A common complaint about representative democracy is that it creates a distant class of lawmakers who will often collude with vested interests, or become so detached from the lives of the general public, that they will make decisions that the public does not support. By contrast, in a Direct Democracy system, such corruption of decision-making is impossible if every citizen is an equally powerful participant in the process.
However, it does not make any sense to think that direct democracy is somehow ideologically predisposed in any particular direction.
Direct democracy is simply a median-reverting institution.
It pushes policy back toward the center of public opinion when legislatures move too far to the right or left or is it, in fact, an opportunity to organize a kind of socio-ecological revolution to break away from the western development model of politics.
We know that every political system man has invented is open to corruption.
It is obvious that modern western democracies are now confronted with a change in culture mainly due to the integration of migrants, globalization, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.
Direct Democracy is presented as a solution to these challenges mainly by Social Media with its partitions and manipulation of voters with false news and software bots that amplify specific conversations on Twitter and Facebook by posting videos, photos, and biased statements targeting particular hashtags and wordings.
Resulting in phony debates, nurtured by cliches and prejudices that are destabilizing the political systems we have had for hundreds of years.
At what cost?
One of the obvious cost is Brexit and the not so obvious Donald Trump.
It is simply impossible to have direct democracy as the common Googlefied smartphone citizen does not have a grasp of political understanding nor the cognitive capacities to achieve direct democracy.
However, this view cuts against democracy in general.
As it implies that politicians always know better than the average citizen.
This is far from the truth when one looks at the current state of the world that is crying for some common action.
Politicians don’t necessarily show expertise and interest and certainly don’t know all the issues and are not always well informed.
They depend on shortcuts and have to ask other politicians and experts.
This morning I received an email from John Taylo in response to my last post ( The Beady Eye ask’s: Does anyone really know what quantum chips will do.)
He sums up the situation by saying and I quote
” We have yet to invent a political system that will harness the knowledge of mankind. if AI can be used for the benefit of all to reduce poverty and increase living standers of all without wrecking the planet it will be ……. Only dreaming”
I replied “What a dream”
Perhaps I should have said ” Where do dreams come from. Look around you. That is where dreams come from. The only planet we know. ”
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Our neurology is primed to establish rapport with other humans, not artificial intelligence driving algorithms or machine learning that are disconnecting us all from what really matters on the planet.
The establishment of rapport depends on eye contact, breading and recognition of subtle changes in voice timbre.
IT’S TIME THAT WE DEMAND THAT ALL SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES ARE SUBJECT TO REGULATION AND LAWS.
THEY TRULY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE TECHNOLOGIES THEY ARE USING AND THE RAMIFICATIONS THAT ARE LESS AND LESS PREDICTABLE.
They ( by which I mean Facebook, Twitter, and all other platforms) are now using technologies to clean up their acts that are biased and driven by profit. Since they are monopolies they will only encourage regulation that cements their power.
WORST OF ALL;
Since these platforms, appear so interactive and democratic, we are seeing a degradation of our social processes as a form of personal empowerment. They are encouraging regardless of content, immune reactions, discouraging cooperation, consensus, or empathy.
MESSAGES ON THESE PLATFORMS MAY COST PENNIES OR NOTHING AST ALL, AND THEY ARE SOLD AND PLACED BY BOTS WITH NO REGARD TO THEIR CONTENT.
Social media manipulates us individually one private screen at a time.
It is no wonder :
WHEN SOCIAL MEDIA IS PROGRAMMED TO ATOMIZE US AND THE MESSAGING IS ENGINEERED TO PROVOKE OUR MOST COMPETITIVE, REPTILIAN SENSIBILITIES.
You ask:
Why Brexit? Why is there a rise in violent crime? Why DONALD DUMPS? Why mass immigration,? Why terrorism? Why inequality is on the rise? Why there is no effective battle against climate change?
FOR THAT MATTER WHY IS THE WORLD IN SUCH A MESS.
BECAUSE WE ARE ALL NOT CONNECTED TO REALITY.
IF WE WANT A WORLD WORTH LIVING IN OR ON RATHER THAN IN THE SOUP OF COMMUNICATIVE HUMAN AND MACHINE LOOPS CALLED BOTS AND ALGORITHMS WE MUST BE ABLE TO INTELLIGENTLY DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW INFORMATION.
Data sound bits may enhance a particular agenda like build a wall but they do not compete for dominance by appealing to our intellect, our compassion, or anything to do with humanity.
BYPASSING OUR HIGHER FACULTIES, OUR REASONING, AND OUR COLLECTIVE AUTHORITY IS UNETHICAL AND WILL BE IN THE LONG RUN, INEFFECTIVE.
Our DNA is not a static blueprint that acts differently in different situations, it does however to some extent depend on what protein soup in which we are swimming around in. IS IT THE IDEOLOGICAL SOUP OF ALGORITHMS, WITHOUT BRING OUR HUMANITY ALONG WITH US.
NOW IS THE TIME TO SEPARATE THIS SYNTHETIC IDEOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE FROM HUMAN TO HUMAN CONTACT SO WE ALLOW ENOUGH TIME FOR NON-CONNECTED, SOCIAL EXPERIENCES.
TO RE-ESTABLISH ORGANIC HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS AND A LOCAL SOCIAL FABRICS.
A good start would be to banning all smartphones at sporting events, schools.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin
Perception is at the heart of this question and of course, there are hundreds of inventions that could and should be mentioned if we had the time and space.
