Do you ever stop to ask yourself why you should trust the information or decisions that algorithms produce?
AI smartphones will soon be standard, using machine learning from the cloud and sooner than later smartphones will have personalized algorithms that will run even when offline.
These algorithms will be own by the companies that both sell and manufacture the phone and will, therefore, carry inbuilt biases depending on which platforms they are attached to.
Imagine a cheap little device that can compute as much data as all the brains in the world. It will have a deep and irreversible affect on everyone and there is no way of predicting what exactly will happen as the developers of such a device will have no idea what it is doing.
How far do we want to go- Robots that obey no matter what with us blind human as their allies.
Today the world faces a number of hugely complex challenges, from global warming to conflicts to nuclear weapons to rampant inequality. But one the real seismic change is how we are going to respond to each other when we all trusting algorithms to make decisions on our behalf.
Now is it the time to put in place world standards and regulations that govern the use of all biological data.
THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE WORLD IS GOING TO NEEDS AS MUCH COMPUTER POWER POSSIBLE TO TACKLE ITS PENDING PROBLEMS.
HOWEVER, IT SHOULD BE A HUMAN RIGHT TO INSPECT THE SOURCE CODES OF ANY TECHNOLOGY THAT HAS BIOLOGICAL DATA IN ITS TARGETED SOFTWARE ALGORITHMS.
IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE COST OF POWER/ENERGY WILL DRIVE THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY AND ITS SYSTEMS IN THE WORKPLACE AND COMMERCIAL WORLD MARKETS NOT TO MENTION SURVEILLANCE EITHER BY GOVERNMENTS OR OTHER ORGANISATIONS.
NOW IS THE TIME TO START DEMANDING STANDARDS.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.
There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.
The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.
In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.
Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.
New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.
All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.
Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.
All need software in the form of algorithms to run.
AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.
Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?
One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
Not surprising.
So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.
That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.
Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this.
Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.
So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.
( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)
Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)
It operates through the following segments:
Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.
Market Cap As of May 2017
$507.5 Billion
Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.
Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:
An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.
Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.
It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.
Amazon:
The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.
Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.
eBay Inc: (PayPal)
There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:
The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:
Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)
Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.
Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.)
A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.
More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.
Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.
These are the main contenders as we know them to-day
—————————————————————————————
So the Question is:
Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.
Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)
At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.
While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.
Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.
One could say that:
Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff, Google represents doming down.
All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.
So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.
I think Not.
In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.
Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us. Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.
The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.
“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”
The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches – is Google.
Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.
Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.
Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.
Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.
Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.
Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.
Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.
By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud. With one winner.
The Google Monopoly.
Once a Google client always a Google client.
How do you stop using Google?
Already impossible.
Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.
Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.
It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.
Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact. It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)
Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?
The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.
Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.
In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.
On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.
Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.
I feel that this will change in the coming years.
All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.
Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.
After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.
It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?
Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.
So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.
= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?
= Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?
= Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?
Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.
Why might this be the case – and does it matter?
Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.
It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.
It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;
Soon, however, things move on to new realms.
Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.
An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.
Social media however has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.
However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.
It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.
It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.
Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.
As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.
The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:
The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.
This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.
Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.
Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.
——
What happens to our online materials at death.
Finally: Capitalism can never be ethical.
There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.
If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service) is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.
Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.
Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.
My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.
Google it.
All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
We live in a world that is being connected and disconnected at the same time.
Two related facts.
But don’t worry we now have Algorithms that both filter and recommend.
All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.
The reality is that there’s no way of knowing where our generation is going in terms of technology and our reliance on it.
The year 2018 will be the year in which human interaction decreases the more technology increases. While social media fosters an environment of connectedness and belonging in the digital world, it also forces a disconnect between people in the real world.
With false news and social media, words are on their last legs, with print for the high jump, we will have more arse holes 2018 twittering shaping the world.
Where two or three words gather together there is a great danger that thought might be present. However we once again don’t have to worry because we have the option to log off and unplug anytime we want, so it’s up to us to decide if we want to engage with the actual world or the virtual one.
Technology may well be is a societal advancement that has enabled our generation to do things previous generations never would have thought possible.
However:
The biggest problem we have is accepting each other’s differences.
“Technology makes us forget what we know about life.”
82 per cent of smart phone users said they rarely (if ever) powered off their phones last year, while less than 43 per cent of 13- to 18-year-olds saw any value in ever going unplugged.
Why?
This is the Eternal Question to which there is no answer, and yet the only one that has to be asked.
Take a look around you.
Every day we becoming more and more desensitized. Save this Save that while saving the planet is being left to technology.
Rapid progress in machine learning has raised the prospect that algorithms will one day be able to do most or all of the mental tasks currently performed by humans.
But the real problem is how one might design a highly intelligent machine to pursue realistic human goals safely.
This is very poorly understood.
Even if advanced machine intelligence does not get ‘out of control’, it is likely to be very socially disruptive and it is more likely it could be used as a destabilizing weapon of war.
It seems that most of us are in a mental wasteland inhabited by those upon whom the portcullis ( A sudden blotting out of all normal thought) has fallen.
How did we get to a place where the content on our phones is more interesting than the world around us?
In today’s society, scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram has taken precedence over the real events scrolling through our daily lives.
Being “connected” to machinery 24/7 is affecting our ability to connect with our lives and the people around us.
Mechanical devices bait us into a make-believe life, as we are slowly being pulled away from a sense of who we are and what really matters.
Modern life is making us lonelier.
It’s not the technology that’s the problem; it’s us for abusing it.
We’ve become more and more antisocial by relying on technology too heavily.
Maybe if we look up and away from the flashing images and colors on our most recent Safari search, we will actually enjoy the company of those around us. So instead of counting the number of likes, count the memories in your life, because at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.
For the foreseeable future, it won’t be possible to take people out of the decision-making process, but the year 2018 will with the power of Profit Seeking Algorithms push us further down the road of hypnotic trance.
