Category Archives: Fourth Industrial Revolution.

THE BEADY EYE OBSERVES WHAT TECHNOLOGY IS DOING TO THE PURSUIT OF PROFIT.

05 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Inequality, Modern day life., Our Common Values., Politics., Reality., Sovereign wealth fund, Technology, The common good., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Wealth., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., WORLD POVERTY WHERE'S THE GLOBAL OUTRAGE

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( A twenty-minute read)

The Internet is an incredibly spectacular thing, and only now — after so many years — we are understanding its power.

In spite (and many times because of) all the social media and internet news, we tend to have a skewed view of the world around us.

But there is one thing that is certain.

It has given rise to highly profitable digital platform monopolies, ‘superstar firms’ which are able to use aggregation and analysis of data to make supernormal profits which are disappearing into the cloud.

But what’s really happening in the global economy?

These multi-conglomerations dominate not just the current digital markets but future ones in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with workforces which are relatively small proportional to value-added, putting downward pressure on labour’s share of income.

It is becoming easier and cheaper to replace human work by increasingly
capable robots and artificial intelligence, this automation will accentuate existing trends in the capital and labour shares.

Whatever the future path of the global economy, with growing automation in

the economies of the world substituting capital for labour more and more

of the wealthiest fortunes are held almost exclusively in financial assets.

                                                     —-

We’re not just entering into a period of severe distress with climate change

we are also entering a period of a new uneven distribution of capital

ownership that is now the driver of inequality.

It’s a “new, harsh reality”, ( from weapons of mass destruction, water crises, large-scale involuntary migration and severe energy price shock, extreme weather events, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, interstate conflict with regional consequences and major natural catastrophes) that the spending power of governments is dimensioning.

Most of us haven’t quite realized there is something extraordinary happening.

Isn’t it absurd that we, 7 billion of us living on the same planet, have grown further apart from each other? Everything is going through change and that most of us are unaware of that.

What sense does it make to turn your back on the thousands, maybe millions, of people living around you in the same city on the same planet in poverty?

You might be lead to believe that the Internet is taking down mass control and the small are no longer speechless. This might well be true when it comes to the rising failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation or if you look at the Arab Spring, Brexit, and the people’s climate revolution/ pollution.

But its not true when one looks at how and by whom the economy of the world that is driven by growth at all costs.

Why?

Because the natural resources industry is owned by sovereignty wealth funds with financial instability around the world as the net result.

But don’t panic.

With Climate change and Ai, and with all of us exchanging half-truths civilisation is in for a rough ride.

However, technological crises have yet to impact economies or securities in a systemic way.

Which panic button to press?

The only category not to feature in the above harsh realities is algorithm profit from profit technological that is spreading inequalities between individuals and families, between countries, generations and genders, as well as between people from different ethnicities and class backgrounds.

Fleckenstein – David Rosenberg’s Proposal To Print Trillions Of Dollars Is Not Helicopter Money, It’s Cold Fusion

Normally revenue, as you know, is generated by profit/taxes but most revenue sources are already accounted for in government budgeting except the supernormal profits made by in no particular order – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco Systems, Intel, to mention just a few.

It’s sometimes hard to fathom the sheer scope of profits made by the world’s most profitable companies.

1. Saudi Aramco: $304.04 M daily – Earns $1 M in 4.7 minutes
2. Apple: $163.1 M daily – Earns $1 M in  8.8 minutes
3. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China: $123.29  M daily – Earns $1M in 11.7 minutes
4. Samsung Electronics: $109.3 M daily – Earns $1 M in 13.2 minutes
5. China Construction Bank: $105.48 M daily – Earns $1 M in 13.7 minutes
6. JPMorgan Chase & Co.: $88.97 M daily – Earns $1 M in 16.2 minutes
7. Alphabet: $84.21 M daily – Earns $1 M in 17.1 minutes
8. Agricultural Bank of China: $83.99 M daily – Earns $1 M in 17.1 minutes
9. Bank of America Corp.: $77.12 M daily – Earns $1 M in 18.7 minutes
10. Bank of China: $74.59 M daily – Earns $1 M in 19.3 minutes

and these are not Sovereign Wealth Funds.

They exist somewhere between the murky grey of return-maximizing, mega-cap asset managers, and clandestine government agencies quietly used to further sovereign agendas.

It is estimated that SWFs combined to hold more than $7.4 trillion in AUM, (Assets under management) representing approximately 6% of global assets under institutional management.

And you wonder with government print trillions to stimulate sagging economies why the world is and still is in a state of meltdown not just climate-wise but capitalistic wise.

We now have both the EU and the UK floating the idea of establishing Citizens wealth funds.

The trouble is that existing wealth funds have already bought up most of the world. Latecomers like THE UK/EU will have nothing to invest in other than technologies that produce profits.

