Category Archives: Technology

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S : ARE OUR LIVES GOING TO BE RULED BY ALGORITHMS.

20 Saturday May 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Communication., Dehumanization., Democracy, Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Disconnection., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Humanity., Imagination., IS DATA DESTORYING THE WORLD?, Modern Day Democracy., Our Common Values., Purpose of life., Reality., Social Media Regulation., State of the world, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Tracking apps., Unanswered Questions., Universal values., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What is shaping our world., What Needs to change in the World

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( Ten minute read) 

I am sure that unless you have being living on another planet it is becoming more and more obvious that the manner you live your life is being manipulate and influence by technologies.

So its worth pausing to ask why the use of AI for algorithm-informed decision is desirable, and hence worth our collective effort to think through and get right.

A huge amount of our lives – from what appears in our social media feeds to what route our sat-nav tells us to take – is influenced by algorithms. Email knows where to go thanks to algorithms. Smartphone apps are nothing but algorithms. Computer and video games are algorithmic storytelling.  Online dating and book-recommendation and travel websites would not function without algorithms.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is naught but algorithms.

The material people see on social media is brought to them by algorithms. In fact, everything people see and do on the web is a product of algorithms. Algorithms are also at play, with most financial transactions today accomplished by algorithms. Algorithms help gadgets respond to voice commands, recognize faces, sort photos and build and drive cars. Hacking, cyberattacks and cryptographic code-breaking exploit algorithms.

Algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything.

Self-learning and self-programming algorithms are now emerging, so it is possible that in the future algorithms will write many if not most algorithms.

Yes they can save lives, make things easier and conquer chaos, but when it comes both the commercial/ social world, there are many good reasons to question the use of Algorithms.

Why? 

They can put too much control in the hands of corporations and governments, perpetuate bias, create filter bubbles, cut choices, creativity and serendipity, while exploiting not just of you, but the very resources of our planet for short-term profits, destroying what left of democracy societies, turning warfare into face recognition, stimulating inequality, invading our private lives, determining our futures without any legal restrictions or transparency, or recourse.

The rapid evolution of AI and AI agents embedded in systems and devices in the Internet of Things will lead to hyper-stalking, influencing and shaping of voters, and hyper-personalized ads, and will create new ways to misrepresent reality and perpetuate falsehoods.

———

As they are self learning, the problem is who or what is creating them, who owns these algorithms and what if there should be any controls in their usage.

Lets ask some questions that need to be ask now not later concerning them. 

1) The outcomes the algorithm intended to make possible (and whether they are ethical)

2) The algorithm’s function.

3) The algorithm’s limitations and biases.

4) The actions that will be taken to mitigate the algorithm’s limitations and biases.

5) The layer of accountability and transparency that will be put in place around it.

There is no debate about the need for algorithms in scientific research – such as discovering new drugs to tackle new or old diseases/ pandemics, space travel, etc. 

Out side of these needs the promise of AI is that we could have evidence-based decision making in the field:

Helping frontline workers make more informed decisions in the moments when it matters most, based on an intelligent analysis of what is known to work. If used thoughtfully and with care, algorithms could provide evidence-based policymaking, but they will fail to achieve much if poor decisions are taken at the front.

However, it’s all well and good for politicians and policymakers to use evidence at a macro level when designing a policy but the real effectiveness of each public sector organisation is now the sum total of thousands of little decisions made by algorithms each and every day.

First (to repeat a point made above), with new technologies we may need to set a higher bar initially in order to build confidence and test the real risks and benefits before we adopt a more relaxed approach. Put simply, we need time to see in what ways using AI is, in fact, the same or different to traditional decision making processes.

The second concerns accountability. For reasons that may not be entirely rational, we tend to prefer a human-made decision. The process that a person follows in their head may be flawed and biased, but we feel we have a point of accountability and recourse which does not exist (at least not automatically) with a machine.

The third is that some forms of algorithmic decision making could end up being truly game-changing in terms of the complexity of the decision making process. Just as some financial analysts eventually failed to understand the CDOs they had collectively created before 2008, it might be too hard to trace back how a given decision was reached when unlimited amounts of data contribute to its output.

The fourth is the potential scale at which decisions could be deployed. One of the chief benefits of technology is its ability to roll out solutions at massive scale. By the same trait it can also cause damage at scale.

 In all of this it’s important to remember that while progress isn’t guaranteed transformational progress on a global scale normally takes time, generations even, to achieve but we pulled it off in less than a decade and spent another decade pushing the limits of what was possible with a computer and an Internet connection and, unfortunately, we are beginning running into limits pretty quickly such as.

No one wants to accept that the incredible technological ride we’ve enjoyed for the past half-century is coming to an end, but unless algorithms are found that can provide a shortcut around this rate of growth, we have to look beyond the classical computer if we are to maintain our current pace of technological progress.

A silicon computer chip is a physical material, so it is governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, and engineering.

After miniaturizing the transistor on an integrated circuit to a nanoscopic scale, transistors just can’t keep getting smaller every two years. With billions of electronic components etched into a solid, square wafer of silicon no more than 2 inches wide, you could count the number of atoms that make up the individual transistors.

So the era of classical computing is coming to an end, with scientists anticipating the arrival of quantum computing designing ambitious quantum algorithms that tackle maths greatest challenges an Algorithm for everything.

———–

Algorithms may be deployed without any human oversight leading to actions that could cause harm and which lack any accountability.

The issues the public sector deals with tend to be messy and complicated, requiring ethical judgements as well as quantitative assessments. Those decisions in turn can have significant impacts on individuals’ lives. We should therefore primarily be aiming for intelligent use of algorithm-informed decision making by humans.

If we are to have a ‘human in the loop’, it’s not ok for the public sector to become littered with algorithmic black boxes whose operations are essentially unknowable to those expected to use them.

As with all ‘smart’ new technologies, we need to ensure algorithmic decision making tools are not deployed in dumb processes, or create any expectation that we diminish the professionalism with which they are used.

Algorithms could help remove or reduce the impact of these flaws.

So where are we.

At the moment modern algorithms are some of the most important solutions to problems currently powering the world’s most widely used systems.

Here are a few. They form the foundation on which data structures and more advanced algorithms are built.

Google’s PageRank algorithm is a great place to start, since it helped turn Google into the internet giant it is today.

The PageRank algorithm so thoroughly established Google’s dominance as the only search engine that mattered that the word Google officially became a verb less than eight years after the company was founded. Even though PageRank is now only one of about 200 measures Google uses to rank a web page for a given query, this algorithm is still an essential driving force behind its search engine.

The Key Exchange Encryption algorithm does the seemingly impo

Backpropagation through a neural network is one of the most important algorithms invented in the last 50 years.

Neural networks operate by feeding input data into a network of nodes which have connections to the next layer of nodes, and different weights associated with these connections which determines whether to pass the information it receives through that connection to the next layer of nodes. When the information passed through the various so-called “hidden” layers of the network and comes to the output layer, these are usually different choices about what the neural network believes the input was. If it was fed an image of a dog, it might have the options dog, cat, mouse, and human infant. It will have a probability for each of these and the highest probability is chosen as the answer.

Without backpropagation, deep-learning neural networks wouldn’t work, and without these neural networks, we wouldn’t have the rapid advances in artificial intelligence that we’ve seen in the last decade.

Routing Protocol Algorithm (LSRPA) are the two most essential algorithms we use every day as they efficiently route data.

The two most widely used by the Internet, the Distance-Vector Routing Protocol Algorithm (DVRPA) and the Link-State traffic between the billions of connected networks that make up the Internet.

Compression is everywhere, and it is essential to the efficient transmission and storage of information.

Its made possible by establishing a single, shared mathematical secret between two parties, who don’t even know each other, and is used to encrypt the data as well as decrypt it, all over a public network and without anyone else being able to figure out the secret.

Searches and Sorts are a special form of algorithm in that there are many very different techniques used to sort a data set or to search for a specific value within one, and no single one is better than another all of the time. The quicksort algorithm might be better than the merge sort algorithm if memory is a factor, but if memory is not an issue, merge sort can sometimes be faster;

One of the most widely used algorithms in the world, but in that 20 minutes in 1959, Dijkstra enabled everything from GPS routing on our phones, to signal routing through telecommunication networks, and any number of time-sensitive logistics challenges like shipping a package across country. As a search algorithm, Dijkstra’s Shortest Path stands out more than the others just for the enormity of the technology that relies on it.

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At the moment there are relatively few instances where algorithms should be deployed without any human oversight or ability to intervene before the action resulting from the algorithm is initiated.

The assumptions on which an algorithm is based may be broadly correct, but in areas of any complexity (and which public sector contexts aren’t complex?) they will at best be incomplete.

Why?

Because the code of algorithms may be unviewable in systems that are proprietary or outsourced.

Even if viewable, the code may be essentially uncheckable if it’s highly complex; where the code continuously changes based on live data; or where the use of neural networks means that there is no single ‘point of decision making’ to view.

Virtually all algorithms contain some limitations and biases, based on the limitations and biases of the data on which they are trained.

 Though there is currently much debate about the biases and limitations of artificial intelligence, there are well known biases and limitations in human reasoning, too. The entire field of behavioural science exists precisely because humans are not perfectly rational creatures but have predictable biases in their thinking.

Some are calling this the Age of Algorithms and predicting that the future of algorithms is tied to machine learning and deep learning that will get better and better at an ever-faster pace. There is something on the other side of the classical-post-classical divide, it’s likely to be far more massive than it looks from over here, and any prediction about what we’ll find once we pass through it is as good as anyone else’s.

It is entirely possible that before we see any of this, humanity will end up bombing itself into a new dark age that takes thousands of years to recover from.

