Right now one of the reasons our economies have to grow is because of debt.
The global economic system runs on money that is itself debt.
GDP (gross domestic product) has outlived its usefulness as a metric of economic size and is it stoking social and environmental crisis by encouraging growth at any cost.
The kind of statistics we’ve used in the past just isn’t working anymore.
With the planet warming and some resources already exploited to near-exhaustion, including many fisheries, with technology removing trade agreements, (as companies and customers increasingly transact their lives in the cloud not to mention blockchains) we need something that accounts for such factors.
GDP can no longer measure the distribution of wealth within a country.
Even where there is growth, disenchantment with how it is shared out can be seen vividly in Brexit-bound Britain. Notably, So, while its total value can go up, gains are all too often skewed to top earners. Those lower down the ladder can fall further behind in relative terms.
It does not encompass the black market, omitting a huge source of activity and income in many developing countries, including in Africa and Latin America.
We’ve got to find another mechanism to include much bigger parts of the population, and use different metrics to measure the success of a country.
So, what are the alternatives to GDP?
The WEF this week proposed a broader measure of growth called.
The Inclusive Development Index (IDI) is an annual assessment of 103 countries’ economic performance that measures how countries perform on eleven dimensions of economic progress in addition to GDP. It has 3 pillars; growth and development; inclusion and; intergenerational equity – sustainable stewardship of natural and financial resources.
However for this to truly work countries would need to be liberated from the pressures to exploit their citizens in the hunt for income to repay debts and we would need to remove the creation of debt- based money.
Another word we would have to cancel the debt of sovereign nations and move the creation of money away from the state.
Of course in a capitalist world, this is unrealistic.
China alone owns– $1.168 trillion as of January 2018 of U.S. debt.
However, the European Union which is in need of reform could do a lot to liberate its members from the tyranny of growth.
Some creative long-term thinking is needed.
It could actively downgrade consumption, by banning advertising on mobile phones, I pads and Public place, all of which use manipulation of emotions.
It could write off a reasonable chunk of the Greek debt by spread it among its members in return for solar power.
It could turn the euro into real money by insisting that all banks in the European Union hold at least 50% reserves against money lent. 90% of the money circulating in our economies is created out of thin air. Banks lend it into existence.
It could create a basic minimum income by taxing all profit-seeking Algorithms.
It could tax plastic and sugar.
It could stop the farcical traveling circus which sees the European Parliament move between Brussels and Strasbourg every month.
It could set an example for the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, we are all to busy with I am alright Jack isolation syndrome – its grow or collapse.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
When we look at the world it is important to recognize that we are looking at the history of different civilizations, however, we all have a common story.
We are born and we die.
Today the story is the same but with more mobility in-between, however, we’ve not changed a dot and it is certain that we will go on making things that will change or existence.
With to days technology, we are on the threshold of not just a new Industrial revolution but changing how we exist and where we exist.
The outline of a mobile phone as we know has changed not just rural Africa and Asia – putting communities in touch, giving access to information and money it is now also creating Social media platforms which are in the process of disconnecting us from reality.
This week Facebook, Google, and Twitter appeared in front of Congress. After which it is obvious, that we are not asking the right questions yet, or we have not found any good answers just yet as to why our world is getting sicker and sicker and it’s not Einstine science as to why.
When it comes to the world we can not cure just one aspect of the sickness, we must address an array of inherited illness.
Our new technological world is removing the need to think, to read, to imagine, to function, to communicate, to earn respect, to know why is true or a false pleasure, to plan long-term.
In other words, the internet has been infected by the problems that we all suffer.
What is need is that we need to take our existence back, whether it be as consumers, as citizens, and say we actually want to have some say over how all of this technology works, because we’ve really given that over to the tech companies ( outside of China, for the rest of the world, there are five big tech companies who really run everything) that have little or no ethical interest in other than profit
Why?
Because before we become the product for internet service providers, no longer just customers. we need a social movement around this issues to stop us all being run by the same algorithms brains driven by different programs that are incapable of acting for the common good.
Greed, inequality, you name it, our political affiliation, based upon the top-level domain information of websites you visit, your sexual orientation, where you like to shop, your financial status, race, gender can now be figured out based on the information that they collect and use.