The character of a sovereign wealth fund depends on its purpose and is shaped by how it is capitalised and governed, how it invests its funds and how returns are spent.

A Sovereign Wealth Fund is a state-owned investment vehicle established to channel balance of payments surpluses, official foreign currency operations, proceeds of privatizations, government transfer payments, fiscal surpluses, and/or receipts from resource exports, into global investments on behalf of sovereigns and in the advance of goals that are not transparent.

Economic theory wise, it is important to understand that SWFs form part of their respective country’s total national capital base, where total national capital is defined as the total combination of net financial assets, total physical capital stock (e.g., real estate, machines, infrastructure), unexploited environment, human capital, and unexploited natural resources.

Commodity SWFs are financed from the proceeds of non-renewable commodity exports (oil, gas, precious metals), which grow the AUM base in times of high prices but destabilize their source economies and budgets in times of low. Non-commodity funds, on the other hand, are typically financed from currency reserves or current account surpluses, driven by corporate or household saving rates.

They were once the mainstays of the global investment landscape.

Despite is name the era of neoliberalism was far from liberal.

We are now experiencing the political consequences of this great deception with the rise of popularism.

This blog has been suggesting for some time the setting up of a perpetual funded World Aid fund by applying a 0.05% commission on all profit for profit sake seeking financial activities. ( See previous posts)

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: ARE PROFIT SEEKING ALGORITHMS BUILDING A DIGITAL POORHOUSE, AUTOMATING INEQUALITY WHILE HURTING THE MOST VULNERABLE.

03 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Humanity., Inequality, Modern day life., Our Common Values., Poverty, Reality., Technology, The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Twenty-minute read)

Should we worry about the rise of artificial intelligence or celebrate it?

Both is the answer.

We all inhabit this new regime of digital data but we don’t all inhabit it in the same way and the pursuit of rapid growth by way of technology won’t solve the huge challenges we face.

A more honest, humane approach is the answer.

If you believe the hype, technology is going to help us end global poverty, that’s easier said than done in a world where most product innovations are geared toward the rich.

The prospect of billions rising up from poverty with nothing more than gadgets is indeed a fanciful notion. This is because poverty is entirely a man-made creation. Capitalism is driven by greed, generating a power structure, which moves wealth disproportionately into the hands of the few.

But why are our societies becoming increasingly unequal, and what can we (or should we) do about it?A homeless man outside Victoria Station in London.

Forget where science ends and ideology begins it is the mechanisms behind the persistence of poverty that counts.

Technology cannot solve the problem of economic disparity.

We often believe that our digital decision-making tools, like algorithms or artificial intelligence or integrated databases, are more objective and more neutral than human beings.

Totally false.

We are building not just ill-conceived mathematical models now micromanage the economy, from advertising to prisons but also hiding the profit of multinational companies in the cloud.

We are building:  A DIGITAL POOR HOUSE.

Even though we live in a hyperconnected world we are watching inequality exploding as we walk past people on the street looking at our smartphones.

The spreading of these kinds of systems is now way beyond just the public service systems that they’re in now. For example, high-frequency trading algorithms that run 99.9% of the world stock exchanges are plundering not just finite resources they are jeopardising our peaceful existence.

Feel free to ignore the weight of the evidence that is now becoming crystal-clear, so stark, that the trade-off of the growth of the economy and the survival of the planet are now intertwined. So we have to go into a mode where we are first educating the people about what’s causing this inequality and acknowledging that technology is part of that cost, and then society has to decide how to proceed.

Deep cultural and political changes are needed in order to think through these technologies in order to get to better systems.

This should apply to all technology – nanotechnology, biotech.

I also really believe we need to stop using these systems to avoid some of the most pressing moral and political dilemmas of our time, which is not just poverty but racism.

Unfortunately, we have Profit-seeking Algorithms that have no moral or ethical bases.

Algorithms — a set of steps computers follow to accomplish a task — are used in our daily digital lives to do everything from making airline reservations to searching the web. They are also increasingly being used in public services, such as systems that decide which homeless person gets housing.

AI with faceless algorithms is worsening the effects and concentrating the power of the wealthy. They are likely to dramatically increase income disparity, perhaps more so than other technologies that have come about recently.

Digital innovation in the form of profit-seeking algorithms that it’s not just going to be benefitting a small fraction of the world’s population, or just a few large corporations. is reinforcing, rather than improving, inequality.

Institutions have embraced digital technologies they are outsourcing the decision to a machine to cut costs avoiding the human costs. They say, “We have this incredible overwhelming need. We don’t have enough resources, so we have to use these systems to make these incredibly difficult decisions.”

If all the resources are automated, then who actually controls the automation?

Is it every one or is it a few select people?

