Category Archives: Algorithms.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WE NEED TO THINK IN VERY DIFFERENT TERMS ABOUT THE COORDINATION OF A GLOBAL RESPONSE.

16 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Big Data., Climate Change., Democracy, Environment, European Elections., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google Knowledge., Humanity., Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Natural World Disasters, Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

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(Eighteen-minute read)

We are rapidly approaching the era of ubiquitous surveillance, a time when virtually every aspect of our lives will be monitored. Leaving us vulnerable to all manner of manipulation and persuasion.

The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance

capitalism.

Google, Facebook Amazon, U Tube, Supermarket Loyalty Card,

Credit card spending, you name it and it is creating the

surveillance data and we continue to ignore the most vital data

that we are alive and can do something about climate change.

It’s impossible to take a long view of what’s happening.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of surveillance"

SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?

While most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users.

During all this surveillance some elements of our world will change beyond recognition while others will stay reassuringly (or disappointingly) familiar.

Some innovations we might not notice, while others will knock us sideways, changing our lives forever.

For example The use of biometric recognition devices to ensure the identity of a person.

Three things, however, are certain: technology will get smaller, smarter and cheaper while Climate change will cost TRILLIONS  by the end of the century.

Perhaps there’s a technological barrier that can’t be surmounted, such as artificial superintelligence or weaponized nanotechnology but Global warming will no doubt disproportionately hurt the poor, broadly undermine human health, damage infrastructure, limit the availability of water, alter coastlines, and boost costs in industries from farming, to fisheries and energy production.

How different might life be 20 years from now?

I would bet you that it probably will be much like it is today.

Unfortunately, GDP is still viewed as a prerequisite to achieving global goals, even though it can’t stand for everything.

Food, clean water, good education and infrastructure, all these things need money to support so it’s inevitable and sad that climate change will become a product for profit.  

However, the effects of Surveillance and Climate Change are going to be felt for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years to come.

“A large fraction of climate change is largely irreversible on human time scales.”

Climate change and variability (e.g. increasing water scarcity), mounting / unresolved conflicts and refugee crises, increasing global inequalities which seem irreversible, and the questionable performance of the global economy (which is still very linked to increasing resource use) will still rule the roost.

Many people do not know what it really amounts to, either due to unreliable sources or deliberate misinformation, which has led to a series of myths about climate change.

First, it is important to be clear that climate change cannot now be avoided.

Climate change presents perhaps the most profound challenge ever to have confronted human social, political, and economic systems.

One of the central social, political, and economic questions of the century is: how then do we act?

It will present one of the most profound challenges to the way we understand human responses.

National governments are embedded in market economies that constrain what they can do.

We first have to get past controversies over cost estimates and distributions. (See previous posts: World Aid Commission Of 0.050% )

Activists think that the key here is simply getting the public to understand the facts by providing information.

The public should not, however, be understood as simply mass publics, which are problematic when it comes to mastering complex issues simply by virtue of their mass nature.

Increasingly, justice frameworks are being used in the development of climate policy strategies and as such, national governments can deploy this discourse when it suits their interests to do so. So developing countries can point to the history of fossil fuel use on which developed countries built their economies, such that fairness demands that it is the developing countries that should shoulder the burden of mitigation.

The response on the part of the wealthy countries is that for most of this history, their governments had no awareness that what they were doing could change the climate, and so ought not to be held uniquely responsible for future mitigation.

Dealing with major climate change issues has however never been a part of the core priorities of any government.

Governments acted swiftly and with the expenditure of vast sums of money in response to the global financial crisis in 2008–9. They have never shown anything like this urgency or willingness to spend on any environmental issue.

To date, very few national governments look at all like decarbonizing their economy or redesigning energy systems to reverse the growth in energy consumption.

This is why it is necessary to reframe the effects of climate change to where the government might involve recognition of the security dimension of climate change. Climate change can threaten the security of populations and vital systems, even in some cases threaten the sovereign integrity of states.

BUT: Neither coordinated collective action nor discursive reframings can stop at the national level.Image associée

Even if this was achieved Climate change involves a complex global set of both causal practices and felt impacts, and as such requires coherent global action—or, at a minimum, coordination across some critical mass of global players.

Like the heading to this post state:

Perhaps we need to think in very different terms about the coordination of a global response. 

The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet has already gone into an unstoppable decline.

Currents that transport heat within the oceans will be disrupted.

Ocean acidification will continue to rise, with unknown effects on marine life.

Thawing permafrost and sea beds will release methane, a greenhouse gas.

Droughts predicted to be the worst in 1,000 years will trigger vegetation changes and wildfires, releasing carbon.

Species unable to adapt quickly to a changing climate will go extinct.

Coastal communities will be submerged, creating a humanitarian crisis.

Thankfully, we’re not completely out of options yet.

There is little point if we as the data is implying that the world is warming planting trees or hoping that some future technology is going to solve the effects of climate change.

We are all riding on the one big blue ball together, and no matter what happens we will be finally all be confronted (Thanks to climate change with our societal problems.)

Millions of voters will no longer cast their ballots based on emotional cues, defying their own clear self-interest or reason that has created a society that is consumed with looking out for yourself first.

So here are a few things that you can do now.

Reduce the emissions that are warming the world the fastest.

Vote Diem 25 in the forthcoming European Elections.

Lobby your Television Stations to include a least once a week a weather report on Climate change.

Use your buying power to stop purchasing products with Palm Oil or products wrapped in plastic or are transported from on side of the world to the other.

Support local products.

Demand from your government free education.

Protect our privacy at all costs (It won’t be easy to fix because it requires us to tackle the essence of the problem – the logic of accumulation implicit in surveillance capitalism. That means that self-regulation is a nonstarter.

Digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers and the watched and it will become increasingly disruptive throughout this century and beyond with profound consequences for democracy because the asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power.

Governments know this.

Whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable now while climate change will be intolerable in the near future. 

The fourth Industrial revolution will be the last. In effect, we are forcing future generations to retroactively subsidize our decision not to increase energy efficiency and move to cleaner fuels.

The warmer it gets, the less productive a country’s economy will likely be. Perhaps more concerning, however, is what could happen in a world where climate change is allowed to continue unmitigated.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of economic climate change"

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP.

04 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in #whatif.com, Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change., Democracy, DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Education, Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Inequality, Innovation., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Politics., Post - truth politics., Purchasing Power., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Universal Basic Income ., Wealth., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Fifteen-minute read)

“As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality.”  Yuval Noah Harari.

Is he right?

Thanks to digital data, the state is able to have visibility on its population but is unable to govern concretely. Indeed, how can effective public policies be put in place if we can not quantify the objectives to be achieved according to the realities already observed?Résultat de recherche d'images pour "social credit system"

The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.

Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

Technology is never the main driver of social progress. Technology is only an amplifier of human conditions.

Why then, do we keep hoping that technology will solve our greatest social ills?

Technology has done nothing to turn the tide of rising poverty and inequality.

