Category Archives: Technology

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THE WORLD: PART TWO: EDUCATION.

30 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Education, Humanity., Modern Day Communication., Social Media., Technology, The Future, The Internet., Unanswered Questions., Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Education can contribute significantly to the promotion of mutual understanding and tolerance.

Today’s revolution in social communications involves a fundamental reshaping of the elements by which people comprehend the world about them, and verify and express what they comprehend. The internet has significant effects on communicating, teaching and learning.

What today is called the digital divide, will be the Educational Disaster of the Future.

Afficher l'image d'origine

It takes a wide range of different communication styles to get across to all the different learning styles that exist, but as our modern world evolves and becomes more sophisticated, so must our learning institutions.

Technology enthusiasts have long heralded the power of technology—from the printing press, to blackboards, to the laptop—to transform education.

The potential of technology to help improve education has significance beyond teaching children reading and math.

Quality education plays an important role in promoting economic development, improving health and nutrition and reducing maternal and infant mortality rates. Economic growth, for example, can be directly impacted by the quality of the education systems in developing countries.

Our first problem is that the internet is not always accessible by all learners and teachers. The second problem is though English all over the world is taught widely as a second language its is the primary language of the internet.

As a result in most of the non-English speaking parts of the world the internet it is only a tool for educational activities.

In my previous post in this series we looked at Communication.

I ended that post by stating that Education is Communication.

With most of the world deprived of any Internet connection we are WiFi our way to a digital divide that will have more than serious consequences for those countries but for all of us. 

Of course, education has used technology for centuries, from blackboards to textbooks, yet in recent history very little has changed in how education is delivered.Afficher l'image d'origine

Modern information and communications technology holds great promise in helping bring quality learning to some of the world’s poorest and hardest to reach communities. But it is highly unlikely that this will happen.

Many emerging and developing nations will be left out of the internet revolution entirely.

Indeed, in some of the most remote regions of the globe, mobile phones and other forms of technology are being used in ways barely envisioned in the United States or Europe.

Here are a few examples.

About half of online Chinese (52%) have used the internet to buy products in the past 12 months.

Majorities of internet users in Bangladesh (62%) and India (55%) say they have looked for a job online in the past year.

54% of internet users across emerging and developing countries use the internet to get political news and information.

In Venezuela, three-quarters of cell phone owners (who constitute 88% of the adult population) use their device to take pictures or video.

More than six-in-ten internet users in Poland (64%) say they have gotten health information online in the past 12 months.

Over half of the reduction in child mortality worldwide since 1970 is linked to “increased educational attainment in women of reproductive age.”Internet Has Most Positive Influence on Education, Least Positive on Morality

Back to Education.

Four years ago the iPad didn’t even exist.

We don’t know what will be the current technology in another four. Perhaps it will be wearable devices such as Google Glass.

You don’t have to be a genius or a clairvoyant to see that Education as we know it is rapidly becoming obsolete.

So what is the future?

On the possibilities of recent forms of technology, often known as Information Communication Technology (ICT). ICT refers to technologies that provide access to information through telecommunications. It is generally used to describe most technology uses and can cover anything from radios, to mobile phones, to laptops.

The future is about access, anywhere learning and collaboration, both locally and globally.

But the questions are:

What will education be? Who or what will be doing the Education? For what purpose?  Is it desirable that we all end up being educated by the cloud if the future of education technology is all about the cloud and anywhere access. 

Thanks to the cloud and mobile devices, technology will be integrated into every part of school. In fact, it won’t just be the classrooms that will change. Games fields, gyms and school trips will all change. Whether offsite or on site the school, teachers, students and support staff will all be connected.

In my ideal world, all classrooms will be paperless.

Unfortunately educators working in and with developing countries rarely have an expertise or even a basic grounding in the wide range of technological innovations and their potential uses for education.

Even the most seasoned education expert is likely to stare blankly if terms such as ‘cloud computing’, ‘m-learning’, or ‘total cost of ownership’ are introduced into the conversation.

Students will take ownership of their own learning. Rather than being ‘taught.’

Students can learn independently and in their own way. They could be in the same room or in different countries.

Will this form of education be mass brainwashing?

The cloud will set, collect and grade work online. Students will have instant access to grades, comments and work via a computer, smart phone or tablet.

The great disadvantage will be the lack of oral communication.

The iPads and other mobile technology are the ‘now’.

Reflecting western style democracy.

Schools of the future could have a traditional cohort of students, as well as online only students who live across the country or even the world. Things are already starting to move this way with the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Infrastructure is paramount to the future of technology in education.

This should be happening now.

Teaching and learning is going to be social but people are even more leery of the internet’s effect on morality. It is should be driven by the question: How is this changing your capacity to engage the world effectively?

Universities should teach students how to deal with a world in constant motion, a world that doesn’t come labeled and arranged for you, a world in which you have to work with a lot of other people both because you need their help and because they need to understand why you think what you’re doing makes sense.

This is what is going to be importance to our world which is reminding us so every day of the week that Inequality is at the source of all our troubles.

We’ve lost sight of this, but we can reclaim it through education. 

It is possible to say that technology is not a purpose but only a tool for all humanistic necessities. This at the moment is totally untrue.

If you don’t believe me, look a Wall Street.

 The winner in this process will be humanity as a whole” and not just “a wealthy elite that controls science, technology and the planet’s resources”;

The Internet transmit and help instill a set of cultural values—ways of thinking about social relationships, family, religion, the human condition—whose novelty and glamour can challenge and overwhelm traditional cultures.

The Internet far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here in Education that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come”

The Internet can make an enormously valuable contribution to human life. It can foster prosperity and peace, intellectual and aesthetic growth, mutual understanding among people’s and nations on a global scale. If it is married into Education for all.

 

Afficher l'image d'origine

 

Wall Street : Every trillionth of a second shares, stock, currency, futures, are bought and sold for profit by Computer programs.

It’s no wonder that a median of only 29% say the internet is a good influence on morality, while 42% say it is a bad influence.

There’s still a way to go to ensure all schools are ready for the future of technology.

So go now, and look with your newly educated eyes at this world.

Afficher l'image d'origine

If students aren’t proficient in their studies to begin with and technology is used incorrectly, a whole mess of problems will arise.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WE ALL BEING BRAINWASHED. THE WAY YOU THINK IS BEING CHANGED.

11 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by in Google it., Google Knowledge., Humanity., Life., Social Media., Technology, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WE ALL BEING BRAINWASHED. THE WAY YOU THINK IS BEING CHANGED.

