SMART PNONES ARE NOW A PART OF THE FABRIC OF OUR CULTURE.
Virtually everyone carries a smartphone today. these things didn’t exist until just over 15 years ago and there are now your web browser, camera and camcorder, music player, gaming console, navigation unit, step counter, flashlight, personal AI assistant, and digital wallet and makes calls, too.
As new generations grow up as digital natives, with iPads and smartphones in their hands before they can even walk, we also could be living in a world with even more screens, and smartphones may be only the beginning.
Surely our reliance on smartphones will evolve into something else. Perhaps blending into our bodies and clothing, telling us when to turn left or right, buy that, speak.
In fact, many believe screens will become even more ubiquitous, including (but not limited to) a world steeped in mixed reality, a combination of a virtual world and physical spaces, with most of us experiencing this hybrid via high-tech goggles.“
As of right now, I believe we are still going towards an era of more screens, screens everywhere, in the bathroom, on doors, and it’s already happening in cars and on fridges with these screens becoming more personalized, calling you by name, entering the era of holographic displays.
Mixed reality experiences are going to get “wild” in the coming years.
The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.
Clearly, what our post-smartphone future looks like is subject to speculation — especially in an industry that not only moves at a torrential pace but could take an unexpected detour at any time.
In other words, ambient computing and mixed reality are both likely to happen, simultaneously and overlappingly.
Ten years from now, when we gaze upon the devices in our hands (or, less likely, consider the implant in our spinal columns), I expect we’re going to be telling one of those two stories again.
Humane’s AI Pin, for example, is a small device you can attach to your shirt or jacket, and it works as a nonphysical smartphone by projecting calls, messages, and info from apps onto a surface (like your hand).
Powered by artificial intelligence, this screen less solution will also have location data and contextual awareness.
we’ll also have a deeper and more self-conscious awareness of the smartphone’s place in our culture.
I could spin a tale about phones that project their displays into mid-air between your fingers. I could predict that we won’t have phones at all but, instead, high-bandwidth jacks plugged right into our brains, connecting us into a 6 or 7G network of wordless, emotive communication.
I could predict that we don’t need to store our lives in our phones — all that data can live in the cloud.
I could predict that our phones will stop consolidating into a single device and instead explode out into a mesh network of tinier, more bespoke gadgets.
I could predict that our phones could shape-shift into a size fit for the task at hand. Morph and upgrade as needed, adding on better cameras, different sensors, and surprising new capabilities.
But in 10 years, maybe the mobile industry will have evolved to a point where modular phones make a comeback.
at least relegated to our pockets more often than not — by smart eyeglasses. Think of how often you check your phone throughout the day. No one would want to be constantly futzing with swipe and tap gestures on their glasses that frequently
a phone isn’t something we carry around with us — it’s everywhere. Every room in your home has a smart speaker, a screen, a lamp, and who knows what, that’s connected to the network and ready to do whatever you would have asked of your phone.
Rather than face the onerous task of taking a phone out of your pocket, unlocking it, opening the right app, and typing words on its little screen, the world around us will simply be equipped to do the tedious stuff for us. There are very obvious and serious ethical problems with this scenario. Equipping the world around us to anticipate and solve our needs requires us to surrender an incredible amount of information about ourselves.
Maybe a fully ambient computing life isn’t in our future, whether it’s sight issues or vertigo and motion sickness, it’s not for everyone and will not replace a smartphone for many.
Smartphones will remain as a bedrock to our overall computing experience for a while yet, but we’ll no doubt see the technology evolve in different directions, as it always does — just not so fast.
Those born after 1995 are the first people in history to go through puberty with a portal to an alternative universe in their pockets – and the toll this has taken on their wellbeing has been devastating.
Companies that strive to maximise “engagement” by using psychological tricks to keep young people clicking are the worst offenders. They hooked children during vulnerable developmental stages, while their brains were rapidly rewiring in response to incoming stimulation. This included social media companies, which inflicted their greatest damage on girls, and video game companies and pornography sites, which sank their hooks deepest into boys.
How do we escape from these traps? Collective action problems require collective responses:
Given that AI and spatial computing (such as Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles) are about to make the virtual world far more immersive and addictive, I think we’d better start today.
Something in our culture is devastating the next generation.
The culprit is a massive, sudden switch from raising kids on play to raising kids on phones—specifically, smartphones loaded with life-sucking social media apps.
The user is not the customer—the user is the product.
This is the business model behind social media platforms, where you try to maximize the amount of time that kids and other users spend there. Children were becoming “merchandise.”
We need to have thousands of experiences every single year, every single day, to practice interacting with others in the real world, navigating conflict and struggle by finding more meaning in one’s lifetime.
I’m going to give my child a smartphone at age 9 or 10 is to destroy that life.
