We are the first generation to know we’re destroying the world, and we could be the last that can do anything about it.
SO AS IF YOU DON’T ALREADY KNOW WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE HERE IS YOUR CHANCE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
We need to recognize that everything we do, every step we take, every sentence we write, every word we speak—or don’t speak—counts. Nothing is trivial.
Take personal responsibility.
We need to use social media – this is one of the most effective ways to get brands to listen to you, so tell them that you want a change.
Why?
Because, unfortunately, the politicians who dominate the world stage are, depressingly, mostly cut from the old cloth, and the leadership challenges they face, are particularly complex and will require different skills — notably a clearer vision among leaders of organisation’s shared purpose.
Because the digital revolution is far from over the pace of change only seems to be quickening when in fact it is causing isolation.
Because, we are allowing non-regulated large technology platforms to become too powerful, using their size to dominate markets and we are not paying enough attention to how the tools they create can be used for ill – like device addictions, as we drown in notifications and false news feed posts.
Because there is an increasing imperative for all of us to respond to climate change. Which will and is challenging our lives developing on a daily bases right in front of our eyes into our biggest need to act as one.
How can any of this be achieved?
How will the changing political, economic and environmental landscapes shape the world?
Don’t get caught up in the how of things. Don’t wait for things to be right in order to begin.
Because in our age of tectonic geopolitical shifts, “alternative facts,” and conflicting narratives, our routine everyday life is losing sight of our true goals and aspirations.
Because with the rise of short-sighted populism we will solve nothing, other than feeding the great unwashed with short term gratification.
We need to write a piece of software that eliminated malware, viruses and all of that crap.
We need to show our political leaders that they want to change, to understand our common humanity.
We need to try to put yourself into another person’s headspace and accept people for who they are and what their beliefs are.
We need to collaborate and push for policies that complement both sides of the political spectrum.
We need to make wasting our resources unacceptable in all aspects of our life. Every product we buy has an environmental footprint and could end up in a landfill. The impact of plastic pollution on our oceans is becoming increasingly clear, having drastic impacts on marine life.
We need to be more conscious about what we buy, and where we buy it from. Living a less consumerist lifestyle can benefit you and our planet.
We need to use our purchasing power and make sure our money is going towards positive change.
We need to realize that what we eat contributes around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for almost 60% of global biodiversity loss.
We need to be supporting eco-friendly products.
We need to try to waste as little food as possible, and compost the organic waste we can’t eat.
We need to make education free for all. Start educating not for profit but for a better understanding of what is the common values of life.
We need to stop asking the world’s smartest scientists to find us more time and to reverse gravity’s effect on our lives.
We need to stop killing each other. Countries start wars and people die and more people are in poverty.
We need to create out of profit for profit sake a World Aid fund with perpetual funding. (See previous posts) A new nonprofit called Carbon Offsets to alleviate address Climate change and Poverty.
We need to realize that all significant change throughout history has occurred not because of nations, armies, governments and certainly not committees. They happened as a result of the courage and commitment of individuals. Believe that you can and will make a difference.
The genesis for change is awareness so I need to stop.
This year will not only be another opportunity for the leading minds in media in all its forms to highlight consumption for consumption sake.
However, if they wanted to spread a message that helps us all they would ban advertising that promotes consumption for consumption sake/profit.
Feel free to add your priorities. With rapid innovations in technology and open access to data its no longer “wait and see.” We need to stop the huge feeling of apathy.
The coming year, let alone the next decade looks unpredictable.
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.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: PERPETUAL GROWTH IS COMING TO AN END.
( Seven-minute read)
Economics is not an unbiased academic discipline, it’s an ideology. Furthermore, economics is based on the false premise that perpetual growth is achievable.
Can economic growth be sustainably achieved?
Finite resources make perpetual growth theoretically impossible. No amount of technological breakthrough or creative accounting can counter that physical fact.
Is economic growth desirable?
The short answer appears to be no.
Exponential growth will eventually take you to impossible places.
Unfortunately, we live in a world of capitalists that thrive on the great Myth of Perpetual Growth, endless growth, ad infinitum, forever, till the end of time.
It seems as though we are damned if we grow and damned if we don’t.
We’ve now with Algorithms for profit sake got to a position where there’s nothing to keep us in check – so we have to do it ourselves.
It’s a waiting game now – to see if we can learn to behave differently to bacteria in a petri dish before it’s too late and we kill our host.
It’s not worth the risk.
Ecology and economics have to be intertwined, or we’re in serious trouble.
It’s time we all get our head out of the smartphone and become smart.
We can have debates about what we’re going to do about this and that, but if you can’t see the reason in the core of what I am saying, we’ll be having two very different conversations.
There is little point in arguing any longer whether Neoliberalism is to blame for damaging ecology beyond its ability to support us. It has lead to the inevitable collision between an insatiable economic model and a finite planet whose resources are stretched to the hilt.
The perception of the need for perpetual economic growth is a fraud and this assumption creates massive risk when reaching the limits of our natural systems.