The entire field of theoretical computer science is all about trying to find the most efficient algorithm for a given problem. The essential job of a theoretical computer scientist is to find efficient algorithms for problems and the most difficult of these problems aren’t just academic; they are at the very core of some of the most challenging real world scenarios that play out every day.

Quantum computing is a subject that a lot of people, myself included, have gotten wrong in the past and there are those who caution against putting too much faith in a quantum computer’s ability to free us from the computational dead end we’re stuck in.

The most critical of these is the problem of optimization:

How do we find the best solution to a problem when we have a seemingly infinite number of possible solutions?

While it can be fun to speculate about specific advances, what will ultimately matter much more than any one advance will be the synergies produced by these different advances working together.

Synergies are famously greater than the sum of their parts, but what does that mean when your parts are blockchain, 5G networks, quantum computers, and advanced artificial intelligence?

DNA computing, however, harnesses these amino acids’ ability to build and assemble itself into long strands of DNA.

It’s why we can say that quantum computing won’t just be transformative, humanity is genuinely approaching nothing short of a technological event horizon.

Quantum computers will only give you a single output, either a value or a resulting quantum state, so their utility solving problems with exponential or factorial time complexity will depend entirely on the algorithm used.

One inefficient algorithm could have kneecapped the Internet before it really got going.

It is now oblivious that there is no going back.

The question now is there anyway of curtailing their power.

This can now only be achieved with the creation of an open source platform where the users control their data rather than it being used and mined.  (The uses can sell their data if the want.)

This platform must be owned by the public, and compete against the existing platforms like face book, twitter, what’s App, etc,   protected by an algorithm that protects the common values of all our lives – the truth. 

Of course it could be designed by using existing algorithms which would defeat its purpose. 

It would be an open net-work of people a kind of planetary mind that has to always be funding biosphere-friendly activities.

A safe harbour perhaps called the New horizon.   A digital United nations where the voices of cooperation could be heard.   

So if by any chance there is a human genius designer out there that could make such a platform he might change the future of all our digitalized lives for the better.   

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com  

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS; WHEN ARE WE GOING TO WAKE UP TO THE POWER OF PERSONALIZE TECHNOLOGY THAT IS CREATING AN OPEN AIR (INVISABLE) PRISON – WHERE THE FUTURE IS NO LONGER THE FUTURE?

12 Saturday Nov 2022

Posted by in 2022: The year we need to change., Artificial Intelligence., Biometric technology., Climate Change., Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Evolution., Facial Recognition., Fake News., GPS-Tracking., Human Exploration., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Privatization, Purpose of life., Social Media, Social Media Regulation., Society, Speed of technology., State of the world, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The cloud., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Unanswered Questions., Universal values., VALUES, What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Ten minute read)

Technology is here to stay and we are supposedly on an unstoppable path towards driverless vehicles, fully automated internet-connected “smart homes”, and godlike artificial intelligence, when if fact we are on a path to the oblivion of our private lives.

As society is moving away from social interactions we take these technologies for granted and lose sight of reality.

So when are we going to wake up to the the pitfalls of personalized technologies that are targeting our lives, and what it is all ready doing, to what is left of what are supposed to be democratic societies.

It is difficult to manage the awesome power that is embedded in today’s technology however should we just sit back and let it exploited us with unregulated profit seeking algorithms and unauthorised data collection.

Its never to late to start asking questions.

We are so used to hearing that technological progress is smooth and inevitable these days, that it just seems like common sense.

However this idea may not be unrelated to the fact that the people who promote personalized technology are mainly the people with a large financial interest in the adoption of new technology -Facebook-Twitter-Google-Apple- LinkedIn – Instagram – Snapchat – Pinterest – Reddit and the rest.

Today, a plethora of personalization software tools, including AI and machine learning algorithms that are destroying individualism.

Just as our past futures need not be dead to us, our present future, with our reliance on devices, are becoming habitual, and if  not already could be compulsory.

There’s is no app for that.

On a social level, the two dimensional world of the flat screen does not support the development of communication.

It’s just sad that people really don’t even have to use their brains anymore. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

It is estimated that as much as 93% of communication is non-verbal, leaving only 7% to the words themselves.

( Not much less alarming, and far closer, is the moment when “deep fakes” – computer-generated pictures and video – become indistinguishable from the real thing.) People who buy into this garbage is being taken for such a ride every month.

The vast majority of people were simply never given the choice to accept the trade-off between personalized technology for profit or technology for the common good. For example tracking due the Covid Pandemic against tracking for profits.

Not convinced?

It is now increasingly clear that many, if we had understood what was at risk, would have never agreed to tracking Apps.

For example, back in 2018, Amazon filed a patent that would allow its Echo device to detect when someone is ill from the change in their voice, nasal tones, and stuffed nose. When synced with Amazon’s website personalization engine, this is invaluable information to make personalized recommendations for cold medicine, recipes, etc.  It allow them to achieve 1:1 personalization like never before. 

 Mobile devices themselves are truly turning people into mindless zombies and simpletons with personalized technology turning into the enemy. Yet most people are too blind to see it.  89% of businesses are investing in personalization.

I.E.  Target the right person, at the right time, with the right offer. Analysing every aspect of the customer journey, companies can incorporate real-time dynamic pop-ups.

 Here’s a fraction of the stats showing the power and importance of personalization:

80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.

The idea of greater convergence and connectivity between personal electronics is correct. One only has to look at the smartphone that trigger customised adverts or programme your phone based on where you are.  A company could tie itself to the Apple ecosystem, using an API to acquire data captured by each user’s Watch device into its own cloud-based system.

———————————-

As society pressures leaders for a more environmentally-friendly agenda the world of 2050 will be unimaginably different in many ways –  other than climate change.

Carbon management solutions will be an integral part of emission reductions.

For that, real-time measurement, abatement, and offset integration will help ensure companies not only talk the talk but also walk the walk and transparently meet their net-zero targets. Setting a target is just the first step; the second is to understand and quantify the real emission baseline into measurable units.  This can only be achieved with massive data collection. and analyzation

———————————–

The amount of information we share shared on social media networks is phenomenal.

A media company is now any company that helps pass information across the globe.  Before mobile technology, you had to search through a dictionary to understand the meaning of a word. Now you can look words up in a dictionary app or quickly search the Internet. Communication has even evolved beyond mobile devices and personal computers. We can now send messages through tablets, voice assistants, smartwatches, and more. That’s right. Your fridge needs a Facebook account. It can e-mail you when your shopping time comes around with what all groceries you need to buy.

So one can see so clearly that society is not going to stop moving away from using technology as our primary communication methods, but here is a word of advice do not rely heavily on technology to live your lives, learn skills.  Your life is yours to control.  Because without them, you will struggle to move on as a society.

It is said that by 2050, “computational machines will have surpassed the processing power of all the living human brains on Earth.

It is said that a AI – a machine that can do everything a human can do – will arrive, they think it’s about 50/50 whether it will be before 2050.

By this time if we dont tackle climate change the cloud will have absorbed the thinking of the many dead brain on Earth.

If we assume that transcendentally brilliant artificial minds won’t be along to save or destroy us, and live according to that outlook, then what is the worst that could happen – we build a better world for nothing?

It is said that AGI will develop. If it does, every other prediction we could make is moot, and this story, and perhaps humanity as we know it, will be forgotten.

With the destruction of genuine human interaction you know, that technology will  happen anyway, so I predict that we will see a lasting cooperation between the human race and the computational machines of the future.

However we are mow just beginning to see the down side to all of this  technology.

Technology has changed how we entertain ourselves, meet each other, and consume all types of media.

We might be walking around with biometric healthcare data chips on your clothes, in a world in which mega scale injections of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere turn the heavens a milky-white, and a whole generation never sees a clear blue sky, in order to reflect more of the sun’s rays and pause the greenhouse effect. Artificial intelligence brains simply cannot cope with change and unpredictable events such as the climate change will create, whole cities that are abandoned and populations relocated, to avoid the worst effects we can’t prevent. We all need to work together to survive.

Society used to be able to make a long-term plan, now it is driven by data with its chaotic effect on our lives shows no sign of abating, it is at least predictably unpredictable.

We need a cultural change in values, to enable more deliberate decision-making.

Future technology is sure to transform our lives in unbelievable ways, but how among us wants to live a life based on private data collected – by the fridge – the smart TV – your clothes – your mobile devices -whether you looked left or right – how many shits you had a day- face recognition – what emotions you had at looking at an emoji- what your are eating, reading, saying- what twitters you like or don’t,- where you were, where you going – all analysed by an invisible algorithm that has no oversight, or conscious.

Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do with this information and data except hope that people come to realize it needs to be regulated.

The changes in the world over the next 30 years, wont be down to technology nor will they be online, thanks to climate change they will metalize mostly through low-cost smartphones receiving increasingly ubiquitous cellular connections as the world fights for resources that are necessary for life.

Remember when people used to sleep and dream at night?

Now all we do is zone out in front of a computer screen all night. It’s time to unplug from all this craziness and go back to nature.

Nature does not spy on itself , in order to evolve. PRISM -- It's the end of the Internet as we know it

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail,com

THE BEADY EYE SAYS. WE ARE CREATING A DANGEROUS DIGITAL INVISABLE WORLD?

20 Thursday Jan 2022

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2022: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Humanity., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Robot citizenship., Speed of technology., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., THE NEW NORM., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Fifteen-minute read) 

We all know that there is an invisible world and that today it is undeniably digital.

This invisible world is becoming both powerful and dangerous leading to digitalizing without a system of oversight of the way we operate in the world, resulting in not just hidden powers but a decoupling between human rights and democracy.

On one hand, digital democracy, or eDemocracy, uses the internet, social media, and technology to improve our democratic systems of governance. 

On the other with our electronic overlords, ( Smartphones, Pads, Apple watches, TV, Web Services), this world of invisibility is been driven by non-accountable, non-transparent commerce, operating profit-seeking algorithms, with self-learning data collection codes, that no one comprehends.

