Category Archives: The Obvious.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE WE HAVE ALREADY PASSED A TIPPING POINT.

08 Thursday Jun 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., 2022: The year we need to change., Carbon Emissions., Civilization., Climate Change., CO2 emissions, Disasters., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., Humanity., Natural World Disasters, Our Common Values., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE WE HAVE ALREADY PASSED A TIPPING POINT.

( Four minute read)

Have we reached a tipping point, that moment from which a system irreversibly changes state?

I say yes.

Climate tipping points could lock in unstoppable changes to the planet, self-sustaining shifts in the climate system that would lock-in devastating changes, like sea-level rise, even if all emissions ended.climate tipping points approaching Degradation drought Amazon less resilient fire emit more carbon than they absorb

Inhabitants of New York on Wednesday are invited to stay at home and to use masks outdoors. More than 100 million Americans are now affected by air quality alerts due to wild fires in Canada.A section of an ice sheet on water in Greenland climate tipping points

In the mean time melting of the sea ice in the Arctic will inevitably lead to a warming of the region: a huge white space, the pack ice reflects light when the sun shines 24 hours a day in summer.

It lowers the temperature of the Arctic. The disappearance of the pack ice – icy water already present in the ocean – will not directly lead to a rise in the sea and the  rise in global temperature caused by the melting of the sea ice risks in turn leading to extreme climatic events: heat waves, droughts, floods, etc.

Are we all screwed?

Yes.

Why?

Because every fraction of a degree makes tipping more likely, but we can’t be sure exactly when tipping becomes inevitable as one tipping point speeds up the next.

These signals can’t tell us exactly how close we are to tipping points, only that destabilisation is underway and a tipping point may be approaching.

These changes are just the beginning of worse to come.

The scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years, and it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.

The most we can be sure of is that every fraction of further warming will destabilise these tipping elements more and make the initiation of self-sustaining changes more likely.

“It’s a huge red flag, but there’s still time to save everything else.”

The temporary reduction in carbon emissions caused by global COVID-19 lockdowns did not slow the relentless advance of climate change.

To implement climate change goals as geopolitical uncertainties threaten to undermine their efforts,

The world is yet to get to a “positive tipping point” in the fight against climate change. Air pollution from power plants contributes to global warming. It is now very likely that the 5-year average temperature for 2021–2025 will pass the 1.5 °C threshold.

Even if emissions are reduced to limit warming to well below 2 °C, the global average sea level would likely rise by 0.3–0.6 m by 2100 and could rise 0.3–3.1 m by 2300.

Three-quarters of people in the world’s wealthiest nations believe humanity is pushing the planet towards a dangerous tipping point and support a shift of priorities away from economic profit.

People know we are taking colossal risks, they want to do more and they want their governments to do more. We and they must move faster to implement more ambitious policies to protect and regenerate our global commons.

People in power seem to feel it is OK to fell old trees or destroy natural ecosystems for buildings or roads, or to dig up oil, so long as they then plant new trees. But this approach is not working.

Overall, 74% of people agreed that countries should move beyond focussing on gross domestic product and profit, and instead focus more on the health and wellbeing of humans and nature.

Its now or never for global cooperation to tackle shared challenges.

There is now a need for major economic and social transformation.

Currently the world is heading toward ~2 to 3°C of global warming; at best, if all net-zero pledges and nationally determined contributions are implemented it could reach just below 2°C.

One barrier appears to be media coverage. It is not helped the understanding of the issues, or what is at stake.

You don’t have to be told that it will not take much to tip us all into killing each other.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950

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

20 Saturday May 2023

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

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

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( Ten minute read) 

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

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

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

Artificial intelligence (AI) is naught but algorithms.

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

Algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything.

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

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

Why? 

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

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

———

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

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

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

2) The algorithm’s function.

3) The algorithm’s limitations and biases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———–

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

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

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

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

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

So where are we.

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

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

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

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

The Key Exchange Encryption algorithm does the seemingly impo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most critical of these is the problem of optimization:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is now oblivious that there is no going back.

The question now is there anyway of curtailing their power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com  

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S . THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY MUST BE BROUGHT TO HEAL WITH NEW LAWS TO REDUCE CONSUMPTION.

25 Tuesday Apr 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., Advertising, Advertising industry,  Attention economy, Capitalism, CO2 emissions, Cry for help., Desensitization., Environment, How to do it., Human values., Modern day life., Profiteering., State of the world, Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Universal values., VALUES, What is shaping our world., Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S . THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY MUST BE BROUGHT TO HEAL WITH NEW LAWS TO REDUCE CONSUMPTION.

( Seven minute read)

It is crystal clear that consumption is a major donator to the problems of both the environment and all of us are now facing. There is consistent evidence that exposure to marketing for unhealthy commodities – for example advertising for alcohol or food and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar – is associated with consumption, including among children and young people.

To confront the climate emergency, the amount we consume needs to drop dramatically. Yet every day we’re told by the advertising industry to consume more.

The purpose of advertising is to boost revenue, gain an advantage over competitors, and build brand awareness, so it latch on to what ever is topical – Climate change – Energy – Sustainability – Cost of living etc.

Now with technology it has billion-dollar persuasion machines, promoting not quality of life but rather quantity of stuff.

It’s woven into our personal communications whenever we use social media platforms. In public spaces, where we have little choice over where we look, adverts are invasive, appearing without our consent, with the trend towards digital billboards only exposes us ever more.

Its so prevalent as to be invisible but with an effect no less insidious than air pollution.

We all have a role to play — from making sustainable choices to help safeguard the ocean and our environment, to urging world and business leaders to take the urgent, widespread, and ambitious action needed to tackle climate change and protect the planet.

———

This is an industry capable of quickly shifting global public opinion, with the power to change hearts, minds and behaviour resulting in action, potentially on a global scale and also with profound and rapid effect.

It must be made to take responsibility for consumption, instead of continuing to drive the high carbon lifestyles and hyper-consumption that is killing us.

If we were to introduce new laws restricting marketing agencies from taking work from clients who aren’t actively reducing their own contributions to climate change, earning money from high carbon clients, the sort of companies from whom the investment community is increasingly divesting; promoting unnecessary and over-consumption, these companies  would eventually be forced to match their green advertising slogans with real green investment.

The questions for the advertising industry would become what are our obligations to tackle climate change i.e. how might we have contributed to climate change and how do we stop doing so, and what are our opportunities i.e. where can we make a positive contribution to the issue?

What other than laws will forced  it to rethink their strategies so the industry will go through a transition period, to discover a purpose beyond profit?

In fact, many would argue that the move to “doing well by doing good” will only become truly mainstream when the corporate social responsibility agenda and the growth agenda become one and the same.

There is no reason that governments could not introduce restricted areas and venues where the advertising of consumption is not allowed.

Buses covered in advertising at London's Piccadilly CircusA billboard advert in Manchester

For example:  Sporting events, Natural Reserves/ Public Park’s, Billboards and bus stops, Out door digital advertising.

We could stop television programming being sponsored by consumption  – Eat now.

Of course in a free society, businesses have the right to advertise their wares, and individual citizens are not the helpless brainless automatons that advertising industry’s considers them to be.

All advertising plays a crucial role in brand competition, drives product innovation, and fuels economic growth but would we not rather see community ads and art than have multi-billion companies putting logos and images everywhere?

If they are allowed to get the message out, the public has a right to reply to those ads.

We don’t want our city’s children bombarded with animated advertising on TV screens in the street.

Critically, the more that people prioritise materialistic values and goals, the less they embrace positive attitudes towards the environment – and the more likely they are to behave in damaging ways. If you think this is a fanciful aim, then you might need to think again with the state the world is in.

We’re in a place where major behaviour change is required.

To question the legitimacy of corporate outdoor adverting and draw attention to the impact they can have on social issues, mental health, wellbeing, the climate, and the communication of public space where governments are too inert/broke/ill-intentioned/in thrall to vested interests to take effective action.

Business leaders must increasingly look beyond short-term profitability to address the pressing need to reduce emissions.

——

.The advertising industry is in a very different place to where it was a year ago.

Where, how, and when you advertise will constantly change with the times. That’s one thing we can count on.

Culture has always defined marketing and brand marketers have a lot of power to dictate.

The rise of the internet, computers, and mobile devices only provided more platforms for video ads to appear. It’s probably still going to be one of the most important advertising trends in the next 5 years.