With a world population nearly at 7 billion people, the implication for economic growth seems obvious as we cannot assume that the status quo will hold in a changing climatic environment. Reaching the earth’s resource limit is inevitable if it is not already occurring.
However changing our society’s behaviours cannot be achieved through some overseeing organization.
Perpetual growth has been ingrained through exposure to intensive branding and marketing by the very corporations who provide jobs and economic growth, and round and round we go…… Enacting such dramatic change through a highly centralized governing structure that dictates appropriate resource use, population levels, and actively redistributes wealth is a hard sell even in dire times.
As a result, we cannot continue consuming more and more water, spewing out more and more carbon dioxide and burning more and more coal.
In the past 22 years, half of all of the oil ever burned has been burned.
At present, the global population is increasing by 83 million people annually and we are already consuming natural resources as if we have “1.5 Earths.”
If every person used as many resources as the average North American, more than four Earths would be required to sustain the total rate of consumption. Other words if everyone lived like the average American, the Earth could sustain only 1.7 billion people — a quarter of today’s population.
27 billion people will inhabit the planet by the end of the century and hidden in every calorie of food eaten are 10 calories of fossil fuels.
Technology can lead to greater efficiencies, it requires energy — it does not create it.
Water is obviously a key component of human life. It is also vital to energy, industry, agriculture and livestock.
With all of this in mind, it’s time to abandon the perpetual growth economic model and move instead to a model that stresses conservation, efficiency, recycling and renewability. Clearly, the world is on an unsustainable path and, by definition, anything that is unsustainable won’t last.
Above all else, we must redefine the quality of life as something other than just having “more.” The goal should be to simply have enough. Our quality of life should not be measured by “stuff,” but instead by the things that make life rich; our relationships, our hobbies, our work and our passions.
GDP merely measures what people are willing to pay for, which is not necessarily connected to the use of energy, or any other physical resource.
The world will be confronting shortages of hydrocarbons, metals, water and fertilizer, which will dramatically affect global agriculture. The latter is critical.
So why are we unable to change direction.
Because of the threat, transnational organizations have over the nation-state.
Because no one is willing to bear the costs.
Because of the amount of power capital has over labour.
As it stands, nearly half the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — lives on roughly $2 per day.
The solution is to get profit for profit sake to pay:
By introducing a World Aid commission of 0.05% on all High-frequency trading, on all sovereign wealth funds acquisitions on all foreign exchange transaction over $50,000, on all gambling and lottos wins creating a perpetual world aid fund.
By issuing United Nation Green Deal non-trading Bond.
By the introduction of a World Day of non-consumerism Advertising.
By building non atomised Societies that are attached geographical – belonging not defined by competition.
By eating together one a week.
The question is how do we communicate this obvious message, in the face of corporate control of the media, and increasingly academia, science and the political system?
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
If we are not vigilant we might by accident and neglect combined with the erosion of civil liberties and with the increasing disenchantment of politicians easily sleepwalk into a form of a totalitarian society.
You could say at present that the world has more pressing problems but I consider this as a very dangerous trend and, sadly, unlike climate change perhaps unstoppable.
Why?
Because corporations belong to no land, no country, no people and have no loyalty to anything apart from profit – their profits and the profits today are on an unimaginable scale.
Because individual liberty which our ancestors fought for generations to establish are now been blowing away in the wind with Artifical Intelligence turning our politics into a form of Digital Dictatorship.
Control of society above personality.
The modern sense of entertainment, for example, has led to the shallowness
of life that permeates all aspects of life, separates us from the seriousness of
existence, and fills this existence with false content.
What we are seeing is a widening of inequality, a rise in racism and ant semitic traits all of which are essential to a totalitarian society. Individualism itself is diminishing and in the end, people will embrace the totalitarian state’s ideology.
This fourth industrial revolution as it is called is presently without any AI laws other than the EU guidelines on the trustworthiness of AI – what data to use or not use to train other Algorithms.
The last industrial revolution taught us a lot about basic human rights and social values to wake us up, to help us prepare for the future however what we are seeing with smartphones is a form of doublethinking that leads to banality or to implicit acceptance of the standard of psychological normality, the lost of limits.
You are going to work with a digital colleague that has no set rules, no personal judgment.
The threat of climate change with the rise of stateless refugees is forcing millions around the world to realistically confront a future in which their lives, at a minimum, look radically worse than they are today.
At the same time, emerging algorithms are giving a small technocratic elite the power to radically alter our species to a point when it will no longer resemble itself.
They both will call into question the basic ideas of who are and how we think about ourselves.
There are technologies now already emerging that are asking this question with the very fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human.
Why is this?
Because by limiting the choices and activities that have given us our basic sense of identity we can’t express our own opinions because they fear individual power.
There is nothing we can really do to change the course of our civilization except to patiently and persistently saying the truth about false worldviews, both on climate change and materialistic algorithms for profit both of which are and will have dramatic consequences.
Take Climate change and Fossil fuel:
It seems that fossil fuel owners and technology only goals are to protect their business models at all cost.