Perhaps its time to pass laws (just like acquiring a fire arm) restricting the acquisition of a smart phone till 18 of age is attend. Or restriction on accessing conventional social media such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat until they are 18.
Tech is and will remain a fantastic tool, but it has to act in people’s service, not people being reduced to serving a product.
Algorithms that re-engage and stimulate the pleasure system and are built to avoid you losing interest in the content have a type of addictive dynamic.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. AI IS NOT LIKE ANY PREVIOUS TECHNOLOGY. ITS GOING TO NEED GLOBAL ACTION TO HARNESS THE EFFECTS IT IS NOW HAVING, NEVER MIND IN THE FUTURE.
Humanity is not approaching this issue remotely with the leave of serious it requires.
Given the speed of development in the field, it’s long past time to move beyond a reactive mode, one where we only address AI’s downsides once they’re clear and present.
We can’t only think about today’s systems, but where the entire enterprise is headed.
While continuing to talk in vague terms about the potential economic or scientific benefits of AI, we are perpetuating historical patterns of technological advancement at the expense of not just vulnerable people but all of us.
When we fail to address these harms, as an inevitable by-product of technological progress we are turning a blind eye to the ethical needs in which powerful AI systems are developed and deployed.
The rapid pace of progress is feeding on itself, creating something smarter than us, which may have the ability to deceive and mislead us — and then just hoping it doesn’t want to hurt us — is a terrible plan.
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We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth.
SHOULD WE BE WORRRIED THAT WE ARE NOW ARE WITH AI ON THE PATHWAY TO EXTERMINATION.
That is what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species – which is what we are likely to become, given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence.
AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on.
It’s not simply what AI can do, but where it is going will be key to managing the resultant fear of AI that permeates society. Gargantuan amounts of data are at this very moment been harvested so machine learning can accomplish tasks that had previously been accomplished only by humans.
With deep learning, improving systems doesn’t necessarily involve or require understanding what they’re doing. If anything, as the systems get bigger, interpretability — the work of understanding what’s going on inside AI models, and making sure they’re pursuing our goals rather than their own — gets harder.
We should be clear about what these conversations do and don’t demonstrate.
In a world increasingly dominated by AI-powered tools that can mimic human natural language abilities, what does it mean to be truthful and authentic?
Take GPT-Chat, which is used by millions around the globe, is churning out human-sounding answers to requests, ranging from the practical to the surreal. It is being used by millions of people, many of whom don’t have any training or education about when it is ethical to use these systems or how to ensure that they are not causing harm.
Even if you don’t use AI-generated responses, they influence how you think.
It has drafted cover letters, composed lines of poetry, pretended to be William Shakespeare, crafted messages for dating app users to woo matches, and even written news articles, all with varying results.
Bots now sound so real that it has become impossible for people to distinguish between humans and machines in conversations, which poses huge risks for manipulation and deception at mass scale.
What does it mean for a machine to be deceptive?
Is it evil and plotting to kill us. Rather, the AI model is responding to my command and playing — quite well — the role of a system that’s evil and plotting to kill us.
If the system doesn’t have that intent, is it deceptive? Does it come back to the person that was asking the questions or getting the system to be deceptive? I don’t know.
There are more questions than answers at this point.
The fact that these technologies are limited at the moment is no reason to be reassured.
Ai has the potential to transform and exacerbate the problem of misinformation, and so we need to start working on solutions now.
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The trajectory we are on is one where we will make these systems more powerful and more capable.
A new tool called Co-pilot uses machine learning to predict and complete lines of computer code, bringing the possibility of an AI system that could write itself one step closer. DeepMind’s Alpha Fold system, which uses AI to predict the 3D structure of just about every protein in existence.
We need to design systems whose internals we understand and whose goals we are able to shape to be safe ones. However, we currently don’t understand the systems we’re building well enough to know if we’ve designed them safely before it’s too late.
Right now, the state of the safety field is far behind the soaring investment in making AI systems more powerful, more capable, and more dangerous.
These harms are playing out every day, with powerful algorithmic technology being used to mediate our relationships between one another and between ourselves and our institutions and environment.
The reason is that systems designed this way generalize, meaning they can do things outside what they were trained to do.
These questions around authenticity, deception, and trust are going to be incredibly important, and we need a lot more research to help us understand how AI will influence how we interact with other humans.
If you have machines that control the planet, and they are interested in doing a lot of computation and they want to scale up their computing infrastructure, it’s natural that they would want to use our land for that.
If you believe there is even a small chance of that happening. Now is the time to use the power of your mobile phones to demand responsible, transparent Ai and to remove profit seeking algorithms.
Each day, we hear about countless instances of greed, hatred, violence, and destruction, and all of the pain, suffering, and sorrow that ensues, while we remain deaf to what is really happing in the world of technology.
