It all depends on how governments and society respond to coronavirus and its economic aftermath.
As we know COVID-19 is highlighting serious deficiencies in our existing system.
Hopefully, we will use this crisis to rebuild, produce something better and more humane. But we may slide into something worse.
My focuses on this post are on the fundamentals of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages, and productivity.
I argue that we will need a very different kind of economics if we are to build socially just and ecologically sound futures.
In the face of COVID-19, this has never been more obvious.
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The COVID-19 pandemic is simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises: The prioritisation of one type of value over others.
From an economic perspective, there are four possible futures:
Descent into barbarism, robust state capitalism, radical state socialism, and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid.
Coronavirus, like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although both appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially driven.
Yes, climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that’s a very shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases.
Likewise with COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires us to understand human behaviour and its wider economic context.
Tackling both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential economic activity.
The epidemiology of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People mix together and spread infections.
We can see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are effective.
Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they weren’t introduced earlier in European countries and the US.
We are now facing a serious recession and we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at the next sign of pandemic.
The economics of collapse is fairly straightforward.
Businesses exist to make a profit.
If they can’t produce, they can’t sell things. This means they won’t make profits, which means they are less able to employ you.
Businesses can and do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don’t need immediately: They want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won’t. So, more people lose their jobs or fear to lose their jobs. So they buy less. And the whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression.
In a normal crisis, the prescription for solving this is simple.
The government spends, and it spends until people start consuming and working again.
This pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures.
But normal interventions won’t work here because we don’t want the economy to recover (at least, not immediately). The whole point of the lockdown is to stop people going to work, where they spread the disease.
If we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood.
At its core, the economy is the way we take our resources and turn them into the things we need to live.
Looked at this way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow us to produce less stuff without increasing misery.
So how do you reduce the amount of stuff you make while keeping people in work?
You have to reduce people’s dependence on a wage to be able to live.
Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of money. The dominant idea of the current system we live in is that exchange value is the same thing as use-value.
This is why markets are seen as the best way to run society. They allow you to adapt, and are flexible enough to match up productive capacity with use-value.
What COVID-19 is throwing into sharp relief is just how false our beliefs about markets are.
There are lots of contributing factors to this. But let’s take two.
First, it is quite hard to make money from many of the most essential societal services-key workers low-paid employee. This is in part because a major driver of profits is labour productivity growth: doing more with fewer people – automation.
Second, jobs in many critical services aren’t those that tend to be highest valued in society. Many of the best-paid jobs only exist to facilitate exchanges; to make money.
People are compelled to work pointless jobs (they serve no wider purpose to society: ie. consultants, huge advertising industry and a massive financial sector) because, in a society where exchange value is the guiding principle of the economy, the basic goods of life are mainly available through markets.
This means you have to buy them, and to buy them you need an income, which comes from a job.
Meanwhile, we have a crisis in health and social care, where people are often forced out of useful jobs they enjoy because these jobs don’t pay them enough to live.
While state-capitalist society continues to pursue exchange value as the guiding light of the economy. It also enacts a massive Keynesian stimulus by extending credit and making direct payments to businesses.
The expectation here is that this is will be for a short period.
Could this be a successful scenario?
Possibly, but only if COVID-19 proves controllable over a short period.
Limited state intervention will become increasingly hard to maintain if death tolls rise.
Increased illness and death will provoke unrest and deepen economic impacts, forcing the state to take more and more radical actions to try to maintain market functioning.
Barbarism is the future if we continue to rely on exchange value as our guiding principle and yet refuse to extend support to those who get locked out of markets by illness or unemployment. It describes a situation that we have not yet seen.
Could this happen?
The concern is that either it could happen by mistake during the pandemic, or by intention after the pandemic peaks.
Potentially just as consequential is the possibility of massive austerity after the pandemic has peaked and governments seek to return to “normal”.
This would be disastrous. The subsequent failure of the economy and society would trigger political and stable unrest, leading to a failed state and the collapse of both state and community welfare systems.
Then there is the possibility that we could see with a cultural shift that places a different kind of value at the heart of the economy.
The state steps in to protect the parts of the economy that are essential to life: so that the basic provisions of life are no longer at the whim of the market. The state nationalises hospitals and makes housing freely available. Finally, it provides all citizens with a means of accessing various goods – both basics and any consumer goods we are able to produce with a reduced workforce.
Citizens no longer rely on employers as intermediaries between them and the basic materials of life.
Payments are made to everyone directly and are not related to the exchange value they create.
Instead, payments are the same to all (on the basis that we deserve to be able to live, simply because we are alive), or they are based on the usefulness of the work.
A Basic Universal Income.
Supermarket workers, delivery drivers, warehouse stackers, nurses, teachers, and doctors are the new CEOs.
If deep recessions happen and there is a disruption in supply chains such that demand cannot be rescued by the kind of standard Keynesian policies we are seeing now (printing money, making loans easier to get and so on), the state may take overproduction.
There are risks to this approach – we must be careful to avoid authoritarianism. But done well, this may be our best hope against an extreme COVID-19 outbreak.
Mutual aid is the second future in which we adopt the protection of life as the guiding principle of our economy. But, in this scenario, the state does not take a defining role. Rather, individuals and small groups begin to organise support and care within their communities.
The most ambitious form of this future sees new democratic structures arise. Groupings of communities that are able to mobilise substantial resources with relative speed. People coming together to plan regional responses to stop disease spread and (if they have the skills) to treat patients.
This kind of scenario could emerge from any of the others.
What hopefully is clear is that all these scenarios leave some grounds for fear, but also some for hope.
The upside of this is the possibility that we build a more humane system that leaves us more resilient in the face of future pandemics and other impending crises like climate change.
A key task for us all is demanding that emerging social forms come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy.
The central political task in this time of crisis is living and (virtually) organising around those values.
Not low-paid workers or National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage because their work is so vital.
Successive governments had failed to reduce inequality between rich and poor despite two decades of interventions.
We must now with an uncertain future focus more on the journey, rather than the ultimate destination.
But be no doubt that we are at a crossroad where the low pay culture that has trapped people in poorly jobs is coming to an end.
Capitalism Inequality can not be allowed to continue.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
We must reclaim reality if not reality will reclaim us.
In a profound and globally interconnected world all our actions and in-actions matter. Nothing on this planet happens in a bubble.
Honesty is truth and the truth sets us free.
To be honest, everything you do directly affects everyone around you and everyone on the planet; and not just what you do, but also what you think, say, feel and believe.
We must all become completely responsible for ourselves and the global society we live in, and especially for all the problems that our global society has created and perpetuated. We don’t solve the problems of the world by blaming others, punishing them or shifting responsibility on to them or others who appear to be in charge, including governments, countries, religions, political systems, economic systems or anything else.
Perhaps with the Corona Virus, we are just beginning to learn this long and hard lesson.
What does it take to be honest?
To be free from deceit.
