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~ Free Thinker.

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Category Archives: COVID-19

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. IT’S NOW OR NEVER FOR RECALIBRATION OF THE CAPITALIST WORLD WE LIVE IN AND DIE ON.

27 Saturday Aug 2022

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2022: The year we need to change., A Constitution for the Earth., Algorithms., Capitalism, Civilization., COVID-19, Cry for help.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. IT’S NOW OR NEVER FOR RECALIBRATION OF THE CAPITALIST WORLD WE LIVE IN AND DIE ON.

Tags

Climate change, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

 

( Six minute read) 

With the current frangible condition of the world the question is, should we be focussing more on local and community resilience rather than trying to address climate change on a world scale. 

Of course it is only natural that all of us look to ourselves but  “The economy comes first,” seems to make less and less sense.

This time is undoubtedly critical, to decide on our definitions of economy or wealth?

What, indeed, is most precious to us?

Covid, of course, may have shifted the landscape, not necessarily of our wants, but of the possibilities available to us, and how we order our list of priorities. 

Taking account of the increased threats to global stability posed by “a nuclear blunder”, aggravated by the gradient of climate change and combine this with technologies that are wreaking the cultural web of civilization, as the loss of biodiversity begins to fracture the web of the biosphere, with consequences that are both wholesale and probably irredeemable. The question must be broader than our “wants” at the personal, or even national level, but must consider “the world” in its full dimension.

Hence, our choices made on the local scale must further consider their impacts more globally not only in a geographical sense, but across the swathe of beliefs and views that different cultures hold as their framework to make sense of existence, to give value and meaning to life, and to decide upon which goals count as being worthy of achieving.

The intermeshing quality of the world’s many woes has been conveyed by the term “changing climate” (i.e. climate change per se being just one item on the list), and amid a morass of such magnitude, positives are apt to remain obscured and muffled.

                                                            ——————–

In the industrialised West, we have become increasingly focussed on money as a goal and the accumulation of personal wealth, and it’s trappings, as our measure of success.

In short, the time is now or never, yet as set against a backdrop of “business as usual”, beyond the confines of human cultures, and considers more broadly our place on this planet, within the context of all life.

Opportunities to address climate change are not merely slipping through our fingers, but wilfully being cast aside.

Thus, the message is not just one of yet another traditional way of life being driven to extinction by climate change, but that because the Earth system is an interconnected and “living” organism, impacts on any component of it will be felt throughout, causing the body to sicken and die.

Change is frightening, and uncertainty even more so; thus we tend to cling to a familiar craft, even as it sinks.

But, if we want a world that is both habitable and agreeable into the future, for all Earthlings, our choices are limited to those which also reduce the conjoined burdens of our rapidly consuming finite resources and the carbon emissions and other pollution that are discharged in the process.

However, due to the tardiness of our efforts, the scale and rate of the changes now required are staggering, amounting to an 8-10% reduction in carbon emissions per year in the wealthiest nations of the world, which presents as a practically insurmountable challenge.

If Capitalism in all its forms usher in a definite of sustained mitigation of carbon emissions, it is highly unlikely that climate targets will be met.

Full collapse is not yet inevitable, or already crumbling out of our hands change might yet be managed.  

Albert Einstein is quoted, perhaps apocryphally, as saying (something like):

“The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. If we want to change the world we have to change our thinking…no problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.”

Is this the world you want.

The perils of treating natural capital as income, are evident to all.

We do not have enough fresh water for the people.. Billions of people are subject to hunger today. So the new model must consider all these needs. This model must be more human and more nature oriented… We are all interconnected but we keep acting as though we are completely autonomous.”

Change requires all of us developed a deeper recognition of our common humanity.

Instead of merely documenting loss of habit, bio-diversity, air and water quality, and more, we have to work with the larger society to do a better job of maintaining invaluable and irreplaceable ecosystem services. 

This can only be achieved by education. Education that balances the sciences with the humanities.

Education that prepares children to live in a changing world by emphasizing critical thinking and learning-to-learn as much more than rote memorization.

(The below video ALUNA should be shown in all schools.)  

Such a world won’t be achieved overnight. 

BECAUSE THE CAPITALIST WORLD IS NOW WITH THE HELP OF ALGORITHIMS GOING UNDERGROUND. 

If there is to be any movement in the right direction we can only make the Capitalists world change its short term model of profit for profit sake with our buying power.  By boycotting any corporations/ companies/ organisations/ etc that dont have sustainability at their core of their business models.  

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

Contact:  bobdillon33@gmail.com  

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR A VIRUS TO MUTATE.

07 Friday Jan 2022

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, 2022: The year we need to change., COVID-19, Covid-19 Vaccines.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR A VIRUS TO MUTATE.

Tags

Coronavirus (COVID-19), COVID-19, Covid/Vaccines/Boosters., Post-Covid-19

 

( Seven-minute read) 


As we know with the flu, figuring out the mutations of viruses takes years. The Coronavirus is no different, it will and is (as we are seeing) mutating into more versions, that will either be more aggressive or less aggressive strains. image of vaccine vials with COVID-19 labels

Should we be worried?

The word mutates naturally conjures up fears of the unexpected. 

It might be a one in a million chance that a mutation will be advantageous to the virus, however, if you let the virus replicate itself 900,000 times, odds are that an advantageous mutation will occur.

Mutations happen by chance, and the rate at which they occur depends on the virus.

For a virus to become more severe or transmit more easily multiple genes have to mutate and once a vaccine has arrived the virus must adapt to it.

We don’t know what those mutations might be doing.

So before we start reading that birds are falling out of the sky, cows getting mad covid, fish jumping out of the sea and we all becoming Hollywood Zombies variants of mass destruction, let’s look at what we truly know.  

                                   ————

Is social media a spreader of the virus? 

Yes and No. Social media is a double-edged sword.

The COVID-19 pandemic is at a scale that we have never seen in the age of social media. And it’s critical to use social media to understand what kind of information is being shared and what people believe in order to ensure an effective policy.

The problem is that, just as social media has been really effective at sharing positive messages, it is conducive to people sharing rumors and misinformation that can spread easily.

People are increasingly turning to social media to understand the virus, receive updates, and learn what can be done to stay safe.

Social media is used to boost an individual’s self-esteem as many use social media to depict the highlights of their life, completely neglecting to post the negatives.

Some of its benefits include increasing interactions with others, having more accessible information, social support, and having the potential to influence many policies related to health but it is not completely without faults.

At one end of the spectrum are people just being uninformed and sharing incorrect information that they think is correct and helpful.

Toward the other end of the spectrum, people share actively harmful misinformation that is reinforced by their preexisting beliefs.

The end result is that many now and in the future will rely on the Internet, for the latest news and updates in the world and social media has started to evolve into sharing information about important current events. However, the spread of misinformation can easily result in mass hysteria about current events.

Those who, during the pandemic, learned how to use all types of video platform services are more likely to continue doing so even when lockdown restrictions are lifted.

                                ————

What is true is this.

While world economies are shut and open, at the moment we don’t know everything about what’s changed with the delta virus to become the Omicron Varient making it more transmissible and it is now finding ways to get around the immunity that we’re generating in the population through vaccination. 

Quarantines may or may not reduce their ability to spread and in doing so reduce the virus’s ability to mutate, however, if the mutations are not beneficial to the virus they will be eliminated by natural selection and the mechanism of evolution so the virus will adapt their environment. 

                                      ———

Is there a limit to how much a virus can mutate or does it just continue to evolve indefinitely? 

There is a limit but we don’t know what it is, because the possible genetic mutations that the virus could undergo are greater than all the atoms in the visible universe. ( There are 4^135 atoms in the visible universe.) 

Therefore it is not possible to predict what new mutations could emerge. But the rate of mutations is important because the faster a virus mutates, the quicker it changes behavior.

It will not matter which mutations the virus has. It’s not a good virus either way. 

The question then becomes, are those changes significant to us?

                        ———————-

According to the (WHO), the current Pandemic could be over by the end of 2022 if the vaccines were shared equitably.  With the current inequalities that already exist in the world, this is pie in the sky. 

The vaccine prevents disease, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent infection.

It’s the transmission of the virus that has to be stoped. Lifting restrictions and allowing as many people as possible to contract the virus is a recipe for mutations to develop. If we pretend like there’s no pandemic, we’re looking at millions of people dying before 85% of any country achieves herd immunity through natural infection.

The truth is that billions of doses worldwide need to be given before we can start returning to normal life.

We won’t be able to prevent new variants completely but we can reduce the risk by ensuring everyone, everywhere is able to be vaccinated.

How long does immunity last?

We don’t know how the vaccines work in real-time.

The jury is still out on Omicron, as the Virus in whatever variant spreads fast, far, and wide, more than any virus in history, cases have been doubling every two days in some places.

The burnout may take several years. Before it happens, havoc reigns because the virus now circulating almost exclusively among those who are unvaccinated is a potential threat to everyone.  

What is a booster?

Is its composition different than its former doses, or identical?

