I have addressed this subject in several previous posts.
You would think that we should learn from previous regulations, like those on the food, pharmaceutical, automobile etc all typically applied after something bad had happened, not in anticipation.
WHEN IT COMES TO TECHNOLOGIES THAT HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO LEARN FROM THEIR OWN ACTIVITIES, with the – possible of impacting on the full spectrum of benefits and risks to humanity ― from the possible development of a more utopic society to the potential extinction of human civilization.
IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE HAVE SOME FORM OF CONTROL.
Without unnecessary constraints on AI researchers and developers, fundamental research fields or technologies should not be regulated.
Aspirational principles alone are not enough, if they are not put into practice, and a question remains: is government regulation and oversight necessary to guarantee that AI scientists and companies follow these principles and others like them?
Even today, we’re seeing signs of narrow AI exacerbating problems of discrimination and job loss, and if we don’t take proper precautions, we can expect problems to worsen, affecting more people as AI grows smarter and more complex.
The recently founded Partnership on AI founding document states that:
“Where AI tools are used to supplement or replace human decision-making, we must be sure that they are safe, trustworthy and aligned with the ethics and preferences of people who are influenced by their actions.”
Because these problems threaten society as a whole, they can’t be left to a small group of researchers to address. At the very least, government officials need to learn about and understand how AI could impact us all.
YOU WOULD WONDER WHY, the topic rarely comes up in political discussion.
Let’s ask ourselves: how can we ensure that AI remains beneficial for all, and who needs to be involved in that effort?
THE PROBLEM IS TO DAY THAT WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO REGULATE, OR AT WHAT LEVEL WOULD WE DO THIS?
This question to me is pointless.
We will never get enough international support lay the foundations for constructive regulation.
CONTROL SHOULD BE IMPLEMENTED LIKE AN LEGALLY REQUIRED MOT.
EVERY ALGORITHM THAT IS INVASIVE OR PROFIT PRODUCING SHOULD BE REQUIRED BY INTERNATIONAL LAW TO LOGE A COPY ITS SOFTWARE PROGRAM OR PROGRAM’S IN A AI BANK.
WHERE IT IS HELD JUST IN CASE OF MALFUNCTION.
THIS NEEDS TO START- soon to have any chance of keeping up with innovation in the field.
WHY?
Because: Algorithms will dominate the coming centuries.
Because: Ascribing human qualities to non-human entities is a minefield.
Because: Algorithms are becoming the single most important concept in our world.
Because: Algorithms are connected to our emotions.
Because: Algorithms are not just particular calculation, but a method followed when making the calculation.
Because: What we call sensations and emotions are all algorithms.
Because: Electronic Algorithms will out perform biochemical Algorithms.
Because: Humans can no longer cope with the immense flows of data.
Because: Algorithms will completely transform the very nature of life transforming the world beyond recognition.
Because: Free –market capitalism and controlled communism are competing data-processing systems.
Because: The Stock Exchange, the economy of the world is already run by high frequency algorithms for profit only.
Because: Algorithms structures will run hospitals. then your faith will be in the hands of the system. What is true of hospitals will be true of armies, wars, prisons, schools, and corporations.
Because: We will need to decide which is a computer and which is the human.
Because: It follows that external algorithms will know you better than yourself.
I am sure you can add to the list.
Algorithms are decoupling us for shared values, with life becoming just data processing.
If this is the sort of world you want to live in stay silent and your wish will come true.
If you can think it, there’s most likely an algorithm for it.
While computer scientists may not be specifically finding better ways to manage your love life, you’d be surprised at how math can play a role as matchmaker. Let’s keep in mind that, during a search, you reach a point when you’ve gathered enough data and a continued search can be seen as both redundant as well as confirming what you know.
Well, how about when finding a parking space?
All human comments appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin of data.
( A twenty-minute read, before we are all raped by Algorithms)
Strength from cultural diversity is being eroded by Algorithms.
At the moment while we’ll be striving to understand the impact of “information flows” — shared value is going out the window.
You could say that 99.4 percent of physical objects are still unconnected but algorithms but they are already transforming the world around us — in education, healthcare, manufacturing, commerce, transportation and other sectors.
In the coming years, the Internet of Everything Economy will be run by Algorithms that control smart grid, smart buildings, connected healthcare and patient monitoring, smart factories, connected private education, connected commercial (ground) vehicles, connected marketing and advertising, and connected gaming and entertainment, among others, will rule the world.
If we are honest, we have been living with the ambiguity created by SHARED VALUE for a long time.
The United nations being the prime example.
Its shared ideology values are ignored daily because they do not possess any legal or constitutional power. (They have however attained limited success in generating greater ideological consensus, whether it is the impact on the environment, on society, or in terms of how it governs itself) Now unfortunately it is trying to operate in a world that is in the middle of a technological revolution which is exposing its limits to the point of being relevance.
Technology trends (including cloud and mobile computing, Big Data, increased processing power, and many others) and business economics (such as Metcalfe’s law) are driving the IoE (The Internet of Everything economy.)
The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before — turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.
On the other hand in my opinion it is and will be a mistake to greet every invention with applause and just let it go its way.
There are many aspect to the Technological Revolution that are desirable and needed, but at what sacrifice, and where to draw red lines is not being addressed. You could say its evolution and can not be changed or stopped.
However Artificial intelligence which is run by Algorithms is void of emotional intelligence.
The future will no doubt push for higher level automated capabilities by integrating human spoken and linguistic capabilities with other human skills such as vision, motor skills, and emotions.
This future will bring about a society of human and machine experts, that collaborate together for improved outcomes in complex processes such as decision-making.
These decisions which will be based on vast quantities of data rather than share values. They will be driven by our old friend capitalist profit, managed by platforms that are totally unregulated, unaccountable.
In a world where we are all supposed to be accountable, Artificial Intelligence must also be accountable not just to its algorithms. It must be totally transparent and regulated by an independent Organisation that ensure it enhances our shared values. As we explore all the possibilities these technologies present, it will be critical to place us at the forefront.
The conversations around these technologies, I suppose in the future will reach an equilibrium and we will understand as a society how to use them responsibly or will it be too late.
I think the more interesting thing that’s happening is we’re evolving into a kind of meta organism, which is the whole species on the planet connected through the Web, sharing information, sharing thoughts, sharing ideas.
We are not sharing empathy and sharing emotions, exploring and expanding the boundaries of what it means to be human, today and far into the future.
People will end up having no sense of control over their changing environments other than what their Virtual Personal Assistant lets them know.
The world we live in has and always will have problems because it is impossible of humans to act as one for the general good of all.
Rest assured that Algorithms will also suffer from the same flaw.
If left to their own devices they will destroy any sense of collaboration, reducing us to smart phone workers with no shared values or jobs for life.
We are more and more desensitized by social media platforms that are run by algorithms to ensure we remain so, we are all too busy checking our smart phones to take any notice. Most of us can not recognize our self.
HUMANIZING TECHNOLOGIES: Are smile that fits the lock of everybody’s heart.
Robots are learning how to detect your personality and even your gender with just a handshake, so giving robots a personality is the only way our relationship with artificial intelligence will survive.
We have all experienced “dehumanizing” technology – software or hardware that seems to diminish our ability to communicate with others or to function effectively in the world.
Technology such as Algorithms for profit are creating new boundaries between people rather than erasing old ones, with Touchy-feely robots becoming the false face of the Algorithms, that run them. Capitalize on our unique strengths and weakness, new technologies are and will further integrate themselves seamlessly into our lives.
We are already accustomed to Amazon’s anticipatory shipping practices, where the company identifies items we may want to buy before we even begin our search. Artificial Intelligence is making technology more personal and purposeful than ever before.
I don’t know about you. Just because I bought something, viewed something, commented on something, or sent an email to someone, I don’t want Watson, Google, Facebook or any other platform invading my Privacy with annoying suggestions, as I have no shared values with any of their Algorithms.
If we don’t get a grip of what I call Algorithms for Profit connecting the unconnected: people, process, data, and things we are going to be looking at a very sad world.