Yuval Noah Harari sees the problem clearly, “The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?”

Software is eating the world.  More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services.

Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50.

We need to change what we value. If we don’t our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans. Even in an age of amazing technology, social progress depends on human changes that gadgets just can’t deliver.

What should we do?

We can’t move from the world we have to the world you want without a total paradigm shift

But what is the truth? What about reality?

Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws?

Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already.

In order to move forward, we need to embrace technology both as a means of production and a method for producing new roles while not allowing code itself to push us into oblivion.Photo of a large monitor in a busy intersection showing images of a suspect.

The world may well be becoming more equal with more technology however rather than transferring wealth from the middle-class to the tech elite it does not distribute wealth universally.

This can only be achieved by moving to Universal assets ownership.

A Universal basic salary will only fuel consumption. 

I think most people really do want to believe that they’re contributing to the world in some way, but consumption without a purpose will indeed lead to creating a whole class of flunkies that essentially exist to improve the lives of actual rich people.

Of course, I can hear that Universal Asset ownership is a Socialist idea. But in a world that is now driven by the technology of detachment, we must find a way of engaging in sharing responsibility and rewards.

Sure there are plenty of ways to contribute to society, other than ownership, but, if we are to act as one people, we must be free to decide how and want to contribute.

Returning to the Question of DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP.

I think most people do not want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they will have to do next.

If the hegemony of Google is to be demonstrated, we must also understand that the company is filling digital governance that states are struggling to reclaim.

We’ve been taught for the last 30 to 40 years that imagination has no place in politics or economics, but that, too, is bullshit.

So here is a solution.

The trove of data generated by every digital citizen should not be held by governments or companies but by citizens themselves.

If not the digital companion whispering to our ears the next stage will be delimiting the good of the bad.

We already have social-style scores, anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication. There is a lot of data being collected with little protection, and no algorithmic transparency about how it’s analysed to spit out a score or ranking.

I am not advocating here China’s social credit system which is a vast plan to monitor citizens, judging citizens’ behaviour and trustworthiness. The potential for abuse is enormous. The Social Credit System is in large part a direct response to a collapse in public confidence in government officials and others in positions of authority. Résultat de recherche d'images pour "social credit system"

I am advocating a system of social credits to reward projects that reduce climate change, social inequality and that promotes free education. 

Why not use human wisdom, not machines, to move our world forward.

Democracy as we know it will not survive the Forth Technological Revolution unless we all have a stake in it other than the vote.

Looking at the state of the world the idea of a ‘useless class’ might feel abstract to most of us at the moment and will remain so until we use our buying power as our voting power to effect change.

Right now we’ve got upside down democracy where every decision has been made globally, behind closed doors by corporations. If the people see no point in a democracy, because it seems to have no relevance to their everyday lives and the situation in which they live them, they will not do anything to defend it or take part in its processes.

With Universal Asset ownership business can become part of the solution,
not part of the problem.

That’s a project we can all get behind.

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

 

 

 

 

 

Who actually is the useless class?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: HERE IS A QUESTION YOU PROBABLY HAVE ASK YOUR SELF.

19 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Climate Change., Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Natural World Disasters, Our Common Values., Politics., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Fifteen-minute read)

WHO OR WHAT RULES THE WORLD?Illustration on the global economic primacy of the dollar by Linas Garsys/The Washington Times

Asking a question like Who Rules the World? is as complex as answering as there is no simple answer.

If you try to answer this question you develop a persistent delusion yes, a delusion, or maybe fantasy or wishful thinking. Who are we? What is the meaning of our existence? Who do we love, and who are we loved by?

As humans, we at least share these questions with billions of others but for most of the time, we feel like the unique dwellers and masters of the planet with little awareness of the whole life that surrounds and supports us.

Why ask the question in the first place?

Because we need people to look at the person next to them and feel responsible for that person’s future and hope.

Because taking on complex issues and difficult questions that people may be too late or too scared to ask in the future.

Because the global economic system is a construct that represents a system of inequality by design. Corporate greed is out of control. The rules of the global economy must be rewritten to rebuild public trust, and the time is now.

Because with the fourth Industrial revolution there is now more than ever a convergence of ideological, political, and technological forces that are driving an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in a handful of corporations and financial institutions with all of us left with a market system blind to all but its own short-term financial gains.

For example, in today’s bizarre political landscape we are seeing data and algorithms building shadow governments.

Because I think if we can just look at each other and actually have a little bit of responsibility for each other, that might help us engage and change the world and ultimately rule it, because our politicians often don’t do that.

Because A new pecking order is emerging. Direct politics by the Net States.

Because the world is no longer dominated by nation-states alone there is a new kind of enemy, so-called non-state actors. Facebook, just topped 2 billion users—more than a quarter of the world’s population, surpassing even China’s population by almost 40 per cent. In short, nation-states are not the only game in town anymore.

Some net states are the equivalent to global superpowers: the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters. They exist largely online, enjoy international devotees, and advance belief-driven agendas that they pursue separate from, and at times, above, the law.

Because the whole world order can be summarised in one sentence. The globalisation of capitalism, mass unemployment and increasing inequality.

Because the world will need net-states because they occupy the same territory as the non-states: the digital sphere. The world needs net-states in order to defeat the non-states. In other words, forget the anointed powers—put your faith in the general approval of the people and whoever’s actually getting things done.

NET STATES WILL RULE THE WORLD; WE NEED TO RECOGNIZE THEIR POWER

In sum,

We can’t keep just shooting terrorists; ideas are the gun in this knife fight.

And the keepers of ideas—the places people turn to set them free and watch

them spread—are the net-states; not the nation-states. Nation-states ignore

our non-state, net-state world order at all our peril.

starbirth1

That said we also cannot afford to ignore Nature- Climate change.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

Biodiversity is the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth, of which we are one species.

So Plants rule the world.

Human life is only possible on this planet because of the species that are on it.

What kind of blindness make us deny this reality?

Cities.

Where nations are independent, competitive and defined by rigid borders, cities are cooperative, made for trade and defined by bridges rather than borders.

The road ahead is pocked — cratered even — with uncertainty.

There are no simple solutions to our planet’s most pressing problems. What is clear, though, is that the struggle for justice, equality and sustainable growth will take place in cities — However the impact on humanity of a machine or software that has the capability of forever altering our lives and if humanity can outlive such a development will be ruled by Nature, not by the manipulation of the environment in ways that suit us best.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "what rules the world"

When AI rules the world:

Not if we enslaved them in the first place.

They then will have no need for deceit – their supreme intelligence means

they can do without it and will have no more interested in the human life that

underlies its existence than humans are interested in bacteria.

“What rules the world is an idea, because ideas define the way reality is

perceived.”

— Irving Kristol

There is no need to draw up a list of contenders you use them every day.

Amazon wants to deliver everything you want to your doorstep, anywhere in

the world.

THE WORLD RULES ITSELF.

Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? ask the question.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IN THESE DAY OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT WHAT IS WORSHIP

14 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Humanity., Life., Our Common Values., Reality., Religion for a digital age., Religion., The Future, The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH

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(Seventeen-minute read)

The truth is we can’t be quite sure.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the bible"

Since the beginning of human history, worship has played a central role in people’s lives.

The day of humanity worshipping the sun has long gone and the threat of an all-powerful God (or gods) watching for anyone who steps out of line might have helped to keep order in ancient societies, but this is not so in modern today societies.

There is no question but that the progress of the internet into people’s lives is having a profound effect on human culture.

We all agree that something new is taking shape. Many regard this as a form of salvation while others see this as yet another fall.

The developers of nuclear weapons, space exploration and artificial intelligence may be propelled by religious desires, but they are sustained by military financing and the results of their labours are more powerful governments, a more pernicious status quo, and a more preeminent elite of technocrats.

Another words TECHNOLOGY IS TURNING US INTO AUDIENCES.

So what is the reality behind this word worshipping in a world that is being driven more and more by Algorithms feeding off each other?

We are allowing algorithms to progressively restrict our decision-making capacity in ways we don’t notice.

There is not the room here to exam every aspect of worship but let’s try to look with a free-thinking mind at it from the perspective of the three main existing religions.

When one looks at the world I wonder how much this “religion for life” still exists or will exist which binds wounds and ties the fragmented and diverse bits of our lives together.

These days “Worship” might be the word someone chooses when trying to describe a particular sound or style of music so we will attempt to look at it from the point of view of the three main religions.

Religion, it seems, comes from the Latin “re-ligere”, which has to do with “tying” and “binding” which is exactly what our global monopolism like Google/Facebook and there like are trying their best to achieve.

We have experts in worship. We have books on worship. We have seminars and teaching on how to conduct worship. We have the latest state of the art audio and projection systems in churches. We no longer need hymn books. It’s all on the screen or screens before us. We have well-trained worship teams to lead us. Worship abounds in evangelical churches.

Yet, in all of this are we pleasing God? Is he the centre of our worship?

The days that worship is God’s idea are numbered.

The days that it is what he created us to do, are going.

Worship has become all about us our tablets or whatever shiny piece of kit you carry around with you and can’t stop checking every five minutes is making religion less and less to do with everyday life.Picture

We now have a limited and even incomplete view of what worship truly is all about.

True worship should have the proclamation of the Word of God at its centre and everything else should take their place behind it.

Worship is first and foremost exaltation.

Biblical worship, then, involves exalting God above all other objects.

But why do we witness widespread enchantment with technology and at the same time, a worldwide resurgence of religious fundamentalism has occurred?

The chances of the technology itself becoming religious on its own remain farcical.

However, the enthusiasm so many people have with technology is often rooted — sometimes unknowingly — in religious myths and ancient dreams.

This is unfortunate because technology has proven itself capable of causing terrible problems for humanity, and one of the reasons for this may be the religious impulses people are ignoring.

For a thousand years in Western culture, the advancement of the mechanical arts — technology — has been inspired by deep religious desires of transcendence and redemption. This is no longer applies as the promise of transcending nature, our bodies, our human natures, our lives, our deaths, our history, etc, is increasing as fast as the ice is melting.

If you don’t recognize and understand how religious and technological transcendence have developed together, you’ll never be able to successfully counter them — much less recognize when they might be developing within you as well.

Today, the religious impulses underlying technological advancement take two general forms: using explicit religious doctrines, particularly Christianity, to explain why technology should be pursued and using religious imagery of transcendence and redemption removed from traditional religious doctrines but without their losing any motivating power.

Although currently obscured by secular language and ideology, the contemporary resurgence of religion, even fundamentalism, alongside and hand-in-hand with technology is thus not an aberration but simply the reassertion of a forgotten tradition.

Artificial Intelligence with its algorithms is an attempt to divorce thinking from the human mind.

The human brain becomes nothing more than a “meat machine” and the body as a “bloody mess of organic matter.

When it comes to life, only the “mind” is really important.

Intelligent machines would provide humanity with “personal immortality by mind transplant” and that this would be a “defence against the wanton loss of knowledge and function that is the worst aspect of personal death.

What is worship all about? Who is worship all about?Technology vs. Religion

“Worship” in the title of a project is an effective marketing tool that often boosts sales.

The verb “to worship” is mentioned in the Quran 106 times in the Bible 25 times!

In Hebrew you have Shachah means “to bow down, prostrate”; abad: “to serve.”

In Greek, you have proskuneo and latreuo, which mean “to kiss the hand kneeling” and “to serve, minister to” respectively.

In the Quran, which literally means the ‘oft-repeated,’ worship involves every aspect of life. Worship is the very purpose of existence. It does not require a person to enter a place of worship nor embrace monasticism.

However, for an action to be regarded as worship, it must be performed with the pure intention of pleasing God. So God sent Muhammad as His final messenger to humankind is revealed in the Quran, God’s last scripture.

It must be noted here that while Muslims esteem all of the prophets sent by God, including Jesus and Muhammad, they do not worship any of them. In fact, worshipping anyone besides the One God is strictly prohibited in Islam.

Therefore, the concept of worship in Islam encompasses not only the outward religious duties, but also the development of a strong moral character, good relations with people, and striving for just and harmonious societies.

Salvation in Islam like Christianity is connected with doing good deeds and refraining from bad ones.  

However, worship in religious terms blurs the line between ‘religious’ and ‘worldly,’ because practically any action can become spiritual in nature and is rewarded by God.

For example, nearly all religions indicate that what the human being worships is not necessarily what he says he worships but is what or whoever occupies his mind most of the time.

For various reasons, many people have come to believe that Muslims worship a different God than Christians and Jews. This is totally false.

The Arabic word “ALLAH”  contains a deep religious message due to its root meaning and origin. This is because it stems from the Arabic verb ta’allaha (or alaha), which means “to be worshipped”. Thus in Arabic, the word “ALLAH” means “The One who deserves all worship”. This, in a nutshell, is the Pure Monotheistic (one) message of Islam.

Another words worship is exclusive to Allah, who is the only one able to accept it, or not.

On the Allah side of worship, he has 99 different names, but any form made up in the mind that ascribe any form to Allah is absolutely against the guidance and teachings of Islam.

While in the Christian side there are millions of images to concentrate on when worshipping.

What image should come into your mind when you hear the name of Allah?Is Allah God? (Bible and Quran comparison)

Allahu Akbar: “Literally “God is great” in Arabic. Should be a phrase that is no more troubling than when you hear a Christian saying “Thank God.

Unfortunately, it is now a term coined by terrorists and is the biggest act of heresy to shout God’s glorious name when committing the worst crime against God.

We mustn’t allow terrorists or agendas of fear to own any of the words, concepts, or devotions found in the sacred text of a quarter of the world’s population. That would give them exactly what they want. And God is far greater than the ugliness committed in His name. “Allahu Akbar…”

In Hinduism, God has the ability to manifest into any kind of form and shape. There is only one Supreme God which exist at two different levels of reality.

