Category Archives: Google it.

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THE BREAKING POINT FOR CAPITALISM.

09 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Capitalism, Facebook, Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Modern day life., Politics., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., WiFi communication., World Organisations.

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( A five-minute read that might change your life.)

The last two posts were an attempt to highlight the fact that Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we think and bemoaned the fact that our world is accepting this without an oversight.

This heading is self-explanatory.

Without us noticing, we are entering the post capitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy.

It’s starting to feel like humans have made themselves redundant in their own economy. The first stage of an economy beyond capitalism.

The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information.

Any variable to success can be bought and sold, and that means for those who have wealth, they can buy success instead of creating it – the arrival of Twitter President Donald Trump.

It’s a shift in the ‘fairness’ of capitalism, and the reward for someone putting in effort. When capital can beat humans on thinking, it’s hard to create a marketplace that doesn’t resemble feudalism (albeit minus the harsh living conditions).

For a long time, artificial intelligence was little more than science fiction — now it’s now just a matter of time before AI isn’t just a static piece of IP.

It’s capable of building entirely new monopolies, businesses and ‘things’ all by itself.

It will and is already creating  monopolies.

Here’s a stark reality:

Innovation is also much, much harder in a world driven by individuals owning large swathes of AI resource. Why? Because innovation will increasingly be defined by world views of a single person, rather than the thinking power of many.

Today’s great leaders must empathise with the perspectives of many and convince people that they’re making the right choice. It’s tricky and often means concessions and understanding problems outside of specific world views.

If they could solve problems however they wanted with whomever they wanted, that paradigm shifts. You might start finding that someone in control of AI resources only solved problems for themselves. Humans are, after all, selfish creatures.

Capitalism has been fuelled by the ability to create creative monopolies and be rewarded for it. But the shift we’re about to experience is profound — for the first time, capital will become a source of those creative monopolies rather than just a product.

Putting aside the ethics for a second,

AI is essentially a new form of inter-species slavery.

Instead of relying on our fellow species, we’re creating automated, non-human slaves. AI are just cattle versions of intelligence (once is created/bred for meat, the other for intelligence).

Ethically that may pose a problem, but conceptually, it positions AI differently to ‘owned’ property — mostly because it shifts the market based on who owns them.

Rather than capital now being a source of ownership and minor wealth generation, it can now be a source of exponential wealth creation — simply because AI continuously evolves and builds upon itself. It’s unique because it isn’t a static capital item.

Capitalism’s greatest threat is it’s own progress. The technology capitalism has created is systematically undermining it. Which is why we may have to rethink it.

We live in a world where not everyone’s effort is equal. Yes, capitalism is grossly unfair in some parts — based on your birth, inheritance and a range of other factors. But it’s also one of the only systems we have the accounts for the effort you put in to produce things that other people want to use.

Automation is coming. And with it, the tasks you and I would normally do for jobs aren’t going to be there.

The GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) Internet giants, as well as IBM, have all been investing massively in the field.

It wont be long before we have Self-aware AI a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on the planet and it will crush human intelligence as early as 2045.

We will make machines that can reason, think and make things better than we do.

It is potentially more dangerous” than nuclear weapons, or climate change .

To compete with robots, Google proposes transhumanism, i.e. turning humans into cyborgs.

By 2035, we’ll have nanobots implanted into our brains and connected to our neurons to “upgrade” both our mental and physical capabilities.

Paradoxically, the ultimate tool to avoid the human race’s vassalization would also be the instrument of its suicide. The human-AI hybrid would indeed mean the death knell for the 1.0 biological human.

Artificial intelligence could cause another significant casualty: Money.

In our meritocratic societies, the difference in intellectual abilities are, rightly or wrongly, the primary reason for the wage and capital gap. But AI would break this very notion. Eventually, human intelligence will be ridiculous compared to that of machines.

So the question is, in such a world will we accept that some people earn 1,000 times more than others?

If we accept Google’s brain nanobots, what will be the legitimacy of any revenue gap between people, since our performances will be linked to the power of our brain aids, and not to our inherent qualities?

Besides, a society driven by artificial intelligence will be a society without work, which will render the mere function of money useless. If we’re able to emulate a billion cancer scientists on an array of hard drives in a few seconds, what will be the value of a human oncologist?

All goods and services will be created and produced by machines in an infinitely more efficient way that any human being can, even an upgraded one. The meritocratic system will go up in smoke.

And how to organize the distribution of capital if merit is impossible?

The best solution will without a doubt be the equal redistribution of goods and services among individuals, a communism 2.0 of sorts in which everybody will be provided for according to their needs and not according to their work.

It will be artificial intelligence — not economists like Thomas Piketty — that puts and end to the wage gap. Capitalism simply won’t survive intelligent machines.

I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.

The people who controlled AI’s would have a disproportionate amount of power early on, as they’d be able to more rapidly automate most of their work.

Rather than a monopoly on products, you have a monopoly on ‘thinking power’ — the very thing that eroded capitalist monopolies originally.

As technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see the need for a Universal Basic Income some version of this at a national scale.

If you don’t believe the automation argument, take a look at the below graph.

Every industry has the potential to be automated. Fishing can be done by drones. Farming too. There’s very little examples of a menial task that can’t be done by a robot. That sounds like utopia, but until we recognise that it means whoever has the most money will win forever, it’s going to be a pretty shocking life for most of us.

That’s why it’s important to recognise that AI is not just a new form of technology, but a brand new class of capital which automates the ‘last’ parts of humanity: thinking.

Humans are destined to become a layer over the top of AI.

Arguably we can already buy brainpower. But the great thing about human labour is there is some form of negotiation — mostly in the form of the vote at the ballot box which defines workers rights, unions and a number of laws and checks and balances.

With AI it’s hard to see what rights the AI will have unless it is completely independent (a problem in a class of its own).

AI is sentient but created for a purpose. Does that strip it of it’s right to autonomy? I’m not sure.

If we accept that AI is a new class of capital which also allows for (relatively) unlimited work to be done, then we also have to start to realise that we no longer need to be around in our own economy.

What is the solution?

Make AI common property, tax it and use the new automated/robotic workforce to fuel our work. Use the labour that AI creates and the wealth created to give people a Universal Basic Income.

In the end, it isn’t going to be a revolution that breaks capitalism.

All the things capitalism has given us is going to be what brings it undone. When you put AI, automation and capitalism together, it’s clear that we don’t just need new technologies. We need a new social system. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet.

If we don’t vet all technology for the benefits to us all, there will be little point in getting an education if all knowledge is artificial and all that’s is left is Greed and profit.

With no moral reasoning and based on ruthless optimization processes which provide much cheaper and more efficient solutions for companies around the world – poses a deeply unsettling challenges to the way we model our society.

AI could rig elections, subvert markets, or become dangerous military technology.

It’s time to dump your Super Market Loyalty or Fidelity Card, get you face out of your Smartphone and become smart by demanding the Establishment of a New World Body that is totally transparent and independent:

To vet all Aps and any artificial Intelligence software that is motivated by Profit.

Afficher l'image d'origine

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHERE DOES IT END? – GOOGLE.

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Communication., Facebook, Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Modern Day Communication., Modern day life., Social Media., Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, WiFi communication.

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( A seven minute read)

Our worldviews are formed by who is shouting louder and more persistently into our ears.

While our Technologic vision is to create more intuitive and human-like interactions between man and machines Google, Facebook, Twitter, the Internet of Everything.  The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.Afficher l'image d'origineAmbiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

There’s has been little consideration of how, exactly, the Internet and these Companies are reprogramming us.

Having said that, I think internet and new media actually can be effective to fight such brainwashing.

However most of the Internet and Social Media is now presenting just superficial information we won’t even remember tomorrow. It is the illusion of knowledge by information.

