to destroying it (known as the “kill chain”) and diminishing or eliminating human input could be a recipe for unprecedented disaster.
The Ukraine war is been used as a proof of concept for their systems, and a marketing tool to boot – after all, what’s more attractive than buying “battle proven” technology?
Revelations that Israel has used AI not to spare civilians but to step up the rate and scope of its devastation of Gaza is just the latest example of why we need to think twice before acquiescing in the rush towards a world dominated by automated warfare.
Between 2019 and 2022, U.S. military and intelligence agencies awarded major tech firms contracts with ceilings worth at least $53 billion combined. Resulting in large military contracts to big tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
The idea that America alone has the ability (and the duty) to protect the world’s democratic societies; and a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a largely unregulated free market that prioritizes corporate needs is a farce. It is on the verge of losing an epic struggle for global geopolitical and economic supremacy—unless it can outpace China in the ‘AI arms race.
U.S. government for Israel’s war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has suggested can plausibly be considered a case of genocide.
Russia’s or Israeli nuclear status means that NATO countries are unlikely to become involved in direct fighting given the risk of escalation.
The time to act is now, because nobody has any idea if we have cyborg fighting wars.
There is another response in play when there is a perceived threat to survival. Physical harm, threats to property used for protection, threats to self value that erode a desire to survive come from the Caveman part of our brain that dictate the innate need to run, hide, fight. As to what is coming next is anyone’s guess.
My guess is that it will be self-help.
Physical aggression and violence dictate fear. the use of run, hide, fight.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
19 Friday Apr 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection, Artificial Intelligence., Attention economy, Uncategorized
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY SAYS; ENTERTAINMENT IS NOW BEYOND THE PALE. WHAT CONSITUTES ENTERTAINMENT? WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? IS THERE ANY LINE TO BE DRAWEN?
( Ten minute read)
Even as violence is a concept that has long accompanied humanity, it is no easy task to make sense of what it is, or how it is exercised.
Ancient Romans flocked to carnage in the Colosseum.
Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone.
Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history.
The relationship between violent media and real-world violence has been the subject of extensive debate and considerable academic research, yet the core question is far from answered.
Portrayals of violence can manufacture our consent with government policies, encourage us to endorse the legitimacy of state power and state violence, and help determine who are “worthy victims”.
Results from the two studies suggest that socialization models of media violence may be inadequate to our understanding of the interaction between media and consumer behaviour at least in regard to serious violence.
Our media outlets from News to Gaming – Movies – Net flicks – Social Media – are saturated with violence.
More than 100 million people watched the gory Netflix show, Squid Game.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice wins Game Beyond entertainment.
This is a bit like benign masochism, the enjoyment of aversive, painful experiences in a safe context.
Whether or not screen violence is bad for us has been extensively studied and there are reasons to reconsider how much we like watching violence per se.
For example, violence creates tension and suspense, which may be what people find appealing. Another possibility is that it is action, not violence, which people enjoy. That it is violence being deemed off-limits that makes it appealing. It may be that it is justified punishment, rather than violence, that we enjoy watching.
All this suggests that media companies may be giving us violence that many of us don’t want or need.
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We should hence consider what other corporate, political or ideological pressures may be encouraging onscreen violence globally causing us to become disconnected with reality.
Movies lie about the real impact of violence on the human body – with almost 90% of violent actions showing no realistic physical consequences to the victim.
The west won the world not by the superiority of its ideas … but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.
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The question of how humans came to be domesticated — at the will of a deity, independently, as some sort of evolved trait — has plagued philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years.
It is tempting to try to answer this question by invoking biology and genetics, arguing that humanity is wired to be violent.
Whether humans will ever live in a violent-free, as digital technologies—such as social media platforms—become increasingly central to our daily existence they have become essential components in how violence is enacted and experienced. Indeed, as access to and use of social media continue to expand across the world so does the violence enacted through these digital platforms become more common.
For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news and watch murder in all its forms.
What lies behind these episodes. Perhaps, some have argued, our intelligence and systems of culture, such as laws and social norms, are all that are holding that innate violence in check.
How good and evil may have come to co-exist in our unique species. Are humans, by nature, good or evil? The question has split opinions since people began philosophising. We have a low propensity for impulsive aggression, and a high propensity for premeditated aggression.
It raises a deeper question: Why did such an unusual combination of virtue and violence evolve?
A deeper understanding of how and why violence emerges, or doesn’t, might help us achieve a less violent future—or at least one in which we can better comprehend and manage our violence.
41% of people in the United States of America have suffered online harassment, from physical threats (14%) and sexual harassment (11%) to name-calling (31%).
But violence in digital environments is not only expanding, it is also becoming more complex as the evolving affordances, structures, and cultures of contemporary digital environments increase their scale, speed, reach, and visibility (Backe et al., 2018).
For instance, violence on social media is found in the new ways cultural and informational wars are enacted and deployed in the United States filled with school shootings and mugging and terrorist attacks and wars.
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It is a widespread phenomenon that directly or indirectly affects many aspects of our lives.
Nonetheless, digital manifestations of violence are often thought to be less “real,” “serious,” or “harmful” than those enacted face-to-face (Dunn, 2021).
Capitalism is a dirty word for many intellectuals but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
Warfare provides people with a semblance of psychological positivity in oppressed societies where other outlets are lacking.
Any stable, lasting peace depends on creating societies with a richness of opportunity and variety that can meet human needs. The fact that so many societies throughout the world fail to do this makes our future prospects of peace look very bleak.
War and other destructive capabilities are merely the flip side of the same uniquely human faculty that has enabled us to coexist peacefully, to innovate, to travel in space and shape our world.
The evolution of entertainment into a global landscape signifies a world where cultural boundaries blur, and creativity knows no limits. In today’s interconnected world, the entertainment industry has expanded its reach, influencing and captivating audiences worldwide with diverse content and experiences.
Entertainment has transcended geographical boundaries, morphing into a global phenomenon that unites people across cultures, languages, and continents.
Social media is cursed with pervasive and impactful harmful content. Can we imagine addressing only part of this violence without considering the rest?
Can we continue to feign not to see that all of these forms of violence mutually reinforce one another.
Film and television have long been seen as legitimate and powerful means to educate, inspire and empower wider society. To deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment – whether that is to raise awareness through empathy and emotional impact, to engage with real world problems, or to make the world a better place.
The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future.
The past two years have seen the most conflicts of any time since the end of the Second World War.
(The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan.)
What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good?
The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements.
Reaching beyond video to monopolise the attention of audiences in the home TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behaviour.
We are exposed to social media violence just by being there.
The amount of violent content has helped normalise aggression. The reality is that social media platforms have got a lot to answer for. In practically every situation where we’ve seen violence happen there has been some sort of connection with an online platform in some form.
Why are these social media platforms not being held to account?
Why are we so scared of asking really difficult questions and why are these social media platforms not putting more money back in the communities that are being affected by violence?
We don’t fully know the impact of social media.
But social media and the fact that something that is say in passing becomes written down, causes what might have been nothing to become something.
For most violence isn’t at all normal, but there is a proportion whose lives are far too full of violence because of inequality and poverty.
The key driver of violence.
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But what about games?
As our younger industry matures, what role should games play in reflecting and commenting on the world around us?
Already we have a number of implications that will define the future shape of the online entertainment market. As society seeks answers in the media they trust, streaming devices are now everywhere, pouring news into social media 7/7
People in entertainment, tries to make something for everyone/to make the most profit instead of making what they want, so personality and quality takes a hit.
There is definitely a cultural degradation taking place.
Violence is an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary digital environments.
Games beyond entertainment.
The advent of video games raise new questions about the potential impact of media violence, since the video game player is an active participant rather than merely a viewer. Video games that involve assuming the roles of aggressors or soldiers offer players the opportunity to be “virtual perpetrators.”
Rewarding players for successfully carrying out violent behaviour.
Online gaming communities, esports tournaments, and multiplayer platforms enable players worldwide to engage, compete, and connect in virtual worlds. Digital platforms have revolutionized entertainment accessibility. Social media influencers transcend borders, shaping entertainment trends and culture on a global scale, such as cultural sensitivities, censorship, and legal barriers that can hinder the free flow of content across borders.
