If we ever wanted more evidence that we are now on the cusp of an event that is going to have a disastrous effect on society we only have to look at what is happening in the world at the moment.
Every advance in technology is moving us further and further from our attachment to nature.
Years of Capitalism for profit has produced – Pollution/Waste/ Excessive production/ Wars/ Climate change and technology in the form of AI. All asking the question is Capitalism obsolete?
It is not working for the vast majority of humanity.
Now faced with the arrival of Artificial intelligence, which if not regulated will control market forces, with the super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires reaping the wealth of automation and profit-seeking algorithms to the detriment of us all.
The more AI advances into a general purpose technology that permeates every aspect of life the less sense it makes to allow it to remain in the private hands rather than of the many.
Indeed there is already a case for nationalizing AI.
Its very pervasiveness is invading not just democracy but our private and social lives. Causing wars and exploitation of not just us but our economies – High-Frequency Trading, Sovereign Wealth funds, Currency trading, Trade Agreements, down to what toilet paper you wipe your arse with.
Its inability to spread the wealth, to tackle inequality and poverty not to mention its exploitation of privacy and democracy have recently seen -FaceBook.
No company should be allowed to possess an exclusive cutting edge technology or core AI platform. Indeed with Deep learning, we are now beginning to see programmers feeding computers with learning algorithms that expose them to terabytes of data resulting in software writing software.
THERE IS NO DISPUTING THAT THE WORLD IS GOING TO NEED THE POWER OF AI TO RESOLVE FORTHCOMING PROBLEMS.
But it must serve society as a whole instead of the private capitalist operating in their own self- centered interests.
It must be brought under social control by Regulation with the creation of a virtual world strongroom, where a copy of all original AI algorithms, software programs are required by law to be lodged to be held and vetted re there compliance with our core values.
As I said in a previous post;
We need to create a class of ‘algorithmic auditors’ — trusted representatives of the public who can peer into the code to see what kinds of implicit political and ethical judgments are buried there and report their findings back to us.
This is a good idea, though it poses practical problems about how companies
can retain the commercial edge provided by their computerized secret sauce if
they have to open up their algorithms to quasi-official scrutiny.
It is very unlikely that this will happen. We are however in danger of
App exploitation not only for profit but when there is no immediate cash peril –
culture, education, and crime.
We are well on the road to becoming slaves to the algorithms with computers
taking more than some tough choices out of our hands if we let them.
God forbid that some form of AI manages to become self-aware.
Such automated augury might be considered relatively harmless if its use is
confined to figuring out what products we might like to buy. But it is not going
to stop there.
Amazon Echo machine-learning services are both a powerful revenue generator that is going to remove us from any commitment to society or nature that sustains us all.
A low-cost, ubiquitous computer with all its brains in the cloud that you could interact with over voice—you speak to it, it speaks to you.
As companies build their vital machine-learning tools inside AWS, the likelihood that they will move to competing for cloud operations becomes ridiculously remote.
All technology programmers whether they are Algorithms for profit or otherwise should under Law be required to submit a verified copy of the program to be held in a virtual world strongroom, accessible to all ensuring transparency and accountability.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.
There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.
The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.
In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.
Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.
New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.
All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.
Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.
All need software in the form of algorithms to run.
AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.
Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?
One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
Not surprising.
So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.
That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.
Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this.
Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.
So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.
( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)
Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)
It operates through the following segments:
Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.
Market Cap As of May 2017
$507.5 Billion
Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.
Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:
An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.
Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.
It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.
Amazon:
The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.
Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.
eBay Inc: (PayPal)
There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:
The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:
Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)
Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.
Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.)
A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.
More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.
Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.
These are the main contenders as we know them to-day
—————————————————————————————
So the Question is:
Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.
Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)
At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.
While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.
Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.
One could say that:
Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff, Google represents doming down.
All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.
So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.
I think Not.
In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.
Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us. Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.
The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.
“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”
The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches – is Google.
Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.
Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.
Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.
Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.
Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.
Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.
Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.
By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud. With one winner.
The Google Monopoly.
Once a Google client always a Google client.
How do you stop using Google?
Already impossible.
Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.
Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.
It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.
Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact. It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)
Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?
The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.
Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.
In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.
On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.
Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.
I feel that this will change in the coming years.
All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.
Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.
After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.
It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?
Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.
So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.
= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?
= Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?
= Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?
Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.
Why might this be the case – and does it matter?
Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.
It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.
It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;
Soon, however, things move on to new realms.
Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.
An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.
Social media however has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.
However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.
It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.
It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.
Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.
As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.
The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:
The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.
This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.
Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.
Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.
——
What happens to our online materials at death.
Finally: Capitalism can never be ethical.
There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.
If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service) is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.
Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.
Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.
My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.
Google it.
All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
There is no denying that the benefits of technology are needed but what are the downsides costs.
As the demand for up-to-date technology increases, we need to reevaluate how we measure the hidden cost of the TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION.
It will not be us picking up the tap, but the yet to be born that will have to pay, living in a world that is detached from what makes it all possible The Earth.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
At this point it is impossible to say with any authority what exactly the cost will be.
Some technologies are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop, but you should know about all of them right now. In the not-too-distant future, we will be able to print human organs, but not the brain.
According to Stephen Hawking, “Humans are entering a stage of self-designed evolution.”