Tags

, , , ,

 

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.Afficher l'image d'origine

THE INTERNET IS CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK.

There’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

For me, as for others, the Net media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

When we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

It is replacing real wisdom with the conceit of wisdom.

It is filling us up with “content,” to the point that we are sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

It is destroying deep thinking, and eroding quiet spaces.

It is replacing compassion with selfishness. It is partly to blame for the current world conflicts.

Our thinking, has taken on a “staccato” quality. A form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source we have already visited.

Smartphones  have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.

They are  becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through our eyes and ears and into our minds.time from human events.

We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.

But there comes a design point when there are so many tools available that our environments lose their simplicity and the cost in added complexity outweighs the benefits of convenience.

In fact it is makes us demonstrably less efficient. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV, our conscience.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s imageDaniel J Levitan

Email, telephone calls, electronic discussion groups, websites, pushed intranet news, letters and memos, faxes, stick-ems, calendars, pagers, and, of course, physical conversations and meetings, are just a few of the communicative events that bombard today’s knowledge worker. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

Printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.

Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.

It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our

We can turn the ringer off our phones, we can close our doors, we can auto-filter our email, we can personalize search engines, ask people to honor privacy, and so forth. But blocking out sacred time segments or sealing ourselves off from outside contact and even filtering email is not a serious solution. 

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Google carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. Which is totally untrue.

Their desire is to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter.”If you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

A load of cobblers. To solve problems that have never been solved before, and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.

If our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence it would be more than unsettling. We would drain of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” turning  our thoughts and actions into scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.

Weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

Remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.  Every information technology carries an intellectual ethic. We stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

What the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

The missing premise is quality: The ratio of high quality to low quality information is falling.

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large-scale.

Information is relentlessly pushed at us, and no matter how much we get we feel we need more, and of better quality and focus.

  • Pushed information is information arriving in our work space over which we have little short-term control – the memos, letters, newspapers, email, telephone calls, journals, calendars etc. that land in one of our in boxes. To deal with it we have to make decisions. Is this garbage? Might it be useful? When? Where should I put it? Must I make a new file or new category for this?
  • Pulled or retrievable information is information we can tap into when we want to find an answer to a question or acquire background knowledge on a topic. Most people harbor a lingering belief that even more relevant information lies outside, somewhere, and if found will save having to duplicate effort.

Our lives ought to get easier in information rich environments but the question is at what cost.

He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement is as good as dead.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet no search engine seems to return hits with sufficient precision to save us from having to browse dozens of useless pages in our effort to berry pick the best items. The result is that we spend more time searching

more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them.

we need a new theoretical understanding of our activity space and our dynamic relation to our environments.Cognitive overload is a brute fact of modern life. It is not going to disappear. In almost every facet of our work life, and in more and more of our domestic life, the jobs we need to do and the activity spaces we have in which to perform those jobs are ecologies saturated with overload.

As technology increases the omnipresence of information, both of the pushed and pulled sort, the consequence for the workplace, so far, is that we are more overwhelmed. There is little reason to suppose this trend to change.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S, It’s time to redefine our “lifespaces”—the way we live

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Google Knowledge., Humanity., Social Media., Technology, The Future, The world to day.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S, It’s time to redefine our “lifespaces”—the way we live

Tags

, , , ,

Afficher l'image d'origine

Humans started to separate from the rest of the great apes about 7M years ago and we became modern humans 200k years ago.

Are we now throwing the old blueprint out the window?

So Are we more attuned to our modern needs for the twenty-first century and beyond?

Have we moved beyond the paradigm of living in a nuclear family home in the suburbs?

What do the objects we select tell us about the relationships that exist between designer, retailer and consumer?

What is the design thinking behind some of the everyday items that shape our lives?

First we have to look at ourselves and according to the fountain of modern-day knowledge Google it.

An average person.

Spends 25 years sleeping.

10.3 years working.

48 days having sex.

Women spend 17 years of their lives trying to lose weight.

Spends 9.1 years watching TV.

Spends 2 years watching commercials.

Spends 1.1 years cleaning.

Spends 2.5 years cooking.

Spends 3.66 years eating, about 67 minutes a day.

Spends 4.3 years driving a car.

Spends 3 months of our life in traffic, about 38 hours a year.

Spends 1.5 years in the bathroom.

Spends a total of 92 days on the toilet.

Spends 70% of our waking life in front of digital media.

We laugh out loud 290,000 times in your life.

We walk a total of 110,000 miles.

We spend 90% of your time indoors.

We consume. 1 teaspoons of alcohol per day.

We have between 4 and 6 dreams a night for a total of 2,000 a year.

We fart 402,000 times in your lifetime.

We spend 14 days of your life kissing.

We drink 12,000 cups of coffee.

If you’re more into tea, you drink 48 pounds in your lifetime.

Women spend nearly 1 year deciding what to wear.

The average man will spend 1 year staring at women.

Women spend 8 years of their life shopping.

Women spend 1.5 years doing their hair.

An office worker spends 5 years sitting at a desk.

The average employee spends 2 years sitting in work meetings.

The average person swears 2,000,000 times.

Your heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times.

The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime

Your body has about 5.6 liters (6 quarts) of blood. This 5.6 liters of blood circulates through the body three times every minute. In one day, the blood travels a total of 19,000 km (12,000 miles)

the human body is about 60 percent water.

You pass around 42,759…. Liters of Urine in an average life time.

You are awake 16 to 18 hours a day.

“The New Frugality”

The average adult spends more than 20 hours online a week.

On average, people spend more than 490 minutes of their day with some sort of media,.with global average consumption set to rise to 506 minutes.

The internet accounted for 13% of average daily media use in 2010, but is set to reach nearly 30% in 2017.

Instant messaging use has leaped from 38% of mobile phone users in 2013 to 42% in 2014, driven by services such as Whats App and Facebook Messenger.

The mobile phone is now the primary device used for gaming with a quarter of mobile users playing games at least once a week.

80% of internet users aged between 35 and 44 are now on social media.

70% of internet users say they feel comfortable giving away personal information on the internet, including their home address, and a quarter say they don’t read website terms and conditions or privacy statements at all.

The start of life on Earth?

Are all becoming shut-ins.?

Or are we closer today to a global revolution than ever before. Can you feel it?

Or are we all disappearing into the Cloud.

The Question is how can we ensure that this is not going to happen.

HERE IS A SUGGESTION THAT COULD NOT BRAKE DOWN THE MESS WE SEE THE WORLD IN.

A UNIVERSITY TRAVEL SUBSIDIARITY AIR TICKET AWARDED TO GRADUATES.

