Category Archives: Technology.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS IT TIME TO REVISIT DARWIN ASSERTION OF SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST?

25 Friday Oct 2019

Posted by in #whatif.com, Artificial Intelligence., Dehumanization., Evolution., Humanity., Our Common Values., Reality., Technology., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The world to day., Unanswered Questions.

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(Five-minute read)

With technology and new technique in artificial intelligence redefining how life can be created opening a research window into the early moments of a human life perhaps the above question is not so farcical, despite some thorny ethical constraints like artificial embryos.

In a breakthrough that redefines how life can be created, embryologists working at the University of Cambridge in the UK have grown realistic-looking mouse embryos using only stem cells. No egg. No sperm. Just cells plucked from another embryo.

What if they turn out to be indistinguishable from real embryos?

Then there are advances in genomic biotechnology presenting the possibility of bringing back long-extinct species.

To get from the genome work in the lab to herds of Woolly Mammoths would definitely bring the survival of the fittest into question.

Generative adversarial network, or GAN, takes two neural networks—the simplified mathematical models of the human brain that underpin most modern machine learning—and pits them against each other in a digital cat-and-mouse game. It is endeavouring to give machines imagination. 

DNA has linked 206 variants to intelligence. One day, babies will get DNA report cards at birth. BBVA-openmind

Herbert Spencer coined the term “Survival of the Fittest” in 1864.

Darwin intended “fittest” to mean the members of the species best suited for the immediate environment, the basis of the idea of natural selection.

Darwin’s distinctive idea was to emphasize natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution: if certain heritable traits increase or decrease the chances of survival and reproduction in the struggle for life, then those traits that favour survival and reproduction will increase in frequency over generations, and thus organisms will become more adapted to their environments, and over a long period of time the differences between varieties of a species can become so great that the varieties become new species.

On the one hand, he tells the reader to disregard his metaphorical personification of Nature as implying “conscious choice” or “intelligent power,” because nature should be understood as “only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws.”

On the other hand, he refuses to give up his personification of Nature, apparently because he senses that this engages the mind of the reader through the poetic imagery of Nature as a person.

The survival of the fittest that determines everything is stuck in our lexicon. With the phrase today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended.

When it comes to technology “Survival of the fittest” is inaccurate for two important reasons.

First, survival is merely a normal prerequisite to reproduction.

Second, fitness has specialized meaning in biology different from how the word is used in popular culture. In population genetics, fitness refers to differential reproduction. “Fitness” does not refer to whether an individual is “physically fit” – bigger, faster or stronger – or “better” in any subjective sense.

It refers to a difference in reproductive rate from one generation to the next.

But in evolutionary terms, survival is only half the picture; you must also reproduce to be “fit” in the Darwinian sense.

The influence of the environment on life expectancy in the future will be far greater political, not a biological issue. It will be the survival of those best able to adapt to change.

Resources, especially those necessary for survival, will become more valued.

Artificial intelligence may gain, along with a sense of imagination, a more independent ability to make sense of what it sees in the world but is the technology ready?

If the AI revolution is going to spread Darwin natural selection it will have to be updated, then the real AI revolution can begin. Darwin always brought in information and made a whole new picture out of it. evolution

Is Darwin still relevant today?   Yes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a biology class that isn’t based on evolutionary biology. Yet the explanatory power of the evolutionary theory is not bound to biology.

Why? Because the theory of evolution is still evolving.

As the late Russian Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

Darwin not only made us aware of how nature works, but also of our place within nature. ( Unfortunately for him the discovery of DNA and that Quantum Mathematics  governs all biology had not been discovered)

Evolution now needs to be critically evaluated in the classroom, rather than dogmatically indoctrinated.

Artificial intelligence is and will take both to a whole new level and transform them into something relevant to our time and our discoveries.

Thus, we say that all the individuals of a species comprise a gene pool from which selection (either artificial or natural) can select. The important point is that we cannot select for genes that are not in the gene pool of the species. Only clones have the same genes and are essentially identical—including the same sex.

In the future, the evolutionist must look to mutations, their most ludicrous mechanism of all.

A new DARPA research program is developing brain-computer interfaces that could control “swarms of drones, operating at the speed of thought.” What if it succeeds?

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

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S : EVERY THING ON EARTH IS LINKED

28 Tuesday May 2019

Posted by in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Democracy, Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Humanity., Life., Modern Day Democracy., Our Common Values., Politics., Space Exploration., Sustaniability, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations., World Politics

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(Twenty-minute read)

We live in a world where consumerism is more important than needs.