We have our hands on the levers of behaviour change, but in an era in which attention is often only ever partial, puncturing the collective consumer inertia with a complex message is no easy feat.

We spend every day thinking of ways to change people’s behaviours,

These skills are the ones needed more than ever by the world to halt the human causes of climate change.

——–

Advertising has always evolved with the technology at hand. This includes tracking of clicked links, customer behaviour, purchase history, survey responses, and more.

Marketers can then use that information to create custom messages or content that’ll match the target audiences’ interests.

Finding out which people to show a particular ad to and the right time to show them is crucial in the world of smartphones

Next step, profit.

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In a cut-throat and viciously competitive market, pioneering new technology can have a major impact on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Another big use of mobile advertising is through games.

A lot of mobile games are created with the format of being able to purchase resources with real-world money.

This means that ads will now be geared towards targeting real people through emails and other registered user data. With more information available, marketers can provide customers with a better offer that’ll most likely translate into sales.

Social advertising is the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms for advertising potentials.

The format itself is undergoing rapid transformation because most people watch for content and not for production quality.

Data collection and cookies naturally have poor public perception, often being viewed as encroaching on private information and stealing data, with ads following consumers around the internet.

Now, these apps aren’t just for sending messages and emoji cause it’s also a place to find advertisements relevant to users.

As the climate crisis bites

————

We need new metrics and measurement tools – and new bonus and remuneration systems to underpin our value systems, not just legislation against high-carbon advertising, focusing on fossil fuel companies, petrol- and diesel-engine cars and aviation.

Because, marketing has been transformed by digital speed, relevance and reach of advertising campaigns.

Because, overconsumption in general, encouraged by advertising, has a climate and ecological impact.

Because, programmatic advertising uses AI to automatically buy ads that can target audiences more specifically. ( Programmatic advertising is a combination of big data processing, technical skills, and automation.)

Because, advertising works by getting under your radar, introducing new ideas without bothering your conscious mind.

Because, contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising where site content and keywords are analyzed in real time to determine their suitability for a brand’s message.

Because, children are now at the mercy of so-called “surveillance advertising”. It is estimated that by the time a child turns 13, ad-tech firms would have gathered 72m data points on them. The more data collected from an early age, the easier it is for advertisers to turn young children into consumer targets.

A transformation of marketing is underway as we spend more time on our mobiles, tablets and laptops. The real-time conversations brands have with people as they interact with websites and mobile apps has changed the nature of marketing

We know that advertising is a key engine of the economy. There are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans.

There’s a long way to go and a lot to be done. The ad business, with strategy tools and processes that were for the most part developed in the 60s to accommodate the advent of commercial TV, is a lot closer to where it started the journey than where it needs to get to.

Let’s create a movement and band together to save the planet in a non-branded or political way.

New checks and balances need to accommodate the natural concerns of councils and residents around climate, air pollution, environmental light pollution, the “attention economy”, mental health and the dominance of non-consensual adverts in public spaces.

I’m sure most advertisers and agencies would rather work on solving this global crisis, and if we can use just 5% of the industry’s time toward this initiative.

It isn’t clickbait that is needed but a genuine concern for the fate of the planet or a cynical hunch that doing the right thing will drive growth and profit – if the improved behaviour is real.

I believe that would lead to greater satisfaction, retention and more.

Break the Silence and comment.

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

Contact; bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

16 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Politics

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

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( Twenty-six minute read)

We have heard all of this over and over, but it is impossible to get serious about climate change, because it has been turned into a product to be traded.

The very words Climate Change, Global warming, Biodiversity, Sea levels, Natural disasters, Droughts, Melting  ice, the list goes on and on as a result they are falling on deaf ears. For example  “sustainable development”: a phrase at which many people quietly glaze over and switch off.  Or “Global warming” is another of those deceptive phrases. It doesn’t sound that threatening.

So if words like “climate change” and “global warming” have become a turn-off for most ordinary people, maybe we should change the words.  Perhaps we should talk instead about what those things actually mean:

Killer weather, a world under water, and a mortgaged future.

We have been told for over three decades of the dangers of allowing the planet to warm.

We all know this and we know that it’s urgent. The world listened, but it didn’t hear. The world listened, but it didn’t act strongly enough. It hasn’t been enough to change our behaviours on a scale great enough to stop climate change.

As a result, climate change is a problem that is here, now. Nobody is safe. And it is getting worse faster and faster, till one tipping point is reached causing a rolling coaster of from here to eternity.

There are many tipping points to choose from.

Here is mind. The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover melts.

This is a feedback loop with teeth.

Back in the 50s it was more than ten meters thick, reflecting as much as 3% of the sun’s incoming light back into space.

That light is now heating the Oceans of the Arctic and the Antarctic, both becoming the fastest places on Earth with rising temperatures. Which means a greater and greater release of permafrost carbon and methane, 20 times stronger than Co2.

The Arctic permafrost contains as much methane as all the Earth’s cattle could create over the next six centuries.

If released this fart would push the Earth into an irreversible tipping point at which point the sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with the global temperatures 5/6 degrees Celsius higher. At that point civilisation would be over.

One would think that such a scenario would be sufficient to make all of us pay attention but not so.

Why?

A big part of the reason is our own evolution. The same behaviours that once helped us survive are, today, working against us.

We lack the collective will to address climate change, because of the way our brains have evolved. We have evolved to pay attention to immediate threats. We overestimate threats that are less likely but easier to remember, like terrorism, and underestimate more complex threats, like climate change. Too much information can confuse our brains, leading us to inaction or poor choices that can place us in harm’s way.

Our brains evolved to filter information rapidly and focus on what is most immediately essential to our survival and reproduction.

In our modern reality it’s causing errors in rational decision-making, known as cognitive biases. “Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival make it difficult to address complex, long-term challenges that now threaten our existence, like climate change.

  • Hyperbolic discounting. This is our perception that the present is more important than the future. Throughout most of our evolution it was more advantageous to focus on what might kill us or eat us now, not later. This bias now impedes our ability to take action to address more distant-feeling, slower and complex challenges. While we may understand what needs to be done to address climate change, it’s hard for us to see how the sacrifices required for generations existing beyond this short time span are worth it.

Families carry water during a drought in Ethiopia; temperature rise already has altered weather and water systems in profound ways (Credit: Creative Commons)

  • To address the issue of climate change it requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities.
  • The larger the group, the more challenging it gets.

The future value is the value of it at some time in the future. The farther into the future we look, the fuzzier our view, but there will be no future unless we invest trillions and trillions into sustainability.

On a warming planet, no one is safe.

The air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all rely on biodiversity.

Unfortunately, we have created a world where an asset from a business perspective, has no value unless it can produce cash flows in the future. The difference in value between the future and the present is created by discounting the future back to the present using a discount factor, which is a function of time that is running out right in front of our eyes.

The world’s ecosystems are capital assets that up to now have escaped valuation and have therefore been mismanaged.

Now they are being bought by rich privateers, together with financial instruments and institutional arrangements that will allow individuals to capture the value of ecosystem assets.  For example, Sovereignty Wealth Funds.  They buy environmental protection, but only by liquidating natural capital (for example, prairies, forests, fisheries) to generate the funds; even “information” economies are built in proportion to such liquidation. The reinvestment in natural capital never equals the amount liquidated because of procedural inefficiency and profit-taking.

—–

The process of valuation in the short term might lead to profoundly favourable effects on the stock market, but the decision of how much to spend now to avert climate changes hinges on assessing how much it is worth to us now to prevent that future damage.

Since most of us would prefer money now, over money later, economists typically figure that we’re willing to spend only less than a dollar now to prevent a dollar’s worth of damage in a year, or in a decade.

The percentage less is called the “social discount rate.”

This implies that we either accept an assumption that many argue is economically unjustified (a near-zero social discount rate), or conclude that we should just accept climate change without much of a fight. (A third alternative is perhaps even less appealing to economists: accepting that their calculations simply can’t illuminate the question.)

We’re much happier to have good stuff now than later, so our short-term discount rate is high.

But we hardly distinguish between goods in the pretty far future and goods in the very far future, so our discount rate in the future is far lower to manage the essentials to life.

Now more than ever we must use the power of the law to fight those who would harm our communities, our climate, and the natural world we value so deeply.

We have an International criminal court, why not use it to fine this lot of polluters.

Peabody Energy

Company summary: Coal company
Based in: Missouri, United States
Founded: 1883
Emissions per capita: 2,231,818 tonnes – or, 449,057 return flights from London to Sydney.