If we didn’t have the bullshit movies, TV shows and sports pumping fake feel-good emotions into our systems, we would all feel the great weight of our inaction in an era where we need to get off our fucking asses and take a stand.
All the world’s problems are not on the internet.
We’re not supposed to watch a screen that pumps fake feel-good emotions into us.
It is quite plausible in the not so distant future we will have nothing serious to contribute when the hype – intelligent software supersedes humanity with genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics. New computer chips specialized for AI will power how we engineer genes, proteins, materials. Quantum computing a million times quicker than present-day computers will change the fields of drug development, manufacturing, and material science.
It will all be very murky but the potential is truly staggering.
Its now or never that we harness all this technology for if a day comes that the final decision is left to a Robotic brain rest assured that,Hal 9000 VS Dave will come true.
I AM SURE THERE IS NO NEED HERE FOR ME TO REMIND YOU THAT TECHNOLOGY IS NOT ONLY CHANGING THE WAY WE CONDUCT OUR LIVES BUT THE WAY WE WILL EXIST IN THE FUTURE.
There is a wonderful aspiration by the writer Isaac Asimov introduced in 1942:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the previous law; and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the previous two laws.
I call the above an aspiration because as we all know that this will never happen.
We now have AI learning from AI, engage in cyberbullying, stock manipulation or terrorist threats. We also have AI surveillance, both private and public collecting data with or without permission.
A.I. systems don’t just produce fake tweets; they also produce fake news videos.
What, exactly, constitutes harm when it comes to A.I.? No one knows.
AI systems, are already no longer limited to a single set of tasks.
On the other hand, we need AI to tackle world future problems, such as climate change, threats from space, immigration, and sustainability itself.
There is no argument that regulation of what I call essential AI should be avoided.
However, my A.I. for profit or exploitation did it should not excuse illegal behavior.
A.I. system must clearly disclose that it is not human. As we have seen in the case of bots — computer programs that can engage in increasingly sophisticated dialogue with real people — society needs assurances that A.I. systems are clearly labeled as such.
We must ensure that people know when a bot is impersonating someone.
We must ensure that A.I. system cannot retain or disclose confidential information without explicit approval from the source of that information. Because of their exceptional ability to automatically elicit, record and analyze information, A.I. systems are in a prime position to acquire confidential information.
We must ensure that an A.I. system must be subject to the full gamut of laws that apply to its human operator. This rule would cover private, corporate and government systems.
Unfortunately none of the above is possible.
This is why I favor ( In the interest of caution) that we establish A World Technological Strong Room, just like the World seed bank where all software programmes are held and available to everyone.
Of course, it would be totally naive to think that all AI should be subject to scrutiny.
It’s not military nor intelligence AI that I am talking about, it is AI that is created for exploitation for profit.
Rather than regulating what AI systems can and can’t do that make it more expensive to develop AIs the strong room would hold the founding programme.
Because Artificial intelligence systems are now learning from each other and have the potential to change how humans do just about everything. We must ensure all AI has an impregnable “off switch.”
How can this achieve? and by whom.
This is where I am open to suggestions.
It could be A United Nations Cloud Strongroom, run by a world people algorithm that copies all existing software and Algorithms.
Companies making and selling AI software will need to be held responsible for potential harm caused by “unreasonable practices” Any sufficiently transformative technology is going to require new laws and New legislation that isn’t imminent.
Of course, some argue that we have better things to worry about. Climate Change, Wars, Sustainability etc, but Superhuman, might finally create a joke so funny that everyone on Earth dies laughing.
The fact is that there are a lot of unquestioned assumptions when it comes to AI, learning in ways far beyond that of humans.
We can’t really predict what might happen next because superintelligent A.I. may not just think faster than humans, but in ways that are completely different. It may have motivations — feelings, even — that we cannot fathom. It could rapidly solve the problems of aging, of human conflict, of space travel. We might see a dawning utopia.
There is one thing for sure it has been set in motion and now we are waiting for the results.
In the meantime, there is something unpleasant about A.I. and that is Humanity is already losing control of artificial intelligence which could have catastrophic consequences for civilization.