As our day-to-day lives are increasingly immersed in technology, it is easy to lose perspective on things that matter. 

The capitalist world of profit and power is disappearing underground.

New technologies – from social media and GPS systems to artificial intelligence and digital twins – make the planet we inhabit unrecognizable from even 20 years ago and it’s only going to get faster, changing how we live.

The rise of the sharing economy, online marketplaces, and digital platforms are shattering old barriers and reducing the distances between industries, societies, and places, all of which are without adequate regulations are vanishing from scrutiny and accountability. 

                             ——————

While it’s true that today, leaders need to deal with unprecedented changes and an unpredictable and challenging future due to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Climate change, and the covid pandemic they need to be more agile, to deal with sudden changes and challenges that any one of these will bring.  

Why?

Because the status quo as the inertia of past success can be crippling for the future.

The paradox of leadership lies in staying focused on the present, while also visualizing the future and creating a roadmap to reach it.

This is a major problem requiring Statmanship on a global scale.

                                —————–  

Why is all of this happening now?

What’s interesting about this question is, there’s no answer to that question.

What I think is so true about that is, with technology even nonconformists are conforming.

Why?

Because these days it’s difficult to not see how real the invisible world is affecting our lives and the systems that govern life.

Today, with the covid pandemic’s we see it is very rare that you find someone that’s not influenced by anyone else.

You don’t have to be a digital native to behave like one.

It’s the invisible world we want to connect with in order to maintain the magic in life.

Why?

Because a world without emotions will be a sterile world.

Yes, the invisible world is real.

It is the limited life of a limited mind.

Increasingly, this limited value is delivered through new cross-sector, outcome-based propositions, rather than traditional sector-specific products and services.

We have all experienced trying to get to speak to a human to solve a problem with a service – press one press two – listen to music – you inquiry- will be answered – press 3 if – till you give up.

If you can spell it you can’t enter it. A society that is dependent on technology can create inequality.

                                           ————-

To stop this invisible world people must take ownership of things as the digital world is not about technology, but people.

At a time when geopolitical tensions are on the rise are at their highest level this century.  And this turbulence is escalating.  Even nuclear non-proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

At the same time, we see trade and technological conflicts that fracture world markets, undermine growth and widen inequalities.

And all the while, our planet is on fire.  The climate crisis rages on.

With Climate Change, we are risking a ‘great fracture’ between world powers, each with their own internet and AI strategy, as well as dominant currency, trade, and financial rules, and contradictory geopolitical and military views.

With dwindling natural resources, an unstable world climate, viruses on the rampart, not to mention the effects of pandemics on world trade, inequality, the world does not need politicians that do not think of the next election but statesmen of the next generation.      

 It is crucial to ensuring a united world.

Those yet to be connected remain cut off from the benefits of this new era and remain further behind. People need money to access the internet and buy the latest devices.

By 2050 there will be 9 billion people to feed, clothe, transport, employ and educate.

Maybe that’s not really bad when you think of what’s coming next. You couldn’t call it a fully digital world yet. It’s not even close.

However, there’s room to dream about building the world we want, instead of the one we’re turning into. 

As we pursue unlimited growth, our limitless consumption threatens to crowd out everything else on Earth. We are warming the climate, overspending our financial resources, requiring more fresh water than we have, increasing income inequality, diminishing other species, and triggering shockwaves whenever we can’t cope with a problem. Billions are committed to a growth-driven world economy.

Our world is full of screens. We keep them in our hands, purses, and pockets, next to our beds while we sleep, and surround ourselves with screens on our desks and countertops. Our TV sets are morphing into interactive screens as we put them online so they display everything for free.

What if that networked system brought everyone the world’s best services, resources, and knowledge-based on what we do, as a normal part of everyday life?

                                           ————————

The top-down approach is no longer sustainable in the Economic/ Power/ or Democracy Capital Accountability. Leadership needs to be vigilant and create a long-term sustainable value proposition for all stakeholders.

The same technologies are giving rise to new business models, with organizations using digital to create and monetize new forms of value. Disruptions in the digital world occur at a phenomenal rate.

They have the power to impact the way entire industries operate reshaping entire industries with profit-seeking algorithms.

Although giving up your data was once an afterthought when gaining access to the newest internet services such as Facebook there aren’t many great options available to limit what is seen and known about you online.

YOU BECOME A DIGITAL FORM OF YOURSELF IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD OF THE INTERNET.  

How do we define what a digital human is?

Worthless, a form of entertainment to have conversations with yourself without being able to show emotion and behavior as a real human. 

So, is the invisible world the real world?

Hard to say, but I think it’s what makes the visible world worth living in.

When someone dies, the essence of that being merely inhabited that form – the life within the form was always invisible.

Digital leaders will have the power to shape the future of our world.

When we want to believe, there is still time to interrupt the announced disappearances of so many plant and animal species which, if we are not careful, will lead to our own end.

This situation cannot go on. It is our common duty to avoid it.

While risks intersect and technologies develop quickly, too often our institutions for governing international security remain reactive and slow-moving.

ALL HUMAN COMMENTS ARE APPRECIATED. ALL LIKE CLICKS AND ABUSE CHUCKED IN THE BIN.

THE BEADY EYE SAYS: ITS TO LATE TOO REGULATE ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE – SO WHAT IF ANYTHING CAN BE DONE?

18 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Disconnection., Emotions., Face Recognition., Facebook, Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, Inequality, Lock Down., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, POST COVID-19., Quantum computers., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media, Social Media Regulation., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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  ( A Thirty-minute read)  Do you have a right to believe what you want? Yes, of course, but we now live in an Algorithmic driven world that is blurring the boundaries and amplifying the social tensions that are festering under the surface.  The problem is that we are allowing the building of technologies, that are making consequential decisions about people’s lives. AI is shaping people’s lives on a daily basis, but it’s an open question whether AI will become a trusted advisor or even a corrupting force.

It’s not COVID-19 that will kill us all its Profit-seeking algorithms.