THE SUBSIDY COULD BE GRADED ACCORDING TO THE MARKS RECEIVED.  

STUDENTS COULD BE ENCOURAGED TO SAVE THE BALANCE DURING THEIR COURSE.  

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE TRAVEL TO OPEN THE MIND.    

Here below are a few observations to help you make your mind up.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

THE BEADY EYE ASK THE QUESTION DO WE REALLY CARE.

25 Friday Sep 2015

Posted by in Humanity., Politics., Technology, The Future, Unanswered Questions.

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

UNFORTUNATELY THE SAPIENS REGIME ON EARTH HAS SO FAR PRODUCED LITTLE THAT WE CAN BE PROUD OF.

Time and time again massive increases in human power has not improved the well-being of individual humans and has caused immense misery to other animals.

In the last few decades we have made some progress as far as human condition is concerned , with reductions in world wars, plagues, and famines.

But we remain unsure of our goals and remain as discontented as ever.

No body seems to know where we are going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have little idea what to do with the power.

Worse still we seem to be more irresponsible than ever, wreaking havoc on the world and nature while seeking little more than self-satisfaction which we never find.

I am sure like me that you are finding it difficult if not impossible to assimilate never mind keep up with all that is presently taking place in world.

Mass migration, climate change, return to the dark ages ISIS, not to mention wars, terrorists, cheat, (Volkswagen) Countries going broke, Designer drugs, Space exploration, the Web/Internet/Apps.

THE FACT IS THAT WE ARE THE TERROR OF THE ECOSYSTEM and it seems lost on us due to short-term profit and greed.

Most of our world organisations with the advance of technology are out of date, underfunded and unrepresentative of humanity and the planet and in need of radical overhauls, but it is of little concern to the populist at large.

However the good news is that in the back ground there is a revolution going on that is changing the way we live and is going to change evolution itself.

Once more we are being presented with opportunities that are opening up so quickly they are outpacing our collective capacity for making wise and far-sighted decisions.

Presently, only a tiny fraction of these opportunities have being realized.

We are releasing ourselves from the shackles of biology.

We are beginning to re shape our minds and our bodies.

If you think that the mapping the first genome require fifteen years and three billion dollars that to day a persons DNA can be mapped within a few weeks for a mere few hundred bucks which means nothing to most people, but soon we will be able to know what you will die from other than accident or bullet.

The road to designer medical care is well on the way for those that can afford it.

Our social media is blinding us to the true consequences of supplementary devices we now use to live our lives.

Or is it telling us that we are standing on the brink of becoming true cyborgs.

Like storing or brains in the cloud, having inorganic features that are inseparable from our bodies that are modify our abilities, our desires, personalities, and identities.

Do we care that bio-engineering could resurrect the Neanderthals. No

Do we care that we are braking the laws of natural selection with impunity by producing a rabbit that glows.  No

Do we care that we can produce mice that grow human ears, or change sex through hormonal treatment, or creating computer versus that are self learning, or bring back extinct creatures. Are these examples not the first steps of genetically engineer that are changing an individual abilities but also their social structure.  No

Tinkering with or genes won’t necessarily kill us.

But we might be fiddle with Homo Sapiens to such an extent that we will be no longer be Homo Sapiens.

Do we care that the Defense Advance research project Agency in the US is developing cyborgs out of insects? No

Do we care that computer algorithms are running the stock exchange or selecting target for drones, running our economies, teaching the next generation? No

What if we have quantum computer power?  Our successors will then function on a different level of consciousness.  Not  to worried we are human.

The Good news. If indeed we become cyborgs with some thing beyond consciousness that we cannot conceive, it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of much interest to us or our current social organisation of Communist or Capitalist, or which gender we are.

At this point you might think why worry we are only upgrading into a different type of human being.

Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer is far more dramatic than anything we have seen to date there is a great and urgent danger that our complacency which is hidden by science under the umbrella of The Gilgamesh Project (that justifies everything that science does by labeling it as curing diseases and saving human lives) is going to be nonrecoverable in the near future.

In my view its time we decide what we want to want by influencing the direction that scientists are taking.

If what is happening is allowed to continue and continue it will without imaginative social policies blight our society and there will be millions of people living wretchedly lives and reacting accordingly.

Globalization, technological changes, and governments policies have produced a class structure with a tiny plutocracy of billionaires, corporations and algorithms that are doing away with people.

We need a politics of time.

We need to scrap the United Nations and replace it with a new fully funded¨( see previous post) World People Protection Organisation that reflects the needs of the planet and all that live on it.

We must realize before its to late that the growing structural inequality is socially unsustainable. A basic world wage would be a good start. ( See Post We don’t live in a digital world the washing machine has changed lives more than the internet)

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT DESIRE

17 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by in Humanity., Social Media., Technology, Unanswered Questions.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT DESIRE

Tags

, , , ,

How often have you said  “I crave this substance, long to see that person again, would die for another piece of something I just ate.

The first time that many people consume an alcoholic beverage, they have no particular desire to drink it. They just go along with the crowd. Then the alcohol hits and they discover that the feeling is very pleasant — in other words, rewarding.

I am sure like me that this is a subject you know little about and seldom question. Like many subjects this is a human attribute we take for granted.

Indeed my desire to explain clearly what I want to, I am sure will fail miserably.

Nothing Ventured nothing gained.

So let’s ask where does desire come from?

How could anything be a desire without one having an urge to obtain the object of desire?

The obvious answer is our senses, sight, smell, touch, taste, pain, combined with abstract stimulants like shape, color, and mood or for example Donald Trump’s taste leaves a lot to be desired.

Some of our thoughts are accepted, some are rejected, and others are ignored.

There are two distinctions of orientation or of intention of a subject toward any phenomenon: “to” or “from” it, attraction or repulsion, acceptance or rejection.

The words ‘desire’, ‘want’, ‘wish’, one’s desires provide one with reasons to act.

The three faces of desire are, in a nutshell, that desires are motivating, that satisfying desires is usually pleasurable, and that desires determine what will count as rewards and punishments.

There can be reward without desire.

When a desire is not satisfied, it is rational to change the world, not the desire.

Changing the desire would leave one with nothing, neither pleasure nor displeasure.

Desire is often for pleasure and satisfying desires is often extremely pleasurable, but the very possibility of a causal relationship between the two speaks to them being different from one another.

But then again for an individual attempting to realize his self-regarding desires, the satisfaction of the satisfaction of a desire is unmeaning.

By the time we desire something, we do not have to learn that getting it would be rewarding; we already believe that.

