I have addressed this subject in several previous posts.
You would think that we should learn from previous regulations, like those on the food, pharmaceutical, automobile etc all typically applied after something bad had happened, not in anticipation.
WHEN IT COMES TO TECHNOLOGIES THAT HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO LEARN FROM THEIR OWN ACTIVITIES, with the – possible of impacting on the full spectrum of benefits and risks to humanity ― from the possible development of a more utopic society to the potential extinction of human civilization.
IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE HAVE SOME FORM OF CONTROL.
Without unnecessary constraints on AI researchers and developers, fundamental research fields or technologies should not be regulated.
Aspirational principles alone are not enough, if they are not put into practice, and a question remains: is government regulation and oversight necessary to guarantee that AI scientists and companies follow these principles and others like them?
Even today, we’re seeing signs of narrow AI exacerbating problems of discrimination and job loss, and if we don’t take proper precautions, we can expect problems to worsen, affecting more people as AI grows smarter and more complex.
The recently founded Partnership on AI founding document states that:
“Where AI tools are used to supplement or replace human decision-making, we must be sure that they are safe, trustworthy and aligned with the ethics and preferences of people who are influenced by their actions.”
Because these problems threaten society as a whole, they can’t be left to a small group of researchers to address. At the very least, government officials need to learn about and understand how AI could impact us all.
YOU WOULD WONDER WHY, the topic rarely comes up in political discussion.
Let’s ask ourselves: how can we ensure that AI remains beneficial for all, and who needs to be involved in that effort?
THE PROBLEM IS TO DAY THAT WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO REGULATE, OR AT WHAT LEVEL WOULD WE DO THIS?
This question to me is pointless.
We will never get enough international support lay the foundations for constructive regulation.
CONTROL SHOULD BE IMPLEMENTED LIKE AN LEGALLY REQUIRED MOT.
EVERY ALGORITHM THAT IS INVASIVE OR PROFIT PRODUCING SHOULD BE REQUIRED BY INTERNATIONAL LAW TO LOGE A COPY ITS SOFTWARE PROGRAM OR PROGRAM’S IN A AI BANK.
WHERE IT IS HELD JUST IN CASE OF MALFUNCTION.
THIS NEEDS TO START- soon to have any chance of keeping up with innovation in the field.
WHY?
Because: Algorithms will dominate the coming centuries.
Because: Ascribing human qualities to non-human entities is a minefield.
Because: Algorithms are becoming the single most important concept in our world.
Because: Algorithms are connected to our emotions.
Because: Algorithms are not just particular calculation, but a method followed when making the calculation.
Because: What we call sensations and emotions are all algorithms.
Because: Electronic Algorithms will out perform biochemical Algorithms.
Because: Humans can no longer cope with the immense flows of data.
Because: Algorithms will completely transform the very nature of life transforming the world beyond recognition.
Because: Free –market capitalism and controlled communism are competing data-processing systems.
Because: The Stock Exchange, the economy of the world is already run by high frequency algorithms for profit only.
Because: Algorithms structures will run hospitals. then your faith will be in the hands of the system. What is true of hospitals will be true of armies, wars, prisons, schools, and corporations.
Because: We will need to decide which is a computer and which is the human.
Because: It follows that external algorithms will know you better than yourself.
I am sure you can add to the list.
Algorithms are decoupling us for shared values, with life becoming just data processing.
If this is the sort of world you want to live in stay silent and your wish will come true.
If you can think it, there’s most likely an algorithm for it.
While computer scientists may not be specifically finding better ways to manage your love life, you’d be surprised at how math can play a role as matchmaker. Let’s keep in mind that, during a search, you reach a point when you’ve gathered enough data and a continued search can be seen as both redundant as well as confirming what you know.
Well, how about when finding a parking space?
All human comments appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin of data.
( A twenty-minute read, before we are all raped by Algorithms)
Strength from cultural diversity is being eroded by Algorithms.
At the moment while we’ll be striving to understand the impact of “information flows” — shared value is going out the window.
You could say that 99.4 percent of physical objects are still unconnected but algorithms but they are already transforming the world around us — in education, healthcare, manufacturing, commerce, transportation and other sectors.
In the coming years, the Internet of Everything Economy will be run by Algorithms that control smart grid, smart buildings, connected healthcare and patient monitoring, smart factories, connected private education, connected commercial (ground) vehicles, connected marketing and advertising, and connected gaming and entertainment, among others, will rule the world.
If we are honest, we have been living with the ambiguity created by SHARED VALUE for a long time.
The United nations being the prime example.
Its shared ideology values are ignored daily because they do not possess any legal or constitutional power. (They have however attained limited success in generating greater ideological consensus, whether it is the impact on the environment, on society, or in terms of how it governs itself) Now unfortunately it is trying to operate in a world that is in the middle of a technological revolution which is exposing its limits to the point of being relevance.
Technology trends (including cloud and mobile computing, Big Data, increased processing power, and many others) and business economics (such as Metcalfe’s law) are driving the IoE (The Internet of Everything economy.)
The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before — turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.
On the other hand in my opinion it is and will be a mistake to greet every invention with applause and just let it go its way.
There are many aspect to the Technological Revolution that are desirable and needed, but at what sacrifice, and where to draw red lines is not being addressed. You could say its evolution and can not be changed or stopped.
However Artificial intelligence which is run by Algorithms is void of emotional intelligence.
The future will no doubt push for higher level automated capabilities by integrating human spoken and linguistic capabilities with other human skills such as vision, motor skills, and emotions.
This future will bring about a society of human and machine experts, that collaborate together for improved outcomes in complex processes such as decision-making.
These decisions which will be based on vast quantities of data rather than share values. They will be driven by our old friend capitalist profit, managed by platforms that are totally unregulated, unaccountable.
In a world where we are all supposed to be accountable, Artificial Intelligence must also be accountable not just to its algorithms. It must be totally transparent and regulated by an independent Organisation that ensure it enhances our shared values. As we explore all the possibilities these technologies present, it will be critical to place us at the forefront.
The conversations around these technologies, I suppose in the future will reach an equilibrium and we will understand as a society how to use them responsibly or will it be too late.
I think the more interesting thing that’s happening is we’re evolving into a kind of meta organism, which is the whole species on the planet connected through the Web, sharing information, sharing thoughts, sharing ideas.
We are not sharing empathy and sharing emotions, exploring and expanding the boundaries of what it means to be human, today and far into the future.
People will end up having no sense of control over their changing environments other than what their Virtual Personal Assistant lets them know.
The world we live in has and always will have problems because it is impossible of humans to act as one for the general good of all.
Rest assured that Algorithms will also suffer from the same flaw.
If left to their own devices they will destroy any sense of collaboration, reducing us to smart phone workers with no shared values or jobs for life.
We are more and more desensitized by social media platforms that are run by algorithms to ensure we remain so, we are all too busy checking our smart phones to take any notice. Most of us can not recognize our self.
HUMANIZING TECHNOLOGIES: Are smile that fits the lock of everybody’s heart.
Robots are learning how to detect your personality and even your gender with just a handshake, so giving robots a personality is the only way our relationship with artificial intelligence will survive.
We have all experienced “dehumanizing” technology – software or hardware that seems to diminish our ability to communicate with others or to function effectively in the world.
Technology such as Algorithms for profit are creating new boundaries between people rather than erasing old ones, with Touchy-feely robots becoming the false face of the Algorithms, that run them. Capitalize on our unique strengths and weakness, new technologies are and will further integrate themselves seamlessly into our lives.