However, here in this post, my main concern is whether the AI techniques will develop into quantum algorithms that will be totally out of control.  If artificial general intelligence is on the not too distant horizon, surely we should be ensuring that it is not owned by anyone corporation and that at its core it respects our core values. To achieve this we cannot surely let wealth be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, or to be let to the marketplace, or any world organization that is not totally transparent and self-financing. We therefore as a matter of grave urgency need a new world organization that vets all technology, and algorithms. (See previous posts) As long as the ALGORITHMS don’t go to war with each other and cause something even more difficult to diagnose than a crash on the stock markets they are safe is as naive as saying ” It’s going to be Great.” AlGORITHMS are increasingly in charge of a world that is precious to us all. Basically, we’re entering the era of machines controlling everything. If we want to create new different societies with human dignity for all we need to do something about it. The difficulty of predicting the future is not just a cliche, it’s a basic fact of our existence. Part of the hypothesis of Singularity is that this difficulty is just going to get worse and worse. Yes, creating AGI ( Artificial General Intelligence) is a big and difficult goal, but according to known science, it is almost surely an achievable one. However, there are sound though not absolutely confident arguments that it may well be achievable within our lifetimes. If artificial general intelligence is on the not too distant horizon, surely we should be ensuring that it is not owned by anyone corporation and that at its core it respects our core values. If we think in months we focus on immediate problems such as the present-day wars, the Covid crisis, the Donald Trumps, the economy, if we think in decades, climate, growing inequality, the loss of jobs to automation are all presenting dangers. But if we look at life in total, science is converging on data processing and AI that is developing itself with algorithms. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. It won’t be long before we will not be unable to distinguish the real world from the virtual world. Since there is only one real world and there can be infinite virtual worlds the probability that you will inhabit this sole world is zero.  So it won’t matter whether computers will be conscious or not. Is starting to feel like it’s every man for himself, Is possible that right now, a global crisis is upon us, Without even knowing… And the virus may not be the biggest threat, but the crisis that follows, Everyday goods that keep us alive will be gone, I’m talking, food, freshwater, medicine, clothes, fuel… Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness and soon rather than later it will be consigned to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Smartphones, and the like to make decisions that are not possible to reverse.  You might think that the above is stupid but it won’t be long before we will be witnessing the most unequal societies in history.                                  —————————— We humans will soon be living with robots that process data without any subjective experiences or consciousness or moral opprobrium. As we watch robots, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence machines, and the like slowly (and sometimes rapidly) permeate our world, it’s not hard to imagine them going from permeating to taking over. Algorithms are increasingly determining our collective future. It will only matter what they think about you. We are already halfway towards a world where algorithms run everything. This is why many of the issues raised in this post will require close monitoring, to ensure that the oversight of machine learning-driven algorithms continues to strike an appropriate and safe balance between recognizing the benefits (for healthcare and other public services, for example, and for innovation in the private sector) and the risks (for privacy and consent, data security and any unacceptable impacts on individuals).                                     —————————— WHAT CAN GOVERNMENTS DO?  Please regulate AI, this is too dangerous. Given the international nature of digital innovation, governments, should establish audits of algorithms, introducing certification of algorithms, and charging ethics boards with oversight of algorithmic decisions. Why? They are bringing big changes in their wake. From better medical diagnoses to driverless cars, and within central governments where there are opportunities to make public services more effective and achieve long-term cost savings. However, the Government should produce, publish, and maintain a list of where algorithms with significant impacts are being used within the Central Government, along with projects underway or planned for public service algorithms, to aid not just private sector involvement but also transparency. Governments should not just simply accept what the developers of algorithms offer in return for data access. To this end, Governments should be at the forefront of the creation of a “statutory building code”, which describes mandatory safety and quality requirements for digital platforms. Social networks should be required by law to release details of their algorithms and core functions to trusted researchers, in order for the technology to be vetted. This Law should enable the enforcement of, 
  • forcing social networks to disclose in the news feed why content has been recommended to a user.
  • limiting the use of micro-targeting advertising messages.
  • making it illegal to exclude people from content on the basis of race or religion, such as hiding a spare room advert from people of color.
  • banning the use of so-called dark patterns – user interfaces designed to confuse or frustrate the user, such as making it hard to delete your account.
  • labeling the accounts of state-controlled news organizations.
  • limiting how many times messages can be forwarded to large groups, as Facebook does on WhatsApp.
If we took the premise that people should have a lawful right to be manipulated and deceived, we wouldn’t have rules on fraud or undue influence.                                 ———————————– To days Algorithms and where we are. As data accumulates, even more so now with Covid- 19 track and trace, and now working from home we have more centralized data depositories and large centralized AI models that work off centralized or decentralized data. How does the concentration of power affect this balance that impinges on individual liberty? Our democratic institutions and public discourse are underpinned by an assumption that we can at least agree on things that are true. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube create algorithms that promote and highlight information. That is an active engineering decision. Regardless of whether Facebook, Twitter profits from hate or not, it is a harmful by-product of the current design and there are social harms that come from this business model. Platforms that monetize user engagement have a duty to their users to make at least a minimum effort to prevent clearly identified harms. We have to focus on the responsibility of platforms. Because people are being manipulated with objectively false information, there has to be some kind of accountability for platforms. Currently, these platforms are not neutral environments they have no common understanding that there are certain things that are manifestly true with algorithms making decisions about what people see or do not see. In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law, and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology. The way Facebook and other platforms approach this problem is: We’ll wait and see and figure out a problem when it emerges. Every other industry has to have minimum safety standards and consider the risks that could be posed to people, through risk mitigation and prevention. There are right now some objectively disprovable things spreading quite rapidly on Facebook. For example, that Covid does not exist and that the vaccine is actually to control the minds of people. These are all things that are manifestly untrue, and you can prove that. However, algorithms are much more prevalent than that- the Apple Face ID algorithm decides whether you are who you say you are. Algorithms limit people’s worldview, which can allow large population groups to be easily controlled. Social Media algorithms tuned to your desires and want’s ensures that everything on your feed will be of interest to you without you knowing what data these algorithms use and what they aim for. Conclusion.  We are already living with large AI platforms that are monopolizing the fruits of globalization with billions being left behind. With us accepting this as if natural.
  • It will be too late when we are asking ourselves. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness? Then ask yourselves what happens to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
  • Whatever view one takes on artificial intelligence ethics. You can rest assured that we will see far more nut cases blowing themselves up, far more wars over finite resources, with vast movements of people.
We have to remember that self-regulation is not the same as having no regulation. Of course, the loudest arguments for and against something often have one thing in common. They are often made by people with no desire to compromise or understand the other side. I think self-regulation, in and of itself contemplates people in power, deciding how they will act. We have to accept from history that we cannot possibly predict all adverse consequences of technology and that’s because it is not just technology that has adverse consequences, but the context in which is applied, It is impossible to regulate AI while thinking about all of its potential adverse consequences.  The seeds for harm at the design stage, or at the development stage, or at the deployment stage. We don’t have to wait for the technology to become an application before we think of regulating it effectively.  There is a need to strengthen specific provisions to safeguard individual liberty and community rights when it comes to inferred data. There is a need to balance the trade-offs between the utility of AI and protecting privacy and data.  Self-regulation within the AI industry may not be enough since it may not solve the massive differential between the people developing the technology and the people affected by it. Machine learning is the next step that they are aiming for, with the algorithms deciding the input and output completely. Inherent political and economic power hierarchies between the state and citizens and within the private sector need to be addressed because the promise of globalization is a lie when it comes to AI and prosperity for all. Algorithms are being used in an ever-growing number of areas, in ever-increasing ways, however, like humans, they can produce bias in their results, even if unintentional. We are all becoming redundant with biotechnology becoming only available to the riches of us. I don’t think that AI per se can be regulated because today it is AI, tomorrow it will be Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality, and the day after tomorrow it may be something that we can’t even think of right now. So it is important to have checks and balances in the use and access to AI that go beyond just technological means. Why? Because they are also moving into areas where the benefits to those applying them may not be matched by the benefits to those subject to their ‘decisions’—in some aspects of the criminal justice system, for example. However, technology companies are not all the same, and nor is technology the only part of the media ecosystem. It is essential to ensure a whole society response to tackle these important issues. You could require algorithms to have a trigger TO SHUT OF – to stop misinformation or terrorist groups using social media as a recruiting platform. BUT who defines what counts as misinformation? It is no longer possible for humans to fact-check so the only course of action is a world Independent Universal Algorithm that is designed to establish fairness.  While “fairness” is much vaguer than “life or death,” I believe it can – and should – be built into all AI using their algorithm. Therefore every Social network should display a correction to every single person who was exposed to misinformation if independent fact-checkers identify a story as false. (Google’s search algorithm is more closely guarded than classified secret documents with  Google Algorithm’s that now owns most of the largest data sets in the world stored in its cloud.)                                        ——————– We now have algorithms fighting with each other for supremacy on the market, prey on other algorithms in order to blunder the world exchanges for profit to such an extent that they now effectively in control of capitalism.  Take for instance, when someone says algorithmic trading, it covers a vast subject not just buying and selling large volumes of shares automatically at very high speeds by unsupervised learning algorithms. There are four major types of trading algorithms.  There are:
  • Execution algorithms
  • Behavior exploitative algorithms
  • Scalping algorithms
  • Predictive algorithms
Transparency must be a key underpinning for algorithm accountability. Why? Because it will make it easier for the decisions produced by algorithms to be explained.  (The ‘right to explanation’ is a key part of achieving accountability and tackling the ethical implications around AI.) We are only on the outskirts of mind science that presently knows little about how the mind works never mind consciousness.  We have no idea how a collection of electric brain signals creates subjective experiences however we are conscious of our dreams. 99% of our bodily activities take place without any conscious feelings. As neuroscientists acquired more and more data about the workings of the brain, cognitive sciences, and their stated purpose is to combine the data from numerous disciplines so as better to understand such diverse phenomena as perception, language, reasoning, and consciousness. Even so, the subjective essence of “what it means” to be conscious remains an issue that is very difficult to address scientifically. To really understand what is meant by the cognitive neurosciences, one must recall that until the late 1960s, the various fields of brain research were still tightly compartmentalized. Brain scientists specialized in fields such as neuroanatomy, neurohistology, neuroembryology, or neurochemistry. Nobody was yet working with the full range of investigative methods available, but eventually, the very complexity of the subject at hand-made that a necessity. The first problem that arises when examining consciousness is that a conscious experience is truly accessible only to the person who is experiencing it. Despite the vast knowledge we have gained in the field of mathematics and computer science, none of the data processing systems we have created needs subjective experiences in order to function. None feel pain, pleasure, anger, or love. These emotions are vanishing into algorithms that are or will have an effect on how we see the world but also how we live in it.   If not address now all moral and political values will disappear, turning consciousness into a kind of mental pollution. After all, computers have no minds. Take images on Instagram they can affect mental health and body image.  You might say so what that has always been the case. And you would be right up to now but because of Covid-19 government has given themselves wide-ranging powers to collect and analyze data, without adequate safeguards. If we are not careful they will have no notion of self, existing only in the present unaware of the past or future, and therefore will be unable to consciously plan for future eventualities. Unconscious algorithms in our brains rather than conscious images in a mind. If you are using a smartphone, it indirectly means that you are enjoying the AI knowingly or unknowingly. It cannot be modified unknowingly or can’t get disfigured or breakdown in a hostile environment. We should not be regulating technology but Artificial Intelligence. It is so complicated in behavior we need to be regulated it at the data level. In lots of regulated domains, there is this notion of post-market surveillance, which is where the developer bears the responsibility of how the technology developed by them is going to be used. As William Shakespeare wrote in – As you Like it.   ” All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and entrances. ”   Sadly with AI, Machine Learning Algorithms no one knows or for that matter will ever know when they enter or exit. Probably like AI learning is actually an ongoing process that takes place throughout all of life. It’s the process of moving information from out there — to here. Unfortunately with the brain, has its own set of rules by which it learns best, unlike AI, the information doesn’t always stick. Together, we have a lot to learn. Humanity is in contact with humanity.   All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the cloud bin.        

                                              social media oligarchy where the richest participants are allowed to spread dangerous                  .                

THE BEADY ASKS. JUST HOW CLEVER DO YOU THINK THE HUMAN RACE IS?

12 Friday Feb 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Life., Pandemic, Post-Covid-19, Reality., Renewable Energy., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The essence of our humanity., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Twenty to Thirty-minute read)

Do not read this if you are depressed or are easily depressed.

If you do read it try not to click the moron like button, but comment.  

We, humans, believe that we are the most intelligent beings on the planet. 

We believed that are superior to the animals due to our exclusive ability to reason.

In simple terms, this comes about when we select only the ‘survivors’ – those that outperformed the rest, whether people, machines, or companies – and come to conclusions based on their attributes, without looking more broadly at the whole dataset, including those with similar characteristics that failed to perform as well.

Our collective ingenuity has got us into the mess of Climate Change and now a Pandemic that is not just killing us but shining a light on our collective stupidity.

The Earth’s carrying capacity could absorb our endless acts of stupidity. 

So to answer this question one could go back over the history of humanity and pick out numerous examples since man emerged from his cave.

From the Nuclear bomb to stepping on the moon. From Michelangelo to Albert Enstine. From the Stone age to the Tec age we have put greed and power before looking after what we had in the first place – Earth. 

                                       ————————

As there is no escaping our interconnected world in this post I want to address the origins of Planetary realism when it comes to that interconnection.

