Category Archives: The Future

THE BEADY EYE’S ACTION PLAN. FOR A GREEN ECONOMY.

02 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2020: The year we need to change., COVID-19, POST COVID-19., Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Seven-minute read)

At the moment we are inundated with rhetoric that the world is going to change due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Now the big question yet to be answered is how in the midst of a coming a Global economic depression to restate countries’ economies.

But the truth remains that few politicians are prepared to take substantive leadership towards changes that could alienate powerful interest groups that benefit from the current paradigm.

It appears that we have a brain drain as existing legal frameworks and regulations do not encourage improved environmental and economic practices or innovations.

However, issues that created a sense of solidarity among civil society and academia in
earlier decades are now back on the table thanks to the Pandemic.

While the rationale for change is clear even with the evidence of climate change, and the possibilities of future pandemics there are a number of barriers or challenges to making this transition.

Key issues affecting the rate of transition to a green economy include entrenched interests supporting the status quo, lack of data and information, organizational obstacles, reaching competitive levels of risk and return for financing, and the need to scale up.

It’s about getting everyone – from governments through to the business community – to work together to do things differently, and this requires a common language.

Whether that is at the international level, the national level, or within the business community. All levels need to be striving towards the same goals, and the indicators provide a common way of talking about this – allowing a better-managed with system corporate social responsibility.

Green Economics principles should be developed to meet the needs and vision of each country and each sector. The goal is not to simply arrive at a list of principles but to engage in discussions with stakeholders about the priorities and approaches to moving toward a green economy.

Environmental well-being contributes to economic well-being when the environment is
able to properly carry out its functions. For longterm prosperity through equitable distribution of economic benefits and effective management of ecological resources; it must be economically viable and resilient, self-directed, self-reliant, and pro-poor. 

The need for a convergence – that all sectors need to work together to deliver these goals.

The first thing to say is that a green economy would not have to be any different than the regular economy.

Supply and demand. 

What role does public policy play in encouraging and facilitating the green economy?

1. The green economy is a means for achieving sustainable development.
2. The green economy should create decent work and green jobs.
3. The green economy is resource and energy-efficient.
4. The green economy respects planetary boundaries or ecological limits or
scarcity.
5. The green economy uses integrated decision making.
6. The green economy measures progress beyond GDP using appropriate
indicators/metrics.
7. The green economy is equitable, fair, and just – between and within countries
and between generations.
8. The green economy protects biodiversity and ecosystems.
9. The green economy delivers poverty reduction, well‐being, livelihoods, social
protection, and access to essential services.
10. The green economy improves governance and the rule of law. It is inclusive;
democratic; participatory; accountable; transparent; and stable.
11. The green economy internalizes externalities.

Thanks to COVID-19 we’re going to see a huge amount of capital flood into sustainability.  It is already happening if at a slow pace.

The government can spark a clean energy economy by setting the rules and letting the private sector scale up.

Of course, finance will not be the only factor in this transition, but rather the forthcoming Economic Depression.

What better way to stimulate growth by securing self-efficiency in green energy (Energy production results in the emission of 80 percent of global carbon dioxide.)   

What better way to promote Tourism that depends on the environmental quality of a destination – i.e. – clean air, water, and land. It depends on the natural environment for its wide array of ecosystems, for example, beaches and coastal areas, mountains, and forests. 

What better way to stop pollution that has an impact on global warming has a potential cost from flooding and hurricane damage, low agriculture yields, and population resettlement.

What better way to realize that GDP is increasing while emissions are going down.

What better way to leave a legacy for the next generation.

What better way to engage the whole population.

What better way to make wealthy countries finally realize that the greenest investments also look like the wisest. 

What better way for the European Union to live up to its name ( Union) by Investing in the sunshine of the south with energy grants to establish solar farms. The north could manufacture them creating millions of new jobs in their economies, in Italy, Spain, Greece.  

The benefits arising from the green economy are extended to all levels of population and all countries, as well as interconnected among the features of mutual influence and common development: the more countries and companies “go green”, the more the economy grows; the more the economy grows through “green plans”, the more research and development on the green economy will be conducted. The more green economy dominates markets, the sooner the world will be a clean place after more than two hundred years of increasing.

That there is a need for a new model of economic development but unfortunately, that is what it is Rhetoric.

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

23 Thursday Apr 2020

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

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(Twenty-minute read) 

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

Coronavirus came after a series of wake-up calls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or is it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

External storage and biological memory are not the same things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This much is certain:

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

It will be a time of contradictions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much of life can now be conducted digitally?

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

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

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

Our Memories!