Since the industrial revolution, concerns have been raised about the negative effect of development on human exploitation, inequality, the environment, and by extension, greater society.
Of all the concerns that development brings, environmental damage has a high-profile due to its long, and sometimes cruel, history from business self-interest, to a sense of responsibility, or a combination of both.
Now it is the time to make capitalism more responsive to social challenges, as corporations are directly facing the trade-offs between private costs and social benefits.
The pursuit of profit and increasing shareholder value are the only responsibilities of business.
The inclusion of non-financial issues into investment decision-making must be a priority.
Why?
Because in terms of corporate social responsibility, the long-term risk of damage to the economic system and long-term value creation, and therefore investment returns, is a palpable threat to asset owners.
National identity and nationhood are not principles that can be “mandated and managed from the top”. Instead, the nation is an “imagined reality” that transcends institutions such as government and civil society. Consequently, the citizen creates the nation.
It is the responsibility of the investor to protect an economy’s ability to create long-term value.
Given long-term horizons, diversification, and long duration liabilities, it is beneficial to work together to reduce Artificial Intelligence future risk. To verify if shared value strategies can be found in practice.
This is so that today’s efforts to create value do not impair the ability of future generations to do the same.
Driven by advances in mobile technology the United nations is total out of date.
The importance of the family as a “basic unit of society”, no longer fully address family related issues.
In today’s investment world, there is no Algorithm that is going pre-empt social change and direct it in “suitable” directions.
Artificial Intelligence is making technology more personal and purposeful than ever before. We are trying to leverage data science with natural interfaces to provide solutions tailored to human behavior, attitudes and comprehension, also known as cognitive systems.
So the Question is:
Are these profit Algorithms degrading our humanity.
Today, the most successful technology goes beyond the technical specs and is all about the user experience. The best use of technology is the one people barely notice.
Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from our health and well-being, to the way we learn, the decisions we make and how we communicate with one another.
Try telling that to a Digital banking Algorithm. The only point of contact between banks and their customers.
Now we can have a whole new social class system.
Since people can be judged by their emotions, and since a persons emotional state has legal consequences in a court of law, and since corporations would love nothing more than to know how we feel so that they can control our behavior by controlling what information we receive when we are connected, and since we are always connected. ….
Well that couldn’t possibly be a problem, or could it?
We are handing over our privacy and our lively mental freedom, step by step, to the lifeless and emotionless domain of machines. We are becoming more and more dependent upon mechanistic mimicking of human qualities, and call it Machine Intelligence.
“The biggest privacy-invasive is no the way with face recognition applications”.
Why? Because the majority of how people experience each other is through screens.
this will bring a new leveraged on degrees of freedom for smart life.
Just because you want to believe it is true doesn’t mean it is true.
The goal should be making people to become aware of the trends and processes they are being involved by their own deeds and making them to ask important questions
In short:
Predictions are hard, but TRYING to fore see and not being blind to what is already happening is immensely important.
I wouldn’t want “devices” to sense anything. Anything.
Constantly arguing with your device about how you really feel.
What a sick world that is going to be.
Ask google why do people die before their time.
You get many answers: How can we know these things?….We can’t, unless we ask and who do we ask in order to get the correct answer.. not a Algorithm. The basic recipes for Capitalist slavery.
How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time with no shared values.
All human comments ( Not that I will know if they are generated by Algo) appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
This is an issue that is long on rhetoric, as newspaper and TV news reports testify. The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes due to conflict and war continues to increase at a staggering rate and will soon be overshadow by Global warming climate change migration.
This post attempts to look at where we have been, and where we are likely to go, in coping with this worlds endless stream of refugees. The refugee problems and crises are far from over and will continue to require urgent international cooperative treatment.
Half of all current refugees have been displaced for over ten years.
At the moment most displaced people stay in their own country this will not be so with climate change.
We all know what causes refugee displacements and asylum flows, but the effects of conflict, political upheaval and economic incentives to migrate, are going to be dwarfed by climate migration.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 217A (III), on the 10 December 1948 will be out of date.
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
This may well represents the first global international expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled but Artificial Intelligence, and technology combined with global warming is going to create a different kind of refugee or migrant.
The right to life is humanity’s most fundamental value.
More than 65 million people are today, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs) or refugees, illegal immigrants, to put a label on them.
The distinction between an economic migrant and a refugee is simple:
Are you running from or to? all are escaping.
Half of the world’s refugees are children under 18 years of age. The average length of time a refugee spends in exile is about 20 years, which is more than an entire childhood, and represents a significant portion of a person’s productive working years.
So let’s try to comprehend ( not that it is possible to do so with written or spoken words) what refugees have to face.
What is a camp? What characterizes a camp and how camps affect the lives of those who are placed in them.
On a global scale, millions of refugees are contained in camps of one sort or another.
Life goes on in camps—albeit a life that is affected by the camp.
They are places where the depoliticization of life takes place, due to humanitarian government, paradoxically they also produces a hyper-politicized space where nothing is taken for granted and everything is contested.
They are places of social dissolution, of new beginnings where sociability is remolded in new ways.
They are places with little or no human rights, dignity strippers, with no education, they are terrorist recruitment centers.
Camps are defined along two dimensions: spatially and temporally.
Temporally, refugee camps are meant to be temporary, while in practice this temporariness are becoming permanent.
Temporary are legal anomalies, in which the administration of justice is virtually in the hands of the humanitarian agencies that exercise this function either directly, or by delegating it to community leaders.
In reality temporary camp are exceptional space put in place to deal with populations that disturb the national order of things, while spatially, camps always have boundaries the fact is that in despite of ubiquitous images of sprawling refugee camps the majority of refugees are no longer confined to camps they now live in cities or towns.
So try to imagine yourself in Zaatari a Jordanian Camp set on a lump of desert.
It has a current population of over 100,000 souls,( Equivalent to the population of Exeter Uk or Reykjavík Iceland.) of which 70% are woman and children.
People are reduced to ants in this dystopian, chronically parched science – fiction setting in Jordan.
A population that is utterly poverty-stricken and powerless, reduced to de facto prisoners with no hope no food no running water, imagine the toilets. Anger blooms, mothers sell their daughters, gangs roam, children go feral:
(Non of this can be blamed on Jordan who have contributed over £500 million against contributions from other countries of around £150 million. With 14,000 new arrivals a week a half a million will only keep the camp open for a few months.)
Or
Imagine you are on a disposable barque approaching Lampedusa with 500 passenger packed like sardines having paid traffickers $ 1000 to $1600. ( Newspapers headlines constantly refer to these people as illegal immigrants. They’er not, they’er refugees. ) You have survived crossing of the Sahara, the violence in Libya and all told your family have raised $6000 for you to make the journey in the likelihood that they will never see you again.
Anyway lets say you don’t drown, now add the screaming and crying ringing in your ears as you scramble the shore to be warped in a tinfoil, and bused to a reception camp, fingerprinted though you are not a criminal.
Your only option is to vanish to continue your journey in the hands of traffickers and gangs who exploit, enslave, rape and bully.
The EU Dublin convention stipulates that people political asylum must remain in the first safe country you land in. There is no picking and choosing.
According to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, European countries have the obligation to provide asylum to those who seek it. This is not the matter of politics and economy, but of basic human rights. There is no person that should live in fear for their life and the lives of their close ones.
Its only by not looking, by turning or backs that we can sail away and think that this is sad, but it is not our sadness.
Refugees are not spread evenly across the world.
Seven countries – Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine and Jordan – host more than 50% of all refugees. Many countries, including some of the richest and most developed countries like the US, UK and Australia, are not fully living up to their responsibility under the Refugee Convention.
At the moment, there are over 9 million refugees seeking asylum.
If all refugees were distributed evenly across all the countries in the world, each country would host 100,000 refugees.
By mid-2015, the World Bank’s estimated cost of the Syrian war for the Middle Eastern countries is $35 billion.
Current funding models for displacement are no sustainable.
Whether greater international coordination could produce better outcomes for refugee-receiving countries and for the refugees themselves is of course governed by funds.