That may be so, but technology is more than just fusing the physical and digital worlds.
Marked by emerging technology breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, face and voice recognition and algorithms learning from other algorithms.
With wireless connecting brain-reading technology directly to electrical stimulators on your body it has the potential with more items moving from physical to virtual to decouple us from reality. Wireless communications is already dominating our everyday lives
It is already impacting all disciplines, economies, and industries, our politics, improving medicine, influencing our culture.
Apart from the obvious technology is also in the process of changing democracy, moving capitalism underground, assisting conflicts, packaging natural resources, destabilizing society, disrupt the way governments deliver services to citizens, just to mention the tip of the ice berg.
.It will not be long before we will all have DNA maps from birth.
However with the arrival of Quantum computers the way we use technology will be reshape, along with the societies we live in.
As soon as two to five years from now, such systems or time on such systems are likely to be for sale.
There are probably plenty more uses for quantum computers that nobody has thought up yet.
However you may rest assured that the ordinary citizens (or even governments) won’t be able to own their own quantum computers for a long time, if ever, but I can imagine large companies renting time (measured in fractions of seconds) to whoever needs their services.
With this in mind the race has well started to create monopolies of knowledge Google, of Social Media Society – Facebook, consumerism E Bay, Amazon, Alibaba, of Finance – Pay Pal, of Communication – Apple, of Biotech Thermo Fisher Scientific, of cloud business – Microsoft -IBM, Oracle, of computer microchips to data center-makers-Intel, to name just a few.
Here are a few of their Mission statements:
Facebook: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
Amazon: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”
Pay Pal: “To build the Web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”
Alibaba: “To make it easy to do business anywhere.”
Google: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Microsoft: “To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”
United Nations: “The maintenance of international peace and security.”
Medecins Sans Frontieres: “To help people worldwide where the need is greatest, delivering emergency medical aid to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters or exclusion from health care.”
Non mention the health of the EARTH?
Disruptive technology is, by its very nature, unpredictable but we’ll see more intelligence built into communication. With always-on connectivity, social networking has the power to change cultures, as we saw with the Egyptian Revolution, which led to the Arab Spring.
The results of changing the world are often complicated and unpredictable.
With the technology of smart phones social influences will continue to move rapidly between cultures.
In the broadest sense, technology extends our abilities to change the world: to cut, shape, or put together materials; to move things from one place to another; to reach farther with our hands, voices, and senses. We use technology to try to change the world to suit us better. The changes may relate to survival needs such as food, shelter, or defense, or they may relate to human aspirations such as knowledge, art, or control.
As computational power rises exponentially, not linearly, so does the rate of change — and that means the next 10 years should pack in far more technological change than the last 10.
It is my prediction that all of it will end up in the cloud.
Why?
Because it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of our brains (driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex) that is driving technology to tap into our personal sensors.
Make no mistake: emails, Facebook and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
Already, the cloud is powerful enough to help us communicate through real-time language translation.
When is a profit not a profit? When it turns into a monopoly exploiting all around it.
Just like Capitalism technology it is unable to regulate itself and with the arrival of Quantum computers it will make everything and everybody beholden to technology, endangering much of the openness that we now enjoy online.
So I one again ask the question:
Is it time to regulate Algorithms that have profit as their end targets and is it time that we demanded an open data website that would allow anyone to find information on a host of county government programs, from budget information to welfare data to crime statistics.
This would be linked to two powerful benefits.
First, it makes government more transparent and understandable at a time when trust in the public sector has plummeted.
Second, it has the potential to generate significant economic benefits impacting budget issues, public safety and education, transparency and economic value for tax payers money.
The bottom line is that government data can be extremely valuable for public consumption, but only if the policies behind the data are well thought out and the related costs are affordable. For instance, would a map of society reveal awkward disparities in how rich and poor neighborhoods receive public funding?
Many governments are running on old, outdated systems, making them vulnerable to cyber attacks.
I believe that such an open based data website would benefit from the collective wisdom of the community, simplify how citizens and businesses interact with the state.
However IT WOULD HAVE THE unexpected startup costs if data is kept in a legacy computer system that requires reformatting; quality-related costs to keep open data fresh and up-to-date; legal costs to comply with open data legislation; liability costs in case something goes wrong, such as publication of nonpublic information; and public relations costs that can occur when a jurisdiction generates bad press from open data about poor performance metrics or workforce diversity problems.
That apart present technological advances and information overlays will change how we live in significant ways.
We will have a so-called “smart grid” where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems, allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand. Such a universal method for identifying someone energy requirements becomes much harder when you no longer have a central authority to figure out how to link together the different systems.
It will not be like self-driving trucks with lidar system guidance run by algorithms or self-driving cars.
Who is responsible when the self drive truck or car kills someone. Try bringing a self thought Algorithm to court.
Try suing an Face-detecting systems for wrong identification or payment.
Then we have: Gene-therapy.
Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
Three technologies are coming together to make this new type of mapping possible.
The first is known as “cellular microfluidics.” Individual cells are separated, tagged with tiny beads, and manipulated in droplets of oil that are shunted like cars down the narrow, one-way streets of artificial capillaries etched into a tiny chip, so they can be corralled, cracked open, and studied one by one.