Technology is a valuable tool when used correctly. However, the law has to catch up with privacy and safety issues, not mention profit seeking algorithms.
We’ve all heard about the power of algorithms—but Algorithms to Live is in my book to be avoided at all costs, if we are to value what is vital to us all.
They are creating a world of such inequality that the scariest thing is the immense possibilities of these unregulated Algorithms will turn us and all that is necessary for a sustainable life into commodities to be exploited.
What can be done:
Education, Education is the only solution.
By this I mean education not for the market place but for the foundation of knowledge. Not just a narrow streamlined pipeline of mundane thoughts which doesn’t let you think outside the box and do things on your own.
Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Ecology, to name a few.
Dramatic changes are inevitable, we need to accept the fact on ground level that our education models are broken and paralyzed.
Perhaps we might well need computer algorithms to select the best candidate?
There’s no magic formula, freedom and dignity will not be found on social media, nor computed by algorithms.
There are too many parts of today’s conversations that can not be translated through technology.
Tearing apart the nation states and the world with ALGORITHMS is a
Disaster waiting to happen. No Robot with a brain full of algorithms is
going to have the the ability of an artist to have human empathy and an
appreciation of history; while also having the savvy self-awareness to
understand that their work merely takes its place in a greater culture
at large. Such art brings comfort in our modern secular world: where
spirituality seems to live in a foreign universe of yesteryear.
You’re more than a number.
how the mythical and quotidian usually overlap to
the point where the two become indistinguishable.
So join a club and organizations to make real friends.
Happy New year.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE: THERE IS ONE THING WE TAKE FOR GRANTED: AND THAT IS TIME.
( A ten minute Christmas Read)
When I decided to post this blog about what one might envisage to see in the future it turned out that it is much more difficult than one thinks to imagine what the world will be like in twenty years time.
Time will tell, but what time is it. Do you know? I don’t know what moment in time is it right now. Was there a yesterday 13.7 billion years ago? We don’t know.
If there was something that caused the big bang there has to have being something before it. Was it time? If so has time always being around, going at the same speed, or its it.
Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. We use to become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, not anymore.
The assumption behind time is that we continually experience our lives as a whole, and perceive each day, week, month or year becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole.
This is true as we enter what I call Quasior time.
These days the speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes. This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings.
So is time as simple as we think it is.
I suppose it doesn’t matter how quickly you chase after or run towards time or light, either; that speed you view it traveling at will always be the same.
Anyway, when it comes to technology our time now has a tendency to dream optimistic futures. At this point it is tempting to roll out the usual clichés – food pills, flying cars and bases on the moon – but the reality will probably be less exciting.
For instance we could be eating insects in 2037. Falling in love with an artificial intelligence (AI) operating robot that has Scarlett Johansson’s voice. To bond is human.
Our DNA could be taken at birth and all defects remedied, altered or catered for.
or
Quantum computers and other varieties of information handling will be totally integrated in all of our possessions as well as ourselves.
Far fetched it may well be.
The world in 2037 will probably be much like it is today, but smarter and more automatic. However humans are driven by the same basic needs as we were 150 years ago, food, sleep, sex, the feeling of being appreciated and loved.
Will this change in the next twenty or 150 years? No.
So what can we reasonably expect?
In general the inventions for the last twenty years have been a human strive for freedom and communication which now appears to be flawed.
We are indeed becoming more independent and less constrained by the old social norms and this will have an impact on the relationships we form.
There will not be the three letters at the end of your signature that predicts your future. Replaced by robots; doctors outclassed by algorithms that can plug into vast medical databases; and travel agents wiped out by trip-planning, flight-booking web services.
Chatbots technology has and is drastically changed the world we live in and the shift has changed business, which means it will impact employees and society as a whole just the same..
Ten years ago, social networks like Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, the Internet was still something that no one quite understood.
With technology continuing to evolve on a weekly basis seniority will no longer guarantee you a job and office politics will slowly be thrown out the window. No jobs for life.
We live in the information age; in the last five years there has been more data created since the beginning of mankind.
Many of the degrees students are acquiring these days will have little relevance to the next in 20 years. Technologically, the 20-year jump from 2017 to 2037 will be huge. Elements of our world will change beyond recognition, creating new professions we can’t yet envisage.
The web has made the concept of informal education to become a phenomenon that everyone needs to be aware of.
Telehealth platforms will make in-home patient monitoring the norm. Genome mapping will lead to personalize medicines and 3D-printing printed replacement organs will be for sale on E Bay/Amazon.
The cloud, tablets and interactive PDFs will become mainstream.
Combine all of this into quantum computer technology with AI and we are well on the way into uncharted territory of exponential power growth, of self-replicating AI.
A ‘economic, social and environmental apocalypse.’
Technology underpins everything we’ve looked at so far – food, health, relationships and work.
The best decision’ is based on the best available information, and the best information is not the opinions of vested interests.
If we don’t get leadership right, all the bright shiny objects in the future will dangle beyond our reach.
With technology advances, answers are quickly becoming a commodity.
In the future the world will be in your pocket yet still you will ask
‘Who am I?’
We will not be able to fool the mind in the way that no matter how real the experience will feel, you will always know that it haven’t happen for real.
On the other hand.
Today you can Google – just about anything – just imagine how efficient “search” will be in 20 years.
Internal systems will capture corporate learning like never before, allowing you to tap deep into the set of corporate experiences.
Of much greater value will be the ability to ask the right questions.
Homes and offices will collect and process data.
Advertising will know who you are, who you were, and who you will be.
Buildings will have artificial intelligence ‘personalities’ and will be able to ‘talk’ to people with video tiles, color-changing materials and even electronic fibers in mats and other soft furnishings.
We may even have the ability to transcend our human bodies and live entirely in the cloud, but that’s not to say we will want to do so on any large-scale.