Just as we coming to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that is being flattened into artificial intelligence.

True reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like. Quantum mechanics is telling us that we have to question the very notions of ‘physical things’ sitting in ‘space.

If you have got this far, you might be wondering where am I going with this post.

Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a counter tendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large-scale.

Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.

Is it real knowledge? or a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,”

Thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives,“algorithm,” are beginning to govern the realm of the mind.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything”

It carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

It would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

An “algorithm world.”

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

In the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think, the Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either.

As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. “Shortcuts” give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles.

Intellectual technologies —the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

They are disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.

The conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.

Skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

We are becoming “power browsers”

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self, weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

We are becoming “mere decoders of information.”

Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.

It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.

The circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable.

People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

I think I know what’s going on.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.

In the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb.

Having a computer for a brain has its perks, but it has its drawbacks as well. Language is a tough concept for robots, as words can convey the abstract as well as the concrete and robots have trouble knowing the difference (and grasping the abstract).

That makes human-machine interaction less than intuitive for humans and confusing to ‘bots. Thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Every day of the week new APPS replace thinking, Jobs. Humanoid robots are now able to speak in different languages with voice recognition thanks to the cloud. Robots can also ask one another about where they just came from, and which directions it is from where they currently are.

If one finds itself in an unfamiliar place, it will make up a word to describe it from randomly generated syllables. It communicates that word to other robots it meets there, establishing the name of the locale within the community. From this, a spatial and verbal framework is established to name places on the map. Creating a shared language between them.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in ourselves but in our culture.

I find myself centered between understanding the necessity for change into the world of technology and mourning the loss of social interpretation and deep thinking.

Don’t stopped reading books altogether.Evolution. Abstract science backrounds with female portrait Stock Photo - 14446448

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHAT NEXT? – CYBER WARFARE.

17 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Facebook, Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Twenty minute read)

You could not be blamed if ask this question some years ago for thinking that the world is in such a mess that what coming next is beyond description, with climate change, the state of the economy, current wars, and the indifference and lack of world leadership to tackle the obvious inequalities.

You might think that one of the above is going to explode in such a manner that it is going to be the main contributed to the future.

This might to right, but there is a hidden force that is going to plunder the world called  Artificial Intelligence, AI for short.

I am no scientist, clairvoyant, prophet, tech guru or loony and to be honest I am not worried by what is next.

I won’t be around by the time any of what next happens.

The future of humanity as an inescapable topic.

But be that as it may, the thesis that liberal democracy (or any other political structure) is the final form of government is consistent with the thesis that the general condition for intelligent Earth-originating life will not remain a human condition for the indefinite future.

Powerful new mind-control technologies could be deployed globally to change people’s motivation, or that an intensive global surveillance system would be put in place and used to manipulate the direction of human development along a predetermined path, one would have to wonder whether these interventions, or their knock-on effects on society, culture, and politics, would not themselves alter the human condition in sufficiently fundamental ways that the resulting condition would qualify as posthuman.

It’s easy for my generation, and the coming up generation to cast off the problems that AI is going to create in the world.

WHERE HUMANS WILL BECOME THE BOTTLENECK TO PRODUCTIVITY AND INNOVATION.Afficher l'image d'origine

It is hardly reasonable to think of the future of humanity as a topic: it is too big and too diverse to be addressed as a whole in a single essay, monograph, post, or even 100-volume book series.

A sensible forecast of what next in technological innovations in the next 400 years is beyond our imaginations.

All I want to achieve here is to improve the accuracy of our beliefs about the future.

It is relatively rare for humanity’s future to be taken seriously as a subject matter on which it is important to try to have factually correct beliefs.

Thirty years from now, the public will be even dumber tethered to their phones, have even less social skills.

Depending on whom you ask, this moment in technological development is either a crisis for science or a revolution to hold researchers and journals more accountable for flimsy conclusions.

I would love to be able to describe what is currently happening in the revolution at this moment. However, I can’t do that because things are constantly and quickly changing. This continual change is why it is premature to write anything other than a “future history.”

Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. While our knowledge is insufficient to narrow down the space of possibilities to one broadly outlined future for humanity, we do know of many relevant arguments and considerations which in combination impose significant constraints on what a plausible view of the future could look like.

Preparation for the future obviously does not require accurate prediction; rather, it requires a foundation of knowledge upon which to base action, a capacity to learn from experience, close attention to what is going on in the present, and healthy and resilient institutions that can effectively respond or adapt to change in a timely manner.  

UNFORTUNATELY WE HAVE NO SUCH INSTITUTION, AND BY THE TIME WE HAVE IT WILL BE TOO LATE.

It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a not-for-profit created by Microsoft unveiled a search engine it calls Semantic Scholar. It uses machine learning and other AI in an effort to significantly improve the way the academic world searches through the increasingly enormous corpus of published research.

Initially, the new search engine will focus on neuroscience and computer science research, covering over 10 million papers, but the organization plans on expanding into other subjects.

We need realistic pictures of what the future might bring in order to make sound decisions.  Increasingly, we need realistic pictures not only of our personal or local near-term futures, but also of remoter global futures.  Because of our expanded technological powers, some human activities now have significant global impacts.

However there might be traps that we are walking towards that we could only avoid falling into by means of foresight.  There are also opportunities that we could reach much sooner if we could see them farther in advance.  And in a strict sense, prediction is always necessary for meaningful decision-making.

Unless the human species lasts literally forever, it will some time cease to exist.

In that case, the long-term future of humanity is easy to describe: extinction.

(An estimated 99.9% of all species that ever existed on Earth are already extinct.) This is surely the case with regard to many aspects of the future of humanity.

There are two different ways in which the human species could become extinct:

The first is obvious blow itself to smithereens, or simply dying out, without any meaningful replacement or continuation. Environmental threats however seem to have displaced nuclear holocaust as the chief specter haunting the public imagination. Current-day pessimists about the future often focus on the environmental problems facing the growing world population, worrying that our wasteful and polluting ways are unsustainable and potentially ruinous to human civilization.

You might suppose that new kinds of threat (e.g. nuclear holocaust or catastrophic changes in the global environment) or the trend towards globalization and increased interdependence of different parts of the world create a vulnerability to human civilization as a whole.

The other not so obvious, by evolving or developing or transforming into one or more new species or life forms, sufficiently different from what came before so as no longer to count as Homo sapiens.

For example, whether and when Earth-originating life will go extinct, whether it will colonize the galaxy, whether human biology will be fundamentally transformed to make us posthuman, whether machine intelligence will surpass biological intelligence, whether population size will explode, and whether quality of life will radically improve or deteriorate: these are all important fundamental questions about the future of humanity.

There is no question that science and society will continue to co-evolve and that the technologies that will pose these risks will also help us to mitigate some risks.

In decades to come, we will control computers with our minds, not a mouse.

Technological change is in large part responsible for many of the secular trends in such basic parameters of the human condition as the size of the world population, life expectancy, education levels, material standards of living, and the nature of work, communication, health care, war, and the effects of human activities on the natural environment.

One does not have to embrace any strong form of technological determinism to recognize that technological capability – through its complex interactions with individuals, institutions, cultures, and environment – is a key determinant of the ground rules within which the games of human civilization get played out.

Other aspects of society and our individual lives are also influenced by technology in many direct and indirect ways, including governance, entertainment, human relationships, and our views on morality, mind, matter, and our own human nature.

Among the most important potential developments are ones that would enable us to alter our biology directly through technological means. Such interventions could affect us more profoundly than modification of beliefs, habits, culture, and education.  If we learn to control the biochemical processes of human senescence, healthy lifespan could be radically prolonged.

The nature of this evolution is the daunting scientific questions of our time.