My great fear with these systems is we’re actually using them as a kind of empathy override, meaning that we are struggling with questions that are almost impossible for human beings to make.

We’re smuggling moral and political assumptions into them about who should share in prosperity.

There’s already an expectation that people will be forced to trade one of their human rights, like their information or their privacy, for another human right.

The economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly, to benefit all of humanity otherwise they will lead to an even greater disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the world.

If AI takes away people’s jobs and only leaves wealth in the hands of those people owning the robots, then that’s going to exacerbate some trends that are already happening.

People now with “predictive data” have real concerns about informed consent. About how their data is being shared, whether it’s legal and whether it’s morally right.

Why?

Because it is impossible to work out why the algorithms had gone against them, or to find a human caseworker to override the decision.

How can we change the societal mindset that currently discourages a greater sharing of wealth? Or is that even a change we should consider?

We’re using these technologies to avoid important political decisions. Exacerbating the divides between the developed and developing world, and the haves and have nots in our society.

The change will only occur when policymakers and voters understand the true scale of the problem. This is hard when we live in an era that likes to celebrate digitisation — and where the elites are usually shielded from the consequences of those algorithms.

Restoring human dignity to its central place has the potential to set off a profound rethinking of economic priorities and the ways in which societies care for their members, particularly when they are in need. If enough of us want to change the status quo for good, then with our collective creativity, with our hunger to solve really hard problems, we will find technology an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal.

Technology can move commodities (food, jobs, wealth) from areas of surplus supply to regions with under-served markets.

Technology can only help us if we chose to make the best use of it.

Computing has long been perceived to be a culture-free zone — this needs to change.

Today more people have access to a cell phone than a toilet.

I use that metaphor specifically because I think that these systems, although we talk about them often as disruptors, are really more intensifiers and amplifiers of processes that have been with us for a long time, at least since the 1800s.

At a time of unprecedented global challenges platforms like Google Facebook, Twitter and there like must be made to use the power of their platforms to stop the DIGITAL POOR HOUSE instead of hoarding profits with profit-seeking algorithms.

If not because bias has been a historical norm, it because us the users of your platform will develop self-defence.

So, next time if you think AI is not affecting you, take out your smartphone.

If Twitter’s not your choice of poison, maybe it’s Facebook or Instagram, or Snapchat or any of the myriad of social media apps out there they are all affecting your decisions and our lifestyles every day.

They are all tailored according to what we are likely to respond to. specifically designed to attract the attention of its members – and so inevitably to confirm them in their opinions and prejudices,  with several extra bills to pay in order to remain a normal citizen. 

Its a ‘mean’ not the ultimate solution.

AI has become so successful in determining our interests and serving us ads that the global digital ad industry has crossed trillions.

artificial intelligence concept Stock Photo - 90948450

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S; JUST WHAT IS IT THAT A QUANTUM COMPUTER CAN OR WILL DO FOR HUMANITY.

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Quantum computers.

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( Fifteen-minute read )

There’s a lot of hype floating around one specific technology that has the potential to change everything:

Google’s recent mythical achievement does not signal the arrival of quantum computing.

Quantum Computing is still far enough away that attempting to predict when it will occur and what useful tasks it will eventually be used for is a recipe for embarrassment because history teaches us that unforeseen applications will blossom as access to new tools becomes available.

In this very detached and disintegrating world, intelligence systems are learning from the environment they are exposed to and make decisions on biases they are developing.

Once you get the wrong side of an algorithm your life immediately becomes more difficult. Your perceived failures are fed into the algorithm, and your situation degrades even further.

This is why it’s imperative that we begin to take the problem of AI BIAS seriously and take steps to mitigate their effects by making our systems more transparent, explainable, and auditable.

We must shift from automation to augmentation.

They are counting on it to change the world by solving problems that are intractable for today’s classical computers.

At the moment its all in the cloud so any assessment or update of what we know about Quantum Computers is pie in the sky.

However, there are a few thoughts.

They conjure up everything from futuristic cities to talking fridges. Undoubtedly the reality is much less sci-fi.

They are supposed to offer an opportunity to manipulate information in a fundamentally different way. To tackle ever-larger questions that can help us gain a profoundly deeper understanding of the world around us.

While traditional computers operate with bits, quantum computers operate with qubits that allow superposition. Qubits enable this because instead of being constrained to one of two possible values (1 or 0), a qubit can exist as a mixture of both.

A unique quantum physics behaviour that binds the destiny of a quantity of different particles so that what happens to one will affect the others.

“Entanglement.”

This means that a Quantum Computer can manipulate all its qubits simultaneously—in other words, instead of doing a set of calculations one after another, a quantum computer could do them all at the same time.

Okay, putting the theory aside, let’s focus on the real-world applications these quantum computers will have on the world.