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation

Company summary: Petroleum company
Based in: Kuwait City, Kuwait
Founded: 1980
Emissions per capita: 2,133,248 tonnes – or, 445,354 return flights from London to Sydney

ConocoPhillips

Company summary: Crude oil and natural gas
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1875
Emissions per capita: 1,464,423 tonnes – or, 305,725 return flights from London to Sydney

Chevron

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: California, United States
Founded: 1879
Emissions per capita: 900,218 tonnes – or, 187,936 return flights from London to Sydney

Saudi Aramco

Company summary: Petroleum and natural gas company
Based in: Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Founded: 1933
Emissions per capita: 750,126 tonnes – or, 150,930 return flights from London to Sydney

ExxonMobil

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1999
Emissions per capita: 559,412 tonnes – or, 116,787 return flights from London to Sydney

BP

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: London, United Kingdom
Founded: 1909
Emissions per capita: 485,306 tonnes – or, 97,647 return flights from London to Sydney

National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)

Company summary: Government-owned national oil and natural gas company
Based in: Tehran, Iran
Founded: 1948
Emissions per capita: 407,542 tonnes – or, 82,000 return flights from London to Sydney

Royal Dutch Shell

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: The Hague, Netherlands
Founded: 1907
Emissions per capita: 384,939 tonnes – or, 77,452 return flights from London to Sydney.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965. The worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.

The top plastic polluting companies

Company Examples of products             Number of countries plastic was found in Pieces of plastic found
Coca-Cola       Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite                                            51                                              13,834
Pepsico            Pepsi, Lays, Doritos                                                  43                                              5,155
Nestlé              Nescafé, Kit Kat, Nestea                                           37                                              8,633
Unilever          Persil, Cornetto, Sunsilk                                            37                                              5,558
Mondeléz International  Oreo, Cadbury, Milka                                34                                                1,171
Mars              Mars bars, M&Ms, Snickers                                      32                                                  678
P&G              Tampax, Pantene, Ariel                                              29                                              3,535
Philip Morris International  Parliament, Merit, Marlboro               28                                                2,593
Colgate Palmolive  Colgate Palmolive                                           24                                              5,991
Colgate, Ajax, Palmolive
Perfetti          Mentos, Chupa Chups, Fruittella                             24                                                465

It’s important to remember that, as a consumer, you do have the power to change the future of these polluting companies. As more people switch to renewable energy, cut down on plastic, and live a little more sustainably, these polluting companies will have no choice but to change their habits to stay on trend.

Economists develop new methods to quantify the trade-off between spending now and spending later.

To figure out how much we should spend fighting climate change, economists have some questions for you:

The health of the planet may hinge on the answers.

Most economic analyses of climate change have concluded that we should be spending only small amounts to combat climate change now, ramping up slowly over time. This conclusion mystifies most climate scientists, who argue that immediate action is the only way to forestall dreadful consequences. And at the heart of the disagreement are these very questions, about the value of future generations’ welfare in monetary terms.

The worst consequences of climate change are likely to unfold only over decades or centuries — in other words, in our children’s or grandchildren’s or great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lifetimes, not ours.

The higher the price payed, also equates with a higher level of risk, which generates a higher discount and lowers the present value of any action.  The higher the level of risk is represented as beta in the capital asset pricing model, means a higher discount, which lowers the present value of  nature.

Discounting is the primary factor used in pricing a stream of tomorrow’s crises. .

By reiterating the importance of the world’s natural capital to the human prospect, the next step, is to focus on stabilizing the scale of human economy.  This requires taking on the advertising industry that is promoting consumption. It should be illegal to advertise any product that is not sustainable in their manufacture. Put restrictions on all advertising that is in contradiction to health of not just us, but the earth.  It has become a voracious top predator across the entire globe.

—

Biodiversity?

It is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms and all its interactions. Bio means living, and diversity is the variety of life on earth. It represents different relationships (like ecological, cultural, or evolutionary) between several types of organisms on this planet. All living beings on from human beings to the tiny creatures like microbes combined to form Biodiversity.

Starting with genes, then individual species, then communities of creatures and finally entire ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, where life interplays with the physical environment. These myriad interactions have made Earth habitable for billions of years.

Wildlife is not something you watch on television. The reality is that the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all ultimately rely on biodiversity.

It represents the knowledge learned by evolving species over millions of years about how to survive through the vastly varying environmental conditions Earth has experienced. We all interdependent with one another. Hence each species plays an essential role to boost ecosystem productivity.

Some examples are obvious: without plants there would be no oxygen and without bees to pollinate there would be no fruit or nuts.

Humans and our livestock now consume 25-40% of the planet’s entire “primary production”, i.e. the energy captured by plants on which all biodiversity depends.

The intricate jigsaw of life, constructed over hundreds of millions of years, has been thrown into disarray in the last 10,000 years by humans relocating species around the world. These invasive species can devastate ecosystems that have never developed defences – from rats devouring albatross chicks in their nests to snakehead fish decimating native species.

If money is a measure, the services provided by ecosystems are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars – double the world’s GDP. Biodiversity loss in Europe alone costs the continent about 3% of its GDP, or €450m (£400m), a year.

From an aesthetic point of view, every one of the millions of species is unique, a natural work of art that cannot be recreated once lost. “Each higher organism is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, a Bach fugue, or any other great work,”

The extinction rate of species is now thought to be about 1,000 times higher than before humans dominated the planet, which may be even faster than the losses after a giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago. The sixth mass extinction in geological history has already begun, according to some scientists.

The results are scary.

Humans can’t have power over nature in nature.

—–

Despite the fact that natural resources are limited and take millions of years in the formation, the human is exploiting them for their endless greed and comfort.

Species extinction provides a clear but narrow window on the destruction of biodiversity.

The huge global biodiversity losses now becoming apparent represent a crisis equalling – or quite possibly surpassing – climate change.

Billions of individual populations have been lost all over the planet, with the number of animals living on Earth having plunged by half since 1970. Abandoning the normally sober tone of scientific papers, researchers call the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation” representing a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”.

Humans may lack gills but that has not protected marine life. The situation is no better – and perhaps even less understood – in the two-thirds of the planet covered by oceans. Seafood is the critical source of protein for more than 2.5 billion people but rampant overfishing has caused catches to fall steadily since their peak in 1996 and now more than half the ocean is industrially fished.

Even much-loathed parasites are important. One-third could be wiped out by climate change, making them among the most threatened groups on Earth. But scientists warn this could destabilise ecosystems, unleashing unpredictable invasions of surviving parasites into new areas.

Today, 75% of the world’s food comes from just a dozen crops and five animal species, leaving supplies very vulnerable to pests or disease that can sweep through large areas of monocultures. Add in the falling yields expected from climate change, and the world’s growing global population faces a food problem.

Locating the tipping point that moves biodiversity loss into ecological collapse is an urgent priority. This being the only living world we are ever likely to know, let us join to make the most of it.

Could the loss of biodiversity be a greater threat to humanity than climate change?

Yes – nothing on Earth is experiencing more dramatic change at the hands of human activity.

Changes to the climate are reversible, even if that takes centuries or millennia.

That call is more urgent than ever. Our posterity is running out of chances.

But once species become extinct, particularly those unknown to science, there’s no going back. To put the matter as concisely as possible, biological diversity is unique in the evenness of its importance to both developed and developing countries is beyond any technical advances.

To spread technical capability where it is most needed, arrangements can be made to retain specimens within the countries of their origin while training nationals to assume leadership in systematics and the related scientific disciplines. Science is the best way to establish links with other cultures because it is concerned not with ideology but with nature and humanity’s relation to nature.

Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival now make it difficult to address long-term challenges that threaten our existence, like climate change.

It is already clear enough that the missing ingredient is political will.

For example

Recognising the power of small groups.

Humans are more likely to change behaviour when challenges are framed positively, instead of negatively. In other words, how we communicate about climate change influences how we respond.  To get people to act, we need to make the issue feel direct and personal by focusing the issue locally, pointing both to local impacts and local solutions: Like moving one’s city to 100% renewable energy.

The key is having a large-scale, organised effort – but one supported and understood by hundreds of smaller groups and communities.

It’s true that no other species has evolved to create such a large-scale problem – but no other species has evolved with such an extraordinary capacity to solve it, either.  If academia, business, government, and citizens act together toward this common goal, we can create a pollution-free energy system; form a prosperous, adaptable and resilient society; keep human, animal, and plant life flourishing; and create a better world for ourselves and generations to come.