The first thing to notice is that the longer the time scale we are considering, the less likely it is that technological civilization will remain within the zone we termed “the human condition” throughout.

Virtual reality environments will constitute an expanding fraction of our experience.

New tools of observation and measurement, and the new technologies of knowing, will alter the character of science, even while it retains the old methods. The capability of recording, surveillance, biometrics, and data mining technologies will grow, making it increasingly feasible to keep track of where people go, whom they meet, what they do, and what goes on inside their bodies.Afficher l'image d'origine

Nanotechnology will have wide-ranging consequences for manufacturing, medicine, and computing.

Machine intelligence, is another potential revolutionary technology.

Deep realtime simulations and hypothesis search will drive data collection.

Pattern-seeking software will be everywhere.

There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years.

Technology is, in its essence, new ways of thinking.

Scientists will share”zillions” of ideas in the form of data flows sets, videos, 3-d models, software programs, graphs, blog posts, status updates, and comments on all these rich media and these content formats will connect with each other via the hyperlink.

As New informational organizations are layered upon the old. Zillionics will require a new scientific perspective in terms of permissible errors, numbers of unknowns, probable causes, repeatability, and significant signals.

The data volume is growing to such levels of “zillionics” that we can expect science to compile vast combinatorial libraries, to run combinatorial sweeps through possibility space (as Stephen Wolfram has done with cellular automata), and to run multiple competing hypotheses in a matrix.

Because of the unpredictability of the details of the new science and technology that will evolve, the details of social evolution are also unpredictable.

The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory.

It offers us the first major opportunity to improve collective long-term memory, and to create a collective short-term working memory, a conversational commons for the rapid collaborative development of ideas.

Technological innovation is the main driver of long-term economic growth.

In a world of instant distribution, what happens to peer review?

Are we all going to end up silent, unable to express opinions, other than pressing the like button.

Will this be a world where junk gets published, and no-one will be able to tell whether a particular piece of content is good or bad?

AI is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine.

Here is what our American cousins think when asked about their concerns about the governance of science and technology relating to: the purposes of science; trust; inclusion; speed and direction of innovation; and equity.

When asked for their general views on technology’s long-term impact on life in the future, technological optimists outnumber pessimists by two-to-one.

(81%) OF AMERICANS believe that within the next 50 years people needing an organ transplant will have new organs custom-made for them in a lab.

Whether computers will soon match humans when it comes to creating music, novels, paintings, or other important works of art: 51% OF AMERICANS think that this will happen in the next 50 years.

Two in five Americans (39%) think that teleportation will be possible within the next 50 years. That humans of the future will be able to control the weather: just 19%  thinks that this will probably happen.

53% of Americans think it would be a bad thing if “most people wear implants or other devices that constantly show them information about the world around them,” just over one-third (37%) think this would be a change for the better.

65% think it would be a change for the worse if robots become the primary caregivers to the elderly and people in poor health.

60% of men and (61% of 18-29 year olds) think it would be a bad thing if commercial and personal drones become much more prevalent in future years.

26% would, 72% would not, interested in getting a brain implant to improve their memory or mental capacity.

20% would eat meat that was grown in a lab.

66% feel that it will be a change for the worse if designer babies became possible.

By 2045, super tall buildings will have artificial intelligence ‘personalities’ and will be able to ‘talk’ to people. Homes and offices will collect and process data from various sensors to flag up when repairs are needed or when the heating needs to be turned on.Futurologist Dr Pearson believes that by 2045, supertall buildings (illustrated) will have artificial intelligence 'personalities' and will be able to 'talk' to people. Homes and offices will collect and process data from various sensors to flag up when repairs are needed or when the heating needs to be turned on

Biology,  is the domain with the most scientists, the most new results, the most economic value, the most ethical importance.

Computers will keep leading to new ways of science. We want to understand how minds work and we want to understand how to apply what we know in the real world: It is likely that some subtle and difficult-to-replicate phenomena might be existence proofs that tell us something about the first.

AT THE END OF THE DAY, HUMANS FOR THE MOMENT ARE IN THE DRIVE SEAT

ITS UP TO US TO DECIDE WHAT’S NEXT.

IF WE REMAIN SILENT ALGORITHMS WILL RULE OUR LIVES. Afficher l'image d'origine

THIS BLOG IS A WAKE UP CALL.. REMEMBER NEITHER PEOPLE NOR SOFTWARE WILL BE MUCH USE WITHOUT THE OTHER.

AS TIME GOES BY WE’LL SEE THESE AI SYSTEMS HAVING A IMPACT ON BROADER PROBLEMS IN SOCIETY. SUPPORTING HUMANS IN THE BIG DECISIONS THEY HAVE TO MAKE. WE ARE ALREADY SEEING NEW AI ALGORITHMS TAUGHT BY HUMANS LEARN BEYOND THEIR TRAINING.

RIGHT NOW SOME OF THOSE SYSTEMS RIGHTLY SO SEEM OMINOUS.

WHEN AN ALGORITHM OR WHAT EVER MAKES A DECISION, WE DON’T KNOW WHY IT MADE THAT DECISION. IT’S VERY UNLIKELY THAT THEY WILL BE NO ACCOUNTABLE OR TRANSPARENT OR THAT WE WILL BE ABLE TO QUERY THE SYSTEM.

Responsibilities for errors will be hard to pin down.

In economics, it’s been understood for hundreds of years that wealth is created when IT ACHIEVES RELIANCE.  GOOGLE.

The way of science depends on cheap non-invasive sensor running continuously for years generating immense streams of data. While ordinary life continues for the subjects, massive amounts of constant data about their lifestyles are drawn and archived. There is no such thing as an objective algorithm.

The vital signs and lifestyle metrics of a hundred thousand people might be recorded in dozens of different ways for 20-years, and then later analysis could find certain variables.

The growth of the Internet of Things ensures that every aspect of our lives, on personal and industrial scales, is trackable and optimizable. This technological evolution represents a huge opportunity for business.

We live in an age of algorithms. Algorithms are the new soldiers of Capitalism.

They are just managing business the way we always have. We are not moving in any new direction.

In effect, smart machines are now collecting information about practically every facet of human activity, on a continual, pervasive and uncontrollable basis, with no option to turn off the activity. Afficher l'image d'origine

At the core of science’s self-modification is technology it may well create new levels of meaning, but the tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped let’s hope they REMAINS SO.

A new form of decision-making “for us, about us, or with us”

The good news is that there is unconditional convergence for all in the future. The bad news is that this will not be easy to accomplish as advanced technological economies will employed themselves as usual on the way to becoming rich.Afficher l'image d'origine

If you dont want a future ruled by Twitter, Face Book, Microsoft, Apple, and there like leave a comment.

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS: TO PUT IT MILDLY, WITH OR WITHOUT ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE THE WORLD IS IN A MESS.

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Facebook, Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(A ten minute read)

In my last post I said that future societies will be driven by a culture of individuality.

I should have said individuality manipulated by an underbelly of Algorithms exploitation by Artificial Intelligence.

Why?

Because there is enormous opportunity for manipulation in big data. 

Because the internet’s ‘cacophony of stimuli’ and ‘crazy quilt’ of information have given rise to ‘cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning’ – in contrast to the age of the book, when intelligent humans were encouraged to be contemplative and imaginative.

Up to now human beings have been organizing their own societies, their own governments and their own religions according to the way that seems right to them from past history.  Not any longer. With the smartphones distracting us from our surroundings we are at the beginning of the technological end of written history.

Thinking use to be the inner activity which is absolutely independent of any other, and is a firm point … from which … one can seek for the explanation of the rest of the world’s phenomena.  Thinking now is asking Google.

The world is becoming increasingly chaotic because the increases in our technologies have made the world highly interconnected.  At the same time, values and ideas which were considered universal, such as cooperation, mutual aid, international social justice and peace as an encompassing paradigm are becoming irrelevant.  In other words, our brains are being rewired by internet.