Optimization slicing through a mountain of variables without breaking a sweat.

Enabling better Weather and climate modelling. Better Personalized medicine. Better Space data analyzation. Better raw computing power for machine-learning software to teach artificial intelligence more like humans. Encryption will become useless. Real-time language translation will be possible.

Open-air gesture control, with the keyboard and mouse—slowly replaced by the gesture interface.

Amazon Google, virtual assistants will understand the context behind the questions you ask; they will recognize the indirect signals given off by your tone of voice; they will even engage in long-form conversations with you.

Devices you wear or even insert inside your body to help you interact digitally with the world around you. These devices will play a supporting role in how we engage with the digital space; we’ll use them for specific purposes in specific contexts with brain implants.

Integrating all of the technologies mentioned above represents the start of an entirely new mass-market medium virtual reality and augmented reality.

The goal of AR ( augmented reality) is to act as a digital filter on top of your perception of the real world.

Everyone’s idea of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality is fixated towards science fiction however AR will eventually do away with most of the traditional computer interfaces consumers have grown up with thus far. AR, when it comes in Quantum form, it will too control machines:

Controlling household functions (lighting, curtains, temperature), as well as a range of other devices and vehicles.Image Credits: WT Vox

Thought itself:

Amputees are now already testing robotic limbs controlled directly by the mind, instead of through sensors attached to the wearer’s stump.

An international team of scientists were able to mimic telepathy by having one person from India think the word “hello,” and through BCI, that word was converted from brain waves to binary code, then emailed to France, where that binary code was converted back into brainwaves, to be perceived by the receiving person. Brain-to-brain communication, people

Useful quantum computers still not insight.

Needless to say, the future is not too far away.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WE ARE WELL ON THE WAY TO TOTALITARIANISM

23 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Dehumanization., Democracy, DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Enegery, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Our Common Values.

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(Twenty-minute read.)

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. 

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: SHOULD WE BE GIVING AWAY OUR PERSONAL DATA FOR FREE.

15 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by in Algorithms., Big Data., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Face Recognition., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google Knowledge., Modern Day Communication., Modern Day Democracy., Our Common Values., Robot citizenship., Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., WiFi communication.

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(Six-minute read)

 

Is it time we started to demand that if you use my personal data it’ill cost you because I am worth it.

We all make a trade-off between security and convenience, but there is a crucial difference between security in the old-fashioned physical domain, and security today.

Security is done digitally with algorithms exploiting and analysing your very mood.

In this digital lifestyle, it is nearly impossible to take part in the web world without leaving a trail behind.

Personal privacy is dead.

How to Protect Yourself From Mobile Data Collection

 

We have no clear sight into this world, and we have few sound intuitions into what is safe and what is flimsy – let alone what is ethical and what is creepy.

We are left operating on blind, ignorant, misplaced trust; meanwhile, all around us, without our even noticing, choices are being made.

With the increasing ownership of mobiles, marketing companies now have unlimited access to our personal data. Every site one opens has an agreement form to be ticked with terms and conditions that are all but unreadable on small screens.

It’s not a choice between privacy or innovation, it is the erosion of legally ensured fundamental privacy rights interfacing with apps.

Nuggets of personal information that seem trivial, individually, can now be aggregated, indexed and processed.

When this happens, simple pieces of computer code can produce insights and intrusions that creep us out or even do us harm. But most of us haven’t noticed yet.

Since there’s no real remedy, giving away our most sensitive and valuable data, for free, to global giants, with completely uncertain future costs, is a decision of dramatic consequence.

iCloud and Google+ have your intimate photos; Transport companies know where your travelcard has been; Yahoo holds every email you’ve ever written and we trust these people to respect our privacy.

You only have to be sloppy once, for your privacy to be compromised.

With your Facebook profile linked, I could research your interests before approaching you.

Put in someone’s username from Twitter, or Flickr and Creepy will churn through every photo hosting service it knows, trying to find every picture they’ve ever posted.

Cameras – especially phone cameras – often store the location where the picture was taken in the picture data. Creepy grabs all this geolocation data and puts pins on a map for you.

Then comes an even bigger new horizon.

We are entering an age of wireless information. The information you didn’t know you were leaking.

Maybe the first time you used a new app.

Every device with Wi-Fi has a unique “MAC address”, which is broadcast constantly as long as wireless networking is switched on.

Many shops and shopping centres, for example, now use multiple Wi-Fi sensors, monitoring the strength of connections, to triangulate your position, and track how you walk around the shop. By matching the signal to the security video, they get to know what you look like. If you give an email address in order to use the free in-store Wi-Fi, they have that too.

Once aggregated, these individual fragments of information can be processed and combined, and the resulting data can give away more about our character than our intuitions are able to spot.