Currently, we are all being encouraged to get a Booster jab as the original vaccine protection wanes after six months.

There appears to be little information as to what is a booster, what it contains, how long it lasts, should it be the same vaccine as you got in the first place, the same amount, or different. 

The truth is that further work will be required to generate data at three months and one year after people have received their boosters, which will provide insights into their impact on long-term protection and immunological memory.

So we are still facing hurdles in getting people vaccinated, let alone boosted.

Millions of people will receive a different jab when they show up for their third appointment. Does this mean your booster dose may be different from the vaccines you had for your 1st and 2nd doses?

If you are on your first jab or second jab is there a different requirement with the booster?  

Why the AstraZeneca vaccine won’t be offered as a booster jab? 

One thing that can often help break through this roadblock, is proper information on each vaccine.

This is hard to unearth.

The ability for providers to not only address questions and misunderstandings about vaccines is so utterly important for general health, but especially during a pandemic.

As such, more efforts should be made to ensure that we understand that giving Covid booster jabs to people every six months is not “sustainable”   

Apparently, there isn’t a need for a new, variant-specific vaccine – at least not yet. It’s not that the vaccine isn’t as good as you were told, it’s that we’re fighting a different variant of the virus now.

The third dose of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines- Pfizer and Moderna- is identical to its first two doses.

If you get the Moderna booster, you will receive half of the original Moderna dose. Please be sure to confirm this with the person giving you the shot.

Like the flu, with regular vaccinations and antiviral pills (COVID-19 isn’t ever going to go away completely ), it will run out the food sooner.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. 

At the start of the pandemic, a key mantra was that we needed the game changer of antibody data to understand who had been infected and how many were protected.

As we have learned more about this challenging infection, it is time to admit that we really need the T cell data too. More research needs to be done to fully understand the relationship between our T cells and immunity to COVID-19.

Early findings suggest that they may provide us with long-term protection against the disease by genetically engineering the T-cell.  

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS : WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU ? WHERE DID YOU COME FROM ? WHERE ARE YOU GOING ?

03 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2022: The year we need to change., Artificial Intelligence., COVID-19, Covid-19 Vaccines., Dehumanization., Evolution., Genetic engineering, Genetics., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Post-Covid-19, Purpose of life., Reality., Technology v Humanity, The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS : WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU ? WHERE DID YOU COME FROM ? WHERE ARE YOU GOING ?

Tags

Artificial Intelligence., The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

(Twenty-minute read)

Here we are at the start of another year and we are truly living in a very unique time in the history of our civilization, facing several simultaneous challenges and converging crises:

A deteriorating environment, very unequal distribution of dwindling resources, widespread poverty, wars, climate change, oppression of many peoples, and dissatisfaction with life even in those countries with a surplus of material wealth.

For the most part, these crises we humans have brought upon ourselves over the course of many centuries by our attitudes towards each other and towards nature, and by the concepts, we have developed regarding who we are and the very purpose of our being here — in other words, Our worldview.

Who are we?

Where do we come from?

What is our purpose?

Where are we going?

All of these questions are fundamental to how we individually and collectively make meaning. As such they are questions asked by all spiritual traditions and since the very beginning of our species. Even the first cave paintings suggest that as soon as we were human, we started to ask these kinds of questions.

                               ————–

The only evidence you have that you exist as a self-aware being is your conscious experience of thinking about your existence.

Beyond that, you’re on your own.

You cannot access anyone else’s conscious thoughts, so you will never know if they are self-aware. Nonexistence is the absence of existence, by definition. Therefore there is no such thing as nonexistence.

To say that something does not exist thus seems to be a fallacy since NOTHING does exist.

How are you?

By far the biggest constituent of you is emptiness are atoms, and since all atoms are 99.9% empty space, technically, you’re made of nothing.

We call ourselves humans. We think we behave intelligently but we humans are animals! defined less by rationality and more by stupidity.

At the basic level, you are made of just four types of particles, which have been around for the majority of the lifetime of the Universe.

Atoms make up your body, 12 kg of bones, 33 kg of muscles, and 15 kg of fat. More than half of those cells aren’t exactly your own. They’re bacterial cells that weigh around 2 kg. Your body contains at least 60 chemical elements. For the most part, it’s oxygen and hydrogen forming H2O or water. 99% of the mass of your body is made up of just 6 elements. Of that, 65% is oxygen.

If you wanted to be more poetic, you could say you are made of stardust. All the elements you’re made of were once cooked up in the stars.

By the way, in case you wondered, the uncoiled DNA from all the cells in your body would stretch from here to Pluto and back. 

What are you?

Mentally, humanity was created as a rational, volitional agent.

According to the Bible, you are a god. ( God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26) but God does not have a body so your physical being is nowhere near a god.

Physiologically and anatomically you are an animal struggling for survival on the basis of evolution. 

Within just the past 12,000 years, your species, Homo sapiens, made the transition to producing food and changing our surroundings. We have been so successful that we have inadvertently created a turning point in the history of life on Earth.

We have altered the world in ways that benefit us greatly. But this transformation has unintended consequences for other species as well as for ourselves, creating new survival challenges, with our megacity incubators of viruses such as the flu and now Covid. 

Where are we going?

Will our species go extinct?

The short answer is yes, replaced by Artificial Intelligence, but not life.

Why?

Because mankind will control life through its varied reproductive activities manipulating life, whether it be by cloning, gene splicing, genetic breeding, etc.

Life in its simplest form, a single-celled organism, has microbial intelligence and can learn and adapt behavior to its environment. However, everything starts with something already alive. Only life begets life and intelligence doesn’t come from non-intelligent sources. 

Even the most simple of life forms is beyond our ability to create from non-living sources.

Life is created and is not the result of abiogenesis it controls and regulates the physical processes within each cell.

So since there is no evidence or logical consideration to believe that life is the result of a physical process, we can dismiss the concept of Artificial life as impossible. It isn’t just a gap in our understanding it is a physical impossibility.

However, there may well be life, with or without consciousness, interfacing with the physical components that support life created by an outside intelligence.

This is probably the most pressing and interesting question for the future.  How much of life will be controlled by AI?

                                 —————-

The current Covid pandemic is being fought against by a new form of vacation that instructs our immune systems to operate in a particular way rather than the immune system reacting. A step in evolutionary development towards part AI life.  

Where is this interpretation of behavior taking place?

What part of the cell decides one food-foraging pattern is preferable to another?

Where is the information stored while it’s being coded into an arrangement of molecules and atoms?

The nucleus of a living cell is often referred to as the “brain” of the cell because it controls cellular processes and functions. However, the nucleus is not capable of conscious levels of intelligence. In fact, we can’t point to any cell part and say, that’s where the intelligence has to be coming from.

Signals received by cells must be transmitted effectively into the cell to ensure an appropriate response. This step is initiated by cell-surface receptors.

How do conscious levels of intelligence now suddenly originate or emerge from unconscious atoms and molecules?

We have to bear in mind that in an evolutionary sense, nothing can influence where we wind up biologically unless it affects individual success in passing along genes. When a new behavior is written to the DNA, the information has to be assigned to an arrangement of atoms that advocate that consciousness exists at the microbial level. 

If so, that creates even greater problems, and without going into all of them, the chief problem is that survival sets a pretty low bar.

The question isn’t so much whether humans survive the next three or three hundred thousand years, but whether we can do more than just survive.

The current virus pandemic highlights this problem. The virus hasn’t yet committed to any direction.

However, it is as with all viruses an evolving entity, subject to the same processes of evolution.

With the new mRNA vaccines, we have a choice to make!

Why?

Because it is inevitable that Genome editing is going to be the future. 

Because now being alive is not a prerequisite for experiencing, evolution. 

We either move into a new phase in the evolution of consciousness and a new era of life on the planet, or we will witness the unraveling of the web of life and the immature end of our species and much of the community of life with us. 

The time to make this choice is now!

It starts with a fundamental shift in our dominant worldview.

It is time to grow up! and for us to respect all life. 

What is our purpose? 

This is explained in the following story.

“In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? Do you actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

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

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS: IS SOCIETY SET TO COLLAPSE?

19 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2021. The year for change., Climate Change., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Disconnection., Human Collective Stupidity., Life., Pandemic, POST COVID-19., Purpose of life., Society, Speed of technology., Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., THE NEW NORM., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS: IS SOCIETY SET TO COLLAPSE?

Tags

Capitalism vs. the Climate., Future Society., Human societies, Rebuilding our society., Social connections., Society, Society Collapse, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

 

 

(Fifteen-minute read) 

Not quite, but every major social indicator imaginable is either flatlining or declining and unwinding, from longevity, to trust, to happiness, to wealth.

 

History shows us that economic collapse will essentially happen with entrenched elites seeking to maintain the status quo.

You would have to be an ostrich with your head stuck in the sand not to see that in exchange for your Freedom, Liberty, and Independence, governments are printing currency to pay their bills and support the tens of millions on public assistance.

