Category Archives: Communication.

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: IS THE IDEOLOGICAL CORE OF OUR CIVILIZATION HOLLOWING OUT.

21 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Communication., Facebook, Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Social Media., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World

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The ideological core of our civilization is hollowing out due to technology.

We are living on the parentheses of a new era. Unfortunately most of us don’t know or don’t care, or perhaps its fortunate that it so.

However, I think – WE ARE AT A CHOICE POINT OF A PLANETARY SOCIETY THAT IS GOING TO BE BASED ON INDIVIDUAL CULTURE.

These are the times we were created for and we need to act at this juncture, for the sake of our children’s lives, we must confront hard data and scientific projections that are dire, harrowing to contemplate.

AS LEONARDO DE vINCI SAID ” Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else”

The Great Grief

Who wants to live in a world governed by algorithms, owned by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft or Apple.  A smart world run on dumbing down technology such as smart phones.

I don’t.

Our present Science will only be 5% OF SCIENCE IN 2024.

Human nature is shifting to racial empathy which is going to shake the foundations of everything.

History used to take hundreds of years to develop now it is our life time. The maps no longer fit the territory of interactive, the stage of radical history.

We are not quite at the beginning of the new age because we are still haunted by the spectrum of the past but the reset button of history has being hit.

The larger question is how we redirect the collective activity of our species on the planet — if this is even possible.

Collectively, our actions in the next decade may well determine the future of our world.

What does this future actually look like? How do we communicate? How does it function? How is it powered? What value system is it based on? What does it feel like to participate in? What are we eating?

When we consider the short timeframe in which humanity must reckon with the ecological crisis, not to mention the unintended consequences of AI that we have unleashed, we do not have time for chaos and incoherence — for a slow-motion breakdown, the rise of Right Wing despotism, or the political vacuum created by Brexit and the winner of forthcoming US Presidential election.

Pretty soon, people may reach a tipping point, a collective realisation that our social structures — our political and economic system — must be reinvented.  As that realisation dawns, an alternative must be ready with a plan of action, and working prototypes.

To ensure our continuity, we must distribute wealth and resources more equitably across the human community, as a whole.

The last few hundred years, since the Industrial Revolution, were a telescoped process.

During this time, humanity overcame local boundaries and became a globally interconnected species — in a sense, a super-organism. We continuously transform our physical environment to satisfy our needs and desires. Imperialism, colonialism, neoliberalism, capitalism, industrialisation, and even communism are all transitional systems. They meshed humanity together, crudely and brutally, connecting the entire species through networks of communication and infrastructure.

As difficult as it is to imagine, we must overcome the blind spots in our ideologies and belief systems. We must find the path that leads to a harmonic, peaceful unification of humanity.

This requires defining a new form of political economy that supports the restoration or regeneration of the Earth’s ecosystems, while allowing every human being to live decently.

It also means defining a new relationship to technology and innovation.

This relationship requires a New Institution in order to ensure that we address Artificial Intelligence. It must question the capacity of an aggregate of self-interested nation-states, as well as self-interested multi-national corporations, and a tiny coterie of the super-wealthy (the 85 individuals who control more capital than half of the world’s 7 billion people), to make the necessary course correction.

We may well be approach the threshold of ecological catastrophe that will force us to reinvent human society for collective benefit — for the benefit of humanity as a whole, as well as the other species that share this living world. This may seem farfetched , but all current indicators are telling us to do so.

Technology has a crucial role to play in this transition, but its power must be harnessed and mastered for ecological restoration and social evolution not for profit.

To build a regenerative society will require that we supersede the current global financial system, based on debt and compound interest, and use our social technologies to devise an economic system that supports healthy lifestyles and patterns of behavior.

How do we transform our social system to create a resilient or regenerative global society? What kinds of changes will be necessary? These questions must be asked, even as they shake the very foundation of our society…precisely, because they do.

For example, we must ask whether we want to reformed capitalism by enforcing it to become a “conscious capitalism.” By placing a World Aid Commission on all High Frequency Trading, on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over ( 20, 000 $), on all Arms sales. ( See previous posts) Transitioning

Humanity has overlaid roads, train tracks, fiber optics, urban and suburban sprawl, across the surface of the planet. We have also constructed a global communication infrastructure, like a planetary nervous system, that allows humanity to communicate instantly, from anywhere across the globe.

If we can marshal our resources to confront the ecological mega-crisis, we can define a path beyond it that integrates cradle-to-cradle principles, biomimicry, and other principles that are symbiotic with nature, eventually producing abundance for all, while enhancing the health of the biosphere.

What sustainability seeks to sustain, above all, is some version of our current way of life, even though the evidence is totally overwhelming that it cannot continue.

Living processes, generally, don’t just endure or persevere. Life either flourishes and blooms, evolves and transforms, or it stagnates and dies. The rhetoric of sustainability tends to support the belief that our current form of post-industrial capitalism can be reformed — that it can persist, in something close to its present order.