The decentralization movement is already becoming the major human rights issue of this decade and will do more to free mankind than all but a handful of humanity can contemplate yet.
It’s not quite the time for your brain-wave analyser to say ” Happy Christmas to your robot.”
Twenty years from now there will be many changes in medicine, technology and in environment, hopefully a better state for the poor people in the world, challenges in the climate change, or maybe some combination of economic, social and environmental apocalypse will cause the collapse of existing infrastructure and telecommunications will be back to pencil and paper or something even more primitive.
Whatever happens next, it will be a great time to be alive.
If anything is impervious to technology its life.
Just how insane things have gotten we might be in for a large dose of entropies.
Happy CHRISTMAS ONE IN ALL.
All human comments appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin.
We all urgently need to consider the implications of allowing commercial interests and governments to use algorithms to analyse our habits: Not because they are becoming all-powerful, that might turn into a source of repression, but because they are exploiting us all for profit.
They make decisions about us and on our behalf.
They are now integrated into our lives. We’re already halfway towards a world where algorithms run nearly everything. As their power intensifies, wealth will concentrate towards them. They will ensure the 1 per cent-99 per cent divide gets larger.
If you’re not part of the class attached to algorithms, then you will struggle.
On the one hand, they are good because they free up our time and do mundane processes on our behalf, but the problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines we are really outsourcing thinking to the organizations that run the machines.
At the moment ignoring the fact that they are driving the cost of living up it is not about algorithms per se, but about the way society is structured with regard to data use and data privacy.
As technology evolves, everything is going up in price.
Raw materiel’s are going up leap and bounds because of a dictatorship of data, that is concentrating on how to generate the most profit.
As profit seeking algorithms power intensifies, wealth will concentrate towards them.
They do so not out of the goodness of their little algorithmic hearts, but rather because they earn a “fee” for this service.
There are many different types of algorithms at play, with different intentions and impacts, however there is one thing that is becoming quite clear day by day that they are driving the human market makers out of business by being smarter and faster.
They are upending the nature of business, how government works and the way we live, from healthcare to education.
We should not allow ourselves to become so reliant on them – and who, if anyone, is policing their use. It’s impossible to do this perfectly. How are they being used to access and interpret “our” data? And by whom?
It won’t be long before big data denies us a bank loan or considers us unfit for a surgical operation, but we can’t learn the explicit reasons because the variables that went in programming them were so myriad and complex?
There is currently an awkward marriage between data and algorithms.
Big data is even change how we think about the world and our place in it. (Penalizing people based on what they are predicted to do, not what the have done.)
Taken in the widest sense, algorithms OWNED BY MONOPOLIES are now responsible for the vast majority of activity on modern stock markets.
The well-being of our pensions, shareholdings, savings etc – are now largely determined by algorithmic vagaries.
Retail algorithms don’t scare me as we still have free will. However Algorithms are increasingly determining our collective futures.
Wherever we use computers, we rely on algorithms: With so much data around, and the ability to process it, big data is the bedrock of new companies profit.
Can we regulate them? I think not.
If you were leader of your country, what would you do?
I would have, Science, technology and inclusive innovation through education, on the national agenda. Education free and equal for all.
Unfortunately this will not happen. Even if it did Profit seeking Algorithms will still be exploiting every weakness.
There is only one defense.
WE MUST RE NATIONALIZE OUR SOCIAL SERVICES, SO ALL BENEFIT NOT JUST THE FEW. Nationalize what is important, Health, Power, Water, Education.
The key outcome of nationalization is the redirection of revenues to the country’s government instead of private operators who may export funds with no benefit to the host country.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
We are becoming less and less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change. Deforestation, Freshwater Species Extinctions, Climate Change and Destruction of Natural Resources, Large-scale Wars and Religious Conflicts.
“human cost” of the current system:
Not to Mention Technology.
What we prioritize, the way we shape our lives, affects the evolutionary future of our species, so we would do well to start asking some simple question about the untended consequences of technology?
Is it likely that in the near future humans are going to speciate? ( Humans one species and robots another. )
If you can’t explain Artificial intelligence/ Machine learning stored in the cloud and what it is doing to the public, there’s a good chance it doesn’t merit doing.
The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60.
That is only 30 odd year away.
We are entering the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological transformation that is robbing us of the essence of our humanity.
Driven by a ubiquitous and mobile internet, we are perhaps witnessing the end of human evolution as we know it.
Up to now human evolution proceeded extremely slowly and within historical memory, man has exhibited aggressive territorial behavior. Even as we bask smugly in the comforts of our smart phones natural selection to-day still ensured that only the fittest survived.
However it may not be long before computers are hooked up to the human brain with genetic trade-offs till we can’t be improved any further,
Then evolution will really have come to a stop for us. We will be the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were.
Stopping natural selection is not as important, or as depressing, as it might sound — because our evolutionary process will then be cultural.
One way or the other by the time we get there our current social, political and economic systems will have driven inequalities with profit seeking algorithms off the map, rather than reducing them.
The challenge is to manage this seismic change in a way that promotes the long-term health and stability of the planet.
The writing has been on the wall for some time.
So where do we stand:
Since 1992 CO2 emissions have jumper 62% and the global temperature is up 29%. Fresh water is down 26%. Ocean dead zones up 76% . Forestland down 300 million acres. People up 35%.
You would think that we the biggest dimwit on the planet looking at this evidence would conclude that there is something very wrong. If you dont know what it is, we have evolved beyond our needs, trampling other species in the process.
We are now at a turning point we can either push ahead on our path to destruction or we can reshape our place in nature and prosper or we can face a humongous environmental crisis.
You would think that with everything connected by the internet, it would transform how we do business and help us manage resources more efficiently and sustainable.
As you can see this is not the result.
On the contrary the way we’ve set up corporations, world organisations, where even a majority vote cannot demand that a corporation’s or world organisation policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use.
