Category Archives: #whatif.com

THE BEADY EYE ASKS; DOES DEMOCRACY DEPEND UPON SOME PEOPLE BEING NON-CONFORMISTS?

15 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Covid - Passports., Covid-19 Vaccines., Post-Covid-19, Privatization

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(Six-minute read) 

THANKS TO TRACK AN TRACE millions of bits of information about each of us circulate through the internet, but our freedom and democracy don’t seem to have been substantially impacted as yet. 

We might still feel free to do as we please but will the introduction of Covid-19 passports turn us all into Dalits? ( Better known as Untouchables)

These people in the Hindu religion face discrimination and even violence from members of higher castes, or traditional social classes, particularly in terms of access to jobs, education, and marriage partners.

The concept of vaccine passports is no longer theoretical.

The premise for such passports (whether digital or otherwise) will indicate whether individuals have received A COVID-19 VACCINATION OR BEEN TESTED RECENTLY.

Are those that are not vaccinated to be marked with a yellow star.

There are also many privacy concerns to be addressed with vaccine passports that will result in benefits been distributed unequally, not removing them but perpetuating them.

We all know that data in the form of knowledge is the manner born to the digital age of algorithms.  

These days we are constantly asked by pop-ups to agree to the website’s privacy policy – us of one’s data and so on in order to personalize your experience and share your data. ( We value your privacy offers a choice – I accept or change consent – manage your choices) 

Why is this happening? 

Because the General Data Protection Regulations ( GDPR) have come into force with fines up to 20 million Euros.

How can such a privacy policy be legal?

They claim to value my privacy and I can review what they mean by that in the policy. However, at the same time, they do not commit to keeping it like that and might not “value my privacy” at any later point in time.

Now think this further.

If this clause is in fact legal, we could set up a website with a volatile privacy policy. That would be a privacy policy that changes on every visit to the website.

As an example, on the first visit, we happily tell the visitor that we do not collect any information, do not use personal information, and of course, also do not sell any kinds of data to advertising networks. However, as soon as the visitor accepted this policy (of course they are privacy-aware and read the policy), it will suddenly change to the opposite. The visitor will never be informed or even asked for consent again.

Clearly, we all place some value on privacy, but why?

We’ve seen how we use privacy as a commodity, if we can give out some of our private information and receive a bargain at the store then we call that a fair trade. 

If we use our privacy as a commodity, then we ought to think about how much we should ask for in return for our privacy. In setting that price, it would be a good idea to think about what sort of value our privacy has.

What if the situation with Covid Passports becomes considerable direr – Stigmatised for life – Contaminated from birth.

Democracy is a social good, and privacy is instrumental to that social good but we ought to think about how much we should ask for in return for our privacy. 

                                  ———————–

The non-conformist can take unpopular stances on government policy that might shine a light on issues that others hadn’t thought of. They’re the ones who get meaningful conversations going in public.

Now most of us are perfectly happy for our lives to be an open book even if there is a price to be paid.  

In setting that price, with the arrival of Covid-19 passports it would be a good idea to think about what sort of value our privacy has.

The argument for Covid -19 passports draws on the concept that people who are being watched will behave differently than people who aren’t being watched.

We don’t do things when we think it’s possible that someone is watching.

Security cameras serve this function even when they aren’t being monitored because the possibility of being watched is often enough to alter our behavior.

There is more at stake here than our preference to maintain sole control of our information. Privacy also serves as a social good.

We can use privacy to delineate our relationships with other people and we can make use of our private information in order to get those things that we want and need.

Now, it might seem like our loss of privacy is necessary to save lives but the flu kills around 650.000 of us a year. 

One thing however remains constant throughout this pandemic and the history of the world. 

WE ALL HAVE TO DIE SOMETIME. SADLY STATISTICALLY YOU ARE STILL YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY. 

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

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WHY IS IT THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO KILL A VIRUS?

04 Thursday Mar 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., COVID-19, Covid-19 Vaccines., Unanswered Questions., Viruses.

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(Twelve-minute read) 

 

Humans have been killing for thousands and thousands of years. Not just each other but almost every living thing, so why are we unable to kill viruses?