For example “Deep learning”, is a powerful tool for solving problems. It helps us tag our friends on Facebook, provides assistance on our smartphones using Siri, Cortana or Google.
Deep learning has helped computers get better at recognizing objects than a person.
The military is pouring millions into the technology so it can be used to steer ships, control drones and destroy targets.
And there’s hope it will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make traders billionaires by reading the stock market and totally transform the world we live in.
Indeed whether you call it Deep learning, it could be the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.
If they can’t figure out how the algorithms (the formulas which keep computers performing the tasks we ask them to do) work, they won’t be able to predict when they fail.
The Question is are we going to rely on a Google AI ethics board or we agree on a World Technological Strong Room where all AI programs are stored and available to everyone.
It’s now or never.
All human comments appriciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
The vast majority of us now live in cities far removed from nature, walking around with our faces in smartphones connected to the cloud by algorithms sporting fancy names like Twitter, Facebook etc.
I am sure you have read or hear that we are now connected more than ever in our history, but most of this connectivity is false. As amazing as this seems, this is just the beginning of what we can expect.
Mobile technology has seen a meteoric rise in adoption since the debut of the first iPhone in 2007. Seven years have given us significant advancements in mobile technology, but relative to the span of recorded human history, seven years is still a short time.
We’re barely skimming the surface of what we can expect from technology.
This very moment we live in a world in which news is broken in under 140 characters and people are more driven by bouncing icons on their mobile phones than what can be experienced outside of their 3.5” screen.
Google attempts to understand our behaviors to deliver more relevant information and content to better connect with users through their various services.
As connected as we are now, there is still a fundamental disconnect between people and the companies that attempt to reach them through these technologies.
We may one day reach a point where true conversations can happen between man and machine, but for now, it is still up to the people, the marketers and brand ambassadors of the world, to drive this human connection.
So what does all of this mean?
The world used to be really small. People were limited to what happened in their city or village and every now and then, if the event was truly important, the news spread far enough. They wrote letters that would take months to reach their final destination if ever at all. The information was kept by few. You would hear from countries directly involved in the recent history of yours and you would barely ever make it very far from home. And even if you did, it was not an everyday thing or an everyday decision for anyone.
This was the life less than 100 years ago.
And to put things in perspective, humans have been on earth for around 200.000 years and the Earth herself is 4.543 billion years old.
So we can agree that the way we live now is fairly recent.
“We are now so disconnected” with the madness being amplified year after year with so much information it leaves us with 3 choices:
You will listen to it as if this had nothing to do with you what so ever.
Or
You hide under your blankets. Forever. And deny it. Live in the bubble. Proclaim that all is well. Refuse to see the disconnection to the point that you are unable to move or function.
Or
We can take a stand, and make a choice.
We can listen enough to know and make an informed choice and then we can choose to do something about it.
This is where the greatness is found.
There are no absolutes in science but we have to begin to trust the science of climate change.
Why?
Because it is untestable that this is the best planet we know, and it is clear beyond any doubt that the risk to us all is climate change.
The move beyond the land and our disconnection from nature are impressive… but it is also one of the main threats facing us all.
With or without the Paris climate agreements: We are still pumping 70 million tons of CO2 into our atmosphere a day.
Rest assure that climate change will not all happen at once.
It must now be treated as a continual threat with no debate.
We exist by nature consent not the other way around and the sooner we learn it the better.
It is the time that we put sustainability on all Education syllabus.
It is the time for all of us to demand that all-weather forecasting slots on our televisions screens at least once every three months addressed climate change.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Do you ever stop to ask yourself why you should trust the information or decisions that algorithms produce?
AI smartphones will soon be standard, using machine learning from the cloud and sooner than later smartphones will have personalized algorithms that will run even when offline.
These algorithms will be own by the companies that both sell and manufacture the phone and will, therefore, carry inbuilt biases depending on which platforms they are attached to.
Imagine a cheap little device that can compute as much data as all the brains in the world. It will have a deep and irreversible affect on everyone and there is no way of predicting what exactly will happen as the developers of such a device will have no idea what it is doing.
How far do we want to go- Robots that obey no matter what with us blind human as their allies.
Today the world faces a number of hugely complex challenges, from global warming to conflicts to nuclear weapons to rampant inequality. But one the real seismic change is how we are going to respond to each other when we all trusting algorithms to make decisions on our behalf.