When I realised that I’m traced over much wider spaces from one part of town to another I asked myself what is the point in giving you information away when you could franchise it out and get something back in return.

Public debate on the topic remains severely stunted.

Through the current trends in the globalization of technology is in the knowledge society, we have to start asking where is the world moving to?

The concepts and applications of biocomputing, medical informatics, anthropocentric computing, high-performance computing, technological diffusion, predictive analysis tools, genetic algorithms, and cultural informatics all in new or little known fields of information technology.

Many organisations create, store, or purchase information that links individuals’ identities to other data. Those who can access and analyse this personal data profiles can take deep insights into an individual’s life.

A law-abiding citizen might say “I have nothing to conceal.” This is a misconception.

In any debate, negotiation or competitive situation, it is an advantage to know about the other party’s position in order to achieve one’s own desired outcome.

Data brokers – buy and combine data from various sources (online and offline) to deliver information on exactly defined target groups to their customers.

“Click-world” merchants know a lot more about their clients’ private and financial habits than the individual knows about the merchant company or its competitors.

You, therefore, could not be blamed for asking -given the increasing bargaining position of merchants, is the consumer still getting a good deal?

It would be interesting to know how good a deal consumers get when they exchange their data for free-of-charge online services.How to Protect Yourself From Mobile Data Collection

Data has become an economic good for which the “producer” is usually not remunerated.

Data privacy is a matter of choice and individuals should have the right to decide if a company can collect information on them.

Is there a solution:

Of course if you Google it what you will get will be all sorts of advice such as, avoid cookies, use the VPN or disabling the location tracking in your devices and use Browsers that don’t track your activities.

It’s tempting to just play ostrich and put our heads under the sand however data collection is affecting and will affect your life.

This is why we must preserve the right of individuals to know what kind of information is being collected and what is being done with that information.

You could say that the most valuable thing on your computer or network is the data you create. After all, that data is the reason for having the computer and network in the first place.

The first thing to understand is that there is very little that can “prove” that any company (whether an individual, government entity, corporation, etc.) is engaged in safe or adequate data handling processes.

Therefore :

We must retain the right to define our own privacy boundaries and then advocate for those boundaries before invasions in our daily lives become out of control and irreversible.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S; IS THE NEW GREEN DEAL PRIMARILY A PETTY-BOURGEOIS ATTEMPT TO RESCUE CAPITALISM BY THE METHODS OF SOCIAL REFORMISTS UNDER THE CLOAK OF CLIMATE CHANGE?

09 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Climate Change., Democracy, DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Environment, European Union., Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Inequality, Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Purchasing Power., Social Media, Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., The Obvious., The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., Wealth., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., World Politics

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(Twenty-minute read) 

In politics, nothing happens by accident.

These days in the higher ethylene of the political world it seems you must be an accomplished liar and not a far-seeing planner to be successful.

With the advent of social media people’s day-to-day exposure to political discussion and disagreement has increased dramatically.

However what is worrying is that technology in the form of social media, the smartphone is continuing to create a contemporary problem that large sections of the public want ‘democracy’ but without the ‘politics.

As a result, were are seeing fake news driving populist politics that has no longterm objectives. 

There is nothing new about fake news it has been prevalent down the ages but the days when a lot of us believe that many of the major world events that are shaping our destinies occur because somebody or somebodies have planned them that way are all but disappeared.

However, with the media making very little effort to explain political decisions, rather than just jumping on any perceived gaffe or conflict ‘democracy’ remains an incredibly positive notion. 

With the public no longer thinking about the world within the silos of government departments governments need to engage people in solutions rather than top-down ‘vote for us and we’ll provide the answers.

Younger people don’t just copy their parents’ tribal loyalties. Voting is more like shopping, with preferences changing on a quim of twitter on social media.  

Unfortunately, our present-day political system has not yet caught up, it offers limited choice. What happens in between elections is for all attentive purposes driven by the smartphone that are monitored by unregulated algorithms owned by you know who.

What is been ignored is that this digital space in all its diversity represents a huge opportunity with the power to engage people in new ways. Online participation in local decision-making is one possibility. This would involve citizens outside election time-.

So we need to understand all the ways people behave and respond in the digital space and set clear and realistic goals for what they hope to accomplish.

However, people are now becoming slow and slower to engage with the internet due to the lack of security/ privacy/and a source of truth.

Why?

Because Capitalism is spending billion on digital marketing each year, and for good reason. Digital media has enormous power to reach and influence people. Over 2 billion people—about one-third of the global population—now access the Internet.

We all know if we are to avoid extinction due to climate change which poses real risks to our collective future we need a green energy transformation.