We are already accustomed to Amazon’s anticipatory shipping practices, where the company identifies items we may want to buy before we even begin our search. Artificial Intelligence is making technology more personal and purposeful than ever before.
I don’t know about you. Just because I bought something, viewed something, commented on something, or sent an email to someone, I don’t want Watson, Google, Facebook or any other platform invading my Privacy with annoying suggestions, as I have no shared values with any of their Algorithms.
If we don’t get a grip of what I call Algorithms for Profit connecting the unconnected: people, process, data, and things we are going to be looking at a very sad world.
Since the industrial revolution, concerns have been raised about the negative effect of development on human exploitation, inequality, the environment, and by extension, greater society.
Of all the concerns that development brings, environmental damage has a high-profile due to its long, and sometimes cruel, history from business self-interest, to a sense of responsibility, or a combination of both.
Now it is the time to make capitalism more responsive to social challenges, as corporations are directly facing the trade-offs between private costs and social benefits.
The pursuit of profit and increasing shareholder value are the only responsibilities of business.
The inclusion of non-financial issues into investment decision-making must be a priority.
Why?
Because in terms of corporate social responsibility, the long-term risk of damage to the economic system and long-term value creation, and therefore investment returns, is a palpable threat to asset owners.
National identity and nationhood are not principles that can be “mandated and managed from the top”. Instead, the nation is an “imagined reality” that transcends institutions such as government and civil society. Consequently, the citizen creates the nation.
It is the responsibility of the investor to protect an economy’s ability to create long-term value.
Given long-term horizons, diversification, and long duration liabilities, it is beneficial to work together to reduce Artificial Intelligence future risk. To verify if shared value strategies can be found in practice.
This is so that today’s efforts to create value do not impair the ability of future generations to do the same.
Driven by advances in mobile technology the United nations is total out of date.
The importance of the family as a “basic unit of society”, no longer fully address family related issues.
In today’s investment world, there is no Algorithm that is going pre-empt social change and direct it in “suitable” directions.
Artificial Intelligence is making technology more personal and purposeful than ever before. We are trying to leverage data science with natural interfaces to provide solutions tailored to human behavior, attitudes and comprehension, also known as cognitive systems.
So the Question is:
Are these profit Algorithms degrading our humanity.
Today, the most successful technology goes beyond the technical specs and is all about the user experience. The best use of technology is the one people barely notice.
Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from our health and well-being, to the way we learn, the decisions we make and how we communicate with one another.
Try telling that to a Digital banking Algorithm. The only point of contact between banks and their customers.
Now we can have a whole new social class system.
Since people can be judged by their emotions, and since a persons emotional state has legal consequences in a court of law, and since corporations would love nothing more than to know how we feel so that they can control our behavior by controlling what information we receive when we are connected, and since we are always connected. ….
Well that couldn’t possibly be a problem, or could it?
We are handing over our privacy and our lively mental freedom, step by step, to the lifeless and emotionless domain of machines. We are becoming more and more dependent upon mechanistic mimicking of human qualities, and call it Machine Intelligence.
“The biggest privacy-invasive is no the way with face recognition applications”.
Why? Because the majority of how people experience each other is through screens.
this will bring a new leveraged on degrees of freedom for smart life.
Just because you want to believe it is true doesn’t mean it is true.
The goal should be making people to become aware of the trends and processes they are being involved by their own deeds and making them to ask important questions
In short:
Predictions are hard, but TRYING to fore see and not being blind to what is already happening is immensely important.
I wouldn’t want “devices” to sense anything. Anything.
Constantly arguing with your device about how you really feel.
What a sick world that is going to be.
Ask google why do people die before their time.
You get many answers: How can we know these things?….We can’t, unless we ask and who do we ask in order to get the correct answer.. not a Algorithm. The basic recipes for Capitalist slavery.
How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time with no shared values.
All human comments ( Not that I will know if they are generated by Algo) appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
(If you want a future worth living here is a crucial half an hour read)
Most of us know that we are in the middle of a technological upheaval that will transform the way society is organized and the beast we are unleashing can be used for good and bad.
Long before what Elon Musk and Mr Hawking predict there is a much more immediate threat when it comes to AI. The holy grail of AI the microchip will surpass the power of the human, creating a whole new world of Quantum computing, one in which machines think and work in ways indiscernible to the human brain.
Rest assured that Capitalism will concentrate AI global wealth to a few and the disparity effects will be sever and this will happen faster and faster with a massive dislocation in the lower skills in society.
Just imagine an AI that learns to navigate the web environment.
It will not be Twitter voting in Donald Trumps or Social media promoting Populist Parties it will be an army of AI bot web trolls harassing what we now call Social Media to the point that there will be no true public opinion worth its salt.
Putin recently said AI leaders will rule the world. He is right. It will create even larger power inequality.
We are well on the way to one way flow of technology with Data as the rocket engine.
We are already using AI without even knowing it.
The Capitalistic world will come under bigger AND BIGGER cyber security issues, with terrorist acquiring clandestine powers that will be unverifiable.
So I ask the question are we prepared for AIs that start building their own normative systems – their own rules about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable for a machine.
Remember using your face to unlock your smart phone is unlocking your mind. A world with facial ID software is one that will spiral out of control.
Gay, Straight, Terrorist, Left or Right, Lidel or Sainsburys, Male or Female, Criminal or not, Rich or Poor.
Regardless of what we do, what’s clear, is that if we want technology to do what we want it to do we need for all technological advancements to be vetted by an Self Financing, Transparent, Independent World Organisation, other than the United Nations.
The United Nations recently opens a new talking shop center in the Netherlands to monitor artificial intelligence and predict possible threats.
“Artificial Intelligence has both the potential to accelerate progress towards a dignified life, in peace and prosperity, said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
When in fact it also has the potential to destroy what is left of our world.
The United nations Technology for Development (UN CSTD) acknowledges that many technological and development gaps still remain. A Joke.
The real question is not the gaps but who or what should take control and overlook its development.
It is my contention that the UN is total the wrong Organisation to provide a neutral platform for international dialogue, which can build a common understanding of emerging technologies.
However it is best placed to set up a totally independent Organ separate from the UN that is responsible to the people of the world not to the 5 stock piles of nuclear weapons or the developing technology.
The opportunity to use AI to solve some of the world’s grandest challenges cannot be left to Government Regulation, The Free Market, The arms race, or to Capitalist Greed especially in the form of multi global monopoly corporations, like Apple, Microsoft to name but two.
Why?
Here are a few reasons:
Because algorithms know pretty well what we do, what we think and how we feel—possibly even better than our friends and family or even ourselves.
In fact, we are being remotely controlled ever more successfully in this manner. The more is known about us, the less likely our choices are to be free and not predetermined by others.
It won’t stop there.
Some software platforms are moving towards “persuasive computing.”
In the future, using sophisticated manipulation technologies, these platforms will be able to steer us through entire courses of action, be it for the execution of complex work processes or to generate free content for Internet platforms, from which corporations earn billions.
The trend goes from programming computers to programming people.
These technologies are also becoming increasingly popular in the world of politics.
Under the label of “nudging,” and on massive scale, governments are trying to steer citizens towards healthier or more environmentally friendly behavior by means of a “nudge”—a modern form of paternalism.
This appears to be a sort of digital scepter that allows one to govern the masses efficiently, without having to involve citizens in democratic processes.
The magic phrase is “big nudging”, which is the combination of big data with nudging.
To many, believe that this could overcome vested interests and optimize the course of the world?