William Shakespeare ” No legacy is so rich as honesty”
Although often invoked, the concept of honesty is quite tricky to characterize in a world that is driven by inequality, inflicted by false news-Social media, plundered by unregulated profit-seeking algorithms, torn apart by wars, facing mass climate immigration, undermined by world institutions that are out of date.
George Grant, the Canadian philosopher, said ” “values language is an obscuring language for morality, used when the idea of purpose has been destroyed.”
The German philosopher Nietzsche saw all this last century but in all disciplines and at all levels (judges in law, ethics professors in medicine, university professors in a host of disciplines, politicians in all parties and, alas, religious leaders in all traditions) have not realized this point and continue to speak about “values” when they often seem to be discussing something they believe is true.
What is interesting is, these things are not simply, “you have yours, I have mine.” They are not values. They are a world away from “values.” We cannot say, “you have your courage and I have mine.”
I say we “cannot have a meaningful notion of “tolerance” “respect” or “dignity” or “honesty” based on an incoherent base of “values.”
That is why we no longer have any confidence that there are any shared purposes for human life.
To tell the truth is one thing, but the whole truth requires far more detail and doesn’t allow for the omission of anything, including the thought process associated with action or conclusion.
Despite its centrality in ordinary life as well as ethics and philosophy of psychology, honesty is not a major trend of research in the contemporary philosophical debate.
We have become so complacent that the conduct of elected governments is questionable.
Telling the truth — the whole truth — is, at times, practically and theoretically impossible as well as morally not required or even wrong.
Hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty are character traits so deeply embedded in our Political worlds that we no longer even take notice.
But honesty means more than not lying it is the language of values.
It is not “imposing values” but “teaching in truth”
These day’s honesty is on an entirely different level.
As we have seen with Julian Assange revealing what is actually happening can be less than ideal to the ego-mind.
If honesty is not telling the whole truth, what is it?
That is indeed a major question, who in this world of false news is to say which particulars are relevant?
What we need is a TRANSPARENT society, where all the values and virtues of democracy and the free market are really at the service of all of us.
This is what democracy is supposed to be.
But this concept is so far from reality, even in the perceptions of the people in the most consolidated political democracies, that we really need to question what is wrong with our society.
Not just changing this single moment in time but rather gifting all future generations to come.
We Are Living in “The Time of Great Awakening!”
What will our descendants in 200 years say about us?
That our lives were terrible because our cars could not fly, our computers had no protobio-chips and so could not think like humans, our planes could not fly around the planet in 30 minutes?
I think not.
The honest truth is that it is too complicated.
All the virtues are shared as objectively true but they are personal in how they apply to us as persons.
Does it even make sense to say that most of us are not honest and also not dishonest?
We assume, that most of us go through our day with the best intention of being truthful. All our conduct, in a sense, hinges on justice, wisdom/prudence, temperance/moderation, and courage/fortitude.
Only those who can face themselves, in all their own peculiarity, seem to be capable of developing a persona that is true to the self — hence, authentic if not honest.
It appears that much of our learning and education is to learn what the word means.
It is not simply or at all a question of “you have yours, I have mine”?
The day we will be able to push our evolution towards a point to achieve these goals, these values, that day and only that day, we can ask ourselves again: “Is our world we live in really better?”
To be honest, as this world goes its one truth at a time at the point of a gun that
makes honesty into a disposition?
Consequently, we cannot order any human action towards an end, because all means are related to ends.
Is honesty genetic?
Honesty comes with a different lens, and it has a knack of revealing certain truths and they come with different levels of discomfort attached to them. So there comes a point at which honesty becomes something else.
That something else is survival.
The kind of world we are living in, there are economic/social benefits of dishonesty. Given this, and the concept of natural selection, will the truth gene(s), gradually become extinct?
It may take years of science to discover.
As the man-made “lie-gene” is still blessed by every government in every nation.
WE’VE LONG BEEN TOLD OUR GENES ARE OUR DESTINY AND THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS THE GENETIC CODE CAN BE ALTERED.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Our egos are the parts of our identities created by external influences to boost their own sense of self.
posting about it all over social media. which closes us off from the world
It’s pandering to a market the world seems to want right now.
Were sold algorithms that only add to the materialism.
An honest action is that with no intent of harm.
One primary reason is the influence of social media despise the truth from life,
can’t get away with lying
There are a few ways to tell if you’ve fallen victim to this superficial, materialistic spirituality. We’re told we need stuff in order to be the best, but no one tells us there is no best.
If humanity stopped fighting and competing against one another; if we bound together in a common cause, we could accomplish spectacular things.
Not true.
We would basically become mindless drones of no culture because it’d all just be one culture with no distinct forms.
If this were to become a reality, Ummm how would govern it.
China’s premier Wen Jiabao put forward the following equation in a speech: “Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth.”
How wrong he was, however, by 2025 there will be 1 trillion networked devices worldwide in the consumer and industrial sectors combined.
He should have said, “Internet + Internet of Things = Becoming what we do not think? Because people are truly not that intelligent.
In our houses cars and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.
Intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities.
Coffee pots that talk to alarm clocks. Thermostats that talk to motion sensors. Factory machines that talk to the power grid and to boxes of raw material.
We might be seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before? This intelligence once locked in our devices will flow into the universe of physical objects.
We are already struggling to name this emerging phenomenon.
Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols.
Others are calling it the Sensor Revolution.
I call it the Programmable Profitable in a World of profit-seeking algorithms.
It’s the fact that once we get enough of these objects onto our networks, they’re no longer one-off novelties or data sources but instead become a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance in the era of the cloud and apps and the walled garden— of Google, Apple, etc, which connotes a peer-to-peer system in which each node will not be equally empowered.
These connected objects will act more like a swarm of drones, a distributed legion of bots, far-flung and sometimes even hidden from view but nevertheless coordinated as if they were a single giant machine, relying on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention.
So the world will act as one. Or will it?
Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a designable environment, a playground for coders and engineers.
It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical putting intelligence from the cloud into everything we touch.
Call it “smart exploration.”
The rises of the smartphone have supplied us with a natural way to communicate with those smart objects. So far they include watches, heart rate monitors, and even some new Nike shoes. Smartphone making payments to merchants wirelessly instead of swiping a card, and some billboards are using the protocol to beam content to passersby who ask for it. As a way to sell more products and services—particularly Big Data–style analysis—to their large corporate customers.
The yoking together of two or more smart objects—is the trickiest, because it represents the vertiginous shift from analysis, the mere harvesting of helpful data, to real automation.
In my view no matter how thoroughly we might use data to fine-tune our lives and businesses,it’s scary to take any decisions out of human hands.
It can be hard to imagine the automation you might someday want or even need, in your daily life. There are all sorts of adjustments you make over the course of any given day that is reducible to simple if-then relationships.
Facebook, which has famously described the underlying data it owns as a social graph—the knowledge of who is connected to whom and how.
Would you want to automate all of these relationships?