Why?

Because we are now engaged in two possible futures for the world, the worst or the best. 

Are we going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot?

or  

Are we going to recognize that Human DNA is too similar to split us into subspecies or races of stupidity?  

Can we act like one? 

I firmly believe we know enough to solve our problems, I just doubt we have the collective will to work together to get the job done. We should be much better than our collective selves.

We have to start accepting our common vulnerability and therefore our common interest instead of just National Interests which is paramount to decisions that have to be on a global scale.    

When the stakes are high, we want those making decisions – whether they be machines or human, to be correct, trustworthy, and responsible.

However, now we are handing these decisions more and more to machine learning algorithms and neural nets. 

We implicitly grant artificial intelligence a degree of agency that not only overstates its true abilities but robs us of our own autonomy... It is always humans who choose whether or not to abdicate this authority, to empower some piece of technology to intervene on our behalf. It would be a mistake to presume that this transfer of authority involves a simultaneous absolution of responsibility. It does not.

Perhaps technology can be correct. But can it be trustworthy and responsible?

While it’s hard to judge even if another person is trustworthy or responsible, it may be even harder to judge something that thinks in such radically different ways as humans.

We once viewed ourselves as the only creature with emotions, morality, culture, which is not true, they can be found in the animal kingdom. 

Confucius:

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

This is to say that intelligence is the ability to recognize our weaknesses and one of our greatest weaknesses is the impenetrable barrier now being created right in front of our eyes between Artificial Intelligence and Capitalist Greed. 

If we measure the IQ of AI it would be against its capabilities of reasoning and its problem-solving ability and nothing else.

Rational thinking and intelligence don’t tend to go hand in hand. 

This measurement doesn’t measure curiosity or creativity.

Unlike the robotic world, people desperately believe they’re smart because they desperately want to see themselves as smart and sometimes because they really can’t tell.

Most of us measure our IQ as being five points higher than it actually is.

Thinking AI might work in the same way as a human brain is not only misleading but dangerous.

Up to now AI only takes orders and does not think by itself so there is a massive disconnect from biological networks. They, that is AI lacks some crucial components essential to navigating the real world…. they do recreate something like human intelligence that has the ability to analyze all matters from multiple angles while not or never will be prepared to take on responsible decision making.  

In short, Dunning and Kruger discovered that the less intelligent you are, the more confident you’re likely to be that you know what you’re doing and the more likely you are to be wrong. Being unsure, in this context, is often a mark of intelligence.

Without being curious, an intelligent person won’t ever use their intelligence to learn and form new ideas.

At the same time, a person without curiosity it seems, be less likely to question themselves or the world around them in the first place. As a result, it seems they would also be unlikely to ever use what intelligence they had to learn new things and question their own misperceptions.

But AI is learning to manipulate human behavior, creating more problems for the world. 

Of course, there is just one thing that nags away at the average man or woman in the street in amongst all this academic and government research and analysis, how safe is AI going to be for me – can I trust big business and government to behave ethically? 

It is already exploiting vulnerabilities in ways people make choices. Click like and the AI steer you towards particular actions by filtering your choices. 

WE now have  “behavioral modification empires.”

The purpose of organizations such as Google and Facebook ceased to be building connections, and instead became about adapting your habits and thought patterns in the name of profit.

With so much misguided thought and active disinformation online, it has become difficult for people with insight worth sharing to do so. Behind the anonymity of the web, anyone can claim to be an expert. When everybody is an expert, nobody is.

In other words, the AI learns how people make choices.

Broad, anonymous social networks breed collective stupidity.

This has enormous ramifications for the future as AI could be used to steer people away from stupid choices or to make them.  

AI can outwit us on the virtual battlefield so let’s not put them in charge of the real thing.

This is already happing with drones that identify, track and kill people without any human intervention. They have no moral capability to decide who lives or who dies, no empathy no compassion. 

However, if a machine can beat us at a game does it make them more intelligent than us?  

Despite the many warning raised not only will we see robots fighting wars they will be planning them too. 

David Dunning and Justin Kruger, “The miscalibration of the incompetent stem from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

This goes directly into how people view themselves and their abilities. For instance, most people think they’re above average when that literally cannot be true.

In any leadership role, you’ve got to establish trust.

It’s trusting that the person is going to do things and trusting that they’re telling the truth and being upfront and honest.

But how you go about doing that virtually is a little different – it’s a different skill set.

We have seen that Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter transform Donald Trump into one of the worst presidents of the USA and a proud country England into a whaling nation of Nigel Farage has beings.

Because of our collective stupidity, social media transformed both into remote winners with lies.

Therefore it is reasonable to say that with the current Coivd-19 Pandemic that hopefully, people are now more likely to be seen based on what they actually do, not based on who they are.

Why?

Because they simply don’t translate into anointing leaders by virtual leadership.

Neither of them got better at the skills, such as reasoning from given data. Indeed smart people are more prone to silly mistakes because of blind spots in how they use logic.

                                       ———————–

Considering the benefits accruing from AI.

Let’s start with how much data we produce globally.  

It’s about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced every day in the world. 

Next, if you Googled “how much energy do Google’s servers use?”  

Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot. An estimate in 2017 claimed that the amount of power required to run Google’s servers is 2.26 million megawatts per year – enough to keep 200,000 homes going for the same time. 

Facebook, in contrast, uses a wee bit more than Google, at about 3.43 million megawatts per year. Between them and Google they could power over 20% of the houses in Scotland.

When we come to the internet as a whole, it uses a bit more than 10% of the world’s energy consumption. 

All electricity generation systems have a ‘carbon footprint’, that is, at some points during their construction and operation carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted.  Then again all electricity generation technologies emit CO2 at some point during their life cycle. None of these technologies is entirely ‘carbon-free’.

While the energy involved in all bitcoin transactions in one year is 77.78 terawatt-hours – equivalent to the entire electrical consumption of Chile.

It’s no wonder that even without co2 emissions have climate change. 

We are going to have to find a way to generate more electricity to power the economies and societies of the future, but in a manner that doesn’t wreck the planet.

There is a saying that “Mad dogs and English men go out in the noonday sun.” 

Did you know the sun produces the equivalent of 38,460 SEPTILLION watts – that’s 3.846 x 1026 watts) PER SECOND.  That’s almost enough to power a Metallica gig.

So you would think that it is a no-brainer that we have solar panels to enable everyone to use this source of energy by giving nonrepayable grants to every home to install them.  To stop Co2 emissions. We have to fit our species into the energy flow of its biosphere.

That is the meaning of life in case you are so stupid still looking for a meaning. 

Instead, we have Paris Climate change conferences promises and the forthcoming Glasgow Zome dribble turning CO2 into a product – for profit.  

Introducing more change to Be-IT

One thing is certain:

The original purpose of the internet has been lost. It set the stage for a technological revolution that could harness human intelligence and advance our shared knowledge.

Its click-baiting algorithms and lack of regulation have brought with them chaos.

As social media came to dominate the landscape, it made using the internet for the purpose of collective intelligence increasingly difficult.

The rise of social media was supposed to bring us closer together but instead, I argue, it has done the opposite.

A system based on generating clicks and interactions has created an environment for the outlandish and bizarre to flourish, with expertise falling by the wayside. With so much content being generated, how can experts possibly stand out from the crowd?

Machines and AI are great, but we have to retain some capacity to think for ourselves. 

No matter how algorithms are retrained they will continue to impact the millions who use them.

The results will be that AI over time, will not categorize people into races on traits it thinks are most important – but into stupid or clever. 

For obvious reasons, this year is different.

The pandemic has, of course, transformed how most workplace in-person teams are now all or partially digital operations in the wake of the pandemic, removing Joe Soap from any say about the Future.

At the moment we have a warlike philosophy – if we continue to develop AI it might not overtake our individual stupidity but our collective stupidity, putting our very existence in danger.

Tech should never be any more than a tool that helps us to bring out the best in humanity. Many of the issues we throw billions at and attempt to solve with technology could be easily achieved if we were able to better utilize our collective intelligence.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. IS IT TIME TO STOP ANONYMITY ON THE INTERNET.?

20 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Artificial Intelligence., Communication., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Democracy., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Fake News., Freedom, Freedom of Speech, How to do it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Modern Day Communication., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Social Media, Social Media Regulation., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Ten-minute read) 

Since the internet was in its infancy, the rights of users to use it to express their opinions were sacrosanct.

However, there is a price for “free” internet, and that we’ve given up more of ourselves than we ever intended to.

Concern already exists that Facebook and similar social media platforms act as echo chambers that validate opinions we already hold – fuelling precisely the type of extreme views that Facebook says it has a right to edit.

Might this new position simply result in more fake news?

The Internet has and is empowering masses of people by access to world-wide information sources, education, and communication but what is now considered permissible and acceptable online is shifting.

The question is with this newfound freedom, that is influencing every aspect of our lives for good or bad, should we be requiring people to register their identity when using the internet.?

If so how.

It would be true to say as we have become constantly connected, none of us are as anonymous as we think.

George Orwell presciently realized that if citizens don’t know what is true and what is false, they can’t make a judgment about what to object to in their lives.

Is it time to introduce an online digital passport to eradicate individual desires, such as credulity, abuse, gender-swapping, exploration, radicalizing, hacking, trolling, spreading false news, promoting popularism groups, bullying, racism, the list is endless? 

( Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says. 

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.”

The GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 give internet users the right to privacy and the right to withhold their personal details.

The Malicious Communication Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003 make it possible to prosecute “trolling” – and many other forms of online harassment are also now covered by the legislation. )

Platforms on the internet avoided liability by claiming they were “mere conduits” of these views and not “publishers” of them.  The argument goes that this includes protection for freedom of expression by the right to remain anonymous online.