If so, than citizens could be governed by a data-empowered “wise king”, who would be able to produce desired economic and social outcomes almost as if with a digital magic wand.
Nobody knows how the digital magic wand, that is to say the manipulative nudging technique, should best be used. What would have been the right or wrong measure often is apparent only afterwards.
Artificial intelligence is no longer programmed line by line, but is now capable of learning, thereby continuously developing itself.
Algorithms can now recognize handwritten language and patterns almost as well as humans and even complete some tasks better than them. They are able to describe the contents of photos and videos. Today 70% of all financial transactions are performed by algorithms.
News content is, in part, automatically generated. This all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today’s jobs will be threatened by algorithms. 40% of today’s top 500 companies will have vanished in a decade.
One thing is clear: the way in which we organize the economy and society and the world will change fundamentally.
The automation of society is next.
With this, society is at a crossroads, which promises great opportunities, but also considerable risks. If we take the wrong decisions it could threaten our greatest historical achievements.
Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel.
It is estimated that in 10 years’ time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money.
Do we want to live in a point scoring loyalty citizen card China / Singapore world.
Today, Singapore is seen as a perfect example of a data-controlled society. What started as a program to protect its citizens from terrorism has ended up influencing economic and immigration policy, the property market and school curricula.
According to recent reports, every Chinese citizen will receive a so-called ”Citizen Score”, which will determine under what conditions they may get loans, jobs, or travel visa to other countries. This kind of individual monitoring would include people’s Internet surfing and the behavior of their social contacts.
With consumers facing increasingly frequent credit checks and some online shops experimenting with personalized prices, we are on a similar path in the West.
It is also increasingly clear that we are all in the focus of institutional surveillance. This was revealed in 2015 when details of the British secret service’s “Karma Police” program became public, showing the comprehensive screening of everyone’s Internet use.
Is Big Brother now becoming a reality?
Everything started quite harmlessly.
Search engines and recommendation platforms began to offer us personalized suggestions for products and services. This information is based on personal and meta-data that has been gathered from previous searches, purchases and mobility behavior, as well as social interactions.
We don’t want A.I. to engage in cyber bullying, stock manipulation or terrorist threats;
We don’t want Governments to release A.I. systems that entrap people into committing crimes.
We don’t want autonomous vehicles that drive through red lights, or worse, A.I. weapons that violate international treaties.
We don’t want – My A.I. did it. Should not excuse illegal behavior.
We don’t want A.I. systems producing fake tweets, producing fake news videos.
We don’t want A.I. weaponizing, any A.I. must have an impregnable “off switch.” It should be illegal to buy, sell or manufacture weaponized AI.
We don’t want AI High Frequency Trading, Unregulated Drones, Unregulated Genetic Engineering or AI Biological Weapons.
We don’t want A.I. be let out into the wild.
We don’t want A.I. Amazon Echo — a “smart speaker” present in an increasing number of homes — is privy to, or the information that your child may inadvertently divulge to a toy such as an A.I. Barbie.
We don’t want seemingly innocuous A.I. housecleaning robots create maps of our homes.
WE DO WANT.
A.I. system to clearly disclose that it is not human.
A.I. system subject to the full gamut of laws that apply to its human operator. This rule would cover private, corporate and government systems.
A.I. systems clearly labeled as such.
A.I. system that cannot retain or disclose confidential information without explicit approval from the source of that information.
Elon Musk recently urged the nation’s governors to regulate artificial intelligence “before it’s too late.”
He is too late, the A.I. horse has left the barn, and our best bet is to attempt to steer it. We must make the right decisions now, not to-morrow.
An AI Future: It’s Not What You Think.
It will not share the same sense of human empathy.
The emergence of a super intelligence / or full autonomy human fallibility must be taken out of the equation.
It will not supplement natural intelligence, you will not be able to upload your brain to the internet. It’s time to dispel these Myths…a set of relatively small failures combined together to create a catastrophe is on the horizon.
Look at the latest research from cognitive science, translate that into an algorithm, and add it to an existing system.
We are trying to engineer AI without understanding intelligence or cognition first. But as AI designs get even more complex and computer processors even faster, their skills will improve. That will lead us to give them more responsibility, even as the risk of unintended consequences rises. We know that “to err is human,” so it is likely impossible for us to create a truly safe system.
We have not yet come up with a clear idea of what we want AI to do or become. This must be achieved as a matter of grave urgency as today.
Whoever gets to level 6 automation first decides for everyone else what the rules are. Otherwise known as the “Golden Rule for AI”, that is, who owns the Gold, therefore rules!
Can we avoid being wiped off the face of the Earth by machines we helped create?
Diversity has a value all in itself, and that the universe is so ridiculously large that humankind’s existence in it probably doesn’t matter at all.
Fortunately, we need not justify our existence quite yet.
Saying we embrace diversity and actually doing it are two different things—as are saying we want to save the planet and successfully doing so.
We all, individually and as a society, need to prepare for that nightmare scenario, using the time we have left to demonstrate why our creations should let us continue to exist.
If we don’t find a way to distribute our wealth better, we will have fueled capitalism with artificial intelligence laborers serving only very few who possess all the means of production.
Once a new technology is introduced it can’t be uninvented.
If we think in terms of decades then Global warming, inequality and the disruption to the global job market by AI loom large.
AS STATED BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI IN HIS CLOSING OBSERVATIONS IN HIS BOOK HOMO DEUS ( which I quote here below and recommend to all)
” If we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes.
1) Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing.
2) Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3) Non- conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
These three processes raise three key questions.
Are Organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable- intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better that we know ourselves? ”
Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of power combined with AI that naturally lends itself to a winner takes all.
All human comments appreciated by a human, all like clicks whether generated by AI or not chucked in the bin.
Wake up. The Paris Climate Change Agreement which covers the period 2020 to 2030, : A system of voluntary, unenforceable pledges relies on peer pressure for ambitious commitments and the “naming and shaming” of countries that drag their feet, is a JOKE. It’s just worthless words. All major industrialized countries are failing to meet the pledges they made to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
Climate change is an issue of huge public interest.
One of the biggest problems that the world is facing aside from the economic pitfalls is the unprecedented occurrences of natural calamities. Not only does a calamity bring about massive death and destruction to the country, but it also causes great financial issues.
The exit of the United States could multiply those troubles, or it could provide an opportunity to fix the looming problem of incredible goals.
Time has nearly run out for limiting warming to 2 °C. “If we wait until 2020, it will be too late.”
The talks were rigged to ensure an agreement is reached regardless of how little action countries plan to take. The final submissions are not enforceable, and carry no consequences beyond “shame” for noncompliance — a fact bizarrely taken for granted by all involved.
Demonstrating, yet again, the utter folly of an approach that is attempting to save the world by putting it on a collective energy diet.
Every major climate change initiative to date has gone up in smoke.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sought to cut emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, was doomed from the start.
The 2009 Copenhagen conference to hammer out a Kyoto sequel was an even bigger debacle.
The carbon market is a concept based on “polluter pays” and cap-and-trade principle. The objective is to reduce gas emissions through the use of market law. It assembles voluntary organizations that exchange the rights to issue carbon dioxide.
During the year, if a company manages to emit less than the allowable amount, it can sell the remainder to another company. This transaction doesn’t change the total emissions of the group. Therefore, one company must emit a lower-than-allowable amount in order for another company to emit more.