But if you take a look around societies that are failing to anticipate their own impending collapses.

There are political classes, intellectual classes, and capitalist classes, to name a few that can conceive of the possibility that society is in a grave, profound difficulty. With the help of the Pandemic now reaching unprecedented proportions, and the continuing Climate crises all are adding up to a pending collapsing society.

Why?

Because we are all too preoccupied with merely surviving the vicious cycle as the collapse intensifies. On one hand are acting as if we are already living in scientifically-planned societies, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about. On the other is the idea that everyone is entitled to have what others have earned is now permeating society with the help of social media.

It is not our hard-won liberties that are being taken away it is our means to live a life in an attempt to save dying economies.

                                  ____________________

If that is not enough just look at what COP26 achieved. 

As you know COP26 was an opportunity for nations from across the globe to agree on a way to limit the devastating impacts of climate change.

What we got was a deal that does not go far enough and will not limit global warming to 1.5C by the end of the century.

Because of the current Pandemic, carbon emissions will continue for the foreseeable future, combined with Methane, we are set to see more wars.

Climate change is going to result in mass migration with wars over resources with the pandemic affecting not just the cost of living but the ability to earn a living. We’re already seeing (with the most recent example in Cameroon where farmers and fishermen are killing each other for water) both ( Climate/ Pandemic ) escalating resulting in steep recessions in many countries.

Current projections suggest that the worldwide recession of COVID-19 would be the fourth deepest and most extreme since the Second World War during this time.

Surely it’s time we started to look at both the Pandemic and Climate Change through the eyes of human liberty, consensus, and laws, all are becoming more relevant day by day, which is paramount to all of us.

Today we are not immune to anybody’s problems.

A collapse of a society anywhere is a global issue, and conversely, anybody anywhere in the world now has ways of reaching us.

However, there are obvious differences between the environmental problems and pandemics in the past and the ones that we face today. The difference between today and the past is globalization.

In the past, you could get solitary collapses.

 

                                            ———————-

If elites wish to maintain the status quo, why don’t people…take action against those elites?

Are we able to choose what we will do with our lives?

What is the point of life if we cannot choose our own paths?

Common sense tells us that with the state of our planet, that we’re is no longer at liberty to ignore what is happening. If we really can choose, then these choices we have made must be uncaused — something that cannot be explained within the model of science that many of us rely on.

However from a purely scientific perspective, how is it possible that anything can occur without having been caused by something else? 

A human act is an act that is deliberately performed by one possessed of the use of reason. Branches of psychology and many wisdom traditions, attempt to make sense of human existence and experience and to connect those experiences to the world at large. 

Our current view of human mental evolution is like a jigsaw puzzle where many of the pieces have been taken out of the box.

They have not yet been put together to form a coherent picture.

One of the oldest questions in psychology, and in other fields such as philosophy, is whether humans have free will. The central puzzles about human cognition are its curious combination of flexibility and efficiency.

But is this all that defines us?

We don’t have to live with what we got.

Take, the technology behind a nuclear bomb.

It only exists because of the technology because of a cooperative hive mind: hundreds of scientists and engineers working together on an atom bomb.  

This same unique intelligence and cooperation also underlie more positive advances, such as modern medicine and now the vaccines we are using to fight covid. 

Still, as far as we know, we are the only creatures trying to understand where we came from. We also peer further back in time, and further into the future, than any other animal.

What other species would think to ponder the age of the universe, or how it will end?

                                    ———–

Either we put our survival before GDP.

Continue as we are or change by putting our Health before Consumption, putting equality before greed, putting transparency before political power, and sharing our responsibility to future generations. 

We don’t know exactly what led to our brains becoming the size they are today, but we seem to owe our complex reasoning abilities to notice the unexpected, which our world is now experiencing and will continue to experience with less and less critical reflection.  

Critical reflection requires that the thinker examine the underlying assumptions and radically question or doubt the validity of arguments, assertions, and even facts of the case. 

We are now in need of some critical thinking, not reflection to consider the results of having linked our scenario-building minds into larger networks of knowledge that have made us increasingly reliant on each other.

So what if anything will bring us together to act as one or when will we hit peak humanity becoming a singularity basically?

By peak humanity I mean we’ll have the ability to do things we can’t do alone.

If we could all work together as well as the human body can, that’s when I think we individual humans will be “cells” and we as a collective would be called an individual.

Our problem is that the majority of us are incapable of putting anything before our daily needs.

                                       ———————–

Because our rapidly expanding technology has allowed us all to become instant publishers means we can share information at the touch of a button.

This transmission of ideas and technology helps us in our quest to uncover even more about ourselves with an immense capacity for good. At the same time, we risk driving our closest relatives to extinction and destroying the only planet we have ever called home.

The technology that defines us can also destroy the world.

Why?

Because we’re simply trying to advance too much too fast.

Our cultures and mindsets cant keep up with our technology and morality, so chaos ensues.

How do you expect to survive in a world that is based on imaginary delusions of people without basic knowledge about how Earth works in terms of physics and biology.

This tells us something profound about ourselves.

Unfortunately, we don’t know all of the determinants of human behavior, and we may never understand all of these determinants—so the question of whether or not we have free will is likely to remain a philosophical quagmire.

This is why we are unable to act as one.

So we are left pretty much where we started.

Religions, Languages, Nations, and Cultures are what divide humanity today which is just another flaw as a species. 

So of course, we pass on the good and the bad.

Not until we learn to pull together our unparalleled language skills, our ability to infer others’ mental states, and our instinct for cooperation, will we have something unprecedented to fight Climate Change and future pandemics.

We understand what others think based upon our knowledge of the world, but we also understand what others cannot know. 

The answer lies in fundamentally changing social behavior away from the rapidly moving consuming beings that we are.

We are the only society in world history that has the ability to learn from all the experiments being carried out elsewhere in the world today, and all the experiments that have succeeded and failed in the past so at least we have the choice of what we want to do about it or do we. 

Most people realize that 2020 has thrust two game-changing trends upon us that will change the world for years to come.

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

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS: EVOLOUTION AND VIRUS MUTATIONS ARE BOTH ONGOIING PROCESSES.

07 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2021. The year for change., Coronavirus (COVID-19), COVID-19, Evolution, Viruses., WHAT IS TRUTH

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAYS: EVOLOUTION AND VIRUS MUTATIONS ARE BOTH ONGOIING PROCESSES.

Tags

CORONA VIRUS., Coronavirus (COVID-19), Evolution, The Future of Mankind, Viruses.

 

(Eighteen-minute read)

From the dawn of humanity and throughout history, infectious diseases have shaped human evolution, demography, migrations, and history they have killed well over half of all humans who have ever lived on earth.

Viruses are precursors of life as we know it, they infiltrate every aspect of our natural world. New viruses and strains were discovered in every decade of the second half of the 20th century. Today we don’t even know how many viruses human beings are subject to, even how many inhabit us at this very moment.

As to where viruses came from is not a simple question to answer. The origins of many human pathogens are ancient, extending back over time scales of thousands to millions of years.

It’s unclear how they first evolved but what is clear is viruses are tiny but their impact on life is huge. This is true not just for people, but for all life forms on earth.

It is estimated that there are 10 viruses for every bacterium on Earth.

We humans have been around for about 200.000 years while the Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. You do the maths. 

Strictly speaking, viruses can’t die, for the simple reason that they aren’t alive in the first place. A virus outside a host is a package of genetic material if it does not find a host it goes back to being just a package of dormant genetic material.

Hence, there shouldn’t even be any question about their survival and their effect on evolution. 

Therefore the term “survive” may not be the most appropriate term when it comes to a virus. 

                                —————————–

To us, disease-causing viruses and bacteria may be evildoers — invaders of our bodies — who, if they can be said to have any aim at all, it is to do us harm.

But by shifting our perspective to their scale it reveals that these pathogens are evolving populations of organisms like any other, whose habitat just happens to be the human body. Like other organisms, these germs are shaped by natural selection to live and successfully reproduce.

We view them as pathogens, however, because the resources they use to do this (and which they destroy in the process) are the cells of our own bodies.

Many of the traits that make us feel sick during an infection are actually pathogenic adaptations — characteristics favored by natural selection that help these germs reproduce and spread.

Without legs, wings, fins, or any of the usual means of locomotion, your descendents’ prospects for reaching a new host under their own power are nil.

However, natural selection has provided pathogens with a number of sneaky strategies for making the leap to a new host, including:

  • Droplet transmission — for example, being passed along when one host accidentally sneezes on another. The flu is transmitted this way.
  • Airborne transmission — for example, being exhaled by one host and inhaled by another. Tuberculosis is transmitted this way.
  • Vector transmission — getting picked up by a carrier (the vector — e.g., a mosquito) and carried to a new host. Malaria is transmitted this way.
  • Waterborne transmission — leaving one host (e.g., in feces), infecting the water supply, and being taken up (e.g., in drinking water) by a new host. Cholera is transmitted this way.
  • Sit-and-wait transmission — being able to live outside a host for long periods of time until coming into contact with a new host. Smallpox can survive for years outside of a host!