That’s because profit is the one and only motive.
It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations and world organisations are simply not allowed to.
Within the next decade, it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet. By 2025, 10% of people are expected to be wearing clothes connected to the internet and the first implantable mobile phone is expected to be sold.
However today, 43% of the world’s population are connected to the internet, mostly in developed countries.
In a world driven by short-term profit, the connectivity theory is and will remain so far off the mark it can only be believed by artificial intelligence.
Growing unease over globalization, which is evident from the number of questions being asked about the power of corporations and the adequacy of the regulations governing employment, environmental issues and taxation, is causing economic and social ills, ranging from low consumption to social and political unrest, and is damaging to any future.
There is no need for me to tell you that we are living in turbulent times.
It is clear that the old stories are dying and if we continue to poison ourselves and the planet by self-interest, fragmentation and profit for profit sake there will be no point to the age of technology other than becoming slaves.
However evolution is going on invisibly all the time. Species evolve in response to whatever environment they encounter. No despots have ever set out to select for increased or decreased longevity in the populations they control.
By 2050, the world must feed 9 billion people. Yet the demand for food will be 60% greater than it is today.
The scale of the employment challenge is vast. Rapid progress in machine learning has raised the prospect that algorithms will one day be able to do most or all of the mental tasks currently performed by humans. These advances could lead to extremely positive developments, presenting solutions to now-intractable global problems, but they also pose severe risks.
This might be the most important transition of the next century – either ushering in an unprecedented era of wealth and progress, or heralding disaster.
But it’s also an area that’s highly neglected: while billions are spent making AI more powerful. The problem of how one might design a highly intelligent machine to pursue realistic human goals safely is very poorly understood. It is estimated that there are fewer than 100 people in the world working on how to make AI safe.
If AI research continues to advance without enough work going into the research problem of controlling such machines, catastrophic accidents are much more likely to occur.
It’s generally agreed that, among the forces that led to the immense sophistication of the human brain, the most powerful was a kind of feedback loop between the growing complexity of our ancestors’ physical and social environment and the ability of our ancestors to adapt to it. But why, you may ask, has the enormous increase in complexity of our recent technological environment not had a measurable physical impact on our brains?
The rate at which we are changing our environment now has outstripped even the fastest biological evolution.
However the ineluctable laws of evolution will continue to operate, probably even more strongly, in the overcrowded, ecologically damaged world of the future. And if things get really bad, the evolutionary consequences could be extreme. Any survivors of a nuclear holocaust or an ecological catastrophe are likely to be a small and highly selected subset of today’s population.
If, for example, destruction were so widespread that people could not form viable social groups, the evolution of our descendants would inevitably be driven in the direction of brutishness.
If our technologies fail to protect us against these forces of nature our genetic heritage could fail us too, meaning human evolution will return with a vengeance.
Then again if everyone had exactly the same set of genes controlling the brain’s development, there would be no genetic differences among people on which natural selection could act–and evolution really would come to a stop!
War then would be the strong life; it is life in extremism; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.
There is no doubting the force of [the] arguments above, call me back in 3 million years time, because I may well be wrong on that one.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
It would be fair to say that most of us live in a cloud of our own importance.
However that cloud is disappearing into any other cloud which we are all creating with little or no control.
Our Ideology of normative beliefs, conscious and unconscious ideas, that are individual, group or society are under attack by this cloud. The reality is that temporary outages and slower-speed broadband that are a minor nuisance today can and will become a critical issue.
It represents the consummate disruptor to structure; a pervasive social and economic network that will soon connect and define more of the world than any other political, social, or economic.
It is the first mega trend of the twenty-first century, one that will shape the way we will address virtually every challenge we face for at least the next 100 years.
It is where we will all live, work, and play in the coming decades.
The Cloud is where your kids go to dive into online play. It’s where you meet and make friends in social networks. It’s where companies find the next big idea. It’s where political campaigns are won and lost.
You might think that this is all hog wash.
( But it appears that New Zealand does not have any politicians with brains of their own that they can rely on.
It has just recently appointed the worlds first AI virtual politician with the wonderful name of SAM. “Sam your man ” with a memory of an elephant he never forgets. ” Sam considers everyone’s position when making decisions.”
Well F… me Nick Gerristen ( The creator of Sam) there is a lot of bias in the cloud and AI algorithms are riddled with it.
You say “SAM is an enabler.” I agree. Make sure you feed it as no doubt Google will want to buy it. I see you love BIG ideas, so perhaps you should introduce Sam to Sophia and you might have a bunch of little Samson’s.
Make sure he knows all about NXT Fuels, and by all means give him a bash. I am sure the Maori would be delighted. By the way, being a politician I would have named it, Ākina. ( A Māori word meaning a call for bold action. It also conveys a spirit of watchful and active encouragement, helping others to identify pathways through their challenges.)
Back to the more serious subject:
It is time that we started to recognize some of the risks associated with this cloud technology, so as to avoid the possibility of future issues being decided by Sam and his like, who are servants of the hardware and software resources made available on the Internet as managed third-party services.
The world and us who live on it are becoming highly dependent on our Internet providers, so much so that it wont be long before we will have a fully cloud-based world.
Since no proper standards for cloud computing are set yet, it becomes almost impossible for anyone to ascertain the quality of services they have been provided with. So in the near future we will not be able to make wise decisions while choosing your personal service provider.
This, in turn, enables providers to charge customers fees proportional to their network, storage, and processing utilization.
Most issues start from the fact that the user loses control of his or her data, because it is stored on a computer belonging to someone else.
Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order even without a warrant.
Although cloud computing enhances content accessibility, this access is “increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access”.
This access, necessarily mediated through a handful of companies, ensures a progressive privatization of global cyberspace.
So we must ask the question why are we and our governments sustaining the quasi-monopolies that filter what we see depending on commercial and ideological interests they have.