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

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get inscribed into our biological memory banks. 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: IS IT NOT SOMEWHAT PATHETIC. THAT A MAN CALLED TOM AT ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF AGE HAS TO RAISE FUNDS FOR THE NHS.

16 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., CORONA VIRUS., COVID-19, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Nato, Our Common Values., Reality., Survival., Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., What Needs to change in the World, World Leaders

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  (Twelve-minute read)  As much as one has to admire the initiative and courage of Tom. The generosity of the public and the power of social media in raising millions for the NHS he high lights what is wrong with a Government, that put the economy before its people’s needs. One key question to ask ourselves about the current pandemic of COVID-19 is: Why are we so unprepared? After all, this is far from the first pandemic and three to four of them were in the last six decades. Anyone with even a modicum of historical knowledge is aware of the infamous Black Death. (Between 1346 and 1353.) Even though none of us were alive then in that pandemic, Eurasia suffered between 75 and 200 million deaths, at a time when the entire global population was less than 500 million. Just over 100 years ago, the so-called Spanish flu killed some 100 million people in the closing months of the First World War and into 1919. The pandemic killed about five times the number of people killed in that war. Why humans kept making the same mistakes over and over again over a period of many centuries. Essentially, it can be blamed on our arrogance — a psychological condition that affects most of us most of the time — drove people to believe that they had nothing to learn from the past.   Today, we are smarter. We have learned more. We are more aware of the traps that lead to disaster. But we really are not. We say that we learn the lessons of history, but we do not.  Did anyone really believe that no global pandemics were ever again going to wreak havoc on human life? We now spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, on detecting space objects that might crash into the Earth, potentially causing many deaths, and maybe even leading to extinction. In the last 10 years, we have started to take this prospect very seriously. And it is good that we do. But aside from small numbers of immunologists working in different countries on different vaccines, how much effort was put into deflecting a new pandemic? Or preparing governments or people for how to cope with one? Not much, overall. We now know that a vaccine was in the works years ago, but that work on it was halted because no money was available to fund the research. Will we learn from this? The major lesson is that we will not unless we take these lessons to heart. We will have more Troys, Vietnams, Afghanistan’s and COVID-19s, unless we really, truly, smarten up. It is only a matter of time before we face a deadlier and more contagious pathogen. We also face the specter of novel and mutated pathogens that could spread and kill faster than diseases we have seen before. With the advent of genome-editing technologies, bioterrorists could artificially engineer new plagues. We can start by learning four lessons from the gaps exposed by the Ebola and Zika pandemics and now this COVID 19.  The most effective way to stop pandemics is with vaccines. Therefore the world must come together to develop preemptively vaccines for diseases predicted to cause outbreaks in the near future. What’s needed are point-of-care diagnostics that, like pregnancy tests, can be used by frontline responders or patients themselves to detect infection right away, where they live. We need to help developing countries establish health systems that can provide routine care and, when needed, coordinate with international responders to contain new outbreaks. Local health systems could be established for half the price of battling future pandemics. They would be essential for knowing when an outbreak is taking root and establishing trust. International actors are essential but cannot parachute into countries and navigate local dynamics quickly enough to contain outbreaks. Investing in our ability to prevent and contain pandemics through revitalized national and international institutions should be our shared goal. We need stronger global coordination. The responsibility for controlling pandemics is fragmented, spread across too many players with no unifying authority.  So Mr. Tom you have inspired me to suggest this. If we are going to keep NATO that has reinvented itself and built a new headquarter at a cost of  €1billion let it be the global coordinator to fight future Pandemics.  What better enemy could it have. Pandemics are an existential threat on par with climate change and nuclear conflict. We are at a critical crossroads, where we must either take the steps needed to prepare for this threat or become even more vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before we are hit by a deadlier, more contagious pandemic. Will we be ready? WHO, which is taking a battering from prevailing political headwinds in the United States, should continue to anchor global action.  All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: NOW THAT YOU ARE IN LOCK DOWN WHAT DO YOU THINK MAKE LIFE WORTH LIVING?

12 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., CORONA VIRUS., COVID-19, Digital age., Digital Friendship., Disconnection., Human values., Humanity., Life., Lock Down., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Reality., Religion., Religious Beliefs., Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World

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(Five-minute read)

I know it’s a heavy question, but now perhaps it is one of the most important questions we all have to answer in the future. 

It can be tough to notice all the amazing things that life has to offer.

Can we be satisfied with the successful pursuit of love, work, and play?

A fulfilling life can be elusive, as there aren’t any concrete factors that truly determine whether or not a person has truly found happiness. Satisfaction often yields happiness, but even the pursuit is enough to give life meaning.

For me, it is sharing that gives life meaning. 