The United Nations’ annual appeal for international aid has risen 500% in 10 years due to the “new norm” of multiple humanitarian crises. Only 26% of the money needed has been committed, to enable the UN to provide assistance to 78.9 million people in 37 countries.
To quote António Guterres: The UN high commissioner for refugees. “Today’s needs are at unprecedented levels and without more support there simply is no way to respond to the humanitarian situations we’re seeing in region after region and in conflict after conflict.”
It has been widely suggested that more resources should be devoted to providing aid to refugees closer to home. “80% of our emergency response is to man-made crises which are now “apocalyptic” with displacement of people the highest since the second world war and multiple crises being the “new norm”.
On average, around 100 million people are affected by natural disasters per year and disasters now cost more than $100bn in economic damages. The number of displaced people has also increased, with 65 million people displaced at the close of 2015 compared with 33.3 million in 2013.
While donors give more generously every year, the gap between funds needed and funds provided continues to widen.
This raises questions about our ability to continue to meet affected people’s needs.
Then there is the question whether to devote resources directly to repatriation and reintegration programs, or simply to provide some form of economic incentive to return.
Neither will stem the flow of long-distance illegal migrants, once such flows have become established.
The best option by far is to find ways of preventing civil wars or to stop them recurring. Civil wars suggest that the causes are chiefly economic rather than political.
To really help displaced people, aid agencies must better understand how people are helping themselves, to figure out how to support these initiatives and advocate on behalf of refugees to overcome the barriers.
Education is to be seen as key to contributing to long-term solutions for refugees, ensuring that displaced generations are equipped to rebuild their lives and communities − either in the country of asylum or upon
their return home.
We need to fix the system – not for today, but to be ready for what the situation will be like five years from now never mind 20 or 30 years in the future.
It’s no wonder that we are living in disturbed times.
It is now time to unite and provide a new home for those who need it the most. What is needed, therefore, is a comprehensive, fully funded global program.
The world can’t keep pretending the refugee catastrophe is a European problem. The brunt of the crisis has fallen on the Turks, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese.
All the goodwill, all the technology, all the appeals, all the solutions will not stop people fleeing wars, or climate change.
A smart phone can be a lifeline if you’ve had to leave everything else behind, because when you take to the roads, to the boats and to the trains, all our political leaders can think of is fences, barbed wire and more police.
There is only one way to help:
And that is to get Profit for Profit sake to contribute.
By placing a world Aid Commission on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over $50,000, on all Sovereign Wealth funds Acquisitions. Combined this with a 0.00005% charge on all tweets, and all online purchases, on all google inquires, on all Facebook postings, etc.
Will create a permanent self funding resource of funds doing away with begging for resources.
Mr António Guterres should call a world summit of all Industrial world leaders not countries with a view to passing a people resolution to implement such a World Aid commission.
Then we might have some hope of a more peacefully world for all.
All suggestions and comments appreciate. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
We all know that the present crisis in European Union has freighting potential to undermine all our lives?
The problem is that despite all the rhetoric Wall Street and World Stock Markets underpin the hard nose of business with the priesthood of economists.
Financial experts and commentators worshiping it worldwide as a God.
Leaving us incapable of grasping that at one point in human history the Laws of the market can only be a human construction which now seen as absolute – even when they clearly do not work.
The high priests of today oblivious to the anti-market nature of their behavior do not hesitate to intervene to fix it on a colossal scale in contravention of the market’s own precepts.
The idea that money-making is the primary Goal of the most admired people in Society, the Goal of our Nations economic philosophies, the G 20, the European Union, our education, combined with our central defining consumerism greed is back firing.
What we got is the results that we see today:
Quantitative Easing, Money Printing /Austerity/ /Germany bailouts /Guarantees/ Banks before people Interest fixing /Elections/ Unemployment/ Bonuses/Tax confusion/ Independent Referendums, all served up with large daily doses of verbal diarrhea by every expert that has written a book.
I have not written any book on the subject and I am no expert but I am beginning to wake up to the need for our Captains of Industry, our political leaders and business to realize that competitiveness is not all that it is dressed up to be.
It can severely impair a given country’s ability to choose its own social and economic destiny and our individuality.
No currency can set the boundaries of a nation.
So it is worth reminding ourselves how grandiose the dreams of the European Union founders were.
Our present world can be seen as full of conflict, pain, misery, wars, while across the world ecological, economic and political spaces are being enclosed through privateering, Algorithms, liberalization and globalization and the hidden purchasing power of Sovereign Funds – All breeding new insecurities anxieties and stresses.
In this world Europe was renamed the European Common Market with its inhabitants viewed chiefly in economic terms, as producers or consumers, not countries with vastly different histories, problems, and circumstances.
The notion that trade and wealth creation would create a Europe laisser-faire was not basis on its history but on a vague notion that togetherness would make us less likely to repeat World War One /Two.
Reducing our society to markets and us humans to consumers.
Those that are rich have status and those who are poor do not.
You only have to read a newspaper to see how the overpaid footballers, film and soap star, business people are held up to be admired. While we the people fooled by capitalism that has made work the center of our lives and are now in the process of destroying it as a satisfying meaningful activity through the world stock exchanges that are driven by algorithms that determine whether we should retire at 63, 65, and 68 remain voiceless.
As a Species we have basis needs for meaning of identity, for community, and security, for food water and freedom.
So it stands to reason to prevent our collectively insane political leaders terminating life in Europe never mind the earth that we need to do something.
We all know that banks can’t stop themselves. Bail them out by all means but only under strict regulations.
If we in Europe want to avoid a repeat of the wars that devastated the Continent in the past all that is required (a saving of trillions) is a united military European Army. This will provide Europe with reasonably secure environment, safe from the threat of major war with its countries being let find their own versions of modernity or not to modernize at all.
Europe does not need a free market to thrive.
How can we achieve this?
There is only one solution scrap the Euro and let each country set its own exchange rates according to its own GDP (without the tanks, planes, nuclear weapons) set against the value of human resources, social capital, and ecological assets.
The present melt down of the EU could not have come at a better time.
If we do not preserve the Capital of Europe its different cultures /languages/ history and the like there will be no Economics.
We all know that economic is not a science however each time history repeats its self the price goes up.
The Euro is fundamental flawed and please god will remain so to protect what is the very essence of living or being born in Europe.
It’s time we all realize that the Natural Capital of the world, water, clean air, oceans, forests have to be protected so we must pay the keepers of the natural capital if we as humans are to live at all.
So let’s start in Europe with some common European aspirations.
Self sufficiency in Power- creates a common European kilowatt price: Abolish road tolls: Proper periphery border controls: Freedom of movement of currencies within the market – abolish commission charges: European Youth employment programs: European health / pension Euro bonds backed by all countries – to mention a few.
God knows it not difficult to identify what is needed, just attached the words total transparency to any common Goal and it will be achieved without Greed.
It isn’t even noon yet as I write this, and I’ve already been accused of being both.
These terms intrigue me because they directly speak to the doggedly tribal nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
You don’t hear of too many other countries being universally spoken of this way. Why these two?
Both Israelis and Palestinians are complex, with diverse histories and cultures, and two incredibly similar (if divisive) religions.
After World War II, Britain decided to let the United Nations decide what to do with Palestine.
The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the UN created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the US governmental establishment supported it.
All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.
The United Nations suggested dividing Palestine into two countries, one Arab and one Jewish.
The Arab leaders said no to the plan, but the Jewish leaders accepted it and declared the state of Israel. The American President gave his support to the new state.
In reality, while the UN General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.
The General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.
In 1967 it took still more Palestinian and Syrian land, which is now illegally occupied territory, since the annexation of land through military conquest is outlawed by modern international law.
Israel, which claims to be the “only democracy in the Middle East,” decided not to declare official borders or to write a constitution, a situation which continues to this day.
To this day it has continued this campaign of growth through armed acquisition and illegal confiscation of land.
So where are we?
To come down completely on the side of one or the other doesn’t seem rational to me.
It is telling that most Muslims around the world support Palestinians, and most Jews support Israel.