A world where every one of us would have a sensor on us. “Presence” tags—low-energy radio IDs that sit on our keychains or belt loops and announce our location, verify our identity.
This is the principle behind Square Wallet and a number of other nascent payment systems, including ones from PayPal and Google. (When you walk into a participating store today, Square can let the cashier know you’re there; you pay simply by giving your name.)
A tracking tool that monitors not just your pet’s movements, but your movements.
GPS reliably know our location within 100 feet, give or take, and that knowledge has and is transforming our lives immeasurably: turn-by-turn driving directions, local restaurant recommendations, location-based dating apps, and so on.
With presence technology, Google has already the potential to know our location absolutely, down to a foot or even a few inches. That means knowing not merely which bar your friend is at but which couch she’s sitting on if you walk through the door.
It means receiving a coupon for a grocery item on the endcap at the moment you walk by.
Think about a liquor cabinet that auto-populated your shopping list based on the levels in the bottles—but also locked automatically if your stock portfolio dropped more than 3 per cent.
Think about a home medical monitoring system that didn’t just feedback data from diabetic patients but adjusted the treatment regimen as the data demanded.
Think about how much more intelligent your sprinklers could be if they responded to the weather report as well as to historical patterns of soil moisture and rainfall.
It does not stop just there think about applications on top of these connected objects.
This means not just tying together the behaviour of two or more objects—like the sprinkler and the moisture sensor—but creating complex interrelationships that also tie in outside data sources and analytics.
Plugged into that information, your system wouldn’t just know how much water is in the soil it could predict how much there will be, based on whether it’s going to rain or the sun will be baking hot that day.
It means walking through an art museum and having your phone interpret the paintings as you pause in front of them.
This simple link—between a tag on us and a tag in the world—stands to become the culmination of the location revolution, delivering on all the promises it hasn’t quite fulfilled yet. A simple link—between a tag on us and a tag in the world—will complete the location revolution.
The treasure that it digs up could be considerable.
This is obviously true for retailers:
It’s a future where the intelligence once locked in our devices will now flow into the universe of physical objects. Users and developers can share their simple if-then apps and, in the case of more complex relationships, make money off of apps, just like in the mobile marketplaces.
Processing it all in the cloud in a language unheard of.
On Google Maps, you can now navigate inside certain airports and stores, with Wi-Fi triangulation helping out your GPS.
And according to a mobile couponing firm called Koupon Media, some 80 per cent of customers who buy gas at one major convenience-store chain never walk inside the store, so presence-based coupons could make a huge impact on the bottom line.
But it’s also true for our everyday lives. Have you ever lost an object in your house and dreamed that you could just type a search for it, as you would for a wayward document on your hard drive? With location stickers, that seemingly impossible desire has become a reality:
A startup called StickNFind Technologies already sells these quarter-sized devices for $25 apiece.
Think about a thermostat app pulling in readings from any other device on that platform—motion sensors that might say which room you’re in, presence tags that identify individual family members (with different temperature preferences)—as well as outside data sources like weather or variable power price.
An even more natural category for apps is security. It locks itself up, shuts down the lights and thermostat, and activates an alarm system complete with siren, flashing lights, and auto-notifications, and notifications with an on-call platoon of off-duty cops all coordinated through the SmartThings.
This, finally, is the Programmable World, the point at which the full power of developers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists are brought to bear on the realm of physical objects—improving it, customizing it, and groping toward new business plans for it that we haven’t dreamed of yet. Indeed, it will marshal all the forces that made the Internet so transformational and put them to work on virtually everything around us.
However, there are obviously some pitfalls lurking in this future of connected objects.
As a sanity check.
Our fears about malicious hackers preying on our email and bank accounts via the cloud might pale in comparison to how we’ll feel about those same miscreants pwning our garage doors and bathroom light fixtures.
The mysterious Stuxnet and Flame exploits have raised the issue of industrial security in the era of connected devices.
Vanity Fair recently detailed nightmare scenarios in which hackers could hit connected objects, from our high tech cars (university researchers have figured out how to exploit an OnStar-type system to cause havoc in a vehicle) to our utility “smart meters” (which collect patterns of energy use that can reveal a great deal about our activities at home) to even our pacemakers.
The idea of animating the inanimate, of compelling the physical world to do our bidding, has been a staple of science fiction for half a century or more.
No, the main existential threat to the Programmable World is the considerably more mundane issue of power. Every sensor still needs a power source, which in most cases right now means a battery; low-energy protocols allow those batteries to last a long time, even a few years, but eventually, they’ll need to be replaced.
Just as with social networking, the privacy concerns of a sensor-connected world will be fast outweighed by the strange pleasures of residing in a hyperconnected world.
A bigger concern, perhaps, is simple privacy. Just because we’ve finally warmed up to oversharing in the virtual world doesn’t mean we’ll be comfortable doing the same in the physical world, as all our interactions with objects capture more and more data about where we are and what we’re doing.
What’s coming is ubiquitous connectivity that will accelerate how people collaborate, share, learn, gather, do business, and exchange knowledge.
It is widely assumed by the general public that humanity is “progressing” and that we are better both physically and mentally than our predecessors were. Of course, this is true for some of us but for 6 billion of us on 2$ a day I doubt they would agree.
A person’s conception of truth is deeply intertwined with their conception of reality and truth isn’t actually divorced from reality. Science is dependent on truthfulness.
Few of us these day’s has the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth, but can we or should we trust the source?
As the saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
In a world where facts are under siege, credentialed sources are proving more important than ever.
We are getting our news from platforms, run by Facebook, Google, Twitter, Messanger, etc including other social media sites and search engines, but can we place our trust in those platforms.
The profession of undermining truth has been in existence for decades. For much of recorded history, the truth was rooted in scholasticism now it’s rooted in a capitalist haze where political correctness and social justice including warfare have descended from the ivory tower of the rich infiltrating tech, business, healthcare, and governments.
The quest for facts these days is now governed by disinterested Google algorithms that trade us, accuracy for efficiency, creating a “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.
It seems that we accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.
As a result, humankind is losing mental capacity to know the truth and we are living in an era of rationality inequality.
For example, voters act on issues that don’t affect them personally and are under no pressure to inform themselves or defend their positions.
People vote as if rooting for sports teams, encouraged by the media, which treat politics as a horse race, encouraging zero-sum competition rather than a clarification of character and policy.
So what is happening?
History is littered with the bending or inverting of truth by people in power has long been consequential, so the recent prominence of “fake news.” is not a new development. The belief that fake news is displacing the truth itself needs to be examined for its truth.
The implication is that we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own.
“Social media.”
Not long ago many intellectuals deplored the lack of democratic access to mass media.
Now a few media corporations, in cahoots with the government, “manufactured consent” with their oligopoly over the means of production and dissemination of ideas.
We used to say, freedom of the press belongs to those who own, one no longer true.