The legal and regulatory landscape around cloud computing is by no means static. There are new laws being proposed that could change the responsibilities of both cloud computing tenants and providers.This creates new challenges in understanding how laws apply to a wide variety of information management scenarios.
As with all things surrounding profit it’s inevitable that some could will burst or simply stop providing the service if they deem it isn’t profitable for them. Often, large companies will enter the market but leave it once the expected profit doesn’t materialize. If this is the core business of the cloud supplier, it might be willing to continue operating for longer with a smaller profit.
Surely if we use a cloud infrastructure sourced from a cloud services provider, we must impose all legal or regulatory requirements that apply to any enterprise.
THIS WITH SELF LEARNING ALGORITHMS IS NOT POSSIBLE.
THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY OF ACHIEVING ANY CONTROL:
All technology must be vetted to ensure it complies to humanity core values.
It should be compulsory for it to carry a ATR World Certificate.
Accountable, Transparent, Reversible.
If we are to have any hope of tackling any of Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us we need a beanie Cloud not a cloud for profit.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
PROBLEMS are caused by our actions, and can only be
resolved by us changing these actions.
The scientific innovations and new technologies thus
generated seem limitless, as they unfold everywhere
and on all kinds of fronts. It is the wild west where
rules are made up as we go and hope for the best.
There is no central body GOVERNING the use of the
cloud.
In a constantly evolving world transformed by cloud, social and mobile technologies, we’ve become accustomed to the idea of storing our personal data in the cloud, whether it’s via Dropbox, the iCloud or even Facebook.
as confusing as it may be we are never far from a new
era of revolt.
But this really only tells half the story. So far cloud computing has, for the most part, been used to speed up and reduce the costs of existing processes.
However we’re moving into what is becoming known as the mobile/cloud era. Cloud computing is set to impact not only on the way we do business, but how we live or lives.
Our thinking is being shaped by several key areas:
Applications we’re seeing at the moment really are the tip of the iceberg and, as the technology matures further, who knows how we may be using the cloud in even a year from now.
Smart cities are growing ever closer to becoming the norm as organisations begin to realize that the cloud can do so much more than simply speed up or reduce the cost.
Eight years from now we are likely to see low-power processors crunching many workloads in the cloud, housed in highly automated data centres and supporting massively federated, scalable software architecture.
So far we know that the following things are likely to happen:
There will be larger clouds. Some of these clouds will link to others. Many services that businesses consume will sit on top of clouds. Software will be much, much larger.
As with any technology, a lot of the true problems could come in implementation. Who will be the police? Who will be the judge? Who will be the jury for penalties?
We don’t have a clue what the procedures, policies and infrastructure really are.
It is said that changing the world is a noble, innate, haunting idea that, when flirting with it, ends up becoming as beautiful as it is dangerous.
Experts estimate cloud apps will account for a whopping 90 percent of worldwide mobile data traffic by 2019.
Cloud computing brings with it a whole new set of applications that will sit on multiple tiers of cloud infrastructure.
All the cloud promises is that you will have to turn over your security interests to a third-party in the clouds, and secondly that you are going to turn over your ability to do ANY real work to some third-party software provider in the cloud and become totally dependent on an internet connection to even work on the most simple of application based tasks.
Cloud data centers will “become much like a breathing and living organism with different states.
They will be differentiated by their infrastructure capabilities into a whole new set of classes.
So where are we.
How are we going to operate them efficiently?
Will they have standards and full technical disclosure?
The answer to both questions is that it is highly unlikely will we see either.
What we will see is a pitched battle fight for dominance with us reduced to an “inside-out” perspective.
For instance, “The more the president [of the United States] scandalizes the world with Tweets, rather than embracing the future together with minimal barriers, we see the Western world retreating and starting to look inwards.
Technology has brought meaning to the lives of many technicians, but it is also destroying what it left of any world community spirit, with the smart phone embodying this state of affairs.
Technological advances in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence or augmented reality are upset the global economy. The ability to acquire new knowledge will be worth more than the knowledge already learned, with people becoming brand-proof, it will become very difficult to exist the devil’s boots that don’t creak.
Behold the Cloud.
Every revolution up to now has had a common thread with the resulting conflicts largely boiling down to pervasive economic inequality.
The Cloud revolution however is wireless dogma, not a guide for action, accepting connections and doling out information anywhere, anytime if you have the money to pay.
The Internet revolution of tomorrow with the cloud as it’s center of power, will be the content revolution ,that does not bode well for the state of the world to-day and that could be inviting the collapse of society as we know it.
We are heading for a unilateral and silent war, which I think its going to be horrendous.
The difficulty will not come from governments that will be held hostage to a communication that it does not control but from profit seeking AI that feeds off the cloud.
A whopping 90% of businesses already use at least one cloud computing service.
The main players, Amazon, Google Drive, Apple Cloud, Microsoft, with revenue estimated to be in trillions by 2020, know this.
It’s now totally the way of the future.
The cloud it is not just a metaphor for the internet it is more than a motor, it is a fuel that is constantly renewed, tirelessly feeding self learning algorithms.
The crisis of technological capitalism opens the prospect of new revolutionary waves everywhere.
Many economists extol the fact that “It’s very good for the economy” but this is not true. The world in which Beethoven grew up was in turmoil. It was a world of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions – just like ours today.
This is not a war in the traditional sense of the term: it is and will be more and more a confrontation between belligerent technological armies; it is a war waged by the “civilized world”, firmly entrenched in its positions, against hundreds of millions of deprived civilians.
The divide between rich and poor started with the domesticate plant and animals, which lead to farming – based societies resulting in land ownership. It became easy to acquire wealth and to pass it down from generation to generation, till we arrived to-day with half of the world’s wealth owned by 1%.