This, of course, is natural — but it’s also problematic.
It means that this is not about who’s right or wrong as much as which tribe or nation you are loyal to. It means that Palestinian supporters would be just as ardently pro-Israel if they were born in Israeli or Jewish families, and vice versa.
It means that the principles that guide most people’s view of this conflict are largely accidents of birth — that however we intellectualize and analyze the components of the Middle East mess, it remains, at its core, a tribal conflict.
By definition, tribal conflicts thrive and survive when people take sides. Choosing sides in these kinds of conflicts fuels them further and deepens the polarization. And worst of all, you get blood on your hands.
It’s still too early to call Israel an apartheid state, but when John Kerry said Israel could end up as one in the future, he wasn’t completely off the mark. It’s simple math.
Israel was carved out of Palestine for Jews with help from the British in the late 1940s just as Pakistan was carved out of India for Muslims around the same time. The process was painful, and displaced millions in both instances.
There are now only a limited number of ways a bi-national Jewish state with a non-Jewish majority population can retain its Jewish identity.
Let’s face it, the land belongs to both of them now.
BUT Israelis and Palestinians remain caught in a sad, frustrating and vicious cycle that must be broken.
The Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands will turn 50 years old this year.
Some considerable time ago I wrote a blog on the subject.
Then as now I stated that the two state solution is not possible and that the only solution is for Israel to grant Palestinians full Israeli citizenship, creating one state for all.
Settlement expansion is simply incomprehensible. No one really understands the point of it. Virtually every US administration — from Nixon to Bush to Obama — has unequivocally opposed it.
It’s been almost 70 years since Israel came into existence.
There are now at least two or three generations of Israelis who were born and raised in this land, to whom it really is a home, and who are often held accountable and made to pay for historical atrocities that are no fault of their own. They are programmed to oppose “the other” just as Palestinian children are.
At its very core, this is a tribal religious conflict that will never be resolved unless people stop choosing sides.
With Israel now legalizing land grab is it not time to stop dealing with Israel as a country above the law and to make it responsible for systematic violations of international conventions and the rights of the Palestinian people.
There is no justification for it except a Biblical one which makes it slightly more difficult to see Israel’s motives as purely secular.
Let’s go straight to the point:
To end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, everyone would like a two-state solution.
This solution is impossible.
But if it Israel doesn’t work harder towards a two-state (maybe three-state, thanks to Hamas) solution, it will eventually have to make that ugly choice between being a Jewish-majority state or a democracy.
Nothing in the current situation excuses the abhorrent and immoral attacks on civilians, whether coming from Palestinians or Israelis, and any lasting solution must work to guarantee peace and security for everyone.
It’s high time we recognize that the Oslo Accords are as likely to bring peace to the Middle East as Donald Trump is to unite America.
From its conception, Oslo never required Israel to recognize Palestinian rights to statehood and has instead enabled Israeli encroachment on the West Bank.
Until now, the international consensus has been focused on a state-oriented resolution as a way to confer rights and stability to Palestinians and Israelis.
But what if that equation were flipped, if the focus were instead on enshrining full equality for everyone before even considering the creation of two states?
If this was supported by a larger Arab consensus framework, Israel would have little option as would Palestine but to come together.
This is the only realistic goal at this juncture.
To create interim arrangements to set the ground for a final agreement.
Of course both sides as in any conflict would have to want peace which now seems very unlikely.
On the Palestinian side, a lack of internal consensus remains challenging while security is the most important issue to Israel.
In such a context, nearly seventy years after the creation of Israel and the beginning of the conflict, whether the result of such an approach leads to one state or two states or 21 states on the land is immaterial.
We must put aside the concept of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in favor of an Israeli-Arab agreement as the only realistic means to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The reality on the ground shows that the search for a two-state solution is a farce that suits those who aim at apartheid.
Although the entire world knows that a durable resolution to the conflict is imperative, not in the interests of justice but also in the pursuit of peace in the region. There is only one solution the creation of a single state, in which the safety and the right to the dignity of each one will be preserved.
There are 2,898,927 Palestinians living in the West Bank, 1,850,559 in the Gaza Strip, 1,471,201 in Israel, and a total of 12,365,761 worldwide.
Palestinian citizens of Israel struggle under a system that accords them fewer rights and opportunities than their Jewish counterparts. And regardless of what one thinks of Hamas, the siege that Israel imposes (with Egyptian collusion) on Gaza affects all of its inhabitants and is unconscionable.
According to the Israeli organization Gisha, over 70% of Gaza’s population relies on humanitarian aid, while 47% suffer from food insecurity. In the second quarter of 2016, unemployment was at 41.7%, and at a staggering 57.6% among young people.
(In fact, slim majorities of both Palestinians and Israelis still support a two-state solution.)
What matters is that we finally wake from the 23-year-old slumber induced by Oslo, the numbing half-century of occupation, and the nearly 70 years of Palestinian dispossession, to see that the only durable resolution to this conflict will be one that protects Israelis and Palestinians equally, with liberty and justice for all.
Such a move would break with the political history of the United States and would run counter to the UN position, for which the status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian eastern part was occupied in 1967 and annexed by Israel in 1980, could be settled through negotiation.
A Confederation of Districts according to the historical name, defined by the good geographical and ethnic sense. As homogeneous as possible, they would necessarily include religious minorities.
Each have a Parliament and a Constitution which legislate on everything related to religion, taxation, police and education.
Insurance law, the management of national research institutes, diplomacy and the army remain the prerogative of the Confederation.
Thus, the cantonal tax authorities collect the tax and return a minority share to the central power, the wealth of each canton being largely the result of the labor of its inhabitants.
Each canton freely decides its name (in the image of Switzerland, where the Republic and Canton of Geneva, then the State of Vaud, and later the Canton of Valais, With whom everyone lives in peace).
Each district decides on the religion it wishes to inscribe in its Constitution (if it wishes to inscribe one … In Switzerland, the cases are very diverse).
Thus, Tel Aviv could decide that its official religion is Judaism, with a taxation in support of its religious institutions.
Many issues remain to be negotiated, including the division of districts, the question of return, the participation of the Palestinian populations in the army (with a staggering of the rules over several years), the creation of a national Constitution, a Constituent Assembly, etc.
From the outset, the state would be recognized by all the countries of the Arab world.
According to the initiative of Saudi Arabia in 2002, the benefits would no longer be counted: Disappearance of separation walls and checkpoints, development of very fruitful economic links, and especially the normal life, finally. For everyone.
So you really don’t have to choose between being “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine.” If you support secularism, democracy, and a two-state solution — and you oppose Hamas, settlement expansion, and the occupation — you can be both.
Again you don’t have to like what Israel is doing.
If Israel truly wanted to destroy Gaza, it could do so within a day, right from the air.
How can this possibly ever be in Israel’s interest?
When civilians die, Israel looks like a monster. It draws the ire of even its closest allies. Horrific images of injured and dead innocents flood the media. Ever-growing anti-Israel protests are held everywhere from Norway to New York. And the relatively low number of Israeli casualties repeatedly draws allegations of a “disproportionate” response. Most importantly, civilian deaths help Hamas immensely.
So please tell me — how can anyone conclude that religion isn’t at the root of this, or at least a key driving factor?
(If you want a future worth living here is a crucial half an hour read)
Most of us know that we are in the middle of a technological upheaval that will transform the way society is organized and the beast we are unleashing can be used for good and bad.
Long before what Elon Musk and Mr Hawking predict there is a much more immediate threat when it comes to AI. The holy grail of AI the microchip will surpass the power of the human, creating a whole new world of Quantum computing, one in which machines think and work in ways indiscernible to the human brain.
Rest assured that Capitalism will concentrate AI global wealth to a few and the disparity effects will be sever and this will happen faster and faster with a massive dislocation in the lower skills in society.
Just imagine an AI that learns to navigate the web environment.
It will not be Twitter voting in Donald Trumps or Social media promoting Populist Parties it will be an army of AI bot web trolls harassing what we now call Social Media to the point that there will be no true public opinion worth its salt.