With the never-ending list of atrocities, it may seem fruitless to try to identify a single contributing factor to all of society’s collective dilemmas, but it is becoming more and more apparent that AI in the hands of a few global mega companies is a recipe for DIASTER.
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Ever since humans picked up a rock and hurled it at another human or animal technology has been shaping the world for yonks’, unfortunately both for good and bad.
DOWN THE CENTURIES ALL OF THESE ADVANCES WERE INCAPABLE OF EFFECTING CHANGE WITHOUT HUMAN ASSISTANCE AND THEIR DECISIONS. Not any longer.
The AI technology we are witnessing today is the first to make decisions without human supervision’s so the future doesn’t look so bright in terms of keeping the planet in peace, as it will lead to a brainwashed society with no values and no real purpose to evolve, other than being herded by an AI sheep dog into predictions.
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AI’s impact in the next five years?
Human life will speed up, behaviours will change and industries will be transformed — and that’s what can be predicted with certainty. AI will rattle society at large.
A threshold will be crossed.
Thinking machines will have left the realm of sci-fi and entered the real world with Human-AI teaming.
We can already see this happening voluntarily in use cases such as algorithmic trading in the finance industry, outpacing the quickest human brains by many orders of magnitude.
Society will also see its ethical commitments tested by powerful AI systems, especially privacy.
As the cost of peering deeply into our personal data drops and more powerful algorithms capable of assessing massive amounts of data become more widespread, we will probably find that it was a technological barrier more than an ethical commitment that led society to enshrine privacy.
AI technologies that are being empowered to code themselves through new generative AI capabilities and simultaneously having less human oversight.
We all must slow down and take steps to bring about more trustworthy technology, but we won’t be able to build trustworthy AI systems unless we know what trustworthy AI means to us.
It is imperative that all AI describe its purpose, rationale and decision-making process in a way that the average person can understand. In other words fairness, accountability and transparency -algorithmic accountability.
AI is the bedrock of world-impacting systems.
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At the micro level, AI affects individuals in everything from landing a job to retirement planning, securing home loans, job and driver safety, health diagnoses and treatment coverage, arrests and police treatment, political propaganda and fake news, conspiracy theories, and even our children’s mental health and online safety.
Without having proper insight into how the AI is making its decisions. Developers should pay close attention to the training data to ensure it doesn’t have any bias, stating from where the information came.
If the data is biased, then developers should explore what can be done to mitigate it. In addition, any irrelevant data should be excluded from training.
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The list of “screwed up” things is a bit overwhelming to comprehend, because there are so many problems affecting so many different people, places, and things.
When you hear politics speak they always mention stuff like health care, transportation, city infrastructure, human rights, free markets. Even though these things are of importance, they don’t set a path for others to follow in the long term.
In all of these instances, both today and throughout history, the underlying reason one group of people has chosen to exploit, oppress, and harm another group of people, has been because of an exaggerated emphasis on their differences rather then what is common to us all – life.
Shouldn’t there be a greater purpose?
What we have are governments focusing on quick fixes and band-aid solutions which don’t address the real problems we’re experiencing as a species.
In an automated world where fun and feeling good are a click away, people can hardly focus on one task.
We grow up demanding to feel good all the time and careless of everything else.
A well-defined message which all presidents/ governments, pass along to their nations and heirs with the intention of making the world a better place to live in is now more than a peroxidative ( self- propagating chain reaction) if we are to avoid a despot future – Climate Change – AI – Wars.
Social media is feeding our false self. Our phones are our best friends. It’s tragic.
People grow up hating education and never building a habit of learning by creating a false self, through filtered images and phony statuses and eventually they start believing in their own shit more than they should.
Unfortunately, their real self remains weak and lacks the qualities it actually needs to handle the hurdles of life.
We are already losing the ability to interact with one another, this is honestly the next step in the evolution of humans and it is absolutely terrifying.
I’d say that it’s not the world that’s fucked up, it’s people who are fucked up. People have become so materialistic, impatient, self-centred, and greedy that they are easy prey for exploitation.
Fortunately, there is a way out.
Humanity has the potential to change, but only with a conscious collective effort.
If you want to make a change, start caring more about others.
Google it. They know everything.
Will the world get a grip?
For humanity to grab on to life and live it to the fullest we must demand transparency when it comes to technologies such as Algorithms.
So, now ask yourself do you want to become a product or service or live your life with your own identity.
Ask yourself do you want to “meander” through life, wandering aimlessly, as the term is commonly (mis)understood to mean to this very day.
Teenagers aren’t stupid. They can sense that what’s being taught in school is hardly something they can later use in real life. Not like us, the generation that can’t find the grocery store without using the navigation on their smartphone.