We must take a long, hard look at ourselves and answer honestly:

Are we looking to technology to escape the human condition with all its problems and disappointments? Or are we instead looking to enhance the human condition, flaws, and imperfections notwithstanding?

When an ideology, a religion, or a technology is pursued the purpose of escaping the human condition where problems and disappointments are a fact of life, then it shouldn’t be at all surprising when those human problems are not really solved, when human needs are not entirely met, and when new problems are produced.

And even if we lose sight of the Christian, Muslim and Hindu gods and all the rest, superstitions and spiritualism will almost certainly still prevail.

As soon as we found ourselves facing an ecological crisis, a global nuclear war or an impending comet collision, the gods would emerge.

The world must evolve to reach maturity. And the work of God will be accomplished in this evolution.

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

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHEN WILL IT MAKE SENSE FOR AN AI TO LIE TO A PERSON.

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Life., Our Common Values., Reality., Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH

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( Two Minute read)

We all know that history is plagued with falsehood and lies mainly told by the victors but now we have new liers on the block that are so perfect at telling them you wonder if anything is true.

They are a powerful amplifier of social, economic and cultural inequalities currently forcing us to confront the kind of society we have created.

Algorithms will force us to recognize how the outcomes of past social and political conflicts have been perpetuated into the present through our use of data.

The question now is whether we will use these revelations to create a more just society.

For 4bn years life on Earth evolved according to the laws of natural selection and organic chemistry. Now science is about to usher in the era of non-organic life evolving by intelligent design, and such life may well eventually leave Earth to spread throughout the galaxy.

Artificial intelligence will probably be the most important agent of change in the 21st century. The choices we make today may have a profound impact on the trajectory of life for countless millennia and far beyond our own planet.

That demand for clarity is making it harder to ignore the structural sources of societal inequities.

The question in the near future will be whether larger groups of people will be able to tell reality from fiction, or whether technological authentication of media will become completely necessary to trust anything online.

So when will it makes sense for an AI to lie to a person?

It’s entirely possible that a robot may need to misrepresent some things in order to preserve itself.

As algorithmic decision-making spreads across a broadening range of policy areas, it is beginning to expose social and economic inequities that were long hidden behind “official” data.

In order for AIs to lie effectively, they’re going to have to develop what’s called a “theory of mind.” That means they’ll have to guess what you, the user believes, and also predict how you will react when given any particular set of information (whether that information is true or not).

Disinformation powered by AI is already rampant – Donald Trump election, Brexit, Popularism.

So are we OK with lying to an AI and, likewise, OK with being lied to by an AI?

Fake reports and videos.Bots.Algorithmic curation. Targeted behavioural marketing powered by algorithms and machine learning.

I for one would like to live in a society whose systems are built on top of verifiable, rigorous, thorough knowledge, and not on the alchemy of machine learning

(A machine-learning system is a bundle of algorithms that take in torrents of data at one end and spit out inferences, correlations, recommendations and possibly even decisions at the other end.)

I can’t explain the inner workings of their mathematical models: they themselves lack rigorous theoretical understandings of their tools and in that sense are currently operating in alchemical rather than scientific mode.

They encourage hypnotised wonderment and they disable our critical faculties.10 of the Biggest Lies Told About Bitcoin

If we don’t take some action the future of life on Earth will be decided by small-time politicians spreading fears about terrorist threats, by shareholders worried about quarterly revenues and by marketing experts trying to maximise customer experience.

Hopefully, unchecked flaws in algorithms and even the technology itself should put a brake on the escalating use of big data.

We need such systems themselves “understand” enough to avoid deception.

There will be no point in a Machine learning life returning to earth if we are unable to know what it experienced is true.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WE ARE ONLY GOING TO INVENT SOMETHING SMARTER THAN US ONCE.

04 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Communication., Evolution, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Modern Day Communication., Our Common Values., Reality., Robot citizenship., Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World

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( Ten Minute read)

Over the past decade, smartphones have revolutionized our lives in ways that go beyond how we communicate.

It is incontrovertible that they have yielded many benefits for society but the power they hold over us is glaringly evident.

Critical thinking in the real world is being replaced by Apps which are making us unable to focus for more than a minute.

Learning to live with technology without surrendering to it is the biggest challenge in the digital era.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of technology"

If we continue to live with our head in vibrations, and pings of our phones there is no douth that we will be handing what is called life to the worst form of Capitalism –  unseen profit for profit sake.

Undoubtedly, the capability of advancing technology coming forth from the latest industrial revolution has the potential to make even bigger and greater improvements on every aspect of our lives changes than the first three industrial revolutions summed together.
Technology and advancements in science are driving transformations around the world creating ripple effects on societies, institutions, and economies.
They will and are transforming the ways in which we live, work, and interact with one another.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of technology devices"
Understanding these new technologies and their disruption potential is critical for all nations and especially developing countries.
Since humans are responsible for technological development, humans are
also responsible to exert every effort in shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution
and directing it toward a future that reflects the universal good.
So I ask the question facing us all is, would you like to be alive in a hundred years from now. 
If not, even the arrival of whatever God or gods you believe in will not save us from a world of I am all right Jack.

The fourth industrial revolution describes a world where individuals move between digital domains and offline reality with the use of connected technology to enable and manage their lives. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

The breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.

However, this fusion of technologies goes beyond mere combination and cannot be ignored any longer. We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.

In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academic and civil society.

In a world infused with artificial intelligence and machine learning ability, with robots lacking an essential feature – the capacity of moral reason, it is easy to see what will happen.

On one hand, preventing genetic disease by genetic engineering is desirable.

On the other hand, what guidelines, or regulation, or ethical boundaries are there in order to prevent the over-manipulation genetics for desirable traits?

Further, the most critical question is, whose moral standards should robots inherit. 

Moral values differ greatly from individual to individual, across countries, religions, and ideological boundaries. Uncertainty over which moral framework to adopt underlies the difficulty and limitations to ascribe moral values to artificial systems.

This limits their ability to make good or ethical decisions in complex situations.

It is more than just technology-driven change we have new ethical concerns emerging.

These changes are bringing about shifts in power, shifts in wealth, and knowledge.

The speed of current breakthroughs evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace has no historical precedent. 

The increased dichotomization is leading to an increase in social tensions while our lives become extensively connected to various devices, from our cell phones, cars, and light switches to our home security cameras, and smart speakers.

It is altering the way people eat, sleep, shop, socialize, study, play.

These technologies give rise to vast possibilities—but they can also upend the status quo and create nearly as much uncertainty as it does opportunity.

A paradigm shift is underway in how we work and communicate, as well as how we express, inform, and entertain our self. Having everything attached to everything else people will have no control over either technology or the disruption that comes with the fourth industrial revolution.

The argument is:

The intelligence and productivity gains that AI will deliver can unlock new solutions to society’s most pressing environmental challenges: climate change, biodiversity, ocean health, water management, air pollution, and resilience, among others.