The second is the ability to identify the genes active in single cells by decoding them in superfast and efficient sequencing machines at a cost of just a few cents per cell. One scientist can now process 10,000 cells in a single day.
The third technology uses novel labeling and staining techniques that can locate each type of cell—on the basis of its gene activity—at a specific zip code in a human organ or tissue.
Then we have, the relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
Then we have, Botnets are used to commit click fraud.
Google ads pay a site owner according to the number of people who click on them. The attacker instructs all the computers on his botnet to repeatedly visit the Web page and click on the ad. Dot, dot, dot, PROFIT! If the botnet makers figure out more effective ways to siphon revenue from big companies online, we could see the whole advertising model of the Internet crumble.
Then we have, hackers breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. The problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video recorders, and other gadgets in the “Internet of things.”
Then we have, reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning may soon inject greater intelligence into much more than games.
SO WHAT NOW?
What are the implications to human development and the diversity of life on earth? What opportunities are there to reduce risks and vulnerabilities, enhance resilience, and create transformations to prosperous and equitable futures?
Science can provide only some answers; it is not a panacea for all problems. We need to also make personal, economic, social, and political changes, whatever the cost will be.
Reinforcement-learning algorithm can learn from collated data and experiment in simulation to suggest, say, how and when to operate the cooling systems.
Algorithms don’t know the Meaning of Environment.
They have however so concept of the “The term ‘environment’ it refers to all external conditions and factors that affect living organisms. Here external factors mean all the things around us such as air, water, light, animals, humans etc.
Algorithms are shadow boxers of yesterday all because technology trends can affect the bottom line of business.
Although big data algorithms hold great promise, they should still be approached with caution and skepticism.
For instance Algorithms should not be relied upon to ration medical care until the technology has substantially matured.
If we ignore what is happening there will be more riots, and increasing divisions along economic, religious and ethnic lines with Robots completely replacing humans in the workforce.
IT IS TIME FOR THE OWNERS ALL PROFIT SEEKING ALGORITHMS TO BE REGISTERED WITH A COPY OF THE WORKING CODE. NO PROFIT EARNING ALGORITHMS SHOULD BE GRANTED A PATIENT.
All human comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ITS ALGORITHMS SHOULD BE REGULATED.
Up to now man has exploited almost every opportunity that has come his way to make profit.
In theory you could lay the blame for all our present day troubles on a plant that exploited man – Wheat – in which man invested, time, labor, energy, power and money.
The next exploitation will not be a plant that we are all biological connected to. It will be an innate object called a micro chip turned into Algorithms.
In recent years we are just beginning to release that there is going to be a fundamental change to the ways we will be living our lives in the future.
Our modern global economy struggles with the challenge of using limited natural resources without exhausting them and we are just beginning to value lower life forms, perhaps because we are going to become one.
If and when computer programs attain super human intelligence with unprecedented power should we begin to value these microchip programs more than we value humans?
Would it be acceptable for artificial intelligence in the form of unsupervised Algorithms to exploit us and the earth?
If it is ethical for humans to exploit so must it be for AI.
This is what is taking place with Capitalist Algorithms that are designed to exploit greed.
Giant Tech like Google and Baidu are spending billions on the race for patents and intellectual property rights, combined with external funds (also in the billions) they are on a mission to privatizing the future.
In 2016, the AI market was worth just $644 million. This year (2017) that amount nearly double. Growing exponentially from there, AI is expanding its reach outside of the technology sector, nature and what it provides us all with is a risk of exploitation.
It is now or never if we are to avoid dismal subjugation to continuing exploitation. There’s no turning back now.
Apple has become an icon of American capitalism, technological innovation, and shareholder wealth creation.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact path that AI will take, but there is one thing for sure – It’s Time to Take AI Seriously.
A small, lucky handful of early movers will ride it to untold riches in the Cloud with Quantum Computing, which will result in the ultimate decoupling of humanity from individualism and nature, turning existence itself into mathematical patterns.
In the next five years artificial intelligence will exist as a layer of capability atop every business process, from customer service and marketing to product development and sales, across every industry.
This can be seen already with hungry money putting a monetary values on nature, as it commences to aid and abet, (failing to convey “real” ecological value or reasons for conservation) the packaging of fresh water, scarce resources, energy, etc.
Rest assured Google with biochemical algorithms will know you from the day you are born. Google was not born yesterday, nor was Twitter/Facebook, there comments or like algorithms can already predict your opinions and desires and will perhaps make important life decision on your behalf such as electing the next D Trump.
By the time the rest of us find out about the phenomenon, it’s too late.
It’s already hard to design regulations that ensure we don’t over farm the land, don’t over fish the seas, don’t over cut the forests and don’t take too much water from our rivers and aquifers.
It is not hard to subject all emerging AI to examination. To hold a copy of their software, before they degrade our humanity further. (See previous posts)
Technology is arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it.
While there are numerous natural resources that are being capitalized upon all across the world we are all so preoccupied committing communal suicide on our smart phones, that we are now unintentionally buying into technology that is not going to save the planet but rape it.
Hungry investment money sole purpose is profit.
If you were expecting some kind of warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.
Our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.
Invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world are now acquiring the very essence of what makes the world tick. To the extent we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world we’ve made.