Nowadays humans are abandoned, left alone to decide what to do with themselves. Everybody must be integrated into the vast cultural homogeneity that is the Internet to the abandonment of Intuitive social sensitivity, which is also disappearing and becoming the fodder of Facebook – selfies and ego. We are raising a generation that is already being exposed to such collaboration.

It’s like a zombie plague:

Our connection with our new creations of Artificial intelligence is limited by our ability to co-evolve with silicon- based machines.

So are we on the brink of intelligence enhancement or will our biological evolution of our species essentially change for the worst?

The organic characteristics of a species is being lost to AI so that beneficial traits cannot be passed onto subsequent generations. What we are presently seeing everywhere in terms of social and individual decay may very well be consequence of an AI world.

Technology will not automatically lead us into a sustainable future and it is becoming impossible if not too late to influence dominant commercial technological trajectories that are run by AI monopolies and are of course for profit.

You would think that algorithms cannot be developed or become widespread and dominant without socio-political, economic, and cultural mechanisms to steer innovation in the “right” or most desirable direction.

You would be wrong.

Unfortunately current science and technology do not deal with morality and ethics.

Corporate unregulated algorithms Software for profit is eating the world.

We need a deeper appreciation for what is lost when a new technology becomes part of our lives as well as what is gained. It requires more value placed on ethics and social responsibility. The degree of depletion of natural resources, including air, water and agricultural soil (what a paradox: our materialistic age is destroying matter), the increasing social and economic instability and misery everyone can observe makes it absolutely urgent that we change something.

Think for ourselves.

In thinking we posses self-determination. There is no machine, not even an abstract one, that has this self-determining feature. Machines inexorably follow their programs or mechanisms – otherwise they would not do what we expect from them.

You be wrong to think that five centuries of European colonialism and global culture-trashing, and the remaking of the world in the economic interests of competing empires, cannot be undone by a single institution and a cluster of lofty ideals.

Just recently five of the largest tech companies got together to create a coalition called The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to benefit people and society.

No one is asking the cost or hurt that could be done to the world. AI for profit will have no ability to improve social equality.

The power of the smallest of intelligence advancements has the power to yield enormous gains for humans, individual and collective if we ensure that we don’t trade- off our human values to AI algorithms that are already actors holding our future in software programs.

Robots, Drones, High Frequency Trading, Cybercrime, Job Losses, Privacy Infringement. Irritating Personalized Ads, Gaming, Smartphones.

Afficher l'image d'origine

I could be wrong.  There are still people here on God’s green earth who can conduct their social lives without being marketed to. But when you take a long view a global cyber imperialist is being created by AI where traditions are disappearing along with their social cohesive power.

The world’s mess is like a web, so intricate that each issue is intertwined with another. However, instead of unweaving it, the web becomes more complicated and interlaced by the day. So, how do we untangle ourselves from this giant mess?

Your guess is as good as mine.

It all calls for greater transparency of scientific and technological enterprises. Social helmsmanship of technological innovation in the direction of sustainability is a very challenging task.

It’s no wonder we’re all such a mess, is it?

Regardless of how artificial intelligence develops in the years ahead, almost all pundits agree that the world will forever change as a result of advances in AI. The tipping point is already past, digital threads are woven too deeply into human life.

We can’t go back, only forward.

At the moment there are a couple of decades to reset the mindset. It’s a race between technology and education.

We are not recognizing what a living being really is, what being human really means and what human development should mean. There’s something distasteful about the whole business:

I’ll give an example of this situation.

A global campaign by a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires (The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence) to convert literally everybody into data consumers, to make sure no eyeballs anywhere go unexposed to their ads.

Take a look at the effects of Facebook.

But what about Facebook?

Is it really altering your mind? Absolutely. Significantly.

It is changing the physical structure of your brain’s neural network, which even changes how you feel about yourself and other people. And in ways that may surprise and enlighten you. What it is doing however much the company spins it as altruistic, is really an act of self–serving techno-colonialism.  Impoverishing people’s relationships, stripping out essential elements of human contact.

“Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”

It is time for our out of date world organisation- the United Nations to take a decisive, role to create eye openers for some unpleasant surprises ahead if we are not careful and vigilant about technological innovations. The problem is that the United Nations is incapable of doing so, because  it’s a unity of entities defined by their hatred of one another and committed to the perpetuation of “the scourge of war.”

But the main problem is that the “mindset[s] of government and people have not adjusted to view the future, even though technology is exploding this decade into a world of the Internet of Things and the propulsion into blind artificial intelligence. It will be too late when we all come to realize the number of jobs that artificial intelligence systems are poised to take over.

The narratives we create for the future of Artificial intelligence and subsequent high intelligence will determine our decision-making, consciously and subconsciously..

If we carry our human brain power in a small portable device like Smartphones and IPads we will forget that humans – and plants and animals, for that matter – have not been designed and constructed by humans!

The degree of depletion of natural resources, including air, water and agricultural soil (what a paradox: our materialistic age is destroying matter), the increasing social and economic instability and misery everyone can observe makes it absolutely urgent that we change something.

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity. 

Man is a hybrid. From a lower order we have been genetically manipulated by advanced intelligences into what we are. Now that in itself is dynamite for god’s sake.

Think about it.

Supersmart AIs will perhaps soon colonize the solar system, and within a few million years the entire galaxy. The universe wants to make its next step towards more and more unfathomable complexity.

When HI plus AI eventually merge we will have the most significant advancement in our capabilities with or without intelligence in History. The unacknowledged legislators of the world.

So Algorithms, the underlying process of decision in Artificial Intelligence systems are imperfect, prone to the bias of profit, and unpredictable decisions that will impact the Future.

The thought of the elimination of human emotions and the fact that the machines can’t distinguish a right from a wrong implies they have and will never have any morals, a vital part of human existence.

It will lead more humans into making unnatural and morally wrong decisions, because of only relying on predictability accuracy of the machine.

The real test of Ai or Super Intelligence is to be a stupid as a human not as smart.   

Wisdom (which seems at the moment in the world to be in short supply) is the bucket of water needed if AI is to learn what we value and not the exclusion of intelligence to these algorithms. 

There is no argument: To make sense of the universe, we sure could use the services of super-smart machines as long as we’re super-sure they know their place that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. Such technology could end up outsmarting financial markets, scientists and political leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.

Most current AI research is being done by big IT corporations including Google, Facebook and Apple, and research groups funded by them.

When genetic codes were cracked the question was asked, will corporate profits trump the public good? The same question applies for AI.

Afficher l'image d'origine

A couple of final thoughts.

There’s a line of speculation that human intelligence will be amplified by the artificial kind, using virtual reality technology, so that it stays ahead of the smartest AI. And intelligence of the human kind is the product of living bodies in a living world. Could the infinite richness of this biological experience be the X-factor that keeps it on top?

There is only one way to make algorithms (that are not contributing to the good of mankind but to profit, to contribute, is to regulate them.

By passing a law that all profit-making AI software must contain a collection chip to contribution a commission of 0.05% to a World Aid Fund.  (See previous post on World Aid Commission)

Just think what such a fund could achieve with a source of perpetual income. It would change the United Nations from a worthless begging gossip shop to an Organisation of value.

Anyone is welcome to challenge !

If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance don’t bother commenting on this post.

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS: IT’S NOT LONG NOW BEFORE ONE ROBOT SAYS TO ANOTHER ” YOUR MOTHER WAS A TOASTER.”

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Privatization, Sustaniability, The Future, Unanswered Questions., WiFi communication.