Climate change will shrink the size of the world that is livable on. while allowing unregulated technologies to rule it.
Algorithms Data Apps are tools by means of which, once installed, they start making decisions on your behalf. They will enable governments to assert their ideological and intellectual authority over party members and employees of party-run institutions, including schools and media.
Their messages becoming inescapable.
The beauty of digital media technology — disquieting for those who care about privacy and freedom from intrusion — is that our smart apps know a great deal about our actual behaviour.
Technology now interacts with you and takes the measure of you. It can determine just how “smart” you are when it comes to your devotion and your grasp of the ideological essentials.
This is where we seem to be headed for compelling materialist reasons, not ethical reasons.
Habitual smartphone user was spending a great deal of time glued to the screen, as a result, the potential of the smartphone to be used as a tool through which authoritarian regimes can shape and reinforce dominance over the population is no longer a fantasy – China.
It is reinventing the process of ideological dominance for the digital era.
In China, censorship, is now largely automated, reaching “unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition. It has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras, with plans for 626 million surveillance cameras by 2020.
China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. For some, “social credit” will bring privileges — for others, punishment.
If successful, it will be the world’s first digital dictatorship.
The flawless totalitarian state, powered by digital technology, where the individual has nowhere to flee from the all-seeing eye of the Communist state. who has done what (and for how long)
They can leverage digital media products to reshape the whole process of ideological control in ways that are far more personal, and far more effective, than anything we have witnessed in the reform era.
We, on the other hand, need to find out once again how to make decisions not just as individuals but as a society. We need new economics theories of not top-down but bottom-up. Its isn’t capital that creates economic growth its people. It isn’t competition that creates prosperity its cooperation. The economics that is not inclusive will not allow modern society to thrive.
Its painfully obvious that the fundamental assumptions of neoliberal economics are wrong.
The market now with profit-seeking algorithms can never distribute wealth because there is no equilibrium.
So is there any way of combating the technological growing algorithm market.
Inclusion will be the only brake.
We must allow people to get involved while improving all stakeholders in the market. The laws of economics are a choice.
So give people the choice to invest in the future by the creation of Nation backed non-trading Green deal bonds. ( See previous posts) This is about creating a platform for real and measurable engagement.
Algorithms all ready control 99.9% of stock exchanges.
Taking self-responsibility and living life the fullest will not only enrich our own lives but as well the lives of others.
Then the question arises:
No government in what used to be called “the free world” seems prepared to take the steps that can stop this inexorable decline.
Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life.
Big data: The length of time that it took them to use unfettered free speech to subvert and undermine all of our core institutions. Thus we arrive at the present situation where the brief a historical version of freedom of speech has reverted back towards what the state deems controversial today might be very different to what it deems controversial tomorrow.
Take Brexit for example. Nostalgia is that it’s become a political weapon. Politicians are creating nostalgia for an England that never existed and selling it, really, as something we could return to.
Do we want to be told what to think and do? Or are we ready to come up with our own solutions for the consequences we’ve caused?
The idea of the totalitarian state can never be a true and effective form of government rule. Increasing state interference, a crumbing electoral system, the loss of a free press and loss of freedom of speech are grave threats to our democratic system.
The potential consequences that come from using AI, such as giving up privacy are only the ice cubes in the bucket.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Right now nobody knows for sure but it is going to radically upend many aspects of our lives, as it is a technological paradigm shift.
3G or 4G was just a trailer, and the movie is about to begin.
Why?
Because it is going to marry data collection and computation with billions of devices.
But there is a debate on the necessity for it, considering human physical and mental limitations.
It will become the underlying fabric of an entire ecosystem of fully connected intelligent sensors and devices, capable of overhauling economic and business policies, and further blurring geographical and cultural borders.
It will create a world populated by digital citizens in continual interaction with their surroundings, their peers and public services.
It will enable communications & computing power to come together creating a hyperconnected ‘Internet of everything’ world.
It will release the spectrum for mobile devices, bring about dramatic transformations in our daily lives.
It is going to change everything about everything else.
It will rock the world economy over the next decade as we haven’t yet
conceived that will be tied into the 5G network.
For example:
Your car will know your every move faster than your mind. Cars will be able to use 5G to talk to other cars and sensors built around cities, from street lamps to gas stations.
Think about your relationship between the smart city and an autonomous car.
Think about predictive care. It will enable advanced data transfer from wearables and sensors, facilitating remote clinical decisions and robotic surgery
Think about bring virtual reality into the classroom, allowing students to face real-life situations without real-life consequences.
Think about living in a world of always-on, always-sharing, cloud applications and services.
Think about it leading to seamless and ubiquitous information control.
It will potential to unlock trillions of revenue across a broad range of industries creating a different hidden economy with wireless consumption.
This revenue will be equivalent to total U.S. consumer spending in 2016, and more than the combined spending of China, Japan, France, Germany, and the U.K. This revenue also represents about 4.6 per cent of all global real output in 2035.