Online trading algorithms that are increasingly controlling markets, stock exchanges, feeding on data to exploit any weakness, while Google’s data-crunching algorithm harvesting our personal data and shape the web we see accordingly. Changing the way humans think. As its code gets ever more sophisticated it is reaching its tentacles into all aspects of our lives, including our cultural preferences.
We have to challenge investments which are driven by AI algorithms if they are based on Profit.
Why?
Because they are packing nature into investment portfolios, which are going to cause more and more conflict in the world.
Take the Paris Climate Change agreement to limit Co2. Worthless!
Because Hungry Money is undermining true conservation investment, and climate change incentives, turning them into emissions trading, commonly referred to as cap-and-trade, embodies commodification of nature in that it allows for the trade of pollution and emissions within a given limit for a specific environment.
Rather than simply outright prohibiting or allowing pollution and other various negative externalities, cap-and-trade essentially permits members of an industry to buy and sell units of emission with a maximum set for the industry as a whole.
Isn’t there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?
In recent decades, market values have crowded out non market norms in almost every aspect of life-medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations.
Without quite realizing it, we are drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Technology and AI are undermining current economic systems with profits that do not contributing to any conservation or sustainability.
Tourist paradises have sprung up in places of high biodiversity, offering exclusivity to their owners and clients while violating agrarian rights, creating social conflict, and destroying ecosystems.
Gigantic cruse Ships bring hordes of App driven city slickers to UNESCO Sites destroying them like Venice, to the Antarctic, to African natural protected areas (in zones of predominantly private property), giving them exclusive rights and increasing real estate values and investments in tourism.
While good governance can be an end in itself, the link between good
governance and poverty reduction is much more complex, and can be obscured by the intrusion of political agendas.
Absentee owners rarely have the same sense of stewardship and restraint as local owners.
What we don’t seem to be able to grasp is that we, every one of us is the Universe. It flows through all of us, not through AI, or platforms driven by profit seeking Algorithms.
They will never be connected like us to it, with or without a conscious.
As algorithms spread their influence beyond machines to shape the raw landscape around them, it might be time to work out exactly how much they know and whether we still have time to tame them.
The parameters used to define “money.”
Who believe money refers only to currencies such as bank notes, coins, and money deposited in savings or checking accounts, digital currency bitcoin, above-ground gold supply, and funds invested in various financial products.
The world isn’t that simple anymore, what Money Can’t Buy is now out of control thanks to AI.
If we are to make this new World of technology work we must apply a World Aid commission on all Algorithms that are designed for profit. ( See previous posts)
There will be little use in walking around a world with Smart phones, Ipads, if we cannot unite before we all vanish into the cloud of exploitation.
You be the :
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
We all know that the present crisis in European Union has freighting potential to undermine all our lives?
The problem is that despite all the rhetoric Wall Street and World Stock Markets underpin the hard nose of business with the priesthood of economists.
Financial experts and commentators worshiping it worldwide as a God.
Leaving us incapable of grasping that at one point in human history the Laws of the market can only be a human construction which now seen as absolute – even when they clearly do not work.
The high priests of today oblivious to the anti-market nature of their behavior do not hesitate to intervene to fix it on a colossal scale in contravention of the market’s own precepts.
The idea that money-making is the primary Goal of the most admired people in Society, the Goal of our Nations economic philosophies, the G 20, the European Union, our education, combined with our central defining consumerism greed is back firing.
What we got is the results that we see today:
Quantitative Easing, Money Printing /Austerity/ /Germany bailouts /Guarantees/ Banks before people Interest fixing /Elections/ Unemployment/ Bonuses/Tax confusion/ Independent Referendums, all served up with large daily doses of verbal diarrhea by every expert that has written a book.
I have not written any book on the subject and I am no expert but I am beginning to wake up to the need for our Captains of Industry, our political leaders and business to realize that competitiveness is not all that it is dressed up to be.
It can severely impair a given country’s ability to choose its own social and economic destiny and our individuality.
No currency can set the boundaries of a nation.
So it is worth reminding ourselves how grandiose the dreams of the European Union founders were.
Our present world can be seen as full of conflict, pain, misery, wars, while across the world ecological, economic and political spaces are being enclosed through privateering, Algorithms, liberalization and globalization and the hidden purchasing power of Sovereign Funds – All breeding new insecurities anxieties and stresses.
In this world Europe was renamed the European Common Market with its inhabitants viewed chiefly in economic terms, as producers or consumers, not countries with vastly different histories, problems, and circumstances.
The notion that trade and wealth creation would create a Europe laisser-faire was not basis on its history but on a vague notion that togetherness would make us less likely to repeat World War One /Two.
Reducing our society to markets and us humans to consumers.
Those that are rich have status and those who are poor do not.
You only have to read a newspaper to see how the overpaid footballers, film and soap star, business people are held up to be admired. While we the people fooled by capitalism that has made work the center of our lives and are now in the process of destroying it as a satisfying meaningful activity through the world stock exchanges that are driven by algorithms that determine whether we should retire at 63, 65, and 68 remain voiceless.
As a Species we have basis needs for meaning of identity, for community, and security, for food water and freedom.
So it stands to reason to prevent our collectively insane political leaders terminating life in Europe never mind the earth that we need to do something.