It overshadows all of our human activities moving desires to the forefront of any aspirations of democracy.

One can ask how has this happened?

The answer is staring us in the face there is no need to look further than free-market capitalism which has married itself to democracy.

Edward Bernay’s its creator (with the help of President Roosevelt, and his uncle Fraud applied the propaganda of war to the propaganda of peace) at the World Fair in 1893 consecrated the marriage of passive consumerism with the market by Public relations, thus engineering the consent of the masses.

As a result of to this day, we are unable to make decisions on a rational base.

So what!Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of how things on earth are linked"

Just look at the state of the world today. The fourth Industrial revolution.

It makes for dismal reading.

There have been over 250 major wars in the world since World War II.

There are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.

There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.

Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.

An estimated 27 million people are enslaved around the world, including an estimated

20 million people held in bonded labour1 billion people – 1/3rd of the world’s labour force, is unemployed or underemployed. At least 700,000 people annually, and up to 2 million, mostly women and children, are victims of human trafficking worldwide (a modern form of slavery.) About 246 million, or 1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labour.

Worldwide, a quarter of all women are raped during their lifetime.

Torture occurred in 125 countries.

There are over 45 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world.

800 million people lack access to basic healthcare. 17 million people, including 11 million children, die every year from easily preventable diseases and malnutrition.

800 million people are hungry or malnourished. Nearly 160 million children are malnourished worldwide. 11 million people die every year from hunger and malnutrition.

2.4 billion people lack access to proper sanitation.

Over 100 million people live in slums.

275 million children never attend or complete primary school education. 870 million of the world’s adults are illiterate.

The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57%.

The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.

Africa alone spends four times more on repaying its debts than it spends on health care.

Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.

Between 10 and 20 per cent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years. Up to 47% of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction.

60% of the world’s coral reefs will be gone.

Desertification and land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe. Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and one billion people are at risk.

Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years, without reaching a tipping point – resulting in multiple adverse effects on the environment and human society, including widespread species loss, ecosystem damage, flooding of populated human settlements, and increased natural disasters.

All of this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The scale and nature of the world’s problems demand a full response; and the need for more unification and intensification of efforts to solve the world’s most serious and pervasive problems.

What are we doing about it since 1893?

Poured trillions in to aid to created debt.

Manufactured a financial crash.

In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians.

When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration.

its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance.

Turning products into environmental false benefits with the loss of control over money flows.

Watching on as democracy being digitised. After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete by introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.

Allowing unregulated algorithms to plunder the world for profit.

Turn a blind eye 65 million refugees – a “new normal”

Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone.

But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge not just the end of politics itself the end of life. Global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.

If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale.

There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority.

Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance.

With them taking over the management of all life and resources – this is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.

The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval.

What if anything can be done.

It is clear to me and by now should be clear to all of us that Capitalism is going underground.  Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation-states, materially and symbolically.

It is clear to me that the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable.

It is clear to me that oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments.

It is clear to me that the United Nations is effectively a gossip shope with vetos and is in needs of reform.

It is clear to me we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Why, because the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.(see previous posts)

It is clear to me that if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth?

It is clear to me that we are spending trillion trying to get off the earth when we should be spending trillions to try to stay on what is left of the earth.

It is clear to me that everything is linked. Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of how things on earth are linked"

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of how things on earth are linked"

It is time to think about how that capacity might be built.

It is time to wake up, to be conscious and take the needed steps to make a change. Stop pretending like you don’t know. Stop thinking its not going to happen in your lifetime. It will affect you and most of all your children and grandchildren. Do you still want to remain passive or pretend it’s not your problem?

What is clear to you?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I leave you with this video.

On viewing it.

It is beyone clear that our future generations will not thank us for their inheritance.

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

 

 

THE BEADY EYE WISHES YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR BY SPREADING SOME GOOD FALSE NEWS FOR 2019.

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by in 2019., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Environment, Evolution., Facebook, Fake News., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Reality., Social Media, Sustaniability, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The new year 2109, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Seven-minute read)

Despite the dire state of the world today here is some good false news.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "fake news images"

Let’s start with an issue that has not received enough attention in the media and popular understanding.

The Earth is finite and this fact will have real-world physical, economic, social, and political implications.

Thus, we are using an economic theory that is simply incapable and inapplicable for informing an unprecedented transformation of the economy by technology.

We need a discussion as to what political leaders, business leaders, and citizens think is an appropriate distribution of wealth across the entire population of the world. This focuses on the real question (how many people have what, independent of the size of the economy, though the two are linked) instead of discussing how to shape policies and taxes to achieve an unspecified growth target independent of wealth distribution.