So which should remain enshrined: freedom of speech or freedom from abuse?

The world feels smaller and we’ve celebrated this but in any human population, there will be people with irreconcilably different understandings of the truth.

Repressing speech has costs, but so does allowing it.

The world, however, has changed, and many of us may be in the time warp of old values. Human beings are poor witnesses, easily misled by a personal bias, profoundly influenced by their social environment.

As products of their society, social media and journalists are no exceptions. 

The world is now a much more dangerous place, not because of Covid -19 which is plunging it into a Depression with social media exposing a system of governance corseted by greed – profit before the people. Then, on the other hand, social media is like cancer at the heart of societies spreading the news, not what the facts are, but what men wish to see.

The press once seemed to have a conscience, thanks to history’s painful social conflicts and questions of war and peace.

Social media is not concerned with any historical lessons it being a wildfire of the short-term reactions of unfounded populism without any in-depth investigative journalism.      

It is becoming impossible to distinguish between paid news and actual, unbiased news.

You could say that the world has more pressing problems.

However, our current and future problems, like the internet, are all interconnected.

Shifting trends and the advancement in communication technology require a re-examination of the underlying principle and its application in new contexts.

There are attempts to get some control.

Free-speech advocates typically claim that the value of unfettered expression outweighs any harm it might cause, offering assurances that any such harm will be minimal.

Because like several other precious freedoms, free speech must be placed outside the reach of political exigency.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, it is impossible to pass binding regulations or laws that don’t restrict the sanctity of free speech.

Free speech or the freedom of expression is the modern civilization’s most precious gift to human society but it can’t be reaffirmed by drowning out its opponents.

                                                         ————

The issuing of Digital Passports could not be left to the whim of Facebook or any other internet providers.

Also “Digital identity solutions leave us open to data exploitation with the valuable data from these solutions (being) used for other purposes, so governments could not be involved in their issuing other than making supporting laws with large fines. 

The most obvious hitch in this plan is that not everyone has a smartphone,

With the current Pandemic and vacations, there will be an attempt to introduce Covid-19 free digital health certification (Of course, this would only be applicable to people with smartphones.) and they could become a prerequisite for some activities.

But for now, we’re many steps removed from that kind of streamlined process even becoming possible. Widespread adoption of so-called immunity passports would require a level of coordination and organization uncharacteristic of any country’s response to COVID-19 so far.

So here is the challenge. 

Is it possible to create a Digital Passport that is unhackable, that can be applied for online, that would combine your present Passport information, that you could use to vote, to register an internet identity, and carry your medical history. 

People would only accept such a thing if it commands public trust.

As evidence with the recent election in the USA entrusting your democracy to a black-box proprietary system that is subject to hacking, glitches, and errors, but NOT subject to scrutiny, analysis, or independent verification, is the surest and quickest way to lose your democracy. 

However, creating an internet user register could be possible not only authenticating the user but making it more transparent and ensure that users have the right to remedy when wrong decisions are made.

As for platforms, they know what they need to do because civil society has told them for years.

Just in case they have not got the message they should ensure that the decisions they make about speech are in line with global human rights standards, rather than making the rules up as they go.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS. CASH IS OXYGEN IN A PANDEMIC AND ECONOMIC DEPRESSION

23 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Climate Change., COVID-19, Democracy, Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Economic Depression., Face Recognition., Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., Human values., Humanity., Inequality., Life., POST COVID-19., Purchasing Power., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Universal Basic Income ., VALUES, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Economy.

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(Three-minute read) 

 In these extraordinary times, I am sure I speak for world citizens that we count on our leaders to bring out their statesmanship and have the courage and imagination to think and work together to fight this pandemic in equally extraordinary ways.

We may be about to face the perfect storm:

 A humanitarian disaster, global recession, severe de-globalization, the crash of healthcare systems, social breakdown, conflicting nationalism not forgetting the power of AI, and its algorithms all point to the need for value realignment.

 Many of the issues have a history of a basis. So potential risks and ways to approach them are not as abstract as we may think.

 How do we actually design a new system that can understand and implement the various form of preference and values of a population?

 The ideal system is, of course, a balance between all the needs of the numerous stakeholders the people, and the earth we all live on.

 So how do our societies reconcile their own historic aspirations while we are struggling with a world of ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE that is isolating us all into data?  

 Neither China nor the US, Iran, Indonesia, or any country can insulate themselves from what is to come.  COVID-19 should be the exception to — not the extension of –geopolitical rivalry. It should be an opportunity to recover trust rather than advance mistrust. 

 HOWEVER, WHAT WE WILL WITNESS IS OUR COLLECTIVE INABILITY TO ACT AS ONE. (DUE TO A MENSTRUUM OF REASONS FAR TO LONG TO ADDRESS HERE.)

 From what we see to date: 

With the erosion of democratic institutions, with the rise of the right, loss of jobs, false news, rising inequality, foodbanks, our inability to tackle Climate change, stop wars, without any robust mechanisms of oversight and accountability for Profit-seeking algorithms there seems little hope for future generations.

Artificial intelligence now embedded in our daily lives has still to show empirical evidence that validates that AI technology will achieve a broad base of social benefit we aspire to.

We need a community of researchers worldwide to really understand the range of potential harms that AI systems pose.  The use of data, machine learning, their applications to society – Face recognition -Track and Trace- all in use without any regulations. 

Therefore there is only one solution to the problems facing us all and that is the introduction of a basic living wage for all. 

Why?“

Because Cash is the best thing you can do to improve health outcomes, education outcomes, and lift people out of poverty. It’s the only solution to an economy where a small group of people is getting very, very wealthy while everyone else is struggling to make ends meet.

It would remove the problem with existing welfare programs that keep people below the poverty line a form of structural inequality.

It would also cost governments less simplifying welfare programs. 

A guaranteed income would give young couples the confidence they need to start a family.

From a macro viewpoint, it would give society a much-needed ballast during a Depression.

It would offset job losses caused by technology.

What are the downsides?

Inflation. 

Who funds it?

Many would support it if tech companies with profit-seeking algorithms paid for it.

High-frequency trading.

Hedge Funds, Sovereignty wealth funds, and currency trading over $50,000  

Cash is King. It’s an idea that is long overdue.

Both the Current pandemic and Automation are fundamentally changing the structure of the economy. Proposals for various forms of regular cash assistance are increasingly part of the political conversation.  And in fact, the cash payments of 2020 are serving as something of a real-life test of the principles behind UBI, even if there are important differences.

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

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. YOU CAN TAKE THE KNEE BUT WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES A NATION.

24 Wednesday Jun 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., A Constitution for the Earth., Civilization., Climate Change., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Democracy, Digital age., Disconnection., Donald Trump., European Union., Evolution, Facebook, Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern Day Communication., Modern day life., POST COVID-19., Social Media, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World

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(Twenty-minute read) 

IT IS NOT COVID-19 OR TAKING THE KEEN OR THE GDP THAT MAKES A NATION. 

SO LET US ASK SOME QUESTIONS:

What is it these days that constituents a Nation?

How does a nation emerge and evolve?  

What are the precise differences between a nation and a gathering of people?

It is hard, -and even one may claim impossible- to give satisfactory answers.

Nations seem so compelling, so “real,” and so much a part of the political and cultural landscape, that people think they have lasted forever. In reality, they come into being and dissolve with changing historical circumstances – sometimes over a relatively short period of time, like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Did you notice that suddenly out of nowhere, the BBC has started to refer to England as the Four Nations?

Charles Stewart Parnell said  “No Man Has the Right to Fix the Boundary to the March of a Nation” no man has a right to say to his country—thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Ernest Renan in 1882 said nations share “a soul” and memories of “endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.

Historical events uniquely fuse together the population of a given territory into a nation.

These nations share “a soul” and memories of “endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.”

But, because of migration, most modern states include within their borders diverse communities that challenge the idea of national homogeneity and give rise to the community of citizenship, rather than membership in the nation.

So is a nation the kind of moral conscience, which we call a nation? 

If one were to believe some political theorists, a nation is above all a dynasty, representing an earlier conquest, one which was first of all accepted, and then forgotten by the mass of the people.

With technology however we are learning that man is a slave neither of his race nor his language, nor of his religion, nor of the course of rivers nor of the direction taken by mountain chains.

Why, then, does national identity give rise to such extremely strong feelings?

And why would so many be ready to “die for the nation” in time of war?

THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. 

In the age of global transportation and communication, new identities arise to challenge the “nation,” but the pull of nationalism remains a powerful force to be reckoned with – and a glue that binds states together and helps many people (for better and for worse) make sense out of a confusing reality.

Language invites people to unite, but it does not force them to do so.

The United States and England, Latin America, and Spain speak the same languages yet do not form single nations.

Religion cannot supply an adequate basis for the constitution of a modern nationality either.

Geography, or what is known as natural frontiers, undoubtedly plays a considerable part in the division of nations.

So a nation’s existence is if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.

National identity is typically based on shared culture, religion, history, language or ethnicity, though disputes arise as to who is truly a member of the national community or even whether the “nation” exists at all (do you have to speak French to be Québécois or Irish to be Irish? Are Wales and Tibet nations?). 

Theorizing further about nations, Renan says they reinforce themselves in a “daily plebiscite” of a common will to live together. 

This might have been true before the arrival of the internet and the smartphone.

Now the world can see into every backyard and what is on the washing line.

In other words, we are no longer living in a world defined by Nationhood but a world that is driven by the whims of bias, color, profit, and the inequality of the accident of birth. 

WE TODAY MIGHT LIVE BEHIND FRONTIERS BUT WE ALL CONNECTED TO ONE ANOTHER.

The term “nationalism” is simply not part of technology so the nation exists in the minds of its members as an “image”. 

For most of the last 50 years, technology knew its place.

THEN ALONG CAME SOCIAL MEDIA.  