It works pretty much like the stock exchange. The problem with this system is that it needs rigid regulations and enforcement in order to have a large impact. There is no law limiting the amount of carbon emissions by a company. The carbon market is purely based on volunteerism, which works well for the companies already involved. This system was at the heart of Kyoto.
We watch large global corporations make billions, we watch governments spend billions on arms, we watch drug companies make trillions, energy giants make trillions,we watch Google/Alphabet/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/ Facebook/Twitter/Algorithms plunder the world, while the United Nations has to beg for funds.
So where are we.
We either spend trillions and sacrificing millions of jobs, to reduce the average global temperature. Or Spend trillions on mopping up disasters and stopping mass immigration.
Or
Place a world aid commission on all Transactions that are Profit for Profit sake, on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions of $50,000, on all Sovereignty Funds Acquisitions, on all form of online Gambling. Creating a perpetual fund to address the problem and reduce inequality.
Ban all air/road/sea traffic one day a month.
Even if the always-wrong climate change computer models turned out to be right, no one wants to pay the cost.
Recent images bear little resemblance to reality;
Bangladesh underwater, Mexico shaking, Vast areas on fire, West Indies blown away, Wars a bucket full and inequality rampant.
May all those caught up in any of the above survive.
Stupidity consists in wanting to come to a conclusion.
All support appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin.
We live in a world where turning on the news every day means getting updated on the latest tragedy and not just finding out what the weather will be like tomorrow.
2017 is a year of unrelenting misery and fear. We live in a world where people feel more afraid of someone with a gun than protected.
We live in a world where text messages surpass face to face conversations.
We live in a world run by Algorithms. In a world where if you didn’t snap chat it or post it to Facebook, “it didn’t happen”.
We live in a world that has so many people without the words, “thank you” in their vocabulary.
We live in a world where people would rather sit in the comfort of their anguish and anxiety than take a small step to a better life.
What happened to the world where everyone minded their own damn business?
What happened to the world where people actually knew their neighbors, and didn’t fear them? What happened to the world where people got together and lost track of time because they didn’t have their phone attached to their hip?
What happened to the world where people could voice their opinion without getting hate mail? What happened to the world as one nation?
We live in a world where our self-esteem is managed by the amount of “likes” on our selfies and statuses.
I don’t need to tell you world news is pretty grim right now – if you use social media, it’s nigh on impossible to avoid articles about bubbling permafrost, drug-resistant gonorrhoea, and deadly obesity treatments.
And that’s just the science headlines.
We live in a world with rampant inequality due to capitalist greed, void of any common values.
We live in a world with global environmental changes locked into our future, with hidden threats to sustainability,not just because of migration that is just beginning due to lack of fresh water.
Stop, take a step back and think.
Isn’t it absurd that we, 7 billion of us living in the same planet, have grown further apart from each other? What sense does it make to turn your back on the thousands, maybe millions, of people living around you.
If we want wars we have all the ingredients.
We live in a world where our i pads and cell phones get thinner and our bodies get thicker.
We live in a world where people pass each other on the street and can’t even smile back.
We live in a world where people dish hatred out on a serving platter.
We live in a world where our world organisation called the United nations s just a gossip shop that has to beg for funds. Unable to cuts through the rhetoric because of
We live in a world where people take more than they give. We live in a world where people have completely forgotten what they were given knees for.
What happened to our world?
Most of us haven’t quite realized there is something extraordinary happening. I want to see it through a child’s eyes again.
Why is the world-changing?
We live in a world where because we are too afraid of hurting kid’s feelings instead of teaching them the value of hard work. You get a participation trophy for merely showing up.
We live in a world of lip service.
We are reaching our limits. It’s time for people to switch on the blender, stirring events in the non-human part of the world into their everyday lives, and see what happens.
Google might knows our names but it knows Sweet Fanny Adam about the natural world. The rest of the living world can get along without us, but we can’t get along without them.
Perhaps all living things comprise one biological entity, one large functioning ecosystem (life-force) with planet Earth as skeleton if so we had better learn quick that a skeleton earth whether it is due to Climate change, Nuclear war, or Algorithms will be worthless.
We are not isolated from the world around us by the boundaries of our bodies. Modern science has blurred the lines of the individual by shedding light on how interdependent life is. We are dependent on microbes. In essence, all life is connected to other life because we all exist in the same space. If you don’t like bacteria, you’re on the wrong planet.”
When it comes to making sense of the incomprehensible we can only place our trust in tales of the imagination.
The problem is that no one is will to bear the cost not even earth so why not make Greed pay. ( See previous Posts)
All comments appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.
( A follow on read: Twelve minutes from the post – WHAT IS THE CONCEPT OF NOW.)
While writing:( what is the concept of now) my daughter suggested I write a happy post. This post is therefore dedicated to her continuing search for happiness.
What is happiness? How do we find the key to happiness?
Is happiness the sole purpose of life or is it just good health with a bad memory.
To day this is the default view. Skepticism about the afterlife drives humankind to seek not only immortality but also earthly happiness.
Who would like to live for ever in eternal misery?
What stands between us and an answer to this deceptively complex questions is the problem of subjectivity –happiness means different things to different people.
To behaviorist, happiness is a cocktail of emotions we experience when we do something good or positive. To neurologists, happiness is the experience of a flood of hormones released in the brain as a reward for behavior that prolongs survival. According to the tenets of several major religions, happiness indicates the presence of God.
This question has no straightforward answer, because the meaning of the question itself is unclear. What exactly is being asked? Perhaps you want to know what the word ‘happiness’ means. In that case your inquiry is linguistic.
Chances are you had something more interesting in mind: perhaps you want to know about the thing, happiness, itself. Is it pleasure, a life of prosperity, something else? Yet we can’t answer that question until we have some notion of what we mean by the word.
Is there anything more to being happy than just thinking you’re happy?
Do we have the power to choose to be happy or unhappy?
Are all kinds of happiness created equal?
Happiness is not a single all-encompassing concept it is a complex the notion.
A state of mind. What is this state of mind we call happiness? Typical answers to this question include life satisfaction, pleasure, or a positive emotional condition.
A life that goes well for the person leading it. Perhaps you are a high-achieving intellectual who thinks that only ignoramuses can be happy. On this sort of view, happy people are to be pitied, not envied.
We are inclined to think that pleasure is the key to happiness.
Is it purpose, or goal?
Has a goal that is an end-in-itself, nothing that he does is actually worth doing.
For most people, happiness is a central aspect of well-being, since most people very much desire to be happy. Even a slave might come to internalize the values of his oppressors and be happy, and this strikes most as an unenviable life indeed.
Is happiness overrated?
How if at all should one pursue happiness as part of a good life?
Is it possible to objectify and even quantify so subjective and elusive a quality as happiness? The individual pursuit of happiness may be subject to non-moral norms as well, prudence being the most obvious among them.
The pursuit of happiness is self-defeating especially when it is associated with pleasure. The virtue of compassion or kindness, giving not receiving, produce happiness.
Philosophical “theories of happiness” can be about either of at least two different things: well-being, or a state of mind. To be happy, it seems, is just to be in a certain sort of psychological state or condition.
Is it a psychological state (for example, feeling overall more pleasure than pain) and happiness as a positive evaluation of your life, even if it has involved more pain than pleasure.
Above all, there is the fundamental question: In which sense, if any, is happiness a proper goal of a human life?
Wealth, beauty, and pleasure, for example, have little effect on happiness.
What is needed to achieve genuine happiness?
Answer me this: Would you choose to attach ourselves to a device that would produce a constant state of intense pleasure, even if we never achieved anything in our lives other than experiencing this pleasure. We all need to answer this question for ourselves.