We can’t undo the mistakes of the past. But this generation of political and business leaders, this generation of conscious citizens, can make things right. This generation can make the systemic changes that will stop the planet warming, help everyone adapt to the new conditions and create a world of peace, prosperity and equity.

The world is now experiencing the early effects of climate change.

The overall effect of inadequate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is creating a human rights catastrophe, and the costs of these climate change related disasters are already enormous. The Colorado river in the USA is drying up, the ice shelf is the Antarctic is melting, the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting five time faster. Somali is no the threshold of a Famine.

—–

If we don’t act, who will?

We have evolved to be able to stop human-induced climate change. Now we must act.

The risk that without intervention we could cross a threshold leading to runaway climate change. An inconvenient truth.

To save natural resources and to bring a change we have to change our habits that exploit our natural resources and directly or indirectly.

If you could ask one question of Global Leader.

What is the main motivation of your leadership?

Which competencies do you see as instrumental to develop in global leaders in order for them to thrive in this new world?

The key to multicultural leadership is in understanding the difference between intent and impact, as well as engaging in supportive interactions that cultivate a nurturing environment.

Sitting in Davis/ G20  ivory tower’s ONE cannot develop global mindset.

“The secret to success is sincerity. Learn to fake that, and you’ve got it made.”

Feel free to add your question.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT’S FAR TO LATE TO CONTROL AI.

01 Saturday Apr 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Artificial Intelligence., Dehumanization., Democracy., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disaster Capitalism., Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Purpose of life., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media Regulation., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Technology., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The metaverse., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, VIRTUAL REALITY., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World

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( Six minute read)

Why?

Because the change is already taking place.

Because,  There are now more cell phones in the world than people. There were less than 7% of the world on online in 2000, today over half the global population has access to the internet.

Because, technology has already radically transformed our societies and our daily lives, from smartphones to social media and healthcare. Technology touches nearly everything we do.

Because, your voice, your image, your race, your shopping habits, your health, your movement’s, your viewing habits, your voting, your financial standing, your criminal record, your interests, your decision making, down to what you are eating, not forgetting your sex life is and has being harvest for free.

All can be and are being faked.

Because, virtual interactions offers enticing financial opportunities for big businesses and digitalized Governments.

——-

Excessive use of technology can do more harm than good, and we should bear this in mind before we rush into digitizing our lives.

When all areas of human activity get rapidly digitized, it’s easy to become desensitized to the importance of innovations and advancements for the overall progress of society. Though it may be tough to predict which advancements technology would bring next, some innovations are already changing our beliefs about the world around us.

The coming generations will be living in a mixture of reality and the metaverse. Using headsets to create a  3D avatar – a representation of themselves –  to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments. Perhaps when they go online shopping, they will be able too try on digital clothes first, and then order them to arrive in the real world.

A virtual economy of inequality.  Nowhere does the intersection of technology, enterprises and individuals hold greater opportunity than in the metaverse.

If it happens at all – will be fought among tech giants for the next decade, or maybe even longer.

———-

The Metaverse doesn’t exist – at least not yet, but there no way of predicting how people will react to it, or how it will be used.

( Everything transformed into line of code, augmenting reality by superimposing a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world. You have an experience while wearing another person’s body and you get to walk a mile in that person’s shoes.)

The next generation of the internet has the power to reshape the way that businesses and consumers engage, transact, socialize, work and learn together exploring the world on their own terms.

As of today, there isn’t anything that could legitimately be identified as a metaverse. The metaverse is essentially a massive, interconnected network of virtual spaces,

A better question might be:

What could become the metaverse?

Something that people would have considered magic just a few decades ago is now gaining popularity in business, gaming, and team building.

The combination of augmented, virtual and mixed reality – will play an important role.

The distinction between being offline and online will be much harder to delineate. So we either end up in a situation where it’s complete chaos and everyone’s allowed to do everything and you know, there’s racism, sexism, abuse and all that kind of stuff, or there’s incredibly tight moderation and no one’s allowed to do anything.

Wearable screens and gesture-based computing, other recent innovations, are predicted to soon substitute the usual PC and phone screens.

A red-haired woman wears the Oculus Quest 2 headset in white, holding two controllers

——-

Robots, another buzzword in today’s business world, have already replaced humans in some workplaces — robotic arms work at assembly or packing lines. Flying cars will soon address the issue of limited ground space and long traffic jams.

Clearly, technology by itself is neither good nor bad. It is only the way and extent to which we use it that matters.

It is indisputable that thanks to technology, we get a chance to live a life our predecessors could not even dream about.

But do all tech advancements bring sole good to our lives?

Or, maybe, the impact of tech innovations is quite ambiguous.

We are all at the mercy of machine learning algorithms, that are non transparent, non accountable, and non regulated.

So we have an open letter from those on High in the Tec world,  advocating that the brakes should be applied to the creation of new tech that generates falsehood’s. You dont have to be a Tech genius to know that this is not going to happen.

My advice is.

To protect oneself.

Every person should have a secret verification word in order to authenticate the caller and a symbol to be used in all texts and emails, that if not present in any communication received or sent,  marks it as False.

——–

All of which begs the question: just why is the 21st century so dystopian?

A few years ago, you might have thought: this is just a phase. It’ll pass. But it’s not. If anything, it’s getting worse, and it feels like it’s here to stay.

When I say “it”, or “dystopia,” you might wonder exactly, precisely what I mean. What I mean is very simple though. How many crises do we face? More than I can easily count. Let’s try to list them all, though we’ll run out of sanity and room before we finish, for sure. Finances? Total crisis, incomes falling around the world, debt levels soaring. Infrastructure? Mega-crisis, unless you think the infrastructure we have survives this century, let alone this decade. Social systems? Everywhere from France to Britain to America — crisis. People’s…minds? Crisis, especially in young people, depression and anxiety and suicide rates soaring. Then there are the big ones: climate change and mass extinction, not to mention politics , which has taken a notably…fascist…turn, again.

All of this is what scholars have begun to call The age of Polycrises.  And in it, the better question isn’t: “what’s in crisis?

It’s: what isn’t?

Like I said, the list above is a mere brief beginning. Migration and refugees? Another one. Peace and democracy? Yup, in crisis.

How about upward mobility? Check. Faith and confidence in institutions? Super crisis. Take a look at any element of society or the world, and chances are, it’s in crisis. How about inequality? Shocking levels of crisis.

This is why the 21st century feels so dystopian.

It’s not really a “feeling,” though that’s the way it’s often made out to be by media. It’s an empirical reality. Scholars have begun to conceptualize the 21st century as a “Polycrisis” for a reason, which is that the dystopia is real.

So when media, bigwigs, wannabe intellectuals and so forth, make all this out to be exaggeration, hyperbole, imply that you are the fainting Victorian bride in the room, because, hey, Tucker!! Everything’s Great!!…they’re completely wrong. And that needs to be said. It’s a form of denialism at this point, because…

The next part is about cause and effect. We need, as a civilization and a world, to figure out what’s causing all this, so we can begin to undo it. But if all we do is deny it…then, my friends, our gooses are well and cooked.  It’s fascism on a dying planet, in different bitter and poisonous flavours, maybe.

ITS NOW AGI. ( Artificial General Intelligence) Already it is transforming every walk of life.

AI is not a futuristic vision, but rather something that is here today and being integrated with and deployed into a variety of sectors.

There are numerous examples where AI already is making an impact on the world and augmenting human capabilities in significant ways. This includes fields such as finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities, digital education, decision making, democracy’s.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to make decisions, often using real-time data. They are unlike passive machines that are capable only of mechanical or predetermined responses. Using sensors, digital data, or remote inputs, they combine information from a variety of different sources, analyse the material instantly, and act on the insights derived from those data. With massive improvements in storage systems, processing speeds, and analytic techniques, they are capable of tremendous sophistication in analysis and decision making.

———-

These software systems “make decisions which normally require [a] human level of expertise” and help people anticipate problems or deal with issues as they come up. As such, they operate in an intentional, intelligent, and adaptive manner

AI generally is undertaken in conjunction with machine learning and data analytics. Machine learning takes data and looks for underlying trends. If it spots something that is relevant for a practical problem, software designers can take that knowledge and use it to analyse specific issues. All that is required are data that are sufficiently robust that algorithms can discern useful patterns. Data can come in the form of digital information, satellite imagery, visual information, text, or unstructured data.