Now is it the time to put in place world standards and regulations that govern the use of all biological data.
THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE WORLD IS GOING TO NEEDS AS MUCH COMPUTER POWER POSSIBLE TO TACKLE ITS PENDING PROBLEMS.
HOWEVER, IT SHOULD BE A HUMAN RIGHT TO INSPECT THE SOURCE CODES OF ANY TECHNOLOGY THAT HAS BIOLOGICAL DATA IN ITS TARGETED SOFTWARE ALGORITHMS.
IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE COST OF POWER/ENERGY WILL DRIVE THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY AND ITS SYSTEMS IN THE WORKPLACE AND COMMERCIAL WORLD MARKETS NOT TO MENTION SURVEILLANCE EITHER BY GOVERNMENTS OR OTHER ORGANISATIONS.
NOW IS THE TIME TO START DEMANDING STANDARDS.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHAT IS THE STANDING OF DEMOCRACY IN THE WORLD TO DAY AND IS IT SOCIAL MEDIA THAT IS ALIENATING US FROM THE VOTE.
Democracy has many strengths, including the capacity for self-correction, but the question is can it survive social media.
The word ‘democracy’ has its origins in the Greek language. It combines two shorter words: ‘demos’ meaning whole citizen living within a particular city-state and ‘kratos’ meaning power or rule.
Democracy of sorts had existed for centuries but there is no absolute definition of democracy. The term is elastic and expands and contracts according to the time, place and circumstances of its use.
Meaningful democracy only arrived at a national level in 1906, when Finland became the first country to abolish race and gender requirements for both voting and for serving in government.
Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world. The combination of globalization and the digital revolution has made some of democracy’s most cherished institutions look outdated.
It is far short of the settled, comfortable state of maturity that many of its early adherents expected (or at least hoped) it would be able to claim after decades of effort.
Just a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter were hailed as tools for democracy activists, enabling movements like the Arab Spring to flourish.
Today, the tables have turned as fears grow over how social media may have been manipulated to disrupt the US election, and over how authoritarian governments are using the networks to clamp down on dissent.
They are fast becoming tools for social control.
So has democracy’s global advance come to a halt, and may even be in reverse.
The notion that winning an election entitles the majority to do whatever it pleases no longer holds water.
Since the dawn of the modern democratic era in the late 19th century, democracy has expressed itself through nation-states and national parliaments. People elect representatives who pull the levers of national power for a fixed period. But this arrangement is now under assault from both above and below.
From above, globalization has changed national politics profoundly.
From below Modern technology is implementing a new modern version with national politicians surrendering more and more power to Social Media.
For example over trade and financial flows, to global markets and supranational bodies, and may thus find that they are unable to keep promises they have made to voters.
International organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, and the European Union might have extended their influence, but they no longer have the power to implement what they preach.
There is a compelling logic too much of this:
The fragility of the United Nations influence elsewhere has become increasingly apparent with the state of the world.
How can anyone Organisation or a single country deal with problems like climate change or tax evasion?
National politicians have also responded to globalization by limiting their discretion and handing power to unelected technocrats in some areas. The number of countries with independent central banks, for example, has increased from about 20 in 1980 to more than 160 today.
So is the power now in the hands of multi Clongormentts like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Mircosoft etc.
Certainly, the perception that democracy in decline has become more widespread than at any time during the past quarter-century. Erosion of freedom over the past few years, adopting smarter methods for m of subversion
There are four main sorts of Democracy.
Direct democracy
Representative democracy
Constitutional democracy
Monitory democracy
A liberal democracy (that is, one that champions the development and well-being of the individual) is organised in such a way as to define and limit power so as to promote legitimate government within a framework of justice and freedom.
Social media is a double-edged sword it allows us to speak truth to power but on the other hand, it allows power to manipulate public opinion and polarize the electorate.
Citizens use it to speak truth to power, and authoritarian governments use it to spread misinformation.
Twitter users got more misinformation, polarizing and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news.”
They fake petition signatures. They skew poll results and recommendation engines.
Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and the blocking of information, the newer methods include demonizing online media and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information overload, doubt, confusion, harassment, and distraction.”