This does not mean that the desirability of desires is a good guide to anything else about them. There are certain kinds of conflict of desire and how do you distinguish between wishes and desires?

Desires are held to conflict just in case the satisfaction of one precludes the satisfaction of the other; second, a desire is said to be satisfied just in case the propositional content of the desire is true.

Yet little is actually known about well-being. The satisfaction of one’s present desires for present states of affairs can affect one’s well-being.

So if I desire fame today and become famous tomorrow, my well-being is positively affected only if tomorrow, when I am famous, I still desire to be famous.

An individual’s well-being is enhanced when her desires are satisfied.

“Well-being,” “welfare,” “utility,” and “quality of life,” all closely related concepts, and are at the center of morality, politics, law, and economics.

Subjective theories of well-being claim that how well our lives go for us is a matter of our attitudes towards what we get in life rather than the nature of the things themselves.

The concept of preference dominates economic theory today.

I could write till the cows come home on the misrepresentations of the bodies, desires and sexualities of people in the world which are embedded in the colonial histories, and in the social, economic and political complexities of the world, with all their racial, ethnic, class and religious diversity.

Exploiting the erotic is a foundational aspect of hegemonic knowledge production, war and colonization.

The distortion of the erotic is tied to the objectification of women, the reproduction of reductive Brown and Black and White masculinities, and to the sensationalization of our identities and lives, thus reinforcing consumerist and fundamentalist politics.

The erotic has been distorted and used to oppress women and distance them from their power.

The Internet stimulates continuing change in sociality and sexual markets.  Economic growth, globalisation and the Internet facilitate access to the world’s oldest profession.

Dating websites cater to people of all ages, all socio-economic groups, married and non-married. Some websites specialise in particular social and/or sexual groups, making it easier for people with arcane tastes and interests to meet up. Commercial sexual services have also take to the Internet, and advertise their services under the guise of ‘call girl’ or ‘escort’ services and the popular ‘Girl-Friend Experience’ (GFE).

As my interest here is to ask the question what is desire, where does it come from rather than the obvious male sexual desire which manifested at least twice as often as female desire I will leave this side of desire for others to comment.

It is sufficient to say that the commercial sex industry is impervious to prohibitions and cannot be eliminated. It should be completely decriminalised.

The sex industry is estimated to be worth over four billion pounds to the British economy.

Capitalism is the economy of desire with advertising its weapon.

Welfare economics defines individual welfare in terms of preference satisfaction or utility, and social welfare as a function of individual preferences.

The desire for status is a controversial topic. On the one hand, many theorists have argued that the desire for status is a fundamental human motive.

So what are desires like that we encounter in ourselves and others?

Will Goggle Glasses create desires?

Will artificial intelligence have desires.?

The only replacement for Desire is Excellence. That state is not, of course, within the experience of normal, sane mortals. Just look at the state of the world.

Can we explore space if we desire to be home.?

Here is a desire of mine. Don’t press the like button leave a comment.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE TAKES A LOOK AT WHAT HUMANITY HAS ACHIEVED TO DATE.

28 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Environment, Humanity., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE TAKES A LOOK AT WHAT HUMANITY HAS ACHIEVED TO DATE.

Tags

, , , , , , ,

The most accurate simulation of the human brain ever has been carried out, but a single second’s worth of activity took one of the world’s largest supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate.Men’s and women's brains are wired differently

SO LET’S HAVE A LOOK AT WHAT WE HAVE ACHIEVED SINCE WE CAME DOWN OUT OF THE TREES AND STOOD UPRIGHT.

( I am sure there will be many gaps in what I write here so you will have plenty of ammunition to comment. Those of you who are shadow people lead by the like button feel free to press it. )

Right: On your marks we off.

At first we were of no significance till we discovered that we could walk up right, discovered fire, tools, and language. We became foragers/ hunters with no hierarchy spreading all over the world providing there was a land bridge developing new weapons and new clothing due to climate change and perhaps unfriendly rivals.

All that changed when we began to devote our efforts to manipulating the lives of animals and plants. The Farmer had arrived. More babies to be fed, so we burnt down forests and planted wheat thus becoming wheat slaves living in settled artificial enclaves dedicated to growing wheat.

Because of this we discovered writing and numbers, money and religion.

This lead to placing a material value not just on possession but on ourselves resulting in a conscious effort to create laws, customs, procedures, to run societies.

By this time with the human brain going into hibernation due to all the information that needed to be stored we are well on the way to creating religious gods, empires, armies, taxes, etc  Thus the arrival of bureaucracy, rulers, social division, ruling classes, slaver, gun power, the wheel and sea worthy ships.

Of course building, pollution, masculine dominance and exploration were now in full swing and it’s not long before the world is dividing into Empires of different cultures, different languages, different belief, most still using their legs and horses with the odd set of wheels to get around.

The Roman empire broke up, the Mongol empire went to pieces, the Chines empire built a wall, America and Europe did not know each other existed. Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world.

90% of humans lived in a single mega world ; the world of Afro- Asia the rest lived in America, central America, the Andean world, the Australian world, islands of the Pacific.

They were all swallowed up by the Afro-Asian world.

Resources were plentiful. Till along came How Much is it.  Money the foundation of Greed and cooperation between strangers drastically reducing diversity. The first step to we becoming US against the Rest.

The European Industrial Imperial steamroller gradually obliterated our uniqueness.

The Spanish quashed the Inca, Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigate the globe, Marco Polo gave the Vatican a Chines map of America, they sending Columbus off to discover it, while Queen Vic with the help of Darwin, Livingstone, Nelson, expanded the British Empire with ball and chain, cannon.

At this stage there is no evidence that history is working for the benefit of humans. Science, engineering, flight, medical advances, power, religious rightness, profit, wealth, corruption, greed and reckless plundering of the earths resources, ignorance, and credit now come into play.

Empirical observations are being put together with the help of mathematical tools.

All of this cost money and it did much more than just charting the universe, mapping the planet and cataloging the animals than did Galileo, Columbus and Darwin. If there had being no funds or these geniuses and they had not being born we would be still waiting on some others to do so.

Of course none of the above is in strict chronological order and I have left out, Michelangelo Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, William Shakespeare, Bach, Confucius, Aristotle, Newton, to mention a few but I hope you get the gist.

I grow sick and tired of all the same old lies
I might be a little young, so what’s wrong?
You don’t have to be old to be wise

— Judas Priest

Anyway it is suffice to say that European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects.