We began the 20th century with the infancy of airplanes, automobiles, and radio. We end the 20th century with spaceships, computers, smartphones, AI and the wireless Internet all being technologies we now take for granted.
However, the world is steeped in poverty with precious little in the way of humanitarian advancement.
HERE IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER IS MY LIST AND WHY.
The credit card:
Part of the fabric of modern day life. Credit no longer the prerogative of the elite. The ultimate symbol of the triumphant Anglo-American consumer culture. The modern manifestation of money. Allowed modern Banks to transcend national boundaries. Guarantees payment of debts.
Microchip: Fiber Optics: Microprocessor: Windows
Created the Credit Card. The Internet and the World Wide Web.
Artificial Fertilizers:
Enabled the further expansion of agriculture and pollution.
Internal combustion engine:
The why is obvious:
The pneumatic tire:
Did more for the engine.
The condom/ Birth pill.
The why is obvious.
Nuclear Power:
Nuclear power has long provoked ardent policy fights, historically centered on the perceived safety or danger of splitting atoms to keep consumers’ refrigerators running.
Today, it’s not local or environmental opposition but economics that’s crippling nuclear power.
It may be very difficult to meet international carbon-cutting goals without the widespread addition of nuclear plants.
This still leaves the problem of waste, and a choice between nuclear waste—deadly but the concentrated poison that lasts thousands of years—and fossil-fuel waste—invisible, diffuse carbon pollution that in sufficient amounts will transform the Earth for thousands of years.
While nuclear waste is nasty stuff, so are the conventional pollutants of fossil-fuel burning. Nuclear power avoids air emissions of over one million tons of sulfur dioxide and 650,000 tons of nitrogen oxides each year, as well as significant particulate emissions.
Since CO2 emissions persist for many years in the atmosphere emissions cuts made today are worth more than the same cuts made down the road.
The best invention may be Toyota’s Hybrid.
AK-47 Kalashnikov: M16:
The twenty century can be characterized by mass warfare and mass killing- two world wars, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia’s killings fields, Rwanda the list goes on.
No firearm of any kind has killed more people.
It is the weapon of choice for terrorists, rebels with 75 million in circulation around the world accounting for 20% of the entire global stock of firearms. Every year, small arms kill between 20,000 and 100,000 people in the world’s conflicts. AK-47s Kalashnikov accounts for a high proportion – and quite possibly the majority – of this human toll. In the 68 years since the first prototype was made, the AK-47 has probably dealt death to millions.
This is the decade of AI (run by the Algorithm) I PAD, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook. Social Media. 3d Printing.
Will there use glorify peace? Not on the evidence so far.
Feel free to add yours and why.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Facebook is simply a platform and will never be held responsible for its users.
We can’t blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them. We are in control. But are we?
Facebook like all other platforms has been distorted by the fortunes they have been able to earn through advertising.
Why?
Because the techniques these companies use are not always generic: they are algorithmically tailored to each person.
There can be no ethics when it comes to technological manipulation that can be sold to the highest bidder.
The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models. Thay have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place.
But how can Google and Facebook or ANY PLATFORM for that matter be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into the most profitable companies on the planet?
Notification technology enables hundred unsolicited interruptions into millions of lives, accelerating the arms race for people’s attention.
When you consider that the total size of all global data hit 20 zettabytes in 2017.
This probably means nothing so picture this: If every 64 – gigabyte I Phone were a brick, we could build 80 Great walls of China with the I Phones needed to store all the above data.
It’s growing every second and completely out of any control.
All of our minds are being hijacked.
Our choices are not as free as we think they are. The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions.
Billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.
We now have an internet-shaped around the demands of an advertising economy with technology platforms contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention.
Manipulating people into habitual use of their products or platforms with rewards or short-term social affirmations, while harvested valuable data about the preferences of users that could be sold to advertisers.
So what if anything can be done.
It is very common, for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.
We’ve truly reached a new level of technological time wasting, with the young generation unable to communicate.
If we the adult world cannot wean ourselves free a good starting point would be if we are to exercise our freedom by banning, iPhones, iPads, laptops and mobile phones from places of education.
They will become a real problem if you don’t, as they are ridiculous thing to be addicted to. It just something to use when you’re procrastinating or is it a procrastination-trap, a slate of tools destined to get you addicted.
We have to learn to deal more effectively with our emotions if we want to procrastinate less.
Such as varying the rewards people receive to create a craving, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as triggers. It makes them look like they have a life.
Social media and other addictive technologies have and are creating an attention economy, which is severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and is possibly lowering IQ.
One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before the Internet.
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
The mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. Everyone is distracted, all of the time.
Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation by looking at your I Phone, I Pad
If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to
”Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”
Get a life and use one.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHAT IS THE STANDING OF DEMOCRACY IN THE WORLD TO DAY AND IS IT SOCIAL MEDIA THAT IS ALIENATING US FROM THE VOTE.
Democracy has many strengths, including the capacity for self-correction, but the question is can it survive social media.
The word ‘democracy’ has its origins in the Greek language. It combines two shorter words: ‘demos’ meaning whole citizen living within a particular city-state and ‘kratos’ meaning power or rule.
Democracy of sorts had existed for centuries but there is no absolute definition of democracy. The term is elastic and expands and contracts according to the time, place and circumstances of its use.
Meaningful democracy only arrived at a national level in 1906, when Finland became the first country to abolish race and gender requirements for both voting and for serving in government.
Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world. The combination of globalization and the digital revolution has made some of democracy’s most cherished institutions look outdated.
It is far short of the settled, comfortable state of maturity that many of its early adherents expected (or at least hoped) it would be able to claim after decades of effort.
Just a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter were hailed as tools for democracy activists, enabling movements like the Arab Spring to flourish.
Today, the tables have turned as fears grow over how social media may have been manipulated to disrupt the US election, and over how authoritarian governments are using the networks to clamp down on dissent.
They are fast becoming tools for social control.
So has democracy’s global advance come to a halt, and may even be in reverse.
The notion that winning an election entitles the majority to do whatever it pleases no longer holds water.
Since the dawn of the modern democratic era in the late 19th century, democracy has expressed itself through nation-states and national parliaments. People elect representatives who pull the levers of national power for a fixed period. But this arrangement is now under assault from both above and below.
From above, globalization has changed national politics profoundly.
From below Modern technology is implementing a new modern version with national politicians surrendering more and more power to Social Media.
For example over trade and financial flows, to global markets and supranational bodies, and may thus find that they are unable to keep promises they have made to voters.
International organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, and the European Union might have extended their influence, but they no longer have the power to implement what they preach.
There is a compelling logic too much of this:
The fragility of the United Nations influence elsewhere has become increasingly apparent with the state of the world.
How can anyone Organisation or a single country deal with problems like climate change or tax evasion?
National politicians have also responded to globalization by limiting their discretion and handing power to unelected technocrats in some areas. The number of countries with independent central banks, for example, has increased from about 20 in 1980 to more than 160 today.
So is the power now in the hands of multi Clongormentts like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Mircosoft etc.
Certainly, the perception that democracy in decline has become more widespread than at any time during the past quarter-century. Erosion of freedom over the past few years, adopting smarter methods for m of subversion
There are four main sorts of Democracy.
Direct democracy
Representative democracy
Constitutional democracy
Monitory democracy
A liberal democracy (that is, one that champions the development and well-being of the individual) is organised in such a way as to define and limit power so as to promote legitimate government within a framework of justice and freedom.
Social media is a double-edged sword it allows us to speak truth to power but on the other hand, it allows power to manipulate public opinion and polarize the electorate.
Citizens use it to speak truth to power, and authoritarian governments use it to spread misinformation.
Twitter users got more misinformation, polarizing and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news.”
They fake petition signatures. They skew poll results and recommendation engines.
Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and the blocking of information, the newer methods include demonizing online media and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information overload, doubt, confusion, harassment, and distraction.”
And yes, governments are increasing their efforts to censor the internet, but that’s because they recognize that the internet poses a threat to their control.
Every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations.
If the liberal world order is indeed coming apart under pressure from
the authoritarians, the future of democracy will be deeply affected.
Social media firms are “largely immune from responsibility” in the legal sense, but that “in the court of public opinion it is a different matter, and future US/EU legislation seems likely if they don’t address these issues in a meaningful way.
So what is the answer?
Is social media basically good, or does it have a “negative impact on society”
There are no gatekeepers when you publish via your social profile, (outside of each platform’s terms of use) – you can write anything and anyone has the chance to view it.
Social Media has truly democratized media and given everyone a medium through which to be heard.
It has also opened the system up to those who would exploit it to push their own agendas. The platforms are now looking to police this, but it’ll likely always play a part.
To make democracy work, we must be participants, not simply observers.
One who does not vote has no right to complain.
Here are a few questions to mull over.
What can be done to fight citizens’ political alienation and distrust?
Are representative democracy and greater public participation the answer or do we need to think beyond current practices?
How can the cultural and historical factors involved and reflected in present developments help us look into the future?
What knowledge is needed to understand and inform decision-making in the future?
Which values are and which values must be at the base of decision-making?
If we are indeed heading for a Smartphone Algorithms Democracy:Who, or What will be in control.
The algorithms behind social media platforms convert popularity into legitimacy, creating echo chambers, overwhelming the public square with multiple, conflicting assertions.
Today, social media acts as an accelerant, and an at-scale content platform and distribution channel, for both viral “dis”-information (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false) and “mis”-information.
“Populist” leaders use these platforms, often aided by trolls, “hackers for hire” and bots, on open networks such as Twitter and YouTube.
Sometimes they are seeking to communicate directly with their electorate. In using such platforms, they subvert established protocol, shut down dissent, marginalize minority voices, project soft power across borders, normalize hateful views, showcase false momentum for their views, or create the impression of tacit approval of their appeals to extremism.
And they are not the only actors attempting to use these platforms to manipulate political opinion — such activity is now acknowledged by governments of democratic countries.
In addition, advanced methods for capturing personal data have led to sophisticated psychographic analysis, behavioral profiling, and micro-targeting of individuals to influence their actions via so-called “dark ads.” to self-censor or opt out of participating in public discourse.
Currently, there are few options for redress. At the same time, platforms are faced with complex legal and operational challenges with respect to determining how they will manage speech, a task made all the more difficult since norms vary widely by geographic and cultural context.
Every democracy needs its justice system, so we must “catch up with the modern world”, to cope with the social media.
In reality, old power structures still have power, they just have it in new spaces.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the Bin.
I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.
There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.
The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.
In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.
Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.
New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.
All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.
Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.
All need software in the form of algorithms to run.
AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.
Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?
One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
Not surprising.