And yes, governments are increasing their efforts to censor the internet, but that’s because they recognize that the internet poses a threat to their control.
Every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations.
If the liberal world order is indeed coming apart under pressure from
the authoritarians, the future of democracy will be deeply affected.
Social media firms are “largely immune from responsibility” in the legal sense, but that “in the court of public opinion it is a different matter, and future US/EU legislation seems likely if they don’t address these issues in a meaningful way.
So what is the answer?
Is social media basically good, or does it have a “negative impact on society”
There are no gatekeepers when you publish via your social profile, (outside of each platform’s terms of use) – you can write anything and anyone has the chance to view it.
Social Media has truly democratized media and given everyone a medium through which to be heard.
It has also opened the system up to those who would exploit it to push their own agendas. The platforms are now looking to police this, but it’ll likely always play a part.
To make democracy work, we must be participants, not simply observers.
One who does not vote has no right to complain.
Here are a few questions to mull over.
What can be done to fight citizens’ political alienation and distrust?
Are representative democracy and greater public participation the answer or do we need to think beyond current practices?
How can the cultural and historical factors involved and reflected in present developments help us look into the future?
What knowledge is needed to understand and inform decision-making in the future?
Which values are and which values must be at the base of decision-making?
If we are indeed heading for a Smartphone Algorithms Democracy:Who, or What will be in control.
The algorithms behind social media platforms convert popularity into legitimacy, creating echo chambers, overwhelming the public square with multiple, conflicting assertions.
Today, social media acts as an accelerant, and an at-scale content platform and distribution channel, for both viral “dis”-information (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false) and “mis”-information.
“Populist” leaders use these platforms, often aided by trolls, “hackers for hire” and bots, on open networks such as Twitter and YouTube.
Sometimes they are seeking to communicate directly with their electorate. In using such platforms, they subvert established protocol, shut down dissent, marginalize minority voices, project soft power across borders, normalize hateful views, showcase false momentum for their views, or create the impression of tacit approval of their appeals to extremism.
And they are not the only actors attempting to use these platforms to manipulate political opinion — such activity is now acknowledged by governments of democratic countries.
In addition, advanced methods for capturing personal data have led to sophisticated psychographic analysis, behavioral profiling, and micro-targeting of individuals to influence their actions via so-called “dark ads.” to self-censor or opt out of participating in public discourse.
Currently, there are few options for redress. At the same time, platforms are faced with complex legal and operational challenges with respect to determining how they will manage speech, a task made all the more difficult since norms vary widely by geographic and cultural context.
Every democracy needs its justice system, so we must “catch up with the modern world”, to cope with the social media.
In reality, old power structures still have power, they just have it in new spaces.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the Bin.
How much stuff do we really need to lead a normal life?
Not as much as you might think.
Automation, digital platforms, and other innovations are changing the fundamental nature of work.
You could say that: The world of work is in a state of flux.
There is growing polarization of labor-market opportunities between high- and low-skill jobs, unemployment and underemployment especially among young people, stagnating incomes for a large proportion of households, and income inequality.
However the field of robotics promises to be the most profoundly disruptive technological shift since the industrial revolution.
The development of automation enabled by technologies including robotics and artificial intelligence brings the promise of higher productivity (and with productivity, economic growth), increased efficiencies, safety, and convenience. But these technologies also raise difficult questions about the broader impact of automation on jobs, skills, wages, and the nature of work itself.
Somehow, we believe our livelihoods will be safe. They’re not:
Every commercial sector will be affected by robotic automation in the next several years. We have yet to reach the full potential of digitization across the global economy.
More than half the world’s population is still offline.
Greater interaction will raise productivity but require different and often higher skills, new technology interfaces, different wage models in some cases, and different types of investments by businesses and workers to acquire skills.
In a recent report, the World Economic Forum predicted that robotic automation will result in the net loss of more than 5m jobs across 15 developed nations by 2020, a conservative estimate. 40–50% of all jobs will be taken by robots in the next twenty years.
By 2025, average salaries in the robotics sector will increase by at least 60% – yet more than one-third of the available jobs in robotics will remain vacant due to shortages of skilled workers.