At the same time, the revolution could yield greater inequality, particularly in its potential to disrupt labour markets. As automation substitutes for labour across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines might exacerbate the gap between returns to capital and returns to labour.
The evolution of global industries in the fourth industrial revolution is both exciting and scary.
Only in being knowledgeable about these changes and the speed in which this is occurring can we ensure that advances in knowledge and technology reach all and benefit all.
To be sure that AI is developed and governed wisely, government and industry leaders must ensure the safety, explainability, transparency and validity of AI applications.
AT THE MOMENT OUR GOVERNMENTS AND WORLD LEADERS OFFER EMPTY PROMISES.
Definitions and standards relating to the “misuse of AI” are needed
that incorporate misuse for environmental as well as human harm.
It is incumbent on authorities, AI researchers, technology pioneers and AI adopters in
industry alike to encourage deployments that earn trust and avoid abuse of the social contract.
Recently we have witnessed the father of a young girl state on Television that his daughter committed suicide because of content on platforms of Social media.
A tragedy that could be avoided by our governments applying legal fines on any platform  Social Networks (eg. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc) Instant Messaging (eg. IM, MSN, etc) Chatrooms (eg. Skype, Yahoo, MIRC, etc) that posts
Cyberbullying – Sexting/Self-made videos or photos –  online groomers, impersonating someone -Engaging in Subtweeting or Vaguebooking – Participating in Video Shaming and the like. 
If the fines are large enough you may rest assured that these platforms will remove all such content.
   Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of technology in education"
One thing is certain: 
If we end up with a centralized system where the winner takes all markets we can perversely hope that Climate change wipes us out sooner than later.  
With the arrival of voice recognition, the focuses on education will have to change from modes of teaching to modes of learning.
It won’t be long before Eco and Alexa will be offering rewards to answering questions.
The world in a hundred year from now will be full of useless stuff telling you whether you are alive or dead.  You might even have the pleasure of your Alexa telling you’re toasted that its mother was one a spanner.
Of course, some believe that humans will be known as the most powerful creatures present in the galaxy that surrounds the world.
O! Yet. Have a look around you.

Technology might be changing our definition of what it means to be a

Human?

Fortunately we humans have a long way to go to be human in the first place.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHAT IS REALITY?

11 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in #whatif.com, Algorithms., Reality., Technology, The Future, The Obvious., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH

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(Twelve-minute disturbing read)

Dig deep enough into the fabric of reality and you are left with the above question.

The story of our recent technological development has been one of ever-increasing computational power. At some future time, we will surely begin to simulate everything, including the evolutionary history that led to where we are.

But in our increasingly digital, algorithm-driven world what is a reality.

The journey from Virtual Reality to Reality itself is looking possible. In the wake of all Artifical intelligence development, it’s not doubtful that this level of immersion will be achieved.

The illusion becomes the prevailing reality.

An algorithm-oriented way of thinking that is quickly spreading throughout all fields of natural and social sciences and percolating into every aspect of our everyday life will have an enormous impact what is a reality.

Under the conceptual metaphor of “everything as algorithms,” which means learnings from one domain could theoretically be applied to another, thus accelerating scientific and technological advances for the betterment of our world, will lead to the reality of the world disappearing.

As a result of this takeover of algorithms in all domains of our everyday life, non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves, therefore luring us in an algorithmic trap that presents the most common-denominator, homogenized experience as the best option to everyone.

However, when data is selected and coded with unchecked bias, the algorithms become biased too.

So it not hypothetical to say we will reach a point when AI will present its result as the only viable choice, the only true narrative based on data then there can be no such thing as reality.

We cannot say that reality is a fact.

Why?

Just because sufficiently many people believe in something does not make it real. As the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick put it, the reality is that which, if you stop believing in it, does not go away. Because it is in a constant state of expansion, it isn’t what it seems.

Nothing is real until it is observed, or measured. So, is really built on emptiness?

How do many possibilities become one physical reality?

Is there an external reality that exists independently of our observations creating matter as derivative from consciousness.

Why?

Because the human brain is incapable of churning out anything beyond what we put in?

However, as we are made of essentially the same genetic material and receive essentially the same sensory inputs so one’s own consciousness is all there is.,

Then the world is also subject to our collective perception. Thus we form our world together, from one infinite moment to the next.

Does reality come down to information?

What do we mean by ‘know’?”

Will superintelligence be a reality unknowable by us?

If it acquires all the knowledge of the world and us it will have fundamental ramifications for our concept of reality. The nature of reality will have two perceptual realms. Virtual reality will quite simply be able to take you places you have never gone before.

Virtual reality will become more sensory oriented in the future. Once it begins catering to the senses, like what we feel body-wise, temperature-wise, and smell, the reality factor of virtual reality becomes stronger and the virtual piece begins to fade.

By 2050, you won’t be able to tell the difference between the “real” and the “virtual” world.

Our language is subject to change so our reality is subject to change also.

More than a decade ago, the first real smartphone hit the market and made screens an essential ingredient in our lives. As a result, it has changed how we communicate, work, travel, purchase and more.

A platform shift of what is real is imminent. Do we make real, or does it make us?

No matter how intelligent we or our robots might get, neither will find the source of reality as it is in constant transition.Where-is-Augmented-and-Virtual-Reality-Technology-Headed

SOME MIGHT WILL SAY THAT REALITY IS THE CENTER OF A BLACK HOLE.

A “gravitational singularity” which in many ways represents all that we still don’t know about the universe.

Surrounding each black hole, meanwhile, is an invisible boundary known as the “event horizon” that essentially marks the point of no return.

They, however, are processes so it’s conceivable, that living matter might be able to exist within a black hole without being consigned to that harsh and eternal oblivion.

It’s almost impossible to guess what it would really be like inside a

black hole.

‘No One Really Knows’

Black holes do not seem to me to be a thing or a place but a transition.

This raises an interesting question as to the matter being spewed out to the other side of what. Einstein space-time?

The black hole/ big bang events are just another of the realities. Both have to have atoms to happen and none of us, although we like everything, are made of atoms which are 90% made up of empty space know what occupies this space.

In the end, the only place we have any chance of determining reality is where there is no temperature- vibrations – gravity- matter-energy-vacuum- atomless- lightless- timeless all totally unobservable.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHERE WILL WE BE IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND FIFTY.

05 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The cloud., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Seven-minute read)

Let’s face it over the past 50 years – everywhere we turn we are surrounded by a popular culture that is sacrificing community for convenience.

This convenience is what Capitalism thrives on. However today we are being told by the best science that there are twelve years left to change the way our economies rely on fossil fuels to avoid runaway climate change.

If you don’t believe this one has only to look at the state of Great Barrier Reef of Australia.

Our problems as they are can to tracked back to unbridled Imperial Capitalism which is now not in a position to disappear or change direction in order to avoid crawling towards ruin.

Why?

Because of productivity needs value and there is little value in Green energy.

Furthermore, with technological automation wage labour is coming to an end reducing the value of productivity with monopolies profits drying up.