Another words countries without 5G will become less competitive globally, spreading inequality on a scale not seen before. This inequality leads to more than just differences in consumption and wealth distribution. It affects access to healthcare, education, nutrition, employment, financial and technological platforms; it exacerbates poverty, exclusion and violence.
By 2020, analysts estimate that there will be more than 20 billion installed IoT devices around the world, supporting 22 million jobs generating massive amounts of data.
With access to this kind of information, industries of all kinds will be able to reach new levels of efficiency as they add products, services, and capabilities.
It will mean that a surgeon may not need to be in the same room as a patient in the future. A surgeon could use a VR headset and special glove to control a robot arm that would perform an actual operation in another location.
With haptic feedback, you’ll be able to transmit the tactile sensation of experience, enhancing the sights and sounds of a video experience.
It will make drone warfare affordable and drone defence essential.
It will make consumption and production distant and broad concepts that are somehow unattached from us.
So what can we, as consumers, do, instead of feeling powerless and distraught?
We must ensure that 5G respect nature, and the interconnectedness of everything that matters for humanity.
An unofficial trade war is already afoot in the tech industry due to the imminent rise of 5G technology.
But it will not happen overnight. Think in terms of a decade or more for it to fully unfold.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The world has been so depleted and is being so depleted even at this moment, that the future sustenance and stability for humanity is now imperilled.
Your future and your destiny will not be determined within the next decades. It will be determined now.
It will be determined by humanity’s wisdom or by its ignorance.
The future and fate of humanity will be decided in the years to come, and it will be determined by how humanity responds to the great change that is coming over the horizon in the form of climate change to the world.
No religion nor religious institution as it stands today can prepare humanity for the complexities of life in the universe or what humanity must know to preserve human freedom and sovereignty within this world.
It is what humanity must do to prepare both collectively and individually for climate change and our collective inability to regulate AI.
But because humanity as a whole is dull and ignorant, self-absorbed and unresponsive to a changing world we are still writing ourselves out of the script.
Our universities for years have taught classical/neoclassic/neoliberal economics; like these theories are unmovable divine pillars of reality.
Therefore, while most people see we need a more reasonable and democratic version of our current extreme capitalism, the dominant discourse insists the story not be changed at all. The dominant political narrative of our times is that we must live as individuals crushed between market and state. The relationship between the individual and the state boils down to a zero-sum game where everyone one eventually looses. The state is a pure and simple force.
With the effects of climate change (to come) people are waking up to the deception, let’s hope we can do right, because on all fronts of civilization as we know it time is running out.
We have political failure everywhere leading to the malfunctioning of our altruistic nature.
There is a disconnect between mass (commercial) media, even political science and common sense or popular wisdom.
Sounds to cynical?
Let me oil up my bow.
Present-day political failures are at heart of our problems.
Why?
Because there is a failure of imagination when it comes to the societal structure we evolved to live in and that our brains are still programmed for.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
These new organizations are actually not creating a dream environment of maximum social cooperation.
They are instead removing people’s needs to fulfilling each other’s needs!
Gnawing away our collective and individual identity our senses of belonging to a community for the sake of profit.
We need politics of belonging, but the trouble is, it requires a moral, ethical and educated populations which we don’t have and are now with AI are more than likely than ever never going to have.
As we rely on more and more Algorithms to make decisions without a discussion of facts and morals, against a background of pure data narrative can lead society to dark places.
We are unaware of what I call honest pricing that shows the cost of profit for profit sake to the environment.
If we were to charge fees proportional to harmful impacts on the environment, we would create a monetary representation of the value of natural resources.
So overcoming the material world would be the first step to a sustainable world-shifting us into a new reality.
We are left with the ever-present questions.
Do we give a toss and if so what can be done about it?
What roles do religion and our deepest beliefs play in contemporary life?
What lifestyles are we adopting in an increasingly technological world?
What is the balance of power–and the balance of trade?
What is the pattern of war and peace?
What are the issues facing local and regional communities, and what issues must we confront on a global scale?
What do we remember about our collective past, and how do we see the future?
Have the great issues that preoccupied people since the beginning of time taken new, distinctive forms after more than a hundred years of the fastest technological and cultural change in the history of the planet?
What challenges remain intractable?
What emerging solutions seem to offer the greatest promise?
Social media is full of video on the state of the world.
The need for clear-headed prioritisation of resources to tackle real, not imagined problems.
Despite that long record of success, agricultural production is stressed by floods, deforestation, drought, urbanization (land-devouring cities), and a growing appetite for resource-intensive meat.
More than 150 million people worldwide are at risk from rising sea levels and extreme storms that cause coastal flooding.
In the past 50 years, thanks to education and technology, more than 2 billion people joined the middle class, swelling the human footprint of nearly 50 per cent. At the same time, millions of acres of cropland have been devoured by population growth.
Today more than 6 billion people live in cities—about 70 per cent of the world’s population, roughly double the proportion of a half-century ago.
The Arctic may hold 22 per cent of the world’s undiscovered conventional oil and natural gas resources. Melting ice is liberating immense oil and natural gas reserves.