The problem is that behind a veneer of objectivity, Capitalism as always sees an opportunity to make a profit – Carbon Credits for instance, with more and more consumerism products being promoted as good for the environment 

With all the political goodwill the transfer to low carbon emission can only be achieved by offering citizens a means to get involved other than protesting.

How can this be done?

We must allow people to exercise democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions and environment ie De-politicising decision-making by limiting capitalism’s worst failing- profit for profit sake.

To have authentic democracy!

Citizens must be afforded the opportunity to get involved not just politically, but financially by creating Green Energy European Bonds that cannot be traded.  

These bonds will allow citizens to regain control over unaccountable ‘technocrats’, complicit politicians and shadowy institutions.

They can be sold like lotto tickets. Forging a common agenda.

Emancipating citizens from all levels of government from bureaucratic and corporate power. Allowing direct investment into shared, green prosperity.

Politics has never been popular and never will be:

The more disengaged, the less likely that political parties will deliver. 

We’re able to measure things in a way that we’ve never been able to measure them before. So why not measure the wealth of a nation by the financial investment support it gets from its citizen’s. Rather than encompassing every possible thing that can go under the rubric of “green.

I suppose my goal here is to propose something vague enough that no one will object to it.

Have you wondered how you got to where you are today?

Greed.

Is technology taking control of our lives or our destiny?

Yes.  We’ve ditched reality.

The very data on which we measure the economy is disconnected from

the reality, with political leaders using high soaring” words “which often

imbibe emptiness.

Communication and leadership are key elements in elections these days

but you can’t sell a bad product, can you? 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. WE MUST REIN IN THE TECH GIANTS BEFORE ITS TOO LATE.

20 Friday Sep 2019

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Capitalism, Democracy, DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, Modern day life., Our Common Values., Purchasing Power., Reality., Social Media., Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Wealth., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Fifteen-minute read) 

WHY?

These days we are allowing Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook do whatever the hell they want. The US sees them as winner-takes-all markets as the law of the capitalist jungle; the EU sees them as an intrinsic threat to consumers.

Because four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. They have aggregated more economic value and influence than nearly any other commercial entity in history.

Because the concentration of wealth leads to concentration of power. Their massive size and unchecked power have and are throttling competitive markets and are keeping the economy from doing its job—namely, to promote a vibrant democracy.

Because all of them have managed to preserve their monopoly-like powers without heavy regulation. 

Because they have effectively ripped the heart out of the journalism, publishing, music, and entertainment industries but, even worse, they are demolishing the ranks of both corporate middle-management and entry-level service jobs and crushed commercial real estate and retail shopping malls, all for the enrichment of a very few.

Because they’re tracking your movements — or, even better, getting you to track yourselves for them, whether it’s “checking in” on Facebook or leaving your cell phone switched on while you travel (and who doesn’t?).

Because as we have seen the harvesting of the personal data use for political purposes.

Because the amount of money they generate, and the volume of content they accumulate, most of it provided voluntarily by you, for free, is stupefying.

Because with the coming of 5G technology they will have  too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy.

Because using black-box algorithms to surface content to users they will have control over the way we use the Internet.

Because they are exploiting their monopoly power to stifle competition; they are spreading fake news; their fantastically rich owners portray themselves as right-on yet go to a great deal of trouble to minimise their corporate tax bills; they are ripping the heart out of communities through the closure of brick-and-mortar retailers.

Because social media is an increasingly key part of how we communicate. Yet legally, nothing stops Facebook from simply banning users from its platform, for any reason it wishes.

Because we’re heading for an Orwellian nightmare the shape of which is just now becoming apparent with climate change is being turned into a product. 

Because this isn’t just abstract concern about what could possibly happen in the future – market power of this magnitude isn’t unprecedented.

Because with a sprawling array of loosely related businesses under one roof they are becoming worldwide conglomerates.

Because no one or any company is now going to penetrate online shopping or the search market.

Google, Amazon, and Facebook are colossal companies. Together they make up almost 10% of the S&P 500. Together, they have a market capitalization of the GDP of France.

These are the 3rd-, 4th-, and 6th-largest companies on earth. Combined, they are worth over $2 trillion. And they’ve grown 470%, 175%, and 95% over the past five years.

Because they will take our choices away.

Because they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.

Because country and companies that dominate technology will gain more power with time and 5G technology, gene editing, nanotechnology, creating what only can be called a profitable circle of global oligopolies.

Because they will soon be introducing their own cyber currencies.

Because our existing computers can’t even scratch the surface of what quantum computers will be able to do via the cloud quantum computers will. Those who own this technology will make supremacy an arbitrary goal.

Such computing power will change the way we do business and the security we have in place to safeguard data, how we fight disease and invent new materials, and solve health and climate problems.

Just like humans, artificial intelligence machines powered by the insights from quantum commercialising technology computers that will learn from experience and self-correct.