AI systems have the ability to learn and adapt as they make decisions. In the transportation area, for example, semi-autonomous vehicles have tools that let drivers and vehicles know about upcoming congestion, potholes, highway construction, or other possible traffic impediments. Vehicles can take advantage of the experience of other vehicles on the road, without human involvement, and the entire corpus of their achieved “experience” is immediately and fully transferable to other similarly configured vehicles. Their advanced algorithms, sensors, and cameras incorporate experience in current operations, and use dashboards and visual displays to present information in real time so human drivers are able to make sense of ongoing traffic and vehicular conditions. And in the case of fully autonomous vehicles, advanced systems can completely control the car or truck, and make all the navigational decisions.

If we don’t want to end up as deglazed digital citizens here’s what should be done.

  • Regulate broad AI principles rather than specific algorithms,
  • Take bias complaints seriously so AI does not replicate historic injustice, unfairness, or discrimination in data or algorithms,
  • Maintain mechanisms for human oversight and control, and
  • Penalize malicious AI behaviour and promote cybersecurity.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. CIVILIZATION WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BE A VERY THIN VENEER.

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Climate Change., CO2 emissions, Dehumanization., Environment, Green Energy., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Life., Reality., State of the world, Telling the truth., The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., Truth, Unanswered Questions., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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.( Twenty minute read) 

There are no words to describe the present state of our world.

Here below is a recent picture from Australia, it more than adequately does the job. Millions of dead fish float were seen floating on the Lower Darling in Far west NSW.

A thousand fish per square metre (caused “severe deoxygenation”)

We seen conflict raging for decades across the world, as if war is always and forever an ordinary routine, limited to developing third world nations, however wars are no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. With the Coming Climate Change we ent seeing nothing yet when it comes to wars.

IT IS THE DEFINING ISSUE OF OUR TIMES, WITH PROFOUND CONSEQUENCES, FOR THE FOOD CHAIN, ENGERY  DISEASES, DWINDELING RESOURSE AND FUTURE WARS.

To date we have had summit after summit with countries promising to reduce their carbon emission at varying degrees and rates of time, with 60% not in the west returning home, PROBALY THINKING WHY SHOULD THEY BE CARRYING THE CAN WHEN ITS IS THE COUNTRIES IN THE WEST THAT CAUSED THE PROBLEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Vermillion Cliffs at Paria Canyon Wilderness in Arizona

We are already in a pivotal moment in deciding our planets future, which requires significant societal changes to mitigate it.

Why?

Because our current global political economy solves problems through business as usual growth, wasting precious time to effectively reduce emissions to prevent human suffering and ecological system collapse at an unimaginable scale.

Because we are unable to put the common good in front of short term profit.

Although we have been raising public awareness on climate change for years, this is not enough; the global temperature increases day by day.  Unless greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature are reduced within years, the world will face demanding consequences.

Because the fragility of life as we know it, will be shattered by Climate change.

——–

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. What we fail to remember is that we ourselves live in the very world we do not seem to care what happens to.

We do not realise is that with each day that passes without any action, the number of natural resources available also decreases significantly.

Take the Fashion Industry’s for example.

10,000 litres of water are used to produce just one kilogram of cotton.

WITH OVER 5 BILLIONS PAIRS OF JEANS PRODUCED A YEAR  – 60 PAIRS A SECOND USING – 1000 LITERS OF WATER PER PAIR = A MIND BLOWING WASTE OF WATER. 

The average jeans collection needs 36,250 litres of water. Hoodies and sweatshirts need 23,450 litres. T-shirts and shirts require 15,000 litres, while our undergarments combined use 45,950 litres of water. The average person drinks 691 litres of water per year.

This means that our jeans collection has used 52.5 years of drinking water for one person.

The next time you put on your best threads, think about the environmental cost of your outfit — you may just be dripping wet.

 

——

” We are now entering in the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability.”

How is the Earth going to survive, if the only species it has the chance to lean on, turn their back to it?

Climate is the envelope within which all other environmental conditions and processes important to human well-being must function. ANY TIPPING POINT COULD opened the floodgates.

Inevitability politicians portray history as a journey from savagery to civilization and assume this trend will continue to their desired outcome.

We have witnessed in the past 30 years the degradation of liberal democracy, the spread of Islamic terror across borders, and the resilience of the illiberal Chinese political system.

Up to now very form of society has been based, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes…This is why Capitalism combined with democracy has provided the perfect balance for governance, and as a consequence took root in most countries.

The liberal arrogance shown at the end of the 20th century paved the way for the blowback of the 21st.

Liberals failed to confront the innate inequality of the post-war international order so liberal inevitability politics sealed its own fate. By failing to address the problems of the now rapidly collapsing global order, and those who are committed to democracy and strong institutions have spent this century trying to pick up the pieces.Vladimir Putin sits angrily at desk

Where eternity politics is best on display currently is in the Russian narrative on their invasion of Ukraine.

To the Russian eternity politician, the West is simply repeating its century-old tactic to assault Russian values and Russia’s greatness, as they did in the Crimean War, Great Northern War, or any other conflict they may pick.

But the eternity politician makes the same mistake as the inevitability politicians, they remove agency from individuals and movements with personalized beliefs, motivations, and tactics.

Herein lies the problem with both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity:

They ignore the fact that developments in the political and social conscience of individuals and societies determine history, not the other way around.

As an entire nation of people is stripped of its agency the war in Ukraine is boiling down into a proxy war between two great powers. However, what cannot be done is to create a single coherent narrative about the historical past, the political present, and the prospective future, because of the simple fact that human beings do not have omniscience.

We cannot possibly isolate the individuals and communities that shape historical development. We cannot aggregate history, and we should not try. Revolutions did occur in China and in Russia (along with many other places), regimes committed atrocities with impunity, as everything they did was in service of the righteous and inevitable world revolution, just as the dogma told them.

The most dangerous facet of the politics of eternity and politics of inevitability is not the gross oversimplification of history they embody, but rather the societal implications they necessitate.

In the case of liberal capitalist democracies, it leads to a small group of wealthy individuals amassing such great control that it threatens the very institutions liberals revere as eternal.

For the Marxist, it leads to the justification of mass arrest, disenfranchisement , and slaughter in the name of an inevitable world revolution that will never arrive. And for the nationalist, it means a constant paranoid struggle for dominance against their neighbours, no matter the cost.

So with the arrival of the Internet /Social media / The smartphone, are we in an “intellectual coma.” left with a form of Capitalism that is no longer working.

In denying historicism, we shouldn’t deny that progress is possible, rather we should accept that progress is not pre-determined, and relies on all of us as active participants to truly make history.

Climate change with out a doubt will lead to social disruption and potentially violent conflict.

I shudder to think about this impromptu utterances.

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Earth on psychiatrist's couch.

 

It’s not that difficult to see that, says mass migration, it will provoke more conflict in the world.

Our tribalism will become more apparent over the next decade or so. Social Media reflects this with the pervasive mentality in western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Africa, south Asia, and Latin America, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, your name it and it is perversely turned into entertainment.

Everything will have to adapt to the changing times.

As culture change, so does the way we consume it – all digital and virtual viewing merging into a digital and physical worlds with  interactions changing into an endless cycle of content discovery, co-creation and sharing, which will deepen the emotional impact of content or by- pass it completely. This extends beyond our screens and newspapers and easily bleeds and blends into politics.

Righteous outrage immediately mounted online.

Xenophobia is an efficient tool to keep people divided. Colonial powers knew this early on. By separating people based on superficial characteristics, such as skin colour, and then assigning qualities to these features (such as being civilized vs. barbarian, or intelligent vs. backward), people started to believe that they were different from each other based on these highly unscientific classifications. To eradicate racism, we must become aware that our ancestors invented the notion of race for self-fulfilling reasons rooted in unscientific assumptions.

The question becomes how we classify people as strangers. This changes over time. Therefore, the classification of people as strangers is culturally constructed, with racism being one of its many forms.

Race and racism were non-existent during most of human history. To be human has always meant one thing -to be civilised. One was not born human. One had to become human.

Racism is a recently invented classification system that triggers xenophobia.

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After demonizing and abusing refugees, especially Muslim and African refugees, for years., now if one does not look like a refugee the chances of being excepted anywhere is almost zero.

You can see it already in Europe.