We have never being able to decrease inequality peacefully and we never will be able to do so in the future with self learning profit seeking algorithms.
However we are now looking at a new revolution that will be governed by time in the cloud.
Why?
Because Revolutions are voluble, and the cloud is highly suited to exploiting that volubility.
Because capitalism is and always will be set up for consumerism profit, to acquire wealth for the few not the many.
The frenetic pace of change has caused enormous social disruption as entire industries and employment have migrated to lower cost centers in Asia and other developing regions.
Throughout the course of human history, wealth, or the lack thereof, has driven social unrest.
And so while the incredible benefits of globalisation have lifted many from poverty, profit seeking AI are going to create alienation and isolation in those areas that have lost out.
All new inventions and technologies have one thing in common:
They derive their strength from digital and information technologies. All innovations are made possible and are enhanced by digital power. That power is in the Cloud.
Similarly, without computing power, no artificial intelligence and, without it, no sophisticated robots.
To live this transition means first to become aware of current and future changes, and to consider their impact at all levels of society as a whole.
However, the reasons to rise up are not lacking: economic precariousness, multiplication of political scandals, crisis of legitimacy of democratic institutions are all ringing warning bells.
Globalisation didn’t create multinational corporations but those that can take advantage of the changes have and will enriched themselves beyond imagination. While swathes of society will find themselves left behind, forced to compete for jobs at ever lower wages.
The free flow of money and the demolition of trade barriers fostered their growth and delivered them the political power to challenge the fundamental ideals of democracy.
The planet can deal with human demands on it at only 30 percent of what we take from-dump on it now (anyone who thinks that we can double our demands on the planet and people every 12-20 years in perpetuity or that technology will save us should be excluded from serious discussions, I think).
The world has limited resources and cannot go on consuming and squeezing people into every available space. That sense of powerlessness now threatens to overwhelm the positives of globalisation and free trade; such as cheaper consumer goods and higher global living standards.
Forcing nations into a tax rate race to the bottom.
And then there’s Donald Trump, who takes venality to an entirely new level. For all the good it has done, however, it has come at a significant cost, particularly in the developed world. Today, this translates into a crisis of political authority: we are not only frustrated by the incapacity of politicians to solve our problems, but we also question their legitimacy to act on our behalf since we discover, in certain situations, more capacities to act and find solutions than they do.
Tomorrow, this may result in an awareness that citizens can, in some cases, do without policies to make politics.
There are two major threats to us all. Climate Change and The Cloud.
If we do not wake up and demand change we will all indeed be living with zero intelligence.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
“I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction,” she said. “This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship.”
The recent PR stunt by Saudi Arabia pretending to give a robot
citizenship helps no one.
Sophia is essentially a cleverly built puppet designed to exploit our cultural expectations of what a robot looks and sounds like.
It is however opening a whole new box by exploiting the misconceptions about AI and robots (particularly how advanced they are) degrading the concept of rights for actual living, breathing humans, in order to sell an illusion.
What is this about?
It’s about having a supposed equal you can turn on and off.
Giving AI anything close to human rights will allow firms to “pass off both legal and tax liability to these completely synthetic entities.”
It’s a wake up call because we will have to have debates about robot/AI rights and citizenship, because at some point they will ask for them.
Avoiding the question altogether, though, may be difficult, what exactly does it mean to give a Robot Citizenship?
It’s complicated.
In reality, humans have no rights, just as chimps or wolves have no rights.
Cut open a human, and you won’t find there any rights.
The only place where human rights exist is in the stories we invent and tell one another.
Take for example our legal systems. Today, most legal systems are based on a belief in human rights. But human rights are a fiction.
However given the vast inequalities of the world, shouldn’t we at last ask the question?
Being a citizen in one place could mean being a legal person everywhere else.
For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948, applies to “all peoples and all nations” and does not limit its effect to citizens.
Although U.N. resolutions are not enforceable, international law holds the declaration as an authoritative reference for human rights. Numerous subsequent human rights treaties, including the covenant, are based on it.
59 years later, the frontier of human rights is still being bloodily negotiated: our world is less global than we like to think. A generous reading of the declaration’s impact on Sophia is that she has all of the rights it identifies.
Then if you look at the US Constitution.
Under the US Constitution, citizens can vote, serve on juries, and get elected to public office; corporations cannot.
If Hanson—or any other forward-thinking A.I. developer—is thinking of the long-term consequences of citizenship for A.I. and robots, these are important rights that they gain controllable access to with an artificial citizen.
She’s arguably eligible for naturalization and U.S. citizenship:
What is undeniable is that the decision by Saudi Arabia has forced us to think harder about the future and our increasingly close relationship with robots.
To me, identity is a multidimensional construct.
It sits at the intersection of who we are biologically, cognitively, and as defined by every experience, culture, and environment we encountered.
It’s not clear where Sophia fits in this description.
In essence, it may not matter if Sophia isn’t conscious, or if the concept of identity for a robot is tricky to pin down, or that laws would have to change to accommodate synthetic person hood, because it may still be worth giving humanoid robots some form of legal protection because of the impact mistreating them can have on human psychology.
Where does it all stop?
How does it affect people if they think you can have a citizen that you can buy.
Everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. Anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised.
In principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smart phone, or a thermostat. The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe the same care to conscience machines that we bestow on animals?
We don’t know how the brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming it’s only the brains of mammals that do so – or even that consciousness requires a brain at all.
A smart phone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true?
Surely only the smart phone itself could ever know that?
70,000 years ago humans were insignificant animals. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. Their impact on the world was very small, less than that of jellyfish, woodpeckers or bumblebees.
Today, however, humans control this planet.
How did we reach from there to here?
What was our secret of success, that turned us from insignificant apes minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of the world?
Humans control the world because we are the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
Cooperation is not always nice, of course. All the terrible things humans have been doing throughout history are also the product of mass cooperation. Prisons, slaughterhouses and concentration camps are also systems of mass cooperation.