No matter what you’re doing everything is more complicated than you think.
You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose.
Governments’ plans to limit climate change to internationally agreed safer levels will currently not limit global warming enough. Governments must not only agree what stronger climate actions will be taken but also start showing exactly how to deliver the changes.
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We all get sucked into the day-to-day, lose focus, or just get bored.
We’vegot to removethatbolt, so get a grip on thewrenchandturn it as hard as youcan!
Don’t be fooled.
AI’s impact in the next five years?
Human life will speed up, behaviours will change and industries will be transformed — and that’s what can be predicted with certainty.
Significant AI advances significant have only just started to rattle society at large.
Governments will be compelled to implement AI in the decision-making processes and in their public- and consumer-facing activities. AI will allow these organizations to make most of the decisions much more quickly. As a result, we will all feel life speeding up.
Society will also see its ethical commitments tested by powerful AI systems, especially privacy.
Presently all across the planet, governments at every level, local to national to transnational, are seeking to regulate the deployment of AI.
But dramatic depictions of artificial intelligence as an existential threat to humans, are buried deep in our collective psyche.
Arguably the most realistic form of this AI anxiety is a fear of human societies losing control to AI-enabled systems. We can already see this happening voluntarily in use cases such as algorithmic trading in the finance industry. The whole point of such implementations is to exploit the capacities of synthetic minds to operate at speeds that outpace the quickest human brains by many orders of magnitude.
The more likely long-term risk of AI anxiety in the present is missed opportunities.
To the extent that organizations in this moment might take these claims seriously and underinvest based on those fears, human societies will miss out on significant efficiency gains, potential innovations that flow from human-AI teaming, and possibly even new forms of technological innovation, scientific knowledge production and other modes of societal innovation that powerful AI systems can indirectly catalyse.
While Western eyes are fixed on Tehran and Tel Aviv, Ukraine’s frontlines, unless we get a grip fast, we will not be going anywhere.
So AI is scary and poses huge risks.
But what makes it different from other powerful, emerging technologies like biotechnology, which could trigger terrible pandemics, or nuclear weapons, which could destroy the world?
No one holds the secret to our ultimate destiny.
AI is dangerous precisely because the day could come when it is no longer in our control at all.
Let us now assume, for the sake of argument, that these machines are a genuine possibility, and look at the consequences of constructing them. … There would be plenty to do in trying, say, to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.
I think it’s going to be the most beneficial thing ever to humanity, things like curing diseases, helping with climate, all of this stuff. But it’s a dual-use technology — it depends on how, as a society, we decide to deploy it — and what we use it for.
It’s worth pausing on that for a moment. Nearly half of the smartest people working on AI believe there is a 1 in 10 chance or greater that their life’s work could end up contributing to the annihilation of humanity.
As the potential of AI grows, the perils are becoming much harder to ignore.
AI safety faced the difficulty of being a research field about a far-off problem, NOT ANY MORE The challenge is here, and it’s just not clear if we’ll solve it in time.
You may face unexpected challenges. We all do. Changing your mindset won’t guarantee that everything will be okay. But it will give you the insight and strength to believe that you will be okay and that you can handle what life dishes up.
But I guarantee if you don’t do anything you will regret it, and you will wake up one day wondering where your life went and how you got to the place you are. As AI evolves, the consequences for the economy, national security, and other vital parts of our lives will be enormous, along with many other questions as yet unforeseen legal, ethical, and cultural questions will be to arise across all kinds of military, medical, educational, and manufacturing uses.
Open AI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic, are not constrained by guardrails and their financial incentives are not aligned with human values. AI-enabled wars already happing, combined with Climate change.
Believe me it’s an unsolved problem, mistakenly believed that the inability to gain access to vast datasets is what’s kept AI out of the hands of all, but a few companies.
In a world full of false material that’s promulgated by AI, there will be lots of AI that can detect the false stuff. We will start to build economies around the whack-a-mole problem of the Good Guys AI staying slightly ahead of the Bad Guys most of the time — but not always.
And some people will make some real money doing this.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin,
Fear is an ancient and conserved response that served humans well enough before the advent of civilisation, but it has become distorted in modern societies where primordial fears can readily transform into phobias.
Fear is part instinct, part learned, part taught. Some fears are instinctive: Pain, for example, causes fear because of its implications for survival. Other fears are learned and also partly imagined. Imagined threats cause paralysis. Real threats, on the other hand, cause frenzy.
For instance social media is now fanning, the flames of fear and disseminating misinformation quickly and widely with fake news.
It’s hard to fully understand the way fear shapes our world without addressing its relationship to anger.
And anger is important for those who profit from fear because anger generates action.
People are more vulnerable when they’re in an angered state. When we’re angry, we don’t pay attention to the details of complex messages, the more one person expresses anger, the more others express anger, and then it becomes a kind of spiral where the anger is ratcheted up and up.