We all know that banks can’t stop themselves. Bail them out by all means but only under strict regulations.
If we in Europe want to avoid a repeat of the wars that devastated the Continent in the past all that is required (a saving of trillions) is a united military European Army. This will provide Europe with reasonably secure environment, safe from the threat of major war with its countries being let find their own versions of modernity or not to modernize at all.
Europe does not need a free market to thrive.
How can we achieve this?
There is only one solution scrap the Euro and let each country set its own exchange rates according to its own GDP (without the tanks, planes, nuclear weapons) set against the value of human resources, social capital, and ecological assets.
The present melt down of the EU could not have come at a better time.
If we do not preserve the Capital of Europe its different cultures /languages/ history and the like there will be no Economics.
We all know that economic is not a science however each time history repeats its self the price goes up.
The Euro is fundamental flawed and please god will remain so to protect what is the very essence of living or being born in Europe.
It’s time we all realize that the Natural Capital of the world, water, clean air, oceans, forests have to be protected so we must pay the keepers of the natural capital if we as humans are to live at all.
So let’s start in Europe with some common European aspirations.
Self sufficiency in Power- creates a common European kilowatt price: Abolish road tolls: Proper periphery border controls: Freedom of movement of currencies within the market – abolish commission charges: European Youth employment programs: European health / pension Euro bonds backed by all countries – to mention a few.
God knows it not difficult to identify what is needed, just attached the words total transparency to any common Goal and it will be achieved without Greed.
We all know or at least we should all be aware that our world is becoming less and less transparent thanks to what we call Artificial Intelligence.
The challenge there is:
The false promise of the Internet was that it can connect people from different backgrounds, with different beliefs and across disparate locations.
The trend toward personalization by AI is impeding the fulfillment of that promise?
What is becoming more and more apparent is that while most personalization on the web is algorithmically driven, aren’t we implicitly, informing the algorithms based on the choices we’ve previously made interacting with content?
Couldn’t you then, in theory, manipulate the filter so you see what you want to see or are there too many factors beyond our control?
Consider:
Even if you’re completely logged out of Google, on a new computer, the company can track 57 signals about you — from what kind of laptop you’re using to what your IP address is to what the font size in your browser is. Already, that gives a lot of important clues about age, income and demographics.
It’s ironic — the promise of personalization is that it gives us our own personal view of the world.
But the challenge is that a lot of the time, it’s actually pushing us toward a stereotyped, simplified version of ourselves: “This person is male, so we’ll show him more gadget and car news.”
So let me ask you.
Many of the major social, discovery and media sites on the Internet now implement some type of personalization. Do you feel these sites have a responsibility to educate consumers about how their information is being filtered? Do you think users should be able to opt out of personalization?
I would say Yes, on both counts.
In an increasingly complex and vast media landscape it is crucial that me maintain our private lives.
Why?
Because: Algorithms of all shapes and sizes are monitoring, analyzing, making
decisions, dictating our credit scores etc. They are shaping our lives and economies, our future, so shouldn’t we know what code and mathematical equations, or deep learning go into making them work.
However Transparency alone won’t help.
Algorithms are complicated so exposing the code behind them won’t make them more understandable. Knowing how an algorithm is coded is useless without knowing the data that has being fed into it in the first place.
There is only one solution and that is the:
The Creation of a New World Organisation that is totally transparent, and self financing: To vet all Technology. To ensure that they comply with the core world gold standard of human values.
(See previous Posts)
Let me ask you two further questions.
Can some level of personalization be useful?
What are we missing that we need to see?
Some amount of algorithmic personalization is necessary — there’s just too much stuff to sort through for humans to do it all. However you don’t know who Google thinks you are or on what basis it’s editing your results, and therefore you don’t know what you’re missing.
A lot of the personalization that exists today just serves up information junk food, but a growing portion is being curated by robots — computer algorithms that are filtering content and deciding what we get to see.
It may be delicious, but it doesn’t feed the soul.
Now it’s possible to live in a bubble where that stuff doesn’t ever show up — you’d never know it’s happening.
Take the Facebook “Like” button — the main way that information gets spread on Facebook. “Like” isn’t a neutral word — it’s easy to Like “I just finished a marathon,” and hard to Like “cell phones may cause cancer.”
So some kinds of information get through, and others don’t, and when that’s happening in the Facebook News Feed, where an increasing number of folks get their news, it’s a real problem.
Most people aren’t aware that their Google search results, Yahoo News links, or Facebook feed is being tailored in this way.
Filters can provide relevance and combat information overload, but with so much riding on automated decisions to ensure algorithms deal with humans fairly is now more relevant than ever.
I recently read that in five-year your smartphone could be reading your mind.
Brain- computer interface.
Personalization couldn’t exist without the massive dossiers of personal data being collected by big companies online these days. And it’s a problem because consumers don’t have much control over that.
The current laws around personal data just don’t contemplate a world in which a click on one website changes what you see on an entirely different one.
Almost all popular websites, from search engines to social networks to media outlets, are now utilizing filters in some way to personalize content for visitors.
When websites show us only what we like, we get cut off from the diverse points of view that can enrich our understanding of the world.
We get Donald Trumps.
Privacy is about controlling what the world is allowed to know about you. This is about controlling what you’re able to see of the world — what your filters let through and what they don’t.
