( Eight minute read.)

When you look at the state of the world you have to ask yourself have we all lost our marbles, and where is the protest voice of the Young.

You could say that we are well along in the process of causing our own extinction and the planet has officially entered its sixth mass extinction event.

Such a view is now beginning to occasionally find its way into mainstream consciousness.

The situation is already so serious with so many self-reinforcing feedback loops already in play it seem we are on a rolling coaster, incapable of acting,or if we do, it will be after the event, if there is anything left to save.

We have a vast choice of the end-of-humanity scenarios to pick from, to derail life as we know it.

For example:

A self-induced catastrophe such as nuclear war or a bioengineered pandemic. Disruptive innovation and technological changes, Solar storms, Cosmic collisions, Super volcanoes, Rising sea levels, overcrowding, denuded resources to mention just a few.

We’re driving to extinction at least 150 species each day.

Nuclear power plants require grid-tied electricity, cooling water and people getting paychecks. Without all these, they melt down, thus immersing all life on earth in ionizing radiation.

As if the above is not enough we are now selling or most valuable resource – Intelligence. 

So what can be done?

First of all, internal and external issues are more linked than ever. Now, more than ever, we need principled leaders with an understanding of history.

Freedom and the rule of law are under threat.

Why?

Because while the world teeters on a precipice of being plundered by Capitalist Artificial intelligence. A new reality is taking shape: war is called peace, a bloody victory is a step towards reconciliation, and a terrorist regime is a legitimate power.

The further we removed ourselves from the world the worse will be our encounter with the world beyond.

Ignoring the unregulated introduction of Artificial Intelligence.

All causing disillusionment and confusion with the great visions of the future, all are demanding that we cope as one with the present reality with our ability to protest hijacked by Internet petitions sites that are ignored or focused on parochial problems.

An individuals future is shaped ultimately by environmental factors.

The year 2017 opens on a world laid to waste. Some areas are littered with mass graves and there doesn’t seem to be any big global rush to reduce emissions as a result of the Paris Climate Agreement.

In the end, no amount of research can do much to prevent permafrost melting realising, methane – a greenhouse gas 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a shorter timescale into the atmosphere, warming it further, which in turn causes more permafrost to melt, and so on.

Scientists estimate up to 13 percent of global carbon emissions come from deforestation – greater than emissions from every car, truck and plane on the planet combined.

Because Globalism is an ideology, and its struggle with nationalism it will shape the coming era.

Donald J. Trump five months short of seventy-one will take office on January 20. His election tips us into the unknown threatened disengagement from the world.

Mother Teresa in the Uk wants disengagement from the EU.

Both are successful alpha personalities.  Both work in progress—“Everything is negotiable”—both displaying a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world, an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.

From Brexit to Trump to the rise of nationalist parties across Europe, the old division between left and right is giving way to a battle between self-styled patriots and confounded globalists.

For decades, trade, industrialization and demographics produced a virtuous circle of rising prosperity. By the 2000s, globalism was triumphant.

IT IS NOW OVERREACHED AND BLIND to the nationalist backlash, not to mention the new form of Globalisation – Artificial Intelligence.

Many globalists now assume that the discontent is largely driven by stagnant wages and inequality. If people are upset about immigration, they reason, it is largely because they fear competition with low-wage workers and not the technological Revolution that is replacing their need to work in the first place. Yet their faith in open borders remains unshaken.

That crisis has woken up globalists to the flaws of globalization but not it seems to me the pending exploration of Apps run on Algorithms that are designed to create profit for the Monopolies of the Internet.  Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, to mention a few.

Many of the tech industry’s biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for A.I. In the industry’s lingo, the companies are engaged in a “platform war.”

The company that controls A.I. will steer the tech industry for years to come.

In fact, much of the backlash against immigration (and globalism) is not economic but cultural: Many people still care about their own versions of national identity and mistrust global institutions such as the EU.

These voters are bothered less by competition from immigrants than by their perceived effect on the country’s linguistic, religious and cultural norms. About how changes to “the composition of the local population” would affect “their neighborhoods, schools and workplaces.”

They might have their priorities slightly wrong.

Is the new nationalism a cloak for ethnic and religious exclusion?

New nationalism often thrives on xenophobia.

Globalists should not equate concern for cultural norms and national borders with xenophobia.

There must be some sort of middle ground between a nationalist and globalist approach. In short, there is ample reason for skepticism about whether the new nationalists can prove themselves a genuinely secular, democratic alternative to globalism.

If globalists are to regain the public’s trust, they will need to re-examine their own policies. Political capital might be better invested in preserving existing trade pacts, not passing new ones. Many European globalists blame the euro’s crisis on too little integration, not too much. But pressing for a more federal Europe could further alienate voters who “do not share our Euro-enthusiasm,”

Borders use to mean something, but this version of civilization is the least sustainable of them all. We cannot sustain the unsustainable forever in a world more interconnected.