Face book alone has around 2.6 billion people using it every month but it remains a sub-identities not a new identity; however, the technology it and other platforms are using does not reflect their impacts on nationhood.

After decades of inward-looking and jargon-infused discourse, governments are just beginning to wake up to social media and finally taking their communications seriously.

They reflect the grand narrative that is shaping a common sense of belonging.

Our digital identity is already an inextricable part of our lives, as is the technology that allows us to manage it. However, there are two really sad things about this and the unintended consequence of the use of these emerging technologies.

First, most people have no idea of the dramatic changes that are occurring slowly yet inexorably.  Second, this shift in identity, from internally derived to externally driven, can’t be good for us as (formerly unique?) individuals nor for us as a (formerly vital?) society.

We come to see our identities as those we would like to have or that we want people to see rather than who we really are. We then feel compelled to promote and market these identities through social media.

It is easier than ever to change our identity, yet it is harder than ever to control.

It isn’t difficult to see how external forces may now be gaining a disproportionate influence over our self-identities compared with previous generations. These platforms are shaping our self-identities in ways in which most of us aren’t the least bit aware.

In previous generations, most of the social forces that influenced our self-identities were positive; parents, peers, schools, communities, extracurricular activities, even the media sent mostly healthy messages about who we were and how we should perceive ourselves.

But now, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme in a social world where profit is motive and rule by the collection of data. 

On the Internet, people create imaginary identities in virtual worlds with a new generation contemplating a life of wearable computing, finding it natural to think of their eyeglasses as screen monitors, their bodies as elements of cyborg selves.

They are and will blur the boundaries between their on-line and off-line lives, and there is every indication that the future will include robots that seem to express feelings and moods, not nations.

We are ill-prepared for the new psychological world we are creating. 

The Internet constantly confronts us with evidence of our past but we are losing the chance to remake ourselves?

This is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity.

What that effect will be we’re not quite sure.

Smartphone—allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos.

This is of particular importance for those who yearn to establish new identities.

The trouble is, most difficult memories aren’t captured by photos, videos, or tweets, complex historical past has to be read or taught as it has a major consequence: 

Memory is almost a form of political representation, enabled by social media; groups are able to preserve their history as they travel across continents.

National identity – there we are. 

But the main victim of today’s shenanigans when it comes to nationhood is that sentiment of self has been tempered for centuries by an intense feeling of collective suffering, generating a crave for unity, a thrive for a fusion of the entire society.

In the end, nations will form a federation like the USA and Europe.

Each nation of Europe represents too much of a specific history for the European spirit
to be anything else than the spirit of the European nations.

Over time this too shall pass eventually but it will take centuries for Europe to forget that Europe is just about nations. 

The USA under the Presidency of Donal Dump nationhood appears to mean that the more you destroy, the more you count.

The Uk now referred to itself as the four nations all of which have their national selections, with the exception of the Olympics.

The best way of being right in the future is, in certain periods, to know how to resign oneself to being out of fashion.

There can be little doubt that the present COVID-19 and the forthcoming Economics Depressions are and will start to exam what defines – A Nation.

The virus loves a large body of people, associated with a particular territory, that is sufficiently conscious of its unity to seek or to possess a government peculiarly its own ends, as it is not talking to itself.

Technology allows for self-representation and preservation of personal and collective identity by providing autonomy and empowerment but it now poses questions about authenticity in new, urgent ways.

Technology can be used to preserve the language, customs, and culture, but it will if not transparent and shared drive inequality without any understanding of the perspective of critical sociology. 

It’s my hope that as we become more sophisticated consumers of computational technology—and realize how much it is changing the way we see our world and the quality of our relationships.

Remember it is nationalism’s adaptability to most local conditions that allow it to thrive, especially when supported by a government intent on expanding its own power domestically and internationally.  It’s an attractive ideology for political leaders, as it provides a ready-made and widely-believed justification for increased political power in order to Make the Nation Great Again. 

One way or the other coming climate change, with mass migration, will redefine what it is to be a Nation.  

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S : WE KNOW THE RIGHT WAY TO GO BUT WHY IS IT SO HARD? IS IT BECAUSE IMAGINATION IS DISAPPEARING.

09 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Big Data., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Disconnection., Economic Depression., Emergency powers., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Freedom, GPS-Tracking., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Inequality, Innovation., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, Our Common Values., POST COVID-19., Reality., Robot citizenship., Sustaniability, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Tracking apps., TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Twenty-minute read) 

If ever there was a need for imagination when this pandemic is over or is eventually under control, hopefully, imagination is going to play a massive role in redesigning not just our societies but the way we live and die on this planet.

The responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises.

If we have learned anything from Covid-19 is that global problems require global solutions, whether it is a pandemic, hunger, or access to quality education, reversing climate change, poverty, and inequality, you name it.

Imagination allows us to engage in thinking about alternatives and there is no doubt that we will need some radical changes.

Here I am referring to creative imagination the role it plays in our thinking.

The key point is that in using a term such as ‘imagining’, I am not just referring to some mental activity, but also evaluating that activity in some way, with all its relations and ramifications.

So here is your chance to submit you imagine creative ideas.

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

Where to start? 

Unfortunately, this pandemic is a present-day dystopia.

It’s not the stuff of science fiction set in some distant future or on another planet it’s damage is ongoing and will only get worse as it continues.

To understand the “real world” one has to experience it not imagine it.

At the moment there is a lot of rhetoric about using a tracking App to monitor the spread of COVID_19. In other words, unregulated squealing Apps (that are owned by private corporations) that Id people that have or had the virus. 

 We recently celebrated VE day that won us freedom at the cost of millions of lives. 

In my view, such a tracking proposition is not far removed from what the Nazis did in identify Jews by marking them with a yellow star. 

It is imperative that we in their honor that we now don’t rubbish there sacrifice by becoming Data slaves. 

(As I have said in the previous post, to ensure tracking does not outlive the effort against COVID-19. Both the technology and related policies and procedures should ensure the deletion of data when there is no longer a need to hold it.)

When people feel that their phones are antagonistic rather than helpful, they will just turn location functions off or turn their phones off entirely.

Imagine living under a Chines automatism system run by a Donal Dump.

Such techniques violate some of the core values of liberal democratic regimes.)

Up to now, we thought that Capitalist Globalization was the bee’s knees when in fact it increased inequalities and undermined democracy.

Now we realize that ecological transition IS more than NECESSARY with a bottom-up economy to protect the world and not the top-down begging world we have a the moment.  

However, the big problem remains the same.

How to distribute the gains of any economy. and now the losses.  

Technology will treat people as units and as such the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power for the few, will continue to grow. 

Cutting-edge technologies are now powered by artificial intelligence and are fundamentally shifting the distribution of power between people who provide data and entities that can make sense and use of these data.

It will become a battle between protecting individual rights and confronting an existential threat to our collective right to health, to a basic living wage. 

Of course, all of this data helps epidemiologists model the movement and the future of the virus but beyond the privacy and data rights, there are questions of biases and discrimination built into the algorithms that power the technology. 

Machines will never be made to think like people.

We have for decades underpaid the people that we now call essential workers as interchangeable units.

Currently, the AI field is mostly controlled by corporate interests. 

As global COVID-19 cases continue to rise, the unmatched connectivity that defines our era serves as both bane and blessing. 

Let’s ask the question one more time, in taking advantage of big data to create databases to track and predict infectious risk, should we be enforcing social- distancing by squealing on each other?

If you are at risk, the odds change rapidly, you become in favor of sharing or donating data.

There’s really no way to stop the movement of microbes and we need to realize that now our citizens really need to realize that.

Mapping potential carriers with big data notwithstanding privacy concerns, analysis of personal, travel, and other data like clinical data allow accurate predictive modeling.

Imagine if we created a society where everything is predicted and determined by big data. Its presence depends on “symbolic function”, the ability to pretend that one object is another thing entirely.

It will be a massive mistake.

So is technology an imaginary friend or foe?

Will we lose that human touch?

There’s no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic has changed daily life.

But what changes will last? How will we live when it’s all over? 

Even now, when we’re seeing a massive, rapid change in most walks of life — inspired by a push in science or technology, or nudged by a freak, global health emergency — it’s hard to find sound prophecy. And that’s despite access to mountains of data.

Who would have imagined that global consumerism could be crushed by the wheels of its own industry … quite so suddenly.

But perhaps this is the kind of tipping point that we secretly crave — a slowing of society.

Many people will struggle to deal with an increasing rate of change and, as a result, suffer a social or personal shock. Whether we survive the shock depends on how well we adapt.

What complicates things is that no two societies are ever fully the same.

We’re seeing that friction today, between so-called “forces” and “anti-forces.” The push and pull of people and places adapting this way or that way. But it’s nigh impossible to predict how much of that change, and its effect on daily life, will remain, and how much — or what — will change back.

Whatever happens, it won’t be on a massive scale because our regular behavior will start to reemerge.

Who will benefit more?

We might discover that work is not really part of your life or something you like to do, but something you must do exactly seven hours and 42 minutes a day. And then your real life starts.

This Pandemic will not be a ‘one-off’ event. 

Now is the time to start investing in spare capacity, in people and equipment, to cope with such events. 

( See post on setting up World Aid Depots)  

We must envision a path that allows humans to flourish by asking: how can we protect people financially, should widespread technological unemployment happen even sooner than we anticipated?

A realization among some that the dominant ways of knowing and organizing, which characterize our modern techno-industrial cultures, cannot handle the realities of living, complex, relational, human, and non-human systems.

This may help bring into focus the need to update the conceptual foundations of our cultures.

But can tech solve everything?

That raises the question of whether privacy isn’t just a cultural construct.

If your health depended on it, wouldn’t you share your data willingly?

So we need to say goodbye to our concepts of data security.