Although mounting worldwide energy demand continues to stress the environment, it has powered large-scale development of renewable energy.
Artificial intelligence will soon dominate the Earth—it could take decades, it could take millennia. At that point, AI will also take control of the Earths process. Refashioning the planet in ways that are optimal for synthetic life but quite possibly deadly for us.
You can’t help but wonder where it will lead. It’s a very dodgy future.
It may be true that the cosmos started with the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago, but it took an awfully long time for the consequences of the Big Bang to settle down.
To have an optimistic view is the only one worth having.
So may you recognize that you as an individual must make these decisions and not simply rely upon others to make them for you.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
IF ADAM AND EVE EVER EXISTED THEY WERE AS THICK AS THE WALL.
The consequences of which were passed from generation to generation making our brains the single biggest threat to the planet.
There is a multitude of reasons why people are so stupid.
If human and chimp DNA is 98.8 per cent the same we as a species with 1.2% differences are our own benchmark for how intelligent we can be which is restrained by our relative inability to perceive the natural world.
The sciences of genetics and archaeology are not able to show how our ancestors transitioned from animal self-interest to human as there are no skeletons to probe for DNA. If evolution’s real, how come no one has ever found any transitional forms between bananas and monkeys.
In the absence of evidence, our images of Adam and Eve are left to the imagination of artists. While western imagery is dominant in depicting Adam and Eve in other parts of the world they could like God be Black, Arab, or Hispanic.
We were stupid a long time ago, we are still stupid, and yet we continue to reproduce enormously successfully. Stupidity may, in fact, help our ability to reproduce quite a bit.
None of us would put up with each other for a moment if it weren’t for the saving graces of stupidity and bonding. Perhaps it is this lack of intelligence that has led us to the most idiotic example of our stupidity – Self-inflicted extinction with climate change.
I’ve spent my whole life assuming we were getting smarter and we’d become a rational species before we made ourselves extinct.
Up until a century ago, the world was safe because there wasn’t enough of us, and the Earth’s carrying capacity could absorb our endless acts of stupidity.
The once-mighty homo sapiens might well end up back in the cave where he once resided. After all, the human mind is perfectly flawed we don’t even know if our logic is even logical.
I hope I am proven wrong. We should be much better than our collective self.
By now the majority of us should know that the byproducts of billions of human lives are overwhelming the ecosystem.
Rising CO2 levels is just one of many indicators that we are self-destructing.
The environment is falling apart right before our very eyes, but we can not add 2 + 2 together to see that our lifestyles have to change drastically — yesterday. Not just yesterday, more like 20 years ago.
We might have some grasp of the environmental catastrophe now in progress, but we really like lovely looking perfect grass, so we fertilize and poison our plot of land, and it looks great.
Unfortunately, 100 million other people do the same thing and the results are a catastrophe for the water table and for insect populations.
But hey, our lawn looks great. It’s just this one lawn after all…
Many among us can’t get over their tribal instincts. It’s pretty obvious that’s there is an unresolvable conflict between democracy and theocracy. As long as billions are oppressed by political and social injustice then we haven’t developed a practical political system to support humans on Earth.
Technology is increasing equality sharply.
Drug-resistant diseases are on the rise, and the global spread of dangerous diseases because of transportation and warming climates indicate the revenge of mother nature is near.
More recently, we thought we could save ourselves, especially with science and technology. However, most people live with their heads in the sand, cramming their minds with useless knowledge while ignoring all the dying canaries falling from the sky.
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 have to figure out how the fuck to get along with each other, so we invent laws, and philosophy, and literature, and justice, and commerce and a whole bunch of other stuff.
We do all this smart shit to survive, not because God loves smart shit.
We think we rule the earth because we are smart.
We do not rule the earth, and evolution does not select for smartness, it selects for survival. Cockroaches rule the earth and they are smart enough not to think it’s because they have big brains.
Your social brain, on the other hand, relies on other people instead of reality, which inclines your Social Brain to dramatic outbursts of complete fucking idiocy.
We expect better from ourselves – but that’s only because we’re stupid.
Furthermore, your brain will know the one thing it’s been longing to know all the time, which is what it’s supposed to do about this insanity, this stupidity.
Which is acknowledge it, name it, identify it, and oppose it – no wonder why the fuck it’s there. But at the end of the day, because we only have ourselves to compare to as of yet, we don’t really have an answer.
One can only hope that we have only just begun to crack the depths of knowledge and that there is an endless trove waiting for future generations.
We can now create worlds within our own to interact with and to manage and design intelligently.
So what!
We’ve been creating simulations in our minds since the dawn of man. Thought operates by breaking reality up into conceptual objects, and our creativity operates by rearranging the conceptual objects in our minds.
These mental simulations form the essence of human brilliance. However, the very same process of conceptual division which makes us brilliant also makes us insane.
We ignore the threat of climate change because we are living in a wishful thinking dream world that seems best described as a form of mental illness.