If you take the time to look closer on today’s situation, through the veil of ignorance, it becomes apparent that most of our worldviews are still based on lies and that fear and lies are the prominent method of control today.

We are shortly going to witness the election of a new US president in a country where military expenditures dwarf the rest of the world but 1 in 5 U.S. children go hungry every night.

What do we see:  A rich blowhard running for president. Tech-bro execs hoping to splinter off into their own anything-goes fiefdoms.

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Technology has been the leading engine of change for the past 100 years and will continue to do so.  The battle for the living room is currently in a full-out war between the leading tech companies – Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix.

Facebook has surpassed the country of India, making it now the second largest country in the world.

This is creating a world where people think that they are engaged. A social and virtual world that is now just a marketing tool.

Sustainability.

In my view, the current language around climate change and its solutions is totally inadequate.

To motivate us to start the change we need to understand the root of today’s problems and see the ruling structures for what they are, and see how we all are a part of that structure.

Around the world, millions of children are trapped in an intergenerational cycle of disadvantage.

Is it time to abandon the concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability? If so, how can we achieve it? And if not, how can we best prepare for the coming ecological decline?

The main difference of today’s way of manipulating the society is that the controlling powers choose to be hidden and are no longer showing their glory to the people. Instead they have made an illusion that the power is located in the hands of the democratically elected governments.

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With so much labeled as sustainable, the term has become  essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative.
Inequity

We are in dire need of a large dose of Empathy and honesty:

Empathy transcends all the properties of the esoteric power structures.

Empathy means to try to understand and listen to the feelings and needs of ourselves and others.

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.Regenerative

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS: THE TIME TO BE EMPATHETIC IS TO DAY. THIS MINUTE. NOW..

26 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by in Communication., Emotions., European Union., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Life., Modern Day Democracy., Natural World Disasters, Social Media., The Refugees, The world to day., What Needs to change in the World

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Our world is quickly becoming a desolate island, a screen that we hold six inches in front of our noses, and it’s a hard pill to swallow.

Because of this, we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with reality, we lose touch with each other. We seem to have forgotten the basic tenets of empathy.Afficher l'image d'origine

We have become such a technology-based society, that we have forgotten how to feel. We have forgotten how to relate. We have forgotten how to connect among other humans, let alone with other sentient animals.

We seem to have forgotten what it feels like to be in someone else’s, or some other animal’s, proverbial shoes.

Here in lies one of the major problems.

Some time ago, (some) humans stopped showing empathy, and started killing indiscriminately — people, and other animals. We kill each other over political differences, racial differences, religious differences, and resources. We kill animals for “research,” or for competition and sport, or for a token.

In a world where there is so much doom and gloom about the state of our environment it’s no surprising that the world has lost 10% of its wilderness areas in the past 20 years. The growth of our modern civilisation, spurred on by technological innovations, has been underpinned by the exploitation of the natural environment. Today, a large fraction of the Earth, once swathed in wilderness, is now monopolised by humans. Although the direct causes of wildlife loss are clear enough, what’s less obvious is why many people seemingly don’t care. Society’s ongoing destruction of the environment can be put down to the fact that not enough people value nature and wilderness any more.

Expanding human demands on land, sea and fresh water, along with the impacts of climate change, have made the conservation and management of wild areas and wild animals a top priority.

For some species, our time to see them is rapidly running out.

The richer we are and the more we consume, the more self-centred and careless of the lives of others we appear to become

Human attitudes towards wild nature and wildlife have, historically, been ambivalent.

It seems to me that there are currently two main approaches to wildlife management.

One: The wise use approach aims to accommodate humanity’s continuous use of wild nature as a resource for food, timber, and other raw materials, as well as for recreation.

Two: The preservationists, whose goal is to protect pristine nature, not to use it, carefully or otherwise. Wild places should be allowed to develop on their own with as little interference from humans as possible.

Neither work:

For years we’ve been told that people cannot afford to care about the natural world until they become rich; that only economic growth can save the biosphere, that civilisation marches towards enlightenment about our impacts on the living planet. The results suggest the opposite.

There is only one way to protect what is left.Afficher l'image d'origine

Protected areas, like national parks and wildlife refuges, are the cornerstones of global conservation efforts.

We must pay for it.  Either by buying the land or paying the locals to maintain it.

Why is it so difficult to persuade people to care about our wonderful planet, the world that gave rise to us and upon which we wholly depend?

Because we lack empathy. Empathy is defined as: the capacity to understand or feel what another being (a human or non-human animal) is experiencing from within the other being’s frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.

Without it we all have different values that give rise to conflicts or dilemmas.

The way in which these different values are prioritized will determine policy of conservation in the future.

For instance, there may be a conflict between sustaining certain human livelihoods and preserving a particular species, or there may be a dilemma between the protection of wild nature and animal welfare.

The question, then, is how we should address such dilemmas and disagreements. The first thing to note, in trying to answer this question, is that the rich anglophone countries are anomalous. The more we consume, the less we feel.