Many bemoan online when social media platforms seemingly descend into ranting and abuse but a great deal of the anger we find when perusing our devices isn’t organic, it’s engineered – for profit.
Provoking anger is rapidly becoming the standard for many online operations.
Why?
Because fidelity of the source is taken by social media sites and search engines as key factors for their Automated Decision Making (ADM) systems to classify content.
In their defence, social media platforms are between a rock and a hard place because of their need to balance free speech against repression of damaging or hateful material.
It works because in our algorithmically driven culture the popularity of any given content is no longer driven by the number of eyeballs that see it, but by the level of engagement it generates.
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Fear sharpens the mind, which is why fear is used in campaigns, whether it’s public health, whether it’s to change people’s attitude to things like climate change.
Fear can steel resolve to do something.
After the second World War and the horrors that the world experienced, democratic countries became defensive. In other words, they saw fear as an important tool for making sure that these kinds of perversions never happened again, but in the process of doing that, fear actually became too important as a component. It started to eclipse the very values that it was supposed to be protecting- “enculturated” in fear – NATO.
But that’s not the whole story.
We can now register a fear with new characteristics in the fear taxonomy, and we could call it global fear.
.For example during COVID too much fear created apathy leading to disinterest and distrust.
What’s needed is a better public understanding of the role these emotions play in our lives, and a clearer appreciation thatwhen emotions are manipulated, even good intentions can have disastrous consequences.
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Fear and anger are dominating our world right now, but are we being manipulated for profit?
Fear and anger abound – in our politics, in our social discourse, and in our expectations for the future.
When fear is pervasive in a system — and it’s pervasive in all of our systems — what that means is that we lose dynamism, we lose innovation. Fears put a stranglehold on our life force. Fear paralyzes us. Fear diminishes us. And the more we conquer our fears, the more meaningful our life becomes.
Fear and anger have been monetised, the result of deliberate manipulation by commercial and political interests.
The antidote for our current malaise isn’t simply to suppress our emotional extremes. In fact, both fear and anger can help positive social change by fostering a thirst for justice and even revolution.
The difficulty for people today is empathising or imaginatively trying to situate themselves in the future … It’s very, very difficult.
The growing fear-based discourse around climate change, for example, and the use of fear-laden expressions and words often backfires on those who deploy them. When someone like [UN Secretary-General] António Guterres uses the term ‘global boiling’ the problem is a lot of people in their daily lives are not experiencing a climate crisis, they don’t experience excessive heat, they don’t have wildfires on their doorstep. They just switch off.
While we tend to equate fear-based leadership with totalitarianism or populism, there are many instances in democratic countries where politics is coloured by the use of fear as a blunt tool of coercion.
More people realise that we’re living in a vicious cycle, where manufactured fear fuels anger and anger in turn blinds us to the recognition that our fear is misplaced. Take the discourse around “illegal” immigration.
As George Orwell’s warnings 1984 to the world which are now coming true as we move into an age of totalitarian Ai dictatorial -an age in which freedom of thought will be a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.
Totalitarianism relies on mass support so we need more people to realize what is at stake and start seeing all around us by taking the smart phone out of our ears.
With AI moving into the Physical world, algorithms are running more and more of life as we know it.
Combined they are evolving towards the same system, a form of oligarchical collectivism with manufactured fear. The strategy of fear is one of their most valuable tactics.
Don’t let it happen. Face recognition becoming a thought or face crime.
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You see the state of the world.
It is not important who is at war or with who, it’s the removal of freedoms and constant surveillance which is now conducted through the smartphones we carry around in our pockets, with every sound you make, every movement scrutinised.
The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence. Everything fades into mist. The past is erased, the erasure is forgotten and the lie comes truth.
No one can stand aside, dont let it happen it depends on you
It’s understandable that we may worry about world events but fear is hardwired in your brain, and for good reason.
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War is peace freedom is slavery.
Israel is as we watch becoming a Totalitarian State.
How does one witness the cruelty of indiscriminate bombing? We cannot physically or mentally feel another’s pain, but we can empathize with it. We tend to still think of war as great power competition or as the Second World War.
The USA vetoed Palestine becoming a full member of the United nations then approved more than $61bn worth of military assistance to help Ukraine in its desperate defence against Russia, as well as billions for other allies including Israel and Taiwan.
The $95bn in total funding includes roughly $61bn for Ukraine (with much of the funding going towards replenishing American munitions); $26bn for Israel; $8bn for US allies in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan; and $9bn in humanitarian assistance for civilians in war zones, such as Haiti, Sudan and Gaza, though the package also includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (Unrwa), an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025. The US has so far sent Ukraine roughly $111bn in weapons, equipment, humanitarian assistance and other aid since the start of the war more than two years ago.