In fact, 2017 is looking pretty bad…Russia dominating the world order. But it too will pop. New cyber attacks.

In this context, the basic principles of democratic life in both Europe and the U.S. — truth, fact-based reality, justice and the rule of law — are being gradually eroded.

The most important thing is to understand what might steer us towards a more secure world order, where respect for the rule of law and for international bodies are granted their proper place.

European powers may choose to find strength in their union. Brought together by the need to combat those who threaten fundamental European values, Paris, Berlin, Rome and the Benelux countries could launch new initiatives to bring about real European cooperation.

Should these institutions find themselves unable to take a stand and act according to global interests and basic values, there is no reason why 2017 should not continue in the same vein as 2016, and the consequences may be irreversible.

It’s time to abandon our usual pessimism about the state of the planet and the course of history. We’ve got many challenges to overcome, but it might be a good idea to adopt a bit of youthful optimism when it comes to confronting them.

We need to create a hope insurgency. 

Despite half of the world’s youth living on less than two dollars a day.

A social media revolution is unfolding before our eyes, forever changing the way we connect. This generation, the most interconnected generation ever, continues to grow rapidly, but its voice is diluted by Social media making the challenges they face are ever more daunting.

We need to ask ourselves:

How can we can empower youth to drive social progress. From crowd-sourcing initiatives and mobile-projects to innovation jams and social media campaigns.

Whatever changes you would like to effect in our society has to begin with you.

The best leaders the world has ever known are the reformers who were accountable and responsible for their own change.

The commitment for change has no days off, does not allow for excuses, does not allow for pardons. If you want to see change you must first start within.

It’s that simple and it’s that profound.

So where is the Global YOUTH Outrage?

Before there were blogs and tweets – even Wikipedia – to turn to, the mainstream media held a monopoly over knowledge and news which was hard to challenge. Now all knowledge is being collected by Google to feed Artificial Intelligent Algorithms.

THE world must change to meet the wave of popular uprising which catapulted Donald Trump to power and brought about Brexit. The world can be changed as much by education as by being harangued. It’s time for international leaders to bury their liberal attitudes and address the concerns of the masses. It is time for government to act in the long-term interest of the people, even if they do not agree in the short-term.

The twin pillars of liberalism and globalisation which have dominated politics over the past generation must adapt to a “world transformed”.

Society is changing rapidly and I fear that many organisations are failing to notice and are being left behind. I suspect that the scale of such a change can only really be appreciated in hindsight.

In the rich world, particularly, the first generation that has rung up a huge national debt and established a huge unfunded pension scheme is about to retire. The interesting, to say the least, question is whether the next generation will be willing to carry this burden and peacefully pay the debt and peacefully pay the pensions. I think not.

WILL THE WORLD OF 2052 BE A BETTER WORLD?

It’s important to note that people 35 years from now will judge their circumstance more on how it has changed from their own recent past than from our vantage point of today.

Billion will have some level of Internet access, be much better informed, and be increasingly helped by local solar energy. They will have many fewer children. They will be largely urban (except for the minority still living off the land). They will grapple with overall effects of climate damage, but those in dense urban areas will likely have little firsthand experience with the damage caused by the erratic weather (though plenty of secondhand information via electronic media). They will live with the unpleasant knowledge that even more climate impacts lie ahead.

There will be huge differences between people and Artificial Intelligence.

There is be no such thing as the Free Market.

People power hopefully will have transformed the world. From a psychological perspective, probably no, because the future prospects in 2052 will be grim.

University is where such simplistic notions are supposed to be challenged, but they now educate for the market place and not for Intelligence.

The winners of tomorrow will be those organizations with strong leaders who demonstrate agility, authenticity, connectivity to their talent, and sustainability.

By 2018, at least 50 percent of developers will include A.I. features in what they create. The goal is to capture all human knowledge and turn it in saleable AI. It’s where the capitalist market is headed.

No worries, you might say: you could just program it to make

The superintelligent machine manufactures some as-yet-uninvented raw-computing material (call it “computronium”) and uses that to check each doubt. But each new doubt yields further digital doubts, and so on, until the entire earth is converted to computronium.

When a computer became capable of independently devising ways to achieve goals, it would very likely be capable of introspection—and thus able to modify its software and make itself more intelligent. In short order, such a computer would be able to design its own hardware.

If this sounds absurd to you, you’re not alone.

I am one protesting voice in the wilderness of the virtual reality, but I am sure there are billions.

The problem is unifying them into one collective protest to demand that the United nations pass a people’s resolution to give all artificial Intelligence and technological advances a stamp of human approval.

All comments, suggestions, welcome, all like clicks chucked in the bin.