Its time to wake up.
We can lose sight of our common problems, but they don’t lose sight of us.
It’s only a matter of time before our Fidelity/ Loyalty cards are linked up to our personal data held by banks, e-commerce sites and social media. If not already.
We will then be looking at citizen character score, which will bring credit scores to a whole new level, turning them more into to life scores, by tracking anything and everything we do. The scary bit is what is tracked and by who.
I hear you saying that this will never be accepted.
It is already on the cards for people living in China and Singapore. Humans and robot algorithms, living in peaceful harmony. Where you go, what you buy, who you know, how many points are on your driving licence, how your friends rate you.
The scores will serve not just to indicate an individual’s credit risk, but could be used in a vast array of applications and organisations such as Governments, Benefits, Hospital Operations, Visa, Education, down to all fields that makes Society including prison sentences, landlords, employers, and even romantic partners to gauge an individual’s character.
All stored in the Cloud. Which comes in many different models forms.
Ubiquitous access to the network: Self-service and on-demand access to computing capabilities. This service will most often be performed by the service provider automatically without the need for human interaction.
Cloud Computers is not the easiest of terms to define, or explain what it all actually means. Owned by Google, Twitter, Gmail and Facebook the Cloud is elusive as grabbing a cloud itself.
Perhaps we can blame it all on Leonhard Euler one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, and also a prolific inventor of canonical notation.
( An Euler path is a path that uses every edge of a graph exactly once.)
One way or the other to use a Trumpetism: It’s ain’t going to be great unless we build algorithms that have a sense of civic purpose embedded in them, giving us both entertainment and the information we really need, not profit.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
O sorry about the line spacing in this post just cannot figure out how to correct it.
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 BLINDto 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.
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.
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
Time spent looking at a cellphone is time spent oblivious to the world.
Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians.
We faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century.” through “bit rot,” when old computer files become useless junk.
There is a sense of powerlessness and fatalism about TECHNOLOGY.
If consciousness or HISTORICAL intelligence are lost, it might mean that value itself becomes absent from the universe.
We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.
Ancient civilizations suffered no such problems, because histories written in cuneiform on baked clay tablets, or rolled papyrus scrolls, needed only eyes to read them.
To day “intelligence” is related to statistical and economic notions of rationality – colloquially, the ability to make good decisions, plans, or inferences. To study today’s culture, future scholars will be faced with PDFs, Word documents, and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes hardware too.
From This to This
Most of the images we take today are uploaded straight from a digital camera or a phone, with the picture never actually existing as a physical artifact.
The significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later.
We’ve learned from objects that have been preserved purely by happenstance that give us insights into an earlier civilisation,”
We need history to embrace new values and institutions in pursuit of a just, fulfilling, and sustainable civilization not a “digital black hole”.
In fact, due to the intricate disconnectedness of production and economies around the world today, our technological civilization is perhaps more prone to a sudden collapse than other societies through history.
When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world-wide web the more important it is that we create legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies.
So digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.
Deciding on the best format to preserve them for the next hundred years relies on anticipating what technology is likely to still be available in the future.
Computer hard disks can hold vast amounts of digitised information, but everything is lost if it fails or is wiped.
How do we preserve our interaction on Facebook, Twitter, comment threads and citizen journalism across the web?
In fact, due to the intricate disconnectedness of production and economies around the world today, our technological civilization is perhaps more prone to a sudden collapse than other societies through history. Plenty of once-great civilisations have collapsed, and our current industrialised society is by no means invulnerable –
Who will decide what worth keeping and where will we preserve a core kernel of human knowledge.
The significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later.
Even though Wikipedia represents a vast repository of information, it is not structured in a way that would guide a post-catastrophe society through stages of recovery.
Google certainly is not.
It has already changed the world by altering the way we interact with technology and there can be no questions its long-term ambitions.
Its mission is to collect information which you will have to buy with a google wallet.
“We envision a marketplace for payment instruments, commerce and loyalty services”
It’s not hard to envision a fully intact ecosystem of Google offerings with location-based mobile ads driving tracked incremental revenue via etail integrated mobile commerce, or via sales that are picked up in-store, via mobile payment.
“Now toss in Google Offers, NFC and QR codes for trigger point marketing, and the fact that Google already has the accounts open and the pot gets even richer.”
Personally I have little time for Banks but I would rather have a bank to provide a of mobile wallet products, not technology companies that can disappear into the cloud.
If Google was to make a move into supporting bank-branded wallets we would all become Googlefyed.
Google has far more on its plate than just financial services.
It’s a major player in telecommunications with its Android smart phone platform. It’s made forays into thermostats, home security and satellite imaging.
So it’s not just words and images that we risk losing for ever it’s the “grey literature” of official reports, briefings and policy statements that are only published online also risk being lost to the future?
Bit rot, a digital dark age is on the horizon unless we store information in DNA.
“It is very possible that … one machine would suffice to solve all the problems … of the whole [world]” – Sir Charles Darwin, 1946.
“Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance – the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.” – Emily Greene Balch.
Perhaps The ETHEREUM IS THE ANSWER.
Importantly, because there is not a company or indeed any entity in charge of or controlling Ethereum, the cost of running the infrastructure doesn’t have to include any profit margin.