Our erroneous belief that we are more concerned about man-made climate change than the people of other nations informs the sentiment, often voiced by the press and politicians, that there’s no point in acting if the rest of the world won’t play its part.

Our refusal to stop pumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is pure selfishness. The more harm we do, the less concerned about it we become. And the more hyper consumerism destroys relationships, communities and the physical fabric of the Earth, the more we try to fill the void in our lives by buying more stuff.

In modern debates about wildlife, however, other values have become increasingly important. We don’t know exactly how ecosystems will respond to climate change but you may rest assured that with rising sea levels nature will be the last to be rescued.

Sustaining interest in this great but slow-burning crisis is a challenge no one seems to have mastered. Only when the crisis causes or exacerbates an acute disaster – such as the floods – is there a flicker of anxiety, but that quickly dies away.

So the perennially low-level of concern, which flickers upwards momentarily when disaster strikes, then slumps back into the customary stupor, is an almost inevitable result of a society that has become restructured around shopping, fashion, celebrity and an obsession with money.

It’s hard to understand how anyone could imagine that economic growth is a formula for protecting the planet.

How we break the circle and wake people out of this dream world is the question that all those who love the living planet should address.

Just look at the United Nations:

For the first time in UN history, candidates seeking to replace the organisation’s secretary-general have held a live debate, presenting the case for their candidacy and taking questions from UN member states on key global issues.

All previous secretary-generals were chosen behind closed doors by the UN’s permanent five members: the US, China, Russia, France and Britain.

This remains so:  The permanent five UN Security Council members still fix “who is going to be selected behind closed doors. Don’t think for a moment that the permanent members are going  give up powers they won after World War II readily. Hand-picking the UN secretary-general is still one of their trump cards.

The possibility of  the United Nations getting an energetic idealist to shake up the world body by streamline archaic UN systems, to stand up to the big powers and do more to end wars, and fight poverty is as remote as ever.  It will remain both bloated and overstretched with its staff more interested in winning promotions than fighting malaria, climate change and regulating poverty or stopping wars, not to mention protecting what’s left of nature.

So long as it has to beg for funds it will remain a worthless gossip shop.  ( See previous posts)

There will be no easy answers.

As Leonard Da Vinci said,

” Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

Empathy is about being we-focused rather than I-focused and understanding that, collectively, we are better off when we step outside of our silos. As a leader, you must emphasize value, not just transactions; people, not just processes.

Empathy brings the big picture into focus.

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS. WE ARE ENTERING THE ERA OF MASS DISTRACTION.

22 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by in Communication., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Modern Day Communication., Technology, The Future, The Internet., What Needs to change in the World, WiFi communication.

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An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images is rendering us manic information addicts.

Every single minute on the planet, YouTube users upload 400 hours of video and Tinder users swipe profiles over a million times.

Each day, there are literally billions of Facebook “likes.”

Online Social media outlets are now publish exponentially more material than they once did, churning out articles at a rapid-fire pace, adding new details to the news every few minutes.

Blogs, Facebook feeds, Tumblr accounts, tweets, and propaganda outlets repurpose, borrow, and add topspin to the same output.

We are guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy.Afficher l'image d'origine

We all distracted by a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego.

Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on.  We are all close to helpless.

Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.

The modest mastery of our practical lives is what fulfilled us for tens of thousands of years — until technology and capitalism decided it was entirely dispensable.

By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact.

We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.

GPS, for example, has led to our not even seeing, let alone remembering, the details of our environment, to our not developing the accumulated memories that give us a sense of place and control over what we once called ordinary life.

New technology has seized control of around one-third young adults’ waking hours.

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The result is yet to be seen and we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, in wars, movement of people, erosion of democracy, surveillance and where to find the truth.

As we are  being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise and this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness.

The amount of time we spend cruising vastly outweighs the time we may ever get to spend with the objects of our desire. Virtual living is creating a mental climate that will be maddeningly hard to manage.

Beyond mere doing, there is also being;

We are becoming each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.

We hide our vulnerabilities, airbrushing our flaws and quirks; we project our fantasies onto the images before us.

Why is any of this important.

Take the smart phone for example.

When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in his or her private zone, you don’t.

They are robbing  us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.

The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade.

Once you disappeared down a rabbit hole, but the smart phone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing.

Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives. All the hazards of real human interaction are being  banished.

Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance.

These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.

The smart phone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist.

We are reducing our human contacts into a world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction.  A Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered way that makes integration of cultures impossible.  This, evolutionary psychologists will attest, is fatal. An entire universe of intimate responses is flattened to a single, distant swipe.

Walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in. Or lunch where the first to person to use their phone pays the whole bill?

Here to the frazzled digital generation if they believe that $3 billion of Mark Zuckerberg Facebook profits will put an end to Disease.

Who does he think he is fooling.  Facebook is a Disease.

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