Some like it warm and damp and others need cold and dry to survive outside a host and any other combination you can think of applies.  They don’t breathe, eat, produce waste, or otherwise. In other, words they do not perform metabolism on their own.

They do need a temperature range to use. If not, they are destroyed but since most viruses are deactivated at temperatures between 165 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit -100 Celsius.

Can they exist in space?  Absolutely. Yes and no. Space is no virus vacation.

Viruses can withstand freezing temperatures 

Viruses are a huge source of selective pressure in the evolution of a species, such as a provirus, a virus that inserts its DNA directly into the chromosomes of the host cell. Rather than just having a separate strand of DNA or RNA floating around in the cell, the provirus adds itself to the host genome and gets replicated with the other genes.

This is the reason the human body reacts to infection by raising its own temperature.

They may be descendants of previously free-living organisms that adapted a parasitic replication strategy. Perhaps they existed before life started and led to the evolution of, cellular life. Whether they did or not is of little consequence as discoveries have continued in the 21st century as new viral diseases such as SARS and Nipah virus and Covid have emerged.

Using the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic as a model, experts suggested the COVID-19 outbreak will last between 18 and 24 months.

I say that they are totally wrong with 7 billion of us rising the chances of genetic mutations, virus mutations will only increase, exposing us to a different set of infections diseases.

It is becoming more and more apparent that the Covid virus has hijacked the flu virus or vice versa. 

All-in-all a virus needs to keep infecting new hosts or it’ll simply run out of ways to reproduce as biological systems either die or figure out how to kill it.

However, if it kills the host too fast, it can’t effectively reach a new host. If the host figures out how to kill it too fast, same thing.

                                    ——————–

These days as are getting fatter, taller, and perhaps cooler we battle diseases with drugs, and vaccines. 

However it stands to reason because we are not immune to the effects of natural selection and our Biology never standstill with the Earth’s temperature increases, we will have to cool down. (Biology is a science and there are many technologies within its scope. So, technology and biology are not opposed concepts.) One contains the other.

Our average temperature is about 98.6 degrees, above that, we have a fever, below we have hypothermia. 

Our brains can only understand “information technologies”. But the concept of technology goes far beyond that into our evolution. 

Innovative new technologies are already restoring and enhancing human sensory and motor functions like never before, but viruses are not will not be controlled by any technology. 

Viruses are the smallest of all microbes. They are said to be so small that 500 million rhinoviruses (which cause the common cold) could fit onto the head of a pin.

Population concentrations and movement, both animal and human, have been steadily increasing in this century, enhancing transmission of respiratory and enteric viruses and compounding the difficulty of preventing environmental transmission.

This could open the door for the evolution of more virulent strains.

Maybe there are other explanations for diseases and our relationship to nature besides those dictated by the accepted theories of the medical-industrial complex that we have been forced to live under.

Perhaps we should recognize them as the fourth domain of life and not dismiss them, if only because they do in fact reproduce outside their own “bodies.”

The more common RNA viruses—like the coronavirus behind the current pandemic.

DNA outcompeted RNA as a type of informational code. But RNA survives as an essential part of terrestrial biology, as we’re seeing with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-

The emergence of the omicron variant is yet another reminder of the urgency to vaccinate to stop the further spread and evolution of SARS-CoV-2. 

Infectious diseases continue to be a major cause of mortality globally, responsible for between a quarter to a third of all deaths and nearly half of all deaths in people under the age of 45, with most of these in principle avoidable.

We have to let go of the self-serving notion that we can control an inexorable natural process. To date, over 250 million infections have been confirmed globally with over 5 million deaths.  

Approximately five percent of the oxygen we breathe is virally derived.

Think about that the next time you take a deep breath.

The current Covid pandemic is just one in the series of ongoing and never-ending deadly viral assaults. Viruses are key drivers of evolution, all the essential things they do in the world far outweigh the bad things.

Without viruses, life and the planet as we know it would cease to exist. And even if we wanted to, it’s probably impossible to annihilate Covid – a virus.

Finally, there is no proof that alcohol kills the virus but the odd glass of whisky might help.  

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With less active lives ( With people now moving less than ever ) there is a degradation in human strength

We don’t challenge our bones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF DYING FROM OLD AGE OR COVID??

29 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Coronavirus (COVID-19), COVID-19, THE ODDS OF DYING FROM COVID, Vaccinations.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF DYING FROM OLD AGE OR COVID??

Tags

Coronavirus (COVID-19), THE ODDS OF DYING FROM COVID, Vaccinations.

(Three-minute read) 

Life is full of decisions that we make based on risks versus benefits.

In 1970, people had a 28% chance of dying before they turned 50.

By 2010, that risk had been cut in half.

THE ODDS OF DYING FROM COVID ARE DIFFICULT TO ESTIMATE AS IT IS NO LONGER A SEASONAL ILLNESS AND IT DEPENDS ON WHICH STRAIN ONE GETS, WHAT AGE YOU ARE, SEX, ETHNIC GROUP, STANDARD OF CARE, AND WHAT THERE IS PRE-EXISTING MEDICAL CONDITION.   

This means death rates will vary from place to place and at different times.

So far 90.4% of COVID deaths were in people with pre-existing medical conditions.

So what are the odds?

To put this into perspective, using death probability statistics from America…

  • [2.4% COVID Risk Age 80+]
  • 1.1% chance of dying by suicide
  • 1% chance of dying of an opioid overdose
  • 0.9% chance of tripping over and dying
  • 0.9% chance of dying in a motor vehicle crash
  • [0.6% COVID Risk Age 70-79]
  • 0.3% chance of dying in a gun-crime shooting
  • [0.07% COVID Risk Age 50-59]
  • 0.06% chance of dying in a fire
  • 0.04% chance of choking to death
  • [0.02% COVID Risk Age 40-49]
  • 0.01% chance of dying of sunstroke
  • 0.01% chance of dying in an accidental gun discharge
  • [0.007% COVID Risk Age 30-49]
  • 0.007% chance of dying due to electrocution, radiation, extreme temperatures, and pressure
  • [0.002% COVID Risk Age 20-29]
  • 0.001% chance of dying in a cataclysmic storm
  • 0.001% chance of being mauled to death by a dog
  • 0.001% chance of being stung to death by wasps and bees
  • [0.0005% COVID Risk Age 10-19]
  • 0.0007% chance of being killed by lightning
  • [0.0001% COVID Risk Age 5-9]

This begs the questions:

  • Why are they so desperate to VACCINATE everyone for a virus that is approximately as lethal as seasonal flu?
  • Why did they lock down the entirety of the West and destroy our economies?
  • Why have they transformed our societies into totalitarian nightmares?
  • What is the purpose of the new COVID police states?
  • How much planning went into crafting this operation?
  • How much of this is completely fake and scripted?
  • Who is pulling the strings here and what are their end goals?
  • What do they mean by “Build Back Better”?
  • What will the “New Normal” look like?

    It’s not yet clear whether any vaccine is reducing the chance of infection. but unvaccinated people are 14 times at a greater risk of dying from covid-19.

That said, we don’t know what the future will hold with the new variant—that has started spreading across the globe and there isn’t any clear evidence that the booster or the current vaccinations are effective. 

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

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE RIGHT TO BE TALKING ABOUT GOING BACK TO NORMAL OR ARE WE JUST FOOLING OURSELVES.

26 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Civilization., Climate Change., COVID-19, Digital age., Education., Environment, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Future Education., How to do it., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., POST COVID-19., Poverty, Reality., Sovereign wealth fund, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The Reset. Fact or conspiracy., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Truthfulness., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE RIGHT TO BE TALKING ABOUT GOING BACK TO NORMAL OR ARE WE JUST FOOLING OURSELVES.

Tags

Artificial Intelligence., Back to normal., Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Defaults looming., Distribution of wealth, Forthcoming Economic Depression ., Global warming, Greed, Inequility, Overriding priority., Post-Covid-19, Rebuilding our society., Sovereign wealth fund, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

 

( Twenty-minute read) 


Apart from the tragic human consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic, it’s impossible to measure the price of A GLOBAL DEPRESSION OR THE COMING CLIMATE CHANGE, NOT TO MENTION THE SURGING INEQUALITY DRIVEN BY AI.

But rest assured that it will be the young generation that will be saddled with the bill and the consequences and few countries are likely to be left unscathed by the covid -19 outbreak’s financial ramifications.

We have conveniently forgotten if you remember before the pandemic we had a financial meltdown in 2008.

Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, economies were all operating on borrowed money with all of them amassing debts away beyond their annual tax revenues to the point that their budgets were consumed entirely by interest payments.

Greece was on the verge of causing the Euro to collapse while England was in the grips of an austerity program that resulted in Brexit the cost of which has no definitive figure. 

90% of this was big banks creating debts world-wise in the knowledge that they would have to be bailed out by the taxpayers. (Too big to fail is a phrase used to describe a company that’s so entwined in the global economy that its failure would be catastrophic.)