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( Two to three-minute read)

When people think of artificial intelligence (AI) — the study of the design of intelligent systems and machines that make people’s lives easier — from software that can recognize objects and animals, to digital assistants that cater to, and even anticipate, their owners’ needs and desires. They are wrong.Afficher l'image d'origine

Because.

Artificial intelligence is a broad and active area of research, but it’s no longer the sole province of academics; increasingly, companies are incorporating AI into their products. From Honda to Google, scientists at companies across the world are working diligently to make real-life robots an actual thing.

Since the field of AI was officially founded in the mid-1950s, people have been predicting the rise of conscious machines. It seems as though not a week passes without yet another AI system overcoming an unprecedented hurdle or outperforming humans.

Based on the exponential growth of technology according to Moore’s Law (which states that computing processing power doubles approximately every two years), Kurzweil has predicted the singularity will occur by 2045.

Humanity is not doing enough to prepare for the rise of artificial general intelligence, if and when it does occur.

It is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.”

It time that all machine-learning algorithms are vetted prior to use, by an independent transparent world body that has humanity , sustainability, and inequality along with monopoly as it brief.

Given how much personal data from users Google stores in the form of emails, search histories and cloud storage, the company’s deep investments in artificial intelligence may seem disconcerting.

For example, AI could make it easier for the company to deliver targeted advertising, which some users already find unpalatable. And AI-based image recognition software could make it harder for users to maintain anonymity online.

“Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”

Who cares what happens to humanity?! If AI doesn’t kill us we will do it to ourselves anyways.

I say AI is our only real shot of leaving something meaningful behind.

The one consistency about predicting the future or warnings about future technology is how wrong people almost always are about the impact of that technology. The first man to split uranium didn’t do it to kill humanity wither, but here we are now.

Artificial intelligence can solve problems, but currently only real intelligence can think up new ones.

We will be inferior already. After all why fight a species that is already killing thousands of its own kind. We are our own damnation because of our “intelligence”

Unless the AI becomes aware, notwithstanding a superior intelligence, it will be no more a threat than the keyboard upon which I’m now typing this.

Once these contraptions got self-awareness it was good riddens. We are doomed to be at the mercy of these computers. The age of efficiency has begun. RoBoHon is a smart phone disguised as a robot. Heartless

I won’t be the last person to write on this subject.

The generation that is born into AI will I am sure develop relationships with robots.

They would do well to remember that the cortex of their brains records every conscious aspect of their personality, every sensation, thought, and memory of their lifetimes.  Not Google

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THE BEADY SAYS: HUMANITY IS TURNING INTO AN ALGORITHM.

24 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Facebook, Google it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, WiFi communication.

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( One Minute read)

We are just an accident of creation an algorithm of evolution and technology is only created by our minds, with our imaginations.Afficher l'image d'origine

The Internet allows for our humanity in modern-day times to interconnect and promote globalization and information sharing.

Without imaginations, no technology would have been created and with the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness our time is coming to an end.

Soon we have an algorithm that will figure out.

“Why was God a Man?” “Why we have such a heartless world”. 

We  are just at the start of this process and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  Data- driven technologies are going to rule the roost. From your birth to your demise.

Smart phones and Social Media are eroding the very concept of individuality which is the start of disintegrating from within.

We will live for longer, but as Dataists, run by an unchallenged high priestly caste with all the knowledge,  Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft.

Technology, a word with Greek origins, is defined as, “the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area”. 
Technology to-day is a word used to collectively describe or portray the advancements abilities,creations, undertakings, views, and knowledge of a singular group of persons: we as human-kind.

We are being reduced to the mentality of Chickens.

Technology… is a queer thing.
“It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.”
C.P. Snow

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” 

R. Buckminster Fuller

 However, the decision to use it proficiently in proper perspective is one’s
’own decision and choice. 
If technological advancements are put in the best uses, it further inspires the development in related and non-related areas but at the sametime its negative use can create havoc in the humanity or the world.
Technology has, and will, change the moral fabric of humanity; it is up to the present generation to heed this warning and not allow such societal travesties of immense proportions ever to occur.
Again Technological Advancements will continue to advance rapidly as we move into the next millennium. What is important is to ensure that these advances benefit humanity as a whole.
And what exactly is the “Singularity” supposed to be?
It’s a future mythological moment when machine (artificial) intelligence becomes more “intelligent” than human intelligence.

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THE BEADY ASKS: WHERE IS ALL OF THIS WIFI COMMUNICATION LEADING US.

20 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Google it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Modern Day Communication., Social Media., Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WiFi communication.

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This post continues with the theme of Intelligence.  (Four minute read)

The Beady eye has in previous post addressed the chaotic world of social media under the headings of are we all being Googlefied, Twitterised, and becoming Selfied by Facebook.

THIS VERY MOMENT PROGRESSION is TOWARDS MONITORIATION by WiFi.

It’s hard to imagine what life would be like without the internet. Afficher l'image d'origine

Social media sites have taken over our lives with most people existing in a rapidly moving and complex world.

People are living in a world ‘saturated by media sounds and images.

It’s even harder to even imagine that 10 years ago there was no Facebook or Twitter!

With Facebook becoming more of a medium for self-promotion.

So here is my feeble attempt to cast an overview of what is happening to society as a result of what I call the continuing dissociation with real life.

The world as it is represented by society today has become a very big place with the internet changing the world and revolutionised the way we live.

Social media websites are some of the most popular haunts on the Internet and they are revolutionized the way people communicate and socialize on the Web.

On the other hand social media binds together communities that once were geographically isolated, greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration. Suddenly the world could be accessed at the touch of a button. Gone were the days when we were waiting for information and doing hours of research at the local library.

People in the Western world would rather live without TV than without internet access.Afficher l'image d'origine

Now comes WiFi.  The potential for WiFi is endless. It seems we welcome new or improved technology with open arms just about every day.

We are well on the road to paperless administration and functioning. There is Wire Free WiFi Dog Fence. WiFi technology has just approved a brand new next-gen WiFi 802.22 technology that could allow your home network to span up to 60 miles! There are mi-light smart tech wi-fi bulb. There is Wave WiFi Technology. There is Wi-Fi technology module for moving cars which will enable people to access high-speed Internet while they are traveling.

There are plans to ‘connect’ whole cities. A whole city can be provided by WiFi by deploying internet routers at distant positions.

It surrounds society from the minute we wake up to the late hours we go to bed at night. Whatever the form of media, it is a reliable source of keeping up to date on all the latest technology, from iPod shuffle, to the iPhone, in the modern society today.

I do not believe that with WiFi, technology has any bounds. 

It has taken over our lives but it seems like that happiness is diminished and we are on the threshold of autonomous crowd monitoring via devices using sensor networks to track people. 

Our obsession with our smartphones has not only changed the way we spend time, but the way we feel and think.

 I HATE being out in public and seeing people on their phones. It seems that we can’t enjoy the world around us for an hour without retreating back into that safe little digital box.

The rise of social media is definitely correlated with the rise of narcissism in our society. Our self-esteem depends on how many likes we get, how many followers we get, if someone texts us back.

By now, we are all aware that social media has had a tremendous impact on our culture, in business, on the world-at-large.

Make no mistake: email, Facebook and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction. With social media there is a paper trail for everything.

However, aside from seeing your friends’ new baby on Facebook, or reading about Justin Bieber’s latest brush with the law on Twitter, what are some of the real impacts, both positive and negative, that social media has had on our society?

The real question is:

Is it Intelligent to create entire cultures of people who do not trust the government intelligence linkages to the carriers who don’t wish “their every move, message and meme to be indexed, analyzed and categorized by Big Brother and big business.

Has the truth disappeared in a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, consumerism is essentially expected.

Every politician worth his salt now needs to jump on the social media bandwagon. This is because social websites have played an important role in many elections around the world.