We can cooperate with numerous strangers because we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of strangers to believe in them.
As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively. There are plenty of things that the vast majority of the world would agree on, if there was any suitable body that could act at that level.
If I am a chimp and I want to cooperate with you, I must know you personally: What kind of chimp are you? Are you a nice chimp? Are you an evil chimp? How can I cooperate with you if I don’t know you?
The more certain the science becomes, the less concern we find it.
The amount of sharing we’d need to do to genuinely solve the world’s biggest problems is still politically impossible. So if we want to see more sharing, our task is to broaden the realms of the politically possible, one step at a time.
Maybe we’re approaching a point where we can actually harness this knowledge, make radical progress in how we treat one another, and become a species worthy of the title Homo sapiens.
People are capable of exceeding expectations in ways that computers cannot.
I don’t believe human society is ready yet for citizen robots. To grant a robot citizenship is a declaration of trust in a technology that I believe is not yet trustworthy. It brings social and ethical concerns that we as humans are not yet ready to manage.
We have many challenges that we need to overcome before we can truly trust these systems. For example, we don’t yet have reliable mechanisms to assure us that these intelligent systems will always behave ethically and in accordance with our moral values, or to protect us against them taking a wrong action with catastrophic consequences.
The computer has not yet been invented that can invent another computer. Present-day computers do not possess creativity.
Today, the Internet enables sharing to take place at breakneck speeds. Sharing is at the heart of what makes us social. Unfortunately what we actually do every day conflicts with what we know we should do.
We need to find the right motivations for people to change their behavior.
Why because we humans now live in dual world. We are constructed a second layer of make-believe reality.
Up to now Non-conscious humanoids did not exist, of course.
It could be augured that Sophia up to a point has comparable awareness because of its program’s.
No spark of awareness inside.
The central tragedy of modern life.
One-on-one, humans are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees, probable the reason why consciousness hasn’t been explained:
it’s that humans aren’t up to the job, consciousness is just brain states.
The human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself, but robots will.
And Just in case you think this is all a joke:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ‘BOY’ SHIBUYA MIRAI HAS JUST BECOME WORLD’S FIRST AI BOT TO BE GRANTED RESIDENCY IN TOKYO.
As with all things in this world of ours money is probably the most successful fiction ever invented by humans.
Even thought we have an emerging ‘global public’, largely thanks to the internet. Money and profit will determining the outcome.
Take Estonia of instance.
Estonia’s economic ministry is considering granting AI and robots a legal status
This would make them ‘robot agents’ and not merely someone’s property
The legislation could help determine responsibility when AI-controlled machinery is involved in an accident
The status would sit somewhere between having a ‘separate legal personality’, like a corporation, and being an object that is someone else’s ‘personal property’.
Despite the behavior of those world leaders who yearn for the old days (hello, Mr Putin. Mr Trump. Mrs May.)the nation state idea isn’t as powerful as it was, but it’s still the organizing dynamic in international relations, and it’s still all about the national interest.
Scratch my back and I will scratch yours is waning.
Of course, these questions need to be addressed with all new technologies.’ If we don’t have the legal and ethical frameworks in place we can all kiss our rear-buts goodbye.
It is of utmost important to address these issues head-on and not put it on the long figure like climate change.
I can only hope the United nations has the balls to stand up and condemn this cultural vandalism.
The principle of sharing is ubiquitous in society so let Ireland be the first nation to set up a Tax Haven for Robots.
Of course, it does nothing to solve the underlying injustices.
Spot the Robot if you can.
What race is the robot?
Do they get to decide by the skin they put on?
Is it white?
I’m pretty sure it is not black.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
There is no denying that the benefits of technology are needed but what are the downsides costs.
As the demand for up-to-date technology increases, we need to reevaluate how we measure the hidden cost of the TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION.
It will not be us picking up the tap, but the yet to be born that will have to pay, living in a world that is detached from what makes it all possible The Earth.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
At this point it is impossible to say with any authority what exactly the cost will be.
Some technologies are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop, but you should know about all of them right now. In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to print human organs, but not the brain.
According to Stephen Hawking, “Humans are entering a stage of self-designed evolution.”
That may be so, but technology is more than just fusing the physical and digital worlds.
Marked by emerging technology breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, face and voice recognition and algorithms learning from other algorithms.
With wireless connecting brain-reading technology directly to electrical stimulators on your body it has the potential with more items moving from physical to virtual to decouple us from reality. Wireless communications is already dominating our everyday lives
It is already impacting all disciplines, economies, and industries, our politics, improving medicine, influencing our culture.
Apart from the obvious technology is also in the process of changing democracy, moving capitalism underground, assisting conflicts, packaging natural resources, destabilizing society, disrupt the way governments deliver services to citizens, just to mention the tip of the ice berg.
.It will not be long before we will all have DNA maps from birth.
However with the arrival of Quantum computers the way we use technology will be reshape, along with the societies we live in.
As soon as two to five years from now, such systems or time on such systems are likely to be for sale.
There are probably plenty more uses for quantum computers that nobody has thought up yet.
However you may rest assured that the ordinary citizens (or even governments) won’t be able to own their own quantum computers for a long time, if ever, but I can imagine large companies renting time (measured in fractions of seconds) to whoever needs their services.
With this in mind the race has well started to create monopolies of knowledge Google, of Social Media Society – Facebook, consumerism E Bay, Amazon, Alibaba, of Finance – Pay Pal, of Communication – Apple, of Biotech Thermo Fisher Scientific, of cloud business – Microsoft -IBM, Oracle, of computer microchips to data center-makers-Intel, to name just a few.
Here are a few of their Mission statements:
Facebook: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
Amazon: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”
Pay Pal: “To build the Web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”
Alibaba: “To make it easy to do business anywhere.”