Putin recently said AI leaders will rule the world. He is right. It will create even larger power inequality.
We are well on the way to one way flow of technology with Data as the rocket engine.
We are already using AI without even knowing it.
The Capitalistic world will come under bigger AND BIGGER cyber security issues, with terrorist acquiring clandestine powers that will be unverifiable.
So I ask the question are we prepared for AIs that start building their own normative systems – their own rules about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable for a machine.
Remember using your face to unlock your smart phone is unlocking your mind. A world with facial ID software is one that will spiral out of control.
Gay, Straight, Terrorist, Left or Right, Lidel or Sainsburys, Male or Female, Criminal or not, Rich or Poor.
Regardless of what we do, what’s clear, is that if we want technology to do what we want it to do we need for all technological advancements to be vetted by an Self Financing, Transparent, Independent World Organisation, other than the United Nations.
The United Nations recently opens a new talking shop center in the Netherlands to monitor artificial intelligence and predict possible threats.
“Artificial Intelligence has both the potential to accelerate progress towards a dignified life, in peace and prosperity, said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
When in fact it also has the potential to destroy what is left of our world.
The United nations Technology for Development (UN CSTD) acknowledges that many technological and development gaps still remain. A Joke.
The real question is not the gaps but who or what should take control and overlook its development.
It is my contention that the UN is total the wrong Organisation to provide a neutral platform for international dialogue, which can build a common understanding of emerging technologies.
However it is best placed to set up a totally independent Organ separate from the UN that is responsible to the people of the world not to the 5 stock piles of nuclear weapons or the developing technology.
The opportunity to use AI to solve some of the world’s grandest challenges cannot be left to Government Regulation, The Free Market, The arms race, or to Capitalist Greed especially in the form of multi global monopoly corporations, like Apple, Microsoft to name but two.
Why?
Here are a few reasons:
Because algorithms know pretty well what we do, what we think and how we feel—possibly even better than our friends and family or even ourselves.
In fact, we are being remotely controlled ever more successfully in this manner. The more is known about us, the less likely our choices are to be free and not predetermined by others.
It won’t stop there.
Some software platforms are moving towards “persuasive computing.”
In the future, using sophisticated manipulation technologies, these platforms will be able to steer us through entire courses of action, be it for the execution of complex work processes or to generate free content for Internet platforms, from which corporations earn billions.
The trend goes from programming computers to programming people.
These technologies are also becoming increasingly popular in the world of politics.
Under the label of “nudging,” and on massive scale, governments are trying to steer citizens towards healthier or more environmentally friendly behavior by means of a “nudge”—a modern form of paternalism.
This appears to be a sort of digital scepter that allows one to govern the masses efficiently, without having to involve citizens in democratic processes.
The magic phrase is “big nudging”, which is the combination of big data with nudging.
To many, believe that this could overcome vested interests and optimize the course of the world?
If so, than citizens could be governed by a data-empowered “wise king”, who would be able to produce desired economic and social outcomes almost as if with a digital magic wand.
Nobody knows how the digital magic wand, that is to say the manipulative nudging technique, should best be used. What would have been the right or wrong measure often is apparent only afterwards.
Artificial intelligence is no longer programmed line by line, but is now capable of learning, thereby continuously developing itself.
Algorithms can now recognize handwritten language and patterns almost as well as humans and even complete some tasks better than them. They are able to describe the contents of photos and videos. Today 70% of all financial transactions are performed by algorithms.
News content is, in part, automatically generated. This all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today’s jobs will be threatened by algorithms. 40% of today’s top 500 companies will have vanished in a decade.
One thing is clear: the way in which we organize the economy and society and the world will change fundamentally.
The automation of society is next.
With this, society is at a crossroads, which promises great opportunities, but also considerable risks. If we take the wrong decisions it could threaten our greatest historical achievements.
Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel.
It is estimated that in 10 years’ time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money.
Do we want to live in a point scoring loyalty citizen card China / Singapore world.
Today, Singapore is seen as a perfect example of a data-controlled society. What started as a program to protect its citizens from terrorism has ended up influencing economic and immigration policy, the property market and school curricula.
According to recent reports, every Chinese citizen will receive a so-called ”Citizen Score”, which will determine under what conditions they may get loans, jobs, or travel visa to other countries. This kind of individual monitoring would include people’s Internet surfing and the behavior of their social contacts.
With consumers facing increasingly frequent credit checks and some online shops experimenting with personalized prices, we are on a similar path in the West.
It is also increasingly clear that we are all in the focus of institutional surveillance. This was revealed in 2015 when details of the British secret service’s “Karma Police” program became public, showing the comprehensive screening of everyone’s Internet use.
Is Big Brother now becoming a reality?
Everything started quite harmlessly.
Search engines and recommendation platforms began to offer us personalized suggestions for products and services. This information is based on personal and meta-data that has been gathered from previous searches, purchases and mobility behavior, as well as social interactions.
We don’t want A.I. to engage in cyber bullying, stock manipulation or terrorist threats;
We don’t want Governments to release A.I. systems that entrap people into committing crimes.
We don’t want autonomous vehicles that drive through red lights, or worse, A.I. weapons that violate international treaties.
We don’t want – My A.I. did it. Should not excuse illegal behavior.
We don’t want A.I. systems producing fake tweets, producing fake news videos.
We don’t want A.I. weaponizing, any A.I. must have an impregnable “off switch.” It should be illegal to buy, sell or manufacture weaponized AI.
We don’t want AI High Frequency Trading, Unregulated Drones, Unregulated Genetic Engineering or AI Biological Weapons.
We don’t want A.I. be let out into the wild.
We don’t want A.I. Amazon Echo — a “smart speaker” present in an increasing number of homes — is privy to, or the information that your child may inadvertently divulge to a toy such as an A.I. Barbie.
We don’t want seemingly innocuous A.I. housecleaning robots create maps of our homes.
WE DO WANT.
A.I. system to clearly disclose that it is not human.
A.I. system subject to the full gamut of laws that apply to its human operator. This rule would cover private, corporate and government systems.
A.I. systems clearly labeled as such.
A.I. system that cannot retain or disclose confidential information without explicit approval from the source of that information.
Elon Musk recently urged the nation’s governors to regulate artificial intelligence “before it’s too late.”
He is too late, the A.I. horse has left the barn, and our best bet is to attempt to steer it. We must make the right decisions now, not to-morrow.
An AI Future: It’s Not What You Think.
It will not share the same sense of human empathy.
The emergence of a super intelligence / or full autonomy human fallibility must be taken out of the equation.
It will not supplement natural intelligence, you will not be able to upload your brain to the internet. It’s time to dispel these Myths…a set of relatively small failures combined together to create a catastrophe is on the horizon.
Look at the latest research from cognitive science, translate that into an algorithm, and add it to an existing system.
We are trying to engineer AI without understanding intelligence or cognition first. But as AI designs get even more complex and computer processors even faster, their skills will improve. That will lead us to give them more responsibility, even as the risk of unintended consequences rises. We know that “to err is human,” so it is likely impossible for us to create a truly safe system.
We have not yet come up with a clear idea of what we want AI to do or become. This must be achieved as a matter of grave urgency as today.
Whoever gets to level 6 automation first decides for everyone else what the rules are. Otherwise known as the “Golden Rule for AI”, that is, who owns the Gold, therefore rules!
Can we avoid being wiped off the face of the Earth by machines we helped create?
Diversity has a value all in itself, and that the universe is so ridiculously large that humankind’s existence in it probably doesn’t matter at all.
Fortunately, we need not justify our existence quite yet.
Saying we embrace diversity and actually doing it are two different things—as are saying we want to save the planet and successfully doing so.
We all, individually and as a society, need to prepare for that nightmare scenario, using the time we have left to demonstrate why our creations should let us continue to exist.
If we don’t find a way to distribute our wealth better, we will have fueled capitalism with artificial intelligence laborers serving only very few who possess all the means of production.
Once a new technology is introduced it can’t be uninvented.
If we think in terms of decades then Global warming, inequality and the disruption to the global job market by AI loom large.