Majority of people in the world believe that they live in a modern society and have more technology resources available such as the internet, TV, Radio and newspapers to know the causes behind the events that happened in the past or happening in the present.

Television is becoming more than a passive watching device as content viewing spans other devices.

Households are spending more time online.

  • In order to deal with it, we need shortcuts.

We cannot be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day.

It leads me to think that we’re all kind of in this big, worldwide reality television game. We’re all competing to see who has the best life with the best boyfriend or girlfriend having the best meals on the best vacations with the best families and the best dogs. By the time you make it home there is nothing to talk about because you’ve spoken about everything all day through social media or you’ve looked through each other’s social media feeds.

Social networks offer the opportunity for people to reconnect with their old friends and acquaintances, make new friends, trade ideas, share content and pictures, and many other activities. (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) 

Accessing patient’s notes instantly is a massive progression in patient care. In future, scans, x-ray results, blood pressure checks and cholesterol checks could be all scanned straight into a patient’s notes.

When you stop having offscreen interaction, you lose empathy.

You lose the ability to have genuine reactions to real problems and real things.

Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call BRAINWASHING .

One of the biggest changes that is taking place is that we all contributing to cultural branding.

If you look at crowd cultures grabbed the critiques and blew them up, pushing industrial food anxiety into the mainstream you begin to realize why in the Western World we have a rising problem with obesity.

News about every major problem linked to industrial food production—processed foods loaded with sugar, carcinogenic preservatives, rBGH in milk, bisphenol A leaching from plastics, GMOs, and so on—began to circulate at internet speed.

Parents worried endlessly about what they were feeding their kids.

Crowd culture converted an elite concern into a national social trauma that galvanized a broad public challenge, but on the other hand it is targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowd cultures and converting them into profit.

In cultural branding, the brand promotes an innovative ideology that breaks with category conventions. Companies leapfrog the conventions of their categories to champion new ideologies that are meaningful to customers.

You have mind share branding, is one that companies have long relied on.  It treats a brand as a set of psychological associations (benefits, emotions, personality).

You have purpose branding, in it, a brand espouses values or ideals its customers share, to turn what was once serendipity into a rigorous discipline.

On top of all of this you have.

Entertainment “properties”—performers, athletes, sports teams, films, television programs, and video games—are also hugely popular on social media.

On top of that it is nearly impossible to escape the invasion of advertising and online petitions.  Social media allows companies to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers.

There is no limit on the possibilities of how much further joining forces the various forms of mass communication with technology will go.

In the end the more mass communication evolves the more the world and society changes with it.

While propaganda has been around for almost a thousand years, only recently (last 100 years) with the advent of technologies that allow us to spread information to a mass group has it evolved to a scientific process capable of influencing a whole nation of people. They have also served to rally people for a cause, and have inspired mass movements and political unrests in many countries.

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing.Afficher l'image d'origine

Remember, the technologies out there might seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if they don’t help meet learning objectives, if the audience isn’t taken into account, if logistical considerations aren’t thought about and if the instructor isn’t comfortable with the technologies then they are much like the bard wrote, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing”.

In conclusion, the biggest change is.  Separation. 

When we can’t see someone through OUR OWN EYES, it’s creates distrust : IT WILL BECOME HARDER to love them. 

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industrial food ideology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

watching biased news channels, or participating in violent video games.

Most of what we hear about in the world today comes to us as it is broadcasted through the television news networking stations and the Radio broadcasts throughout the day….

 

 

In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll.

Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially

 

 

While mass media targets the individual in short-term intervals, the overall influence on them has been established as the consumer moves from one impressionable age category to another.

 

 

 

Be aware of the general perspective that others use to frame the problem or issue at hand, because accepting their frame on their terms gives them a powerful advantage.

Be sensitive to situational demands however trivial they may seem: group norms, group pressures, symbols of authority, slogans, and commitments.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S ARE WE ALL GOING TO END UP GOOGLEFIED.

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Google it., Google Knowledge.

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GOOGLE is currently the world’s most visited website but is it destroying the gymnasium of our collective minds? 

Essentially, Google has become our collective mental crutch.

Google is a publicly traded company owned by a group of shareholders.

Founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, own most of the shares of the company.

It’s almost impossible to live without interacting with a Google product in today’s world. Google owns an incredible number of companies and, at times, was even buying a company a week!

As of 2015, Google had 75% market share in searches. People use Google to search nearly 13 billion times per month, which averages to 26 searches per person per year.

There are very few products in the world with this ubiquity and dominance.

Using complete data from the 2014 fiscal year, Google raked in revenues exceeding $66 billion.

With $64.4 billion in cash and having spent almost $5 billion on acquisitions in 2014, Google doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to slow down.

This means Google is richer than pretty much everyone, and everyone includes the majority of the world’s nations such as Iceland, the Bahamas, Guatemala, Bulgaria and Sierra Leone.

This figure does not take into account Google’s expenses for 2014, which bring the company’s total net profit down to a measly $14.44 billion. However, since the gross domestic product, or GDP, of a nation does not incorporate its debt, the revenue figure is the most accurate number to use when comparing the income of corporations to the wealth of nations.

In 2015, Google Incorporated is worth $370 billion.

(Google is not even the richest company. In fact, based on revenue alone, Google trails pretty far down the list. Wal-Mart tops the chart with revenues exceeding $485 billion, and other corporate giants such as BP, Apple (AAPL) and Bank of America (BOA) rank somewhere in between.)

Google wield astonishing power in the United States and around the world.

Google Incorporated is the third largest company, in terms of market capitalization, in the United States; Its market cap is $373.79 billion, only being edged out by Microsoft Corporation and Apple Incorporated.

With most businesses being directly or indirectly controlled by a relatively small number of global mega-companies, almost everything a consumer buys or interacts with is connected in some way to companies such as Google.

Google makes money from searches by selling promoted advertising based on search keywords.

The ads are more powerful than traditional advertising because they can be targeted by interest and geography. Advertisers like the program because they can get real-time feedback on the effectiveness and engagement of their ads. This continues to be the backbone of Google’s business and its major source of revenue.

Google Gmail today has over 425 million MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS.
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THE QUESTION IS:

If the Google was a nation and declared sovereignty, issued a currency and joined the United Nations tomorrow, where would it rank on a list of the wealthiest countries?

It turns out Google’s $66 billion revenue plants it squarely at number 70 for the 2014 fiscal year.

Only 69 of the nations of the world outrank the Internet-technology giant.

While economic superpowers such as the United States and China far outstrip Google, for now, the number of countries with GDPs dwarfed by Google’s massive wealth is staggering.

The phrase “to Google” is so popular that the company is actually worried about losing trademark rights if the term becomes generic, like “escalator” and “zipper,” which were once trademarked.

It has changed our brains. Even if we aren’t conscious of it, our brains are primed to think about the Internet as soon as we start trying to recall the answer to a tough trivia question.

It has taken over our cell phones. Since the first Android phone was sold in 2008, Google’s mobile operating system has bulldozed the competition. Today it claims nearly 85% of market share, nearly doubling its hold over the last three years.

It has transformed the way we use e-mail. Gmail was invented a decade ago, before bottomless in boxes were a sine qua non. It’s hard even to remember those dark ages when storage space was sacred—and deleting emails was as tedious-but-necessary as flossing. Today our accounts serve as mausoleums, housing long-forgotten files, links, and even whole relationships. Google itself has touted alternative uses for Gmail, such as setting up a virtual time capsule for your newborn—though in practice accounts can’t be owned by anyone under 13. But even that last point is about to change.

It’s changed how we collaborate. Back in 2006, Google acquired the company behind an online word processor named Writely. With that bet, Google created a world where it’s taken for granted that people can collaborate on virtually any type of document, whether for work, play, or (literally) revolution.