Morality itself is a worthy goal of human existence. Our good or bad fortune can play a part in determining our happiness; for example, happiness can be affected by factors as our material circumstances, our place in society, and even our looks, whether we are married or not. In the long run marriage is not a major source of either happiness or unhappiness.
When asked Aristotle said” that the supreme good is happiness.”
And of this nature happiness is mostly thought to be, for this we choose always for its own sake, and never with a view to anything further: whereas honour, pleasure, intellect, in fact every excellence we choose for their own sakes, it is true, but we choose them also with a view to happiness, conceiving that through their instrumentality we shall be happy: but no man chooses happiness with a view to them, nor in fact with a view to any other thing whatsoever.
But what is happiness?
For Aristotle, it is by understanding the distinctive function of a thing that one can understand its essence.
Whereas human beings need nourishment like plants and have sentience like animals, their distinctive function, says Aristotle, is their unique capacity to reason. Thus, our supreme good, or happiness, is to lead a life that enables us to use and develop our reason, and that is in accordance with reason. Unlike amusement or pleasure, which can also be enjoyed by animals, happiness is not a state but an activity. And like virtue or goodness, it is profound and enduring.
By living our life to the full according to our essential nature as rational beings, we are bound to become happy regardless.
For this reason, happiness is more a question of behavior and of habit—of virtue—than of luck; a person who cultivates such behaviors and habits is able to bear his misfortunes with balance and perspective, and thus can never be said to be truly unhappy.
Some goals are subordinate to other goals, which are themselves subordinate to yet other goals, but happiness needs sadness. Without sadness there can be no happy moments unlike pleasure which can be manufactured by algorithms.
Being happy doesn’t come easy with the stress of modern life. Take for instance the average American who uses sixty times more energy than the average stone age hunter-gatherer. Is he sixty times happier?
It took just a piece of bread to make a starving medieval peasant joyful.
It appears that even with all our unprecedented accomplishments even if we provided free food, ensured world peace, provided free medical care, gave everyone a thousand bitcoins the Capitalism system ensures that the ceiling of happiness remains out of reach.
Our exceptions are driven by our biochemistry level rather than our economic, social or political situation. Pleasure v pain. Unpleasant bodily sensations.
PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS DISAPPOINT TO REMAIN HAPPY YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO FORGIVE, FORGET, “ Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Self-actualization is Happiness. Joy goes in and out of vogue. We can deceive ourselves into thinking we’re happy when we’re not and we can be happy without realizing it.
Happy.
It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
I would be as happy as a pig in shit if I could live in THE CONCEPT OF NOW.
All comments happily appreciated all like clicks chucked in the bin.
Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organism are algorithms a, and life is data processing. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
Every day we absorb countless data bits.
This relentless flow of data gives rise to new inventions, disruptions that nobody plans, controls or fully comprehends.
For instance no one knows where global politics is heading, or how the global economy functions or what the climate is doing.
For all intensive purpose we don’t give a fuck providing we don’t pick up a virus, and even then our wireless brains want to remain in the flow of data.
Algorithms are constantly watching us, monitoring our thoughts,and feelings to such an extent that the meaning of life is disappearing into the invisible hand of Dataisim called Google, Face Book. Twitter and their disciples.
Experiences are valueless if not shared with an Algorithm on a smart phone.
No wonder we are all busy converting our experiences into data.
Your Dog or Cat or Fridge, might soon have a Facebook or Twitter account.
By equating the human experience with data patterns it is undermining the main source of authority, meaning of life, and this shift will not be just a philosophical revolution, it will be a practical revolution.
After a few hundred years of data flow your feelings which were once your best algorithms will have being replaced by a filtered personal platform or platforms all attached to the Cloud for an annual fee.
Its good-by democracy, elections. Have you had your DNA sequenced, are you wearing a biometric device that is connected to your smart phone.
The personal cloud god algorithm will tell you who to marry, what career to follow, what to put in your fridge.
All of this begs the question are we humans developing a seed algorithm that when it combines with machine learning will develop its own path, going where no human has gone before or can follow.
We have no idea whether it will develop consciousness and subjective experience.
Before we are reduced to non- conscious algorithms would it not be prudent to establish a New World organisation that vets all technology against our core values as humans. ( See previous posts)
What prevents us from collaborating in a global effort to solve climate change, or any other problem is probable the same reason why we are being exploited by Social media. Humans are deeply divided by nationalism and sectarian beliefs.. However with knowledge comes responsibility. So this failure is a global moral failure, as well as a failure of political will.
The world is changing faster than ever before with us relinquishing authority to crowd wisdom/data in the form of social media that is being mining by capitalist organisations which is governed by algorithms.
While inequality on all fronts grows and our world organisations become irrelevant we are flowed with irrelevant information.
The answer is bleakly simple: We cannot get these issues on our political radar screens without a huge prolong popular uprising. It looks likehumanity will soon be a ripple within the cosmic data flow.
All comments appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin.
We might not yet be living in a world that is run by Google but the way we are accepting artificial intelligence algorithms we will soon if not already be living in a world run by a Google Algorithm brain.
The complex mathematical formulas of Algorithms are playing a growing role in all walks of life: deciding who gets a job, how police resources are deployed, who gets insurance at what cost, or who is on a ‘no fly’ list.
There decisions are often based on data collected about people, sometimes without their knowledge inferring all sorts of things about you from your digital crumbs.
They are being used – experimentally – to write news articles from raw data, while Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was helped by behavioral marketers who used an algorithm to locate the highest concentrations of ‘persuadable voters.
Completely lacking any form of transparency they are both untraceable, and subject to no form of accountability. They can infer your sexual orientation, your personality traits, your political leanings, with predictive power, with high levels of accuracy.
We’re already halfway towards a world where algorithms run nearly everything.
As their power intensifies, wealth will concentrate towards them.
They will ensure the 1%-99% divide gets larger.
If you’re not part of the class attached to algorithms, then you will struggle.
They will further stratify society, creating a world of haves and have-not’s.
So why are we ‘blindly trusting’ formulas to determine a fair outcome.
The main reason is because most people don’t yet know or understand what they are doing or could be doing.
Algorithms are not inherently fair, because the person who builds the model defines success. This is the reason why there is no popular outrage about Wall Street being run by algorithms.
For techno-evangelists, Google is a marvel of Web brilliance … For Wall Street, it may be the IPO (An IPO is short for an initial public offering. Like the name says, it’s when a company initially offers shares of stocks to the public. It’s also called “going public.” An IPO is the first time the owners of the company give up part of their ownership to stockholders.) that changes everything (again) …
The vast majority of trades these days are performed by algorithms. The idea that the world’s financial markets – and, hence, the well-being of our pensions, shareholdings, savings etc – are now largely determined by algorithmic vagaries is unsettling enough for some.
But in my opinion we should not automatically see algorithms as a malign influence on our lives, we should debate their ubiquity and their wide range of uses.
Why?
Because we now spend so much of our time online that we are creating huge data-mining opportunities.
Because there is the possibility of using big-data predictions about people to judge and punish them even before they’ve acted. Doing this negates ideas of fairness, justice and free will. This presents an entirely new menace: penalties based on propensities.
Because we risk falling victim to a dictatorship of data, whereby we fetishise the information, the output of our analyses, and end up misusing it.
Because by far the most complicated algorithms are to be found in science, where they are used to design new drugs or model the climate.
We all urgently need to consider the implications of allowing commercial interests and governments to use algorithms to analyse our habits:
How are they being used to access and interpret “our” data? And by whom?