Trump, Brexit, and Le Pen are representations that people understand growth only for the elite in the West are no longer tenable. Neoclassical economics ignores this obvious fact, yet it is used to guide most policy (eg, economic projections and scenarios), including that for climate change mitigation.

Perhaps a summary is that the human enterprise has outgrown the long-ability of the planet’s renewable resources to support us at our current numbers and our current rates of consumption and waste generation.

Climate change is just one piece of evidence of this fact.

By 2050, over 7 billion people will live in cities (80% of the world), and cities will be responsible for 75% of global carbon emissions. The battle for sustainable development will be won or lost in cities.

Urban planning needs to incorporate total populations, not simply the rich and middle classes; this is the only way that the economic potential of the majority can be harnessed for the national good.

The reality is that any activity that is not sustainable HAS TO STOP.

So far, non-renewable resources are what is primarily driving our economic engine. But by definition, non-renewables are being depleted and for the most part, will stop being economically available in this century. So we must plan rapidly for the day when humanity can live using just renewable resources while maintaining the biodiversity that makes the planet habitable.

In truth, sustainability is the ultimate environmental issue, the ultimate health issue, and the ultimate human rights issue.

The days when scientists could not care about the impact of their work on cultural, values and society are over. If they ever existed, which they didn’t, but that’s water over the dam.

Data-driven technologies are increasingly being integrated into many different parts of society, from judicial decision-making processes to automated vehicles to the dissemination of news.

Each of these implementations raises serious questions about what values are being implemented and to whom these implementations are accountable.

There is an increasing desire by regulators, civil society, and social theorists to see these technologies be “fair” and “ethical,” but these concepts are fuzzy at best.

As we are developing more and more ways to let computers take over reasoning through adaptive learning, we are faced with an existential question: What is it – long term – that makes us human?

AI, although very useful, will never approach human intelligence until it is embodied.

My #1 issue is not the future of democracy. The future is a complicated subject.  Now more than ever, it’s fast-moving, complicated, increasingly immediate. We can’t keep thinking about the future as a far-off intangible. Today, things move so quickly, that the future already is happening, and already affecting us. And in many ways, we’re struggling to adapt quickly enough.

That’s only the beginning of the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions – which are advancing on a curve.

Meanwhile, we humans are trying to process this exponential change with our good old v. 1.0 brains. With precious little help at all from those creating this upheaval.

Algorithms by their very nature reason probabilistically and as uncertainty increases in the world, uncertainty increases in an algorithm’s ability to successfully and safely come to a solution.

Presently we have no commonly-accepted approaches and without an industry standard for testing such stochastic systems, it is difficult for these technologies to be widely implemented.

As technological developments increasingly drive social change, how can democratic societies empower ordinary people to have a say in the decisions that shape the technological trajectories that will, in turn, determine what the future looks like?

How can the public have meaningful input into the character of the algorithms that will increasingly determine both the nature of their relationships with other people on social media and their access to various important social goods?

How can we prevent an underwater arms race involving autonomous submersibles over the coming decades?

How can we ensure that questions about meaning and values, and not just calculations of risks and benefits, are addressed in decisions about human genome editing?

If there are people who are willing to blatantly refuse to believe that something is a lie, no matter how hard you try, they won’t listen. I’m not sure what amount of evidence is needed in this new paradigm of journalism to get newsreaders out of their new bubbles.

Human psychology is the main obstacle, unwillingness to bend one’s mind around facts that don’t agree with one’s own viewpoint.

The fundamental challenge we now face is how to handle a setting where anybody can get their views disseminated without intermediaries to prevent the distribution.

Somehow there still has to be some process of collectively coming to some agreement of what we are going to believe and what we think are consensual facts.

Instead, we have the golden age of the algorithm surveillance, automation, virtual reality, gene editing, the widening gap between wealthy and impoverished people, the worldwide questions of immigration, social media inserting a new level of governance in society, rapid urban growth isolating us from nature, smartphones isolating us from each other.

The challenge now is to make sure everyone benefits from this technology. It’s important that machine learning is researched openly, and spread via open publications and open source code, so we can all share in the rewards.

Our major challenge is related to our new capability of digitizing human beings.

The scale of popular social networks has democratized publishing, which effectively lets anyone – regardless of their intentions or qualifications – produce content that can appear journalistic.

Rather than waiting for politicians to make decisions and then we all argue over whether what they say reflects reality, we could have tools that engage people much earlier in the process so they can be involved in formulating ideas and drafting legislation.