While Wall Street hedge funds, with credit default swaps and sovereignty wealth funds, we’re making hay while the sun-shined, world debts were doubling. 

Take Iceland for example. German banks pumped $21 into its banks, Sweden $400 million, England around $30billion, the Netherlands $300 million, Oxford University a mere $50 million. Iceland’s banks went bankrupt. The government couldn’t bail them out because it didn’t have the money. Instead of being too big to fail, they were too big to save. Iceland never resorted to austere budget cuts that are so prevalent in Europe.

They imposed capital controls. They let the banks fail.

Iceland’s economy successfully survived a sovereign bankruptcy and government collapse.

However, Iceland’s government today is spending a back-breaking 17.3% of its tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt.

Without a doubt, Iceland was and is the canary in the coalmine for the sovereign debt crisis that is now unfolding across the world right now.

With investors around the world suddenly wake up to a sobering reality of a major default… bigger than Iceland in 2008. It won’t be long before we see countries defaulting because of the amount of government borrowing to fight Covid-19 

So what happens when governments themselves ceased to be credible? 

This might be something that had been considered preposterous only months ago but when one looks at what is only the start of a global depression it is now very much on the cards.

It’s important to remember that throughout history humanity has experienced no shortage of pandemics and deadly viruses but despite the similarities, of these pandemics some of the differences are now even more striking.

The economic fallout from these pandemics was barely noticeable. (The same can be said of the Spanish Flu of 1918.)

What is making the COVID-19 pandemic so unique is not the virus itself, but our collective response to it. Governments in their zeal to control society, have destroyed the global economy on a scale the modern world has never seen. These losses are unprecedented in modern history. The loss of human life that can never be recovered is regrettable but there’s a degree of anxiety now that’s well beyond the health scares which are still very serious and concerning.

If we take a look for example at the USA.

Its economic loss is more than twice the total monetary outlay for all the wars the US has fought since September 11, 2001, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

Closer to home. 

Millions out of work, industries losing billions, and that’s just the beginning. Transportation companies losing billions in market value with tourism the restaurant and foodservice industry decimated with real estate defaults looming.

Further afield the so-called least Developed Countries, whose economies are driven by the sale of raw materials, will not be spared either. Latin American region as similarly vulnerable.

In addition to global poverty, the pandemic has adversely affected vaccination rates, HIV transmission, gender equality, education, and more. Unfortunately, these problems won’t be reversed overnight—or anytime soon.

When will things go back to normal?

Never.  

Our society is fundamentally flawed, with a devastating financial storm more than likely on its way we cannot simply hit the reset button and go back to normal.

As we go about rebuilding our society for a new day, it is absolutely critical that we focus our efforts on healing the wounds of the people who suffered most.

We all know that the distribution of wealth is key to any recovery and we are going to witness in this pandemic and subsequent economic depression how inequality is the main cause s of why our world is in such a mess. 

So if we want a world worth living in we must address the distribution of wealth along with education.

( The Solution.

Embedding equity and empathy into our cultures by reimagining schools and the introduction of a Universal Basis Living Wage. 

Rather than preparation education (to enter a world of I am all right Jack ) we should be promoting core values education.

This education should be free to all paid for by the state. Not designed by wealthy white men paying the minimum wage, awarding themselves dividends, launching profit-seeking algorithms, running plundering sovereignty wealth funds, leaving the young generation with massive debt.

After two decades of progress around the world, nearly 37 million people have lost significant amounts of income and are now living on less than $1.90 per day. 

There is little point in governments spending billions on projects that enrich the few while their citizens have to resort to food banks, social welfare, etc. 

While Countries’ debts are ballooning exponentially, due in part to combating Covid-19, the fourth industrial revolution in the form of Technology is eroding the opportunities of earning a living or sharing in the profits of automation, machine learning, etc. 

It is not possible to stop the erosion but it is possible to share the wealth in a fair and meaningful way with a guaranteed income that would cut government costs while stimulating economic recovery. 

By scrapping the concept of the welfare state a form of structural inequality and replace it with a government-guaranteed payment to provide financial security

Cash is the best thing you can do to improve health outcomes, education outcomes and lift people out of poverty.  

It would stop people from emigrating not just to other countries but to cities.

The social welfare state is what prevents the poor from building their wealth to better their lives.

How could it be financed?  

Place a 0.05% aid commission on revenue made by profit-seeking algorithms and tax the top 1% and allocate 10 to 12% of GDP directly to the universal income payments.

The benefit would automatically rise with national prosperity and inflation.

The simplicity of the program means it would also cost governments less.

It is inevitable. If we don’t we will rebuild an exclusionary society.) 

                                                ————–

Germany, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. are all in the top 10 spenders, all conjure money out of thin air and funnels it to the government.

There will be inquiries.  How long of a sentence does someone get for railroading his nation’s economy? Life? 30-years? 10-years?

Where should we begin to rebuild our lives?

There are a number of possible futures however if we don’t take this opportunity to build a future that is more humane we will slide into something far worse.

The responses so far to the pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises.

The overriding priority remains to save lives.

However, understanding human behavior in its wider economic context is necessary if we are to solve climate change or if we are to tackle future pandemics problems all created by our economic structure.

Both are socially driven. 

With every week that passes, we learn more about the virus and understand more about how to defeat it. But the more we learn, the more we realize how little the world yet understands about the true nature of the threat – except that it is a shared one that we must all work together to defeat. 

Now is the time to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization…

The world is “not at the mercy of the virus called covid, but the fuse is burning on the bomb – Climate Change. 

It is at the mercy of Profit for profit’s sake that must be harnessed to affect change.

(See previous posts) 

At the end of the day, the Icelandic people are responsible back in 2008 for their collapse. They were never bailed out. They were stuck with the bill.

It does not take a genius to describe the changes that are needed.   

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WHY IS IT THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO KILL A VIRUS?

04 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., COVID-19, Covid-19 Vaccines., Unanswered Questions., Viruses.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WHY IS IT THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO KILL A VIRUS?

Tags

CORONA VIRUS., Coronavirus (COVID-19), Viruses.

 

(Twelve-minute read) 

 

Humans have been killing for thousands and thousands of years. Not just each other but almost every living thing, so why are we unable to kill viruses?

First, to kill a virus we must know what we are trying to kill.

Bacteria are not the most abundant microbes that live in and on our bodies.

That award goes to viruses.

If you think you don’t have viruses, think again.

To put it simply, when it comes to where viruses live in the human body, figuring out where they don’t live is a far better question than asking where they do.

It has been estimated that there are over 380 trillion viruses inhabiting us, a community is collectively known as the human virome.

Here’s where viruses come in.

They’ve already figured out how to kill bacteria. It’s all they live for.

Viruses are the most common biological entities on Earth.

Experts estimate there are around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, and if they were all lined up they would stretch from one side of the galaxy to the other.

So it’s clear that there’s a war being fought on our body surfaces every minute of every day, and we haven’t a clue who’s winning or what the consequences of this war might be.

The name Virus is from a Latin word meaning “slimy liquid” or “poison.”

They are microorganisms smaller than a bacterium that cannot grow or reproduce apart from a living cell.

They are not plants, animals, or prokaryotic bacteria (single-cell organisms without defined nuclei), and they are generally placed in their own kingdom.

In fact, viruses should not even be considered organisms, in the strictest sense, because they are not free-living—i.e., they cannot reproduce and carry on metabolic processes without a host cell.

Viruses must rely on a host for energy production, reproduction, and survival. It can remain inside the host for extended periods of time without causing any apparent changes in the host cell.

Viruses are quintessential parasites. They derive energy, as well as all other metabolic functions, from the host cell.

Most viruses vary in diameter from 20 nanometres (nm; 0.0000008 inches) to 250–400 nm; the largest, however, measure about 500 nm in diameter and are about 700–1,000 nm in length.

It is still traditional to divide viruses into three categories: those that infect animals, plants, or bacteria.

Antibiotics are not effective against viruses because viruses are entirely devoid of the machinery for life processes.

If you want to learn more follow the link below.  

                          https://www.britannica.com/science/virus

                                               —————————–

The resilience of viruses is what has made them such a menace throughout history remaining to this day the biggest and minuscule threats to humanity.

They don’t have to play by the same rules that living things play by.

They don’t really do anything — they’re effectively inert until they come into contact with a host cell, existing like freeloading zombies — not quite dead, yet certainly not alive.

“Viruses can be present in many locations – they can lurk in people, they can lurk in materials that are stored in freezers, they can lurk in wildlife and domestic animals – it’s really impossible to say if a virus has gone extinct.

It appears they take advantage of our bodies because our bodies are governed by our brains, which are unable to remember if they fought with a particular virus or not. So they mutate and hoodwink the immune system because our immune system is out of commission.  

So the only way to drive a virus to extinction is to eliminate it in the wild, which is an impossible task.

Regardless of whether there is a single person or animal not infected anywhere on the planet, we have to live with the virus. 