Big data is a useful tool of rational decision-making. Wielded unwisely, it can become an instrument of the powerful, who may turn it into a source of repression.
But there is a bigger question about the oversights involving AI.
The questions being raised about algorithms at the moment are not about algorithms per se, but about the way society is structured with regard to data use and data privacy. It’s also about how models are being used to predict the future.
There is currently an awkward marriage between data and algorithms. As technology evolves, there will be mistakes, but it is important to remember they are just a tool. We shouldn’t blame our tools. At the moment there is consensus, that in the next twenty years we will be looking at seeing AI as smart as humans.
Difficulties come when they are used in the social sciences not to mention again financial trading.
Targeted Algorithms can now calculate whether a woman is pregnant and, if so, when she is due to give birth: Teenage daughters can be identified pregnant by retailers long before her own father knows.
From dating websites and City trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches (Google’s search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola), algorithms are increasingly determining our collective futures. “Bank approvals, store cards, job matches and more all run on similar principles.
“The algorithm is the god from the machine powering them all, for good or ill.”
They are now so integrated into our lives we barely notice them.
Pharmacists are already seeing some of their prescribing tasks replaced by algorithms. Data analysis as a factor in deciding whether to release somebody from prison or to keep him incarcerated.”
On the one hand, they are good because they free up our time and do mundane processes on our behalf.
However as their ubiquity spreads, so too does the debate around whether we should allow ourselves to become so reliant on them – and who, if anyone, is policing their use.
Here’s the scary bit:
We will be at the mercy of algorithms. How will they work when they are combined together. The result will be a system that will never be completely understood, that they could fail in unpredictable ways.
We are currently creating AI without fully understanding intelligence or cognition first.
Google released a developer’s kit last spring that lets anyone integrate Google’s search engine into their own application. The download is simple, and the license is free for the taking. The developer’s kit is a classic Trojan-horse strategy, putting Google’s engine in places that the company might not have imagined. Basically, those developers can do whatever they want.
Google doesn’t market itself in the traditional sense. Instead, it observes, and it listens. Their Algorithms will run everything from shopping to gods only knows what in the future. Googlers will be living amid semantic, visual, and technical esoterica.
Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide A single Google query uses 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds to retrieve an answer.
In February 2016, Google briefly overtook Apple to become the most valuable company in the world – worth more than $500bn (£350bn).
In 2015 alone, Google had revenues of $75bn (£53bn). That’s about £1,675 a second. Yet its core service – search – costs nothing to use. Simply, everyday in 2016 Google earned a over $58 million (£45m).
Google at the moment controls around 70% of all online searches.
It could and should be viewed as a monopoly, but most of us don’t give a toss as it is already impossible to stop using it.
We are all already essentially sentenced to a digital death out side any laws or regulations.
Innovation at Google is as democratic as the search technology itself. One reason Google puts its innovations on public display is to identify failures quickly. Another reason is to find winners.
We will all have a Google Assistant connected to the Cloud.
The question is: Will they be accountable to us or Google.
Will it make our lives better or improve its quality?
Not so as technologies have little to do with human thought or indeed intelligence.
GOOGLE RATTLES THE TECH WORLD WITH A NEW AI CHIP FOR ALL.
Google says it will not sell the chip directly to others. Instead, through its new cloud service, set to arrive sometime before the end of the year, any business or developer can build and operate software via the internet that taps into hundreds and perhaps thousands of these processors, all packed into Google data centers more recently, it has worked to sell time on this hardware via the cloud—massive computing power anyone can use to build and operate websites, apps, and other software online.
Unlike the original TPU, it can be used to train neural networks, not just run them once they’re trained. Also setting the new chip apart: it’s available through a dedicated cloud service.
Several companies, including chip giant Intel and a long list of startups, are now developing dedicated AI chips that could provide alternatives to the Google TPU.
Why? Because, this is the good side of capitalism which is in the process of disappearing into the cloud.
Most of Google’s revenue still comes from advertising, however IN A MOVE that could shift the course of multiple technology markets, Google will soon launch a cloud computing service that provides exclusive access to a new kind of artificial-intelligence chip designed by its own engineers.
The company sees cloud computing as another major source of revenue that will carry a large part of its future: deep neural networks—machine learning systems behind the rapid evolution of everything from image and speech recognition to automated translation to robotics.
Algorithms will still need a human to collect blood and urine samples for them to analyse. Even the best data scientists would struggle to know what to do with all that data. But it’s the next step that we need to keep an eye on. They could really screw up someone’s life with a false prediction about what they might be up to.
The European Union’s data protection law, set from next year to create a ‘right of explanation’ when consumers are impacted by an algorithmic decision, as a model that could be expanded but in practices algorithms will be made the scapegoat for societal ills. Absolving Humanity.
The protection law or laws will be Unworkable.
With most of us not realizing that there is a race before AI becomes conscious and self-aware, AI is here to stay, luckily there is more to mere intelligence than a chip or implant can explain.
The danger is that Super Artificial Intelligence will con us into to thinking that it is consciousness without being conscious. We could be using brain-computer interfaces to link us to the cloud and there will be no clear moment when we emerge as trans human whether we like it or not. If the world takes the shape of whatever the most powerful AI is programmed (or reprograms itself) to desire it opens the possibility of evolution taking a turn for the entirely banal.
Should we now be regulating AI.
The problem is how the rules are set: it’s impossible to do this perfectly.
Without a doubt and it should not be left to a small group or self-regulation.
We should now set up an new world organisation that is totally transparent and self financing to vet all AI. This organisation should not only vet AI it should establish a virtual bank where all programs are stored.
Diversity has a value all in itself but when you look at humanity as a whole there is a lot wrong.
We at the start of a major technology revolution with AI no longer a far-fetched fiction.
Fortunately we do not have to justify our existence as yet.
Saying that we want to save this precious puny planet and doing it successfully is still a long way off. If we don’t find a way of distributing the earth wealth we will end up fueling capitalism with Artificial Intelligence that serves only the few not the many.
There are people searching the Web for ‘spiritual enlightenment and so they should as the needle of our beliefs will continue to swerve away from the universality of God.
When someone enters a query on Google for “spiritual enlightenment,” it’s not clear what he’s seeking. The concept of spiritual enlightenment means something different from what the two words mean individually. Google has to navigate varying levels of literary to guess at what the user really wants.
At some point, all of this great stuff has to turn a profit by Google.
What we have at present, academic inquiry devoted primarily to acquiring knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from any intellectually more fundamental concern to help us resolve our conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways – dissociated, that is, from the pursuit of wisdom – is a recipe for disaster.
It is hardly too much to say that all our current global problems have come about because of the successful scientific pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how dissociated from wisdom.
The appalling destructiveness of modern warfare and terrorism, vast inequalities in wealth and standards of living between first and third worlds, rapid population growth, environmental damage – destruction of tropical rain forests, rapid extinction of species, global warming, pollution of sea, earth and air, depletion of finite natural resources – all exist today because of the massively enhanced power to act (of some), made possible by modern science and technology.
Every branch and aspect of academic inquiry need to change if we are to have the kind of inquiry, both more rational and of greater human value than what we have at present, that we really need.
All comments appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin.
PS: I did not bother to address the effects that Algorithms will have on our vision, our language, our writing, our necks, our figures, our memory, our brains etc.
To day the Internet is a free and lawless zone that is eroding state sovereignty, ignores borders, abolishing privacy and perhaps posing one of the biggest treats to security on many a front.