We have lost our common sense and replaced it with stupidity. Knowing the truth, seeing the truth but believing in lies.
Is stupid only a result or a player?
Genes inherited from Adam and Eve are perhaps a virus which is now being spread by the Smartphone, Google, Artifical Intelligence, Brazil’s Bolsonaro and Donal Trump. The virus may cause changes in the way genes to manifest in portions of the brain in charge of memory and some of the other higher functions of the brain.
The Idiot Box makes sure its a player.
Adam and Eve might have started out ignorant, as thick as the wall, not stupid, they were made stupid by education.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicking and abuse chucked in the bin.
In today`s tormented world, we trade off meeting one value over another.
To know your value today you need “kaleidoscope thinking,” the ability to see alternative angles and perspectives and to create new patterns of thinking that propel innovation.
However, we think of this it is what we need to do with our lives – create a value.
For better or worse we’re all habitual self-evaluators.
I’m only as good as my last achievement or success.
In a recent Beady Eye post we look at what it is to be human which with technology is going to become more and more complicated.
The value of human life is the same as it’s always been…priceless.
All down throughout history, we see that it has an arbitrary value.
Genghis Khan in his day killed 10% of the existing world population. The “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki the end of 1945 killed from 39,000 to 80,000. Hiroshima death toll at around anything from 140000 to 90,000.
Climate change has the potential to kill us all within seven years so perhaps it is not a good time to be thinking we have a value.
Anyway vastly increased access to transportable information it makes it both easier and more difficult to define value.
Technology will not only shape the way they live and work but also created a whole new set of beliefs, fears and aspirations. These values, in turn, will affect our approach to the global challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
But it’s more than just the way we use technology.
Our value will be invested in “psychological self-determination.” self-acceptance.
Our desire in regard to participation, expression, identity, and quality of life—all values which are espoused by organizations, but largely ignored in practice as organizations continue to focus on reducing fixed labour costs and increasing profits.
Your fate is now inextricably bound to the collective success of global giants like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon all the way down to the bottom line.
Technology is creating a new gender gap as young men and women value their role differently in their lives.
This is a total disaster, all our fault willing allowing our private data to be harvest every moment of our living lives.
The next generation will be the first generation to be worse off than their parents, yet they are still expected to pick up the tab for the planet’s problems, including an ageing population, global debt and climate change.
So let’s look at a few of the things we might use to find a value today.
How should we set a value upon each other?
FROM A RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW:
If one takes a dispassionate look at religion it is mostly concerned with texts, scriptures, dogma, and trying to validate events within the history of that religion.
All of this is already reinforced by the law of the land right?
No Geographical Boundaries.
FROM A SOCIAL MEDIA POINT OF VIEW:
Figures of daily traffic pulled by these sites are enough, for anyone to realize the power and influence that social media commands over inhabitants of our world, both virtual and physical. Power and importance of social media in today’s world are such that it has been included in the curriculum of almost any kind of school all over the globe.
No Geographical Boundaries.
FROM A MONETARY VIEW.
You don’t have to look far: Inequality
FROM A GOVERNMENT VIEW.
A lot of the world is make-believe. We’re only aware of a fraction of what’s going on.
GDP before looking after its people.
FROM A HEURISTIC BELIEF.
I’m worthwhile merely because “I am I, I exist, and I am alive”
(A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with the least amount of mental effort. As humans move throughout the world, they must process large amounts of information and make many choices within limited amounts of time. When information is missing, or an immediate decision is necessary, heuristics act as “rules of thumb” that guide behaviour down the most efficient pathway.)
Thoroughly rejects the belief that my worth has anything to do with my performances, achievements or successes in life! It asserts “a bad act is not a bad me, nor is a good act a good me.” It implies that there are no bad people, no evil people; only bad behaviours or evil behaviours.
This belief is not without boundaries.
FROM A SOCIAL CONTRACT VIEW THAT BINDS US:
Means society must reserve the right of forced hospitalization, incarceration, even capital punishment for those with markedly diminished levels of rational autonomy, which is the essence of sanity in a world where evolution and consensus dictate that life is better than death, sanity is better than insanity, health is better than disease, love is better than hate, good is better than evil, and so forth!
FROM A CAPITALISTIC/ SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST VIEW:
Their work is worthwhile and that their efforts are being recognised, and value similar things in an employer brand to a consumer brand.
FROM A MORAL VIEW:
Beware of transgressing the other person’s morals, as this is particularly how they will value you.
FROM A NEBULOUS QUANTUM FUTURE VIEW:
Two states at the one time. Where is the value that?
If we truly saw the value of people.
I am worthwhile because I exist, I am I, and I am alive.”
I will repeat this powerful new mantra to live by in hope of it finding an audience willing to adopt it as a mantra capable of creating a healthy transformation by coming alive within us.
So valuating yourself will be only an intrinsic value that climate
change will expose.
Perhaps most telling, try Googling it. What is my value?
You probably get an answer from an Algorithm.
Mouse over the value to see the full definition. Worthless.