The Israel bill includes about $4.4bn to replenish depleted US supplies given to Israel; $4bn for missile defence, including the much-vaunted Iron Dome, and $1.2bn for the Iron Beam; and $3.5bn to help Israel buy weapons. There are also provisions to make it easier to supply Israel with US munitions held in other countries.
What is what.
If you can have all the information that’s out there, crunch it into some kind of algorithm, that you can then target discriminately, proportionately.
The idea that machines are going to replace humans in wars is fundamentally untrue.
We are seeing this to a certain extent right now, in Palestinian/Israel war with Ai deciding who and how to kill. Both wars are is very much a battle of machines and soldiers, a high technology-driven conflict.
Where you can attack, use some surgically precise weapons, take care of the problem, eliminate your opponent and then extract yourself from a situation, has actually turned into a quagmire with new super weapons, whether it be cyber information warfare or artificial intelligence everyone wants to be ahead of the curve, right?
However, this approach also overshadows political considerations, including the causes of conflicts, obscures the costs of conflict, and creates illusions of quick and easy victories—all of which has led to two decades of war in the twenty-first century.
One of the problems here is this idea that you can simply solve problems by targeting them with cruise missiles, is simply not the case.
The belief that technology can help prevent war by creating a deterrent, is an illusion.
Wars will never be able to solve the difficult and complex political and cultural problems on the ground. Weapons can help produce ceasefires, but they cannot themselves create long-lasting, established peace.
Essentially, the idea that science can produce technologically advanced weapons so horrible that no one will ever want to fight is farcical. If we are ever going to get rid of war military culture it must be understood that it does not exist in isolation.
Through the use of technology WE GOING TO CREATE WARS.
The rush to apply cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence to military systems is well under way. A new breed of techno-evangelists, many of whom stand to make billions if we go down the high tech path they are so aggressively promoting.
The application of science to unpick the supposedly immutable principles of warfare, making conflicts shorter and more humane, or eliminating the need for large-scale campaigns, found a home in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Such views reached their zenith with the advent of nuclear weapons and the logic of deterrence.
Importantly, technology-based approach emerges as a counter to the deterrence-based approach. Although nuclear weapons had made war unlikely, given the risks of mass casualties and devastation.
There is a need for much greater restraint in making assumptions as to what ends can be achieved militarily. Replacing people with machines on the battlefield, will not result in ‘clean’ conflicts.
Where there may be feelings of anger and betrayal, or even a sense of exhaustion, not uncovering the truth may lead to conspiracy or a turn to an engineering-infused idealism—that smarter systems will produce better results next time.
High-tech wars transfers the risk from soldiers to civilians.
It envisions the military drawing on US advanced technologies, such as AI, cyber resources, unmanned systems and machine learning to offset or create an overmatch of adversarial capabilities. Reducing the time that it takes from identifying a target to destroying it (known as the “kill chain”) and diminishing or eliminating human input could be a recipe for unprecedented disaster.
The Ukraine war is been used as a proof of concept for their systems, and a marketing tool to boot – after all, what’s more attractive than buying “battle proven” technology?
Revelations that Israel has used AI not to spare civilians but to step up the rate and scope of its devastation of Gaza is just the latest example of why we need to think twice before acquiescing in the rush towards a world dominated by automated warfare.
Between 2019 and 2022, U.S. military and intelligence agencies awarded major tech firms contracts with ceilings worth at least $53 billion combined. Resulting in large military contracts to big tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
The idea that America alone has the ability (and the duty) to protect the world’s democratic societies; and a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a largely unregulated free market that prioritizes corporate needs is a farce. It is on the verge of losing an epic struggle for global geopolitical and economic supremacy—unless it can outpace China in the ‘AI arms race.
U.S. government for Israel’s war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has suggested can plausibly be considered a case of genocide.
Russia’s or Israeli nuclear status means that NATO countries are unlikely to become involved in direct fighting given the risk of escalation.
The time to act is now, because nobody has any idea if we have cyborg fighting wars.
There is another response in play when there is a perceived threat to survival. Physical harm, threats to property used for protection, threats to self value that erode a desire to survive come from the Caveman part of our brain that dictate the innate need to run, hide, fight. As to what is coming next is anyone’s guess.
My guess is that it will be self-help.
Physical aggression and violence dictate fear. the use of run, hide, fight.
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≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY SAYS; ENTERTAINMENT IS NOW BEYOND THE PALE. WHAT CONSITUTES ENTERTAINMENT? WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? IS THERE ANY LINE TO BE DRAWEN?
Even as violence is a concept that has long accompanied humanity, it is no easy task to make sense of what it is, or how it is exercised.