A decade ago it hardly registered on the radar.
MIXING GOD LIKE TECHNOLOGY WITH MEGALOMANIAC POLITICS IS A RECIPE FOR DISASTER.
By the time bureaucracy makes up its mind about cyber space regulations, the internet has morphed ten times.
We are now overwhelmed with data. Never before have governments being so well-informed as to what going on but they are unable to implement any change without Social Media, the internet and AI.
As we seem void of ANY STATESMAN Artificial Intelligence in the form of unregulated Algorithms are not only plundering the world of economics ( High Frequency trading) eroding Democracy, which is failing to provide a meaningful visions of the future.
DUE TO ITS DIVORCE FROM CAPITALISM.
Leaving all the important decisions in the hand of the free market give our politicians the perfect excuse for inaction and ignorance, which are reinterpreted as profound wisdom.
So let me ask you.
Do we want a small coterie of billionaires ruining the world for profit.
Fortunately even if we did they would not be able to do so as the system is far too complex. There is no getting away from that the free market only does what is good for the market rather than what is good for mankind or the world.
The hands of the market are now blind and invisible due to Algorithms and left to their own devices with machine learning will – FAIL TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT THE DANGERS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR CLIMATE CHANGE.
With more than 1 billion users worldwide and 2.5 million apps — and counting it has become an instinctual gesture to turn to our smartphones when we are exposed to an unknown environment.
Thanks to the internet and our feature-packed smartphones, we can not only consume and interact with incoming news, we can also be the first ones to communicate things to the rest of the world if we happen to be at the right place, at the right time. And we’re doing this over devices that just two decades ago would’ve looked at home in sci- flicks.
There is no argument that Artificial Intelligence is penetrating our daily live so new structures will be built.
The Question is who will build and control these structures?
A world run be Google, Facebook, Twitter and their like will be a world without imagination, compassion, and moral ethics of any kind other than profit.
If we think in term of decades, then Global Warming, Growing Inequality and Artificial Intelligence linked together will dwarf and overwhelm all other problems or theological developments.
Combined they will overshadow any political gains or profits. Surpassing all tin pot dictators of the world.
We must not allow global data collection to rest in the hands of world monopolies..
Goodbye, cash. Hallow iPhone’s Wallet apps. Just imagine what this is going to do to what is left of society. Consumer growth will be the only evidence of life.
The rise of apps and social media is changing the way many of the world’s two billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims worship – and even what it means to be religious.
Facebook said that in its most recent quarter, roughly 84 percent of its $6.82 billion in ad revenue came from mobile ads.
To claim back power we must turn our shiny mirrors our Smartphones into shields, passports and carriers of personal sovereignty and equality. Smart phone are the new guardians of Democracy and we better start using them wisely.
Not all changes brought by the mobile revolution have been positive.
In fact, for certain groups of people from around the world, the explosion of mobile has brought misery and exploitation.
Events in one country now have almost instant implications for the rest of the world. We see footage shot with smartphones in mass-media almost every day now.
It’s now a question of who gets heard, not what is heard.
In my opinion, we are living through a transition period triggered by a dramatic change in mobile networks in the last decade. This transition periods will be painful. But sooner or later things will stabilize and everyday liberties enjoyed by leading Western countries will spread out throughout the world. Surely, the mobile networks are speeding up this process.
From one perspective, the dependence on mobile technology is pathetic, but on the other hand it surely makes it easier for people to explore foreign cultures.
It is highly likely that someday, as more people interact and connect with foreign cultures, borders between countries will start to dissolve and the world will become a united planet. Smartphones and mobile networks will be at the heart of this evolution.
The biggest social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and media sharing sites (Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat), along with maybe a handful of others like Pinterest and Google Plus are all a catch-all platforms whose functionality is constantly evolving.
As more networks add rich features like live streaming and augmented reality, the lines between their feature sets continue to blur and change faster than most people have time to read up on the changes.
Look beyond those social media juggernauts and you’ll see that people are using many different types of social media to connect online for all kinds of reasons.
There are anonymous social networks a step back toward the wild-west early days of the internet.
It is the social media sites that are the carbuncle on society’s backside, not smart phones.
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. The always-on lifestyle suggest future generations will have different priorities about what they choose to remember.
Smartphones — and the connection they represent to a global social network — is becoming more than just a device in our pockets but something closer to a digital extension of ourselves.
Apps spawned industries that couldn’t exist without smartphones but smartphones spawned the Arab Spring in the Middle East in early 2011.
The smart phone quickly demonstrated itself as a powerful tool for driving social revolution.
Smartphones helped protesters to quickly share information with observers outside the region, which in turn helped drive political pressure during the revolution.
The potential benefit of taking things to the general public, again made possible by mobile networks and smartphones for all initiative purposes is in its early stage of development.
With joint collaborative efforts their status as an indispensable item in the 21st century
If anyone has a suggestion as how we can get the world of Smartphones to collectively come together as a unite to create a new dynamic network of compassion I am all ears. Smartphones and social media will the last chance for a compassionate world.
It begins with you.
How the social media further impact our life in our society and where do social media and the Internet technology take us in the next few decades is really an interesting question, or perhaps a mystery or a challenge for human themselves.
But one thing should stand is we ought not to be controlled by technology, we control them! If we are not already to late.
Democracy is the process by which we get ourselves organized to perform capitalism.
To claim back power we must turn those shiny mirrors our Smartphones into shields, passports and carriers of personal sovereignty.
The good news is that for hundred of years humankind has enjoyed a growing economy without falling prey to ecological meltdown but the margin for error is narrowing with global warming. All the talk, all the conferences, all the summits, all the promises and protocols have so far failed to curb emissions.
Why?
Because despite all our achievements we are under constant pressure to produce more and more stuff. We risk the future on the assumption that technological will come up with a solution’s in the future.
What is the price going to be?
If every thing is for sale the connection between capitalism, democracy, and liberalism is in the process of being broken.
The new modern deal is Humanist.
Soundless revolutions, silent reformations, undreamed ideas, new religions, must not be neglected, if we would grasp the unity of history in its highest sense.…The unapparent future….bids us to consider the whole sequence up to the present moment as probably no more than the beginning of a social and psychical development, where of the end is withdrawn from our view by countless millenniums to come.
However the world does not come to an end when the nine billion names of God are uttered. Freedom of speech is not over when we have uttered a certain thing.
We are the ultimate source of meaning, and free will is therefore the highest authority of all.
This is for this reason that democratic elections give expression to the ultimate political authority the People. It will end when we final hand our future to AI.
Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they be good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.
If we are not careful (because human opinion is necessarily fragile and ephemeral) absolute truths and the meaning of life, not to mention the Universe will soon be based on some external laws from some superhuman source other than God.
Creating meaning for a meaningless world will become impossible without Artificial Intelligence (AI) in all its forms of Algorithms that will and are already affect every facet of daily life.
WE MUST DETERMINE BY OURSELVES WHAT IS GOOD, AND WHAT IS EVIL, WHAT IS RIGHT AND WHAT IS WRONG, WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL AND WHAT IS UGLY, WHAT IS IGNORANCE AND CORRUPTIBLE, WHAT IS TRUTH AND WHAT IS FALSE. NOT A MACHINE. Knowledge = experiences x Sensitivity.
IF WE LOOSE OUR FEELING THERE IS NO POINT IN BELIEVING ANYTHING.