Data security is something for healthy people.

On the other hand fear of infection is limiting “in-person” interactions, forcing us deeper into an “increasingly chilling use of online systems and all-electronic communication.

Change depends on how we see ourselves as individuals and groups living through the now.

The internet might just be facilitating.

But it’s still about the real world and a reminder that you can’t eat anything on your computer screen.

In the next Pandemic and the forthcoming Depression, there will be nowhere to hide” from economic collapse in our networked world. 

Take video conferencing.

It’s fine as an exception, but as a rule, it fails to fully translate subtle forms of communication — body language below the head and shoulders. All sound is normalized, mics get muted, along with nervous hands or a lost, downward gaze.

In the end, previous pandemics have profoundly re-shaped society and despite huge advances in medical knowledge, we are once again forced to respond in much the same ways as we did to previous pandemics.

Until a worldwide vaccine we’re really back to what our ancestors would have had in terms of dealing with this kind of disease – just stay away from each other in an effort to slow down its spread.

What we’re doing now is keeping it running at any cost.

However, it is obvious that the right path in tackling both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential economic activity.

There is now an opportunity to change course, the earth must be respected.

So imagination without reality is the osmotic membrane between matter and mind, the antechamber between outside and inside, the free zone between the laws of nature and the requirements of reason.

Without, it indicates a lack of commitment to the truth or existence of what is thought of by the person or persons who invented big data. Thinking of something that is not present to the senses without commitment to its truth or falsity a Digital prison. 

Up to now, we live in a world of the short-term profit-driven corporate world, with the support of the trillion-dollar advertising industry and complicit governments who have fetishized economic growth.

If technology dominates us, not only is the whole struggle to imagine a world of equal opportunities betrayed but the opportunity is lost.

So it’ll only be when it’s all over that we’ll have the luxury of telling the story as a neatly bound series of logical events.

The impacts we’ll see from this is going to be far greater than what happened before. Whether imagery is a form of imagination, and whether supposition is a form of imagination as quick as you can imagine there is a depression of historic proportions coming.

Imagination makes our world an even more spectacular place.

We imagine even when we don’t think that we are imagining.

Everything that humans have achieved has started with the glimmer of imagination.

It is, in sum, the pivotal power in which are centered those mediating, elevating, transforming functions that are so indispensable to the cognitive process that philosophers are reluctant to press them very closely.

Why does it seem to diminish over time for all but the most creative among us?

My own ability to imagine up a story or new world seems far weaker than it used to be. Or is it?

It fails to exclude such things as remembering.

We can leave a legacy worthwhile.   So comment. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. ARE WE LOOSING OUR WORKING MEMORY OR IS GOOGLE DESTROYING THEM.

23 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2020: The year we need to change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Climate Change., CORONA VIRUS., COVID-19, Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disasters., Disconnection., Environment, Google, Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., International solidarity., Life., Lock Down., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Pandemic, Post-Covid-19, Reality., Survival., Sustaniability, Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Twenty-minute read) 

Post COVID-19 this will become a question that we will all have to ask yourselves. 

Coronavirus came after a series of wake-up calls.

Perhaps the COVID-19 outbreak is the wake-up call the world needs to get people accustomed to the fact that because of climate change, we all now need to change our lifestyles to protect our lives. 

The COVID-19 outbreak should be a wake-up call that the economic and social costs of climate change will likely be so catastrophic – potentially many times worse than what we’re currently witnessing – that as a nation and the community of nations, we can’t afford not to take massive measures to combat and mitigate the dangers.

Confronting climate change will take a global effort far beyond any that’s been on the table so far, and far beyond the voluntary commitments in the Paris Climate accord.

We don’t yet know how long the COVID-19 outbreak will last, how many people will get sick or die, or the ultimate cost to global wealth and to people’s jobs and homes.

However, it seems obvious to say that, if we can transform the economy for a virus, we can also do so to prevent climate change.

Acres of column inches have already been written about how the Coronavirus is going to change our economies, politics, and societies forever. 

We can choose to prioritize something – in this case, human life – above the maximization of profit and even our individual freedom.

Unchecked, climate change will wreak far greater damage on our ability to live safe, profitable, happy, and free lives than COVID-19.

Despite the brief dip in emissions due to COVID-19, there is a risk that the pandemic – which is likely to dominate politics for months or even years to come – will overshadow environmental concerns. 

Mortimer Adler Said ” To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is this fact that the liberal arts acquire their name.”

For most of human history, the only other reliable sources of information were other people.

We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. If we know that a fact is only a Google away, then we’re not going to waste precious synaptic space on it. Better to let a server remember.

Or is it?

Feel like you’re losing grip of your memory. Google it.

Every time we recall a memory we also remake it, subtly tweaking the neuronal details. (This is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.) Although we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them, they aren’t.

A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it.

The brain has no interest immaculate recall – it’s only interested in the past to the extent it helps us make sense of the future.

By having memories that constantly change, we ensure that the memories stored inside our mental file cabinets are most relevant.

Although our memories always feel true – as a literal recording of the past – they’re mostly not, since they’re always being edited and bent by what we think now. And now. And now. 

And this is where the internet comes in. One of the virtues of transactive memory is that it acts like a fact-check, helping ensure we don’t all descend into selfish solipsism. ( Solipsism: The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified)

By sharing and comparing our memories, we can ensure that we still have some facts in common, that we all haven’t disappeared down the private rabbit hole of our own reconsolidations.

I don’t think it’s a sign that technology is rotting our cortex – I think it shows that we’re wise enough to outsource a skill we’re not very good at.

Because while the web enables all sorts of other biases – it lets us filter news, for instance, to confirm what we already believe – the use of the web as a vessel of transactive memory is mostly virtuous. We save hard drive space for what matters, while at the same time improving the accuracy of recall.

But if a fact stored externally were the same as a memory of that fact stored in our mind, then the loss of internal memory wouldn’t much matter.

External storage and biological memory are not the same things.

When we form, or “consolidate,” a personal memory, we also form associations between that memory and other memories that are unique to ourselves and also indispensable to the development of deep, conceptual knowledge.

The associations, moreover, continue to change with time, as we learn more and experience more.

The essence of personal memory is not the discrete facts or experiences we store in our mind but “the cohesion” which ties all those facts and experiences together.

What is the self but the unique pattern of that cohesion?

Our over-reliance on google and the smartphone search engines is destroying our memories – ‘digital amnesia’. 

Google in its very nature is making us stupid, making us more likely to recall where the facts are rather than the facts themselves.

We hold the answers to just about all of life’s questions in our palms today. But that means our brains are feeling free to take some R & R.

If you have no working memory, you can have no longterm memory and you understand very little.

The growing reliance on the world wide web for fact-checking is rotting our memories.

We off-load memories to the cloud just as readily as we would to a family member, friend, or lover.

Almost all information today is readily available through a quick internet search. It may be that the internet is taking the place not just of other people as external sources of memory but also of our own cognitive faculties becoming an extension of our own intelligence, rather than a separate tool.

At this point, you might be asking why is any of this important.

Indeed, As the specter of creeping authoritarianism – as emergency disaster measures become normalized, or even permanent – it should be at the forefront of our minds. 

Because the consequences of COVID-19 will reorder society in a dramatic way, and this combined with climate change we are witnessing a tipping point as to how the world is going to work.

Unfortunately, we constructed a world that could not be more suited to a Pandemic – density everywhere- inward rural migration and now Data harvesting.

We can expect greater efforts to digitally capture and record our behavior in urban areas – and fiercer debates over the power such surveillance hands to corporations and states.

One consequence of coronavirus could be an entrenchment of exclusionary political narratives, calling for new borders to be placed around urban communities – overseen by leaders who have the legal and technological capacity, and the political will, to build them.

In other words an intensification of digital infrastructure in our cities to track the spread of COVID-19 using “big data” analysis to anticipate where transmission clusters will emerge next.

A police security robot drives on the high-speed railway station platform in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The device, which patrols public places, warns people when they are not wearing masks, checks their body temperature and identity.

This much is certain:

Just as this disease has shattered lives, disrupted markets and exposed the competence (or lack thereof) of governments, it will lead to permanent shifts in political and economic power in ways that will become apparent only later.

It will be a time of contradictions.

Internationally, many issues that appeared pressing prior to the pandemic will likely recede in prominence once the world begins its recovery. All non-coronavirus issues will be pushed aside.

Not only because of a shared experience but also because of the mutual assistance that will be required at the same time, democracies must prevent the emergence of a big brother-style intrusion into the personal sphere by the security apparatus.

Such a thing can only occur in the absence of massive civilian oversight.

Many countries will set up committees of inquiry to find out why they and their healthcare systems were caught unprepared, humanity is destined to return to its old self after the adjustment period ends. And that, on balance, is a good thing.

Coronavirus will not end globalization, but it will change it by disrupting our lives and causing painful tragedy —it may introduce a new acceptance of unpredictability into our thinking.

This is certainly not the last time that we’re going to have these kinds of disease eruptions if we deny, delude, and delay on climate change.

We know what to do to halt climate change, we just have to do it.

Our current sense of risk — such as when it is safe to cross a road — is insufficient to deal with threats that are so dire they must be minimized; we need a complete rethink.

If we don’t we will have unregulated algorithms run the world.

How much of life can now be conducted digitally?

If we can accept canceled flights, closed schools, postponed sporting fixtures now, perhaps we can accept restraints in the future.

If we can rely on international co-operation now, perhaps we can summon the same spirit again.

At some point, a nudge will be required. If the shock of coronavirus disruption isn’t enough for us to recalibrate, what will be? 

Our Memories!

We have to recognize there will be other pandemics and be better prepared. We must also recognize that climate change is a deeper and bigger threat that doesn’t go away, and is just as urgent.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

get inscribed into our biological memory banks.