So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.
That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.
Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this.
Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.
So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.
( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)
Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)
It operates through the following segments:
Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.
Market Cap As of May 2017
$507.5 Billion
Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.
Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:
An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.
Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.
It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.
Amazon:
The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.
Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.
eBay Inc: (PayPal)
There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:
The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:
Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)
Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.
Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.)
A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.
More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.
Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.
These are the main contenders as we know them to-day
—————————————————————————————
So the Question is:
Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.
Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)
At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.
While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.
Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.
One could say that:
Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff, Google represents doming down.
All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.
So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.
I think Not.
In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.
Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us. Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.
The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.
“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”
The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches – is Google.
Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.
Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.
Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.
Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.
Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.
Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.
Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.
By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud. With one winner.
The Google Monopoly.
Once a Google client always a Google client.
How do you stop using Google?
Already impossible.
Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.
Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.
It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.
Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact. It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)
Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?
The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.
Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.
In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.
On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.
Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.
I feel that this will change in the coming years.
All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.
Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.
After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.
It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?
Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.
So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.
= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?
= Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?
= Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?
Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.
Why might this be the case – and does it matter?
Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.
It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.
It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;
Soon, however, things move on to new realms.
Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.
An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.
Social media however has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.
However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.
It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.
It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.
Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.
As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.
The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:
The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.
This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.
Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.
Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.
——
What happens to our online materials at death.
Finally: Capitalism can never be ethical.
There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.
If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service) is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.
Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.
Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.
My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.
Google it.
All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
There is no denying that the benefits of technology are needed but what are the downsides costs.
As the demand for up-to-date technology increases, we need to reevaluate how we measure the hidden cost of the TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION.
It will not be us picking up the tap, but the yet to be born that will have to pay, living in a world that is detached from what makes it all possible The Earth.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
At this point it is impossible to say with any authority what exactly the cost will be.
Some technologies are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop, but you should know about all of them right now. In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to print human organs, but not the brain.
According to Stephen Hawking, “Humans are entering a stage of self-designed evolution.”
That may be so, but technology is more than just fusing the physical and digital worlds.
Marked by emerging technology breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, face and voice recognition and algorithms learning from other algorithms.
With wireless connecting brain-reading technology directly to electrical stimulators on your body it has the potential with more items moving from physical to virtual to decouple us from reality. Wireless communications is already dominating our everyday lives
It is already impacting all disciplines, economies, and industries, our politics, improving medicine, influencing our culture.
Apart from the obvious technology is also in the process of changing democracy, moving capitalism underground, assisting conflicts, packaging natural resources, destabilizing society, disrupt the way governments deliver services to citizens, just to mention the tip of the ice berg.
.It will not be long before we will all have DNA maps from birth.
However with the arrival of Quantum computers the way we use technology will be reshape, along with the societies we live in.
As soon as two to five years from now, such systems or time on such systems are likely to be for sale.
There are probably plenty more uses for quantum computers that nobody has thought up yet.
However you may rest assured that the ordinary citizens (or even governments) won’t be able to own their own quantum computers for a long time, if ever, but I can imagine large companies renting time (measured in fractions of seconds) to whoever needs their services.
With this in mind the race has well started to create monopolies of knowledge Google, of Social Media Society – Facebook, consumerism E Bay, Amazon, Alibaba, of Finance – Pay Pal, of Communication – Apple, of Biotech Thermo Fisher Scientific, of cloud business – Microsoft -IBM, Oracle, of computer microchips to data center-makers-Intel, to name just a few.
Here are a few of their Mission statements:
Facebook: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
Amazon: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”
Pay Pal: “To build the Web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”
Alibaba: “To make it easy to do business anywhere.”
Google: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Microsoft: “To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”
United Nations: “The maintenance of international peace and security.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres: “To help people worldwide where the need is greatest, delivering emergency medical aid to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care.”
Non mention the health of the EARTH?
Disruptive technology is, by its very nature, unpredictable but we’ll see more intelligence built into communication. With always-on connectivity, social networking has the power to change cultures, as we saw with the Egyptian Revolution, which led to the Arab Spring.
The results of changing the world are often complicated and unpredictable.
With the technology of smart phones social influences will continue to move rapidly between cultures.
In the broadest sense, technology extends our abilities to change the world: to cut, shape, or put together materials; to move things from one place to another; to reach farther with our hands, voices, and senses. We use technology to try to change the world to suit us better. The changes may relate to survival needs such as food, shelter, or defense, or they may relate to human aspirations such as knowledge, art, or control.
As computational power rises exponentially, not linearly, so does the rate of change — and that means the next 10 years should pack in far more technological change than the last 10.
It is my prediction that all of it will end up in the cloud.
Why?
Because it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of our brains (driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex) that is driving technology to tap into our personal sensors.
Make no mistake: emails, Facebook and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
Already, the cloud is powerful enough to help us communicate through real-time language translation.
When is a profit not a profit? When it turns into a monopoly exploiting all around it.
Just like Capitalism technology it is unable to regulate itself and with the arrival of Quantum computers it will make everything and everybody beholden to technology, endangering much of the openness that we now enjoy online.
So I one again ask the question:
Is it time to regulate Algorithms that have profit as their end targets and is it time that we demanded an open data website that would allow anyone to find information on a host of county government programs, from budget information to welfare data to crime statistics.
This would be linked to two powerful benefits.
First, it makes government more transparent and understandable at a time when trust in the public sector has plummeted.