There are fewer empirical studies of video game violence than other forms of media violence. Still, several meta-analytic reviews have reported negative effects of exposure to violence in video games.
Content matters. much of the research into video game violence has failed to control for other variables such as mental health and family life, which may have impacted the results.
Given that effects on individual users may differ widely, policy discussion should be more focused on “more pressing” issues that influence violence in society such as poverty or mental health.
Rest assured that entertainment will need to master new forms of interactive entertainment — whether in video games, sports betting or the more social and communications-based services that thrive on smartphones — to keep audiences hooked.
There was no such thing as YouTube its their Tube.
U Tube now has a War Channel created to appeal military enthusiasts around the world; offering viewers hours of programming on the American Civil war, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Ukraine and all.
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Why are people less imaginative?
Because we all have the internet and other high-information sources that fill in the gaps for us.
Story telling, character-building, authenticity, and originality have all gone out the window, as entertainment has become largely an industry as opposed to a genuine creative outlet.
Game makers have the opportunity – and responsibility – to offer their players an appropriate and powerful means to get close to challenging issues or subject matter.
Games are brilliant at engendering empathy by allowing you to experience the life of other people first hand. As game makers and storytellers we have the ability to take our audiences to places they haven’t been or to feel things they have yet to experience.
There’s the possibility of vertical escalation—meaning that Russia would use more advanced weapons, including nuclear weapons—on the battlefield. And there is the possibility of horizontal escalation, the war spilling over to other countries.
What if anything can be done?
Here are a few key recommendations, which includes improve regulations and legislation for social media companies, greater responsibility so tech companies are held accountable for inaction, and for young people to be involved in panels that are consulted on tackling online harms and the development of games, new content and online spaces.
Legislation in relation to social media platforms is needed, but it is one aspect in an array of required measures, including education, the need to address social inequalities, the need for transparency by companies, by governments who should be constantly aware of how fake violence on our screens serves real violence in our world.
Why?
Because exposure to media violence can desensitize people to violence in the real world.
Yes, its true that for some people, watching violence in the media becomes enjoyable and does not result in the anxious arousal that would be expected from seeing such imagery , but society as a whole is another question.
An average American youth will witness 200,000 violent acts on television before age
18. 46% of television violence occurs in cartoons.
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The prevalence and impact of violence portrayed in media and entertainment and the near-ubiquitous portrayals of violence in various forms of media must remained a topic of intense scrutiny.
Fear is what, anxiety and depression, wars, domestic violence, relationship breakdowns, child abuse, terrorism, mass shootings, self-harm and all forms of violence towards oneself and others have in common.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
15 Monday Apr 2024
Posted #whatif.com, 2024 the year of disconnection
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY ASK’S. Have you ever asked yourself: What do I need in life to survive?
( Fifteen minute read)
Looking at contemporary politics, it’s easy to feel a sense of despair.
All across the world, we see a resurgence of wars, racist demagogues, now rendered respectable by the embrace of the “mainstream” political right and much of the commentariat.
Your beliefs, ideas, and values make up your ideological framework. This framework is developed over a lifetime of socialization.
Dominant ideologies are powerful forces in society. They are how dominant groups preserve their power. They do this by promoting ideas to advance their interests and maintain social order. Such ideologies shape dominant discourses that legitimize the current organization of society. These ideas are embedded in the practices of social institutions. The majority of people accept these conditions even though it is not in their interest to do so. This is referred to as hegemony, or rule by consent.
Ideology touches every aspect of life and shows up in our words, actions, and practices…. Because ideology structures our thoughts and interpretations of reality, it typically operates often beneath our conscious awareness … it shapes what seems “natural,” and it makes what we think and do “right.”
Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture.
You may have noticed that many of us support ideologies that do not best serve our interests. Why is that? A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.
The simple answer is that powerful groups have ways to encourage us to believe ideologies that protect their interests. This process of getting people to accept the interests and values of ruling groups without force is called hegemony. Hegemony can also be defined as rule by consent.
Dominant ideologies, however, are not more influential because they contain better ideas. Instead, they represent the extent to which powerful groups in any society are able to shape our ideas, values, and beliefs. Dominant ideologies are often linked together. Through hegemony, ruling groups try to ensure that we will accept their views and ideologies without question.
The transformative ideologies are the most difficult to pinpoint.
However, some people resist submitting to the desires of the ruling group.
To address social problems, we must be able to recognize dominant and counter ideologies. We must be aware of how they impact the economic, social, political, and environmental ideas and values in our society.
We need to foster international cooperation and solidarity to address environmental challenges collectively, transcending borders and divisions to stop coming wars.
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Physiological needs are the requirements of all biological creatures.
Unfortunately our system of Capitalism has turned all of these needs into products, resulting in government’s using what should be considered essentials into revenue generating sources, by applying service charges or taxies. Capitalism has fuelled the industrial, technological and green revolutions, reshaped the natural world and transformed the role of the state in relation to society.
In recent years, capitalism’s shortcomings have become ever-more apparent. Prioritising short-term profits for individuals has sometimes meant that the long-term well-being of society and the environment has lost out – especially as the world has faced the Covid-19 pandemic and Climate change.
It has lost its ability to be fair.
57% of people worldwide say that “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world”.
The reality is that in daily life, most of us are pursuing all of these basic human needs simultaneously to varying degrees.
Without air, water, and food, sleep homeostasis and sex all biological organisms perish.
So instead of focusing on which need you’re attempting to meet, government’s have allowed and are still condoning life to be exploited for profit resulting in – Inequality, Climate change and Coming wars.
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In order to live you need fresh air. That’s pretty self-explanatory.
In order to live you need fresh water. That’s pretty self-explanatory. (You can only survive without water for 3 days.)
In order to live you need food. That’s pretty self-explanatory. (Most of us, we need food, daily else we feel less than fulfilled.)
In order to live you need to build a good shelter. That’s pretty self-explanatory.
In order to live you need a living environment where security and safety are met. That’s pretty self-explanatory. (There is a primal innate fear of others and the need to seek security that is hardwired into the human brain. You don’t have to look around very long to notice how much of human behaviour is driven by the desire to feel secure.)
These unmet basic human needs fuel our unconscious behaviour.
We all share the same needs.
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Healthy identity is based on the fulfilment of these needs … These needs are felt and remembered cellularly throughout our lives, though we may not always be intellectually aware of them.
They were originally experienced in a survival context of dependency. We may still feel, as adults, that our very survival is based on finding someone to fulfil our basic needs.
In adulthood the needs can be fulfilled only flexibly or partially, since we are interdependent and our needs are no longer connected to survival.
Research suggests that over 95% of our behaviour is unconscious.
In today’s society, we also seek greater levels of financial security which goes hand in hand with the need for job security. (Tools like insurance have also been created in an attempt to offer more stable financial security in case of an unforeseen event.)
If you don’t have enough money to pay for rent (or your mortgage and taxes), clothes (for protection, not fashion), and transportation (to get food and make money), your safety needs aren’t being met.
The result is that individuals necessarily act selfishly when basic human needs drive them.
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In some parts of the world, many individuals can’t meet their physiological needs.
It’s estimated that over a billion people don’t have sufficient food to eat, basic nutrition, or clean water to drink. Shelter from the elements, clothes to cover our bodies, and some semblance of the familiar.
Belonging is also a psychological need.
(Belonging is a feeling of connection with and approval from others. It starts with our immediate family, then bridges out to friends, religious groups, and other social groups (like sports teams or clubs). This need to belong later extends into professional relationships and a significant other. This unmet need to belong drives us to identify with social groups, religious institutions, and other special-interest groups in adulthood. It also fuels a lot of people’s impulse to invest time in social media.)
Our image-driven culture pushes us to be more concerned with what other people think than with how we feel about ourselves. We seek approval from others instead of self-acceptance.
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Physiological needs can also remain unmet even in individuals who aren’t in an environment of lack.
How do you know if you have unmet basic human needs?
To accomplish this, we must first cultivate self-awareness and self-leadership, become honest with ourselves, and learn to abide in our centre. These practices allow us to reflect on our lives and better understand ourselves. Self-actualization appears to be rare in our societies today and has become much more complex and even distorted at times.
For example, financial security is one domain that is constantly emphasized in today’s society and it seems that many spend their entire lives engaged in its pursuit, finding out, often too late, that they will never truly achieve any semblance of it.