As we begin in 2019 we have only 48.8% worried by Climate change/destruction of nature, 29.2% of us worried by Poverty, 22.7% worried by Government accountability and transparency/corruption, with only 18.2% worried by Food and water security.

Water is a social issue, a political issue, an energy issue, even a gender issue

– and how clean water scarcity triggers a host of problems, from disease

outbreaks to government feuds.

So the challenge before us is to begin to construct a truth signalling layer into the fabric of facts, particularly online. Even if we have structures that impose constraints on people in power and we put pressure on powerful people to be honest with us, in a sense, all of that is being circumvented by social media.

We need to turn social media upside down by changing the algorithms in Facebook or on Google to nudge people into sharing or consuming news that is slightly outside their normal comfort zone. We have to have a setting where we trust other people.

Fix it. Get out of your silo. If you can’t figure out the societal and cultural

implications of what you’re doing, start seeking out people who might.

A major issue most people face, without knowing it, is the bubble they live in.

Our world is far too beautiful to allow Social Media and profit-seeking algorithms to rip it apart.  Happy New year.

All human comments appreciated/ All abuse and like clicks and false news chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE TAKES A LOOKS AT THE WORLD:

11 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Evolution, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Life., Our Common Values., Sustaniability, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations.

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( A ten-minute read)

Putting religious beliefs aside ask yourself or Google a question :

WHAT IS WRONG IN THE WORLD?

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "what is wrong with the world today"
There is no shortage of people who know what is wrong.

The most frequently cited reason is probably the decline of religion, specifically the religion of the person writing it.

The list is endless.

Lack of respect for elders, unregulated capitalism, greed, alcohol, the economy, the rich, attachment, premarital sex, liberals, the unemployed, pride, lawyers, apathy, Starbucks.

The planet itself is fine and does what it does best which is to exist, orbit, and rotate.

The real question is what is wrong with our civilization?

We live in a world where text messages surpass face to face conversations.

We live in a world where if you didn’t snapshot it or post it to Facebook, “it didn’t happen”.

We live in a world where our self-esteem is managed by the amount of “likes” on our selfies and statuses.

We live in a world where our tv’s and cell phones get thinner and our bodies get thicker.

What happened to the world where everyone minded their own damn business?

What happened to the world where people actually knew their neighbors and didn’t fear them?

What happened to the world where people got together and lost track of time because they didn’t have their phone attached to their hip?

What happened to the world where people could voice their opinion without getting hate mail?

What happened to the world as one nation under God?

The answer I suppose depends on seeing the world within framed views of rich and poor.

What is clear is that people’s desires are contradictory, so it becomes a matter of democracy.

The problem is that most people fail to see things from other peoples perspectives. There’s no right or wrong. Just different point of views. People have become greedy and have forgotten their own truth but what happens when people stop caring.

I’m going to assume almost everyone knows that poverty is a huge problem in so many countries across the world, you’re not starving right now but you know there are hundreds of thousands of people that are.

I thought by the end of writing this, I would know what was wrong with humanity, but I don’t and I would be most grateful to anyone that can offer an explanation.

I think it was Einstein who said that ” we seem to have found the way but lost the destination”. We all seek understanding and sympathy if not empathy.

Industrial Civilization leaves us slaves to nothingness and our last days are spent in a hospital where machines are our mothers.

The only thing that is certain in life is the depravity of mankind.

As a species, we generally are self-destructive, greedy, and overpopulated.

We are the only species that hunts on a full stomach, enact genocide, and create wars by selling arms.

Unfortunately, the current technological advances are not going change the fundamental problem of what we call civilization.

Ever since the dawn of our species through no fault of our own, we have been unable to act as one : (FOR THE COMMON GOOD).

EVER POLITICAL IDEOLOGY HAS BEING BASED ON GROWTH.

We now enter a new age of TECHNOLOGY where data is feeding artificial intelligence that is, in turn, fanning advances in the world of scientific research, that is and will have far-reaching consequences on all aspect of living.

However, despite thousands of academic papers on the subject, our current civilization relies on trial and error.

The core of our present-day technology is flawed in as much as it is going to created greater inequality. While we are busy focusing on computer intelligence artificial intelligence might arrive in a living form first and bring with it unprecedented ethical challenges.

THE CORE OF SCIENCE SHOULD BE TO GENERATE KNOWLEDGE THAT OTHER PEOPLE CAN TAKE AND BUILD ON.

We need to push the frontiers of our knowledge with deep knowledge far beyond cool social apps, and neural networks that are presently trampling over moral boundaries.