Developments in motion control, sensor technologies, and artificial intelligence will inevitably give rise to an entirely new class of robots aimed primarily at consumer markets. For example “Create Your Taste” kiosk – an automated touch-screen system that allows customers to create their own burgers without interacting with another human being.
The thing is: we’ve heard this all before. Time and time again, we underestimate capitalism’s extraordinary ability to come up with new meaningless jobs. (It’s 37% in the UK right now, but it could be 50%, 60% or even 100% in the future.)
Unless we update our ideas about what ‘work’ even is. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson’s Law, and much the same whether the volume of work, were to increase, diminish or even disappear.
Labor which was once the capital of working men will be longer true.
Again: it’s not about the technology, it’s about the choices we make as a society.
When it comes to universal basic income: we don’t have to wait for the robots. We are more than rich enough to do it right now – in fact, we should have done it forty years ago!
Technology is not destiny, education is.
Everything depends on the choices that we make as a society.
If history is any precedent, we already know the answer.
MOST OF US ARE NOW SURROUNDED WITH A PORTION- DISTORTED EMBARRASSMENT OF NOT JUST FOOD BUT GOVERNMENT SIZE.
It’s time for taxpayers to remind themselves just how much the cost of government to run us is..
Let’s take the cost of running the UK as an example.
The House of Commons with 650 Mbps at £76,000 pa costing the tax payer £156 million a year.
Add in the £6.4m pa given to opposition parties (Short Money), and support items like IT, and the overall total for each MP goes up to £242,000 pa.
But that’s only part of the bill: we also need to add in the costs of running the Commons itself. According to the HoC Administration Resource Accounts 2006-07, those costs total £210m, which is a further £325,000 per MP.
Oops I nearly forgot the gold-plated final salary pension guaranteed by taxpayers.
The official cost of MPs’ pensions is under 12 per cent of their salary, after 11 per cent contributions from MPs themselves. This adds up to total pay and pension for an MP of £85,000 (their £76,000 salary and £9,000 pension).
So with 650 MPs, that means each one costs us £85,000 pa in salary, pension contributions and employment taxes. Those troublesome “staffing allowances” cost us an additional £57.9m pa- £90,000 for each MP. Then there’s incidental expenses, additional cost allowances, and travel expenses, totaling a further £30.7m (£48,000 each).
Then you have 814 unelected Peers in the House of Lords at £83,000 pa. Costing the tax payer £67,932,000 a year plus £462,510 in tax-free expenses. Members can claim £300 or £150 for every day they attend the House and undertake parliamentary work. The dining rooms and bars are all subsidised by the taxpayer.
Baroness Smith of Gilmorehill, who has claimed £220,000 of expenses over her 27 year career on the red benches, has never spoken in a debate.
The total cost of members’ allowances and travel is around £20 million per annum.
So reducing the size of the House by about 250 members would represent a significant saving to the taxpayer.
Then you have the Civil Service 418,343, (316,792 full-time and 101,551 part-time.) Gross annual earnings (excluding overtime or one-off bonuses) for Civil Service employees is around £25,350, pa.
You dont have to ask why people are lying on the floors of hospital corridors.
————————————————————————————————-
‘What do you do when there is nothing left to do?’
What should a government faced with an unmanageable level of unemployment do when conventional policy has failed to resolve the issue?’
Perhaps then a seemingly radical solution, such as universal basic income (UBI), becomes plausible. Universal Basic Income (UBI), a form of social security paid to individuals, not households. It is paid to everyone.
It would give individuals the freedom to say ‘yes’ to jobs. Individuals will not have to do that which they do not wish to do. Fewer people will engage in menial and unsatisfying work. Employers may be forced to increase the wages for underpaid or unpaid jobs.
UBI creates a floor (minimum level) on the income distribution curve, alleviates poverty, and gives bargaining power to the ones who have it least.
Forgetting about work for a moment (if you can), think about what you should do when your physiological needs are no longer a concern. If you’ve had a passion at the back of your mind then you might finally pursue it. If, on the other hand, you’ve passed life going from one kind of busy to another, then you might have missed opportunities to reflect and figure out what you would like to be doing. The cost of failure may have been too high if it meant putting you or your family’s livelihood at risk.