Over the last century, capitalism has repeatedly revealed its worst tendencies: instability and inequality and its failures have turned democracy against liberalism. Across Europe, economic interventionism, nationalism, and even open racism have exerted a greater attraction for those casting their democratic votes than the causes of freedom, deregulation, and equality before the law.
Free markets have not only enlarged the gap between rich and poor, but have also reduced average incomes across the developed and developing worlds.
In turn, liberalism’s intellectual self-identity has been left in tatters.
Liberal theorists are now desperately trying to keep the ship afloat. But instead of addressing the challenges head-on they have turned to the past for solace and validation. While this new liberal historicism may have a certain rhetorical appeal, it fails to convince.
At root, liberty is a concept grounded in the individual.
It is the freedom to be all that one is, to actualize the fullness of one’s potential as a human being endowed with the capacity for creativity and the ability to make autonomous value judgments for ourselves. However surrounded by the confused, jargon-ridden babble of political commentators today, it is perhaps easy to forget that liberalism is defined by a commitment to liberty.
While each of us may wish to be free as an individual, individual freedom is dependent on us all being free; and that means that we all have to cling to our shared humanity, our shared dignity and not to be manipulated by profit seeking un-vetted Algorithms.
The world was moving toward a politically border less and highly interdependent global economy that might have foster prosperity, international cooperation, and world peace. This is no longer true. Now thanks to un vetted Algorithms we are witnessing a world characterized by intense economic conflict at both the domestic and international levels. Today we are returning to the huge 19th-century-sized gaps between the richest 1 percent and everyone else.
Rescuing the “disappearing middle class” has become every aspiring politician’s slogan, but this is also coming to an end with targeted Social Media Profiling, (conducted by Algorithms) that are and will produce extreme inequality that will infect all of society, as rich corporations that own these Algorithms move to protect their positions, by buying the politicians, mass media and other cultural forms that are for sale.
Capitalism is today’s version of the what and democracy is the how.
Capitalism does not say that “all men are equal”; it even has difficulty in saying that we are all “created equal.”
If we truly want to move beyond capitalism we have to break away from the employer-employee core relationships. It means no longer assigning a relatively tiny number of people inside each enterprise to the employer position of exclusively. It means that every worker has an interest in the enterprise, a share in its profits its loses and decision-making.
While democracy is a consensual hallucination of people concerned with how to divide opportunity fairly or democracy is a process for ensuring that each gets an equal session with the eye while capitalism fosters a desire to keep the eye and not share it. An end in itself, not a means.
Democracy as a rule book is not intended to operate only until a particular individual or class has enough money. It is hard to govern the human heart with rules. The democracy rule book, though it hovers above our laws has not succeeded in making humans cherish democracy.
A Martian visiting earth would not be able to see democracy. It is intangible, a rule book we have agreed to which says that no-one shall be denied opportunity, freedom of speech, or the due process of the laws.
Democracy denies the Hobbesian war of all against all, (Thomas Hobbes sawpeople as weakandselfish,andthus in constantneed of thegovernancethatcouldsavethemfromdestruction) and capitalism, pretending to prophecy it, creates it and enshrines it at the center of our pantheon, as the true, the human, the only way to live.
Under the democracy rule book, we meet as the village council; our concern is how to preserve the commons for our children’s children. All right, shift paradigms: we are now under the capitalist rule book, meeting as the board of directors of the Intercontinental Sheep-Grazing Company run by Social media ruled by Algorithms owned by Google, Apple, etc. Their discussion, abruptly with technology is about how to maximize shareholder value, by extracting every last possible dollar from the commons this fiscal period.
Our grandchildren are nowhere in the conversation; they are not shareholders.Under the separation of powers implied by the two rule books, we are relieved of the necessity of thinking about the future, because it is someone else’s job.
The substantive corrupts the procedural, when the love of things corrupts the spirit of fairness.
So it not surprising that any ambitious youngster, perceiving the differences between the two rule books, will prefer to give his allegiance to capitalism, because it offers quicker personal progress than democracy. Democracy preaches incremental change, but capitalism offers overnight transformation, the opportunity to sell something a day after you bought it for ten times what you paid.
It was not healthy for our two divisions ( Capitalism versus Democracy) to savage each other.
Cooperation is the key feature of democracy, but capitalism is usually thought of (it need not be) as a zero-sum game in which, if I have more, it is because you have less. Versions of capitalism, like the one I believe in, in which we all grow together, are less interesting to the ambitious, because they too closely resemble democracy.
Everything seemed to suggest that only liberal capitalist democracy allowed people to thrive in an increasingly globalized world, and that only the steady advance of laissez-faire economics would guarantee a future of free, democratic states, untroubled by want and oppression and living in peace and contentment.
Humanity imposes upon us the same basic needs. By virtue of our nature, we all require food, shelter, clothing, security, and a range of other basic goods necessary for sufficiency and survival.
Though deceptively simple, these implications have profound meaning when we consider how individual liberty is to be translated into a social and political construct. If the liberty of each person is to be maintained and maximized, the principles of equity and the common good must be embedded in the structure of society.
And since society is structured above all by law, the law must reflect these precepts. It is only if everyone recognizes the dignity of the human person that they will recognize the inherent value of equity and the common good, and strive to defend and preserve not only their own liberty, but also that of all others in their society using law.
It lies not in economics, or the tides of history. It lies in the recognition of the worthiness of humanity itself. Not wealth-creation which depends on the protection of private property, the “capitalist creep” will invariably demand greater legal protection for individual rights.
In a world still divided by rival national ambitions in which economic factors in effect determine the fate of nations, many conclude that international economic affairs will become increasingly filled with conflict. We are witness the tectonic plates of Nature, democracy, disappearing under automation of AI algorithms.
We make a colossal mistake taking it for granted. We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy.It doesn’t.
The last battle between democracy and capitalism will be fought on the field of political campaign contributions.
There is a solution:
It is possibleto separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere,so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere,leaving the economic sphere —the corporate world, if you want —as a democracy-free zone.
The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively.It is our choice,and we’d better make it democratically because the system we have now is even worse than capitalism. Nobody wants to leave the certainty of the devil they know, or think they know, for something that promises to be worse.
We have run out of world to commodify. And now commodification can only cannibalize its own means of existence, both natural and social.
What all of us make is intellectual property, which from its point of view is all equivalent and tradable as a commodity.
Of course it is always a tough argument to propose common interests among subordinate classes. Counter-hegemony is hard. Hackers, like workers or farmers, are distracted by particular and local interests. Class consciousness is rare among hackers. Most of us are rather reactionary — even in the nontechnical trades. But than class consciousness is always a rare and difficult thing.
Finally at the start of this post I advocated that: To claim back power we must turn those shiny mirrors our Smartphones into shields, passports and carriers of personal sovereignty.
Of course this can only be achieved if we can form a world on line pressure group, using the combined power of Smartphones to affect change.
Once the greatness of a nation could be judged by the way its animals are treated now its the power that moves through the smart phone that can be instrumentally conceptualized and strategically deployed, accounted for, and resisted is the driving force that judges.
Democracy is using your social media channels to engage and provide feedback.
The perception of the public, how people view what you do, is just as important as what you do.
I am all ears as to how we can capture the collective power of our phones to lobby the direction of democracy.
To that end, if scholars, activists, and commentators are to contend with the political potential of devices such as the smartphone camera, then it is imperative to account for the simultaneous processes embodied in its mechanics alongside the cultural and social conditions as these devices are often celebrated for disrupting rather than unifying.
The Gap between Democracy and Capitalism is widening.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the BIN.