AS STATED BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI IN HIS CLOSING OBSERVATIONS IN HIS BOOK HOMO DEUS ( which I quote here below and recommend to all)
” If we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes.
1) Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing.
2) Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3) Non- conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
These three processes raise three key questions.
Are Organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable- intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better that we know ourselves? ”
Concentration of wealth leads to concentration of power combined with AI that naturally lends itself to a winner takes all.
All human comments appreciated by a human, all like clicks whether generated by AI or not chucked in the bin.
To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
To be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
A charter represents a document that describes a project, its rationale, its goals and its participants. The purpose of a charter aims at aligning the expectations of all the contributors so that their energy focuses on the project’s priorities.
The Charter is not to be confused with The Universal Declaration of Human rights adopted after World War 11. It is perhaps the closest thing we have to a global Constitution- categorically states that the right to life is humanity’s fundamental value. Death is a crime.
It would appear that from the speeches given by either of the above that they DO NOT fully comprehended the above charter.
In his Sovereignty – centric speech Mr Trump threatened to totally destroy North Korea, called Iran a corrupt dictatorship whose main export is violence.
While Mrs May in her speech threatened withdrawal of funds.
This is not the first time not will it be the last that a World leader has used the UN to criticize other nations. Mr Bush with the axis of evil. Mr Khrushchev trumping the table and calling Filipino some obnoxious name in Russian.
Both Mr T and Mrs M appear to think that the yard stick to measure a nation’s success is GDP. This kind of thinking is driving humankind to make happiness a second goal for the twenty-first century which is highly unlikely unless inequality, war, and climate change disappear.
Surely the UN is not the platform for sovereign selfish nations to be expressing treats to other nations. Stirring up hornets nest is not what the world needs.
Here a few examples from each of their recent addresses to the UN.
MR D Trump first:
“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. “Rocket Man” is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”
” It has just been announced that we will be spending almost $700 billion on our military and defense.”
Then a raft of contradictions:
” In America, we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to watch.”
” We are celebrating the 230th anniversary of our beloved Constitution, the oldest constitution still in use in the world today. This timeless document has been the foundation of peace, prosperity and freedom for the Americans, and for countless millions around the globe whose own countries have found inspiration in its respect for human nature, human dignity and the rule of law.”
“But we can no longer be taken advantage of, or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return.”
“As long as I hold this office, I will defend America’s interests above all else.”
“The United States is one out of 193 countries in the United Nations, and yet we pay 22 percent of the entire budget and more. In fact, we pay far more than anybody realizes.”
“The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security and prosperity for all. Now we are calling for a great reawakening of nations, for the revival of their spirits, their pride, their people and their patriotism.”
“Our hope is a word and (sic) world of proud, independent nations that embrace their duties, seek friendship, respect others and make common cause in the greatest shared interest of all, a future of dignity and peace for the people of this wonderful Earth.”
“This institution was founded in the aftermath of two world wars to help shape this better future. It was based on the vision that diverse nations could cooperate to protect their sovereignty, preserve their security and promote their prosperity.”
The success of the United Nations depends upon the independent strength of its members.
“We do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.”
“Today, if we do not invest ourselves, our hearts and our minds in our nations – if we will not build strong families, safe communities and healthy societies for ourselves – no one can do it for us.”
“This is the beautiful vision of this institution, and this is the foundation for cooperation and success. Strong, sovereign nations let diverse countries with different values, different cultures and different dreams not just coexist, but work side by side on the basis of mutual respect. Strong, sovereign nations let their people take ownership of the future and control their own destiny, and strong, sovereign nations allow individuals to flourish in the fullness of the life intended by God.”
We want harmony and friendship, not conflict and strife. We are guided by outcomes, not ideology. We have a policy of principled realism rooted in shared goals, interests and values.
And just as the founders of this body intended, we must work together and confront together those who threaten us with chaos, turmoil and terror.
“We will fight together, sacrifice together and stand together for peace, for freedom, for justice, for family, for humanity and for the almighty God who made us all.”
“Are we still patriots? Do we love our nations enough to protect their sovereignty and to take ownership of their futures? Do we revere them enough to defend their interests, preserve their cultures and ensure a peaceful world for their citizens?”
The UN relies on the independent strength of its members.
Theresa May:
“We face challenges that go right to the heart of who we are as nations.”
“I believe that the only way for us to respond to this vast array of challenges is to come together and defend the international order that we have worked so hard to create and the values by which we stand. For it is the fundamental values that we share, values of fairness, justice and human rights, that have created the common cause between nations to act together in our shared interest and form the multilateral system. And it is this rules-based system which we have developed, including the institutions.”
This statement in the light of Brixit is total hogwash and on we go.
“Indeed, the defining purpose of the UN Charter is to maintain international peace and security, to develop friendly relations among nations, to achieve international cooperation in solving problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character; and to be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of those common ends.”
“An outward-looking global Britain and the second biggest funder of the UN the UK will remain committed to spending 0.7% of GNI on development and humanitarian support. And that is why we will remain generous in our funding but set aside 30% to be paid only to those parts of the UN that achieve sufficient results.”
It is true to say that the UN needs reform, but it can only become relevant if it is financed to tackle world problems. ( See previous posts)
Both Speeches ignore Climate Change and the need to address inequality that is the spawning bed of all terrorism, driven by the technology of the smart phone.
The world is changing and we don’t have to be prophets to see if we as its intelligent guardians don’t address its underling problems there will be problems that will put all our technology, all our unsustainable greed, all our power of destruction, into the shade.
All comments appreciated, all like clicks chucked in the bin.
We got it all wrong when it comes to helping Refugees.
They are not invisible people.
Camps are the wrong way to help today’s refugees.
We cannot turn our backs on the ten million people who have been forced to flee their homes. Every decent society knows this and knows that it’s our moral duty to come up with a workable way of helping the refugees.
So here’s the crucial question: what, beyond safety itself, are the critical elements of normality for any refugee?
The entire international refugee support system has presumed that the answer is food and shelter.
But is this really the right response in 2017?
The system was designed to cope with the displaced of post-war central Europe, many of them Germans who had fled the Russians, or Jews freed from the concentration camps.
Refugees nowadays do not have the luxury of a short-term solution. The problems they are fleeing are likely to last for a very long time. Imagine yourself in their position, displaced with your family. Would you really resign yourself to years in a refugee camp, living off food tokens, housed in a converted container?
UNHCR, and its penumbra of similar organisations, are designed for care.
Like all welfare programmes, theirs treats people as passive recipients. Inadvertently, it infantilises.
That so many refugees forgo this care, preferring the struggle of earning a living beneath the official radar of regulations that prohibit it, is testimony to the heroism of the human spirit. We shouldn’t, even with the best intentions, crush that spirit. We should do what we can to make autonomy less grim.
The key confusion has been to conflate refugees with migrants.
Refugees, by definition, are people who didn’t choose to be migrants: they wanted to live at home but their home became unsafe. Migrants are people who seek a better life. Migrants go to honeypots — dream locations can readily be ranked by their desirability.
Refugees do not go to dream locations; they are seeking proximate havens. All of the top ten destinations for refugees are themselves countries of emigration. All are poor countries in disorderly neighborhoods.
So this is the real answer for refugees, not tents and food but autonomy and community. It’s what you would want in their position.
In asking the development agencies to scale-up and integrate the new mechanisms for generating jobs for refugees with those for speeding post-conflict recovery, it would at last become possible to meet our true international duty of rescue. In the process we should free ourselves from the lazy trap of fitting the present into the past.
But try telling that to the current wave of some 65.6 million people around the world that have been forced from home from today’s wars and conflict zones. 65.3 million people on the run – most are now crammed into often squalid and unsafe camps as they wait in increasing desperation for a home, somewhere.
65.6 million is according to the UNHCR the latest figures (which should be taken with a dose of salt as many nations are not equipped with refugee registers or effective data collection procedures. It excluded people who were displaced by natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes, which separately uprooted at least 19 million people in 2015.