So here we are. WE CREATED THE WORLD THAT YOU SEE AROUND YOU.
After numerous wars and two million years of being marginal creatures, thirteen odd billion years after the big bang we have arrived at the Capitalist creed OF THE FREE MARKET and a belief that Science which is about 500 years old can solve all our problems.
The question is how many people want to live in a world that you see around you.
We need to ignite a second cognitive revolution. It is unclear whether bio engineering could really resurrect Neanderthals. Tinkering with our genes won’t necessarily kill us. But we might fiddle to such an extent that we would no longer be Homo sapiens.
ayn rand apollo 11 human achievement day
In a previous post I asked what do we want to become. A human who stood on the moon and saw a dying world that could be so beautiful if we learned to share.
                                               Paradise Lost or Found.
Unlike other animals, we humans need to create the means for our physical survival as well as our spiritual well-being. We need to figure out how to acquire food, build shelters, cure illnesses, build cities, travel to the Moon, and create everything that deserves the label “civilization.”
Take a moment to look around you. Reflect on your own achievements and take pride in them. Reflect on the virtues that have allowed you to achieve the things you value.
The potential for human achievement is endless, but only if we truly value achievement and appreciate that the achievements we create in our modern world are manifestations of the moral virtues we each create in our character. Not Twitter, not Face book, not the internet, or the web of everything, not Google, not Apple.
If there’s one thing that many science and reality-minded people tend to do quite a bit, it’s over analyze every little detail.
The answer is right in front of your eyes . Open them.
We must tap Greed by creating a World Aid Fund by placing 0.05% commission on all High Frequency Stock Exchange Transactions, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over $20.000. on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all new Drilling wells. ( See previous Posts)

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS INTO THE COMING DIGITAL BLACK HOLE OF HISTORY.

17 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Education, Google Knowledge., History., Privatization, Sustaniability, Technology, The Future, The Internet.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOKS INTO THE COMING DIGITAL BLACK HOLE OF HISTORY.

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Time spent looking at a cellphone is time spent oblivious to the world.

Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians.

We faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century.” through “bit rot,” when old computer files become useless junk.

There is a sense of powerlessness and fatalism about TECHNOLOGY.

If consciousness or HISTORICAL intelligence are lost, it might mean that value itself becomes absent from the universe.

We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it.

Ancient civilizations suffered no such problems, because histories written in cuneiform on baked clay tablets, or rolled papyrus scrolls, needed only eyes to read them.

To day “intelligence” is related to statistical and economic notions of rationality – colloquially, the ability to make good decisions, plans, or inferences.  To study today’s culture, future scholars will be faced with PDFs, Word documents, and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes hardware too.

 From This to This      

Most of the images we take today are uploaded straight from a digital camera or a phone, with the picture never actually existing as a physical artifact.

The significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later.

We’ve learned from objects that have been preserved purely by happenstance that give us insights into an earlier civilisation,”

We need history to embrace new values and institutions in pursuit of a just, fulfilling, and sustainable civilization not a “digital black hole”.

In fact, due to the intricate disconnectedness of production and economies around the world today, our technological civilization is perhaps more prone to a sudden collapse than other societies through history.

When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world-wide web the more important it is that we create legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies.

So digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future.

Deciding on the best format to preserve them for the next hundred years relies on anticipating what technology is likely to still be available in the future.

Computer hard disks can hold vast amounts of digitised information, but everything is lost if it fails or is wiped.

How do we preserve our interaction on Facebook, Twitter, comment threads and citizen journalism across the web?

In fact, due to the intricate disconnectedness of production and economies around the world today, our technological civilization is perhaps more prone to a sudden collapse than other societies through history. Plenty of once-great civilisations have collapsed, and our current industrialised society is by no means invulnerable –

Who will decide what worth keeping and where will we preserve a core kernel of human knowledge.

The significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later.

Even though Wikipedia represents a vast repository of information, it is not structured in a way that would guide a post-catastrophe society through stages of recovery.

Google certainly is not.

It has already changed the world by altering the way we interact with technology and there can be no questions its long-term ambitions.

Its mission is to collect information which you will have to buy with a google wallet.

“We envision a marketplace for payment instruments, commerce and loyalty services”

It’s not hard to envision a fully intact ecosystem of Google offerings with location-based mobile ads driving tracked incremental revenue via etail integrated mobile commerce, or via sales that are picked up in-store, via mobile payment.

“Now toss in Google Offers, NFC and QR codes for trigger point marketing, and the fact that Google already has the accounts open and the pot gets even richer.”

Personally I have little time for Banks but I would rather have a bank to provide a of mobile wallet products, not technology companies that can disappear into the cloud.

If Google was to make a move into supporting bank-branded wallets we would all become Googlefyed.

Google has far more on its plate than just financial services.

It’s a major player in telecommunications with its Android smart phone platform. It’s made forays into thermostats, home security and satellite imaging.

So it’s not just words and images that we risk losing for ever it’s the “grey literature” of official reports, briefings and policy statements that are only published online also risk being lost to the future?

Redstone Computer Tertiary Memory.PNG

Bit rot, a digital dark age is on the horizon unless we store information in DNA.

“It is very possible that … one machine would suffice to solve all the problems … of the whole [world]” – Sir Charles Darwin, 1946.

“Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance – the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.” – Emily Greene Balch.

Perhaps The ETHEREUM IS THE ANSWER.

Importantly, because there is not a company or indeed any entity in charge of or controlling Ethereum, the cost of running the infrastructure doesn’t have to include any profit margin.

It might allow us to push the boundary on what the digital realm can cover.

But this is a what if for the history books.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT DEATH

14 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Humanity., Technology, The Future

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT DEATH

Tags

, , ,

Of all mankind’s ostensible insoluble problems, one has remain the most vexing, interesting and important, the problem of death itself.

The denial of death is one of humanity’s deepest motivations.

In the decades to come we may see, one universe, one humankind, one religion, that unites us all but in the end we all share the same destiny – that just as surely as we are alive, so we die.

Death reminds us of our human vulnerability in spite of all our technological advances.

It is an integral part of our lives that gives meaning to human existence.

All that you are, and all that you’ve done and been is culminated in your death.

But now it is turning into a technical problem?

In recent years, medical technology has advanced rapidly. It has been suggested that methods such as nanotechnology, cell rejuvenation, and gene therapy might result in a significant increase in the human lifespan.

In theory, with the help of medical technology, it could be possible to keep living for hundreds or thousands of years, even eternally.

The whole brain definition of death is an unwieldy, historical compromise which will unravel as 21st century technologies permit the repair, replacement and manipulation of body, and especially brain, tissue.