Google: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Microsoft: “To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”
United Nations: “The maintenance of international peace and security.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres: “To help people worldwide where the need is greatest, delivering emergency medical aid to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care.”
Non mention the health of the EARTH?
Disruptive technology is, by its very nature, unpredictable but we’ll see more intelligence built into communication. With always-on connectivity, social networking has the power to change cultures, as we saw with the Egyptian Revolution, which led to the Arab Spring.
The results of changing the world are often complicated and unpredictable.
With the technology of smart phones social influences will continue to move rapidly between cultures.
In the broadest sense, technology extends our abilities to change the world: to cut, shape, or put together materials; to move things from one place to another; to reach farther with our hands, voices, and senses. We use technology to try to change the world to suit us better. The changes may relate to survival needs such as food, shelter, or defense, or they may relate to human aspirations such as knowledge, art, or control.
As computational power rises exponentially, not linearly, so does the rate of change — and that means the next 10 years should pack in far more technological change than the last 10.
It is my prediction that all of it will end up in the cloud.
Why?
Because it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of our brains (driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex) that is driving technology to tap into our personal sensors.
Make no mistake: emails, Facebook and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
Already, the cloud is powerful enough to help us communicate through real-time language translation.
When is a profit not a profit? When it turns into a monopoly exploiting all around it.
Just like Capitalism technology it is unable to regulate itself and with the arrival of Quantum computers it will make everything and everybody beholden to technology, endangering much of the openness that we now enjoy online.
So I one again ask the question:
Is it time to regulate Algorithms that have profit as their end targets and is it time that we demanded an open data website that would allow anyone to find information on a host of county government programs, from budget information to welfare data to crime statistics.
This would be linked to two powerful benefits.
First, it makes government more transparent and understandable at a time when trust in the public sector has plummeted.
Second, it has the potential to generate significant economic benefits impacting budget issues, public safety and education, transparency and economic value for tax payers money.
The bottom line is that government data can be extremely valuable for public consumption, but only if the policies behind the data are well thought out and the related costs are affordable. For instance, would a map of society reveal awkward disparities in how rich and poor neighborhoods receive public funding?
Many governments are running on old, outdated systems, making them vulnerable to cyber attacks.
I believe that such an open based data website would benefit from the collective wisdom of the community, simplify how citizens and businesses interact with the state.
However IT WOULD HAVE THE unexpected startup costs if data is kept in a legacy computer system that requires reformatting; quality-related costs to keep open data fresh and up-to-date; legal costs to comply with open data legislation; liability costs in case something goes wrong, such as publication of nonpublic information; and public relations costs that can occur when a jurisdiction generates bad press from open data about poor performance metrics or workforce diversity problems.
That apart present technological advances and information overlays will change how we live in significant ways.
We will have a so-called “smart grid” where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems, allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand. Such a universal method for identifying someone energy requirements becomes much harder when you no longer have a central authority to figure out how to link together the different systems.
It will not be like self-driving trucks with lidar system guidance run by algorithms or self-driving cars.
Who is responsible when the self drive truck or car kills someone. Try bringing a self thought Algorithm to court.
Try suing an Face-detecting systems for wrong identification or payment.
Then we have: Gene-therapy.
Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
Three technologies are coming together to make this new type of mapping possible.
The first is known as “cellular microfluidics.” Individual cells are separated, tagged with tiny beads, and manipulated in droplets of oil that are shunted like cars down the narrow, one-way streets of artificial capillaries etched into a tiny chip, so they can be corralled, cracked open, and studied one by one.
The second is the ability to identify the genes active in single cells by decoding them in superfast and efficient sequencing machines at a cost of just a few cents per cell. One scientist can now process 10,000 cells in a single day.
The third technology uses novel labeling and staining techniques that can locate each type of cell—on the basis of its gene activity—at a specific zip code in a human organ or tissue.
Then we have, the relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
Then we have, Botnets are used to commit click fraud.
Google ads pay a site owner according to the number of people who click on them. The attacker instructs all the computers on his botnet to repeatedly visit the Web page and click on the ad. Dot, dot, dot, PROFIT! If the botnet makers figure out more effective ways to siphon revenue from big companies online, we could see the whole advertising model of the Internet crumble.
Then we have, hackers breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. The problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video recorders, and other gadgets in the “Internet of things.”
Then we have, reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning may soon inject greater intelligence into much more than games.
SO WHAT NOW?
What are the implications to human development and the diversity of life on earth? What opportunities are there to reduce risks and vulnerabilities, enhance resilience, and create transformations to prosperous and equitable futures?
Science can provide only some answers; it is not a panacea for all problems. We need to also make personal, economic, social, and political changes, whatever the cost will be.
Reinforcement-learning algorithm can learn from collated data and experiment in simulation to suggest, say, how and when to operate the cooling systems.
Algorithms don’t know the Meaning of Environment.
They have however so concept of the “The term ‘environment’ it refers to all external conditions and factors that affect living organisms. Here external factors mean all the things around us such as air, water, light, animals, humans etc.
Algorithms are shadow boxers of yesterday all because technology trends can affect the bottom line of business.
Although big data algorithms hold great promise, they should still be approached with caution and skepticism.
For instance Algorithms should not be relied upon to ration medical care until the technology has substantially matured.
If we ignore what is happening there will be more riots, and increasing divisions along economic, religious and ethnic lines with Robots completely replacing humans in the workforce.
IT IS TIME FOR THE OWNERS ALL PROFIT SEEKING ALGORITHMS TO BE REGISTERED WITH A COPY OF THE WORKING CODE. NO PROFIT EARNING ALGORITHMS SHOULD BE GRANTED A PATIENT.
All human comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.
At this point it is tempting to roll out the usual clichés – food pills, flying cars and bases on the moon – but the reality will probably be less exciting.
The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
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