To put this number into perspective, one in about every 113 people in the world is currently a refugee. This means that of the 7 billion people on earth, over 65 million of them are living as refugees –– forced to leave their homes. The numbers are so breathtaking that they take a while to settle into the mind. This is the largest number ever recorded – and a testament to massive failures of both the international community and the United States in dealing with this crisis.
(There are also 10 million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement.)
I say the US, because it is the worst offender. It led the invasion of Iraq in 2003 without a legitimate casus belli. It set in motion the events that produced the Arab Spring resulting in immense forcible displacement in the region.
Just compare this 65 million with one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history — when a shattered Europe at the end of the Second World War had to resettle a staggering 16 million displaced persons.
A horrifying number certainly, but only a third as many as we have now.
The fact that the average amount of time people worldwide are living in displacement is now a staggering 17 years suggest that something is going terribly wrong in how we’re dealing with this issue.
In this climate, it is not surprising that there is animosity towards refugees by so many people. There has been a perceptible rise in racist and xenophobic acts in many nations, sometimes fueled by politicians and the media. The political reality suggests most countries will remain reluctant to house all but a very small minority of those displaced by violence.
We now live in a world where nearly 20 people are forcibly displaced every minute and we have seen anything yet. Wait tilluninhabitable regions due to climate change then we will have millions turning into billions.
Combined this with the violence in the Middle East and North Africa, with nine civil wars now going on in Islamic countries between Pakistan and Nigeria and half of the 23 million population of Syria been forced from their homes, plus 2.6 million Iraqis displaced by Islamic State – Isis – and 1.5 million people displaced in South Sudan.
Religious, ethnic and separatist conflicts are tearing countries apart.
Nationalism and socialism no longer provide the ideological glue to hold together secular states or to motivate people to fight.
Wars are currently being waged in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, south-east Turkey,Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and north-east Nigeria and none of them show any sign of ending.
Europeans were jolted by pictures of the little drowned body of Alyan Kurdi lying on a beach in Turkey and half-starved Syrians crammed into Hungarian trains.
What is to be done to stop these horrors? Perhaps the first question is how we can prevent them from getting worse, keeping in mind that five out of the nine wars have begun since 2011.
Let me begin by attempting to demonstrate why the refugee question must be addressed:
The waves of refugees now are just the leading edge of a global catastrophe, just watch as global warming takes its toll in the coming years.
The core problem remains the amount of violence we have in too many areas of the world. Until we figure out how to isolate wars and cut off their oxygen — as was done eventually in the Balkans in the 1990s — we will only delude ourselves in thinking our era grows less violent.
There is a danger that by attributing mass flight to too many diverse causes, including climate change, political leaders responsible for these disasters get off the hook and are free of public pressure to act effectively to bring them to an end.
Not an easy delusion to maintain as 48 million people call out to us from refugee camps that now seem as much prisons as safe havens.
It is better first to be informed and draw an opinion, rather than only to be opinionated. Half of refugees worldwide are children.
But why has this topic been so often ignored, or if mentioned, referred to as a “taboo”?
The fact is that world media in all its forms is dissenting us all to the point that refugees from war-torn countries are considered collateral damage, making good news footage.
World leaders can no longer watch passively as so many lives are needlessly lost.
We must be smart about finding solutions to help refugees.
We must find humane and dignified means to ensure refugees don’t risk their lives and those of their families by resorting to ruthless traffickers.
We must open designated channels of entry and offer tagged shelter under repatriation once its is safe to do so.
We must stop the world media spreading a climate of xenophobia.”
We must stop the growing resistance from nations to providing asylum for refugees.
We must stop spreading (due to political rhetoric) painting refugees as terrorists or beggars. “Refugees… don’t bring danger” but “flee from dangerous places.
The world governments will resist doing anything until such time as it is profitable to do so. This will be too late.
One of the more comforting claims in recent years is that the world is a less violent place than the blood-soaked centuries gone by. Bull shit.
The modicum of UNHCR support before abandonment, puts a spotlight of Shame on our world!
I have this awful feeling of deja vu. One begging UN resolution after another.
However there are the beginnings of an awakening about all this. In October the World Bank approved its first refugee loan — for job generation for Syrian refugees in Jordan.
Perhaps if the top five Tech Conglomerations were to charge a cent on all like clicks, on all shared photos, on all sales, all up loads, on all searches, on all tweets, on all e mails, on all Skype calls, they could save the world from melt down. This combined with a 0.05% world aid commission,( See previous posts) would create a perpetual fund of trillions to address inequality that leads to all our troubles.
In just a single minute on the web 216,000 photos are shared on Instagram, a total of £54,000 ($83,000) sales take place on Amazon, there are 1.8 million likes on Facebook and three days worth of video is uploaded to YouTube.
All suggestions and comments appreciated. All like click chucked in the bin till they are chargeable.
The answer is that there is nothing in its internal logic to interrupt its momentum – to stop it eating its way through our planet, and ultimately collapsing our global ecosystems.
We all know that capitalism has brought with it historically unprecedented material advances. But today it is more obvious than ever that the imperatives of the market will not allow capital to prosper without depressing the conditions of great multitudes of people and degrading the environment throughout the world.
After years of ill-health, capitalism is now in a critical condition.
Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated.
We have now reached the point where the destructive effects of capitalism are outstripping its material gains.
No ‘developing’ economy setting out on the capitalist road today, for example, is likely to achieve even the contradictory development that England underwent and is now dismantling.
There is a growing disparity between the material capacities created by capitalism and the quality of life it can deliver.
This is visible not only in the growing gap between rich and poor but also, for instance, in the deterioration of public services in the very countries – such as the US and UK – where the principles of the capitalist market are most uninhibited.
Capitalism was born at the very core of human life, in the interaction with
nature on which life itself depends, and the transformation of that interaction by agrarian capitalism revealed the inherently destructive
impulses of a system in which the very fundamentals of existence are subjected to the requirements of profit.
In other words, the origin of capitalism revealed the essential secret of capitalism.
To day Capitalism is incapable of promoting sustainable development,
not because it encourages technological advances that are capable of straining the earth’s resources but because the purpose of capitalist production is exchange value not use value, profit not people.
Whatever capitalism may do to enable the efficient use of resources, its own imperatives will always drive it further. Without constantly breaching the limits of conservation, without constantly moving forward the boundaries of waste and destruction, there can be no capital accumulation.
There is, in general, a great disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers.
Why?
Because the ethic of ‘improvement’ in its original sense, in which production is inseparable from profit, is also the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness.
The world is changing and the only profits matter approach to business is becoming harder to justify and get away with. The old style of the end justifies the means and the purpose of business is profit is dying.
The transparency of social media and the advent of the global economy, driven by Artificial Intelligence is demanding a change to how Capitalism works.
We are on call 24/7 through email and smart phones which is causing the line between money as the great motivator or happiness to blur.
The attempt to achieve material prosperity according to capitalist principles is increasingly likely to bring with it the negative side of the capitalist contradiction, its dispossession and destruction, more than its material
benefits – certainly for the vast majority.
The system’s contradictions have always gone far beyond the vagaries of economic cycles.
The use of wealth to create more wealth is coming to an end and will be hopefully replaced with intrinsic rewards than by pure financial ones. If values are not lived and only decorate the walls they can become a demotivating factor.
Life would indeed be nasty, brutish, and short if it were solitary, fortunately for all of us, in capitalist society it isn’t.
The beautiful thing about capitalism is that it’s ultimately based on
voluntary exchange for mutual benefit.
So why does it not get sufficient credit for the amazing value it has created.
Because the destructive effects of capitalism have constantly reproduced themselves, its positive effects have not been nearly as consistent since the system’s moment of origin.
So where does this leave us?
Unfortunately there will be no escape from exploitation. Increasingly significant numbers are not so much oppressed by capitalism as they are excluded by it.
The market can no longer act as a regulator of the economy as it becomes digitized. To guarantee some rationality, some correspondence between what people want and what is produced we all Technology to be verified in order to ensure it is complying with core human values. (See previous Posts)
While capitalist discipline celebrates consumption, not all of its subjects are rightly called consumers. To the contrary, many who are subject to its discipline do not so much struggle to consume and accumulate as merely survive, which suggests that capitalism works to deform humanity.