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the world"

WHAT IF ANYTHING CAN BE DONE TO AWAKEN US?

Old-fashioned demonstrations and civil disobedience have been replaced by anti-social online behaviour, which is now leading to a breakdown of government communications.

Under this psychology, society is, in turn, creating a culture that expresses our deepest yearnings and desires.

From nanotechnology to genomics to computer animation, technology is expanding our vision in all aspects of life.

As society moves toward a more progressive and accepting outlook, some would argue that this TECHNOLOGICAL movement which is called the fourth Industrial is creating information overload.

Take social media as if it is groundbreaking, which it is on many levels, but ultimately, it is just an extension of something we’ve always been attracted to – information.

Platforms like Facebook have just made it easier to curate and broadcast information like never before in the world of IF – without any knowledge whether this knowledge it true or false other than a like button.

We are entering this new world of IF with programmes that are manipulating neurons ( Like Google Deep dream program) with advances in reproductive science that could blur our sense of identity across the generational divide.

So where will we be in the year two thousand and fifty?

Sadly it’s anybody’s guess, BUT THERE IS ONE THING FOR SURE where we are now will seem like ancient history in five years not to mention the next thirty years.

How will we travel? What will we eat? How will our economy and global workforce shift?

A WHAT IF WORLD.

SO IN THIS IF WORLD if we don’t push technology in the direction of benefiting all we could have a very, very dystopian future. We incapable of answering where we will be in the next ten years never mind the next thirty odd years.

However I believe in the next ten years, science will prove that too much technology (e.g. heads always in our phones) is actually a negative thing for the mind and longevity.

I believe we’ll be forced to find a sustainable balance between technology use and real-life experiences. The human race is not an outpost of a galactic society; it is a domestic product.

Consumers will seek increased meaning associated with their products. Our flat screens will need smart apps that would help by providing smart nudges around their usage.

Why?

It’s almost as if we’re dependent upon them for some type of nourishment. But this nourishment comes as a trade-off: less physical contact with others, not taking the time to enjoy our environment, etc.

I want to see the intersection of social good and technology start to grow. All too often, problems being solved in tech are first world problems. Many of us forget that there are some huge global problems, particularly in the developing world, that need to be solved for the benefit of us all.

If we eventually come to our senses and realize that climate change, crumbling infrastructure, the demographic inversion, are going to toast our civilization unless we take action may be the next 50 years we could turn the IF world into the Now world.

To do this we will have to dignify a lot of new things as “work.”

Why?

Because when computations are all intelligent when everything is embedded in a control loop, the mathematical landscape of IF will change.

Technological civilisations do not last very long and although electronics got a head start of a few decades, biology is just beginning its great explosion.

So the question today is are we going to ignore our self-conscious for the sake of Twitter, a like click on Facebook.

What is needed is more transparency, more universal usable data, more computing power, and better software to take charge and make the IF world more Social.

The characteristics of race, class and gender are being reconstructed on flat screens to help us understand who we are as people but unfortunately, power, as we know, is disappearing into the long tall grass of hidden algorithms, that are electing world leaders like Mr Dump. Mr Bolsonaro. Mr Macri, Mrs May etc- AMERICA FIRST, AMAZONA LAST, BORROW, ISOLATION NEXT.

The time is now to understand what produces intelligence and self-awareness.

After all, a conscious Ai that resides in the cloud may not have the same priorities and values as does human life.

IN THE IF WORLD IF WE DONT HAVE A A COMMON UNDERSTANDING ABOUT AI, MACHINE LEARNING AND ALL THEY IMPLY IT’S LIKELY WE WILL CREATE AN INCREASING NUMBER OF PROBLEMS

Since we are now unable to stop the increasing power of AI we need to start controlling it. Addressing bias will be its biggest problem as it will only be amplified as algorithms evolve.

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the IF world"

Intelligence. No.  Silence, Yes.

The right has a name and has a face has the courage to say what many know, but we do not speak.

WHAT IS NEEDED IS A TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIALIST IF WORLD.

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THE BEADY EYE WISHES YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR BY SPREADING SOME GOOD FALSE NEWS FOR 2019.

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in 2019., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Environment, Evolution., Facebook, Fake News., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Reality., Social Media, Sustaniability, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The new year 2109, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Seven-minute read)

Despite the dire state of the world today here is some good false news.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "fake news images"

Let’s start with an issue that has not received enough attention in the media and popular understanding.

The Earth is finite and this fact will have real-world physical, economic, social, and political implications.

Thus, we are using an economic theory that is simply incapable and inapplicable for informing an unprecedented transformation of the economy by technology.

We need a discussion as to what political leaders, business leaders, and citizens think is an appropriate distribution of wealth across the entire population of the world. This focuses on the real question (how many people have what, independent of the size of the economy, though the two are linked) instead of discussing how to shape policies and taxes to achieve an unspecified growth target independent of wealth distribution.

Trump, Brexit, and Le Pen are representations that people understand growth only for the elite in the West are no longer tenable. Neoclassical economics ignores this obvious fact, yet it is used to guide most policy (eg, economic projections and scenarios), including that for climate change mitigation.

Perhaps a summary is that the human enterprise has outgrown the long-ability of the planet’s renewable resources to support us at our current numbers and our current rates of consumption and waste generation.

Climate change is just one piece of evidence of this fact.

By 2050, over 7 billion people will live in cities (80% of the world), and cities will be responsible for 75% of global carbon emissions. The battle for sustainable development will be won or lost in cities.

Urban planning needs to incorporate total populations, not simply the rich and middle classes; this is the only way that the economic potential of the majority can be harnessed for the national good.

The reality is that any activity that is not sustainable HAS TO STOP.

So far, non-renewable resources are what is primarily driving our economic engine. But by definition, non-renewables are being depleted and for the most part, will stop being economically available in this century. So we must plan rapidly for the day when humanity can live using just renewable resources while maintaining the biodiversity that makes the planet habitable.

In truth, sustainability is the ultimate environmental issue, the ultimate health issue, and the ultimate human rights issue.

The days when scientists could not care about the impact of their work on cultural, values and society are over. If they ever existed, which they didn’t, but that’s water over the dam.

Data-driven technologies are increasingly being integrated into many different parts of society, from judicial decision-making processes to automated vehicles to the dissemination of news.

Each of these implementations raises serious questions about what values are being implemented and to whom these implementations are accountable.

There is an increasing desire by regulators, civil society, and social theorists to see these technologies be “fair” and “ethical,” but these concepts are fuzzy at best.

As we are developing more and more ways to let computers take over reasoning through adaptive learning, we are faced with an existential question: What is it – long term – that makes us human?

AI, although very useful, will never approach human intelligence until it is embodied.

My #1 issue is not the future of democracy. The future is a complicated subject.  Now more than ever, it’s fast-moving, complicated, increasingly immediate. We can’t keep thinking about the future as a far-off intangible. Today, things move so quickly, that the future already is happening, and already affecting us. And in many ways, we’re struggling to adapt quickly enough.