Social Media with it’s like algorithms are now fueling, accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that can be weaponized: since everyone reviles these bigotries, they can be used to demonize adversaries, which in turn spreads a terror of being demonized. It has become the place where one can express heterodox opinions without fear of being silenced or fired.
A network of pluralistic ignorance enforced by denunciation mobs.
So when it comes to intolerant repression of non-leftist ideas, don’t blame the Millennials or the iGens because unregulated Social Media is now blazing out of control abetted in part by government subsidies and lack of will to regulate.
People gravitating to people who are like them.
Social media held out the promise of giving a voice to the people, unfortunately, is making us dumber.
It is true to say that the network dynamics of social media are still poorly understood, but they do not yet host the mechanisms of vetting and reviewing that are necessary for true beliefs to bubble up to prominence from the turbid pools of self-presentation, group solidarity, and pluralistic ignorance.
We project the best sides of our lives through social media but revile real vulnerability.
So we are living in a post-truth world” true?
If your answer is “yes” then the answer is “no” because you’ve just evaluated the statement in an evidentiary manner, so evidence still matters and facts still matter.
But humans are fundamentally irrational – No.
If humans were truly irrational, who specified the benchmark of rationality against which humans don’t measure up? How did they conduct the comparison? Why should we believe them? Indeed, how could we understand them?
We did not evolve with the truth-augmenting technologies that have been invented in recent millennia and centuries, such as writing, quantitative datasets, scientific methodology, and specialized expertise. We evolved with the reality of the thought of what is true.
We don’t believe in reason; we use reason but as soon as you try to argue that we should believe things by any route other than reason, you’ve lost the argument, because you’ve appealed to reason.
That is why a defence of reason is unnecessary, perhaps even impossible. The very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason.
This is the point where it gets somewhat complicated.
We build mental models of the world around us that allow us to explain, predict, and control things to our advantage.
Algorithms know this by monitoring our lives and consultancy firms that specialize in defending products from tobacco to industrial chemicals that harm the public (that have and are with us since the dawn of Capitalism) are manipulating the market place for profit while ensuring that the truth stays buried.
So our reasoning is contaminated by false news.
Social media is a major source of these falsehoods coupled with peculiarities in human behaviour on social media, make it easy for fake news to spread. Twitter, Facebook you name them.
“Political” fake news spread three times faster than other kinds, and the top 1 per cent of retweeted fake news regularly diffused to at least 1,000 people and sometimes as many as 100,000.
Out of all of the news you see reported, how much of it do you believe is made up or fake news?
Around 40% with 70% per cent more likely than true news to receive a retweet.
While the political repercussions of fake news are quite obvious, the phenomenon it depends on how the information is presented and how rationality is defined.
The powers of inference for example.
Rational inference, scepticism, and debate are in our nature but set against false news that is normalizing the production of alternative facts are a project long in the making.
Politicians—two in particular—lies a lot. But politicians have always lied. They say that in war, truth is the first casualty, and that can be true of political war as well.
THERE’S A TON OF MISINFORMATION OUT THERE, AND WE’RE NOT OKAY LETTING IT GO UNCHECKED.
Why is the truth important?
We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally.
Spreading disinformation here, hiding evidence of harm there, undermining authorities evidence can change people’s minds. Internet discussion groups, in which these ideas harden and grow more extreme in the absence of critical engagement.
Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change.
Forecasting is no longer the dark art of pundits, gurus, it is big data and everyday fact-checking with Google has and is been revolutionized.
When people are confronted with their own ignorance of the facts, they become more epistemically humble about their opinions.
Unwelcome news is automatically rebranded fake news.
In the end, we are mere mortals but has the day of rationality-promoting norms and institutions passed?
The causes are complex, but it’s exhausting to live in a society where asking for help equals failure.
“Life before Google.”
Nothing can reverse the damage that has been done during our own generation, and some of this regression in truthfulness in the last 50 years is a paradoxical byproduct of the fantastic progress, we have made inequality.
From climate breakdown to air and water pollution, Co2 emissions, natural disasters, the spread of the coronavirus virus, ongoing wars, our media watchdogs that don’t know what they are watching only using them to boost their viewing ratings.
Something important about the way we conceive of truth in our daily lives is needed if we are to tackle the difficulty assessing the reliability of the information that we find on the internet.
To achieve this these platforms with profit-seeking algorithms need to put their money where their mouths are.
Considering the technological boom are humans becoming smarter or more stupid?
The art of creating scientific disinformation is now at a new level of the tricks reanalysing results to reach different conclusions and hiring people prepared to rig methodologies to produce funders’ desired result.
The truth of history constitutes its whole value.
Enriching a favoured few at the expense of the great majority of mankind will be the last lie. The inconvenient truths will inevitably come to light.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The films served to both promote products and a vision of America undergirded by chemicals and synthetic materials. We learn the industry was proud to produce insecticides, PCBs, vinyl and other materials and toxins later identified as environmental toxins.
We may die out as a species for one reason or another, but evolution is inevitable so there will be a change in the future. We are not done evolving yet, so it begs the question of what could Homo sapiens really become – and what is forever beyond our reach?
We were fish once, and now we eat fish for dinner!
Humankind has come a long way from a single cell floating in the ocean waters, we have managed to become the multi-cellular wonders of nature that we are today.
However, evolution doesn’t have a direction, it’s confined are of this ecosystem called Earth which decides in the long run which direction if any it goes in.
Future humans might be very different from people today but not in the way science fiction movies would lead you to think.
Combining knowledge of our past with current trends, we are entering a new phase in human evolutionary history—one that makes the future less predictable and more interesting than ever before.
SO THE FIRST THING TO APPRECIATE IS THAT:
Evolution and natural selection are not the same things.
Evolution refers to the relationship between a species (a breeding population) and its ever-changing environment. Evolution does not concern what individuals may think it is the gradual genetic change of a species over time.
Natural selection is the phenomenon that rewards certain advantageous traits and punishes others through better or worse survival or reproduction. Medical science and public health measures have enabled the developed world to escape most natural selection.
Right now most of us are the sacrificial generation.
In nature, natural selection is the most powerful evolutionary force, but other factors may take over when technology grants a second chance to those who would have died.
Consequently, even with a complete lack of natural selection, it doesn’t mean that humans will not evolve. It is a selective force that clearly has shaped human evolution in recent centuries and may still be doing so today with the Coronavirus.
With the Viruses, natural selection may not be “over for humans.”
This set aside we are more than likely going to have to adapt to climate change’s, to technologies like Biotechnology involving living systems and organisms to develop or make products.
Technology is already affecting the way our memory works and humans may eventually reach a point where they can force evolution upon themselves through the use of technology.
We now have genetic samples of complete genomes from humans around the world, and with geneticists are getting a better understanding of genetic variation and how it’s structured in a human population environmental factors are no longer the driving force for evolutionary change.
We’ve all heard of designer babies, perhaps in the future, it may be seen as unethical not to change certain genes.