Active listening by taking your friend’s feelings into account when making a decision and phasing out people who introduce stress or negative feelings out of your life.

The successes of your friends are important and worthy of celebrating.

Get to know them.

Find value in what you do. I.E. finding a job that aligns with your personal passions. It’s important to find a line of work that offers the amount of freedom you feel is necessary and appropriate. Accomplishing something of value.

Obsessing over past failures can’t change what happened. The opinions of others carry only as much weight as you allow them to.

Giving back. Find a cause you are passionate about and donate to it, volunteer your time, or offer your support in some way.

Remember that your strengths are a big part of what makes you great.

Forgiving can be among the hardest things to master, as often it’s the things that hurt the most that are most in need of forgiveness.

Remember, life is always worth living and there are people out there that can help.

It’s about the relationships we create, develop, support and maintain with people, colleagues, friends, and members of our family. Every person we meet adds invaluable experience to our life. Even the most complicated relationships we find ourselves in teaching us something worthwhile.

The answer rests in the ability to create, to dream and to strive to turn those dreams into reality. It’s all about big and small achievements when we prove ourselves being able to push the limits away. It’s about discovering the depths of your unlimited potential. 

By accepting what is going on and what happened, we release ourselves from oppressive judgments and wishes for things to pan out differently.

Enjoy all the little things, and with the time you will discover their profound meaning and that they weren’t little after all.

One thing that makes life more fulfilling and worth living are really connecting with the world around us. Nature. 

Religious faith may be reassuring, but science cannot objectively tell someone whether they should adhere to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or some other religion. It cannot even tell an individual what version of Christianity (Catholic, Baptist, Morman, etc.) or Islam (Shia or Sunni) they ought to adopt. Hence, religion and vague spiritual ideas—such as “everything happens for a reason”—can not provide an evidence-supported basis for living.

But most people, fortunately, can find lots of reasons to value their lives. 

Time does not stand still for anybody so perhaps Boris Johnston Priminster after his Coronavirus experience now realizes that sharing is what makes life go around and not get Brexit done.

One thing that makes life more fulfilling and worth living are really connecting with the world around us. If you consider your most precious memories they are probably with other people when you were doing something beyond your personal satisfaction.

Living a full, meaningful and thriving life comes down to being engaged in the world around us, not in virtual reality.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. YOU CAN’T MANAGE THE TRUTH. WE ARE OR WILL WE BE LOOKING A SOCIAL BOMB WITH THE CURRENT PANDEMIC.

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Civilization., Communication., CORONA VIRUS., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Disasters., Disconnection., Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Humanity., Inequality, International solidarity., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Reality., Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truthfulness., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, VALUES, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

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(Four-minute read)

We already have the power to destroy ourselves without the wisdom that we don’t, but this Coronavirus pandemic is another kettle of fish altogether, there is no need to press a button. 

Most species live for millions of year so we are at 200,000 are teenagers. 

If we play our cards right we could be around for hundreds of thousands of years to come. 

Now that we realized the truth, of the fragility of our present times we need to revamp our World Institutions to get the risk of living down and keep it down forever. 

Perhaps after this Pandemic, we as a species need to write a constitution for humanity to set us on the right course to sustainability. 

Why? 

Because no one individual, no president or politician has been able to solve in the last century even if they wanted to, the problems that Earth our home must tackle as a species. 

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Worldwide we are now looking at more than 838,000 cases of COVID-19 leaving the majority of citizens jobless, broke, and without options.

You’d think people would be used to it by now. Every couple of years the world is thrust into hysteria by the latest virus that is threatening to wipe out a significant portion of the population.

How many shocks can an international economy sustain?

How many shocks are likely on their way?

Forests are burning. Glaciers are melting. Ecological systems are collapsing. Resources are running out.

Coronavirus has and is changing everything and not everything.Post image

We just haven’t noticed it yet.

But those changes will become more apparent by the day.

Suddenly, we may have to think about things we’ve never needed to consider before.

Like a social bomb that can explode at any moment.

In our global society, this outbreak moved from a remote village to a major city on the other side of the world in under 36 hours.

Despite generous government-mandated disaster pay, unemployment, and stimulus checks, it’s only a matter of time before many issues combine to become the flashpoint that leads to an explosion of civil unrest.

The consequences will be very different in countries where political institutions are weaker and where the illness or death of a leader has been known to generate the kind of power vacuum that might inspire rival leaders, opposition parties, or the military to launch a power grab. 

HOWEVER, ultimately its impact will not be counted in human fatalities.

Nor in the cost of treating the sick.

It will be in our minds. It’s in our economic system. In our societies that are all linked to the overwhelming extent of globalisation, urbanisation and ecosystem collapse.