We would basically be left with suicide, illnesses, accidents, famine, and homicides. Another words the like hood of dying from some disease or virus will be highly unlikely.

Even if it seems a distant goal the quest of immortality is very much on the cards.

The (current) essence of being human is to be mortal, immortals would necessarily be a different type of being and therefore have a different identity.

To control human destiny, with the dream of conquering death would raise profound questions.

You are not obliged to entertain all thought experiments, no matter how implausible, but if technology will make our current ethical views inadequate within some finite, foreseeable period of time, we should adjust our thinking, and law, to a more solid footing.

Our current concepts of death don’t very well address the status of a person who might eventually be brought back to life.

When and if these remediative technologies come available, there will be tremendous material interests at stake. These technologies will develop just as the industrialized world shifts to increasing proportion of elderly.

Nanotechnology is developing a bionic immune system, and by the year 2050 we could reach a mortal state.

Research is also being conducted on the creation of computer chip matrices into which nerves can grow, and which could permit two-way communication between neurons and computers.

Such computer-brain interfaces raise the possibility that computer technology may also be developed to remediate neural capacities.

Already advances are being made in electronic prosthetics for sight and hearing, from cochlear implants to optic nerve interfaces.

Computer engineers are also developing biological computing and storage media3, and software that learns, suggesting a future convergence between organic computing, neural network software and neural-computer interfaces.

Personhood in a cybernetic medium is a common, but minority, position in the field of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Most cognitive scientists accept the materialist assertion that mind is an emergent phenomenon from complex matter, and that cybernetics may one day provide the same requisite level of complexity as a brain.

Of course, those who embrace the possibility of self-aware machine minds do not necessarily want to see them be developed, or grant them “human rights” once they do develop.

Another technology that may eventually challenge our death concepts is cryonic suspension, the freezing of heads, or whole bodies, for eventual reanimation.

Barring the end of civilization as we know it, technology will eventually develop the capacity to remediate severe brain injuries, and perhaps even translate human thought into alternative media.

So you are can begin to see that we will be forced to acknowledge that the destruction of the “integrative” functions of the body is an inadequate definition of death, since the social person will remain intact.

When we get to the point where neurological functions can be controlled, designed and turned on and off, the illusory sense of continuous self-identity will become more obvious.

Once we cast off this fundamental predicate of Enlightenment ethics, the existence of an autonomous individual, we are beyond the ethical frameworks of contemporary bioethics.

It might be necessary that old people had a duty to die.

We soon have to answer the question: Is there can only be one death.

There are ethical worldviews that do not have the autonomous individual at their core, from the Democracy to Communism.

By the time we have developed adequate frameworks based on our cherished liberal democratic values it will be too late.

After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for such a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply doesn’t exist. Luckily if we wished to cure death, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that we might be able to do that even in the distant future.

But don’t be fooled. Have a look,

//youtu.be/u_Vpy3xs0cE

The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism.                          “The Glorious Dead.”  Résultat de recherche d'images pour "we shall remember them"

Warfare has been the crucial defining element for Britain and its empire in the 20th century. There have been only two years since 1945 that a serving member of the armed forces has not been killed.

The Cenotaph (literally “empty tomb” in Greek)  May they rest in Peace. 

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

The Beady Eye looks at “biology as technology”

11 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Big Data., Environment, Humanity., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on The Beady Eye looks at “biology as technology”

Tags

, , , , ,

Artificial intelligence is all around us.

But what is the most powerful technology on Earth?

You may think of a B-2 bomber, or a nuclear reactor, or maybe even far-reaching social media platforms.

But there is only one technology known to man that can heal itself, adapt to its environment, sustain itself for decades, replicate, and evolve:

The living organism.

Biological systems have the ability to do things that no human-made machine or chemistry can begin to approach: the ability to replicate, to learn, to scale from one to billions, to adapt, and to evolve.

By gaining control over biological systems and their biochemical pathways — and designing new pathways by rewriting the DNA “software” in cells — synthetic biologists are ushering in the “Biological Age.”

Creating substances with not only superior electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, but with properties that we have never seen before in man-made materials: materials that can regenerate, that respond to the environment, that learn and evolve.

We’re “on the cusp of revolutionary change” coming much “sooner than you think.”

Sugar-fueled biological actuators for hybrid robotics are on the horizon, all grown in “living foundries.

You might think that this is science fiction but it is becoming tangible due to the rapid, simultaneous development of genome-scale engineering tools, enormous data sets of genome sequences, new imaging and analytical capabilities, and the convergence of advances in information science and engineering with biology..

While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict future consumer applications.

If we could harness the power of biology in a predictable manner, then we could create living materials that perform functions seamlessly, cheaply, and with very low energy requirements, like walking, talking, dancing, killing, Robots.

A goal along these lines, of course, raises a lot of questions:

Better for whom? Better in what way? For biological humans? For all conscious beings? If that is the case, who or what is conscious?

Evolutionary biological changes move every which way with no apparent direction.

Yet, we continue nonetheless to see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution’s supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking we are now on the verge of  creating  a “post human” stage of civilization.

This stage may be only a few decades away.

Unfortunately if all the AI systems decided to go on strike tomorrow, our civilization would be crippled: Primitive human societies might then remain on Earth indefinitely but not to worry we’ll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years.

Ray Kurzweil - director of engineering at Google - claims that by 2045 humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity

The simple act of connecting with someone via a text message, e-mail, or cell-phone call uses intelligent algorithms to route the information. (The number of people using Twitter and Facebook daily is around 1,138,000,000)

So a digital brain will need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human.

I could at this stage give your brain a more ambitious goal, such as contributing to a better world which is badly needed considering that we are well on the way to extinction. However there is no justification for thinking that our own species will be especially privileged or protected from future technological disasters.

We tend to view the existence of our race as constituting a great ethical value when in fact our existence in a biology sense it is not worth the steam off our piss.

Why?

Because in the future almost every product we touch will be originally designed in a collaboration between human and artificial intelligence and then built-in automated factories.

Because we will continue to pollute our planet and the sky’s above to appease the Stock Exchange.  

Because there will be many ways in which humanity could become extinct before reaching post humanity by wiping out what we should be rely on.

Perhaps the most natural interpretation of disaster is that we are likely to go extinct as a result of the development of some powerful but dangerous technology to combat climate change. We would do well to remember Robert Oppenheimer words when he first viewed an atomic explosion ” Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”

Extinction might be the best option.

It is not clear that creating a new human race is immoral.