It might allow us to push the boundary on what the digital realm can cover.
As if there are not enough problems in the world here is another that is out of control.
THIS IS THE LADY, that initiated the privatisation boom.
She saw privatisation as “fundamental to improving Britain’s economic performance”.
But it also chimed with her political ideology.
“It was one of the central means of reversing the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism,” she declared, adding: “Just as nationalisation was at the heart of the collectivist programme by which Labour governments sought to remodel British society, so privatisation is at the centre of any programme of reclaiming territory for freedom.”
England is now one of the most sold off countries on earth.
Here is just a few items recently sold.
Before you look remember that the rest of the world governments are doing the same thing flogging off what is not belong to them but belongs to the generations of people who worked and payed taxes.
Governments of very different political and ideological streams are bent on privatizing, and governments that are already privatizing are moving from selling small retail outlets and industries to selling larger mining and infrastructure enterprises. Just look what happened when the World Bank forced Bolivia to sell its water to Privatization.
Above all, perhaps, in shifting the democratic to market-based principles of allocation, it favors those who are strongest in their control of the market, and who also happen to represent the social basis of Conservatism.
The UK has sold: Gold Reserves, Transportation, Mail, Water, Banks, Health, Universities, Prisons, Power, Car parking, Schools, Telecom, Gas, Steel, Airports, Gambling, Fire and Ambulance services, Rolls Royce, Jaguar, British Airways, Shipbuilding, Council Housing, Sea link, and the list goes on.
Whats’ left: Scotland, and the crown Jewels. It has already sold Northern Ireland and Democracy many times ( MP Expenses Scandal)
Privatisations by share offer, 1981-91 From Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11(Bantam, 1992).
Date
Company
% of equity initially sold
Proceeds £m
Feb 1981
British Aerospace
51.6
150
Oct 1981
Cable & Wireless
50
224
Feb 1982
Amersham International
100
71
Nov 1982
Britoil
51
549
Feb 1983
Associated British Ports
51.5
22
June 1984
Enterprise Oil
100
392
July 1984
Jaguar
99
294
Nov 1984
British Telecom
50.2
3,916
Dec 1986
British Gas
97
5,434
Feb 1987
British Airways
100
900
May 1987
Rolls-Royce
100
1,363
July 1987
British Airports Authority
100
1,281
Dec 1988
British Steel
100
2,500
Dec 1989
Regional Water Companies
100
5,110
Dec 1990
Electricity Distribution Companies
100
5,092
Mar 1991
National Power and PowerGen
60
2,230
May 1991
Scottish Power and Scottish Hydro Electric
100
2,880
Whatever way you look at it the acceleration of interest in privatization evident in the last two to three years is striking.
Here is the list of sales in the rest of the world-wide.
You will be shocked and hopefully made a aware or appreciate what is going on.
We have rampaging Sovereign Wealth Funds buy up the world resources, and manipulating Governments. This combined with the World Bank and the IMF SUPPORT IT IS THE GREATEST SALE OF ALL. EARTH. BUY AND GET NOTHING FOR FREE.
So what is privatization and what is happening in privatization?
Privatization is the transfer of ownership of assets to the private sector. Through management contracts and leases and sell off (sale of minority shares.)
Why privatize?
All types of privatization have the potential to increase so-called static efficiency-what economists like to call X-efficiency-which means pushing enterprises to operate cost effectively on their production frontier.
What Is Being Privatized?
There are virtually no limits on what can be privatized.
The argument that privatization creates additional public resources is illusory.
Attempts to sell nonviable firms as going concerns may not only invite special protection or subsidies, but may also lead to subsequent government bail-outs.
Markets fail, but so do governments. which lead to government bail-outs, financed either through taxes or inflation and the new buzz word Austerity a Capitalist word for Privatization by the back door. Greece!
Both taxes and inflation hit the poorer citizen harder than the rich.
The World Bank and the IMF act as a catalyst for privatization.
From Water, to Oxygen, to Time, everything that you take for granted will be privatized and subject to easy and affordable payments.
Not in your wildest dreams will it be affordable.
Get used to it. For there is absolutely nothing that you can do.
Or is there. (See below)
The most concerning effects of all this is – The Race to Buy Up the World’s Fresh Water supplies.
Out of the 1,226 billionaires around the world four billionaires including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page are backing a newly unveiled asteroid-mining venture, Planetary Resources Inc adding to an impressive list of ultra-rich people trying to reshape spaceflight and exploration in the 21st century. Each man is worth $1 billion or more, according to recent estimates by Forbes magazine, with Google execs Page and Schmidt having about $16.7 billion and $6.2 billion to their names, respectively. Film maker James Cameron worth $700 million or so.
H20 will open up a Trillion dollar market in Space.
We are in the midst of a global freshwater crisis.
Around the world, rivers, lakes, and aquifers are dwindling faster than Mother Nature can possibly replenish them; industrial and household chemicals are rapidly polluting what’s left.Meanwhile, global population is ticking skyward.
Goldman Sachs estimates that global water consumption is doubling every 20 years, and the United Nations expects demand to outstrip supply by more than 30 percent come 2040.
Water has been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,”
If all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil—and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East.
