If humanity wants to hope to contain global warming below 1.5°C – Governments must close the gap between net zero rhetoric and reality.
There can be no more hiding, and no more denying deluding yourself with a lot of greenwashing.
Political leaders, blinded by capital and powerful private interests, have long decided Earth is a small price to pay for the yachts, mansions, private jets and record profits of the one percent.
In Glasgow at the COP26 climate conference we watched as world leaders came up with new excuses, symbolic targets and new ways to silence the progressive voices who opposed them.
Global heating is supercharging extreme weather at an astonishing speed, this life-altering issue which we are NOW all witnessing daily – Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, is not getting the urgency and attention it demands.
Exploitation and development of new oil and gas fields must stop this year.
If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.
A huge part can be done with existing technologies.
These technologies can and will create billions of jobs to drive a sustainable world, but it remains a fight of David against Goliath, because of how we measure our well being.
How we evaluate what we are doing needs to change.
GDP is a totally numbers-driven index that does not produce the true picture.
There are growing calls to find GDP alternatives to measure countries’ wealth and welfare.
GDP can’t accurately represent the wealth of a country when it ignores how money is divvied up.
Considering GDP alone, a rich country where 10% of the population controls 75% of the wealth (looking at you, United States) may rank higher than a poorer country with a more even distribution of wealth.
One of GDP’s biggest flaws is that it counts tragedies as economic bonuses. If a hurricane or tornado hits and a country spends millions of dollars rebuilding, those expenses boost GDP, even though people lost their homes, jobs, and lives.
GDP ignores many crucial ways to measure the wealth of a country: clean air, health, life span, gender equality, opportunity, education, and more. This is understandable – GDP wasn’t developed to rank countries’ welfare, but simply to measure money as the world recovered from the Great Depression.
Of course GDP cant be replaced over night, but it can be complemented by a Thriving Places Index (TPI) and this index could easily be expanded to other parts of the world.
TPI’s primary focuses are sustainability, equality, and local conditions. Unlike GDP, this index measures equality by investigating how evenly distributed life expectancy and wellbeing are across a country.
Interestingly, the U.N. encourages nations to use it alongside their gross national income data. They say that it can help governments assess national policy by “asking how two countries with the same level of GNI per capita can end up with different human development outcomes.”
By factoring in the ecological footprint, inequality, wellbeing, and life expectancy of a country, it provides a simple but rounded glance at the wealth of a country.
This alone will not however solve the problems that are now on the horizon.
We must implement measurements by monetising environmental damage factors to help countries better understand exactly where they stand environmentally.
The Green GDP is a noble effort to factor in the cost of climate change in a way that people whose focus is money can appreciate. While subjective data can immediately turn some financially conservative parties off, putting a number on the impact of environmental negligence could potentially hit home.
Our Profit driven societies focused too much on an idea that futuristic technologies will save the world from climate chaos, rather than focusing on what can be done today. If cuts to carbon are left to the future and not made in this decade, it will be too late to stay within the 1.5C limit.
What are the crucial new technologies in development for combatting Climate Change?
Clean energy is perhaps the biggest issue to tackle.
Convert carbon dioxide into a usable energy source using sunlight.
There are numerous projects trying to achieve this, but most of the hydrogen used today is extracted from natural gas NG00, -3.93% in a process that emits carbon dioxide as well as the more-fleeting, but more-potent, methane.
Electrical transport and advanced batteries?
Particularly for use in electric vehicles; hydrogen; and carbon capture appears to be the miracle solution to reduce the heavy ecological impact of transport. This technology is not all green under the hood. Even before having driven a single kilometre, the electric vehicle has emissions almost twice as high as those of a thermal vehicle.
Big data has big implications in creating awareness about the consequences of climate change but it’s harvesting with the use of non transparent and unregulated algorithms.
Crowdsourcing for environmental solutions by gathering journalists, scientists, technologists, and people passionate about sustainability is creating a new wave of environmentalism.
Mobile apps such as Oroeco is an app that tracks your carbon footprint by placing a carbon value on everything you buy, eat, and do. However most Apps are profit seeking and like Big data they remain un -transparent and unregulated.
Interactive maps really drive home the point of climate change.
All of these technologies use microchips in order to operate and these are made from rare finite resources.
For the first time, a mining company is preparing to mine the seabed to collect rocks rich in metals for the batteries of electric cars. A practice that promises to destroy ecosystems that are still unexplored and that could constitute a ticking “climate bomb”. Poisoning of fresh water reserves, artificialization and loss of biodiversity, toxicity for humans, radioactive pollution, occupation of agricultural land… The extraction and transformation of raw materials are much more polluting than for the fossil car.
In the end here is where we are.
Some of the highlights included a prediction of violent conflicts and civil wars, extreme poverty and the loss of several points of gross domestic product in some developing nations, mass extinctions, and an intense, regular pattern of natural disasters.
The average decline of the species analysed was 68% in 2020, and 60% in 2018, revealing an accelerating collapse of biodiversity around the world. “We can tell ourselves that 1% is not much, but losing 1% in two years is absolutely colossal. The mere fact that this index is not improving is a disaster in itself
Taking into account a global population rise of about 2 billion people, as well as the need to supply electricity to 785 million people who do not have access to it, and clean cooking to the 2.6 billion people who currently lack it there is no more time for multinationals to obtain justice.
Governments must fine them.
Instead we see governments like the UK licensing new oil and gas fields in the North Sea and has also mooted a new coalmine for coking coal alongside introducing fracking.
Instead we see Energy being use a a weapon of war.
We all know what is necessary for life however in the age of instant gratification, we have little appreciation of where it all come from and we remain unwilling to pay for a future that only exists on the planet we all inhabit.
A large-scale nuclear war would, by all scientific projections, be a planetary disaster of the highest order.
A large -scale climate event would be far worse. Here to day gone to morrow against watch our demise over a few generations.
So every one of us must engage now. ( See previous posts as how this can be achieved)
The simplest thing you can do is educate others.
Tell people there are other ways to measure a country’s wealth.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Contact: bobdillo33@bobdillon33
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.
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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).
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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,
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.
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