The human race will one day split into two separate species one more advanced than the other.
Races, as normally understood, would still be a thing, but with two separate species that will probably still call themselves human, even if they are technically different from those before them.
Of course, we don’t know this for sure but consider it’s not really a biological question anymore, it’s a technological question it is not beyond conceptuality that humans will not evolve into a single, ubiquitous ethnic group.
However, there is also a risk that current society collapses and some new society arises with ideas of eugenesy or breading races of superhumans and slaves.
One species with hi-tech machine implants, growable limbs and cameras for eyes even with different facial features and skin colour and external aids entirely responsible for survival.
A collective thought consciousness. Thought could be converted into instant gratification, and consequences to misusing it controlled by AI.
Computers will punish you!
The human brain, being a machine striving for maximum efficiency, typically remembers where information is stored, rather than the information itself but as technology becomes more and more advanced, our brains will adapt in order to maximize efficiency – perhaps to the detriment of our memory.
Nanomachines would be part of the human form.
People could download their being into a computer system and be a part of the AI collective.
We will no longer operate within the confines of survival of the fittest.
There is still going to be selection but artificial selection, so its no surprise that much technological advancement is currently aimed at the human body.
Up to now, sexual selection has defined evolutionary paths.
This will become less and less with gene editing with many of our internal functions becoming obsolete and what we might see is differentiation along lines where people live.
And what about space?
If humans do end up colonising Mars, what would we evolve to look like?
With the lower gravity, the muscles of our bodies could change the structure. Should we spend too long as galactic explorers, it’s likely that we’d eventually lose most of our muscle mass?
“What once use to be a magic flute will become a water carrier.”
So if we survive climate change humans will not evolve just for reproduction.
Whether it is genetically enhanced humans, bionic men, or uploaded beings, technology and its advancement with our decisions will shape the future of Earth and its inhabitants, including ourselves.
It will certainly be shaping human development. Bio to Artificial transmission with no inoculations.
Google Brain / Health or Microsoft Health vaults.
However, the future might be a lot slower than we think. It will take thousands of years for us to develop technologies that allow us to colonize the solar system.
If we do manage to move to other worlds, it’s likely that we’ll need to adapt to them using a combination of genetic engineering and technology.
All these changes may mean that Homo sapiens will speciate, or evolve into multiple new species. It will mean that our progeny have survived, even if they are nothing like us.
If we consumed most of the planet’s resources in doing so that is not evolution; that is the road to extinction.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin
The Dead Sea will be almost completely dried up, nearly half of the Amazon rainforest will have been deforested, wildfires will spread like, umm, wildfire, and the polar ice caps will be only 60 per cent the size they are now.
Wars will involve not only land and sea but space. Superhurricanes will become a regular occurrence.
Should you be worried, of course not AI/Algorithms are here to guide you.
AI-related advancements have grown from strength to strength in the last decade.
Right now there are people coming up with new algorithms by applying evolutionary techniques to the vast amounts of big data via genetic programming to find optimisations and improve your life in different fields.
The amount of data we have available to us now means that we can no longer think in discrete terms. This is what big data forces us to do.
It forces us to take a step back, an abstract step back to find a way to cope with the tidal wave of data flooding our systems. With big data, we are looking for patterns that match the data and algorithms are enabling us to find patterns via clustering, classification, machine learning and any other number of new techniques.
To find the patterns you or I cannot see. They create the code we need to do this and give birth to learner algorithms that can be used to create new algorithms.
So do you remember a time, initially, when it was possible to pass on all knowledge through the form of dialogue from generation to generation, parent to child, teacher to student? Indeed, the character of Socrates in Plato’s “Phaedrus” worried that this technological shift to writing and books was a much poorer medium than dialogue and would diminish our ability to develop true wisdom and knowledge.
Needless to say that I don’t think Socrates would have been a fan of Social Media or TV.
The machine learning algorithms have become like a hammer at the hands of data scientists. Everything looks like a nail to be hit upon.
In due process, the wrong application or overkill of machine learning will cause disenchantment among people when it does not deliver value.
It will be a self-inflicted ‘AI Winter’.
So here is what your day at 70th might be.
Welcome to the world of permanent change—a world defined not by heavy industrial machines that are modified infrequently, but by software that is always in flux.
Algorithms are everywhere. They decide what results you see in an internet search, and what adverts appear next to them. They choose which friends you hear from on social networks. They fix prices for air tickets and home loans. They may decide if you’re a valid target for the intelligence services. They may even decide if you have the right to vote.
7.30 am
Personalised Health Algorithm report.
Sleep pattern good. Anxiety normal, deficient in vitamin C. Sperm count normal.
Results of body scan sent health network.
7.35 am
House Management Algorithm Report.
Temperature 65c. House secure. Windows/ Doors closed Catflap open. Heating off. Green Energy usage 2.3 Kwh per minute. (Advertisement to change provider.) Shower running, Water flow and temperature adjusted, shower head hight adjusted. House Natural light adjusted. Confirmation that smartphone and I pad fully charges. Robotic housemaid programmed.
Refrigerators will be seamlessly integrated with online supermarkets, so a new tub of peanut butter will be on its way to your door by drone delivery before you even finish the last one.
8.45 am. Appointments Algorithm.
Virtual reality appointment with a local doctor.
Voice mails and emails and the calendar check.
A device in your head might eliminate the need for a computer screen by projecting images (from a Skype meeting, a video game, or whatever) directly into your field of vision from within. It checks
9 am.
Personalised Financial Algorithm.
Balance of credit cards and bank accounts including citizen credit /loyalty points. Value of shares/ pension fund updated.
10 am. Still in your Dressing gown.
11 am. The self-drive car starts. Seats automatically shift and rearrange themselves to provide maximum comfort. Personalised News and Weather Algorithm gives a report. The car books parking spot places order for coffee. Over coffee, you rent out a robot in Dublin and have it do the legwork for your forthcoming visiting – hotels.
12 pm.
Hologram of your boss in your living room.
1 pm.
Virtual work meeting to discuss the solitary nature of remote work.
Face-to-face meeting arranged.
2 pm. Home. Lunch delivered.
3 pm. Sporting activity with a virtual coach.
5 pm. Home
7 30 pm.
Discuss and view the Dubin robot walk around containing video and audio report.
Dinner delivered. Six quests. The home management algorithm rearranges the furniture.
8 30 pm
Virtual helmets on for some after-dinner entertainment.
10 pm
Ask Alixia to shut the house down not before you answer Alixia question to score points and a chance to win — Cash- Holiday- Dinner for two- a discount on Amazon- e bay- or a spot of online gambling.
———
The fourth industrial revolution is not simply an opportunity. It matters what kind of opportunity is for whom and under what terms.
We need to start thinking about algorithms.
The core issue here is of course who will own the basic infrastructure of our future which is going to be effect all sectors of society.
They are not just for mathematicians or academics. There are algorithms all around us and you don’t need to know how to code to use them or understand them.