If you don’t agree, take a closer look at the lives of some of the wealthiest people on the planet or those who are rich and famous. Their lives are filled with tragedy. Wealth doesn’t solve the problems we think.
Understanding the fundamental impermanence of things can be very freeing since it reflects a very real and dominant factor in life, one that we often struggle to accept. If you don’t agree, just ask impermanence’s primary representative, death. It will knock on everyone’s door one day or another, most often unannounced.
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What would you do if you only had one month to live? One week. one day?
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Consider the overall direction of your life.
Because what the world needs are people who have come alive to the rip off capitalism.
Why because it is failed and is still failing, even on its own terms. While experience varied between countries, generally this involved the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy being in public ownership – the national utilities of water, gas and electricity, along with the crucial productive infrastructure of transport and telecommunications, with the remainder of the economy being regulated to various degrees.
Government spending was used to maintain full employment, along with the implementation of industrial policies, regional policies, and active labour market policies. These interventionist measures generally went beyond just maintaining economic growth and full employment, to welfare state delivery.
Any governments pursuing these sorts of progressive agendas would be likely to wish to co-operate and collaborate internationally – on tackling the climate crisis, the industrial-scale global tax avoidance and evasion, and the root causes of international financial crises which lie in the deregulation of speculative finance and the financial sector generally.
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To get any sense of where to go, we need a much more thorough understanding of the forces that underlie this symbiosis of economic power and political power and the distortions of public discourse that it induces.
“The voters don’t choose the politicians, the politicians choose the voters”
Ultimately, it is worth remembering that citizens in a capitalist, liberal democracy are not powerless.
We live in an oligarchy, not in a democracy, A thing cannot be changed if the plan is for something that the situation is not. Oligarchy cannot be stopped by treating it as though it were a democracy.
As a society we continue to make slow progress in ameliorating this historical deficit.
Of critical importance also is the role of the individual in promoting his or her own equality. No amount of government intervention will confer equality if individuals fail to take advantage of the opportunities before them.
The system must be fixed for problems to be addressed.
So I say first things first, let’s ensure that we build a system where there is equal opportunity for all so that individuals can succeed or fail on their own merit. Will such a system guarantee full equality?
I have my doubts but I’m convinced it will promote greater equality in our imperfect society.
Young politicians enter the great building of power with sincere hearts, but leave with the stench of the corrupt swamp having their noble intentions suffocated and extinguished.
Every nation needs to wake up from their own illusions of their own importance in the world and start looking after its people.
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To make sure that the government gets the message that the people all of the people should be represented not just the few.
Get money out of politics ENTIRELY and then maybe there’s hope.
Now with the technology that exist, I think a ‘perpetual referendum’ democratic socialism, may be a solution:
We need to assert the importance of turning the social surplus toward ending hunger and illiteracy and toward addressing fundamental problems of social and economic life — such as the catastrophe of the climate and of endemic joblessness.
No point running a government if you don’t have an organized mass force to drive the social policy from the hall of government to the home of the poorest worker.
Government’s won’t put such perpetual referendum in place but we the people with technology can.
Your vote (on one thing or many things, doesn’t matter) is kept online at all times and can be polled by the computer at any time. And not only can be but must be. And you can change your vote (or votes) at any time.
The people must take back what people with money have stolen from them over the decades, i.e. our right for true democratic representation where elected politicians carry out the will of the people not the will of the wealthy few who have corrupted it.
The abolition of intellectual property and the renationalisation of monopoly infrastructure could reverse the tendency towards private monopoly that could contributed greatly to stopping the rising inequality of the early 21st century. The massive financial sector of the early 21st century, is a huge source of inequality.
We might be blind to what capitalism could look like in another two centuries. However, that does not mean we should not ask how it might evolve into something better in the nearer term.
The future of capitalism and our planet depend on it.
Until politicians work for every person these are the choices.
Capitalism thrives on the mantra of individualism and free enterprise. In this economic system, private entities, such as individuals or businesses, own the means of production. But, it’s essential to note that capitalism is not just about profit. It’s also about personal freedom, economic resilience, and societal prosperity. It champions the belief that everyone has the right to economic freedom. This belief is driven by the potential for profit.
Communism is a quintessential manifestation of egalitarian ideals. It seeks to pull down the socio-economic partitions between the affluent and the impoverished. Its driving force is the establishment of equality and fairness. The societal benefits are not skewed in favour of a privileged few. Instead, they are spread across all its members. Yet, the intricate dynamics of human nature and socio-political realities often pose significant challenges to implementing communism. It’s a philosophy that seeks to remould society’s foundation. It presents a different perspective on the socio-economic structures that govern our world. Its cardinal principle is collective ownership and equality.
Socialism amalgamates elements from both capitalism and communism. It is unlike the laissez-faire economics of capitalism. However, it is not as radical as communism in its distribution mechanism. It encourages fair wealth distribution. But, it does not eschew private property. socialism emerges with a balanced approach. Yet, it does not do so at the cost of personal freedoms, as in capitalism. The means of production are often state or worker-controlled. There is a conscious effort to check capitalist-style monopolies and wealth concentration.
Most nations operate in mixed economies. They cherry-pick elements from different ideologies.
They create a model that best serves their unique needs. The impact of these ideologies on today’s world is profound and multifaceted. It colours the lenses through which we view societal structures, economic models, and the state’s role in our lives.
As we go about our daily activities, we are engaged in a web of relationships that connect us to the larger world. We rely on ideas and values to form opinions, make assumptions, and arrive at conclusions. However, many of us aren’t aware of where these notions come from or how they influence our thinking. Most of us assume that our points of view are accurate and truthful. We think that they are just common sense. This may lead us to dismiss, discredit, or misinterpret perspectives that differ from our own.
This means that we rarely evaluate our perspectives in relation to alternative points of view.
A future where our planet’s people can succeed emphasizes sustainability, collective action, and innovation. What if we demanded that profit be removed from the policy of government’s.
Many types of government expenditure constitute investment: purchases of transport and energy infrastructure, school and hospital buildings, IT systems, defence systems, and intangible assets. Government investment often includes purchases needed to implement long-term policies, such as investment in green energy infrastructure to support action on climate change.
Another words invest public funds, allowing a fair profit, keep sufficient funds for maintains, and then nationalize, so everyone benefits.
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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
05 Friday Apr 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT: OUR CURRENT THEORIES ON THE BIG BANG. THE COMPLEXITY OF WHICH IS YET TO BE ANSWERED.
( Twenty minute read)
In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today. Even earlier, this thinking goes, at some point our entire universe — all the stars, all the galaxies, all the everything — was the size of a peach and had a temperature of over a quadrillion degrees. For decades this explanation, the amazingly fantastical story, holds up of the creation of the Universe and to all current observations.
The problem is that the physics that we use to understand the early universe (a wonderfully complicated mishmash of general relativity and high-energy particle physics) can take us only so far before breaking down.
Taken at face value,
This tells us that at one point, the universe was crammed into an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point. This is obviously absurd, and what it really tells us is that we need new physics to solve this problem — our current toolkit just isn’t good enough. We need some new physics, something that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies.
What we know as the Big Bang was sparked by something else happening before it — the Big Bang was not a beginning, but one part of a larger process. In other words, the complicated (and, admittedly, poorly understood) physics of this critical epoch may indeed allow for a radically revised view of our time and place in the cosmos.
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I am neither a Scientist or a Quantum professor so what follows is what I have learned while researching this post. It is for some Einstein out there to answer the questions.
It is quite obvious that the Universe has not existed forever. It was born. Out of time. An entity cannot appear out of nothing and time has no entity while space and light do, even if they are expanding or traveling. A God as an entity is an other matter.
A universe popping into existence out of nothing is so bonkers. A detonation occurs in one place and shrapnel flies into the void.
In the Big Bang, there was no centre and no pre-existing void, so it didn’t happen at any ‘location’. Space itself popped into existence and began expanding everywhere at once, before time was invented.
But what is time? Does it exist? is the past present and the future all one and the same.?
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Time is familiar to everyone, yet it’s hard to define and understand.
Science, philosophy, religion, and the arts have different definitions of time, but the system of measuring it is relatively consistent. It is not something we can see, touch, or taste, but we can measure its passage. But if a system is unchanging, it is not timeless.