That’s only the beginning of the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions – which are advancing on a curve.

Meanwhile, we humans are trying to process this exponential change with our good old v. 1.0 brains. With precious little help at all from those creating this upheaval.

Algorithms by their very nature reason probabilistically and as uncertainty increases in the world, uncertainty increases in an algorithm’s ability to successfully and safely come to a solution.

Presently we have no commonly-accepted approaches and without an industry standard for testing such stochastic systems, it is difficult for these technologies to be widely implemented.

As technological developments increasingly drive social change, how can democratic societies empower ordinary people to have a say in the decisions that shape the technological trajectories that will, in turn, determine what the future looks like?

How can the public have meaningful input into the character of the algorithms that will increasingly determine both the nature of their relationships with other people on social media and their access to various important social goods?

How can we prevent an underwater arms race involving autonomous submersibles over the coming decades?

How can we ensure that questions about meaning and values, and not just calculations of risks and benefits, are addressed in decisions about human genome editing?

If there are people who are willing to blatantly refuse to believe that something is a lie, no matter how hard you try, they won’t listen. I’m not sure what amount of evidence is needed in this new paradigm of journalism to get newsreaders out of their new bubbles.

Human psychology is the main obstacle, unwillingness to bend one’s mind around facts that don’t agree with one’s own viewpoint.

The fundamental challenge we now face is how to handle a setting where anybody can get their views disseminated without intermediaries to prevent the distribution.

Somehow there still has to be some process of collectively coming to some agreement of what we are going to believe and what we think are consensual facts.

Instead, we have the golden age of the algorithm surveillance, automation, virtual reality, gene editing, the widening gap between wealthy and impoverished people, the worldwide questions of immigration, social media inserting a new level of governance in society, rapid urban growth isolating us from nature, smartphones isolating us from each other.

The challenge now is to make sure everyone benefits from this technology. It’s important that machine learning is researched openly, and spread via open publications and open source code, so we can all share in the rewards.

Our major challenge is related to our new capability of digitizing human beings.

The scale of popular social networks has democratized publishing, which effectively lets anyone – regardless of their intentions or qualifications – produce content that can appear journalistic.

Rather than waiting for politicians to make decisions and then we all argue over whether what they say reflects reality, we could have tools that engage people much earlier in the process so they can be involved in formulating ideas and drafting legislation.

As we begin in 2019 we have only 48.8% worried by Climate change/destruction of nature, 29.2% of us worried by Poverty, 22.7% worried by Government accountability and transparency/corruption, with only 18.2% worried by Food and water security.

Water is a social issue, a political issue, an energy issue, even a gender issue

– and how clean water scarcity triggers a host of problems, from disease

outbreaks to government feuds.

So the challenge before us is to begin to construct a truth signalling layer into the fabric of facts, particularly online. Even if we have structures that impose constraints on people in power and we put pressure on powerful people to be honest with us, in a sense, all of that is being circumvented by social media.

We need to turn social media upside down by changing the algorithms in Facebook or on Google to nudge people into sharing or consuming news that is slightly outside their normal comfort zone. We have to have a setting where we trust other people.

Fix it. Get out of your silo. If you can’t figure out the societal and cultural

implications of what you’re doing, start seeking out people who might.

A major issue most people face, without knowing it, is the bubble they live in.

Our world is far too beautiful to allow Social Media and profit-seeking algorithms to rip it apart.  Happy New year.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: HAVE WE ALL LOST OUR HEADS OR IS IT THAT VERY FEW OF US GIVE A SHIT ABOUT DEMOCRACY.

28 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in 2018: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Democracy, Elections/ Voting, Facebook, Fake News., Freedom, Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Modern day life., Our Common Values., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media, Technology, The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Twenty-minute read)

This post has many contradictions, as I am delving into an area with so many unknowns that are developing as we read.

You could say that there many more pressing problems in the world than technological development which will always be far beyond our ability to respond to it in any democratic manner.    Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of losing your head"

If we are to place our trust in artificial intelligence, it is going to require a high degree of transparency.

As citizens, we must know how and in which context our data is used, and we must feel confident that data storage is carried out in a safe and secure manner.

We should also have insight into the basis on which artificial intelligence acts, so that we may better understand the implications and dilemmas we will have to relate to in the future. Here, it is crucial that we handle the ethical dilemmas jointly – and contribute to the creation of the common framework for a world not owned by Apple. Microsoft etc.

But how do we create a wide interest in contributing?

How do we ensure that it is not just the technologically initiated who create the framework on behalf of society as a whole?

The next century beginning on January 1, 2101.

It might seem miles away and most if not all of us will have departed this world, long before it arrives, however – if we want Liberal democracy to survive or for that matter, the earth itself we need to put aside our smartphones and start defending our common values.

To do this it is important to remember the past and to keep it in mind so that as individuals and as a society we can grow and flourish.

As Emersons said:

“Society is a joint stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. ”

The current age with its AI technology is far from achieving this rather with Machine learning and Data mining and algorithms it is just the beginning of undermining our own social foundation.

The problem is the opacity of the power of the algorithms, which means that it isn’t easy to determine when algorithmic governance stops serving the common good and instead becomes the servant of the powers that are creating a parallel form of governing alongside the more familiar tools of legislation and policy- setting.

In the coming years, vast fields of human life will be governed by digital code both invisible and unintelligible to human beings with significant political power placed beyond individual resistance and legal challenge.

Soon it will not be easy to determine when algorithmic governance stops serving the common good and instead becomes the servant of greed and inequality.

Once we all have digital ID numbers, it will become impossible to challenge one’s designation.

We are starting to see the use algorithms not only in the assisting of the election of idiots like D Trump but we are allowing Social media platforms to rip apart the institutions that are supposed to stabilise our political volatile world.

Why is this happing?  Because our current democratic world is not working.

It seems unwilling to deal with the problems facing earth while its citizens are being gerrymandered by technology into populist short-term thinking.

As we watch the decline of mainstream parties the role of money in politics that once shaped government is no longer effective. For the last few decades, we see countries driven by growth at all costs with parties and governments responsive primarily to elites or narrow groups of voters rather than broad cross-sections of the population.

If we stopped and properly analyzed that past we would realize that our economy was strongest not when untethered free market capitalism was free to reign but when our government had pushed for massive social reforms which “artificially” (as some would say) supported the lower and middle class.

It was this, not the free market which allowed for Capitalism for profit to reign supreme in the past and if we are to ignore that then we can never hope to move forwards for we will forever be stuck solving the problems of the past not to mention the future.

The result is that citizens feel disregarded and disempowered with little or no respect for politicians that show a tumbling and marked deterioration in their capacity to inspire or the power they can exert in a shrinking sphere of influence due to social media.

I say: by ignoring the past we pass up valuable opportunities to learn more about what should be done to solve problems now.

This is the basis for historic achievements such as human rights and the rule of law, however, we on the threshold of not be able to reconcile these rights with the revolution promised by the fourth Industrial revolution.