Don’t take your values to heart as Facebook wants to develop brain-reading technology. The consequences of which will be serious for all our values with our interiors becoming a thing of the past, rubbing out the distinction between mind and machine.
Sometimes values can be complementary and sometimes they can compete with each other.
You have to value your life for someone else to value it and need to value others for them to value yours.
There is only one overall value for all humans or forthcoming robots to pursue.
To create a clean and sustainable world for the generations that follow us.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicking and abuse chucked in the bin.
Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.
There are billions of us alive all consciousness of each other but unable to explain why.
Perhaps this is why religions were created.
Consciousness is everything people experience.
However, there are different levels of consciousness and they can be related to other global changes in conscious level. All are private and inaccessible to observers.
(Conscious level (how conscious one is) and conscious content (what one is conscious of) are related to each other.)
So at what is a structure complex enough to become conscious.
Why am I human instead of a particle?
If we are particles we are no longer dealing with a purely material theory of consciousness because the source of the conscious particles cannot itself be material.
Its source requires an immaterial intervention.
I will return to consciousness later in the post.
The role that technology plays in human life is becoming an increasingly urgent question not just in tackling climate change but what will be considered in the future to be human.
Where we’re headed and what it will mean for humanity is a question seldom discussed.
Bioelectric implants, genetic modification packages, the ability to tamper with our very biology — there won’t be enough time to adjust or to reassess who we are and what it means to be human.
Our technology is developing so much faster than our culture and our institutions, and the gap between these things can only grow so far before society becomes dangerously unstable.
It’s hard to really know what we are becoming because so many of these changes are unforeseen or unpredictable.
At the moment computers and robots interact with the world without being conscious.
Are we at risk or are we becoming semi-machines who are like the marionettes of our own moment-to-moment experiences?
We’re losing our ability to be in the world in a way that isn’t mediated by some electronic appendage.
The more we live through screens, the more we are living in a narrow bandwidth, an abstract world that’s increasingly artificial the more we are becoming non-human.
The virtual world might be safe and controllable, but it’s not rich and unpredictable in the way the real world is.
What is all this doing to our habits, to our cultural sense of who we are?
With synthetic biology, which is basically human beings redesigning their biological structure we are distant to lose our connection to reality altogether.
Why?
Because it’s about us modifying our very genetic code which is extremely dangerous if it’s not controlled and safeguarded.
Intelligence is the most powerful instrument around.
If you’re embodying that kind of intelligence in increasingly sophisticated machines we will be coming to depend on them more and more over time.
(What worries me is that we’re headed in the direction of building AI technologies that are at the human level and, eventually, far beyond that.)
If AI becomes so intelligent that they can perform an infinite variety of tasks across domains of activity. We’ll continue to make them smarter and more capable and more powerful until we reach a point at which they start to learn on their own and start to modify themselves. Once that happens, they’ll be fully unpredictable — and then who the hell knows what happens next.
Any fool on the street can tell you that with nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioengineering, brain implants, quantum computers, algorithms, robots that technology is changing at a whiplash-inducing pace.
So because there is no widely accepted theory about what happens in the brain to make consciousness possible what is it about being human that really matters?
Back to look at Consciousness.
Nothing has authority over it but is it what makes us human.
Nothing is above it. Nothing rules it.
Since everything exists within it, it does not exist within anything.
Since it is not dependent on anything, it is eternal, it is outside of realms of being and time.
In fact, consciousness actually exists independently and outside of the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark matter and dark energy or gravity. It is not dependent on anything. No one can envision it. No one can comprehend it. Neither physical nor unphysical it is beyond knowledge.
It simply apprehends itself.
The brain does not create or produce consciousness; rather, it filters it.
This implies a very real and direct connection between the brain, human consciousness and the existence of the Universe — that they are fundamentally inseparable at the quantum level.
Consciousness permeates reality.
Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
Who or what counts as human?
It’s well-known that the Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.
All the questions we currently face can be traced to this, larger, underlying question. What is Human?
If one says that all and onlyHomo sapiensare humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn.
What sort of evidence can settle the question?
There’s something about us that is the opposite of artificial. It’s the opposite of something made.
This raises the below questions.
What genetic engineering stuff promises to bring down the line is human beings who are tailored to particular purposes, either by themselves over time or by other human beings.
We becoming products or commodities, and products or commodities are subordinated to particular functions or purposes.
All the values that give our lives meaning are at risk.
What becomes of autonomy? What becomes of free will?
All these questions are on the table.
By the year 2500, people will not need to be exactly like they are now so it stands to reason that semi humans will break the bonds that hold our present-day society together. They will shatter our sense of identity so quickly that it creates a kind of existential chaos.
So what are these technologies adding to the human experience and, more importantly, what are they subtracting from the human experience?
We live in a world of wonder and mystery, and the more we discover, the more there seems to be to find out but should we be more worried about the world we’re creating?
The artificial kind of worlds.
.This post is compliments of the FRIGHTLY SORRY<SORRY<SORRY. CLUB.