We need more minds thinking about where it’s all going to end up and not allow computers to figure out for itself.

OUR CIVILIZATION NEEDS TO WIN THE RACE BETWEEN THE GROWING POWER OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE GROWING WISDOM WHICH WE WILL MANAGE IT.

EVEN IF THERE IS AN AMAZING OPPORTUNITY TO HELP HUMANITY FLOURISH THERE MUST BE A LINE DRAWN SOMEWHERE.

As always it is our complacency that is the real threat to the world.

So I leave you with these questions.

How can we ensure that artificial intelligence is developed in ways that benefit all parts of society, and serves the public interest?

How can we design meaningful public engagement around the future impact of AI technologies?

FINALLY, ANY AI THAT GAINS CONTROL OVER IMPORTANT SYSTEMS WITH UNSUPERVISED INTELLIGENCE IS GOING TO POSE AN EXISTENTIAL RISK NOT JUST TO THE PLANET BUT TO HUMANITY AS A WHOLE. SO EMPOWERED IT WILL BECOME UNQUESTIONABLE.

The more AI advances into a general purpose technology that permeates every corner of life, the less sense it makes to allow it to remain in the hands that serve a few instead of the many.

Most of today’s and past world problems have their roots in Inequality.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE EVER GOING TO STOP RAPEING OUR WORLD FOR PROFIT.

02 Saturday Jun 2018

Posted by in Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Environment, Evolution, Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, Humanity., Life., Our Common Values., Robot citizenship., Sustaniability, Technology., The cloud., The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Five Minute read)

We are just beginning to realize that our societies are founded on a very limited definition of power.

Google it and you will see where the real power is.

Data:

As software devours the world (we are all producing trillions of it) – to be exploited by Algorithms, that are aligning us all in one direction of living, without awareness or the ability to truly see the world around us.

There is no argument that Artificial Intelligence is the way forward but what is the point if we are not citizens anymore.

We’re consumers AND WILL REMAIN SO FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of technology in the future"

AI for profit is infiltrating every aspect of our lives and is going to expand the world inequality beyond wars.  

If we want to change the direction of AI to serves us all we have to change the way corporations view us and the world.

And we all know that this is impossible.

There is no point in hoping that our governments are going to introduce regulations that are going to stick, as AI has passed the threshold of any transparency.

The warnings surrounding the AI revolutions are plenty.

The voiced by Elon Musk: ( Do you Trust this Computer) The not so late Prof Stephen Hawking warns us, Westworld: shows us.

Unfortunately, there is no money to be made ensuring that AI servers us rather than the owners of the algorithms. So we end up working on symptoms all the time, ignoring the causes till its too late.

This too late scenario is not an option with AI for profit that’s is now developing its own rules as to who gets what at what price, with little or no obligations for any of this technology to contribute to the core values of life. 

AI might stabilize our environment, allow us to share more equally in the opportunities of life without damaging the planet, but this is pie in the sky.

The need for a balance needed for this technology which brings such benefits in terms of health, communication, education, safety, business, is now paramount.

In this, I am all right Jack world such an achievement would be surely something miraculous.

The reality is while we are all distracted, bombarded with false news no one has a crystal ball to see the future, but we do have the cultural history to know what happens when power is abused.

What will artificial intelligence do to us?

AI deals with ends: It establishes its own objects.  In essence, AI represents thoughtless.

AI makes its own decisions about who and where to target.

We are in danger of losing the essence of human cognition. U Tube is full of disinformation rhetoric, social media full of weird views.

With social media playing such a big part in our lives, could we be sacrificing our mental health and well-being as well as our time? In some ways, the AI explosion represents the latest challenge for transparency.

What does the evidence actually suggest?

Conclusive findings are limited.

People use social media to vent about everything from customer service to politics, but the downside to this is that our feeds often resemble an endless stream of stress.

It won’t be long before marketers will be buying data science products that autonomously construct audience segments and our world organizations such as Governments will not be able to cope.

At the moment most of AI is narrow, meaning it is specifically programmed to accomplish one task or two, however it is well on the way to developing what is called general AI that will assist us with practically everything we do.

It must be remembered that machines will not learn the same way as humans do. They will think in an abstract way whether they are managing multiple goals simultaneously or not.

An example is Face recognition.

Before all of this happens:

Surely we as the creators of AI should be passing laws that require all AI programs to be vetted against human values. That a copy of the original program should be held in a virtual cloud strongroom available to one and all. (See previous Posts)

Until we have a viable path forward.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of technology in the future"

There are now billions of people walking around with supercomputers in their pockets, and they are all connected to each other by the internet. Unless we use this power to replace Capitalism with a form of Direct democracy that really recognize that we are interconnected, that our well being is inextricable from that of our ecosystems, profit-seeking Algorithms and there like will continue to rape our Planet.