We need to better understand them to better understand, and control, our own futures. To achieve this we need to better understand how these algorithms work and how to tailor them to suit our needs. Otherwise, we will be unable to fully unlock the potential of this abstract transition because machine learning automates automation itself.
The new digital economy, akin to learning to read, has obscured our view of algorithms. Algorithms are increasingly part of our everyday lives, from recommending our films to filtering our news and finding our partners.
Building a solid foundation now for governance for AI the need to use AI responsibly
and to consider the broader reaching implications of this transformational technology’s use.
The world population will be over 9 billion with the majority of people will live in cities.
So here are a few questions at 30 you might want to consider.
How does the software we use influence what we express and imagine?
Shall we continue to accept the decisions made for us by algorithms if we don’t know how they operate?
What does it mean to be a citizen of a software society?
These and many other important questions are waiting to be analyzed.
If we reduce each complex system to a one-page description of its algorithm, will we capture enough of software behaviour?
Or will the nuances of particular decisions made by software in every particular case be lost?
You don’t need a therapist; they need an algorithm.
We may never really grasp the alienness of algorithms. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to live with them.
Unfortunately, their decisions can run counter to our ideas of fairness. Algorithms don’t see humans the same way other humans do.
What are we doing about confronting any of this – Nothing much.
So its no wonder that people start to worry about what’s left for human beings to do.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
So information may very well come to succeed capital as a central theoretical concept for political and social philosophy.
The retrieval systems of the future are not going to retrieve facts but points of view.
However, the weakness of databases is that they let you retrieve facts, while the strength of our culture over the past several hundred years has been our ability to take on multiple points of view.
The question is, will new technologies speed the collapse of closed societies and favour the spread of open ones. The information revolution empowers individuals, favours open societies, and portends a worldwide triumph for democracy—may not hold up as times change.
The revolution in global communications will forces all nations to reconsider traditional ways of thinking about national sovereignty.
We are witnessing this happing already with the rise of popularism – Election of Donal Trump and Boris Johnston, but the tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. However, mere tools aren’t enough. The tools are simply a way of channelling existing motivation.
The influence in the information age is indeed proving to revolve around symbolic politics and media-savvy — the ‘soft power’ aspects of influence.
The information revolution may well enable hybrid systems to take the form that does not fit standard distinctions between democracy and totalitarianism. In these systems, part of the populace may be empowered to act more democratically than ever, but other parts may be subjected to new techniques of surveillance and control.
Technology with algorithms are leading to new hybrid amalgams of democratic and authoritarian tendencies, often in the same country, like China that is building a vast new sensory apparatus for watching what is happening in their own societies and around the world.
The new revolution in communications makes possible both an intense degree of centralization of power if the society decides to use it in that way, and large decentralization because of the multiplicity, diversity, and cheapness of the modes of communication.
Of all the uses to which the new technologies are being put, this may become one of the most important for the future of the state and its relationship to society.
So are we beginning to see the end of democracy and the beginning of Cyberocracy?
Crime and terrorism are impelling new installations for watching cityscapes, monitoring communications, and mapping potential hotspots, but sensor networks are also being deployed for early warning and rapid response regarding many other concerns — disease outbreaks, forest protection.
However, the existence of democracy does not assure that the new technology will strengthen democratic tendencies and be used as a force for good rather than evil.
The new technology may be a double-edged sword even in a democracy.
To this end, far from favouring democracy or totalitarianism, Cyberocracy may facilitate more advanced forms of both. It seems as likely to foster further divergence as convergence, and divergence has been as much the historical rule as convergence.
Citizens’ concerns about top-down surveillance may be countered by bottom-up “sousveillance” (or inverse surveillance), particularly if individuals wear personal devices for detecting and recording what is occurring in their vicinity.
One way or the other Cyberocracy will be a product of the information revolution, and it may slowly but radically affect who rules, how and why. That is, information and its control will become a dominant source of power, as a natural next step in political evolution.
Surplus information or monopoly information that is concentrated, guarded, and exploited for privileged economic and political purposes could and WILL most likely lead to Governance by social media platforms owned by Microsoft/ Apple/ Google/ Facebook/ Twitter.
When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
The structure may be more open, the process more fluid, and the conventions redefined; but a hierarchy must still exist.
The history of previous technologies demonstrates that early in the life of new technology, people are likely to emphasize the efficiency effects and underestimate or overlook potential social system effects.
The information revolution is fostering more open and closed systems; more decentralization and centralization; more inclusionary and exclusionary communities; more privacy and surveillance; more freedom and authority; more democracy and new forms of totalitarianism.
The major impact will probably be felt in terms of the organization and behaviour of the modern bureaucratic state.
The hierarchical structuring of bureaucracies into offices, departments, and lines of authority may confound the flow of information that may be needed to deal with complex issues in today’s increasingly interconnected world.
Bureaucracy depends on going through channels and keeping the information in bounds; in contrast, Cyberocracy may place a premium on gaining information from any source, public or private. Technocracy emphasizes ‘hard’ quantitative and econometric skills, like programming and budgeting methodologies; in contrast, a Cyberocracy may bring a new emphasis on ‘soft’ symbolic, cultural, and psychological dimensions of policymaking and public opinion.
Why will any of this happen?
Because the actual practice of freedom that we see emerging from the networked environment allows people to reach across national or social boundaries, across space and political division. It allows people to solve problems together in new associations that are outside the boundaries of formal, legal-political association.
As Cyberocracy develops, will governments become flatter, less hierarchical, more decentralized, with different kinds of middle-level officials and offices?
Some may, but many may not. Governments [particularly repressive regimes] may not have the organizational flexibility and options that corporations have.
So where are we?
Future trends:
The advanced societies are developing new sensory apparatuses that people have barely begun to understand and use;
A network-based social sector is emerging, distinct from the traditional public and private sectors. Consisting largely of NGOs and NPOs, its rise is leading to a re-balancing of state, market, and civil-society forces;
New modes of multiorganizational collaboration are taking shape, and progress toward networked governance is occurring;
This may lead to the emergence of the nexus-state as a successor to the nation-state.
We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordination activities that take advantage of that change.
Civil society stands to gain the most from the rise of networks since policy problems have become so complex and intractable, crossing so many jurisdictions and involving so many actors, that governments should evolve beyond the traditional bureaucratic model of the state.
There is no doubt that the evolution of network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies will attract government policymakers, business leaders, and civil society actors to create myriad new mechanisms for communication, coordination, and collaboration spanning all levels of governance.
However, states, not to mention societies as a whole, cannot endure without hierarchies.
In the information-age government may well undergo ‘reinventing’ and be made flatter, more networked, decentralized, etc.—but it will still have a hierarchy at its core.” As the state relinquished the control of commercial activities to private companies, both the nation and the state became stronger. Likewise, as the social sector expands and activities are transferred to it, the state should again emerge with a new kind of strength, even though it loses some scope in some areas.