Our interconnected world – and its ultra-efficient flow of trade, investment, knowledge and people – has been revealed to have feet of clay.

Globalisation will have to be rethought because most of the population is the urbanised disassociated from even basic agriculture, NOT TO MENTION THE WORLDS ECOSYSTEMS. 

We have skewed supply chains so far to the extremes that when they are perturbed, people get into a lot of strife and our way of life isn’t built to cope with it.

What COVID19 is emphasising is that our system is set up ideally to transmit such a disease and is extremely susceptible to even small interruptions.

It jumped into a world humans have moulded to their own purposes. But that world is also nirvana to a virus.

We’ve actually put ourselves in an ideal position from the perspective of a virus, which is why we see estimates of anywhere between 30 and 60 per cent of the population likely to get it.

It has burst on an unready world.

COVID-19 will eventually pass and become more controllable with vaccines and developed natural immunity, but not yet and not before it could wreak profound change on those who currently hold political, economic and military power around the globe.

It has set in motion a chain of events that will bring consequences, that none of us  IMAGINE NOW.

Everybody is suddenly very aware of just how reliant we are on China for everything from medicines and machinery to electronic components and rare Earths.

There is a big judgement call to make such are the levels of interdependency built by reliance on global just-in-time supply chains that the developed economies will largely sink or swim together.

But it’s not just China. It’s the whole globally specialised network of supply.

Diversification is now a necessity, not just strategic aspiration.

Suddenly the logic of many belts and many roads is plain.

It is not possible to manage the truth.

When benefits run out on a national scale, fear, lack of food, employment, the number of people dying with the potential for much more yet to come there is risks of a domino effect leading to Civil unrest.

Fear becomes the default emotion. The very emotion that motivates people to take to the streets to engage in civil unrest and protest.

Exceptional conditions of imbalance between needs and available resources.

Historically, larger outbreaks of civil unrest tend to occur in largely populated areas.

But most people don’t go further and ask the question; “What exactly are people afraid of?” Is it death? Of course, that is mankind’s greatest anxiety, especially for those who have children. 

South Korean soldiers, in protective gear, disinfect the Eunpyeong district against the coronavirus in Seoul, South Korea. Picture: Woohae Cho/Getty Images

Civil unrest affects more than just the civilians involved and the law enforcement that are called on to subdue it. It isn’t limited to riots. Violence and destruction aren’t necessary to classify civil unrest. It can start for many reasons. Of course, any prediction is hard to make given that infections haven’t yet peaked.

The sooner you accept the need to go into lockdown, the better.

The sacrifice isn’t fun, and borders on tragic. Hopefully, people will see fit to prepare for such setbacks in the future as history has shown that this will not be the last impending “catastrophe” to derail us from our lives. 

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WILL THE WORLD BE EVER A SAFE PLACE.

05 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Artificial Intelligence., Biotechnology., Capitalism, CORONA VIRUS., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Democracy, Digital age., Disasters., Disconnection., Environment, Evolution, Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Inequality., International solidarity., Life., Lock Down., Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Nanotechnology, Pandemic, Political Trust, Post - truth politics., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media, Survival., Sustaniability, Technologically Enabled Genetics., Technology v Humanity, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Aid., World Economy., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics, World Trade Organisation

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    (Thirty-minute lockdown read )  My previous post asked the question of what skills will be needed to rebuild …

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S : Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now?

31 Tuesday Mar 2020

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( An essential twenty-minute read) 



It all depends on how governments and society respond to coronavirus and its economic aftermath.

As we know COVID-19 is highlighting serious deficiencies in our existing system. 

Hopefully, we will use this crisis to rebuild, produce something better and more humane. But we may slide into something worse.

My focuses on this post are on the fundamentals of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages, and productivity.

I argue that we will need a very different kind of economics if we are to build socially just and ecologically sound futures.

In the face of COVID-19, this has never been more obvious.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises: The prioritisation of one type of value over others. 

From an economic perspective, there are four possible futures:

Descent into barbarism, robust state capitalism, radical state socialism, and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid.

Coronavirus, like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although both appear to be “environmental” or “natural” problems, they are socially driven.

Yes, climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that’s a very shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases.

Likewise with COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires us to understand human behaviour and its wider economic context.

Tackling both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential economic activity.

The epidemiology of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People mix together and spread infections.

We can see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are effective.

Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they weren’t introduced earlier in European countries and the US.

We are now facing a serious recession and we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at the next sign of pandemic.

The economics of collapse is fairly straightforward.

Businesses exist to make a profit.

If they can’t produce, they can’t sell things. This means they won’t make profits, which means they are less able to employ you.