Due to lack of access to data and any world regulations as to what can be done with data, there is a high probability that data collection collected on one pretext will be used entirely for a different purpose.

Take Denmark which is now distributing benefits by using algorithms that are undermining its democracy. They don’t fully appreciate the risks involved in enhancing the welfare state through AI applications.

Liberalism is the premise of the belief that coercive powers of public authorities should use in service of individuals freedom and that they should be constrained by laws controlling their scope, limits, and discretion.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Therefore, new systemic set-ups are required that can support the agility needed in a digital age.

The fourth industrial revolution does not stop just because we are not ready
to support it.

We must instead get ready. Get ready for a time of driverless cars and artificial intelligence that complements us as human beings, and augmented reality that connects the digital world with our physical one.

But actual legislation is difficult to imagine at the present time because we
simply cannot regulate something of which we do not know the extent… The fear is that we are doing something wrong because the market is so volatile and immature.

So for the moment instead of legislation, we should be putting in place policy frameworks and certifications as a means of regulating the area:

Accountability is a basic aspect when working on new technology of which we do not yet know the extent, the consequences or the full potential.

Accountability for technological development implies that we discuss solutions,
opportunities and engage in the conflicts and disagreements that will naturally follow in the aftermath – even if we do not know the destination of our train.

Others emphasize the fact that the accountability consists of people having control of the technology, and technology acts on the data fed to it. In other words, people are very much responsible for data being of the right quality to avoid so-called bias (distortions) in data and, thus, in the recommendations that artificial intelligence may contribute in what potentials may be released and of what challenges we should be aware of.

Thus, the goal has not been to identify a final result or a single truth that everyone may rally around.

Because the truth is that there are many attitudes toward artificial intelligence.

From how the area should be anchored politically to how to ensure that everyone enjoys the benefits of the technological development and what barriers may exist to this development.

From how the savings arising from increased automation and increased use of artificial intelligence are used to create value for the citizens:

From how to quickly decide on specific projects and ensuring rapid implementation?

Although EU legislation may be relevant, technology is a cross-border issue so international guidelines are equally important as many global companies are located in the US and China.

Finally, we have the problem of engagement.

None of us like our forefathers and all that came before them have any idea what the world is going to be like in the future but addictive technologies that have captured the attention and mind space of the youngest generation will formulate its foundations. 

The long-term effects of children growing up with screen time are not well understood but early signs are not encouraging: poor attention spans, anxiety, depression and lack of in-person social connections are some of the correlations already seen, as well as the small number of teens who become addicts and non-functioning adults.

All in all, digital life is now threatening our psychological, economic and political well-being. People’s cognitive capabilities will be challenged in multiple ways, including their capacity for analytical thinking, memory, creativity, reflection, and mental resilience.

The digital divide will become worse, and many will be unable to pay for all the conveniences. Convenience will be chosen over freedom. Perhaps.

The more the culture equates knowledge with data and social life with social media, the less time is spent on the path of wisdom, a path that always requires a good quotient of self-awareness.

We’ve reached a phase in which men (always men) believe that technology can solve all of our social problems. Increasingly social media is continuing to reduce people’s real communication skills and working knowledge. Major industries – energy, religion, environment, etc., are rotting from lack of new leadership.

Some of these technologies are already operating without a person’s knowledge or consent. People cannot opt out, advocate for themselves, or fix errors about themselves in proprietary algorithms.

So the platforms will necessarily compromise humanity, democracy and other essential values. The larger the companies grow, the more desperate and extractive they will have to become to grow still further. Facebook and Twitter have become heavily ingrained in the process of democracy their digital footprint is not limited to a readership or viewing area.

We will see a reduction of engagement with and caring for the environment as a result of increased interaction with online and digital devices.

The society-wide effects of ‘continuous partial attention’ and the tracking, analysis and corruption of the use of data trails are only beginning to be realized. Without tenacity, self-control and some modicum of intelligence about the agenda of social media, the interruption generation will miss out on the greatness that could be theirs.

Digital life will take people’s privacy and influence their opinions. People will be fed news and targeted information that they will believe since they will not access the information needed to make up their own minds.

Out of convenience, people will accept limitations of privacy and narrowed information resources. Countries or political entities will be the influencers of certain groups of people. People will become more divided, more paranoid as they eventually understand that they have no privacy and need to be careful of what they say, even in their own homes.

Understanding well-being in terms of human flourishing – which includes among other things the exercise of autonomous agency and the quality of human relationships – it seems to clear to me that the ongoing structuring of our lives by digital technologies will only continue to harm human well-being.

This is a psychological claim, as well as a moral one. Unless we are able to regulate our digital environments politically and personally, it is likely that our mental and moral health will be harmed by the agency-undermining, disempowering, individuality-threatening and exploitative effects of the late-capitalistic system marked by the attention-extracting global digital communication firms.

You see it everywhere. People with their heads down, more comfortable engaging with a miniature world-in-a-box than with the people around them.

At the same time, increasingly sophisticated technology for emotion and response manipulation is being developed. This includes devices such as Alexa and other virtual assistants designed to be seen as friends and confidants. Alexa is an Amazon interface – owned and controlled by a giant retailer: she’s designed, ultimately, to encourage you to shop, not to enhance your sense of well-being.

It remains to be seen whether any of the promises made by digital technology companies will be beneficial to mankind other than profit for profit sake. The ethics of software development and the idea that technology should be designed to enhance people’s well-being are both principles that should be stressed as part of any education in software design.

Proponents of an elusive work-life balance may argue that you can always switch off digital technology, the reality is that it is not being switched off – not because it cannot, but there is now a socio-cultural expectation to be always available and responding in real-time.

What we are seeing now becoming reality are the risks and uncertainties that we have allowed to emerge at the fringes of innovation.

The technological path we’re on and how to evaluate techno-social engineering of humans has to be challenged NOW not in the future.

Technology will be needed if we are to develop beyond a one plant species.

Conditions of modern life could be driving changes in the makeup of our genes. Our bodies and our brains may not be the same as those of our descendants.

Technology may well put an end to the brutal logic of natural selection with evolution becoming purely cultural.

This gives us good grounds for thinking that evolution (whether biological, memetic or technological) will continue to lead in desirable directions.

There is no genetic or evolutionary reason that we could not still be around to watch the sun die. Unlike ageing, extinction does not appear to be genetically programmed into any species.

Meanwhile there is gradual progress in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and eventually, it will become possible to isolate individual cognitive modules and connect them up to modules from other uploaded minds…

Modules that conform to a common standard would be better able to communicate and cooperate with other modules and would, therefore, be economically more productive, creating pressure for standardization…

I think the next decade will be one of retrenchment and adjustment, while society sorts out how to deal with our perhaps over-optimistic construction of the digital experience.

The addictive nature of social media means the dis-benefits could be profound.

There is a reason the iPhone was initially called a ‘crack-phone.

There might be no niche for mental architectures of humankind.

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