First, to kill a virus we must know what we are trying to kill.

Bacteria are not the most abundant microbes that live in and on our bodies.

That award goes to viruses.

If you think you don’t have viruses, think again.

To put it simply, when it comes to where viruses live in the human body, figuring out where they don’t live is a far better question than asking where they do.

It has been estimated that there are over 380 trillion viruses inhabiting us, a community is collectively known as the human virome.

Here’s where viruses come in.

They’ve already figured out how to kill bacteria. It’s all they live for.

Viruses are the most common biological entities on Earth.

Experts estimate there are around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, and if they were all lined up they would stretch from one side of the galaxy to the other.

So it’s clear that there’s a war being fought on our body surfaces every minute of every day, and we haven’t a clue who’s winning or what the consequences of this war might be.

The name Virus is from a Latin word meaning “slimy liquid” or “poison.”

They are microorganisms smaller than a bacterium that cannot grow or reproduce apart from a living cell.

They are not plants, animals, or prokaryotic bacteria (single-cell organisms without defined nuclei), and they are generally placed in their own kingdom.

In fact, viruses should not even be considered organisms, in the strictest sense, because they are not free-living—i.e., they cannot reproduce and carry on metabolic processes without a host cell.

Viruses must rely on a host for energy production, reproduction, and survival. It can remain inside the host for extended periods of time without causing any apparent changes in the host cell.

Viruses are quintessential parasites. They derive energy, as well as all other metabolic functions, from the host cell.

Most viruses vary in diameter from 20 nanometres (nm; 0.0000008 inches) to 250–400 nm; the largest, however, measure about 500 nm in diameter and are about 700–1,000 nm in length.

It is still traditional to divide viruses into three categories: those that infect animals, plants, or bacteria.

Antibiotics are not effective against viruses because viruses are entirely devoid of the machinery for life processes.

If you want to learn more follow the link below.  

                          https://www.britannica.com/science/virus

                                               —————————–

The resilience of viruses is what has made them such a menace throughout history remaining to this day the biggest and minuscule threats to humanity.

They don’t have to play by the same rules that living things play by.

They don’t really do anything — they’re effectively inert until they come into contact with a host cell, existing like freeloading zombies — not quite dead, yet certainly not alive.

“Viruses can be present in many locations – they can lurk in people, they can lurk in materials that are stored in freezers, they can lurk in wildlife and domestic animals – it’s really impossible to say if a virus has gone extinct.

It appears they take advantage of our bodies because our bodies are governed by our brains, which are unable to remember if they fought with a particular virus or not. So they mutate and hoodwink the immune system because our immune system is out of commission.  

So the only way to drive a virus to extinction is to eliminate it in the wild, which is an impossible task.

Regardless of whether there is a single person or animal not infected anywhere on the planet, we have to live with the virus. 

                                       —————————–

The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was reported in 1977.

Measles, smallpox, anthrax, and tuberculosis were all gifts from our farmed animals.

In 1980, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been eradicated. Currently, there is no evidence of naturally occurring smallpox transmission anywhere in the world.

Although a worldwide immunization program eradicated smallpox disease decades ago, small quantities of smallpox virus officially still exist in two research laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia, and Russia.

But what occurs at the end of a virus’s existence is only just starting to gather interest.

Why do some viruses disappear? And what happens to them?

In a nutshell, we get lucky. 

Sars was driven to extinction by a combination of sophisticated contact-tracing and the quirks of the virus itself. Other than Sars, only two other viruses have ever been driven to extinction on purpose – smallpox, and rinderpest, which affects cattle.

The war against these two viruses was won using vaccines, which are also set to eliminate polio – cases have decreased by 99% since the 1980s – and possibly eventually measles, though recently these efforts have been set back by war, the anti-vaxxer movement.

With Covid-19 the virus can’t break into just any cell in the body. Instead, one of its proteins will bind to another protein. Once the invasion takes place, the cell, in essence, is transformed into a factory that churns out hundreds and hundreds of copies of the virus making it difficult to distinguish a healthy cell from an infected one.