Businesses can and do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don’t need immediately: They want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won’t. So, more people lose their jobs or fear to lose their jobs. So they buy less. And the whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression.

In a normal crisis, the prescription for solving this is simple.

The government spends, and it spends until people start consuming and working again.

This pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures.

But normal interventions won’t work here because we don’t want the economy to recover (at least, not immediately). The whole point of the lockdown is to stop people going to work, where they spread the disease.

If we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn’t mean loss of livelihood.

At its core, the economy is the way we take our resources and turn them into the things we need to live.

Looked at this way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow us to produce less stuff without increasing misery.

So how do you reduce the amount of stuff you make while keeping people in work?

You have to reduce people’s dependence on a wage to be able to live.

Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of money. The dominant idea of the current system we live in is that exchange value is the same thing as use-value.

This is why markets are seen as the best way to run society. They allow you to adapt, and are flexible enough to match up productive capacity with use-value.

What COVID-19 is throwing into sharp relief is just how false our beliefs about markets are. 

There are lots of contributing factors to this. But let’s take two.

First, it is quite hard to make money from many of the most essential societal services-key workers low-paid employee. This is in part because a major driver of profits is labour productivity growth: doing more with fewer people – automation.

Second, jobs in many critical services aren’t those that tend to be highest valued in society. Many of the best-paid jobs only exist to facilitate exchanges; to make money.

People are compelled to work pointless jobs (they serve no wider purpose to society: ie. consultants, huge advertising industry and a massive financial sector) because, in a society where exchange value is the guiding principle of the economy, the basic goods of life are mainly available through markets.

This means you have to buy them, and to buy them you need an income, which comes from a job.

Meanwhile, we have a crisis in health and social care, where people are often forced out of useful jobs they enjoy because these jobs don’t pay them enough to live.

While state-capitalist society continues to pursue exchange value as the guiding light of the economy. It also enacts a massive Keynesian stimulus by extending credit and making direct payments to businesses.

The expectation here is that this is will be for a short period.

Could this be a successful scenario?

Possibly, but only if COVID-19 proves controllable over a short period.

Limited state intervention will become increasingly hard to maintain if death tolls rise.

Increased illness and death will provoke unrest and deepen economic impacts, forcing the state to take more and more radical actions to try to maintain market functioning.

Barbarism is the future if we continue to rely on exchange value as our guiding principle and yet refuse to extend support to those who get locked out of markets by illness or unemployment. It describes a situation that we have not yet seen.

Could this happen?

The concern is that either it could happen by mistake during the pandemic, or by intention after the pandemic peaks.

Potentially just as consequential is the possibility of massive austerity after the pandemic has peaked and governments seek to return to “normal”.

This would be disastrous. The subsequent failure of the economy and society would trigger political and stable unrest, leading to a failed state and the collapse of both state and community welfare systems.

Then there is the possibility that we could see with a cultural shift that places a different kind of value at the heart of the economy.

The state steps in to protect the parts of the economy that are essential to life: so that the basic provisions of life are no longer at the whim of the market. The state nationalises hospitals and makes housing freely available. Finally, it provides all citizens with a means of accessing various goods – both basics and any consumer goods we are able to produce with a reduced workforce.

Citizens no longer rely on employers as intermediaries between them and the basic materials of life.

Payments are made to everyone directly and are not related to the exchange value they create.

Instead, payments are the same to all (on the basis that we deserve to be able to live, simply because we are alive), or they are based on the usefulness of the work.

A Basic Universal Income.

Supermarket workers, delivery drivers, warehouse stackers, nurses, teachers, and doctors are the new CEOs.

If deep recessions happen and there is a disruption in supply chains such that demand cannot be rescued by the kind of standard Keynesian policies we are seeing now (printing money, making loans easier to get and so on), the state may take overproduction.

There are risks to this approach – we must be careful to avoid authoritarianism. But done well, this may be our best hope against an extreme COVID-19 outbreak.

Mutual aid is the second future in which we adopt the protection of life as the guiding principle of our economy. But, in this scenario, the state does not take a defining role. Rather, individuals and small groups begin to organise support and care within their communities.

The most ambitious form of this future sees new democratic structures arise. Groupings of communities that are able to mobilise substantial resources with relative speed. People coming together to plan regional responses to stop disease spread and (if they have the skills) to treat patients.

This kind of scenario could emerge from any of the others.

What hopefully is clear is that all these scenarios leave some grounds for fear, but also some for hope.

The upside of this is the possibility that we build a more humane system that leaves us more resilient in the face of future pandemics and other impending crises like climate change. 

A key task for us all is demanding that emerging social forms come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy.