Ancient Romans flocked to carnage in the Colosseum.
Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone.
Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history.
The relationship between violent media and real-world violence has been the subject of extensive debate and considerable academic research, yet the core question is far from answered.
Portrayals of violence can manufacture our consent with government policies, encourage us to endorse the legitimacy of state power and state violence, and help determine who are “worthy victims”.
Results from the two studies suggest that socialization models of media violence may be inadequate to our understanding of the interaction between media and consumer behaviour at least in regard to serious violence.
Our media outlets from News to Gaming – Movies – Net flicks – Social Media – are saturated with violence.
More than 100 million people watched the gory Netflix show, Squid Game.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice wins Game Beyond entertainment.
This is a bit like benign masochism, the enjoyment of aversive, painful experiences in a safe context.
Whether or not screen violence is bad for us has been extensively studied and there are reasons to reconsider how much we like watching violence per se.
For example, violence creates tension and suspense, which may be what people find appealing. Another possibility is that it is action, not violence, which people enjoy. That it is violence being deemed off-limits that makes it appealing. It may be that it is justified punishment, rather than violence, that we enjoy watching.
All this suggests that media companies may be giving us violence that many of us don’t want or need.
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We should hence consider what other corporate, political or ideological pressures may be encouraging onscreen violence globally causing us to become disconnected with reality.
Movies lie about the real impact of violence on the human body – with almost 90% of violent actions showing no realistic physical consequences to the victim.
The west won the world not by the superiority of its ideas … but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.
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The question of how humans came to be domesticated — at the will of a deity, independently, as some sort of evolved trait — has plagued philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years.
It is tempting to try to answer this question by invoking biology and genetics, arguing that humanity is wired to be violent.
Whether humans will ever live in a violent-free, as digital technologies—such as social media platforms—become increasingly central to our daily existence they have become essential components in how violence is enacted and experienced. Indeed, as access to and use of social media continue to expand across the world so does the violence enacted through these digital platforms become more common.
For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news and watch murder in all its forms.
What lies behind these episodes. Perhaps, some have argued, our intelligence and systems of culture, such as laws and social norms, are all that are holding that innate violence in check.
How good and evil may have come to co-exist in our unique species. Are humans, by nature, good or evil? The question has split opinions since people began philosophising. We have a low propensity for impulsive aggression, and a high propensity for premeditated aggression.
It raises a deeper question: Why did such an unusual combination of virtue and violence evolve?
A deeper understanding of how and why violence emerges, or doesn’t, might help us achieve a less violent future—or at least one in which we can better comprehend and manage our violence.
41% of people in the United States of America have suffered online harassment, from physical threats (14%) and sexual harassment (11%) to name-calling (31%).
But violence in digital environments is not only expanding, it is also becoming more complex as the evolving affordances, structures, and cultures of contemporary digital environments increase their scale, speed, reach, and visibility (Backe et al., 2018).
For instance, violence on social media is found in the new ways cultural and informational wars are enacted and deployed in the United States filled with school shootings and mugging and terrorist attacks and wars.
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It is a widespread phenomenon that directly or indirectly affects many aspects of our lives.
Nonetheless, digital manifestations of violence are often thought to be less “real,” “serious,” or “harmful” than those enacted face-to-face (Dunn, 2021).
Capitalism is a dirty word for many intellectuals but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
Warfare provides people with a semblance of psychological positivity in oppressed societies where other outlets are lacking.
Any stable, lasting peace depends on creating societies with a richness of opportunity and variety that can meet human needs. The fact that so many societies throughout the world fail to do this makes our future prospects of peace look very bleak.
War and other destructive capabilities are merely the flip side of the same uniquely human faculty that has enabled us to coexist peacefully, to innovate, to travel in space and shape our world.
The evolution of entertainment into a global landscape signifies a world where cultural boundaries blur, and creativity knows no limits. In today’s interconnected world, the entertainment industry has expanded its reach, influencing and captivating audiences worldwide with diverse content and experiences.
Entertainment has transcended geographical boundaries, morphing into a global phenomenon that unites people across cultures, languages, and continents.
Social media is cursed with pervasive and impactful harmful content. Can we imagine addressing only part of this violence without considering the rest?
Can we continue to feign not to see that all of these forms of violence mutually reinforce one another.
Film and television have long been seen as legitimate and powerful means to educate, inspire and empower wider society. To deliver a transformational experience beyond pure entertainment – whether that is to raise awareness through empathy and emotional impact, to engage with real world problems, or to make the world a better place.
The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future.
The past two years have seen the most conflicts of any time since the end of the Second World War.