The question of why time is irreversible is one of the biggest unresolved questions in science.
As far as the universe is concerned, time had a beginning. The starting point was 13.799 billion years ago when the Big Bang occurred.
If the universe is considered to be an isolated system, its entropy (degree of disorder) can never decrease. In other words, the universe cannot return to exactly the same state in which it was at an earlier point.
Time cannot move backward.
The “grandfather paradox” is a classic example. According to the paradox, if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before your mother or father was born, you could prevent your own birth.
Many physicists believe time travel to the past is impossible, but there are solutions to a temporal paradox, such as traveling between parallel universes or branch points.
Will time end?
The answer to this question is unknown. Time does not actually exist. “Time is just an illusion.” Is this really true? Is time just a figment of our imagination?
It makes no appearance in physical science except…” What does that mean?
Indeed, this question borders the realm of metaphysics and ontology (the philosophy of existence) as much as it does on the strictly empirical questions about time that physics is well-equipped to address.
Time is all over the place in physics.
Is it a ‘quantum’ thing?
Quantum things are fundamentally unpredictable, appearing randomly, all over the inflationary vacuum, parts of it ‘decayed’ into ordinary, everyday vacuum. Think of tiny bubbles forming in a vast ocean.
In each bubble, the inflationary vacuum disappeared, but its enormous energy had to go somewhere.
It went into creating matter and heating it. It went into creating a Big Bang. Our Big Bang Universe is merely one such bubble among a possible infinity of other Big Bang universes in the ever-expanding inflationary vacuum!
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The twin pillars of modern physics are Einstein’s General Relativity and Quantum theory.
The laws of quantum theory permit this to pop into existence out of nothing.
The former reigns supreme in the large-scale Universe, while the latter orchestrates the small-scale world of atoms and their constituents. They have resisted a merger, which is a problem because, in the Big Bang, the Universe was small.
It is essential to unite Einstein’s theory with quantum theory.
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There isn’t any wave particle duality because an electron isn’t a particle and it isn’t a wave. Instead it’s an excitation in a quantum field. The electron field can interact in ways that look like a particle and it can interact in ways that look like a wave, but that doesn’t mean it is a particle or is a wave.
The fundamental basis of QM is assuming that energy comes in discrete quantities rather than a continuum. There’s no obvious, intuitive reason for this, necessarily… but the results that come out of QM are spectacular- in that they are extremely well supported by experiments.
“Why is energy discrete rather than continuous?”
Physics is a parallel world of tricky mathematical models, fine tuned in order to reproduce the behaviour of reality, but it is not the reality itself. It may sound obvious, but for many people it isn’t so.
Nobody really knows what an electron is completely.
What an electron is and what an electron can behave are different concepts to be clarified.
It’s my opinion! By the way particle is point, but wave is a function to describe all the possible locations of the particle. Electron particle cannot appear at two different points but you can find it through your interaction experiment setup.
Particles can be in two (or more) places at the same time.
This is not yet a proof that quantum mechanics hold for large objects.
For example, there is not yet a quantum mechanical theory of gravity.
In 2005, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed more than 10,000 galaxies and led astronomers to estimate there must be 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and 50 billion trillion stars.
Where did it all come from?
The religious explanation is that a supernatural causal agent call God brought all matter, energy, space and time into existence? God who was speaking spoke from outside of time.
If the universe has a beginning, that means there’s got to be some kind of beginner; It’s a beginner beyond space and time, and that looks too much like the God of the Bible.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” accurately describe what science has discovered?
Why is that proof that God created everything, first of all that God exists and that then he actually created all of this?
The Big Bang model is the idea that the universe is traceable back to a beginning.
Not just a beginning of matter and energy, but a beginning of matter, energy, space and time. And how the universe continuously expands from that beginning, and expands at the just right rate to make life possible and even advanced life possible at this moment in the universe.
This flash called the Big Bang is generated by the sudden annihilation of all anti-matter in the universe.
A delicate balance of a billion and one particles to every billion anti-particles guarantees the existence of matter in the later universe. And it also guarantees the possibility of life.
From the creation event, protons, neutrons, anti-protons, anti-neutrons decompose into even more fundamental particles called quarks.
But the universe is too hot and too dense even for quarks to exist and too compressed for light to be possible.
After the creation event the universe was too hot for atoms to exist. Electrons could not orbit around nuclei. Because the universe was nothing but charged particles, an amorphous glow is all that appears. The universe would be so hot that protons and neutrons can’t stick together. All atomic nuclei fall apart.
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The universe therefore must have a beginning and, hence, a beginner beyond space and time; there must be an actual beginning of time; That means no matter what you speculate about the universe, as long as it expands on average you are stuck with this beginner beyond matter, energy, space and time.
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We’ve got two easy proofs that any lay person can appreciate that the universe indeed must have this singular beginning of matter, energy, space and time.
So what are we to make of all the observations that the entire universe appears to have been meticulously designed for humans?
And astronomer George Greenstein in his book, The Symbiotic Universe, expressed these thoughts:
“As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?”
Stephen Hawking concedes, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”
The probability of all these known parameters randomly coming together would be one chance in 10215, a probably so incredibly tiny that statistically speaking, it’s impossible. And this probability is becoming even more remote with every new scientific discovery.
Such a high degree of design demonstrates that this entity of a god must be a personal being with an amazing creativity, wisdom, power, care and love to a degree far beyond human capabilities. He has fine tuned the Milky Way galaxy, the solar system, and planet earth so that spiritual life can be fused with physical life in this one small place for one brief span on our time line.
Millions of galaxy clusters fill the universe, each containing thousands of galaxies, adding up to ten billion trillion stars. That’s ten with 21 zeros after it.
We needed all of those stars for some reasons, alright?
This enormity is essential to life’s existence. If the number of stars in the observable universe were any greater or any fewer, life would be impossible. If there were fewer stars in the observable cosmos, nuclear fusion would be so inefficient that the only elements to form would be hydrogen and helium. With more stars in the universe, all the elements would be heavier than iron. No carbon, no nitrogen, no oxygen.
Only in a cosmos with a finely-tuned mass of stars can the life-essential elements be produced.
So it turns out, the vast reaches of the cosmos are not a big waste of space, energy, matter and time.
If energy cannot be created or destroyed, where does it come from?
Many scientists believe that the total energy of the universe is zero. Hence, no energy needed to be “created” when the universe came into existence.
As Stephen Hawking explained, when you pull two objects apart, you need to expend energy to overcome the gravity that pulls them together. As it takes positive energy to separate them, gravity must be negative energy. If that theory is correct, then there was never any need to create energy or matter – they cancel each other out. That implies that the big bang could have started as a simple statistical fluctuation.
Additionally, many galaxies appear to lack sufficient mass to be held together by gravity and should have been torn apart long ago.
So, what is causing these unknown phenomena? Dark matter, which makes up 85% of total matter in the universe, is a hypothetical type of matter that responsible for the way galaxies are organized.
Our universe is therefore the result of a quantum fluctuation. Particles routinely pop into and out of existence.
Take the sun as an example.
Its nuclear fusion reactions turn matter (think of it as concentrated energy) into visible sunlight and other forms of energy. The sunlight hits a green leaf on Earth and the solar energy is now transferred into a chemical energy store as oxygen is separated from carbon dioxide and water, leaving carbohydrate in the leaf.
We eat the leaf and breathe in the oxygen.
The respiration reaction in our muscle cells allows the energy to be used to move our arm as we hammer in a nail. The arm, nail, hammer and the air absorb the sound, get hot and radiate infrared heat to outer space.
So the energy concentrated in the original hydrogen atoms in the sun is now scattered into the universe. Low-grade and almost useless, but still the same amount we started with.
Finally my conclusion’s.
For some thing to come into existence from nothing is impossible even a black hole has to start with some thing and disappear into some thing. What that is Space time In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. From Wikipedia.
According to the best of current physical theories, space-time explains the unusual relativistic effects that arise from traveling near the speed of light as well as the motion of massive objects in the universe.
So its some thing that travel’s faster than the speed of light depended on its state of motion – warped spacetime!
Light was known to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it did not obey the same laws of mechanics as matter.
Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
Weight arises due to the warping of time, rather than space. What this means in practice is that gravity on earth is “equivalent” to acceleration mostly in the sense that clocks on the surface run more slowly than clocks in outer space.