Second, it has the potential to generate significant economic benefits impacting budget issues, public safety and education, transparency and economic value for tax payers money.
The bottom line is that government data can be extremely valuable for public consumption, but only if the policies behind the data are well thought out and the related costs are affordable. For instance, would a map of society reveal awkward disparities in how rich and poor neighborhoods receive public funding?
Many governments are running on old, outdated systems, making them vulnerable to cyber attacks.
I believe that such an open based data website would benefit from the collective wisdom of the community, simplify how citizens and businesses interact with the state.
However IT WOULD HAVE THE unexpected startup costs if data is kept in a legacy computer system that requires reformatting; quality-related costs to keep open data fresh and up-to-date; legal costs to comply with open data legislation; liability costs in case something goes wrong, such as publication of nonpublic information; and public relations costs that can occur when a jurisdiction generates bad press from open data about poor performance metrics or workforce diversity problems.
That apart present technological advances and information overlays will change how we live in significant ways.
We will have a so-called “smart grid” where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems, allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand. Such a universal method for identifying someone energy requirements becomes much harder when you no longer have a central authority to figure out how to link together the different systems.
It will not be like self-driving trucks with lidar system guidance run by algorithms or self-driving cars.
Who is responsible when the self drive truck or car kills someone. Try bringing a self thought Algorithm to court.
Try suing an Face-detecting systems for wrong identification or payment.
Then we have: Gene-therapy.
Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
Three technologies are coming together to make this new type of mapping possible.
The first is known as “cellular microfluidics.” Individual cells are separated, tagged with tiny beads, and manipulated in droplets of oil that are shunted like cars down the narrow, one-way streets of artificial capillaries etched into a tiny chip, so they can be corralled, cracked open, and studied one by one.
The second is the ability to identify the genes active in single cells by decoding them in superfast and efficient sequencing machines at a cost of just a few cents per cell. One scientist can now process 10,000 cells in a single day.
The third technology uses novel labeling and staining techniques that can locate each type of cell—on the basis of its gene activity—at a specific zip code in a human organ or tissue.
Then we have, the relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
Then we have, Botnets are used to commit click fraud.
Google ads pay a site owner according to the number of people who click on them. The attacker instructs all the computers on his botnet to repeatedly visit the Web page and click on the ad. Dot, dot, dot, PROFIT! If the botnet makers figure out more effective ways to siphon revenue from big companies online, we could see the whole advertising model of the Internet crumble.
Then we have, hackers breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. The problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video recorders, and other gadgets in the “Internet of things.”
Then we have, reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning may soon inject greater intelligence into much more than games.
SO WHAT NOW?
What are the implications to human development and the diversity of life on earth? What opportunities are there to reduce risks and vulnerabilities, enhance resilience, and create transformations to prosperous and equitable futures?
Science can provide only some answers; it is not a panacea for all problems. We need to also make personal, economic, social, and political changes, whatever the cost will be.
Reinforcement-learning algorithm can learn from collated data and experiment in simulation to suggest, say, how and when to operate the cooling systems.
Algorithms don’t know the Meaning of Environment.
They have however so concept of the “The term ‘environment’ it refers to all external conditions and factors that affect living organisms. Here external factors mean all the things around us such as air, water, light, animals, humans etc.
Algorithms are shadow boxers of yesterday all because technology trends can affect the bottom line of business.
Although big data algorithms hold great promise, they should still be approached with caution and skepticism.
For instance Algorithms should not be relied upon to ration medical care until the technology has substantially matured.
If we ignore what is happening there will be more riots, and increasing divisions along economic, religious and ethnic lines with Robots completely replacing humans in the workforce.
IT IS TIME FOR THE OWNERS ALL PROFIT SEEKING ALGORITHMS TO BE REGISTERED WITH A COPY OF THE WORKING CODE. NO PROFIT EARNING ALGORITHMS SHOULD BE GRANTED A PATIENT.
All human comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: THE NEW TYPE OF NON- CONSCIOUS INTELLIGENCE DRIVEN BY NON-CONSCIOUS ALGORITHMS IS GOING TO DESTROY WHAT IS LEFT OF DECENCY IN THE WORLD. (Guest post an unknown source.)
The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.
The fact is, as time goes by it will be easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms, not because they are getting smarter and smarter but because humans are professionalising.
One would have to say are we all such naive bonkers that we are going to allow algorithms dictate our lives.
The answer so far appears to be yes. We are going to become militarily and economically useless.
Technical difficulties or political objections might slow down the algorithmic invasion of the job market but while the systems might need humans, it will not need individuals.
These systems will make most of the important decisions depriving individuals of their authority and freedom.
They are already assembling humans into dividuals ie. humans are becoming an assemblage of many different algorithms lacking a single inner voice or a single self.
Its time we realized that if we continue down this path allowing large corporations platforms to introduce algorithms willy nilly with no overall vetting as to whether they comply with our values we will be replacing the voter, the consumer, and the beholder.
The Al algorithm will know best, will always be right, and beauty will be in the calculation of the algorithm. Individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to autonomous networks.
People will not see themselves as individuals but as collections of biochemical mechanisms that are constantly monitored and guided by a network of electronic algorithms.
We are already crossing the line. Most of us use Apps without any thought whatsoever.
You might say that every age has its organizing principles.
The nineteenth century had the novel, and the twentieth had TV; in our more modern times, they come and go more quickly than ever—on Web 1.0 it was the website, for example, and a few years later, for 2.0, it was the app.