In Jason Silva latest video (below) he conveniently ignores in his presentation the power of the planet to move not just continents but all of us.

When he advocates that AI, Biology, and Nanotechnology will combine to make nature with technology one and the same to become the motherboard of technology he ignores nature.

Nature is the physical world collectively, plants, animals, landscapes, oceans, air, and all other features and forces that are not created by man.

It won’t be the coming together of AI,Biology, Nanotechnology, nor big data, or patterns, that is going to tax the human imagination, rather the rewards of climate change that is well on the way to changing the planet we all live on. 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S : IN THIS AGE OF TECHNOLOGY ARE WE REALLY TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER?

13 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Algorithms., Technology., The cloud., The Future, The Internet., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( A twenty-minute read)

Today’s atomizing forces are brand new and far less tangible: ubiquitous Internet access, constant email and social-media updates, all distracting us from our surroundings, loved ones and other people around us.

Are we indeed socially hobbled by our little screens?

If matters have gotten worse, how would we know?

We’re disengaged.’ Compared to what?

If the new technologies are to fulfill their promise, it is necessary to direct attention towards the costs and concerns that come with the globalization of technology.

Although information technology and increased knowledge can empower everyone on an individual level, the limitations of the existing structures within the job market, socioeconomics, and governmental sovereignty are hard to cast away; an underlying irony has yet to be eliminated.

We are only just beginning to replacing vague theories with some hard data and the overarching effects so far point to the disruptive nature of technology.

So here are a few facts explaining how digital-age technologies have already transformed our world, for better and for worse.

Wealth boosted by technology has not been equally distributed.

By 2020, it is estimated that the 1 percent will own 54 percent of global wealth.

Thanks to technology, we can vent our frustration in increasingly visible ways.

Jobs will be computerized in the next 10-20 years.

With the rise of websites like WebMD, LegalZoom, and E*Trade, even white-collar professionals like lawyers, doctors, and financial middlemen are under threat from technology. Are any jobs safe? For the time being, positions that require empathy—say, nurses over doctors—are better positioned to withstand the technological blow.

Furthermore, governmental programs do not provide the assistance needed to help workers transition to the technological age, further wedging the gap between rural and urban. This disparity is also magnified within the stratification of international systems: The digital divide that exists among developed and developing countries is obvious and the high cost of bringing broadband and technology to third-world countries is an issue that needs to be solved.

Health will be run by algorithms attached to the cloud.

To put this in perspective, a full human genome sequence cost $100 million in 2002. Today, it can be done for $1,000; by 2020 it may cost less than a cup of coffee.

Technology can be a double-edged sword, but at least when it comes to our health (if not necessarily our medical professionals), it has largely been a force for good but just imagine what is going to happen to Health Insurance when your health is monitored by the Cloud.

Education.

Today, there are more than 80,000 education apps available for download through Apple’s App Store; 72 percent of those are aimed at toddlers and preschoolers. But while parents and app developers have obviously embraced the tech education revolution, the link between technology and educational performance is murky at best.

Technology can help save the planet…

The World Bank estimates that climate change may push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.

Of course, technology has played a role in our current predicament. The shale revolution—which at its core is a technological revolution—has given a new lease on life to the oil and gas era. That may be good for falling oil prices, but it’s horrible for our environment.

But what makes the difference is that the global economy grew by 3 percent in 2014 while world emissions remained flat.

People are not willing to fundamentally change their lives for problems far off in the future, even ones as potentially catastrophic as climate change. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, alternative energies need to become as cheap and reliable as their carbon-emitting counterparts, and quickly.

Cheaper alternative energy is the best hope the world has left.

Global Security:

Technology has also created a whole new set of global security concerns.

The thoroughly modern phenomenon of cybercrime and economic espionage is estimated to cost the world more than $445 billion every year. That’s roughly 1 percent of global income. And while it hasn’t happened yet, the fear that cyber attacks can spill over and trigger real-world conflicts remains an ongoing concern.

Technology has also changed the face of modern warfare. A decade ago, the Pentagon had a stockpile of fewer than 50 drones; today it has an arsenal of about 7,000. The Pentagon estimates that China will build nearly 42,000 drones by 2023. Others will follow suit. Yet another possible complication.

But the most worrisome development?