The central political task in this time of crisis is living and (virtually) organising around those values.

Not low-paid workers or National Minimum Wage or National Living Wage because their work is so vital.

Successive governments had failed to reduce inequality between rich and poor despite two decades of interventions.

We must now with an uncertain future focus more on the journey, rather than the ultimate destination.

But be no doubt that we are at a crossroad where the low pay culture that has trapped people in poorly jobs is coming to an end. 

Capitalism Inequality can not be allowed to continue. 

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THE BEADY SAY’S: TO ANCHOR OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CORONA VIRUS THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS AND WILL BE VITAL.

27 Friday Mar 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Communication., CORONA VIRUS., COVID-19, Democracy, DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Fake News., Freedom of the Press., Honesty., Human values., International solidarity., Life., Lock Down., Modern Day Communication., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Post - truth politics., Reality., Robot citizenship., Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Truth, Truthfulness., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, What Needs to change in the World, World Leaders, World Politics

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(Four-minute read) 


At the moment rightly so we are all preoccupied with the consequences of our own individual lives and all indicator point to world disaster on a scale not seen by most of us. 

However, if and when we return to a semblance of normal the freedom of the press will be in jeopardy when the blame game starts, which is inevitable. 

Why will it be?

Because the present pandemic marks the emergence of a new model of watchdog function, one that is neither purely networked nor purely traditional but is rather a mutualistic interaction between the two.

What globalization, technological integration and the general flattening of the world have done is to super empower individuals to such a degree that they can actually challenge any hierarchy—from a global bank to a nation-state—as individuals.

The fear that the decentralized network, with its capacity to empower individuals to challenge their governments or global banks, is not a democracy, but could lead to anarchy.

But the alternative is to give the government a veto over what its citizens are allowed to know.

There should be relentless exposure of politician or businessman, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life if we are to change the world for a better future.

False news forces us to ask how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet. It circumvents the social and organizational
frameworks of traditional media, which played a large role in framing the
balance between freedom and responsibility of the press.

Many of the problems can be laid at the feet of the Internet—fragmentation of the audience and polarization of viewpoints.

We cannot afford as a polity to create classes of privileged speakers and
press agencies, and underclasses of networked information producers whose products we take into the public sphere when convenient, but whom we treat as susceptible to suppression when their publications become less palatable.

Doing so would severely undermine the quality of our public discourse.

The risk is that the government will support its preferred media models and that the
incumbent mass media players will, in turn, vilify and denigrate the newer
models in ways that make them more vulnerable to attack and shore up the
the privileged position of those incumbents in their role as a more reliable ally watchdog.

Clarifying that the freedom of the press extends to “every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion” and that liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer and individual bloggers. 

Social distancing must not be allowed to turn into ruling distancing.

 Long live WikiLeaks. 

An uncomfortable fact is that a free press in a democracy can be messy at the best of times with governments around the world underestimated the coronavirus the political exploitation of the outbreak is now a reality. 

Capturing the treatment of television is less comprehensive as it is a visual medium.

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: THIS CORONA VIRUS IS ASKING ALL OF US WHAT TYPE OF WORLD DO WE WANT?

19 Thursday Mar 2020

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(Seven-minute read) 

I know that humans are the only type of species that are suitable to manage the earth but it does not make them the right species!

Apparently not.

Did we ever think that we would be living in a world where it is life-threatening to go our side and I am not talking about terrorists or any other Hollywood science fiction movie scenario?

There’s a lot of bad news out there but this is not a death sentence. 

 It’s time to save the world. ” We can use it as we wish”

No one owns the earth. No one has the right to do whatever they want.

We’re not the only thing that lives here, nor are we more important in any way.

We cannot use the world as we please as our actions are endangering not just us but other species. 

Our Earth was meant to be lived on in union with its Ecosystems and we cannot allow that to be broken.

The Coronavirus ( Covid  19 ) is illuminating what is wrong with our world. 

So our most crucial life questions are: 

What Kind of World Do We Want to Leave to Our Children?

Whatever your interest — whether it’s the environment, health care, poverty, or education — there are simple steps each of us can take to make life better not just for someone in our own community. 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” now needs an Earth Declaration. 

Here are the top six of my non-legal binding the goals.  

Use Global Warming to Solve Global Warming.

Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts to protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss.

Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development.

Sustainable Development Goals which will take years for a critical mass of governments to actually rally behind. 

The allocation of resources to fight climate change and other environmental issues over the next decade can be achieved by making a profit for profit sake pay. ( See the previous post on a 0.05% World Aid Commission. How it could be implemented so the costs are spread fairly) 

End poverty in all its forms everywhere.