.  Viruses pick up errors in their genetic code as they spread, so in some cases it is possible to simply wait them out (Credit: Reuters)

We are left with speeding up viral evolution artificially with drugs that could bring some benefits.

At the heart of the plan is the biology of “RNA viruses” – a group that includes many of humanity’s most intractable pathogens, including HIV, the flu, coronaviruses, and Ebola. Their genetic material is made of RNA as opposed to DNA, which means that when they hijack their host’s machinery to copy themselves, they don’t include a “proofreading” step where they check for mistakes.

But this staggering rate of mutation is a double-edged sword.

Above a certain rate, mutations become harmful, leading to virus strains that are burdened with genetic faults that hinder their spread.

This is usually thought of as a bad thing for humans, because these mutations mean that there’s an extraordinary amount of genetic diversity among RNA viruses, allowing them to evolve rapidly – so any vaccines or drugs that target them quickly become obsolete.

However eventually, this could lead to their extinction or ours.

In the meantime, one remedy for this Catch 22 is to make a conscious effort to remind ourselves about the world before vaccines.

Here are a few to remember. 

Smallpox – HIV – Influenza – Rofavirus – Marburg – Measles – Ebola – Rabies – Hib – Hantavirus – Dengue – Sars-Cov – Sars- Coc2 – Mers -Cov – Swine Flu – Avian Flue – Whooping Cough – Mumps – Chickenpox – Diptheria – Rubella.  (Cancer is neither a bacteria nor a virus however it is known that some viruses lead to cancer or help to kill cancer.) 

The 1918 flu pandemic, which infected a third of the world’s population and killed 50 million. This strain of influenza has gone extinct along with every flu virus that existed in humans until about 120 years ago. However, every few decades, a new type of flu will evolve quietly accumulating mutations that were useless or even actively harmful to its own survival. 

In the meantime, please can we learn two obvious lessons?

First, let’s stop bringing wild animals into markets alive (if at all): viruses do not survive long in dead bodies, even if not refrigerated. It’s a cruel practice anyway.

And second, let’s keep our distance from bats. As long as there are bats, there will be zoonotic viruses. Definitely don’t eat them.

Your missions down the research rabbit hole might’ve even led you to other novel ways of killing germs: namely,  Steam and ultraviolet (UV) light.

I would say any claim that they do is false.

As for their ability to kill COVID-19, your guess is as good as anyone.

To kill a virus one must break its out shell, without harming the healthy cells around it.

Nither shaking or steaming or sticking your head in a microwave will kill a virus.

Make no mistake about it; the viruses that have evolved with us for so many years are not only part of our past but will play a significant role in the future of human health.

Get Vaccinated. 

 

The fight against Ebola in Africa has been complicated by the fact the virus continues to circulate in wild animals (Credit: Reuters)

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASK. SHOULD WE AGREED TO COVID PASSPORTS?

26 Friday Feb 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, Covid. Passports/ Digital ID.

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(Seven-minute read) 

 


COVID LIKE THE FLU IS A VIRUS IT MUTATES IT DOES NOT DISCRIMINATE, UNLIKE PASSPORTS WHICH ARE DISCRIMINATORY.

They should be fought against “tooth and nail.

They will become a backdoor to the rules yet to be made up, mutating into a wider digital identity scheme with the data more than likely to flow to third-parties with varying degrees of repurposing trustworthiness.

Even with the most privacy-preserving technology, the expectation is that health data will be viewed by different actors, from healthcare settings, employers, clients, police, and pubs to insurance companies, who may have different levels of experience and trustworthiness in handling personal data. 

For those without a passport, they will constitute a denial of liberties that others are being granted.

Such a program could potentially bring about invidious discrimination against racial and ethnic groups and stigma against an uninfected individual fracturing the solidarity of societies so the introduction of a vaccine passport or any such document that would deem someone “immune” goes beyond just the obvious challenge of logistics.

Why?

By replicating existing inequities, the use of immunity passports would exacerbate the harm inflicted by COVID-19 on already vulnerable populations.