If one goes beyond classical physics and into modern quantum field theory, then questions of absolute versus relational spacetime are rendered anachronistic by the fact that even “empty space” is populated by matter in the form of virtual particles, zero-point fields and more.
You can’t get something for nothing. In the quantum realm, something really can emerge from nothing.
As long as you have empty space — the ultimate in physical nothingness — simply manipulating it in the right way will inevitably cause something to emerge. Take a meson and try to rip the quark away from the antiquark, and a new set of particle-antiparticle pairs will get pulled out of the empty space between them an electromagnetic fields where many properties of all physical systems are conserved: where things cannot be created or destroyed. In theory, a strong enough electromagnetic field can rip particles and antiparticles out of the vacuum itself, even without any initial particles or antiparticles at all.
In early 2022, strong enough electric fields were created in a simple laboratory setup leveraging the unique properties of graphene, enabling the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. The prediction that this should be possible is 70 years old: dating back to one of the founders of quantum field theory.
In the Universe we inhabit, it’s truly impossible to create “nothing” in any sort of satisfactory way. Everything that exists, down at a fundamental level, can be decomposed into individual entities — quanta — that cannot be broken down further. If you take all of them away, however, the “empty space” that remains isn’t quite empty in many physical senses the quantum fields remain. Just as we cannot take the laws of physics away from the Universe, we cannot take the quantum fields that permeate the Universe away from it. No matter how far away we move any sources of matter, there are two long-range forces whose effects will still remain: electromagnetism and gravitation. Even if you create a perfect vacuum, devoid of all particles and antiparticles of all types, where the electric and magnetic fields are zero, there’s clearly something that’s present in this region of what a physicist might call, from a physical perspective, “maximum nothingness.”
Space cannot be “entirely emptied” As to where is came from. Clearly, we exist, as do the stars and galaxies we see, so something must have created more matter than antimatter, making the Universe we know possible. It seems like an impossibility. On one hand, there is no known way, given the particles and their interactions in the Universe, to make more matter than antimatter. On the other hand, everything we see is definitely made of matter and not antimatter.
Doesn’t it matter. The fact that we exist and are made of matter is indisputable; the question of why our Universe contains something (matter) instead of nothing (from an equal mix of matter and antimatter) is one that must have an answer.
When it does, one of the greatest mysteries in all of existence will finally have a solution.
Therefore as Max Beerbolm said: ” Besides Dr Einstein there are only two men who can claim to have grasped the Theory of Relativity I cannot claim to be either of these. The attempt to conceive Infinity has always been quite arduous enough for me. But to imagine the absence of it ; to feel perhaps we and all the stars beyond or ken are somehow cosily ( thought awfully) closed in by curtain curves beyond which is nothing; and to convince myself, by the way, that this exterior is not ( in virtue of being nothing) something and there fore …. but I lose the thread.”
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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
01 Monday Apr 2024
Posted #whatif.com, 2024 the year of disconnection, A Constitution for the Earth.
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS : IS THE UNITED NATIONS ANYLONGER RELEVANT?
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( Five minute read)
IT’S APRIL FOOLS DAY.
In a world full of geopolitical tensions unprecedented in decades are we fooling ourselves with the United Nations.
The United Nations stands at a crossroads. It is bedeviled by a litany of challenges, including gross underfunding, bloated bureaucracy, disunity, and geopolitical rivalry among the permanent members of the Security Council. The stakes could not be higher.
People are looking to their leaders to get out of the current global “mess”, the worsening climate emergency, escalating conflicts, technological disruptions, cost-of-living crisisis.
The question is. Is the United Nations capable of dealing with these conflicts, especially when one of its priorities is to balance its neutrality in the face of differences between member states.
The UN is an old organisation established after World War II to promote peace, now a broken institution that sometimes works when it comes to distribution food aid.
Even though the agency has been marginalised from playing a significant political role, it has still been able to play an important role in providing humanitarian aid, for eradicating poverty, promoting education, and improving health and gender equality around the world.
One of the most significant criticisms has been the ineffectiveness of the UN Security Council in resolving conflicts.
For example, the United Nations Security Council’s all-powerful group, the P-5 (the five permanent members – also veto powers – of the council), excludes huge demographics of the world population such as Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Members from these regions therefore rightfully feel relegated to be second-class members of the organization’s top brass.
The Security Council, which is responsible for maintaining international peace and security, has often been paralyzed by the veto power of its five permanent members – the United States, China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. This has made it difficult for the Security Council to take decisive action in conflicts such as the Syrian civil war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and more recently in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
I think where we see a lot of people losing faith is when they see these moments of hypocrisy
The powerful role Russia still plays as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, even as it threatens international peace and security
The US, which, while it is able to use its powerful veto power to block resolutions on Palestine because of its bilateral relations, turns around and tries to pass resolutions on territorial integrity in the case of Ukraine.
The UN is going to use a lot of rhetoric, but on an effective level it is not going to be able to carry out any kind of instrument to stop this as no one wants to deployed peacekeeping forces in various conflict-ridden regions of the world.
Against a backdrop of harmonisation among countries seems to be the UN’s priority, but experts think reform is more urgent.
One of the key challenges facing the UN is the increasing complexity of conflicts and the rise of new security threats such as terrorism and cyber warfare.
To address these challenges, the UN must strengthen its conflict prevention and resolution capabilities, investing in early warning systems, mediation, diplomacy, and working more closely with regional organizations.
It must also address the root causes of conflicts, including poverty, inequality, and human rights abuses.
It must promote multilateralism and global cooperation to address global challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and terrorism.
Why? Because if you don’t have an actor that is able to impose all the legislation, then you have a problem.
It’s obvious that organisations, international organisations, also have to change and their priorities might not change.
Although the UN has faced criticisms for its limitations, it remains an essential institution for addressing the world’s most pressing issues.
One of the reasons why the UN remains relevant is its ability to mobilize resources and coordinate efforts towards global challenges. Its ability to set and promote international standards and norms.
Upholding human rights. The UN’s human rights bodies and mechanisms provide an essential avenue for monitoring and investigating these violations, and for promoting accountability and justice.
It must be Transparent and and accountable by promoting open and inclusive decision-making processes.
It must reform its organizations for equal participation and influence by all global regions and interests.
It must embrace technology and innovation to increase its effectiveness and efficiency.
The challenges facing the world today – such as climate change, pandemics, and terrorism – require coordinated and collective action at the global level, and the UN is uniquely positioned to play a central role in this effort.
The reforms must aim to make the UN nimbler, less bureaucratic, more transparent and accountable, and more decentralized and effective.
They must be about placing sustainable development “at the heart” of the UN because development is the UN’s “best tool for preventing conflict and building a future of peace.
None of these reforms can be achived while the veto power of its five permanent members remain.
The ICJ is the UN’s judicial organ, composed of 15 judges elected to nine-year terms by the General Assembly and Security Council. The ICJ does not have the authority to weigh in on any international legal dispute it wishes; instead, the Court’s ability to hear a case is derived from the consent of the Member States concerned.
Member States are bound to comply with ICJ decisions in any case to which they are a party is now a joke.
The UN system is comprised of more than 30 affiliated organizations, all with conflict of interest.
Perhaps its time to move these agencies out of the UN into independent organiations, subject to an new AI world sustainable legal consitution.
Discussing reforms without making provisions for adequate resources will lead nowhere; ( See previous post on Funding to bring the United Nations closer to “we the people.”)
A permanent coordinating platform should be set up to integrate the UN response across agencies, funds, and related organizations. Data is now a major economic asset, but its use and consequences go well beyond commercial issues to matters such as the quality of society and political systems.
The distribution of power has also shifted considerably. Global institutions need to reflect these changes or lose legitimacy in the eyes of the emerging players, whether governments or their people.
Yet data governance at the global level lags well behind technological developments
.In today’s complex world, identifying problems, designing policies, and delivering change is no longer within the power of states standing alone. It requires participation of diverse actors, including nonprofits, grassroots movements, corporations, and local authorities.
Getting inclusivity right and shifting to a more equitable governance model will be critical to weathering power politics and delivering for all.