They’ll be able to use quantum simulations to design entirely new molecules for use in medicine making it possible for chemists to determine viable drug options quicker. Instead of troubleshooting issues bit by bit as we do now with classical computers, they will allow for a person’s genes to be sequenced and analyzed much more rapidly tackling the entire problem at once.

How do they do it?

By creating what we now perceive to be free platforms run by algorithms.  

( To Big Tech, you’re not the customer, you’re the product they’re selling to others:)

Google offers a vast bounty of free services in order to maximize its data collection and optimize its advertising capabilities. Similarly, Amazon is credibly accused of hurting suppliers, hurting competitors, and even hurting its own employees — but nobody can deny that it’s a cheap and convenient way to shop for a staggering array of things.

Amazon is keeping tabs on you, monitoring your purchases, pushing other products on you and, in the form of the hideous Alexa, listening in on you while you sleep. Throw in the electronic snooping of Facebook, Google and your iPhone.

We know the problems; they’re easy to diagnose, however shaping the solutions is going to be more difficult.

So what if anything can be achieved to restrain their coming power?

The difficulty lies in defining what the real harmful effect is of these companies and establishing a causal link between their creation, their products, behaviour, and trends such as populism, depression, and manipulation. The contribution to society of these companies’ products is not as black and white as some would like them to be. 

We’re heading down an entirely new field of physics, and by its very nature, there will be discoveries, innovations and solutions we have never dreamed of yet.

However we’re living in a capitalists world we should be empowering people to choose where to sell their information, personal data so it would no longer be monopolised by the tech giants.

Competition authorities need to move beyond a reliance on prices towards an analysis of the impact of takeovers and mergers on societal welfare.

As we grapple with how best to protect ourselves against the risks of new, disruptive technologies, policymakers need to understand the roles that ethics and law can and should play. 

If human rights are at risk, and existing law is found wanting, we may need new, legally enforceable rights and mechanisms to grapple with emerging technologies. Citizens should not need to rely on the “ethical conscience” of tech companies to know their fundamental rights are protected. Ethics are laudable—but sometimes they are not enough.

At their core, Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and while Facebook’s goal was to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” are both truly admirable and few people would disagree with them but ethical promises made by tech companies are not good enough.

Instead of adding value to our societies, Facebook,  Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Apple have sucked the data out of us.

They or at least their free platforms which have become essential to daily life should be regulated as public utilities.

Failing to do so risks a backlash which will be bad for everyone.

Why? 

Because there is one indisputable fact.

In front of every great fortune lies a great crime, Immense wealth translates automatically into environmental impacts regardless of the intentions of those who possess it. 

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Google does the same by using algorithms to decide what comes up on an internet search. They hardly pay any taxes and their business practices and technology will help crush industries and companies left and right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “platform utility.” A platform utility would be barred from owning any of the participants on the platform.

 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S : IS 5 G GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD WE LIVE IN?

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Dehumanization., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Humanity., Inequality, Medical, Modern day life., Reality., Robot citizenship., Sustaniability, Technology, The cloud., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., War, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Ten-minute read)

 

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.This picture, posted on Twitter by Inga Sarda-Sorensen, shows dark storm clouds over the New York skyline

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.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. HUMANITY MUST NOW COME FIRST.

16 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change., Dehumanization., Democracy, Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The state of the World., The world to day., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Politics

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( Seventeen-minute read)

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.A Brazilian protester stands before gunfire during protests against corruption and police brutality.

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.Our world relies on vast global networks.

So may you recognize that you as an individual must make these decisions and not simply rely upon others to make them for you.

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE LOOKING NOT JUST AT THE BEGINS OF A FAILED STATE BUT THE FINAL DEATH THROBS OF A EMPIRE

26 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in Brexit v EU - Negotiations., Brexit., Capitalism, Climate Change., Democracy, Environment, European Commission., European Union., Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Inequality, Life., Our Common Values., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Social Media, Sustaniability, The essence of our humanity., The new year 2109, The Obvious., The Queen., The state of the World., The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Fifteen-minute read)

The British Empire was the largest in history existing from the sixteenth century into the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, it squandered all that it acquired on a victorian class system.

Queen Elizabeth II

It killed with famine, sword and fire more people than Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler or Stalin.

In the defence of its imperial interests, it precipitated in two World Wars.

Now it is presiding with “Mad cow disease” it’s very own self-destruction.

At stake are fundamental ideas about British sovereignty and whether in a

a progressively globalized world in which some claimed that the individual

the nation-state was becoming unviable with the can sovereignty in its

existing forms remain intact.

Queen Elizabeth II in 1992, referred to the year as the royal family’s “annus horribilis.”

SHE WAS WRONG.

Why?