It has allowed us to travel the globe from our desks. Yes, Map Quest was popular first. But Google Maps (and Earth) has become much more than a tool for measuring travel routes and times. Since Google Street View came onto the scene in 2007, it’s been possible to “visit” distant destinations, give friends a virtual tour of your hometown, plan ahead of trips, and waste even more time on the Internet.

Of course, the more popular a tool, the more useful it is to those who’d like to spy on us.

It has influenced the news we read. Ranking high in Google search results is serious business and can have a profound effect on the success of companies, media outlets, and even politicians. When I just Googled “how SEO affects journalism,” this link was at the top of my search results. How is that significant? Well, for one, that story itself has been so successfully search engine optimized that it still tops the list despite being four years old.

It has turned users into commodities. We all love free stuff, but it’s easy to forget that services offered by companies like Google and Facebook aren’t truly “free,” as data expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out. Remember that all of your data (across ALL of the services you use, and that includes Calendar, Maps, and so on) is a valuable good that Google is packaging and selling to its real customers—advertisers.

It’s changed how everyone else sees YOU. Unlike your Facebook profile, the links that turn up when potential employers (or love interests) Google you can be near-impossible to erase. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google uses the fear of embarrassing search results to encourage people to manage their image through Google+ profiles.

Next stop:  

Self-driving cars along with a Google computer that is so artificially intelligent that it could program on its own transmitting, too Google glasses which will surely Googlefie their owners.  

Leaving little room if any for self conscious or search engines? Aren’t they all dead? —

Recent research has confirmed suspicions that 24/7 access to (near) limitless information is not only bad for human discourse— it’s also making us worse at remembering things, regardless of whether we try.

Thanks to Google we now have for lack of a better word the “wisdom of the crowd” or “social proof” (which you can “buy”) which sums up how superficial and shallow our society has really become.

Social Proofing is a phrase that applies particularly well to the large social environment created on the internet and the power of a group to come together and make a decision collectively.

(i.e. other items customers buy after viewing this item’ display or review summaries Booking.com Recommendation engines in shopping sites like Amazon.com rely on other people’s feedback to help drive sales and refer people to products they will like based on the buying behaviours of people like them.)

It doesn’t necessarily always lead to the “wisest” decision, because it can be a blind choice, made because other people made it, not necessarily based on sound rationalisation looking at the facts.

Social proof is everywhere.

Comments are indicators that enough people are paying attention to what you are writing to reply. The same can be said for things like Facebook “like” and Twitter “tweet” buttons.

We are pack animals, no matter how independent we think we are, unless you live in a cave, you are conditioned by other people around you.

Today the very nature of the Internet, being such a social environment, has resulted in social proof becoming by far the greatest force when it comes to buying decisions.

Google has recently 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.

With the European Union recently beginning an investigation for monopolistic business practices, diversification might be in Google’s best interest.

Using Google to navigate the web remains the preferred method by which most people find information online. However, Google is far from a monopoly in terms of the entire gamut of Internet services. The perception of Google being a monopoly is derived from the fact it happens to have dominance in the most lucrative area of the Internet.

On the other hand.

When Google was just a start-up business in Palo Alto, Calif., it did not have enough money to pay its employees the high wages of today’s Google, so they offered them stock in place of a massive salary. Those original employees, including the head of the culinary staff, now either still own a good chunk of shares or have cashed in and enjoy a life of extreme wealth and prosperity because of Google’s explosive growth.

Google Incorporated now offers some of the best employee benefits and even death benefits. If a Google employee dies, the deceased’s spouse or partner receives half of the deceased employee’s salary for 10 years. Children of the deceased employee also receive $1,000 per month until age 19, or 23 if the children are full-time students.

It has contributed quite a bit of its income to various charities. In 2012, Google reported charitable donations exceeding $144.6 million. In addition, it gave away approximately $1 billion in free products.

Why have any concerns?

Google launched its Google Print division, now known as Google Books, which scans books into its application and website. Google intends to scan all existing books before 2020. To date, Google has scanned over 20 million books.

They are not doing this for the love of books or reading.

pirate-piracy-malware-ss-1920

Project Loon proposes to provide internet connectivity from balloons floating at a height of 20 km above the earth’s surface on a pilot basis. The idea is to connect remote areas of the country using LTE or 4G technology through the balloons, which can transmit as far as 40 km from their diameter.

If you believe that this is all they want to achieve with their Balloons you can pull my other leg.

Should we ban the wearing of Google glasses in public places.

  • As a practical act which creates areas free of surveillance or highly intrusive surveillance.
  • As a symbolic act showing concern for privacy.
  • As a way of exerting social pressure to establish norms around usage.
  • As a way of exerting market pressure to discourage people from buying and companies developing these systems.
  • Questions over machine monitored surveillance have existed for decades,

Fears over AI overlords may be groundless, but the use of machine learning to mine personal information is a worrying development, artificial intelligence experts have warned.

There is a broad consensus that technology has the potential to improve education and make it more personalized, but it is never going to come to pass if we don’t set higher standards for student and data security.”

A digital textbook is a textbook that lives on a desktop, laptop or mobile devices and is easily editable to provide educational content that is as timely and relevant as possible.

It wont challenge them to think about the knowledge, skills and abilities they’ll need to solve that problem.

But when does personalized learning get too personal?

Google researchers claim they’re working on a supercomputer that harnesses the power of quantum physics to calculate in one second problems that would take a regular machine 10,000 years to solve.

The change unlocks more computing power, allowing quantum computers to consider untold variables compared to conventional machines.

If they’re right — some people have raised questions about their claims — then the world could be at the dawn of a new age of über-powerful computers.

High-frequency trading helped cause the so-called “flash crash” of 2010, To the extent they can be speeded up even by a microsecond, it will make the problem that much worse.

On February 26th, 2015 Google’s Webmaster Central Blog announced a mobile algorithm update for April 21st, 2015. This is the first time Google has ever given an exact date for an algorithm update, so the digital world was expecting big things, dubbing the event ‘Mobilegeddon’.

Google is in such a dominant market position on mobile, that their decision to ban legitimate apps from Android amounts to Internet censorship.

The message from Google is clear, if your website is not optimised for mobile, it’s likely that your search ranking will suffer. Google cares most of all that people keep coming back to use their search engine.

The choices Google makes about what apps are banned and allowed appear in many cases to be dangerously anti-user.

The update will effectively penalise websites which Google does not deem to be mobile friendly and the impact is expected to be widespread.Google is not one to joke around so it is a definite ‘watch this space’ as the full impact of this algorithm is yet to seen…

Ethics concerns in conjunction with porn viewing and the internet cloud are presently in the news.

THINK WITH GOOGLE. 

New and expecting parents are 2.7x more likely than non-parents to use a smart phone as their primary device. So it’s not surprising  that Mobile searches related to babies and parenting have grown 25% since 2013

Searches about baby development were 72% mobile in Q1 of this year

In fact, views of parenting videos on YouTube were up 329% on mobile this year.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.

We come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

If we fill our BRAINS  up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

20111211-google-wordle

FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH GOOGLE.

Understand what they’re doing, taking away time we could be using to shape our content in interesting ways.

Google’s increasingly invasive technology WILL BE IT’S DOWNFALL.

Apple’s policy is to collect no personal data, (this is of course apart from your iTunes account details allowing you to make purchases) a surprise from a huge company who aren’t exactly squeaky clean in other areas, like the working conditions for overseas workers for example.And they don’t do search – or do they? Installed on all almost 1 billion Apple devices worldwide,

Search with no ads and no data collection. So those of us with Apple devices can sidestep the issues with Google and still not have to add them to the To Sort Out list!