And now, another shift is underway:
Today’s organizing principle is the algorithm. (Though you could productively argue that our new lingua franca will either be artificial intelligence or virtual reality.)
Algorithms rule the modern world, silent workhorses aligning data sets and systematizing the world. They’re everywhere, in everything, and you wouldn’t know unless you looked. For some of the most powerful companies in the world—Google, Facebook, etc.—they’re also closely held secrets, the most valuable intellectual property a company owns.
Perhaps it is naïve to believe algorithms should be neutral? but it’s also deceptive to advance the illusion that Facebook and the algorithms that power it are bias-free.
They are not neutral.
Facebook is intended to be the home of what the world is talking about. Their business model depends on it, even if that’s an impossible goal. As such, with now well over a billion users, and still growing, it’s worth asking:
What role should Facebook play in shaping public discourse? And just how transparent should it be?
After all, Facebook is mind-boggling massive.
It accounts for a huge portion of traffic directed to news sites; small tweaks in its own feed algorithm can have serious consequences for media companies’ bottom lines.
What can be done? ( See previous posts)
Evolution will continue and will need to do so if we humans are to exist.
We therefore should welcome all technology that enhances our chances of this existence in as far that it equates to human values.
All Algorithms that violate these values for the sake of profit or power should be destroyed.
After all if humans have no soul and if thoughts, emotions, and sensations are just biochemical algorithms why can’t biology account for all the vagaries of human societies.?
If Donald Trump is the best that twitter Algorithms can produce it appears to me that there is a long way to go and it’s not too late to change course.
All human comments appreciated. All like algorithms clicks chucked in the bin.
We all know or at least we should all be aware that our world is becoming less and less transparent thanks to what we call Artificial Intelligence.
The challenge there is:
The false promise of the Internet was that it can connect people from different backgrounds, with different beliefs and across disparate locations.
The trend toward personalization by AI is impeding the fulfillment of that promise?
What is becoming more and more apparent is that while most personalization on the web is algorithmically driven, aren’t we implicitly, informing the algorithms based on the choices we’ve previously made interacting with content?
Couldn’t you then, in theory, manipulate the filter so you see what you want to see or are there too many factors beyond our control?
Consider:
Even if you’re completely logged out of Google, on a new computer, the company can track 57 signals about you — from what kind of laptop you’re using to what your IP address is to what the font size in your browser is. Already, that gives a lot of important clues about age, income and demographics.
It’s ironic — the promise of personalization is that it gives us our own personal view of the world.
But the challenge is that a lot of the time, it’s actually pushing us toward a stereotyped, simplified version of ourselves: “This person is male, so we’ll show him more gadget and car news.”
So let me ask you.
Many of the major social, discovery and media sites on the Internet now implement some type of personalization. Do you feel these sites have a responsibility to educate consumers about how their information is being filtered? Do you think users should be able to opt out of personalization?
I would say Yes, on both counts.
In an increasingly complex and vast media landscape it is crucial that me maintain our private lives.
Why?
Because: Algorithms of all shapes and sizes are monitoring, analyzing, making
decisions, dictating our credit scores etc. They are shaping our lives and economies, our future, so shouldn’t we know what code and mathematical equations, or deep learning go into making them work.
However Transparency alone won’t help.
Algorithms are complicated so exposing the code behind them won’t make them more understandable. Knowing how an algorithm is coded is useless without knowing the data that has being fed into it in the first place.
There is only one solution and that is the:
The Creation of a New World Organisation that is totally transparent, and self financing: To vet all Technology. To ensure that they comply with the core world gold standard of human values.
(See previous Posts)
Let me ask you two further questions.
Can some level of personalization be useful?
What are we missing that we need to see?
Some amount of algorithmic personalization is necessary — there’s just too much stuff to sort through for humans to do it all. However you don’t know who Google thinks you are or on what basis it’s editing your results, and therefore you don’t know what you’re missing.
A lot of the personalization that exists today just serves up information junk food, but a growing portion is being curated by robots — computer algorithms that are filtering content and deciding what we get to see.
It may be delicious, but it doesn’t feed the soul.
Now it’s possible to live in a bubble where that stuff doesn’t ever show up — you’d never know it’s happening.
Take the Facebook “Like” button — the main way that information gets spread on Facebook. “Like” isn’t a neutral word — it’s easy to Like “I just finished a marathon,” and hard to Like “cell phones may cause cancer.”
So some kinds of information get through, and others don’t, and when that’s happening in the Facebook News Feed, where an increasing number of folks get their news, it’s a real problem.
Most people aren’t aware that their Google search results, Yahoo News links, or Facebook feed is being tailored in this way.
Filters can provide relevance and combat information overload, but with so much riding on automated decisions to ensure algorithms deal with humans fairly is now more relevant than ever.
I recently read that in five-year your smartphone could be reading your mind.
Brain- computer interface.
Personalization couldn’t exist without the massive dossiers of personal data being collected by big companies online these days. And it’s a problem because consumers don’t have much control over that.
The current laws around personal data just don’t contemplate a world in which a click on one website changes what you see on an entirely different one.
Almost all popular websites, from search engines to social networks to media outlets, are now utilizing filters in some way to personalize content for visitors.
When websites show us only what we like, we get cut off from the diverse points of view that can enrich our understanding of the world.
We get Donald Trumps.