                                       —————————–

The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was reported in 1977.

Measles, smallpox, anthrax, and tuberculosis were all gifts from our farmed animals.

In 1980, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been eradicated. Currently, there is no evidence of naturally occurring smallpox transmission anywhere in the world.

Although a worldwide immunization program eradicated smallpox disease decades ago, small quantities of smallpox virus officially still exist in two research laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia, and Russia.

But what occurs at the end of a virus’s existence is only just starting to gather interest.

Why do some viruses disappear? And what happens to them?

In a nutshell, we get lucky. 

Sars was driven to extinction by a combination of sophisticated contact-tracing and the quirks of the virus itself. Other than Sars, only two other viruses have ever been driven to extinction on purpose – smallpox, and rinderpest, which affects cattle.

The war against these two viruses was won using vaccines, which are also set to eliminate polio – cases have decreased by 99% since the 1980s – and possibly eventually measles, though recently these efforts have been set back by war, the anti-vaxxer movement.

With Covid-19 the virus can’t break into just any cell in the body. Instead, one of its proteins will bind to another protein. Once the invasion takes place, the cell, in essence, is transformed into a factory that churns out hundreds and hundreds of copies of the virus making it difficult to distinguish a healthy cell from an infected one.

.  Viruses pick up errors in their genetic code as they spread, so in some cases it is possible to simply wait them out (Credit: Reuters)

We are left with speeding up viral evolution artificially with drugs that could bring some benefits.

At the heart of the plan is the biology of “RNA viruses” – a group that includes many of humanity’s most intractable pathogens, including HIV, the flu, coronaviruses, and Ebola. Their genetic material is made of RNA as opposed to DNA, which means that when they hijack their host’s machinery to copy themselves, they don’t include a “proofreading” step where they check for mistakes.

But this staggering rate of mutation is a double-edged sword.

Above a certain rate, mutations become harmful, leading to virus strains that are burdened with genetic faults that hinder their spread.

This is usually thought of as a bad thing for humans, because these mutations mean that there’s an extraordinary amount of genetic diversity among RNA viruses, allowing them to evolve rapidly – so any vaccines or drugs that target them quickly become obsolete.

However eventually, this could lead to their extinction or ours.

In the meantime, one remedy for this Catch 22 is to make a conscious effort to remind ourselves about the world before vaccines.

Here are a few to remember. 

Smallpox – HIV – Influenza – Rofavirus – Marburg – Measles – Ebola – Rabies – Hib – Hantavirus – Dengue – Sars-Cov – Sars- Coc2 – Mers -Cov – Swine Flu – Avian Flue – Whooping Cough – Mumps – Chickenpox – Diptheria – Rubella.  (Cancer is neither a bacteria nor a virus however it is known that some viruses lead to cancer or help to kill cancer.) 

The 1918 flu pandemic, which infected a third of the world’s population and killed 50 million. This strain of influenza has gone extinct along with every flu virus that existed in humans until about 120 years ago. However, every few decades, a new type of flu will evolve quietly accumulating mutations that were useless or even actively harmful to its own survival. 

In the meantime, please can we learn two obvious lessons?

First, let’s stop bringing wild animals into markets alive (if at all): viruses do not survive long in dead bodies, even if not refrigerated. It’s a cruel practice anyway.

And second, let’s keep our distance from bats. As long as there are bats, there will be zoonotic viruses. Definitely don’t eat them.

Your missions down the research rabbit hole might’ve even led you to other novel ways of killing germs: namely,  Steam and ultraviolet (UV) light.

I would say any claim that they do is false.

As for their ability to kill COVID-19, your guess is as good as anyone.

To kill a virus one must break its out shell, without harming the healthy cells around it.

Nither shaking or steaming or sticking your head in a microwave will kill a virus.

Make no mistake about it; the viruses that have evolved with us for so many years are not only part of our past but will play a significant role in the future of human health.

Get Vaccinated. 

 

The fight against Ebola in Africa has been complicated by the fact the virus continues to circulate in wild animals (Credit: Reuters)

 

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

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS: ITS TO LATE TOO REGULATE ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE – SO WHAT IF ANYTHING CAN BE DONE?

18 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Disconnection., Emotions., Face Recognition., Facebook, Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, Inequality, Lock Down., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, POST COVID-19., Quantum computers., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media, Social Media Regulation., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAYS: ITS TO LATE TOO REGULATE ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE – SO WHAT IF ANYTHING CAN BE DONE?

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Algorithms trade., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism and Greed, Globalization, Government, Inequility, Post-Covid-19, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

  ( A Thirty-minute read)  Do you have a right to believe what you want? Yes, of course, but we now live in an Algorithmic driven world that is blurring the boundaries and amplifying the social tensions that are festering under the surface.  The problem is that we are allowing the building of technologies, that are making consequential decisions about people’s lives. AI is shaping people’s lives on a daily basis, but it’s an open question whether AI will become a trusted advisor or even a corrupting force.

It’s not COVID-19 that will kill us all its Profit-seeking algorithms.