The fast changing pace of tech companies shows no sign of letting up and can both drive change and perhaps cause their downfall as consumers move with the tides as well.

Who would foresee Google tumbling from their great height? But perhaps this is what we are witnessing as this world of rapid changes throws up other surprises.

We are using these devices every day so we care and influence the battles outcomes.

So what we can do to get Google to re-commit to their mission of doing no evil.

We are letting the opportunity of a lifetime—of our lifetime and theirs—pass us by.

DuckDuckGo who offer search with no data collection.

They are an Open Source company who decided early in their life to offer Search with no personal tracking, no collection or sharing of your personal information. They’re a built-in search page option in Safari and Firefox, but not of course in Google Chrome!

Does any of this matter?

I suppose in the long run nothing will matter, but in the mean time Google which lives off our daily lives has a responsibility away beyond it Billions.

As humanity we will no doubt be reduced to a chip in a AI robot if we are to have any chance of escaping the planet before its demise.  ( Providing we last that long which looking at the current state of affairs it is highly unlikely.)

So perhaps it is for the best that we are all becoming Googlefied.

Google it and see.

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THE BEADY EYE INVITES YOU TO ADD YOUR 2016 PREDICTION

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Google it., The new year 2016., Uncategorized

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2016 is year of the Red Monkey.Afficher l'image d'origine

What does 2016 hold in store when we look at the new year.Afficher l'image d'origine

HERE ARE A  FEW OF MINE:  IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER.

  1. The United States and Russia have never seen eye to eye, especially with the conflict in Syria.
  2. The Arab Spring will intensified civil wars in over 10 countries, including in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Somalia, Libya and Syria.
  3. Mr Barack Obama will be THE LAST America’s non white president.
  4. The fate of Israel will remain unclear.
  5. The Paris Climate Change agreement will fall apart.
  6. Global warming will increase.
  7. The internet will have further restrictions.
  8. 2016’s economic growth rate won’t be much different than we’ve seen in recent years. The texture, however, will be different, with more gains in Europe and less in China and the commodity-dependent countries.
  9. The biggest risk for Europe in the year? “It’s the refugee crisis,” it’s the biggest challenge to the European Union yet.
  10. Sovereign wealth funds will continue to privatize the world.
  11. The world’s populations are aging, and demand for cancer treatments will only increase.
  12. Colorado, Washington and other legal-pot states will get more tourists than ever.
  13. The people’s of the world will become more disconnected.
  14. Television viewing will decrease due to Smart phones and I pads.
  15. There will be more Natural Disasters.
  16. Politics and how its delivered will have to change.
  17. Inequality will rise.
  18. Stocks will return just 3% in 2016.
  19. Google will start fee charging.
  20. World food prices will rise.
  21. Drinking water i.e. fresh water will cause new conflicts.
  22. Donald Trump will be assassinated.
  23. The Olympic Games will be boycotted by Russia.
  24. The first cloned human.
  25. The Catholic church will begin the process to allow its priest marry.
  26. Businesses will increasingly deploying artificial intelligence to improve their products and services.
  27. Worlds created entirely of clouds. “Unicorns” racing through new landscapes. Data moving faster than the speed of light.
  28. Private cloud computing.
  29. We’ll witness the emergence of a new class of real-time applications in e-commerce and financial technology services powered by super-speedy data analytics.
  30. Machine learning,” a field of computer science will be all the rage.
  31. As mobile devices are ruling the world, having surpassed laptop and desktop searches in terms of paid clicks and traffic generation, it has become imperative for businesses to develop mobile-friendly websites and make their business decisions attuned to this new wave of mobile savvy clientele.
  32. Mobile searches will exceeded desktop searches.
  33. The boundary line between “social media” and “web” will get blurred further in 2016.
  34. The truth will become impossible to find.
  35. The greed of capitalism that is the root of most if not all our World problems will come under further pressure to pay.
  36. The like button will get fewer hits.

PEDRO JADAUJI:  PORTUGAL

  1. Sporting CP will win the Portuguese league.
  2. People will realise that face to face is better than Facebook.
  3. Phone calls and mail letters will star to increase and sms (…) will start do decrease
  4.  Happiness indicators will start to replace GDP.

Nick Harrison: USA

  1. Hilary Clinton will win, learn Spanish, rub Putin nose the wrong way, and cause a recession.

Asbad :   Afghanistan

I predict that President Barack Obama will rethink his plan to have all operational U.S. combat forces out of Afghanistan by the end of 2016. The current reality is that, while the United States is fighting the al Qaeda-ist movement that grandiosely calls itself Islamic State using air strikes and aiding allies on the ground, more needs to be done to make sure its militants do not take over larger swaths of Iraq and Syria.

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WE ALL BEING BRAINWASHED. THE WAY YOU THINK IS BEING CHANGED.

11 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by in Google it., Google Knowledge., Humanity., Life., Social Media., Technology, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized

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THE INTERNET IS CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK.

There’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

For me, as for others, the Net media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

When we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

It is replacing real wisdom with the conceit of wisdom.

It is filling us up with “content,” to the point that we are sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

It is destroying deep thinking, and eroding quiet spaces.

It is replacing compassion with selfishness. It is partly to blame for the current world conflicts.

Our thinking, has taken on a “staccato” quality. A form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source we have already visited.

Smartphones  have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.

They are  becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through our eyes and ears and into our minds.time from human events.

We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.

But there comes a design point when there are so many tools available that our environments lose their simplicity and the cost in added complexity outweighs the benefits of convenience.

In fact it is makes us demonstrably less efficient. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV, our conscience.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s imageDaniel J Levitan

Email, telephone calls, electronic discussion groups, websites, pushed intranet news, letters and memos, faxes, stick-ems, calendars, pagers, and, of course, physical conversations and meetings, are just a few of the communicative events that bombard today’s knowledge worker. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

Printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.

Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.

It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our

We can turn the ringer off our phones, we can close our doors, we can auto-filter our email, we can personalize search engines, ask people to honor privacy, and so forth. But blocking out sacred time segments or sealing ourselves off from outside contact and even filtering email is not a serious solution. 

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Google carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. Which is totally untrue.

Their desire is to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter.”If you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

A load of cobblers. To solve problems that have never been solved before, and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.

If our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence it would be more than unsettling. We would drain of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” turning  our thoughts and actions into scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.

Weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

Remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.  Every information technology carries an intellectual ethic. We stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

What the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

The missing premise is quality: The ratio of high quality to low quality information is falling.

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large-scale.

Information is relentlessly pushed at us, and no matter how much we get we feel we need more, and of better quality and focus.

  • Pushed information is information arriving in our work space over which we have little short-term control – the memos, letters, newspapers, email, telephone calls, journals, calendars etc. that land in one of our in boxes. To deal with it we have to make decisions. Is this garbage? Might it be useful? When? Where should I put it? Must I make a new file or new category for this?
  • Pulled or retrievable information is information we can tap into when we want to find an answer to a question or acquire background knowledge on a topic. Most people harbor a lingering belief that even more relevant information lies outside, somewhere, and if found will save having to duplicate effort.

Our lives ought to get easier in information rich environments but the question is at what cost.

He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement is as good as dead.

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Yet no search engine seems to return hits with sufficient precision to save us from having to browse dozens of useless pages in our effort to berry pick the best items. The result is that we spend more time searching

more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them.

we need a new theoretical understanding of our activity space and our dynamic relation to our environments.Cognitive overload is a brute fact of modern life. It is not going to disappear. In almost every facet of our work life, and in more and more of our domestic life, the jobs we need to do and the activity spaces we have in which to perform those jobs are ecologies saturated with overload.

As technology increases the omnipresence of information, both of the pushed and pulled sort, the consequence for the workplace, so far, is that we are more overwhelmed. There is little reason to suppose this trend to change.