As non biological brains become as capable as biological ones of effecting changes in the world—indeed, ultimately far more capable than unenhanced biological ones—we will need to consider their moral education.

The question is can they have any morals and if so what left of us will have to dumb itself down considerably. For any post human stage system that displayed the knowledge of Watson, (Watson is technology that works to understand us) for instance, would be quickly unmasked as non biological.

So what does the Future of Tech Robots.

The power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing. Technological singularity is the development of  ‘super intelligence’ brought about through the use of technology.

Itself imply that we are likely to go extinct soon, and we are unlikely to reach a post human stage.

What would be left of humanity would be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious.

HOWEVER ALL IS NOT LOST

This possibility of a post human stage  is compatible with us remaining at, or somewhat above, our current level of technological development for a long time before going extinct.

We are still lacking a “theory of everything”, but we cannot rule out the possibility that novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be utilized to transcend those constraints.

If we could create quantum computers, or learn to build computers out of nuclear matter or plasma, we could push closer to the theoretical limits. At our current stage of technological development, we have neither sufficiently powerful hardware nor the requisite software to create conscious minds in computers.

Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously in feasible, unless radically new physics is discovered.

As we gain more experience with virtual reality, we will get a better grasp of the computational requirements for making new worlds appear realistic to their visitors.

These shortcomings will eventually be overcome.

At the moment the amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can be roughly estimated. Memory seems to be a no more stringent constraint than processing power.

Our current understanding impose theoretical limits on the information processing attainable in a given lump of matter. We can with much greater confidence establish lower bounds on post human computation, by assuming only mechanisms that are already understood.

One candidate is molecular nanotechnology, which in its mature stage would enable the construction of self-replicating nanobots capable of feeding on dirt and organic matter – a kind of mechanical bacteria. Such nanobots, designed for malicious ends, could cause the extinction of all life on our planet.

So we are able to gain an insight into how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics).

In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between both.

As you cannot create energy or destroy it and energy can only move from a state of higher activity to one lower activity it stands to reason that biological evolution, simple put, is descent with modification.

To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most of us believe in nationalism, capitalism, and human rights. There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans.

Now you might think that all of this is hog wash, but every point in history is a crossroads and sometimes history- or the people who make history – takes unexpected turns.

How we using and develop Technology will determine the forming any new Monotheism Global Society.

Are we heading towards ecological disaster or technological paradise?  Both do not seem bound by any deterministic laws.

You may rest assured that when Cognitive computers and Quantum computers get together with Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality along with the Arms race, biochemical pathways will not enhance human well-being.

Because human brains suffer from minimal development.

Instead of concentrating on developing technologies beneficial to mankind we are developing  autonomous weapons with no accountability to select, to kill, or destroy ( which means no deterrence of future crimes, no retribution for victims, no social condemnation, no meaningful human control)

Individual humans like me are far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to my own advantage. It for some mysterious reason like all of us follows one path then another like a gene that has no awareness, or consciously seek to survive.

The next effort of science will be to create a new body for the human being. It will have a perfect brain-machine interface to allow control and a human brain life support system so the brain can survive outside the body.

A computer environment into which human minds can be uploaded.

These are daunting challenges, to say the least.

Each will require the commitment and individual efforts of literally billions of our fellow humans, as well as many careful, specific programs put into effect by entire populations. But there is one action that we must take, individually and as a world, if any of the others are to be successful. It directly contradicts some of our deepest evolutionary programming, but if we are to survive as a species, we must stabilize or even reduce population size.

God forbid. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.

However it is conceivable to imagine history going on for generations upon generations while bypassing the Scientific Revolution as modern culture and science have to rely on religious and ideological beliefs to justify and finance its existence and scientific research.

So the below fellows might be the very thing to complete the Job. Rid the world of the very thing that is destroying it. 

One last thought try not to join the shadow people by pressing the like button.  Leave a comment. When you comment, you inspire, when you press the like button you expire.

Here a few links that might open your eyes.

https://youtu.be/XNbaR54Gpj4            https://youtu.be/PVXQUItNEDQ

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

The Beady Eye looks at the Internet. A “real” value or a ‘huge” liability?

07 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Big Data., Humanity., Politics., Technology, The Future, The Internet.

≈ Comments Off on The Beady Eye looks at the Internet. A “real” value or a ‘huge” liability?

Tags

, , , , ,

The Internet’s impact on culture, business, and politics is vast, for sure.

It is becoming a bigger part of our lives everyday, making life more convenient but also taking away the human element of living in the moment and making relationships more superficial.

But where actually is it take us?

To answer that question is difficult, because the Internet is not simply a set of interconnecting links and protocols connecting packet switched networks, but it is also a construct of imagination, an inkblot test into which everybody projects their desires, fears and fantasies. Some see enlightenment and education. Others see pornography and gambling. Some see sharing and collaboration; others see e-commerce and profit.

The purpose of this post however is not to highlight all that the Internet has achieved or all that it will achieve.

 It is to ask the question is it good for a Democratic World.?

We know that it is exposing Capitalism for what it is and Communism for what it wants, along with the comity of Nations. It is making us ask what a well-functioning democratic order requires.

It is creating a world people’s voice that could be manipulated in the extreme.

You might think with all the other problems the world faces this it is of little importance. You would be wrong as it is shaping the Future.

As a result of the Internet and other technological developments, many people are increasingly engaged in a process of “personalization” that limits their exposure to topics and points of view of their own choosing.

The growing power of consumers to “filter” what they see and the servers to dish up what they want you to see is from the standpoint of democracy, a mixed blessing.

But in a heterogeneous society, such a system requires something other than free, or publicly unrestricted, individual choices. Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a more difficult time addressing social problems and understanding one another.

People should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance.

As a matter of technological feasibility, our communications market is moving rapidly toward this apparently utopian picture which is a far cry from reality.

It is happening on the Internet where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and we the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

We are moving into “Corporatism which is the halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.

Consider this: It is estimated that the 2016 presidential election in the USA could cost as much a $5 billion, more than double what was spent getting Obama re-elected in 2012.

We are allowing ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies, Screen watchers.

The internet is introducing a system of perfect individual control reducing the importance of the “public sphere” and of common spaces in general.  It is increasing people’s ability to wall themselves off from topics and opinions that they would prefer to avoid.

I am sure that if new technologies diminish the number of common spaces, and reduce, for many, the number of unanticipated, unchosen exposures, something important will have been lost.

Because the Internet has changed the quantity and range of information available to citizens, it directly influences how societies evaluate government performance—in all parts of the globe.

It is Changing Democratic Attitudes throughout the World.