I suspect we’re going to see more nativism, more xenophobia, and more talk of building walls on our borders. Neighbour helping neighbour is a dying falsify.

Very concept of providing refuge is not and should not be based on factors such as physical proximity or skin colour.

The idea of granting asylum, of providing someone with a life free from political persecution, must never be founded on anything but helping innocent people who need protection. That’s where the core principle of asylum is located. If not we are showing ourselves as giving up on civilization and opting for barbarism instead.

On the one hand, there is something to be said about the idea of mankind as a group defined, beyond gender, race, or class, by a characteristic shared by all humans.

The history of the idea of human nature since the 5th century BC represents the history of Western violence and domination. It bears witness to some of the deepest conflicts and divisions the earth has seen.

The West identifies capitalism, liberalism and democracy as markers of civilisation and progress against Islamic fundamentalism, theocratic rule, and what it irresponsibly calls ‘the Muslim world’.

——–

These things exist with or without climate change, but the effects of climate change — migration in particular — will exacerbate them and help fuel reactionary movements around the world.

Ideology will always be a surface-level justification for conflict — people come up with narratives to justify whatever they’re doing in the political world. But if you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

We can say with some confidence that climate change will render huge parts of the world less hospitable to human beings, and that as a consequence, humans will have to change how and where they live.

Are we prepared?   NO!

Do we have the institutions, the structures, the systems of cooperation we need to deal with this problem?  NO!

Have we existing structure of peacekeeping that can hold up under these conditions?   NO!

Can Western democratic society, which is built on a system of limitless growth and productivity, change its destructive relationship with nature?  NO!

Modern liberal democratic societies are successful at improving the lives and freedoms of people who live in them. The problem is that these systems are based on the exploitation of nature and our environment, and we’re sort of trapped in this paradigm.

The lessons for those of who lived through the coronavirus pandemic today, it that Civilization is a very thin veneer. That your well-being as individuals really depends on the flourishing of the greater society.

Why?

Because under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous. If a pandemic finds a society that is fractured, where there is distrust, where the public health system is neglected or in decay … that is going to be revealed, as it was with profiteers during the pandemic “willing to make money off human misery”

——–

Putting the pandemic into perspective as a terrible episode, but nonetheless just one episode, in a much longer story. This however  is not an option when it comes to Climate Change. Overwhelmed by the disaster, people will see what our system of Capitalism has become.

I think one of the things that is clearly exacerbating matters is when the issue is what we’d call politicized.

With technology and social media we humans – we become the stories that we tell ourselves. Our stories are never just stories. They are self-fulfilling prophecies.

That’s because we tend to use history, which is at its heart the study of surprises, as a guide to the future. This should however not stop us from aiming to better understand the future: the knowledge gained through planning is crucial to the selection of appropriate actions as future events unfold. We don’t know the answer, but we can at least ask useful questions and catalyze the conversation!

It’s important to remember that technology is often value-neutral: it’s what we do with it day in, day out that defines whether we are dealing with the “next big thing”.

Is there a way to think of the human being beyond the opposition between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarian’?

Or is such an idea of mankind yet to be invented?

 

Watch and weep.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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

12 Saturday Nov 2022

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

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( Ten minute read)

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

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

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

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

Its never to late to start asking questions.

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

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

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

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

There’s is no app for that.

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

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

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

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

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

Not convinced?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————————-

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

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

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

———————————–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember when people used to sleep and dream at night?

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

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

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail,com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. TO SECURE A FUTURE ALL OF US MUST FIGHT THE RIGHT WAR RIGHT NOW.

19 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by in 2022: The year we need to change., Climate Change., Disconnection., Earth, Education., Energy, Environment, Evolution, Extermination., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., Human values., Humanity., Life., Modern day life., Natural World Disasters, Nuclear power., Our Common Values., Profiteering., Purpose of life., Real life experience's, Reality., Renewable Energy., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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If humanity wants to hope to contain global warming below 1.5°C – Governments must close the gap between net zero rhetoric and reality.

There can be no more hiding, and no more denying deluding yourself with a lot of greenwashing.

Political leaders, blinded by capital and powerful private interests, have long decided Earth is a small price to pay for the yachts, mansions, private jets and record profits of the one percent.

In Glasgow at the COP26 climate conference we watched as world leaders came up with new excuses, symbolic targets and new ways to silence the progressive voices who opposed them.

Global heating is supercharging extreme weather at an astonishing speed, this life-altering issue which we are NOW all witnessing daily – Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, is not getting the urgency and attention it demands.

Exploitation and development of new oil and gas fields must stop this year.

If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.

It’s Now or Never.

A huge part can be done with existing technologies.

These technologies can and will create billions of jobs to drive a sustainable world, but it remains a fight of David against Goliath, because of how we measure our well being.

How we evaluate what we are doing needs to change.

GDP is a totally numbers-driven index that does not produce the true picture.

There are growing calls to find GDP alternatives to measure countries’ wealth and welfare.

GDP can’t accurately represent the wealth of a country when it ignores how money is divvied up.

Considering GDP alone, a rich country where 10% of the population controls 75% of the wealth (looking at you, United States) may rank higher than a poorer country with a more even distribution of wealth.

One of GDP’s biggest flaws is that it counts tragedies as economic bonuses. If a hurricane or tornado hits and a country spends millions of dollars rebuilding, those expenses boost GDP, even though people lost their homes, jobs, and lives.

GDP ignores many crucial ways to measure the wealth of a country: clean air, health, life span, gender equality, opportunity, education, and more. This is understandable – GDP wasn’t developed to rank countries’ welfare, but simply to measure money as the world recovered from the Great Depression.

Of course GDP cant be replaced over night, but it can be complemented by a Thriving Places Index (TPI) and this index could easily be expanded to other parts of the world.

TPI’s primary focuses are sustainability, equality, and local conditions. Unlike GDP, this index measures equality by investigating how evenly distributed life expectancy and wellbeing are across a country.

Interestingly, the U.N. encourages nations to use it alongside their gross national income data. They say that it can help governments assess national policy by “asking how two countries with the same level of GNI per capita can end up with different human development outcomes.”

By factoring in the ecological footprint, inequality, wellbeing, and life expectancy of a country, it provides a simple but rounded glance at the wealth of a country.

This alone will not however solve the problems that are now on the horizon.

We must implement measurements by monetising environmental damage factors to help countries better understand exactly where they stand environmentally.

The Green GDP is a noble effort to factor in the cost of climate change in a way that people whose focus is money can appreciate. While subjective data can immediately turn some financially conservative parties off, putting a number on the impact of environmental negligence could potentially hit home.

Our Profit driven societies focused too much on an idea that futuristic technologies will save the world from climate chaos, rather than focusing on what can be done today. If cuts to carbon are left to the future and not made in this decade, it will be too late to stay within the 1.5C limit.

What are the crucial new technologies in development for combatting Climate Change?

Clean energy is perhaps the biggest issue to tackle.

Convert carbon dioxide into a usable energy source using sunlight.

There are numerous projects trying to achieve this, but most of the hydrogen used today is extracted from natural gas NG00, -3.93% in a process that emits carbon dioxide as well as the more-fleeting, but more-potent, methane.

Electrical transport and advanced batteries?

Particularly for use in electric vehicles; hydrogen; and carbon capture appears to be the miracle solution to reduce the heavy ecological impact of transport. This technology is not all green under the hood. Even before having driven a single kilometre, the electric vehicle has emissions almost twice as high as those of a thermal vehicle.

Big data has big implications in creating awareness about the consequences of climate change but it’s harvesting with the use of non transparent and unregulated algorithms.

Crowdsourcing for environmental solutions by gathering journalists, scientists, technologists, and people passionate about sustainability is creating a new wave of environmentalism.

Mobile apps such as Oroeco is an app that tracks your carbon footprint by placing a carbon value on everything you buy, eat, and do. However most Apps are profit seeking and like Big data they remain un -transparent and unregulated.

Interactive maps really drive home the point of climate change.

All of these technologies use microchips in order to operate and these are made from rare finite resources.

For the first time, a mining company is preparing to mine the seabed to collect rocks rich in metals for the batteries of electric cars. A practice that promises to destroy ecosystems that are still unexplored and that could constitute a ticking “climate bomb”. Poisoning of fresh water reserves, artificialization and loss of biodiversity, toxicity for humans, radioactive pollution, occupation of agricultural land… The extraction and transformation of raw materials are much more polluting than for the fossil car.

In the end here is where we are.