However, here in this post, my main concern is whether the AI techniques will develop into quantum algorithms that will be totally out of control.  If artificial general intelligence is on the not too distant horizon, surely we should be ensuring that it is not owned by anyone corporation and that at its core it respects our core values. To achieve this we cannot surely let wealth be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, or to be let to the marketplace, or any world organization that is not totally transparent and self-financing. We therefore as a matter of grave urgency need a new world organization that vets all technology, and algorithms. (See previous posts) As long as the ALGORITHMS don’t go to war with each other and cause something even more difficult to diagnose than a crash on the stock markets they are safe is as naive as saying ” It’s going to be Great.” AlGORITHMS are increasingly in charge of a world that is precious to us all. Basically, we’re entering the era of machines controlling everything. If we want to create new different societies with human dignity for all we need to do something about it. The difficulty of predicting the future is not just a cliche, it’s a basic fact of our existence. Part of the hypothesis of Singularity is that this difficulty is just going to get worse and worse. Yes, creating AGI ( Artificial General Intelligence) is a big and difficult goal, but according to known science, it is almost surely an achievable one. However, there are sound though not absolutely confident arguments that it may well be achievable within our lifetimes. If artificial general intelligence is on the not too distant horizon, surely we should be ensuring that it is not owned by anyone corporation and that at its core it respects our core values. If we think in months we focus on immediate problems such as the present-day wars, the Covid crisis, the Donald Trumps, the economy, if we think in decades, climate, growing inequality, the loss of jobs to automation are all presenting dangers. But if we look at life in total, science is converging on data processing and AI that is developing itself with algorithms. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. It won’t be long before we will not be unable to distinguish the real world from the virtual world. Since there is only one real world and there can be infinite virtual worlds the probability that you will inhabit this sole world is zero.  So it won’t matter whether computers will be conscious or not. Is starting to feel like it’s every man for himself, Is possible that right now, a global crisis is upon us, Without even knowing… And the virus may not be the biggest threat, but the crisis that follows, Everyday goods that keep us alive will be gone, I’m talking, food, freshwater, medicine, clothes, fuel… Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness and soon rather than later it will be consigned to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Smartphones, and the like to make decisions that are not possible to reverse.  You might think that the above is stupid but it won’t be long before we will be witnessing the most unequal societies in history.                                  —————————— We humans will soon be living with robots that process data without any subjective experiences or consciousness or moral opprobrium. As we watch robots, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence machines, and the like slowly (and sometimes rapidly) permeate our world, it’s not hard to imagine them going from permeating to taking over. Algorithms are increasingly determining our collective future. It will only matter what they think about you. We are already halfway towards a world where algorithms run everything. This is why many of the issues raised in this post will require close monitoring, to ensure that the oversight of machine learning-driven algorithms continues to strike an appropriate and safe balance between recognizing the benefits (for healthcare and other public services, for example, and for innovation in the private sector) and the risks (for privacy and consent, data security and any unacceptable impacts on individuals).                                     —————————— WHAT CAN GOVERNMENTS DO?  Please regulate AI, this is too dangerous. Given the international nature of digital innovation, governments, should establish audits of algorithms, introducing certification of algorithms, and charging ethics boards with oversight of algorithmic decisions. Why? They are bringing big changes in their wake. From better medical diagnoses to driverless cars, and within central governments where there are opportunities to make public services more effective and achieve long-term cost savings. However, the Government should produce, publish, and maintain a list of where algorithms with significant impacts are being used within the Central Government, along with projects underway or planned for public service algorithms, to aid not just private sector involvement but also transparency. Governments should not just simply accept what the developers of algorithms offer in return for data access. To this end, Governments should be at the forefront of the creation of a “statutory building code”, which describes mandatory safety and quality requirements for digital platforms. Social networks should be required by law to release details of their algorithms and core functions to trusted researchers, in order for the technology to be vetted. This Law should enable the enforcement of, 
  • forcing social networks to disclose in the news feed why content has been recommended to a user.
  • limiting the use of micro-targeting advertising messages.
  • making it illegal to exclude people from content on the basis of race or religion, such as hiding a spare room advert from people of color.
  • banning the use of so-called dark patterns – user interfaces designed to confuse or frustrate the user, such as making it hard to delete your account.
  • labeling the accounts of state-controlled news organizations.
  • limiting how many times messages can be forwarded to large groups, as Facebook does on WhatsApp.
If we took the premise that people should have a lawful right to be manipulated and deceived, we wouldn’t have rules on fraud or undue influence.                                 ———————————– To days Algorithms and where we are. As data accumulates, even more so now with Covid- 19 track and trace, and now working from home we have more centralized data depositories and large centralized AI models that work off centralized or decentralized data. How does the concentration of power affect this balance that impinges on individual liberty? Our democratic institutions and public discourse are underpinned by an assumption that we can at least agree on things that are true. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube create algorithms that promote and highlight information. That is an active engineering decision. Regardless of whether Facebook, Twitter profits from hate or not, it is a harmful by-product of the current design and there are social harms that come from this business model. Platforms that monetize user engagement have a duty to their users to make at least a minimum effort to prevent clearly identified harms. We have to focus on the responsibility of platforms. Because people are being manipulated with objectively false information, there has to be some kind of accountability for platforms. Currently, these platforms are not neutral environments they have no common understanding that there are certain things that are manifestly true with algorithms making decisions about what people see or do not see. In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law, and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology. The way Facebook and other platforms approach this problem is: We’ll wait and see and figure out a problem when it emerges. Every other industry has to have minimum safety standards and consider the risks that could be posed to people, through risk mitigation and prevention. There are right now some objectively disprovable things spreading quite rapidly on Facebook. For example, that Covid does not exist and that the vaccine is actually to control the minds of people. These are all things that are manifestly untrue, and you can prove that. However, algorithms are much more prevalent than that- the Apple Face ID algorithm decides whether you are who you say you are. Algorithms limit people’s worldview, which can allow large population groups to be easily controlled. Social Media algorithms tuned to your desires and want’s ensures that everything on your feed will be of interest to you without you knowing what data these algorithms use and what they aim for. Conclusion.  We are already living with large AI platforms that are monopolizing the fruits of globalization with billions being left behind. With us accepting this as if natural.
  • It will be too late when we are asking ourselves. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness? Then ask yourselves what happens to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
  • Whatever view one takes on artificial intelligence ethics. You can rest assured that we will see far more nut cases blowing themselves up, far more wars over finite resources, with vast movements of people.
We have to remember that self-regulation is not the same as having no regulation. Of course, the loudest arguments for and against something often have one thing in common. They are often made by people with no desire to compromise or understand the other side. I think self-regulation, in and of itself contemplates people in power, deciding how they will act. We have to accept from history that we cannot possibly predict all adverse consequences of technology and that’s because it is not just technology that has adverse consequences, but the context in which is applied, It is impossible to regulate AI while thinking about all of its potential adverse consequences.  The seeds for harm at the design stage, or at the development stage, or at the deployment stage. We don’t have to wait for the technology to become an application before we think of regulating it effectively.  There is a need to strengthen specific provisions to safeguard individual liberty and community rights when it comes to inferred data. There is a need to balance the trade-offs between the utility of AI and protecting privacy and data.  Self-regulation within the AI industry may not be enough since it may not solve the massive differential between the people developing the technology and the people affected by it. Machine learning is the next step that they are aiming for, with the algorithms deciding the input and output completely. Inherent political and economic power hierarchies between the state and citizens and within the private sector need to be addressed because the promise of globalization is a lie when it comes to AI and prosperity for all. Algorithms are being used in an ever-growing number of areas, in ever-increasing ways, however, like humans, they can produce bias in their results, even if unintentional. We are all becoming redundant with biotechnology becoming only available to the riches of us. I don’t think that AI per se can be regulated because today it is AI, tomorrow it will be Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality, and the day after tomorrow it may be something that we can’t even think of right now. So it is important to have checks and balances in the use and access to AI that go beyond just technological means. Why? Because they are also moving into areas where the benefits to those applying them may not be matched by the benefits to those subject to their ‘decisions’—in some aspects of the criminal justice system, for example. However, technology companies are not all the same, and nor is technology the only part of the media ecosystem. It is essential to ensure a whole society response to tackle these important issues. You could require algorithms to have a trigger TO SHUT OF – to stop misinformation or terrorist groups using social media as a recruiting platform. BUT who defines what counts as misinformation? It is no longer possible for humans to fact-check so the only course of action is a world Independent Universal Algorithm that is designed to establish fairness.  While “fairness” is much vaguer than “life or death,” I believe it can – and should – be built into all AI using their algorithm. Therefore every Social network should display a correction to every single person who was exposed to misinformation if independent fact-checkers identify a story as false. (Google’s search algorithm is more closely guarded than classified secret documents with  Google Algorithm’s that now owns most of the largest data sets in the world stored in its cloud.)                                        ——————– We now have algorithms fighting with each other for supremacy on the market, prey on other algorithms in order to blunder the world exchanges for profit to such an extent that they now effectively in control of capitalism.  Take for instance, when someone says algorithmic trading, it covers a vast subject not just buying and selling large volumes of shares automatically at very high speeds by unsupervised learning algorithms. There are four major types of trading algorithms.  There are:
  • Execution algorithms
  • Behavior exploitative algorithms
  • Scalping algorithms
  • Predictive algorithms
Transparency must be a key underpinning for algorithm accountability. Why? Because it will make it easier for the decisions produced by algorithms to be explained.  (The ‘right to explanation’ is a key part of achieving accountability and tackling the ethical implications around AI.) We are only on the outskirts of mind science that presently knows little about how the mind works never mind consciousness.  We have no idea how a collection of electric brain signals creates subjective experiences however we are conscious of our dreams. 99% of our bodily activities take place without any conscious feelings. As neuroscientists acquired more and more data about the workings of the brain, cognitive sciences, and their stated purpose is to combine the data from numerous disciplines so as better to understand such diverse phenomena as perception, language, reasoning, and consciousness. Even so, the subjective essence of “what it means” to be conscious remains an issue that is very difficult to address scientifically. To really understand what is meant by the cognitive neurosciences, one must recall that until the late 1960s, the various fields of brain research were still tightly compartmentalized. Brain scientists specialized in fields such as neuroanatomy, neurohistology, neuroembryology, or neurochemistry. Nobody was yet working with the full range of investigative methods available, but eventually, the very complexity of the subject at hand-made that a necessity. The first problem that arises when examining consciousness is that a conscious experience is truly accessible only to the person who is experiencing it. Despite the vast knowledge we have gained in the field of mathematics and computer science, none of the data processing systems we have created needs subjective experiences in order to function. None feel pain, pleasure, anger, or love. These emotions are vanishing into algorithms that are or will have an effect on how we see the world but also how we live in it.   If not address now all moral and political values will disappear, turning consciousness into a kind of mental pollution. After all, computers have no minds. Take images on Instagram they can affect mental health and body image.  You might say so what that has always been the case. And you would be right up to now but because of Covid-19 government has given themselves wide-ranging powers to collect and analyze data, without adequate safeguards. If we are not careful they will have no notion of self, existing only in the present unaware of the past or future, and therefore will be unable to consciously plan for future eventualities. Unconscious algorithms in our brains rather than conscious images in a mind. If you are using a smartphone, it indirectly means that you are enjoying the AI knowingly or unknowingly. It cannot be modified unknowingly or can’t get disfigured or breakdown in a hostile environment. We should not be regulating technology but Artificial Intelligence. It is so complicated in behavior we need to be regulated it at the data level. In lots of regulated domains, there is this notion of post-market surveillance, which is where the developer bears the responsibility of how the technology developed by them is going to be used. As William Shakespeare wrote in – As you Like it.   ” All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and entrances. ”   Sadly with AI, Machine Learning Algorithms no one knows or for that matter will ever know when they enter or exit. Probably like AI learning is actually an ongoing process that takes place throughout all of life. It’s the process of moving information from out there — to here. Unfortunately with the brain, has its own set of rules by which it learns best, unlike AI, the information doesn’t always stick. Together, we have a lot to learn. Humanity is in contact with humanity.   All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the cloud bin.        

                                              social media oligarchy where the richest participants are allowed to spread dangerous                  .                

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THE BEADY ASKS. JUST HOW CLEVER DO YOU THINK THE HUMAN RACE IS?

12 Friday Feb 2021

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Life., Pandemic, Post-Covid-19, Reality., Renewable Energy., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The essence of our humanity., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY ASKS. JUST HOW CLEVER DO YOU THINK THE HUMAN RACE IS?

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Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism vs. the Climate., Environment, Global warming, Our collective stupidity., Our Common Values., Our future., Our world problems, Technology, The essence of our humanity., The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

 

 

(Twenty to Thirty-minute read)

Do not read this if you are depressed or are easily depressed.

If you do read it try not to click the moron like button, but comment.  