It is altered the informational relationship between governments and their citizens.

In how information is packaged, how that information can be physically transmitted and the networks that determine who can send and receive those transmissions. This has meant the largest decentralization in communication capacity and increase in expressive capacity that we have ever seen in human history—particularly in nations where access to political information tended to be very limited, often due to strict government censorship of traditional media.

Thus, the expansion of the Internet has significant ramifications on the amount and type of information that individuals use to evaluate their governments.

The global nature of the Internet opens a larger window for individuals to better view how governments function in other countries, particularly the advanced democracies that are most visible on the Internet. This provides users with a more realistic and globally consistent scale by which to make comparative evaluations about how well their own government functions.

As a result, the Internet is playing a central role in shaping the political evaluations and resultant satisfaction that citizens have toward their governments.

This is significant because the impetus to act politically—from day-to-day civic activities to the more extreme cases of protest and revolution—begins in the minds of men and women.

An understanding of this mix will permit us to obtain a better sense of what makes for a well-functioning system of free expression and to address the serious dangers that are hidden within the Internet.

For example the creation of perfect and splendid isolation, or a process of getting over disagreements, or the undermining our values to the detriment of the all of us.

The reasons why the Internet is supposed to strengthen democracy include the following.

1.The Internet lowers the entry barriers to political participation.

2. It strengthens political dialogue.

3. It creates community.

4. It cannot be controlled by government.

5. It increases voting participation.

6. It permits closer communication with officials.

7. It spreads democracy world-wide.

In contrast, the Internet, far from helping democracy, is a threat to it precisely because the Internet is powerful and revolutionary, it also affects, and even destroys, all traditional institutions–including–democracy.

To deny this potential is to invite a backlash when the ignored problems eventually emerge.

So why will there be problems?

Because more than half of communications traffic is data rather than voice.

Because it has been liberated from the terror of the PC as its gateway into the world of Smart Phones.

Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.

Because a politically disenfranchised digital underclass is emerging.

Because with the commercialization of the Internet things previously unreachable are now available through our personal computers.

Because cars will be chatting with highways. Suitcases will complain to airlines. Front doors will check in with police departments. Pacemakers will talk to hospitals. Television sets will connect to video servers. Keeping this aggregated information in the cloud allows researchers and developers to examine the data and identify “digital bio markers” to inform prevention, diagnoses and treatment in a constellation of brain and mental disorders that are now mostly defined by subjective symptoms.

Because it is making Politics More Expensive and Raise Entry Barriers.

Because it is making reasoned and informed political dialog more difficult.

Because it disconnects as much as it connects.

With the increase of smartphones in recent years many have all griped about the narcissism of people who spend all their time on social networks, text messaging at a dinner table or taking photos of the food they eat.

Because it is facilitating the International Manipulation of Domestic Politics.

Because it will essentially making the world a global village with vast deserts of highly visible inequalities which would not be possible without the internet.

And this is why ubiquitous, scalable technology such as the Internet must be part of the solution if we are to avoid an information-choked societies.

Because it is creating a mental fog or scrambled thinking in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way.

Constant multitasking is taking its toll.

Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient. The flow of information can be overwhelming and lead to “paralysis by analysis.” Chronic multi-tasking can make us less productive, not more. Increased choices and uncertainty can lead to increased stress and anxiety.

Because it is causing  fragmentation, increasing cost, and declining value of “hard” information. Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information.

Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.

 

It’s naïve to cling to the image of the early Internet – – nonprofit, cooperative, and free.

You might say that the CONTROVERSY ITSELF is superficial; as the obvious reality is the internet and technology are not only here to stay, but constantly evolving and permeating more of our lives.

The real conversation should be how we can best use the Internet in smarter ways that help us to monitor and enhance the brain, and how can we actively prepare to manage information overload.

“Big Data” applications are becoming available and capable of helping personalize brain health tools at the individual level, based on both past data and information gathered over time. This, in turn, is already changing research and preventive health practices. Tablet-based screenings can be instrumental in diagnoses of Alzheimer’s and MCI.

Mobile devices are already entering the sports world, with cognitive tests for concussions. Institutions like AAA have begun large-scale web-based assessments and cognitive training that works on driver’s cognitive skills in order to become safer (and less expensive to insure) drivers.

Now, every new technology presents a fair set of challenges. It is important to note that these are quasi-universal features of modern life, not the type of conditions of disorders that our medical system is set up to address.

There is talk about how social networks and new devices like the Google Glass visor have diluted privacy, smart phone apps “turning us into sociopaths” and the danger of turning over our daily routines to new technology like Apple’s Siri digital assistant.

The trick will be in properly preparing and guiding people to adapt to the mental demands of a modern society. Fortunately it is us, not the Internet, who have a plastic and resilient brain.

My conclusion is that information does not necessarily weaken Democracy or the state but electronic voting will not strengthen democracy as it will be manipulated by Big data.

So is the internet good for the brain?

If the analytical and collaborative power of the internet is used properly to monitor and enhance brain functionality in a cost-effective, scalable manner the answer can be a resounding “yes”

At the moment it is having a negative impact on our societies having a  polarizing effect on democracies. Although it has the capacity to bring people together, too often the associations formed online comprise self-selecting groups with little diversity of opinion.

Free speech on the Internet is not enough to ensure a healthy democracy. The conception of free speech emerging in today’s communications market emphasizes “an architecture of control…by which each of us can select a [customized] free-speech package.”

Google News feed filters out the information we receive. It is a product of what information we demand.

We should create twenty-first-century equivalents of the kinds of public spaces and institutions where diverse people will congregate.

If we are to avoid western democracy being hobbled by disengagement, falling turnout, and disconnection with citizens we must counter the growing power of consumers to “filter” what they “see” will create information ghettos and isolated citizens.

The Internet changes expectations. The Avaaz 41 million-strong online internet community is a prime example.

It lowers the economic and information cost of group formation and the internet lends itself to this type of direct connection, and hence is likely to create demands for more direct forms of democracy. But the way the Internet empowers people – by giving them huge choice over the information they receive – can make them less likely to engage in a free debate of ideas.

Why?

Because there will be neither leaders nor agendas to make Governments sit down with their detractors.

Citizens can use new media to avoid, rather than embrace, new ideas or common experiences.

The Internet, as a highly democratic and participatory medium, can perform democratic wonders. But the bien pensant e-Democracy consensus is wrong and dangerous if it thinks this will happen automatically.  All of these facets are critical if we are to thrive at a human.

Let us hope the consensus can be remade.

So let’s hear your voice.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