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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
01 Monday Apr 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection, A solution to Climate change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., CAPITALISM IS INCOMPATIBLE IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE., Climate Change., Collective stupidity., Dehumanization., Digital age., Disaster Capitalism., Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., HUMAN ABILITIES., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Inequality., INTELLIGENCE., Language, Migrants/Refugees., Modern day life., Monetization of nature, Natural selection., OUR BRAINS, Our Common Values., Purpose of life., Reality., Robot citizenship., Society, State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Technology's, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., The new year 2024, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD. , Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, VALUES, War, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN WE REFLECT UPON OUR ORIGINS IT IS DIFFICULT TO AVOID THE MOST ESSENTIAL QUESTION OF THEM ALL – WHAT MAKES US HUMANS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER ANIMALS?
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Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, Environment, Inequility, Sustainability, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.
( Twelve minute read)
Our brain have difficulties in accepting that we actually are animals and thus highly dependent on nature where nothing exists alone.
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Science has organized human evolution into six levels.
We share the first five with other creatures, while the sixth level makes us unique – language.
Our use of language and given rise to the sciences and philosophical thoughts that now are transforming the entire biosphere, while abusing it to such a degree that we are currently on the verge of destroying it completely.
It is difficult to understanding that extinctions are not features of this civilization, but virtually all past civilizations have faced this fate. We might be more advanced technologically now, but this gives little comfort as we are not immune to the threats that undid our ancestors.
MAYBE THIS IS THE MAIN REASON THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO ADDRESS THE CLIMATE CRISIS, WHICH IS NOW AN INDUSTRY RATHER THAN A THREATH TO OUR VERY EXISTENCE, to the biodiversity, to food security, access to fresh water, the lack of which will result in wars.
Unfortunately we are still animals living in a world that is changing the atmosphere’s chemistry, which is becoming a reality, not tomorrow, but right now and that’s with the number of people we already have.
Indeed the very technology we now rely on bring new unprecedented challenges.
From the emergence of Homo sapiens, it took roughly 300,000 years before one billion of us populated the Earth, with people evolving into their current form some 200,000 years ago.
(Huts, 2 million years ago. Boats, 900,000 years ago. Cooking, 500,000 years ago. Javelins, 400,000 years ago, Glue, 200,000 years ago. Clothing possibly 170,000 years ago.)
“Behavioural modernity,” evolved 50,000-65,000 years ago. It took 15,000 to 10,000 years to start growing stable foods.
The planet most likely will surpass eight billion people sometime around mid-November. (The world population is to exceed 10 billion this century.)
Climate change – the world population – technologies inequality – you name it, will determine how many of us will be living on Earth as we approach 2100.
There can be no mistaking the import of this, as it belies the dangers of the next several decades which will see migration on a massive scale, due wars because of runaway climate change.
Unprecedented droughts or city-destroying floods would prompt mass migrations, destabilizing the rich world or giving rise to far-right nationalism. Or a global famine could send food prices surging, triggering old-fashioned resource wars.
Survival and success do not depend on brutal force. There is an empirical connection between violence and climate change that’s persists across 12,000 years of human history.
The long chain of evolutionary development has taught us with technology and political trends conflict will continue and even intensify.
“Whether we like it or not changes will be happening, and the situation will not improve by itself.
The future well-being and actual life on earth depends on us all and our ability to express compassion and work together as the eusocial creatures we de facto are.
“No one is doing this in the right way at the moment,”
World hunger, ecological and environmental disaster, global warming, massive shifts in weather systems, the re-emergence of diseases long thought controlled, with political turmoil, in a world where a barrel of water is more expensive than a barrel of oil.
Empathy, compassion and cooperation are now so saturated by Tec that we are becoming a species totally unscrew and desentized to reality, others, and their needs, becoming algorithms predictions.
Efforts so far to incorporate climate change into future population projections have been inadequate.
————-
Where is it leading us?
To answer that, we have to think about how we got here in the first place – Greed
Currently it is estimated for that 50 million people are living on less than the $3.65 a day, with half of the global population lives on less than US$6.85.
You could add another few billons who are not poor enough to feature.
The world is divided into the very rich, and the very poor. And since everybody knows there aren’t a whole lot of very rich people, they assume the majority of the world’s population is living in extreme poverty. But that’s completely wrong; the overwhelming majority of people live somewhere in the middle.
Our problem is inequality, attached to Greed, which is now plundering the world in the form of profit seeking algorithms that are generating profits for the few, using the latest technology Algorithmic trading designed to capitalize on market inefficiencies, trades can be completed at speeds and frequencies impossible for mere mortals.
Algorithm’s are creating a new social contract between a sovereign and citizens, in which the people collectively who were sovereign are becoming digitalised citizens.
Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge.
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.
Neither, physical military strength, nor access to capital are now sufficient for economic success.
If we are to have any chance, we have to change to direct democracy which is easier to achieve than big, sprawling governments.
I’m not sure we can, but I know it will happen because capitalism or any other systems will no longer generate sufficient income to sustain social welfair states.
———————
The problem is how do we reconcile that with democracy in countries composed of millions of citizens?
Talk of artificial intelligence destroying humanity plays into the tech companies’ agenda, and hinders effective regulation of the societal harms AI is causing right now.
Barely a week seems to go by without a tech industry insider trumpeting the existential risks of artificial intelligence (AI). Fearmongering narratives about existential risks are not constructive.
Serious discussion about actual risks, and action to contain them, are.
The sooner humanity establishes its rules of engagement with AI, the sooner we can learn to live in harmony with the technology.
Algos require an uninterrupted power supply and reliable internet access. Even a brief failure in these conditions can prove cataclysmic.
———————–
What is needed are direct opportunities for all to invest in the future.
One of our fundamental challenges in the years ahead will be to mobilize the substantial sums needed for investment in everything from green infrastructure to the cutting-edge technologies that we will need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and slow the course of climate change.
At the moment we have Green bonds/Climate change bonds are issued exclusively to finance projects that positively impact the environment. Today, more than 50 countries have issued green bonds. However, the appeal of this market and the fact that there is no binding regulatory framework for green bonds may lead to suspicions of ‘greenwashing’ (false green claims).
There’s nothing new or specifically European about green bonds.
They’ve been around since the beginning of the 21st century. Although they weren’t yet called green bonds, the first of them are thought to have been issued in 2001 by the City of San Francisco to finance a solar power project.
Any organization – such as governments, corporations, and financial institutions – can issue a green bond.
The green bond market is a portion of the larger debt market. Historically, over US$2 trillion of green bonds have been issued globally to date, with the potential to grow to US$5 trillion by 2025.
Industry bodies and investor action groups such as Climate Action 100+, as well as large
market investors such as sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, are in a strong position to drive development of this market. However there is no universally accepted legal and commercial definition of a green bond.
Green bonds are proven to be an effective means to secure the resources required to meet the national climate change goals, so why not issue green bonds that any joe soap could invest in.
Lotteries exist in 46.67% of countries worldwide. In many countries, with the adoption of digitalization the Lottery is a lifestyle and a massive contribution to their revenues. The Lottery industry continues to grow worldwide, with an expected increase of 4.1% CAGR by 2031. The spread of online lotteries associated with the increase in smartphone and internet usage is one of many factors that can drive growth in the global market. The Lottery market is projected to grow to $405.20 billion by 2028.
It would be everyone’s collective interest to identify with the physical manifestations of climate change.
Climate change is a defining issue of our time.
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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
.
13 Tuesday Feb 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection, Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Collective stupidity., CULTURES COLLIDE, Disaster Capitalism., Earth, Earth from Space., Environment, Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Our Common Values., Reality., Space Exploration., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD. , War, Wars, What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IF YOU HAD A CHOICE WHAT SORT OF WORLD WOULD YOU LIVE IN?
( Five minute read)
On July the 20th this year it will be fifty five years since one of us stood on another planet. Since then only 24 people have seen the whole of Earth. Achived with less computer power that is now in our phone’s.
In those fiftyfive years we have had fifty-five active conflicts. Eight of these 55 conflicts were classified as wars.
This is the world we got.
We are truly living in a very unique time in the history of our civilization, facing several simultaneous challenges and converging crises:
Because the world is a cauldron where dozens of cultures, religions and ideologies mix with each other, which always leads to a conflict. We are all born of frailty and error.