Global poverty. Reduce inequality within and among countries. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Expand access to clean drinking water, green energy.

Artificial Intelligence and Automation. 

The 2020s sounds like such a radical futuristic decade however to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development requires a coherent and plausible conception of social justice. A basic income, a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.

Stop the sale of arms. 

The estimate of the total value of the global arms trade in 2017 was at least $95 billion.* However, the true figure is likely to be higher. On any given day at any given moment in your life, there are at least 15 wars and armed conflicts actively going on all around the world — even if you’re only hearing about a few of them on the news.

There are an estimated 11-12 million refugees in the world today with between 12-24 million Internally Displaced Persons.

Electoral Reform with Citizens’ Assemblies. 

These aren’t just focus groups or consultations though but for the members to engage in serious, informed reflection on important policy matters with people they may never normally meet.

As Hubert Reeves ( Canadian-French Astrophysicist) say’s, ” Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and Destroys a Visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshipping “

Feel free to have idea sex between your ideas and mine so we can come up with even better ideas. It’s a way of saying: “We agree that these are the world’s top priorities right now.”

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S OK. WITH THE CORONA-VIRUS LETS TRY AND PUT WHERE WE ALL LIVE AND HAVE LIVED EARTH INTO PERSPECTIVE.

27 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in 2020: The year we need to change., Evolution, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations.

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Twenty minutes read. 

Most of us struggle with seeing things from a different perspective but our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.

So the purpose of this post is an attempt to take the complexity of the world and simplify it into some sort of graphic that will either help you understand it or motivate you to do something differently.

Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. There is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future.

When one considers our world from a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

The state of the world today with Social media and profit-seeking algorithms is one of distrust. There are things that are certain in this world and there are lots of uncertainty attached to many things. Sometimes the only way to understand the world at its extremes is to put it in terms we use every day.

The fact is that at least two of the world’s largest powers have been at war with each other more than 50% of the time since about 1500. 

The only problem we have here is us and therefore we cannot kill our way to a solution.

The Earth is about 3.5 million times larger than a human.

If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.

Here’s what we’ve got.

We see our earth as big, and in a relative way, it is.

There are about 7 billion people currently on Earth.  Over its existence, around 106 billion people have lived on Earth.

It exists on a blue dot, 24,901 miles in circumference that is over 4 1/2 billion years old, weighing in a 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds (or 5,974,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms)

(Since Earth is too big to be placed on a scale, scientists use mathematics and the laws of gravity to figure out Earth’s weight.)

It has a solid iron ball in the middle that is 1,500 miles wide. 

It makes up about 0.0003% of the total mass of our solar system.

75% of the Earth is covered in water only 2.5 per cent of it is fresh essential for producing food, clothing, and computers, moving our waste stream, and keeping us and the environment healthy.

About 321 billion gallons per day of surface water is used by humans.

Humans who are just 0.01% of all life have destroyed 83% of wild mammals.

Plants overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world’s biomass.

It takes light a little over 8 light-minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth and it can circle our planet about seven and a half times in a single second.

Our closest star is Proxima Centauri at a distance of four light-years.

The Milky Way itself is about 100,000 light-years across and is home to about 400 billion stars.

(A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!)

According to the Big bang theory which happened about 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the universe came into existence at the same time.

So anything can serve as a symbol as long as it refers to something beyond itself.

In our daily activities to give such things more than a passing glance.

However, our planet only seems large until we take a look at the rest of the cosmos around us.

Where do start? Its age., its place in the cosmic, or it’s future.

“Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite.

We’re visual creatures.

So perhaps a sense of scale might help.

Let’s start with a few comparisons

Life on Earth first emerged about 600 million years and we are the first generations whose decisions will determine for good or ill the future of human life on this planet, and we seem stuck in a way of thinking that is obsolete in a globalized world of growing populations. The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing.

To our brains, a million, billion, and trillion all seem like large, vague numbers. 

Today (January 2020) Bill Gates fortune amounts to around $108,5 billion around 0.5% of the GDP of the United States. By the time I complete this post, $1436400 amount will be added to his net worth and is predicted to hit the trillion mark by the age of 86.

If you are one of the so-called “rich” and you were lucky enough to make a million dollars per year, it would take you almost 80,000 YEARS to catch up. 

We share the Earth with an estimated 1 quadrillion ants. Insects outweigh us by a factor of 17.

For every human, there are about one million ants and the total weight termites are more than the weight of all the humans in the world. They alone make up 10% of all animal biomass and 95% of soil and insect biomass in tropical regions.­ Colonies of multi-drug resistant EBSL E. coli

Bacteria were one of the first life forms to appear on Earth, about 3.8 billion years ago, and they will most likely survive long after humans are gone.