Privacy is about controlling what the world is allowed to know about you. This is about controlling what you’re able to see of the world — what your filters let through and what they don’t.
Its time to wake up.
We can lose sight of our common problems, but they don’t lose sight of us.
It’s only a matter of time before our Fidelity/ Loyalty cards are linked up to our personal data held by banks, e-commerce sites and social media. If not already.
We will then be looking at citizen character score, which will bring credit scores to a whole new level, turning them more into to life scores, by tracking anything and everything we do. The scary bit is what is tracked and by who.
I hear you saying that this will never be accepted.
It is already on the cards for people living in China and Singapore. Humans and robot algorithms, living in peaceful harmony. Where you go, what you buy, who you know, how many points are on your driving licence, how your friends rate you.
The scores will serve not just to indicate an individual’s credit risk, but could be used in a vast array of applications and organisations such as Governments, Benefits, Hospital Operations, Visa, Education, down to all fields that makes Society including prison sentences, landlords, employers, and even romantic partners to gauge an individual’s character.
All stored in the Cloud. Which comes in many different models forms.
Ubiquitous access to the network: Self-service and on-demand access to computing capabilities. This service will most often be performed by the service provider automatically without the need for human interaction.
Cloud Computers is not the easiest of terms to define, or explain what it all actually means. Owned by Google, Twitter, Gmail and Facebook the Cloud is elusive as grabbing a cloud itself.
Perhaps we can blame it all on Leonhard Euler one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, and also a prolific inventor of canonical notation.
( An Euler path is a path that uses every edge of a graph exactly once.)
One way or the other to use a Trumpetism: It’s ain’t going to be great unless we build algorithms that have a sense of civic purpose embedded in them, giving us both entertainment and the information we really need, not profit.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
O sorry about the line spacing in this post just cannot figure out how to correct it.
( A Ten minute read, that challenges the reader to leave a comment.)
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today.
People’s characters, conceptions and behaviour are socially and culturally are being constructed by Data. We are living in a data explosion.
Like every period of significant rupture and change throughout history, the data-evolution we are witnessing is in urgent need of a stronger ethical and critical backbone.
Big Data is creating a new kind of digital divide: “the Big Data rich and the Big Data poor.” Inequality has become an essential part of the system that creates, stores and makes data accessible.
Tech giants like Google are creating what some call an “intellectual monopoly,” as universities’ best brains are hired to work with their exclusive access to privately harvested data to produce scientific results which are often not shared publically if they are profitable.
The Internet, has become an alternative space of consumption, production and social interaction. It is an increasingly influential space where the future divisions and similarities between people are being formed and the political and economic rules and structures that govern this space called Internet deserve our critical attention.
Ninety percent of data that exists in the world today was created in the past two years. This mass explosion of data – and our increasing reliance on it is creating a very disturbed place devoid of human life and filled with whirring fibre optic cables, servers and generators to convey the vastness of the web through binary code and pixels:
The majority of data which exists nowadays is made not by governments or scientific organisations but by ordinary citizens.
It’s the kind of information that most people share without a second thought, but when compiled in physical form, presents a surprisingly discernible narrative from hobbies and habits to musical tastes and conversations.
I am all for Technology but its impact on organisations and institutions will be profound.
Governments, armies, churches, universities, banks and companies all evolved to thrive in relatively murky epistemological environment, in which most knowledge was local, secrets were easily kept, and individuals were, if not blind, myopic.
When these organisations suddenly find themselves exposed to daylight, they quickly discover that they can no longer rely on old methods; they must respond to the new transparency or go extinct.
They are struggling to cope with transparency.
In my last post I asked the question – are we just becoming fodder for Artificial Intelligence, ie Data.
Don’t get me wrong, data is a treasure trove when it comes to health, predicting the climate, space, and the like. Community projects such as Open Street Map and Safecast‘s work to record radiation levels in Japan.
Big data’s impact on politics can also be beneficial such as Madrid City Council site, which acts as an open consultation platform where people can have their say on issues from bull fighting to transport proposals, something we’ll likely see a lot more of over the next few years.
We will see more and more live data streams on a map of the capital, showing Tweets, Instagram posts and TfL updates, while another by Future Cities Catapult asks users to make decisions about housing, energy, transport and building projects, and uses data modelling to predict the effects those decisions would have over the next 20 years.
Now I am no data mining scientist but it seems to me that the data world is not clear-cut, whilst a good data visualisation is worth a thousand words, it does not automatically follow that it tells the whole truth.
Machines are learning to recognize all sorts of patterns in the data at a scale and speed humans couldn’t possibly manage to do on their own. It’s not just data on its own, it’s data from a gigapixel imaging devices that can scan the whole body for indications of cancer, or data captured by sensors installed in self-driving cars about nearby objects and vehicles in motion that can eliminate sources of human error and make self-driving cars possible.
Whole industries are being disrupted by those who know how to tap the new potential of the right information in the right place at the right time.
The whole Big Data thing started with Google.
Some estimates put the total amount of data generated each day at 2.5 quintillion bytes!
While the massiveness of data boggles the mind with ease, the granularity of it is equally staggering when you consider the individual sources of the stuff.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN generates about 30 Petabytes per year (as a result of 600 million collisions per second generating data in their detectors.
The Synoptic Survey Telescope generates 30 Terabytes of astronomical data per night.