Technology has given terrorist groups like ISIS an unparalleled platform to spread their messages of hate. The knowledge needed to build bombs in the comfort of your own home is now just a few short clicks away. Technology is capable of empowering every single individual in the world, even the worst of us.

Finance and the world economy.

It is quite obvious that money in the form of cash is going to disappear.

World stock market is now run by high-frequency trading algorithms. Personal credit lines are governed by algorithms. World trade is reverting to protectionism. Inequality is widening.

Communication:

We are all talking on our cell phones. Public spaces aren’t communal anymore. No one interacts in public spaces.

On the other hand, access to the wealth of information and opinion available on the internet is exposing people of all ages to views, lifestyles, and knowledge they might never have encountered otherwise, potentially generating greater compassion and understanding both within local communities and for people on the other side of the world.

In the next few years, virtual reality could offer a further means of breaking down geographic and social barriers.

Project Syria, for instance, uses virtual-reality goggles to place people inside the meticulously researched world of a Syrian citizen caught in the Syrian conflict, cutting through the ‘empathy fatigue’ often brought about by constant access to global news.

THEN THERE IS:

CRIME:

WHAT LAWS SHOULD APPLY TO AI.

SHOULD THEIR CREATORS BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS ACTIONS?

An AI programme could be an innocent agent with either the software programmer or the user being held to be the perpetrator-vi another.

Does the programmer know that if the machine is used in a certain way that a certain outcome is inevitable?

Who or what should be punished if for an offense of which an AI system is directly liable.

Is Ai a service or a product. The legal implications will be profound.

PRIVACY: 

Nothing is private any longer. Whether you like it or not everything is data.

Should AI platforms Pay us for the Data?

FALSE NEWS:

There is no longer a source of Facts. Campaigns to manipulate public opinion through false or misleading social media postings have become standard political practice across much of the world.

Exploiting every social media platform — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and beyond — and relying on human users and computerized “bots” that can dramatically amplify the power of disinformation campaigns by automating the process of preparing and delivering posts. Bots interact with human users and also with other bots. They generate so much content — and they share each other’s content — that it’s hard to disaggregate the networks.

The impact goes beyond electoral politics to hot-button issues such as climate change and the safety of vaccines.

So should we put aside these value judgments and focus on how technology will simply make the world different going forward. 65 percent of children entering primary school today will end up working in jobs that don’t even exist yet. Our time is better spent figuring out how to live in this new world rather than lamenting the old one.

Unfortunately, by the time we get around to waking up to Algorithms, we will be owned by one.

History also advises that the measures taken must be developed through close consultation between governments, private sector experts, and stakeholders and citizens. Experience with previous technologies suggests that prudent policies can help us effectively manage the risks associated with new technologies without harm to their benefits. But can we say that this is honestly true with Algorithms that are learning from each other or driven by profit, filtering platforms in order to supply personalized information?

The result is having corrosive effects across the whole political arena worldwide.

Whether you are techno-utopians or techno-skeptics technology is changing our lives and the world we all live in and on IN MORE WAYS THAN WE YET OR WILL EVER BE CAPABLE OF COMPREHENDiING.

This is why I advocate a strong room for technology. Where all software is stored and available to all. (See the previous post)

If we are not careful the very thing that we all cherish Freedom will become the sole prerogative of the Algorithms world OF APPLE, MICROSOFT, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, AND THEIR LIKE.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of technology"

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

revolutionary.

What was still missing from the research, he decided, was historical perspective.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY ASKS: FROM NAKED APE TO ROBOT – WILL IT BE WORTH IT?

08 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Evolution., Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Sustaniability, Technology., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

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 ( A Fifteen minute read)

We are becoming less and less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change. Deforestation, Freshwater Species Extinctions, Climate Change and Destruction of Natural Resources, Large-scale Wars and Religious Conflicts.

“human cost” of the current system:

Not to  Mention Technology.

What we prioritize, the way we shape our lives, affects the evolutionary future of our species, so we would do well to start asking some simple question about the untended consequences of technology? 

Is it likely that in the near future humans are going to speciate? ( Humans one species and robots another. )

If you can’t explain Artificial intelligence/ Machine learning stored in the cloud and what it is doing to the public, there’s a good chance it doesn’t merit doing.

Mannequin heads sitting on a shelf in a factory The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60.

 That is only 30 odd year away.

We are entering the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological transformation that is robbing us of the essence of our humanity.

Driven by a ubiquitous and mobile internet, we are perhaps witnessing the end of human evolution as we know it.