A deteriorating environment, a very unequal distribution of dwindling resources, widespread poverty, wars, climate change, oppression of many peoples, and dissatisfaction with life even in those countries with a surplus of material wealth.
What can we do about it?
The answer to such question is certainly not simple, and you will not find it in any textbook.
All these problems and converging crises are systemic.
For the most part these crises we humans have brought upon ourselves over the course of many centuries by our attitudes towards each other and towards Nature, and by the concepts we have developed regarding who we are and the very purpose of our being here — in other words, our worldview.
The 20th century revolution of technologies that permits long distance travel and instant communication across the world has brought all cultures closer together, making us more aware than ever of the many diverse spiritual-cultural traditions that have flourished for millennia as intricate, elaborate meta-solutions to the challenges and opportunities of living in a particular place.
Now we are challenged to integrate the wealth of knowledge and capability that this remarkable period has brought us into a new narrative of interbeing — a synthesis of ancient wisdom of our interconnectedness and interdependence with modern science and technology.
We now have a choice to make!
Either we move into a new phase in the evoloution of consciouness and a new ear of life on planet Earth, or we will witness the unraveling of the web of life and the immature end of our species and much of the community of life along with us.
The time to make this choice is now!
It starts with a fundamental shift in our dominant worldview. It is time to grow up!
A world with less gravity and more humanity.
Where people get what they deserve rather than deserve what they get.
Where there is a God for everyone and no one God is better than other.
Where an empty stomach is an alien concept.
Where mind is held high and heart is held higher.
Where people are immaterialistic.
Where people think logically, question and reason everything without blindly following anything or be superstitious.
Where people respect each other and not judge others for their actions.
Where one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.
History shows us that none of the above is possible without AI augmentation of human intelligence to enshrin values of beauty, agency, and individuality. by benevolent, incorruptible agencies that are beyond human intelligence.
The era of Artificial Intelligence is here. AI has already started.
AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
Its true that AI doesn’t have goals of its own, but its influnce on our lives is endangering the very meaning of life and instead of us embracing a worldview based on facts, it will cause us to lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
Understanding what “we” want is among the biggest challenges facing AI.
It is very difficult to encode human values in a programming language, but the problem is made more difficult by the fact that we as humanity do not agree on common values, and even parts we do agree on change with time. The question then becomes how do we aligne AI with Human values.
Whose human values?
Ah, that’s where things get tricky.
A major change is coming, over unknown timescales but across every segment of society, and the people playing a part in that transition have a huge responsibility and opportunity to shape it for the best.
So here are some of the questions we should be asking.
What does it mean to you to have artificial intelligence aligned with your own life goals and aspirations?
How can it be aligned with you and everyone else in the world at the same time?
How do we ensure that one person’s version of an ideal AI doesn’t make your life more difficult?
How do we go about agreeing on human values, and how can we ensure that AI understands these values?
If you have a personal AI assistant, how should it be programmed to behave?
If we have AI more involved in things like medicine or policing or education, what should that look like?
What else should we, as a society, be asking?
Globally, humankind must think about the kind of future we want to have.
The recently articulated United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a good starting point, but these goals are merely the preconditions necessary for survival and flourishing, so they are not
enough. A further step is needed to determine our common goals as a civilization, and more
philosophically, the purpose of human existence, and how AI will fit into it.
Generative AI is not hype.
Instead, it acts at a scale so large that it will transform how we interact with technology itself. It will far outpace what we’ve seen so far today.
AI has been used to help sequence RNA for vaccines and model human speech, technologies that rely on model- and algorithm-based machine learning and increasingly focus on perception, reasoning and generalization.
If we reach a point where AI is able to understand our languages, AI systems would be able to read and understand everything ever written. In the mean time rest assured that we will continue to fight wars against each other, as we have done since day until the end of time, or at least Earth’s time which is in about 5.4 billion years.
All human comments appriciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com
10 Saturday Feb 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAYS: No matter what era we are in — or what new technology comes along — our fundamental beliefs will always be with us. Not True. Algorithms are exploiting the very foundations of everything.
Tags
AI, Artificial Intelligence., Climate change, Machine learning., Social Media, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.
( Fifteen minute read)
Put simply, the meaning of life is life itself.
You can write volumes on the state of the world, but one has only to look at the state of the world to see what algorithms are doing.
Algorithms form an increasingly important part of our daily lives, even if we are often unaware of it.
Most of us have no idea what they are — or how we’re being influenced by them.
They have become instrumental in our everyday lives.
Algorithms are making hugely consequential decisions in our society on everything from medicine to transportation to welfare benefits to criminal justice and beyond. Subtly shifting the way our society is operating.
We can see them at work in the world. We know they’re shaping outcomes all around us.
Are we making a mistake by handing over so much decision-making authority to these programs?
This paradox—that the internet is both saviour and executioner of democracy is part of a massive unfolding social experiment.
The proliferation of algorithms is eroding our ability to think and decide for ourselves. They are turning people into products, and they don’t even realize it.
Billions of people around the world are interacting with these technologies, which is why the tiniest changes can have such a gigantic impact on all of humanity.
We will blindly follow them wherever they lead us. There is no one assessing whether or not they are providing a net benefit or cost to society.
WE DON’T HAVE TO CREATE A WORLD IN WHICH MACHINES ARE TELLING US WHAT TO DO OR HOW TO THINK, ALTHOUGH WE MAY VERY WELL END UP IN A WORLD LIKE THAT WHERE ALGORITHMS DECIDE WHO LIVES OR WHO DIES.
How you see the world matters.
————————
Beliefs are the things we hold true, regardless of whether we have any proof of their objective truth.
You see, in time, beliefs become labels.
We plaster them on our foreheads and use them to justify our action or inaction. That belief will then drive how you behave as you interpret it as being damning or empowering.
We all would be a lot happier if everyone else around us had the same beliefs as we do, or at least, that they would not challenge us on them. Of course, that is impossible, and this is precisely what fuels most of the world’s conflicts.
And here comes the kicker:
You can decide the direction you take. Your beliefs do not control you, so long as you become self-aware and take charge of your life. Or maybe if you assume everything will fall apart, you never get disappointed.
So, herein lies the persistent conflict of our society:
All of us are driven by our life experiences and by merely being human, but the creeping influence of algorithms in our lives are fucking up the world. We’re increasingly moving towards government by algorithm.
Automated systems are being rolled out with little transparency or public debate, and risk exacerbating existing inequalities.
The algorithm takes the biases and prejudices of the real world and ‘bakes them in’, and gives them a veneer that makes it seem like a policy choice is actually neutral and technical. But it isn’t,”
The problem is, both beliefs and values have strong momentum and seem glued to our character.
How do these beliefs played out in real life?
Are we just becoming throwaway survival machines, following our genetic and neurological programming in an indifferent world?
I believe that human life and the world mean much more than that.
There’s beauty everywhere—we have only to open our eyes to see it.
——————–
When it comes to climate change, the science is settled.
When it comes to technology its all together the opposite.
The sobering truth is that both the climate and technology are out of control.
Given the difficulty of getting the human brain or our political system to tackle anything beyond immediate crises, our attempts to rectify what’s wrong are usual puny compared to what’s really needed.
If you listen to our politicians, there is a strong consensus on climate change.
It consists of four parts.
First, carbon emissions are causing significant changes to our climate. Second, we need to take urgent action to reduce those emissions, including reaching net zero by 2050. Third, we have already made good progress in reducing emissions. And fourth, the steps we need to take to reduce emissions further will also bring many positive benefits for society.
We have a pretty clear understanding of the threat climate change poses to us, our children and our grandchildren. We are already being forced to cope with more droughts, more floods, more extreme storms. At the same time, we have in our arsenal effective policies that are difficult for rational people to demagogue as crippling to the economy or as a subversion of our cherished way of life.
So why does climate misinformation continue to spread online and in our media?
Dire warnings of the looming climate disaster may just make people throw up their hands in despair, sink into denial, or dig their heels in deeper against government action.
Instead, we seem to firmly believe that climate solutions inevitably mean more government, higher taxes and less freedom — and thus are threats to all our core values and identity.
———————-
Technology’s benefits are numerous in all fields, however in the system’s that effect our daily lives it is becoming a threat to our core values, through the use of algorithms. Pushing us like a digital slave army to mindlessly, unwittingly and unwillingly livestream our digital existences into the commercial coffers of companies that see us as nothing more than walking dollar signs.