We, humans, believe that we are the most intelligent beings on the planet. 

We believed that are superior to the animals due to our exclusive ability to reason.

In simple terms, this comes about when we select only the ‘survivors’ – those that outperformed the rest, whether people, machines, or companies – and come to conclusions based on their attributes, without looking more broadly at the whole dataset, including those with similar characteristics that failed to perform as well.

Our collective ingenuity has got us into the mess of Climate Change and now a Pandemic that is not just killing us but shining a light on our collective stupidity.

The Earth’s carrying capacity could absorb our endless acts of stupidity. 

So to answer this question one could go back over the history of humanity and pick out numerous examples since man emerged from his cave.

From the Nuclear bomb to stepping on the moon. From Michelangelo to Albert Enstine. From the Stone age to the Tec age we have put greed and power before looking after what we had in the first place – Earth. 

                                       ————————

As there is no escaping our interconnected world in this post I want to address the origins of Planetary realism when it comes to that interconnection.

Why?

Because we are now engaged in two possible futures for the world, the worst or the best. 

Are we going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot?

or  

Are we going to recognize that Human DNA is too similar to split us into subspecies or races of stupidity?  

Can we act like one? 

I firmly believe we know enough to solve our problems, I just doubt we have the collective will to work together to get the job done. We should be much better than our collective selves.

We have to start accepting our common vulnerability and therefore our common interest instead of just National Interests which is paramount to decisions that have to be on a global scale.    

When the stakes are high, we want those making decisions – whether they be machines or human, to be correct, trustworthy, and responsible.

However, now we are handing these decisions more and more to machine learning algorithms and neural nets. 

We implicitly grant artificial intelligence a degree of agency that not only overstates its true abilities but robs us of our own autonomy... It is always humans who choose whether or not to abdicate this authority, to empower some piece of technology to intervene on our behalf. It would be a mistake to presume that this transfer of authority involves a simultaneous absolution of responsibility. It does not.

Perhaps technology can be correct. But can it be trustworthy and responsible?

While it’s hard to judge even if another person is trustworthy or responsible, it may be even harder to judge something that thinks in such radically different ways as humans.

We once viewed ourselves as the only creature with emotions, morality, culture, which is not true, they can be found in the animal kingdom. 

Confucius:

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

This is to say that intelligence is the ability to recognize our weaknesses and one of our greatest weaknesses is the impenetrable barrier now being created right in front of our eyes between Artificial Intelligence and Capitalist Greed. 

If we measure the IQ of AI it would be against its capabilities of reasoning and its problem-solving ability and nothing else.

Rational thinking and intelligence don’t tend to go hand in hand. 

This measurement doesn’t measure curiosity or creativity.

Unlike the robotic world, people desperately believe they’re smart because they desperately want to see themselves as smart and sometimes because they really can’t tell.

Most of us measure our IQ as being five points higher than it actually is.

Thinking AI might work in the same way as a human brain is not only misleading but dangerous.

Up to now AI only takes orders and does not think by itself so there is a massive disconnect from biological networks. They, that is AI lacks some crucial components essential to navigating the real world…. they do recreate something like human intelligence that has the ability to analyze all matters from multiple angles while not or never will be prepared to take on responsible decision making.  

In short, Dunning and Kruger discovered that the less intelligent you are, the more confident you’re likely to be that you know what you’re doing and the more likely you are to be wrong. Being unsure, in this context, is often a mark of intelligence.

Without being curious, an intelligent person won’t ever use their intelligence to learn and form new ideas.

At the same time, a person without curiosity it seems, be less likely to question themselves or the world around them in the first place. As a result, it seems they would also be unlikely to ever use what intelligence they had to learn new things and question their own misperceptions.

But AI is learning to manipulate human behavior, creating more problems for the world. 

Of course, there is just one thing that nags away at the average man or woman in the street in amongst all this academic and government research and analysis, how safe is AI going to be for me – can I trust big business and government to behave ethically? 

It is already exploiting vulnerabilities in ways people make choices. Click like and the AI steer you towards particular actions by filtering your choices. 

WE now have  “behavioral modification empires.”

The purpose of organizations such as Google and Facebook ceased to be building connections, and instead became about adapting your habits and thought patterns in the name of profit.

With so much misguided thought and active disinformation online, it has become difficult for people with insight worth sharing to do so. Behind the anonymity of the web, anyone can claim to be an expert. When everybody is an expert, nobody is.

In other words, the AI learns how people make choices.

Broad, anonymous social networks breed collective stupidity.

This has enormous ramifications for the future as AI could be used to steer people away from stupid choices or to make them.  

AI can outwit us on the virtual battlefield so let’s not put them in charge of the real thing.

This is already happing with drones that identify, track and kill people without any human intervention. They have no moral capability to decide who lives or who dies, no empathy no compassion. 

However, if a machine can beat us at a game does it make them more intelligent than us?  

Despite the many warning raised not only will we see robots fighting wars they will be planning them too. 

David Dunning and Justin Kruger, “The miscalibration of the incompetent stem from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

This goes directly into how people view themselves and their abilities. For instance, most people think they’re above average when that literally cannot be true.

In any leadership role, you’ve got to establish trust.

It’s trusting that the person is going to do things and trusting that they’re telling the truth and being upfront and honest.

But how you go about doing that virtually is a little different – it’s a different skill set.

We have seen that Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter transform Donald Trump into one of the worst presidents of the USA and a proud country England into a whaling nation of Nigel Farage has beings.

Because of our collective stupidity, social media transformed both into remote winners with lies.

Therefore it is reasonable to say that with the current Coivd-19 Pandemic that hopefully, people are now more likely to be seen based on what they actually do, not based on who they are.

Why?

Because they simply don’t translate into anointing leaders by virtual leadership.

Neither of them got better at the skills, such as reasoning from given data. Indeed smart people are more prone to silly mistakes because of blind spots in how they use logic.

                                       ———————–

Considering the benefits accruing from AI.

Let’s start with how much data we produce globally.  

It’s about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced every day in the world. 

Next, if you Googled “how much energy do Google’s servers use?”  

Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot. An estimate in 2017 claimed that the amount of power required to run Google’s servers is 2.26 million megawatts per year – enough to keep 200,000 homes going for the same time. 

Facebook, in contrast, uses a wee bit more than Google, at about 3.43 million megawatts per year. Between them and Google they could power over 20% of the houses in Scotland.

When we come to the internet as a whole, it uses a bit more than 10% of the world’s energy consumption. 

All electricity generation systems have a ‘carbon footprint’, that is, at some points during their construction and operation carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted.  Then again all electricity generation technologies emit CO2 at some point during their life cycle. None of these technologies is entirely ‘carbon-free’.

While the energy involved in all bitcoin transactions in one year is 77.78 terawatt-hours – equivalent to the entire electrical consumption of Chile.

It’s no wonder that even without co2 emissions have climate change. 

We are going to have to find a way to generate more electricity to power the economies and societies of the future, but in a manner that doesn’t wreck the planet.

There is a saying that “Mad dogs and English men go out in the noonday sun.” 

Did you know the sun produces the equivalent of 38,460 SEPTILLION watts – that’s 3.846 x 1026 watts) PER SECOND.  That’s almost enough to power a Metallica gig.

So you would think that it is a no-brainer that we have solar panels to enable everyone to use this source of energy by giving nonrepayable grants to every home to install them.  To stop Co2 emissions. We have to fit our species into the energy flow of its biosphere.

That is the meaning of life in case you are so stupid still looking for a meaning. 

Instead, we have Paris Climate change conferences promises and the forthcoming Glasgow Zome dribble turning CO2 into a product – for profit.  

Introducing more change to Be-IT

One thing is certain:

The original purpose of the internet has been lost. It set the stage for a technological revolution that could harness human intelligence and advance our shared knowledge.

Its click-baiting algorithms and lack of regulation have brought with them chaos.

As social media came to dominate the landscape, it made using the internet for the purpose of collective intelligence increasingly difficult.

The rise of social media was supposed to bring us closer together but instead, I argue, it has done the opposite.

A system based on generating clicks and interactions has created an environment for the outlandish and bizarre to flourish, with expertise falling by the wayside. With so much content being generated, how can experts possibly stand out from the crowd?

Machines and AI are great, but we have to retain some capacity to think for ourselves. 

No matter how algorithms are retrained they will continue to impact the millions who use them.

The results will be that AI over time, will not categorize people into races on traits it thinks are most important – but into stupid or clever. 

For obvious reasons, this year is different.

The pandemic has, of course, transformed how most workplace in-person teams are now all or partially digital operations in the wake of the pandemic, removing Joe Soap from any say about the Future.

At the moment we have a warlike philosophy – if we continue to develop AI it might not overtake our individual stupidity but our collective stupidity, putting our very existence in danger.

Tech should never be any more than a tool that helps us to bring out the best in humanity. Many of the issues we throw billions at and attempt to solve with technology could be easily achieved if we were able to better utilize our collective intelligence.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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All comments and contributions much appreciated

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