Because along came a five-year austerity plan aimed at reducing the country’s massive deficit, which had been fueled by bank bailouts and stimulus spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and resultant recession which resulted in 52 per cent of voters opting to leave the EU, (making the United Kingdom the first country to ever do so)

Manufactured by Magie Thatcher who turned the market into replacing society as the model of state governance. 

Not surprising as worldwide political culture has in fact transformed from one based on class to a new sort of populist, demotic politics, shaped at least as much by the mass media, especially the popular press, as by the politicians.

A sort of firestorm has broken out not just in Brazil but all over the world.

Why?

Because the relationship between public culture and consumer capitalism, while the very Earth itself is struggling with climate change has been close, in many ways the one constantly trying to outguess the other.

This game of one-upmanship, marked by ironic knowingness, has been labelled “postmodern, Brexit or Donal Trump trade wars”.

It points to the growing understanding of the relative nature of truth, itself a reaction against the prevailing supposedly “modern” certainties of the 20th century (reason, freedom, humanity, and truth itself), which indeed have often had and are having appalling outcomes.

However, it is a sign of the times that these antifundamentalist currents, themselves critical of much of Western culture, emerged at much the same time as new fundamentalisms emerged in the forms of American neoconservatism and certain strains of radical Islam. The ferment of intellectual and cultural changes involved are inextricable from the massive changes underway in the transition to the novel forms of society made possible by new information technologies.

What the Smartphone and Social Media have and are doing since the 1960s onward for Africa are also unravelling England and the EU with the perception of poor economic performance and calls for the modernization of not just for British society and the British economy but the EU and the world at large.

Both England and the European Union need to reform.

Optimism only carries you so far.

History rhymes rather than repeats are what is required.

A society where elites are widely loathed, where the political parties are polarized by demographic echoes is on the brink of collapse.

Why?

Now as then — much more now than then, in fact — there is a pervasive mistrust of institutions, a sense that governments are rotting from the head down.

The abject failure of rulers in improving human values has resulted in a downgrading of human to sub-human levels with a race to expect dishonest money is the net result of the ultimate degradation of society.

How do you trick someone into giving you something they have?

First, you offer them something worthless, while convincing them that actually much better than what they have. Second, you convince them that what they do have is worthless.

This is a typical approach used by both con artists and governments.

These huge scams are just diversions from the ultimate crime Climate change.

Our survival instinct has to quickly override our conditioned naiveté and passivity that has been bred into us. We are not just threatened as countries but as species at the same time.

A twitter/ facebook driven world will be a world of shallow values- unravelling our societies.

The thin veneer of civilization that we all depend upon on a daily basis is disappearing at a staggering pace and its not just the melting of ice.

The question now is.

Do we follow the trodden path where we only find all the grass eaten?

Creativity and imagination are what is needed as we are not getting across the problems of probability.

How we discuss and what we discuss is vital.

We must know the facts. We need a world brain bus.

Who is more likely to embrace the marginalized, to work for the disenfranchised?

Who will work for those of all backgrounds, all races and ethnicities, all religions, sexual preferences, gender identities?

Who will work to promote respect and equality for all people in the World?

Who sends a message that I want our children to believe in?

The rich and the poor, the entitled and the marginalized—they all make up the threads that a country needs to weave a unified society. When not include we weaken the material that fabricates our entire fabric of the world.

There has never been such a thing as an empire only a company called East India Company merchants. The British Empire did not exist in the Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages, England was part of other empires: 

The British Empire was a commercial, not a military or political one.

Originally, holding an empire was about power. Throughout history, kings and queens have invaded territories in order to gain strength and power. With colonies, a country gains space, a larger army, more trade markets and the chance to make money out of whatever resources are on offer in them.

The formation of the empire was thus an unorganized process based on piecemeal acquisition, sometimes with the British government being the least willing partner in the enterprise.

An ‘Empire’ is a group of countries ruled over by a single monarch or ruling power. An empire doesn’t need an ’emperor’. The British Empire comprised of Britain, the ‘mother country’, and the colonies, countries ruled to some degree by and from Britain.

(British Empire, a worldwide system of dependencies—colonies, protectorates, and other territories—that over a span of some three centuries was brought under the sovereignty of the crown of Great Britain and the administration of the British government.)

To this day Britain’s ‘cultural imperialism’, suggesting that it was based on nationalism and racist scorn for other people.

With a handshake and the commitment “On the word of an Englishman,”
Captain James Cook claimed it for the British crown.In the century 1815–1914, 10 million square miles of territory and 400 million people were added to the British Empire. By the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, Britain was the ‘Mother Country’ of a worldwide empire which covered a fifth of the land in the world, and Britannia ‘ruled the waves’.

Sorry but Empires have benefited no one nor will any future trade deals that are not attached to sustainability do anything to resolve Climate change.

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

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