Examples:
Every time you pick up your smartphone, you’re summoning algorithms. At this point, they are responsible for making decisions about pretty much every aspect of our lives.
The right to an explanation of an algorithm-generated decision does little to fix “systemic injustices” Getting an explanation but no democratic say in how systems work is like getting a privacy policy without a ‘do not consent’ button.
Deciding who gets access to welfare. Using automated interviews with a virtual border guard, based on “deception detection algorithm. Using algorithms to model when and where crime will happen — an area known as predictive policing — is on the rise. Using algorithms to come up with a personality assessment. Having your credit rating scored decided by an algorithm based on questionable data.
Grading algorithm does not not relied solely on automated means. Substituting a mathematical approach for human judgment does not automatically make it fair.
Profit seeking algorithms. Market making algorithms. Execution algorithms Scheduled algorithms. Participation algorithms. VWAP and TWAP algorithms are time-slicing algorithms. Liquidity-seeking algorithms (a.k.a. opportunistic algorithms) Arrival price algorithms seek to trade close to market prices.
Recent developments in algorithmic trading include clustering and high-frequency market forecasting are playing a central role in finance.
The worst-case scenario is that we fail to disrupt the status quo, in which very powerful companies develop and deploy AI in invisible and obscure ways.
We have no right to see all of the data these companies collect about us, no right to get a percentage when they resell our data without our knowledge or informed consent, no right to ask them to stop. We are for all purposes indentured servants, offered free digital room and board in return for paying with our digital souls and our real-world time.
Social media companies have managed only to create a toxic brew of horrific hate speech that they cannot seem to get rid of.
Algorithms really are so powerful that a few lines of code can push us into any behaviour.
The right message targeted at the right time could mass convert the entire population of a country into mindless zombies who would readily convert even their most deeply held beliefs in an instant.
When it is obvious to all is that the world is changing, responding faster than expected to Technology’s
Why are we being such idiots?
What gives? It’s not that we are stupid or blind our core values are under attack.
If everything is a core value, then nothing is really a priority.
In this age where technology is dominant, core values may seem like something from the past. So core values may not seem like they have a place.
All of this data is used first and foremost to make money from us.
There is a really frustrating lag between what AI is capable of and what it’s legislated for.
Core values are the foundational beliefs held by an individual or an organisation.
Anyone can go to Google and search the meaning of core values,. There are another thing on your to-do list that you don’t have time for, but what about the bigger picture?
When you hear about core values, what comes to mind?
Core values make the biggest difference between successful and failure.
There are more than just words on a wall — it’s how you behave. It’s who you are at your core.
Everyone knows their role, what is expected of them, and they are empowered to act in accordance with their core values.
Once upon a time voting or making decisions in alignment with your core values were the foundation of who we are as individuals. Not any longer with Algorithms running social media.
——————–
To look at it simply, culture is just a collection of people. It is the environment created by the cumulative behaviour of the people.
We all have things that we value deeply, whether we realize it or not.
You remember values, don’t you? You know, those moral thoughts and behaviours we used to hold dear, like decency, civility, honesty and respect, as well as caring, optimism, empathy, and tolerance?
They were once a beacon of idealism. Rewarding behaviour based on them, and align all of our decisions with them.
Core values represent the lens which we view the world. They must be embedded in everything we do.
These “alt” credos and codes of behaviour are the trademarks of the incivility we witness on a daily basis, often expressed with rancour and rage. They have become commonplace on television, in social media and in everyday life. Of even more concern is that these new “moral standards” serve as models of behaviour for our impressionable children and youth.
Hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values—it’s better not to profess any values at all.
———————
Education and knowledge were cornerstones of our achievement.
We are now living in society that at large looks to social media /television and film personalities for political advice.
You must ensure they are accurate, meaningful, relatable and fully operationalized.
If we continue our descent into callousness, selfishness and hostility, we negatively impact and harm the quality of our lives. We could lose sight of our basic human values and diminish the essence of what MAKES THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL.
Achieving a more transparent and less manipulative media may well be the defining political battle of the 21st century.
Just as we are using our formidable intellect and creativity to reduce our carbon footprint, we can similarly mobilize our resources to improve our emotional footprint, or how we treat and affect each other.
Values are the criteria by which individuals judge ideas, objects, people, situations, and actions as good, worthwhile, desirable, wrong, worthless, or undesirable
.Values are individuals’ embedded abstract motivations. They guide individuals to understand, justify, and explain norms, attitudes, and actions. One of the limitations of examining values is that values cannot be generalized because they vary between a person and another, culture and another, society and another, even a country and another, thus scrutinizing values will be different in the future.
Core values can be only be fostered in Education, not in schools but with compulsory NATIONAL SERVICE.
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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com.
04 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted 2024 the year of disconnection, President of the USA., The USA., Ukraine/Russian war., Unanswered Questions., USA Presidential Election, Wars, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders
in≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS THE USA ITCHING FOR YET ANOTHER WAR?
Tags
gaza, Israel, middle-east, palestine, Presidential USA Election, The USA., USA under President Trump., War
( Four minute read)
The U.S. is in danger of slow-walking itself into a war with Iran.
ONE WOULD THINK: THAT AFTER THE RECENT US INVOLVEMENT IN DISASTROUS WARS, THAT IT AND ALL OF US, WOULD LEARN THAT MILARTY DETERRENCES DON’T WORK.
Since Biden refuses to pressure Israel to stop its bombardment of Gaza and accept a ceasefire, he is escalating the US confrontation with the Houthis.
Biden and his administration are practically sleepwalking the US into another war.
In the process, Biden risks entangling the US in another open-ended conflict, which is likely to expand by accident or miscalculation, rather than by design.
Either way, it threatens to prolong the forever war.
With persistent support of Israel, the Biden administration has alienated its allies in the Arab world and is now a heartbeat or an election result away from another war that it will lose.
The Gaza invasion has already spilled into clashes in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and the Red Sea.
They all require serious effort and inevitable trade-offs.
Why
Because it’s nearly impossible to dislodge an Indigenous insurgent movement without a huge commitment of ground troops.
Because today’s U.S. military is not designed to fight wars against two major rivals simultaneously.
This isn’t because the United States is in decline.
It’s because unlike the United States, which needs to be strong in all three of these places, each of its adversaries—China, Russia, and Iran—only has to be strong in its own home region to achieve its objectives.
Because in past conflicts, it was always able to outproduce its opponents. That’s no longer the case:
Because in past conflicts, it could easily outspend adversaries. That’s no longer the case:
All of that pales alongside the human costs that the United States could suffer in a global conflict.
In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the United States would be hard-pressed to rebuff the attack while keeping up the flow of support to Ukraine and Israel.
——————-
The US administration has multiple options to lean on the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
It could threaten to withhold billions of dollars in military aid, which allow Israel to continue its assault, or it could stop using Washington’s veto power on the UN security council to quash resolutions calling for a ceasefire.
The Houthis are portraying themselves as one of the few forces in the Middle East willing to stand against Israel and its western allies in defence of the Palestinian cause. Aside from the Houthis and Hamas, the alliance also includes several Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and the powerful Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
True global leadership at this moment means de-escalation and forging visions for a just future for all.
Without demanding a ceasefire in the immediate future, the putative US/UK commitment’s to peace rings hollow and feels more like it’s been overshadowed by their own and very real addictions to war.,
Any sane person would hear this.
Do most Americans realize how steeped in violence their country is?
A country beholden to its own violence’s is not limited to mass murderers.
How many of us have read the Creed of a United States Marine? “My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life,” it states, along with “my rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.”
Maybe this makes sense as part of military indoctrination but, let’s face it, culturally, we are all expected to buy into this idea, and with interest.
The truth of the matter is that the US make a lot of war.
Military conflicts make up perhaps 93% of its history. Roughly a quarter of the country has lived only in a time of war. And within that history, American weapons are an industry, a mythology and identity simultaneously.
Why do they call armed, military helicopters “Apache” helicopters for goodness’ sake?
When will the US face the fact that it is a country baked in its own violence, much of it racist in intent and effect? That reflects its own genocidal and racist past. If they were to be honest they would see that this dark heart of violence is not simply a partisan issue but is a much longer and more intimate part of its our own national tragedy.
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