The choice is not between returning to a normal life versus issuing immunity passports. Instead, the choice is between periodic lockdowns, attempting to emerge from lockdowns with immunity passports, and attempting to emerge from lockdowns without immunity passports.

First, a strong presumption should be in favor of preserving people’s free movement if at all feasible.

Passports or Digital IDs will eventually be weaponized creating coercive and stigmatizing work environments and are more likely to compound than redress…structural disadvantages and…social stigmatization.

In either form they will create a perverse incentive for individuals to seek out infection or choose to fraudulently acquire passports permitting immune individuals to exercise more freedoms than those who are not immune would undermine the message that we are “all in this together”

Although we recognize the deep existing inequalities in all countries and the ways in which COVID-19 has increased the hardships for the worst off they will turn the population into products to be are traced and tracked with employees risking losing their jobs if they don’t get vaccinated.

The advantages accruing to those with immunity (and immunity passports) would persist into the future. 

                                           —————————-

Faced with a deep economic recession/ depression governments around the world are considering the use of immunity passports to allow a degree of normality to return.

It is unethical to require someone to avoid contact with others if they pose no or minimal risk of spreading the virus. I acted in the belief that I was immune.

Some have claimed that “the whole point of immunity passports is to control movement”.  However, this claim is a gross mischaracterization: the point of immunity passports is to facilitate movement when it is safe to do so.

The root of the concern for many is the unknown degree to which past infection confers future immunity. Until it is understood whether or not people can be reinfected with the disease, and how long any immunity lasts, the move to issuing covid passport is premature.

For certificates or any form of passport to work internationally, they must be recognized by countries around the world.

COVID jabs certificates are readily available to creative forgers to copy.

Individuals who are immune to SARS-CoV-2 are expected to be at a vastly reduced risk of getting and transmitting the virus, and so removing their civil liberties would be unjustified.

The main argument for their issue is that it is unethical to restrict freedom unless there is a real risk to other people.

We have the technology to decide who is not a risk, we should use it.

Whether immunity passports should be used to reliably identify immune individuals it would be better to look for solutions to the inequitable distribution of resources and to tackle the upstream causes of inequality.

This same reasoning should be applied to immunity passports.

Furthermore, as some have highlighted, the advantages of COVID-19 immunity might not entrench existing inequalities in the way often assumed. We might wish to certify only those who are unlikely to transmit the virus.

The U.K., now shut out of the E.U. thanks to Brexit, is considering its own brand of immunity proof that would allow vaccinated people to go to restaurants, pubs, and—if other countries allow—the airport.

The safety-first mentality could spread into almost every area of modern life. When it does, there’s no telling where it will lead – this is murky territory that will develop into an app.

Everyone’s vaccination status is already being logged centrally by the National Immunisation Vaccination System using their NHS number. This information could be easily linked with an app.

Will, there use be legal or illegal?

That’s the crucial, still unanswered question.

Unless such discrimination is ruled out under the law, we can expect more of it.

The moral quandary is the same: Is vaccine ID a harmless tool that creates a safer society — or a sudden expansion of a surveillance state?

God forbid if I am ever asked to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am. I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS: ITS TO LATE TOO REGULATE ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE – SO WHAT IF ANYTHING CAN BE DONE?

18 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Digital Friendship., Disconnection., Emotions., Face Recognition., Facebook, Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Google, Inequality, Lock Down., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, POST COVID-19., Quantum computers., Reality., Robot citizenship., Social Media, Social Media Regulation., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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  ( A Thirty-minute read)  Do you have a right to believe what you want? Yes, of course, but we now live in an Algorithmic driven world that is blurring the boundaries and amplifying the social tensions that are festering under the surface.  The problem is that we are allowing the building of technologies, that are making consequential decisions about people’s lives. AI is shaping people’s lives on a daily basis, but it’s an open question whether AI will become a trusted advisor or even a corrupting force.

It’s not COVID-19 that will kill us all its Profit-seeking algorithms.