Assuming UBI ensures a basic livelihood for everyone in a community, do these citizens have a duty to give back by working? Do individuals have a duty to accept paid, available employment?
I would say Yes: Individuals should have a duty to do something, providing it is socially beneficial. There was something about people helping each other for its own sake that makes for a good society. A society is not well-functioning if it’s members are not interested in actively improving each other’s well-being.
Caring for the those who cannot care for themselves (such as the elderly, children and disabled). One could volunteer for various causes they care about, whether they be social, environmental, tech-related or so on.
Your recognition that you have alleviated the suffering of others might make you feel like you have done something meaningful.
UBI provides the opportunity for you to try contributing to your community in different ways. This freedom lets you find a way to contribute that is most satisfying for yourself.
It would remove fear replacing it with dignity.
UBI would also reduce the cost of citizens relying on the state for assistance.
There are many pending environmental crises hanging over us, but human wastefulness can be avoided. Can you imagine a world of 7.6 billion people no longer struggling for food or shelter and now focused on bettering the world for their children? That’s universal basic income. That’s a legacy we can all leave.
So why is it not being done?
Because it would downsize our consumerism lifestyle and remove inequality.
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
I can hear you saying where will the money come from?
Vat, Negative Interest rates, Earnings from investments, Decreasing militry spending, Sovereign wealth funds, etc.
It would ensure that the distribution of the fruits of technology advancement are distributed fairly.
As Jeremy Howard said: ” In a post-scarcity world , why hold back wealth from people just because they can’t provide labor inputs just to create wealth.”
All human comments and suggestions appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin>
I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.
There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.
The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.
In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.
Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.
New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.
All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.
Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.
All need software in the form of algorithms to run.
AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.
Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?
One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
Not surprising.
So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.
That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.
Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this.
Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.
So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.
( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)
Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)
It operates through the following segments:
Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.
Market Cap As of May 2017
$507.5 Billion
Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.
Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:
An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.
Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.
It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.
Amazon:
The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.
Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.
eBay Inc: (PayPal)
There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:
The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:
Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)
Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.
Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.)
A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.
More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.
Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.
These are the main contenders as we know them to-day
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So the Question is:
Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.
Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)
At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.
While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.
Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.
One could say that:
Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff, Google represents doming down.
All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.
So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.
I think Not.
In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.
Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us. Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.
The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.
“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”
The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches – is Google.
Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.
Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.
Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.
Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.
Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.
Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.
Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.
By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud. With one winner.
The Google Monopoly.
Once a Google client always a Google client.
How do you stop using Google?
Already impossible.
Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.
Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.
It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.
Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact. It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)
Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?
The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.
Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.
In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.
On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.
Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.
I feel that this will change in the coming years.
All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.
Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.
After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.
It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?
Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.
So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.
= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?
= Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?
= Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?
Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.
Why might this be the case – and does it matter?
Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.
It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.
It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;
Soon, however, things move on to new realms.
Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.
An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.
Social media however has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.
However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.
It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.
It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.
Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.
As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.
The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:
The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.
This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.
Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.
Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.
——
What happens to our online materials at death.
Finally: Capitalism can never be ethical.
There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.
If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service) is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.
Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.
Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.
My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.
Google it.
All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE: THERE IS ONE THING WE TAKE FOR GRANTED: AND THAT IS TIME.
( A ten minute Christmas Read)
When I decided to post this blog about what one might envisage to see in the future it turned out that it is much more difficult than one thinks to imagine what the world will be like in twenty years time.
Time will tell, but what time is it. Do you know? I don’t know what moment in time is it right now. Was there a yesterday 13.7 billion years ago? We don’t know.
If there was something that caused the big bang there has to have being something before it. Was it time? If so has time always being around, going at the same speed, or its it.
Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. We use to become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, not anymore.
The assumption behind time is that we continually experience our lives as a whole, and perceive each day, week, month or year becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole.
This is true as we enter what I call Quasior time.
These days the speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes. This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings.
So is time as simple as we think it is.
I suppose it doesn’t matter how quickly you chase after or run towards time or light, either; that speed you view it traveling at will always be the same.
Anyway, when it comes to technology our time now has a tendency to dream optimistic futures. At this point it is tempting to roll out the usual clichés – food pills, flying cars and bases on the moon – but the reality will probably be less exciting.