The project is the brainchild of two American companies. One, True Alaska Bottling, has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka’s bountiful reserves.
The other, S2C Global, is building the water-processing facility in India. If the companies succeed, they will have brought what Sitka hopes will be a $90 million industry to their city, not to mention a solution to one of the world’s most pressing climate conundrums.
They along with Nestle are turning life’s most essential molecule into a global commodity.
Fresh Air is next on the list.
By definition, a commodity is sold to the highest bidder, not the customer with the most compelling moral claim.
As the crisis worsens, companies like True Alaska that own the rights to vast stores of water (and have the capacity to move it in bulk) won’t necessarily weigh the needs of wealthy water-guzzling companies like Coca-Cola or Nestlé against those of water-starved communities
In Phoenix or Ghana; privately owned water utilities will charge what the market can bear, and spend as little as they can get away with on maintenance and environmental protection. Other commodities are subject to the same laws, of course. But with energy, or food, customers have options: they can switch from oil to natural gas, or eat more chicken and less beef.
There is no substitute for water, not even Coca-Cola.
The Colorado River Basin is struggling through its 11th year of drought. In the USA the real water barons cannot be reduced to a simple archetype. They include a diverse array of buyers and sellers—from multinational water giants like Suez and Veolia that together deliver water to some 260 million taps around the world, to wildcatter oil converts like T. Boone Pickens who wants to sell the water under his Texas Panhandle ranch to thirsty cities like Dallas.
Eventually every last drop will be privately controlled.
And when that happens, the world will find itself divided along a new set of boundaries: water haves on one side, water have-nots on the other. The winners (Canada, Alaska, Russia) and losers (India, Syria, Jordan)will be different from those of the oil conflicts of the 20th century, but the bottom line will be much the same: countries that have the means to exploit large reserves will prosper.
The rest will be left to fight over ever-shrinking reserves. Some will go to war.
The World Bank infamously required scores of impoverished countries—most notably Bolivia—to privatize their water supplies as a condition of desperately needed economic assistance. These days, global water barons have set their sights on a more appealing target: countries with dwindling water supplies and aging infrastructure,
Nowhere is this truer than China.
As the water table under Beijing plummets, wells dug around the city must reach ever-greater depths (nearly two-thirds of a mile or more, according to a recent World Bank report) to hit fresh water. Since 2000, when the country opened its municipal services to foreign investment, the number of private water utilities has skyrocketed. But as private companies absorb water systems throughout the country, the cost of water has risen precipitously. “It’s more than most families can afford to pay,
Meanwhile, more than half a million pipes burst every year, according to the American Water Works Association, and more than 6 billion gallons of water are lost to leaky pipes.
Privatization of basic human needs is never good.
Our governments are controlled by private corporations and banks.
Privatization of government services (such that benefit the people, all the people) is perverting Democracy.
Privatization of public services is the death knell of parliamentary democracy, the death knell of the extreme form of capitalism currently practiced in too many countries.
We face a global water crisis, made worse by the warming temperatures of climate change.
A quarter of the world’s people don’t have sufficient access to clean drinking water.
Water privatization is used here as a shorthand for private sector participation in the provision of water services and sanitation. has turned a public good into a private good.
Many believe that the privatization of water is incompatible with ensuring the international human right to water.909 million people were served by “private players” in 2011 globally, up from 681 million people in 2007.
The World Bank Group pushes privatization as a key solution to the water crisis.
Instead of using its position to line the pockets of water companies, the World Bank should support what is most needed: affordable and clean – and public – water for all. When the private sector engages in water provision, greater disparities in access and cost follow.
The current Chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, the largest producer of food products in the world, believes that the answer to global water issues is privatization.
For profit” everything! Profit is killing the planet.
Human males seek dominance even at the price of self-annihilation.
Are we all mad, it looks like it.
We can talk till the cows come home > We Can have Summits on Climate Change > We can listen to the G8 the G7 the United Nations, the World Health, the President of the USA, the technocrats, the Economic Gurrous, Religious Leaders, the Free market, China, the International space station, your neighbor.
If the truth was known no one has a blind notion how to change course.
WELL LET ME TELL YOU AS CAPTAIN OF THIS BLOG AND POST THERE IS ONLY ONE SOLUTION’S.
That is to make Capitalism with its insatiably greed for profit PAY by placing a World Aid Commission of all High frequency stock trading, on all Foreign Exchange transactions over $20,000, on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisition. (See previous posts). This can be achieved with little or no cost to the world economy by the click of a button. Producing a vast perpetual fund to address the Inequality the bane of the modern world.
Before I finish I can hear you saying who, how, where this fund would operate.
It does not matter as long as the funds are allocated on a lotto bases.
Every deserving project (world wise) after a vetting process to see if viable would be placed in a once a year draw according to its capital requirements.
Unlike the World bank or IMF the winners would not have to repay the funds, (provided the project undertake was totally transparent and completed in full. ) any residual funds could be places in a People World fund to protect against privatization.
Any comments, ideas, positive or negative – Welcome.
I dare you to change the course of humanity with me.
Technology is now deeply embedded within society, so not planning for the future of technology is by far one of the most costly mistakes we will ever make, in more ways than one.
From This to This 
Meanwhile, global population is ticking skyward.