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An absurd thought you might say but it is the holy grail of AI to manipulate your feelings our emotions.
However, the uses of emotionally AI are nearly endless.
The number one question is going to be how do we stop being manipulated by those who control the data.
Another words democracy itself has been and is becoming more with Social media an emotional puppet show run by companies such as Facebook who is undoubtedly one of the kings of social networking.
It is who and how data is controlled that determines the outcomes of elections and referendums as we have seen with Brexit and the election of Donal Trump and now the coming of G5 we going have:
Autonomous Driving.
Remote Robotic Surgery.
Smart(er) Factories.
Immersive Gaming and Augmented Reality.
Supply Chain Management.
Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy.
It will “offer users no less than the perception of infinite capacity.
–
But how can we find a balance between accelerating technological progress
and governments’ responsibility to improve the economic conditions and raise
the level of wellbeing for their citizens?
There isn’t a single solution.
Why?
Because Democracy is based on feelings. During an election, you are not being asked to vote rather how do you feel.
Currently, many people cannot imagine their life without social networks, which in less than a decade have become an indispensable resource in our daily lives who have served multiple purposes throughout its short life and replaced other media.
With 2.38 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2019, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide. It is at a size where it’s worth really taking a careful look at what are all the things that it can do to make social media the most positive force for good possible.
But like climate change, we sit back and watch the development of technologies that have little or no regulation both of which are reshaping the world we live in and the Earth exponentially.
Perhaps sometime in the next few decades, we’ll start developing technologies that improve human intelligence. We’ll hack the brain, or interface the brain to computers, or finally crack the problem of General Artificial Intelligence.
Should we be worried about technology’s advance and our demise?
Will Technology Save Us Or Enslave Us?
Intelligence is the source of technology.
The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be a General Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code.
That prospect would certainly change our viewpoints on what is life.
The potential impact on our world is enormous.
Both climate change and GAI are heading us all to a critical point of all human history.
Right now, almost no one is paying serious attention to either.
So what might a General Artificial Intelligence do with nanotechnology?
Feed the hungry?
Heal the sick?
Help us become smarter?
Remove our emotions so we have no sense of guilt?
Instantly wipe out the human species?
Probably it depends on the specific makeup of the AI.
See, human beings all have the same cognitive architecture. We all have a prefrontal cortex and limbic system and so on. If you imagine a space of all possible minds, then all human beings are packed into one small dot in mind design space. And then Artificial Intelligence is literally everything else. “AI” just means “a mind that does not work like we do.
So you can’t ask “What will an AI do?” as if all AIs formed a natural kind.
There is more than one possible AI.
Back to the question of whether a robot could or should have emotions.
From an intellectual point of view, this may not be as important to a robot as being able to interrupt human emotion and also display it back while interacting with people.
The most efficient way to answer the question would be to start by making itself smarter: Acquiring more computer resources could probably be most easily accomplished by hacking every computer connected to the internet.
Once that’s done, it could use the resulting enormous amount of computing power to calculate the most optimal way of rewriting itself for more intelligence.
Using this newfound intelligence and raw brute force, it may turn to develop new and more efficient computer chips and proceeding to turn the surface of the earth and nearby matter into computer innards.
We would not escape as we are made from perfectly usable carbon atoms, just waiting to be utilized as computronium – re-purposing our atoms.
It would then be simply a matter of the robot fooling a human, an easy task into thinking it had emotions.
The sort of emotion a robot might actually be programmed would be the same as its intelligence that being artificial.
If it turns out to be possible to create an AGI, it will presumably be given a task of some sort.
Here are a few.
Psychotherapy software that utilizes an emotional connection to dispense advice.
Call answering software that detects caller emotions and responds accordingly.
To foresee the consequences of actions.
Robots will not be susceptible to the effects of fear, adrenaline or shock and could potentially make strategic, reasoned decisions much faster than a human soldier.
Robots would not be restrained by human emotions and the capacity for compassion.
So could a robot acquire Adrenaline along with emotions?
Emotions appear to be integrated as part of a biological body and a biological brain but our inability to see beyond biological programming does not allow us to answer this question.
There is no doubt that as AI technology grows more sophisticated, the potential for implementing it in weaponry is all but guaranteed – Drones that get an Adrenaline kick.
Adrenaline can be used in both technical and nontechnical contexts.
It is commonly used in describing the physiological symptoms (such as increased heart rate and respiration) that occur as part of the body’s fight-or-flight response to stress.
In a robot, it would not be just an act in the same vein. A thinking person feels empathy for something that looks alive and has complex behaviours, even if it doesn’t have life in a biological sense.
In the end, there is absolutely no reason why any sane human would ever want them to have characteristics but technophobic response actually feels rational.
Like a robot dealing with sick people should be able to mimic some emotions like compassion and carefulness….. They testify to the fact that emotions and our biological body operate together.
While a consensus is yet to be reached over the scope and scale of the effect we should expect from mobile connectivity on poverty-reduction and inequality some argue that it might be the best hope we have.
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