A central understanding of the big picture that enhances the management of complexity is now needed more than ever.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Everyone sees the world in different ways however the greatest innovations of man are found in the most simple things:
Starting with Fire, Language, Tools, and Wheel writing has been the sole reason that mankind has been able to accumulate knowledge.
Since then the use of our inventions have taken us a long way, they’ve allowed us to land on the moon, travel over oceans, and even eliminate major health threats with various medicines.
You could not be blamed for asking what was actually gained by landing on the moon — a handful of rocks and a game of low-gravity golf — was of virtually no value and yet the act of the journey was invaluable beyond all measure as it personified our continuing evolution.
The same is true with technology today.
The development of it is mind-blowing but its application is almost entirely mindless – profit-seeking algorithms and weaponized drones.
Setting aside why do we exist and what is the purpose of life? (These are hard questions that demand answers) it is what we have not achieved that will be judged by future generations.
Karl Marx once famously observed that capitalism carried within it the seeds of its own destruction but he was wrong. It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s people.
The human race ended the 20th century in pretty good shape, at least comparatively speaking.
The first half of the 1900s was almost certainly the most bloody and brutal phase of humanity’s existence.
Now we have all the information in the world yet it has made us only more ideological and more ignorant; we have access to limitless opinions yet we seek to criminalise those who don’t agree with us. We are so advanced and yet so backward, so cynical and yet so stupid, that we can no longer even agree on what constitutes a fact.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Consider the internet itself, probably the most revolutionary invention in the history of humankind. Its potential to share information thus to accelerate the advancement of science and keep the world running in the event of a catastrophic disaster — the purpose for which it was first intended — is all but limitless.
And what do we use it for most? Porn.
Consider the smartphone, the match to the powder keg of the worldwide web. Almost everyone in every half-developed part of the world, even people living on the streets, has a device more powerful than supercomputers that once took up whole buildings. We can access virtually any image, any idea, any information from anywhere in the world.
And what do we overwhelmingly use it for? Taking pictures of ourselves.
Let’s look at medical technology — the smartest minds on the planet developing machines and medicines that keep the average person today alive for longer than was once ever dreamt of.
And what is the result?
We are fatter and lazier than ever, resulting in spiralling hospital costs that will send most Western governments broke in a matter of decades. It was once said that the only two certainties in life were death and taxes and yet now we are defying death and there aren’t enough taxes to pay for it.
We are too dumb to even know when to die.
It may well be impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, but over millions of years of evolution, we’ve picked up some less than ideal characteristics.
Why? Because of greed.
It will take the efforts of several scientific disciplines and sophisticated technology, probably over many years, to discover the underlying nature of our mental faculties, their neurological basis, and their development over time.
And it’s fair to say that we have little idea of what we’ll evolve to in the future, but there is one thing for certain, evolution is about adapting to your environment – Weaponized drones, Climate change, Algorithms.
Algorithms that are feeding Social media, are stripping us of a collective understanding of what is going on in the world.
People like to blame fake news on Facebook, and that is true enough.
But the far greater truth is far worse than that. Neither fake news nor Facebook emerged like Athena fully-formed from nothing. They were made by us. By us and for us and of us.
While the positive uses for technology are endless I marvel as I read Asimov to see the way in which he foresaw the ethical conundrum in which we now find ourselves embroiled.
Of course, when they (the future generations) look at our achievements the one thing they will not be able to comprehend is why we have not been able to stop killing each other.
Weaponized drones are now more acceptable than land mines, cluster bombs, or chemical weapons.
It might be argued that this would be a way of sparing human beings who could stay comfortably at home and let our intelligent machines do the fighting for us. If some of them were destroyed — well, they are only machines. This approach to warfare would be particularly useful if we had such machines and the enemy didn’t.
Just like those tried at Nuremberg who attempted to wash their hands of mass killings we have now developed weaponized drones to kill, with a Punches Pilot immunity, that is violating all existing international law.
So humans through the use of technology may eventually reach a point where they can force evolution upon themselves.
Perhaps the result (if we are not already wiped out by Nuclear or a Weather bomb) will be that we’re no longer subject to the driving force of evolution – but unnatural selection by drones.
Now the question is, how accurate is this statement?
Is technological progress actually taking us backwards?
Are we advancing ourselves to death? At what point do many deaths become too many deaths?
This is the first problem with technology.
If it is accurate, we’re already screwed.
Of course, none of this is important given the glacial pace of evolutionary change, we probably won’t have to worry about that for thousands of years.
Wrong.
We’ve come to believe that, with enough information, human behaviour is predictable.
But number-crunching algorithms are leading us perilously wrong. There’s something unsettling in the idea that, amid the vagaries of choice, chance, and circumstance, mathematics can tell us something about what it is to be human.
Who we are together, as a collective entity?
Despite the grand promises of Big Data, uncertainty remains so abundant that specific human lives remain boundlessly unpredictable. The more data that are collected, cross-referenced, and searched for correlations, the easier it becomes to reach false conclusions.
It might be true that in large groups, the natural variability among human beings cancels, however, if we end up with algorithms setting thresholds extremely unlikely outcomes are bound to arise eventually.
The gift is not a technology to enable us to realise evolution for the cruel being it is, but giving mankind the intelligence and tools to exclude ourselves from the other species on the planet and take a step back to interpret for ourselves where we as a race are going?
Leaving the brutality of evolution behind is not a gift given to us by evolution.
We have evolved to the point whereby we stand on the threshold of controlling our genetic and ultimately evolutionary destiny. Unfortunately, the problem with humans is, whenever we encounter a problem we have evolved to the point where we think that we can overcome it with technology.
Advances in technology, medicine and culture mean it isn’t just the fittest who get to pass their genes on to the next generation.
External aids could be entirely responsible for our survival.
All of this relies on earth’s natural resources which are supposedly gonna be gone by 2050!
The problems in this world are manmade therefore man can solve them.
The sad truth is that we have Governments and World Organisations that pay lip service when the real debate is a knowledge- and research-based exchange of argument and counterargument that should be focused at the analysis of a specific question, our survival.
Passion and competition, yes, but, more than anything else, debate is an exercise in critical thinking! The human brain, being a machine striving for maximum efficiency, typically remembers where information is stored, rather than the information itself.
Technology has already affected the way our memory works.
AI. After all, natural evolution wouldn’t be able to mould and program devices to a point of sophistication that may lead to sentience, but we may be able to and maybe at that point even though its not natural, it is an evolution born of natural origins and most likely would go on to create newer better versions of itself.
In theory, humans are exercising their judgement in the process, but in reality, the computer system is viewed as too “smart” to be second-guessed by a human being.
So . . . what do we need to be more afraid of?
Robots with a compulsion to out-think humans? or humans that are afraid to second-guess the robots?
We must confront an urgent problem related to technology: the automation of “pre-emptive violence” – front-loaded with a bias to kill, with little impetus to contradict that bias.