However, here in this post, my main concern is whether the AI techniques will develop into quantum algorithms that will be totally out of control.  If artificial general intelligence is on the not too distant horizon, surely we should be ensuring that it is not owned by anyone corporation and that at its core it respects our core values. To achieve this we cannot surely let wealth be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, or to be let to the marketplace, or any world organization that is not totally transparent and self-financing. We therefore as a matter of grave urgency need a new world organization that vets all technology, and algorithms. (See previous posts) As long as the ALGORITHMS don’t go to war with each other and cause something even more difficult to diagnose than a crash on the stock markets they are safe is as naive as saying ” It’s going to be Great.” AlGORITHMS are increasingly in charge of a world that is precious to us all. Basically, we’re entering the era of machines controlling everything. If we want to create new different societies with human dignity for all we need to do something about it. The difficulty of predicting the future is not just a cliche, it’s a basic fact of our existence. Part of the hypothesis of Singularity is that this difficulty is just going to get worse and worse. Yes, creating AGI ( Artificial General Intelligence) is a big and difficult goal, but according to known science, it is almost surely an achievable one. However, there are sound though not absolutely confident arguments that it may well be achievable within our lifetimes. If artificial general intelligence is on the not too distant horizon, surely we should be ensuring that it is not owned by anyone corporation and that at its core it respects our core values. If we think in months we focus on immediate problems such as the present-day wars, the Covid crisis, the Donald Trumps, the economy, if we think in decades, climate, growing inequality, the loss of jobs to automation are all presenting dangers. But if we look at life in total, science is converging on data processing and AI that is developing itself with algorithms. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. It won’t be long before we will not be unable to distinguish the real world from the virtual world. Since there is only one real world and there can be infinite virtual worlds the probability that you will inhabit this sole world is zero.  So it won’t matter whether computers will be conscious or not. Is starting to feel like it’s every man for himself, Is possible that right now, a global crisis is upon us, Without even knowing… And the virus may not be the biggest threat, but the crisis that follows, Everyday goods that keep us alive will be gone, I’m talking, food, freshwater, medicine, clothes, fuel… Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness and soon rather than later it will be consigned to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Smartphones, and the like to make decisions that are not possible to reverse.  You might think that the above is stupid but it won’t be long before we will be witnessing the most unequal societies in history.                                  —————————— We humans will soon be living with robots that process data without any subjective experiences or consciousness or moral opprobrium. As we watch robots, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence machines, and the like slowly (and sometimes rapidly) permeate our world, it’s not hard to imagine them going from permeating to taking over. Algorithms are increasingly determining our collective future. It will only matter what they think about you. We are already halfway towards a world where algorithms run everything. This is why many of the issues raised in this post will require close monitoring, to ensure that the oversight of machine learning-driven algorithms continues to strike an appropriate and safe balance between recognizing the benefits (for healthcare and other public services, for example, and for innovation in the private sector) and the risks (for privacy and consent, data security and any unacceptable impacts on individuals).                                     —————————— WHAT CAN GOVERNMENTS DO?  Please regulate AI, this is too dangerous. Given the international nature of digital innovation, governments, should establish audits of algorithms, introducing certification of algorithms, and charging ethics boards with oversight of algorithmic decisions. Why? They are bringing big changes in their wake. From better medical diagnoses to driverless cars, and within central governments where there are opportunities to make public services more effective and achieve long-term cost savings. However, the Government should produce, publish, and maintain a list of where algorithms with significant impacts are being used within the Central Government, along with projects underway or planned for public service algorithms, to aid not just private sector involvement but also transparency. Governments should not just simply accept what the developers of algorithms offer in return for data access. To this end, Governments should be at the forefront of the creation of a “statutory building code”, which describes mandatory safety and quality requirements for digital platforms. Social networks should be required by law to release details of their algorithms and core functions to trusted researchers, in order for the technology to be vetted. This Law should enable the enforcement of, 
  • forcing social networks to disclose in the news feed why content has been recommended to a user.
  • limiting the use of micro-targeting advertising messages.
  • making it illegal to exclude people from content on the basis of race or religion, such as hiding a spare room advert from people of color.
  • banning the use of so-called dark patterns – user interfaces designed to confuse or frustrate the user, such as making it hard to delete your account.