For instance we could be eating insects in 2037. Falling in love with an artificial intelligence (AI) operating robot that has Scarlett Johansson’s voice. To bond is human.
Our DNA could be taken at birth and all defects remedied, altered or catered for.
or
Quantum computers and other varieties of information handling will be totally integrated in all of our possessions as well as ourselves.
Far fetched it may well be.
The world in 2037 will probably be much like it is today, but smarter and more automatic. However humans are driven by the same basic needs as we were 150 years ago, food, sleep, sex, the feeling of being appreciated and loved.
Will this change in the next twenty or 150 years? No.
So what can we reasonably expect?
In general the inventions for the last twenty years have been a human strive for freedom and communication which now appears to be flawed.
We are indeed becoming more independent and less constrained by the old social norms and this will have an impact on the relationships we form.
There will not be the three letters at the end of your signature that predicts your future. Replaced by robots; doctors outclassed by algorithms that can plug into vast medical databases; and travel agents wiped out by trip-planning, flight-booking web services.
Chatbots technology has and is drastically changed the world we live in and the shift has changed business, which means it will impact employees and society as a whole just the same..
Ten years ago, social networks like Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, the Internet was still something that no one quite understood.
With technology continuing to evolve on a weekly basis seniority will no longer guarantee you a job and office politics will slowly be thrown out the window. No jobs for life.
We live in the information age; in the last five years there has been more data created since the beginning of mankind.
Many of the degrees students are acquiring these days will have little relevance to the next in 20 years. Technologically, the 20-year jump from 2017 to 2037 will be huge. Elements of our world will change beyond recognition, creating new professions we can’t yet envisage.
The web has made the concept of informal education to become a phenomenon that everyone needs to be aware of.
Telehealth platforms will make in-home patient monitoring the norm. Genome mapping will lead to personalize medicines and 3D-printing printed replacement organs will be for sale on E Bay/Amazon.
The cloud, tablets and interactive PDFs will become mainstream.
Combine all of this into quantum computer technology with AI and we are well on the way into uncharted territory of exponential power growth, of self-replicating AI.
A ‘economic, social and environmental apocalypse.’
Technology underpins everything we’ve looked at so far – food, health, relationships and work.
The best decision’ is based on the best available information, and the best information is not the opinions of vested interests.
If we don’t get leadership right, all the bright shiny objects in the future will dangle beyond our reach.
With technology advances, answers are quickly becoming a commodity.
In the future the world will be in your pocket yet still you will ask
‘Who am I?’
We will not be able to fool the mind in the way that no matter how real the experience will feel, you will always know that it haven’t happen for real.
On the other hand.
Today you can Google – just about anything – just imagine how efficient “search” will be in 20 years.
Internal systems will capture corporate learning like never before, allowing you to tap deep into the set of corporate experiences.
Of much greater value will be the ability to ask the right questions.
Homes and offices will collect and process data.
Advertising will know who you are, who you were, and who you will be.
Buildings will have artificial intelligence ‘personalities’ and will be able to ‘talk’ to people with video tiles, color-changing materials and even electronic fibers in mats and other soft furnishings.
We may even have the ability to transcend our human bodies and live entirely in the cloud, but that’s not to say we will want to do so on any large-scale.
The decentralization movement is already becoming the major human rights issue of this decade and will do more to free mankind than all but a handful of humanity can contemplate yet.
It’s not quite the time for your brain-wave analyser to say ” Happy Christmas to your robot.”
Twenty years from now there will be many changes in medicine, technology and in environment, hopefully a better state for the poor people in the world, challenges in the climate change, or maybe some combination of economic, social and environmental apocalypse will cause the collapse of existing infrastructure and telecommunications will be back to pencil and paper or something even more primitive.
Whatever happens next, it will be a great time to be alive.
If anything is impervious to technology its life.
Just how insane things have gotten we might be in for a large dose of entropies.
Happy CHRISTMAS ONE IN ALL.
All human comments appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin.
So reducing the size of the House by about 250 members would represent a significant saving to the taxpayer.
At this point it is tempting to roll out the usual clichés – food pills, flying cars and bases on the moon – but the reality will probably be less exciting.
bobdillon33blog 