At present drones are the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.
So are we at the peak of human evolution?
Certainly not. Certainly not as long as there are humans, there will be human evolution.
We are not even close to the peak of evolution.
Just look at wthat werecently found > The Higgs Boson, Mapped the Human Genome, Cloned a sheep, built the International Space Station, discovery the Double Helix Structure of DNA, Split the Atom, invented the Internet, we’re revisiting the theories of Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
We have Created Nuclear Weapons, the Periodic Table of the Elements, Created the Internet Developed Vaccines, Created Music, Created Photography, Flight, Electronic Devices, Traveled to the Moon, Eradicated Small Pox, Created the Television, Discovered Mathematics, Invented the Printing Press, The Phone, Discovery and Control of Electricity, Cars, Invented Zero, Created of United Nations, Discovered World is Round.
AND STILL, WE ARE UNABLE TO ACT TOGETHER.
Why?
Because you know the downfall of civilisation has really passed the point of no return when even a rich white guy can’t get anything done.
Humans are the only organism that can alter their environment to suit them (instead of the other way around)
Finally, people must take into account that nature will commence exerting its own controls LONG BEFORE the human race has reached the point where it can step off the evolutionary treadmill.
With our increasing reliance on technology – and in particular machinery – to do our dirty (but muscle-enhancing) work. The less each generation depends on physical strength, the more likely it is that the whole species will grow weaker to the point of stagnation.
As evolution relies on the survival of the fittest, evolution itself will evolve everything else in all our lives will be transitory and every other artificial intelligent goodwill application will become visionary.
Only when we’ll be able to repair and augment our children’s DNA. Then we really will have triumphed over evolution. Race” will no longer be an issue. Perhaps we will stop killing each other.
Yet we’ve got our problems. A lot of them but the very things we invented to sustain us will destroy us.
The exact nature of our evolutionary relationships with the planet and AI will be the subject of debate for the foreseeable future.
It doesn’t matter if we’re uncovering evidence for climate change or deciding whether a drug has an effect: the concept is identical.
By setting an arbitrary threshold, and agreeing that anything beyond that point gives you grounds for suspicion with greed this is the evolutionary path we are setting our selves.
Mentally the world appears to be de-evolving with smartphones and social media platforms.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
The degree of choice on the web can be overwhelming, but who, exactly, is making the “Choice”
Has The web has been highjacked by Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Social Media and their like?
Why?
Besause they are absorbing their users’ personal data and feeding greedy algrithms who in the end are disempowered by isolation from the wider web.
(By clicking continue below and using our sites or applications, you agree that we and our third party advertisers can:)
Greedy algorithms can be characterized as being ‘short-sighted’, and also as ‘non-recoverable’. The choice made by a greedy algorithm may depend on choices made so far, but not on future choices or all the solutions to the subproblem.
It is important, however, to note that the greedy algorithm can be used as a selection algorithm to prioritize options within a search, or branch-and-bound algorithm. They iteratively make one greedy choice after another, reducing each given problem into a smaller one.
They can make commitments to certain choices too early which prevent them from finding the best overall solution later.
Without any accountability, they are drastically changing the ways we conduct our daily lives.
There are a few variations to the greedy algorithm:
Pure greedy algorithms.
Orthogonal greedy algorithms.
Relaxed greedy algorithms.
It’s no wonder that Berners-Lee isn’t particularly pleased with the way things have gone with his creation.
With Social networks, slowly algorithms are growing more and more powerful and their predictions growing more accurate. It won’t be long before we could see living, breathing, as the choices of a greedy algorithm.
In other words, a greedy algorithm never reconsiders its choices.
The web is cleaving into the haves and have-nots of news readership. Wealthy readers will pay to opt-out of advertising; less privileged readers will have to stick with news that’s ad-supported.
For example, take Google, one of the leaders in using big data and algorithms to support human decision-making. Google has developed both a hiring algorithm and a retention algorithm it analyzes candidates against this profile to make hiring decisions.
Algorithms to develop lists of “flight risks” — that is, people who are likely to leave their jobs soon.
Amazon’s Choice” algorithm, which leverages a machine learning model to discern what products a customer most likely wants. Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants are drastically changing the ways consumers encounter products.
Customers are no longer putting themselves in front of physical products before purchasing them.
As more users are turning to voice ordering through the Amazon Alexa platform and its competitors we are losing control over our personal data.
Hopefully, Amazon’s algorithms are capable of remaining unbiased.
(We can make whatever choice seems best at the moment and then solve the subproblems that arise later.)
On top of all of this, we have all become blind to the damage that the internet can do to even a well-functioning democracy. Brexit/ USA.
It might be true that around the world, social media is making it easier for people to have a voice in government — to discuss issues, organize around causes, and hold leaders accountable, but these governments are winning elections by false news, echo chambers where people only see viewpoints they agree with — further driving us apart.
Social media can distort policymakers’ perception of public opinion.
If there’s one fundamental truth about social media’s impact on democracy it’s that it amplifies human intent — both good and bad.
Unprecedented numbers of people channel their political energy through this medium, it’s being used in unforeseen ways with societal repercussions that were never anticipated.
So it is inevitable that Facebook to influence public sentiment — essentially using social media as an information weapon.
Some 87% of governments around the world have a presence on Facebook.
And they’re listening — and responding — to what they hear.
Misinformation campaigns are not amateur operations.
Increasingly the web will become profoundly useless unless we demand the Web we want from Governments and the Monomorphic platforms that dominate it today.
We are all part of the web so what we endorse must be questioned as to the transparency as to where the information comes from in the first place.
Today the bulk of people who are or not doing this are isolated from each other by Apps.
The like button is not a public metric for the popularity of content. It is a flattener of credibility.
There is no point waking in the morning with Alexa telling you what to do, where to go and what it has bought and who to vote for.
Even if social media could be cured of its outrage -enhancing effects it is undermining democracy.
Even though we have unprecedented access to all that was ever written and digitized we are less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity becoming more and more misguided.
The Web is now a global experiment that will test the very foundation of our global communities
There can not be self -governance for the web.
Fake news, Racism, Pornographic content and unfounded crap should be removed by not allowing anything to be posted without a traceable verified name or source.
Are you sure you want to post this? It is your choice and your choice alone.
Perhaps its time we all franchise our data as we are entering into a continuous partnership so both parties need to be confident it’s the right fit. It’s all a choice. Just do something about it- YOU CAN, what is true technology integration?
How we are going to learn content is one of the ways forward.
In fact, everywhere we look we are starting to be presented with more choices.
Resolve to avoid false comparisons on the web is not possible so the future of the web is all about choice but it is important to understand the paradox of choice.
Choice without education or choice with education.
you ultimately do have to choose. so be the difference that
makes the difference.
Events change our perception and our perspective changes
with experience but at least let our choices about Our lives
which are constantly in flux be our choices.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
It’s all a choice. Just do something about it- YOU CAN, what is true technology integration? 
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