(The list encompasses not just the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, but hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, Serbian military measures against Kosovo, fighting in Eastern Congo, complete turmoil in Sudan since April, and a fragile cease-fire in Tigray that Ethiopia seems poised to break at any time. Syria and Yemen have not exactly been quiet during this period, and gangs and cartels continuously menace governments, including those in Haiti and Mexico. All of this comes on top of the prospect of a major war breaking out in East Asia, such as by China invading the island of Taiwan.)
What happens when a smart TV becomes too smart for its own good?
The answer, it seems, is more intrusive advertisements.
Reaching beyond video to monopolise the attention of audiences in the home TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behaviour.
We are exposed to social media violence just by being there.
The amount of violent content has helped normalise aggression. The reality is that social media platforms have got a lot to answer for. In practically every situation where we’ve seen violence happen there has been some sort of connection with an online platform in some form.
Why are these social media platforms not being held to account?
Why are we so scared of asking really difficult questions and why are these social media platforms not putting more money back in the communities that are being affected by violence?
We don’t fully know the impact of social media.
But social media and the fact that something that is say in passing becomes written down, causes what might have been nothing to become something.
For most violence isn’t at all normal, but there is a proportion whose lives are far too full of violence because of inequality and poverty.
The key driver of violence.
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But what about games?
As our younger industry matures, what role should games play in reflecting and commenting on the world around us?
Already we have a number of implications that will define the future shape of the online entertainment market. As society seeks answers in the media they trust, streaming devices are now everywhere, pouring news into social media 7/7
People in entertainment, tries to make something for everyone/to make the most profit instead of making what they want, so personality and quality takes a hit.
There is definitely a cultural degradation taking place.
Violence is an almost ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary digital environments.
Games beyond entertainment.
The advent of video games raise new questions about the potential impact of media violence, since the video game player is an active participant rather than merely a viewer. Video games that involve assuming the roles of aggressors or soldiers offer players the opportunity to be “virtual perpetrators.”
Rewarding players for successfully carrying out violent behaviour.
Online gaming communities, esports tournaments, and multiplayer platforms enable players worldwide to engage, compete, and connect in virtual worlds. Digital platforms have revolutionized entertainment accessibility. Social media influencers transcend borders, shaping entertainment trends and culture on a global scale, such as cultural sensitivities, censorship, and legal barriers that can hinder the free flow of content across borders.
There are fewer empirical studies of video game violence than other forms of media violence. Still, several meta-analytic reviews have reported negative effects of exposure to violence in video games.
Content matters. much of the research into video game violence has failed to control for other variables such as mental health and family life, which may have impacted the results.
Given that effects on individual users may differ widely, policy discussion should be more focused on “more pressing” issues that influence violence in society such as poverty or mental health.
Rest assured that entertainment will need to master new forms of interactive entertainment — whether in video games, sports betting or the more social and communications-based services that thrive on smartphones — to keep audiences hooked.
There was no such thing as YouTube its their Tube.
U Tube now has a WarChannel created to appeal military enthusiasts around the world; offering viewers hours of programming on the American Civil war, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Ukraine and all.
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Why are people less imaginative?
Because we all have the internet and other high-information sources that fill in the gaps for us.
Story telling, character-building, authenticity, and originality have all gone out the window, as entertainment has become largely an industry as opposed to a genuine creative outlet.
Game makers have the opportunity – and responsibility – to offer their players an appropriate and powerful means to get close to challenging issues or subject matter.
Games are brilliant at engendering empathy by allowing you to experience the life of other people first hand. As game makers and storytellers we have the ability to take our audiences to places they haven’t been or to feel things they have yet to experience.
There’s the possibility of vertical escalation—meaning that Russia would use more advanced weapons, including nuclear weapons—on the battlefield. And there is the possibility of horizontal escalation, the war spilling over to other countries.
What if anything can be done?
Here are a few key recommendations, which includes improve regulations and legislation for social media companies, greater responsibility so tech companies are held accountable for inaction, and for young people to be involved in panels that are consulted on tackling online harms and the development of games, new content and online spaces.
Legislation in relation to social media platforms is needed, but it is one aspect in an array of required measures, including education, the need to address social inequalities, the need for transparency by companies, by governments who should be constantly aware of how fake violence on our screens serves real violence in our world.
Why?
Because exposure to media violence can desensitize people to violence in the real world.
Yes, its true that for some people, watching violence in the media becomes enjoyable and does not result in the anxious arousal that would be expected from seeing such imagery , but society as a whole is another question.
An average American youth will witness 200,000 violent acts on television before age
18. 46% of television violence occurs in cartoons.
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The prevalence and impact of violence portrayed in media and entertainment and the near-ubiquitous portrayals of violence in various forms of media must remained a topic of intense scrutiny.
Fear is what, anxiety and depression, wars, domestic violence, relationship breakdowns, child abuse, terrorism, mass shootings, self-harm and all forms of violence towards oneself and others have in common.
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