Some of the highlights included a prediction of violent conflicts and civil wars, extreme poverty and the loss of several points of gross domestic product in some developing nations, mass extinctions, and an intense, regular pattern of natural disasters.

The average decline of the species analysed was 68% in 2020, and 60% in 2018, revealing an accelerating collapse of biodiversity around the world. “We can tell ourselves that 1% is not much, but losing 1% in two years is absolutely colossal. The mere fact that this index is not improving is a disaster in itself

Taking into account a global population rise of about 2 billion people, as well as the need to supply electricity to 785 million people who do not have access to it, and clean cooking to the 2.6 billion people who currently lack it there is no more time for multinationals to obtain justice.

Governments must fine them.

Instead we see governments like the UK licensing new oil and gas fields in the North Sea and has also mooted a new coalmine for coking coal alongside introducing fracking.

Instead we see Energy being use a a weapon of war.

We all know what is necessary for life however in the age of instant gratification, we have little appreciation of where it all come from and we remain unwilling to pay for a future that only exists on the planet we all inhabit.

A large-scale nuclear war would, by all scientific projections, be a planetary disaster of the highest order.

A large -scale climate event would be far worse. Here to day gone to morrow against watch our demise over a few generations.

So every one of us must engage now. ( See previous posts as how this can be achieved)

The simplest thing you can do is educate others.

Tell people there are other ways to measure a country’s wealth.

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

Contact: bobdillo33@bobdillon33

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHO OWNS ENGLAND AND IS IT GOING DOWN THE PAN?

04 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2022: The year we need to change., British Culture., Climate Change., England in five years., England's future., England., English General Election., European Union., EU_UK relations for the foreseeable future., How to do it., Human values., Life., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, Money in Politics., Our Common Values., Political Trust, Politics., Privatization, Profiteering., Robot citizenship., Russia / Ukraine ., Stimulus package., The common good., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The UK Class system., Universal values., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH

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( Ten minute read)

This is a country that sold is nations assets to private enterprises – energy, water, rail, etc, (In the ideology of Maggie Thatcher, shop till you drop), believing that the free market would give its citizens the best deal.

The massive privatisations of public assets undertaken by Mrs Thatcher and subsequent Tory governments since the 1980s now with the help of multilabel other world problems have come home to roost.

Below are a few examples of this.

[ARM Holdings, one the key British companies for research and innovation in electronics, was sold off in 2017 for £24bn to the Japanese company Softbank.

Amazon, a US corporation, now dominates retail in the UK.

Apple has shifted its tax liability in the UK to Ireland.

The key national airports in the UK – Heathrow and Gatwick – are both in foreign ownership.

Liverpool, Glasgow and Great Yarmouth ports are owned by Deutsche Bank. Felixstowe, is owned by one of Asia’s richest men and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

Even Associated British Ports, which manages many UK ports, is owned by the Singapore foreign reserve fund and Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund and registered offshore in Jersey.

Waterstones, the only surviving national book chain in UK, is also Russian owned.

Facebook and Twitter are now the main source of news for most British people despite its biases and its inadequate constraints on the dissemination of fake news. Both of these companies are effectively unregulated despite their critical social media roles, and both make enormous sums of money from advertising that goes untaxed.

The NHS, which is thought of as the great British innovation, is also increasingly being infiltrated by American health providers. Social care Southern Cross purchased by Blackstone, a US company.

Boots, which has 2,500 shops in the UK acquired by private equity in 2007, asset stripped and saw its HQ moved to Switzerland to avoid UK taxes. It is now wholly owned by the giant US pharmacy chain Walgreens.]

What are the common elements in the above?

With London becoming the global centre of such transactions because of weak regulatory systems, especially in respect of privatised utilities, it has been price gouging at the expense of consumers in the UK.

It is now clear that some at least of the purchasers of domestic assets have used the opportunity to launder illegally acquired money.  Russian millionaires had a field day.

We are now looking at a country that recently spent nearly $8 billion building two new large, conventionally-fuelled aircraft carriers, spending between £72.1bn and £80.4bn, on a high-speed rail HS2 to save thirty minutes traveling time, while its people can’t afford their energy bills, to feed themselves, to house themselves, or afford the cost of a rail ticket.

A country that turned its back on the biggest market on its door step the EU with £25bn left to pay by 2057.

A country that in the first year of the pandemic, from April 2020 to 2021,  borrowed £299bn, the highest figure since records began in 1946, to save it economy more than its people with, the cost of Government measures announced so far range from about £310 to £410 billion.

Most of this extra money was spent on public services (such as the NHS), and support for businesses.

In the space of 15 months, from March 2020, the three main Covid loan schemes – bounce back, CBILS and a scheme for larger loans, CLBILS – handed out nearly £80bn to businesses with fraud losses estimated at £4.9bn at the end of March, money the government is unlikely to ever recover.

The UK government wasted hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on poor quality and unusable personal protective equipment (PPE) while leaving frontline workers insufficiently protected from covid-19. The decision to prioritise hospitals meant that social care providers were left exposed by the lack of PPE contributing significantly to deaths in care homes in the first wave.

Among the government deals was a contract with a jeweller worth £70.5m (€80.5m; $97.6m) to buy sterile gowns. It also signed contracts for millions of face masks, which were not usable in the NHS because they had the wrong type of fixing.

The question of whether greater investments in health care in non-crisis times may have reduced the level of emergency funding needed to respond effectively to the pandemic warrants important reflection.


Money

Now with more money going out and less coming in, the English government has only one option – to borrow.

When a government spends more than it collects, it runs an annual budget deficit. The level of the national debt in the UK equates to 108% of national output (GDP) and the average amount of debt owed per person in the UK to day is ten thousand pounds.

This is a country that sold it soul to consumerism,  which is still spending millions on football with millions of lotto funds spent to win medals, with a homicide rate was 11.7 per million population, while small businesses and charities are going bust.

Like most of Europe it is in a downward spiral economically, with inflation and energy cost mounting ( due in part to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine,) and will have to borrow another £200bn by the end of the year.

 Its’ no wonders it is going down the Pan.

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 In the back ground there are other reason for its troubles–  its class system, its colonial history, its antiquated education system, its benefits system, its first past the post election system, to mention a few.

Its colonial past making it a very ethnically diverse nation,( People born outside of the UK account for 10% of the UK’s population.)

It has lost its once dominance as an empirical power in the world.

Once a rich country the crimes of your past are catching-up with you.

Britain was the world’s largest market for transportation of human lives, bowing to the new citadel whose tentacles reached out into great swathes of colonial wealth – and steadily drank it dry until the slave trade was finally banned by an act of parliament.  The arrogance and greed of your masters could not go unnoticed – could not pass-by unatoned for.  Nor could the pacifistic stance taken by the greater populous when confronted with such frequent acts of national and international vandalism.

Like most of us it has now become enslaved to the smart phone.

Now a country of digitalized citizens, with short term ambitions, in desperate need of a written constitution.

Why?

Despite considerable social change, and strong policy intervention, it still have some way to go to address equality of opportunity and racism.

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In the next few days the Conservative party will elect a new leader to take control of the country, without a general election.

He or she is facing social, unrest, as the UK economy is now too weak for sharp spending cuts due to the recent financial crisis, and Covid  pandemic, it is now currently facing serious issues in terms of cutting its unemployment rate and reducing its national debt.

Not to mention other current issues such as immigration, internal ethnic relationship, internal security, economic recovery, and Britain’s relationship with the EU all acting as major blocks to the progress of the British society.

Whatever the next British government may be, these are the issues that party has to address and solve. 

Modern British society has to find ways to deal with these crucial issues in order to move towards a brighter future.

So who owns the country?

Private no right of way sign

Behind this simple question lies England’s oldest and best-kept secret. It’s a secret that goes back to the Domesday Book – and an issue that goes to the heart of many of the biggest problems the country face to day.

Central government owns more than 16 million square metres of property and land across the UK – six times the area of the City of London. There are over 97,000 properties owned by foreign firms in England and Wales.

Collectively, the Royal family owns 180,550 acres of land, or roughly 282 square miles with an elite of less than 1% of the population owning half of England with a few thousand dukes, baronets and City bankers now owning far more land than all of Middle England put together.

As Mark Twain once said, “buy land: they’re not making it anymore” – and in England, its scarcity has made it so sought-after that land values have increased fivefold since 1995.