In 2010 the list of largest databases in the world quotes the World Data Centre for Climate database as the largest in the world, at 220 Terabyte (possibly because of the additional 6 Petabyte of tapes they hold, albeit not directly accessible data). By the end of 2014, according to the Centre’s web site, the database size is close to 4 Petabyte (roughly 2 Petabytes of these are internal data).
Every interaction that every user has with any piece of technology produces more of it, and as people are becoming more comfortable using technology and more reliant on the information it provides, they want to use more of that data in simple and rewarding ways.
Although it may be logical to assume that we retain the power to control our digital privacy, like the bar-coded plastic membership cards that dangle from our key chains, our privacy is quickly slipping through our fingers.
As surveillance technologies shrink in cost and grow in sophistication, we are increasingly unaware of the vast, cumulative data we offer up.
Of course not many of us are concerned in an era when cellphone data, web searches, online transactions, and social-media commentary are actively gathered, logged, and cross-compared, we’ve seemingly surrendered to the inevitability of trade-offs in a digital future.
Mobile devices themselves are becoming the primary access point for information.
There is nothing new about this data digital culture, however significant changes are happening — some are obvious while others are below the surface. We’re only just starting to see how revolutionary big data can be, and as it truly takes off, we can expect even more changes on the horizon.
While digital natives are comfortable with technology, the question is: which technology, in which context?
There are now more mobile phones on Earth than there are people! And most of these phones have cameras. Yet Google Glass feels invasive because of its ability to record video.
As wearable technology is getting its toehold embedded technology, it’s not so much about the technology, but when, all of a sudden, things go from impossible (or immoral) to ubiquitous only a fraction of the world is going to benefit.
The fact is that when we all start to wear wearables, the intimacy level will be much higher that we cannot avoid considering how these devices literally change who we are and our bodily engagement with the world.
For example when one buys a Fitbit because they desire to be seen as fitness-conscious, just as much as they seek truth in quantification. Their exercise routine or daily walks are an act of designing a better self, so the device simply becomes part of that ecosystem.
A teleological view of human nature is inherently dynamic.
We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We know longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help to bring about a better society or a better world?
In the words of moral and political philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, this teleological view maps out the journey between “man-as-he happens-to-be” and “man-as-he-could-be-if-he realized-his-essential-nature.”
Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
The inevitable price of the convenience of opting in is compromise.
The promise of big data cannot be segregated from this price.
Embracing the radical transparency at our threshold, many see a potentiality that far outweighs the threat—after all, what do we have to hide?
Yet, privacy is not secrecy—and while there are things we should be comfortable bearing, our dignity should not be one of them.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden said his biggest fear was that we “won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things.”
Machines will win our hearts with every step they take in evolution. Undoubtedly, this is a co-evolution.
It’s a symbiotic relationship where we are becoming more and more enmeshed and less aware of the capacity of this evolving interconnection. It’s a compulsory affair built on convenience and reward.
Arguably, we are no more mindful of the bits and bytes that we tap, swipe, and key than we are of our own breathing.
The true heirs of this data are platforms like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others that we have gifted seemingly insignificant data to—under the guise of “sharing.”
As more mobile devices enter the world, they generate more and more data that needs to be understood, analyzed, presented, and consumed.
There is already so much data stored in the world that we are running out of ways to quantify it.
Data is quickly becoming the primary content of the 21st century.
Humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. (Yes, that’s a number with 20 zeroes in it.)
For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: Indeed, this pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.
The sense of living a life of purpose, meaning, sociality, and mutuality are disappearing. These scenes used to be the backbone to political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.
Modern economics focuses a lot on incentives, but not nearly enough on intrinsic motivation.
Samsung has just warned its customers that their smart televisions may be impinging their privacy.
Facebook is now a public entity. It claims to have upwards of 300 Petabyte of data in their (so-called) data warehouse;
Fortunately there is a series of mixed media installations that encourage visitors to think twice about the information they post online.
If you don’t want them to share your photos and information in your profile updates and statuses you need to issue the following statement. I declare that I have not given my permission to Facebook to use my photos or any information in my profile, my updates and my statuses.
Twitter has produced a millionaire buffoon as president of the USA.
Three examples of a big difference in perception and expectations.
Our lack of control over the data we upload serve as a chilling reminder of global governments’ power to use personal data without our consent, and the extreme lengths used to conceal surveillance programmes.
We must learn once again to pose questions of our governments by taking a fresh look at democracy.
The conversation, both national and world-wide, is terrifically out of balance, with near-total focus on what’s broken and how we should fix it, and so little focus on stories of attractive, desirable possibilities we might agree to work toward.
To tackle social problems in their entirety, organisations need to mount a collective approach. It is the role of statesmanship – always in short supply – to remind us of the enduring commonalities that we are forever in danger of overlooking.
We are currently opting into an unfathomable interdependency with an urgent need to re-evaluate our daily interactions with technology and their impact on the fidelity of our privacy.
What that ecosystem and the devices that inhabit it will look like 20, 10, or even five years from now is anyone’s guess and it’s not at all comfortable.
We need a more controlled understanding of Big Data before headgear and an apps allows users to control products using their brainwaves.
Data itself is of no value if it is just being stored and not converted into useful information or actionable insight.
As I have said in the last post the AI genie is out of the bottle with no way to get it back in. So, knowing what you know now, do you choose the red pill or the blue one?
Red for access to a digital divided world.
or
Blue for a digital world where all technology is vetted by an Independent totally transparent New World organisation. Called Click.
All comments welcome all like clicks chucked in the bin.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
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