The number of bacteria on our planet is estimated to be five million trillion trillion – that’s a five with 30 zeroes after it.

All the bacteria on Earth combined are about 1,166 times more massive than all the humans. For every human walking over the face of the planet. 

Bacteria are the huddled masses of the microbial world, performing tasks that include everything from causing diseases to fixing nitrogen in the soil.

The number of bacteria makes the globe’s human population look downright puny.

Because the number of bacteria is so large, events that would occur once in 10 billion years in the laboratory would occur every second somewhere on the Earth.

We may have been underestimating our own humanness for the past several decades when it comes to Bacteria. The average human has over 100 trillion microbes in and on their body microbial cells outnumber human cells in your body by a ratio of around 10:1.

Our modus operandi was to kill them, rather than synchronize with them.

Bills and coins are the best way to transfer bacteria between people worldwide; 

The debate over the microbiome will rage on, as the fear of the invisible and little understood will drive the masses in the short-term.

It is a fact that bacteria live in a whole series of worlds which stretch our imagination, be it the clouds in the sky, an Antarctic ice flow, a 100 degree C hot sulphur spring, 10 km down at the bottom of the sea, 1500 m below the surface of the earth in solid rock, in a rotting peach, in the roots of plants, the stomachs of animals and even your mouth, bacteria can be found there.

The vast majority of life is land-based and a large chunk – an eighth – is bacteria buried deep below the surface but bacteria also now found circling the Earth in the most upper layers of our atmosphere.

Recent findings on animal-bacteria interactions will likely require biologists to significantly alter their view of the fundamental nature of the entire biosphere.

“And that’s the way it is.”

My preference would be to avoid mentioning any ratio at all – you don’t need to it convey the importance of the microbiome. 

Some 70 per cent of the global consumption of the drugs are used in animal and fish farming and to spray on crops.

Antibiotics in the environment do not do any good, they only contribute to risks which we are now witnessing with the Coronavirus. A rapidly spreading virus that is establishing itself across the world through international travel, trade and tourism.

We are now living in a bacterial world, and it’s impacting us more than

previously thought.  No matter what process you think you are studying, you

must look for and consider a major role for bacteria. 

The World Bank has estimated that drug-resistant infections could cost the world economy $1 trillion every year after 2030.

By 2050 costing the world around $100 trillion in lost output: more than the size of the current world economy, and roughly equivalent to the world losing the output of the UK economy every year, for 35 years not to mention killing an extra 10 million people across the world every year.

Back to earth.

This is what a quadrillion looks like written out: 1,000,000,000,000,000.

If it survives us it has 6.5 billion years before the sun (which is 92,960,000 miles away) about 109 times larger than the earth. That means you could fit around 1.3 million earth’s inside the sun which is actually considered a dwarf star — By contrast, UY Scuti is the largest star we humans are aware of; it is a hypergiant around 1.7 billion miles in diameter. UY Scuti is around 5 billion times larger than our sun.

Its no wonder we a pixel.

The diameter of our solar system is around 5,580,000,000,000 miles — that is, about five and a half trillion miles across.  Expanding outward from here, we have to start talking about things in terms of light-years, as the scale is just too massive to discuss in miles. (One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km).

Our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter of which since the dawn of man we have observed the equivalent of the top of rubber on a pencil.

This is about one 24-millionth of the entire night sky visible from earth.

The diameter of the observable universe is estimated at about 28 billion parsecs (93 billion light-years).

Ok, the numbers are pretty hard to comprehend even when you know what each unit represents. To even think of how long 10 trillion kilometres might be, let alone 93 billion times that distance, can cause your brain to hurt.

Earth, in turn, is nothing more than a molecule in the incomprehensibly vast cosmic ocean. 

Without a global jurisdiction, no government can enforce any kind of coherent rights doctrine, particularly in the face of borderless problems like terrorism or environmental crisis. 

It is up to the people of earth to dissolve the strains between each-other in an equitable, harmonious way. 

The planet you were born on is dying.

We’re on a timeline that leaves little space for politicians to gamble. This is a world that requires nations, corporations and individuals to think not in terms of quarterly reports or midterm elections, but in decades.

For transformative change to be possible, we sometimes need marginalized peoples to speak out, in a loud voice, against the status quo.

The guardians for future generations, representing the children of 2050, can be that voice that says we are spending too much on conflict and too little on peace.

Thus  as Irving John Good said, “The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultra-intelligent machine.” 

“The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

If I took a personal guess the way we are going there will be no need for such an intelligent machine as there will be nothing to be intelligent with. 

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