Just over 400 hectares (1,000 acres) of central London’s super-prime real estate belongs to the Crown, the Church, and four wealthy aristocratic estates.

Over 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of the English uplands are tied up in huge grouse-moor estates owned by around 150 people. The Duke of Northumberland, whose family lineage stretches back to Domesday, owns 40,468 hectares (100,000 acres) – a tenth of his home county.

Corporations own around 18% of England and Wales.

The Crown Estate owns London’s Regent Street, including the freehold for Apple’s flagship UK store, from which the Crown collects more rent than from all its agricultural land.

The National Trust owns around a fifth of the Lake District National Park in Cumbria.

The Duchy of Cornwall owns London’s Oval Cricket Ground, Maiden Castle in Dorset (above) and Ham Hill in Somerset.

Paternoster Square in the City of London, home of the London Stock Exchange, is owned by the Church Commissioners.

The Crown still owns the freehold OF the Houses of Parliament.

The housing crisis hasn’t been caused by a sudden rise in the price of bricks and mortar, but rather in the value of the land on which homes are built.

The vast gap in living standards between the precariat and the executive class are all to some extent the result of increased foreign ownership of almost everything that continue to call ‘British’.

There is hope, however to be fair few countries will escape the fever that’s upon this world – Climate change.

A fever for which the only cure is the unconditional metamorphosis of man himself, washed through and through, cleansed of that reckless hubris which has brought us to this tipping point of all of us having to live without the all gentle arts that nature had so diligently taught us.

The tide is turning upon mankind. Now it is our turn to be on the receiving end.

In the coming years Climate Change will make the cost of living we see to day ingenuous, compared to what is in store.

No man or woman can turn his or hers back for long upon her simmering powers.

When it comes to climate no man can lay claim to having pacified and sold her soul – because passivity was not on her agenda, and her soul was never for sale. And those who sought to profit from her bounty will soon leave empty handed; for that time, prophesied of old, has finally come. And yes, nature it is that once again rises up in defiance of all attempts to bring her under the control of those who would use and abuse her for their private wealth and make of her a platform for staging their profit driven foreign wars.

Not even the vicious technologically engineered destruction of our climate can suppress the rising winds of change that are upon this scarred and battered jewel called Earth. It can only increase their velocity.

The result is only too obvious with unstable work, often poorly paid, and increasingly inadequate to support a family. It is unsurprising therefore that there has been a sharp increase in poverty much of it in families in full-time work.

Prepare yourselves for the deluge – a great cleansing is upon the island; a cleansing that will jolt befuddled minds into memories of great stories of other eras, when lands were not swallowed by mighty acts of nature.

You were so proud to turn away from nature and forge your industrial steel into the wheels of the brave new world of mass consumerism  you new face a heavy price for its blinkered, stubborn occupants, who for so long turned a blind eye on deeper truths and refused to look upon the blood encrusted pages of your colonial history.

Oh England, my England, so where is your soul today?

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At this point you may well be asking what if anything can be done?

The master Conservative plan is levelling up. The big idea for post – Brexit Britain.

It identifies six capitals: physical capital (i.e. infrastructure and housing), human capital (skills and health), intangible capital (ideas and innovations), financial capital (business finance), social capital (community and public trust), and institutional capital  (local leadership).

The plan comes at a defining moment but it will fail to devolve enough power and money.

Why?

Because the places that have an abundance are now in a virtuous circle, where the different capitals reinforce one another.

Because is not matched by the scale of investment or the proposed solutions. Missing are a clear set of mechanisms that break the vicious cycles in places that are lacking in the six capitals.

Because this work has to be done at the local level because places face different challenges and have different growth potential.

Because if there is going to any levelling up is going to happen centrally from Whitehall.

Because the existing system for distributing money is highly complex  inequality will be aggravated and come to the forefront in the next general election.

Levelling up is a scatter gun approach for votes and it is on this feeling that the Government’s future electoral hopes hang.

IN THE END HERE IS THE BEADY EYE’S ADVICE TO WHO EVER GETS INTO POWER.

APART FROM A WRITTEN CONSTITUTION,  MAKE EDUCATION FREE AND BRING BACK A YEAR OF NATIONAL SERVICE TO TEACH THE VALUES THAT ARE NECESSARY AND FUNDEMENTAL TO THE FONDATIONS OF ANY NATION.  PUT THE PEOPLE FIRST NOT THE GDP.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. HAVE WE ALL GONE BONKERS WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE?

30 Tuesday Aug 2022

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Four minute listen.

( Five minute read)

The message is clear Climate Change is here and is already having a significant impact.

It is inconceivable that we still have people refusing to accept the facts that surround them,  even if they saw 100 more years of it plain and apparent they and unfortunately many of our present world leaders are blind to what is happing and what is to come.

How much more evidence do they and us need ?

MAKE YOUR MINDS UP!

The Evidence for Rapid Climate Change Is Compelling:

I’ve not noticed any changes in the weather outside of the norm or I don’t give a Fuck what is happing. I’d rather live on another planet, than on one where every aspect of your life is subject to rigorous scientific control is not possible.

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.Rivers and reservoirs have shrunk dramatically in the past 20 years

Right now there’s nothing like enough understanding.

Observers recognise that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.

Human activity is the principal cause. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system.

However if there was meeting tomorrow of world leaders they would as before, argue that its not their responsibility, making promises that cannot be kept.

To have any chance of drilling into them the urgency of tackling climate change on a global scale perhaps it would be best to invite them all together in Gautama bay, take their mobile phone, starve them for a week and get them to write their last wills and testaments.

This might fired the starting gun on what will become a global race to eliminate fossil fuels.

At this point you might be asking why is it so difficult for the world to take action.

The effort to control climate change impacts virtually every element of a country’s economy “so countries have traditionally been nervous about what they’re going to be asked to do.”

The idea that every five years countries would be asked to come up with more ambitious targets, ramping up their efforts is therefore bull shit.

“We are living in an interconnected global village with a common stake,” says Xi.

Hybrid wind-solar plant at Zaozhuang, China“All countries are closely connected and we share a common future. No country can gain from others’ difficulties or maintain stability by taking advantage of others’ troubles.”

“We should embrace the vision of a community with a shared future in which everyone is bound together,” he continues.  He is right!  Heart-stirring stuff, eh?

A cynic might think his reassuring words were partly a ploy to reingratiate China with the climate-conscious Europeans, and isolate a climate-sceptic US President MR DUMP. 

But there is a much more important broader context for his announcement:

Let’s be clear what it means:

China, the most polluting nation on earth – responsible for around 28% of global greenhouse gas emissions – is saying it is going cut that back to virtually zero within 40 years. The commitment is of significant because China has never promised anything near as bold as this on climate before. President Xi’s 2060 pledge was notably unconditional – China will move ahead whether or not other countries chose to follow.

Why?

Because the cost of renewables follows the logic of all manufacturing – the more you produce, the cheaper it gets. Why invest in new oil wells or coal power stations that will become obsolete before they can repay themselves over their 20-30-year life?

Why carry carbon risk in their portfolios at all?

It looks like Xi has judged that the economics of clean energy mean that decarbonising is now the most sensible choice for the Chinese economy as well as for the world’s climate.

So can we stop worrying about climate change?

Sadly we cannot.

It is going to take eye-popping investment in wind, solar and nuclear power.

Even as the economics tilts in favour of renewables the task of decarbonisation is still enormous. However once half the world is on-board with the project of decarbonisation it is hard to see how the rest could hold out.

Evidence of environmental damage and climate change everywhere. It’s the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. Tackling it means changing how we do virtually everything.

We are right to be anxious and afraid at the prospect.  Remember that by  2050 urban centres will hold 75% of the world population and 40% of them have no resilience plans in place, and have no plans to develop one in the hear future.  

Currently accounting for 70% of the worlds population and 70% of global GDP and 70% of CO2 emissions.

Don’t get me started on the food crisis.

You’ll be even more apprehensive if I was venture down that online rabbit hole.

Consider this conundrum:

When you talk to climate scientists you quickly discover they are far more worried about the dangers of global warming than most of us. Some tell you privately that they have had counselling to cope with the psychological effects of knowing the world is facing an impending disaster and not enough is being done.

Yes at this moment in history were in a mess.  Wars, Natural disasters, Energy, Rampant Inequality etc. On the right, I am alright Jack on the left just of a scream that will before defang in the next few years.

Leadership is action not position.

As Henry Miller said  ” No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance. “

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

Contact: bobdillon33gmail.com