Capitalism has so construed the market that humans interact agonistically, competitively.
All of us, winners and losers, consumers and excluded, compete for resources, for market share, for a living wage, for a job, for the time for friendship and family, for inclusion in the market, and so forth.
Capitalism is now in the process of becoming invisible on the surface.
First, it is computerized and robotized, not to lessen everyone’s work time, but instead to raise profits by reducing payrolls.
Second, it exploited low-wage immigrant labor to offset wage increases won by years of labor struggles.
Third, it moved production to lower-wage countries such as China, India, Brazil and others.
Fourth, it divided and weakened the labor unions, political party groups and other organizations that pursued labor’s interests.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer capitalist cell.
As a result, inside nearly every country of the global capitalist system, the rich-poor divide deepened.
Can anything be done?
Not much.
Capitalism makes a virtue of what an earlier era denounced as a vice, pleonexia or greed – a restless, possessive, acquisitive drive, but which today is celebrated as the aggressive, creative, entrepreneurial energy that distinguishes homo economicus.
Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them.
In fact, in many countries today, and for much of human history, it has been widely understood that those who are rich are rich because they took from others, and especially because they have access to organized force—in today’s terms, the state.
Such predatory elites use this force to gain monopolies and to confiscate the produce of others through taxes. They feed at the state treasury and they benefit t from state-imposed monopolies and restrictions on competition. It’s only under conditions of capitalism that people commonly become wealthy without being criminals.
It fails not simply on the grounds of what it fails to do but because of what it succeeds in doing: distorting human desire and relations.
It is often unclear what exactly is being condemned when it comes to Capitalism.
The term “capitalism” refers not just to markets for the exchange of goods and services, which have existed since time immemorial, but to the system of innovation, wealth creation, and social change that has brought to billions of people prosperity that was unimaginable to earlier generations of human beings.
The above may be true but it is now being exploited by what I call the fearsome five empty calorie connections” Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter.
Even if they remain in possession, or indeed outright ownership, of the means of production – they are subject to the demands of competition, increasing productivity, capital accumulation, and the intense exploitation of
labor.
In this barren space, they and us are now locked in competition and struggle for scarce resources.
If you have got this far I can hear you saying come to the point.
What might be the alternatives to capitalism look like?
Capitalism is a cultural system and not simply an economic one, it cannot be explained by material factors alone.
It is now obvious, that the value Capitalism created is at a cost, which we are now reaping: Our environment, (Climate change) our core values, (We all have a core value in the unknown.) our Humanity all of which have been and are being hijacked by Greed/Profit and now technological progress.
Even if capitalism succeeds in reducing poverty, it is still wrong on account of its distortion of human desiring and human relations, rendering them antagonistic, competitive.
Over the last century, capitalism has repeatedly revealed its worst tendencies: instability and inequality. Inequality has proved to be an inherent trend of capitalism. Resting everything on self-interest is relying on a very incomplete theory of human nature.
Now that the capital markets are run by Algorithms and the world has an apparent love-hate relationship with the economic social system, capitalism, is it not time to create a new model of Capitalism.
“Conscious Capitalism.” or Social-Capitalism the seeds of which can be seen in countries like Sweden, Norwegian.
The first principle is that business has the potential to have a higher purpose that may include making money, but is not restricted to it.
Truly moving beyond capitalism means breaking from the employer-employee core relationship.
It means no longer assigning a relatively tiny number of people inside each enterprise to the employer position of exclusively making the sorts of decisions.
(In private corporations the employers are the boards of directors selected by the major shareholders. In state or public enterprises of the traditional socialist economies, the employers are state officials.)
Instead of either kind of employer-employee relationship, system change installs a different core relationship inside enterprises. A different group of people — all workers in the factory, office or store — democratically makes those same decisions. The rule is “one worker, one vote,” and in general, the majority decides. The difference between employer and employee dissolves.
Every business has the potential for a higher purpose. And if you think about it, all the other professions in our society are motivated by purpose, beyond a narrow interpretation of purpose as restricted to maximizing profits.
I think that capitalism and business should fully reflect the complexity of
human nature.
Capitalist interaction is highly structured by ethical norms and rules. Indeed, capitalism rests on a rejection of the ethics of loot and grab, the means by which most wealth enjoyed by the wealthy has been acquired in other economic and political systems.
Capitalist contradictions are increasingly escaping all our efforts to control
them. The hope of achieving a humane, truly democratic, and ecologically sustainable capitalism is becoming transparently unrealistic.
In the midst of the descending darkness of capital, the difference this time is that we know what happened last time.
Postmodern society thwarts our innate desire to participate politically. Just voting in an election every few years, marching once in a while, or signing petitions on Avaaz or MoveOn doesn’t count for much.
We need new avenues for passionate participation – not just in elections every few years, but continuously.
A more generous, egalitarian, patient, deliberate, and accountable form of capitalism must begin with incisive and interdisciplinary social inquiry, without which policy change cannot be successful.
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Wake up. The Paris Climate Change Agreement which covers the period 2020 to 2030, : A system of voluntary, unenforceable pledges relies on peer pressure for ambitious commitments and the “naming and shaming” of countries that drag their feet, is a JOKE. It’s just worthless words. All major industrialized countries are failing to meet the pledges they made to cut greenhouse-gas emissions.
Climate change is an issue of huge public interest.
One of the biggest problems that the world is facing aside from the economic pitfalls is the unprecedented occurrences of natural calamities. Not only does a calamity bring about massive death and destruction to the country, but it also causes great financial issues.
The exit of the United States could multiply those troubles, or it could provide an opportunity to fix the looming problem of incredible goals.
Time has nearly run out for limiting warming to 2 °C. “If we wait until 2020, it will be too late.”
The talks were rigged to ensure an agreement is reached regardless of how little action countries plan to take. The final submissions are not enforceable, and carry no consequences beyond “shame” for noncompliance — a fact bizarrely taken for granted by all involved.
Demonstrating, yet again, the utter folly of an approach that is attempting to save the world by putting it on a collective energy diet.
Every major climate change initiative to date has gone up in smoke.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sought to cut emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, was doomed from the start.
The 2009 Copenhagen conference to hammer out a Kyoto sequel was an even bigger debacle.
The carbon market is a concept based on “polluter pays” and cap-and-trade principle. The objective is to reduce gas emissions through the use of market law. It assembles voluntary organizations that exchange the rights to issue carbon dioxide.
During the year, if a company manages to emit less than the allowable amount, it can sell the remainder to another company. This transaction doesn’t change the total emissions of the group. Therefore, one company must emit a lower-than-allowable amount in order for another company to emit more.
It works pretty much like the stock exchange. The problem with this system is that it needs rigid regulations and enforcement in order to have a large impact. There is no law limiting the amount of carbon emissions by a company. The carbon market is purely based on volunteerism, which works well for the companies already involved. This system was at the heart of Kyoto.
We watch large global corporations make billions, we watch governments spend billions on arms, we watch drug companies make trillions, energy giants make trillions,we watch Google/Alphabet/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/ Facebook/Twitter/Algorithms plunder the world, while the United Nations has to beg for funds.
So where are we.
We either spend trillions and sacrificing millions of jobs, to reduce the average global temperature. Or Spend trillions on mopping up disasters and stopping mass immigration.
Or
Place a world aid commission on all Transactions that are Profit for Profit sake, on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions of $50,000, on all Sovereignty Funds Acquisitions, on all form of online Gambling. Creating a perpetual fund to address the problem and reduce inequality.
Ban all air/road/sea traffic one day a month.
Even if the always-wrong climate change computer models turned out to be right, no one wants to pay the cost.
Recent images bear little resemblance to reality;
Bangladesh underwater, Mexico shaking, Vast areas on fire, West Indies blown away, Wars a bucket full and inequality rampant.
May all those caught up in any of the above survive.
Stupidity consists in wanting to come to a conclusion.
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