Up to now human evolution proceeded extremely slowly and within historical memory, man has exhibited aggressive territorial behavior. Even as we bask smugly in the comforts of our smart phones natural selection to-day still ensured that only the fittest survived.

However it may not be long before computers are hooked up to the human brain with genetic trade-offs till we can’t be improved any further,

Then evolution will really have come to a stop for us. We will be the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were.

Stopping natural selection is not as important, or as depressing, as it might sound — because our evolutionary process will then be cultural.

One way or the other by the time we get there our current social, political and economic systems will have driven inequalities with profit seeking algorithms off the map, rather than reducing them.

The challenge is to manage this seismic change in a way that promotes the long-term health and stability of the planet.

The writing has been on the wall for some time.Homo floresiensis

So where do we stand:

Since 1992 CO2 emissions have jumper 62% and the global temperature is up 29%. Fresh water is down 26%. Ocean dead zones up 76% . Forestland down 300 million acres. People up 35%.

You would think that we the biggest dimwit on the planet looking at this evidence would conclude that there is something very wrong. If you dont know what it is, we have evolved beyond our needs, trampling other species in the process.

We are now at a turning point we can either push ahead on our path to destruction or we can reshape our place in nature and prosper or we can face a humongous environmental crisis.

You would think that with everything connected by the internet, it would transform how we do business and help us manage resources more efficiently and sustainable.

As you can see this is not the result.

On the contrary the way we’ve set up corporations, world organisations, where even a majority vote cannot demand that a corporation’s or world organisation policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use.

That’s because profit is the one and only motive.

It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations and world organisations are simply not allowed to.

Within the next decade, it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet. By 2025, 10% of people are expected to be wearing clothes connected to the internet and the first implantable mobile phone is expected to be sold.

However today, 43% of the world’s population are connected to the internet, mostly in developed countries.

In a world driven by short-term profit, the connectivity theory is and will remain so far off the mark it can only be believed by artificial intelligence.

Growing unease over globalization, which is evident from the number of questions being asked about the power of corporations and the adequacy of the regulations governing employment, environmental issues and taxation, is causing economic and social ills, ranging from low consumption to social and political unrest, and is damaging to any future.

There is no need for me to tell you that we are living in turbulent times.

It is clear that the old stories are dying and if we continue to poison ourselves and the planet by self-interest, fragmentation and profit for profit sake there will be no point to the age of technology other than becoming slaves.

However evolution is going on invisibly all the time. Species evolve in response to whatever environment they encounter. No despots have ever set out to select for increased or decreased longevity in the populations they control.

By 2050, the world must feed 9 billion people. Yet the demand for food will be 60% greater than it is today.

The scale of the employment challenge is vast. Rapid progress in machine learning has raised the prospect that algorithms will one day be able to do most or all of the mental tasks currently performed by humans. These advances could lead to extremely positive developments, presenting solutions to now-intractable global problems, but they also pose severe risks.

This might be the most important transition of the next century – either ushering in an unprecedented era of wealth and progress, or heralding disaster.

But it’s also an area that’s highly neglected: while billions are spent making AI more powerful. The problem of how one might design a highly intelligent machine to pursue realistic human goals safely is very poorly understood. It is estimated that there are fewer than 100 people in the world working on how to make AI safe.

If AI research continues to advance without enough work going into the research problem of controlling such machines, catastrophic accidents are much more likely to occur.

It’s generally agreed that, among the forces that led to the immense sophistication of the human brain, the most powerful was a kind of feedback loop between the growing complexity of our ancestors’ physical and social environment and the ability of our ancestors to adapt to it. But why, you may ask, has the enormous increase in complexity of our recent technological environment not had a measurable physical impact on our brains?

The rate at which we are changing our environment now has outstripped even the fastest biological evolution.

However the ineluctable laws of evolution will continue to operate, probably even more strongly, in the overcrowded, ecologically damaged world of the future. And if things get really bad, the evolutionary consequences could be extreme. Any survivors of a nuclear holocaust or an ecological catastrophe are likely to be a small and highly selected subset of today’s population.

If, for example, destruction were so widespread that people could not form viable social groups, the evolution of our descendants would inevitably be driven in the direction of brutishness.

If our technologies fail to protect us against these forces of nature our genetic heritage could fail us too, meaning human evolution will return with a vengeance.

Then again if everyone had exactly the same set of genes controlling the brain’s development, there would be no genetic differences among people on which natural selection could act–and evolution really would come to a stop!

War then would be the strong life; it is life in extremism; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

There is no doubting the force of [the] arguments above, call me back in 3 million years time, because I may well be wrong on that one.

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