  • labeling the accounts of state-controlled news organizations.
  • limiting how many times messages can be forwarded to large groups, as Facebook does on WhatsApp.
If we took the premise that people should have a lawful right to be manipulated and deceived, we wouldn’t have rules on fraud or undue influence.                                 ———————————– To days Algorithms and where we are. As data accumulates, even more so now with Covid- 19 track and trace, and now working from home we have more centralized data depositories and large centralized AI models that work off centralized or decentralized data. How does the concentration of power affect this balance that impinges on individual liberty? Our democratic institutions and public discourse are underpinned by an assumption that we can at least agree on things that are true. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube create algorithms that promote and highlight information. That is an active engineering decision. Regardless of whether Facebook, Twitter profits from hate or not, it is a harmful by-product of the current design and there are social harms that come from this business model. Platforms that monetize user engagement have a duty to their users to make at least a minimum effort to prevent clearly identified harms. We have to focus on the responsibility of platforms. Because people are being manipulated with objectively false information, there has to be some kind of accountability for platforms. Currently, these platforms are not neutral environments they have no common understanding that there are certain things that are manifestly true with algorithms making decisions about what people see or do not see. In most Western democracies, you do have the freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is not an entitlement to reach. You are free to say what you want, within the confines of hate speech, libel law, and so on. But you are not entitled to have your voice artificially amplified by technology. The way Facebook and other platforms approach this problem is: We’ll wait and see and figure out a problem when it emerges. Every other industry has to have minimum safety standards and consider the risks that could be posed to people, through risk mitigation and prevention. There are right now some objectively disprovable things spreading quite rapidly on Facebook. For example, that Covid does not exist and that the vaccine is actually to control the minds of people. These are all things that are manifestly untrue, and you can prove that. However, algorithms are much more prevalent than that- the Apple Face ID algorithm decides whether you are who you say you are. Algorithms limit people’s worldview, which can allow large population groups to be easily controlled. Social Media algorithms tuned to your desires and want’s ensures that everything on your feed will be of interest to you without you knowing what data these algorithms use and what they aim for. Conclusion.  We are already living with large AI platforms that are monopolizing the fruits of globalization with billions being left behind. With us accepting this as if natural.
  • It will be too late when we are asking ourselves. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness? Then ask yourselves what happens to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
  • Whatever view one takes on artificial intelligence ethics. You can rest assured that we will see far more nut cases blowing themselves up, far more wars over finite resources, with vast movements of people.
We have to remember that self-regulation is not the same as having no regulation. Of course, the loudest arguments for and against something often have one thing in common. They are often made by people with no desire to compromise or understand the other side. I think self-regulation, in and of itself contemplates people in power, deciding how they will act. We have to accept from history that we cannot possibly predict all adverse consequences of technology and that’s because it is not just technology that has adverse consequences, but the context in which is applied, It is impossible to regulate AI while thinking about all of its potential adverse consequences.  The seeds for harm at the design stage, or at the development stage, or at the deployment stage. We don’t have to wait for the technology to become an application before we think of regulating it effectively.  There is a need to strengthen specific provisions to safeguard individual liberty and community rights when it comes to inferred data. There is a need to balance the trade-offs between the utility of AI and protecting privacy and data.  Self-regulation within the AI industry may not be enough since it may not solve the massive differential between the people developing the technology and the people affected by it. Machine learning is the next step that they are aiming for, with the algorithms deciding the input and output completely. Inherent political and economic power hierarchies between the state and citizens and within the private sector need to be addressed because the promise of globalization is a lie when it comes to AI and prosperity for all. Algorithms are being used in an ever-growing number of areas, in ever-increasing ways, however, like humans, they can produce bias in their results, even if unintentional. We are all becoming redundant with biotechnology becoming only available to the riches of us. I don’t think that AI per se can be regulated because today it is AI, tomorrow it will be Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality, and the day after tomorrow it may be something that we can’t even think of right now. So it is important to have checks and balances in the use and access to AI that go beyond just technological means. Why? Because they are also moving into areas where the benefits to those applying them may not be matched by the benefits to those subject to their ‘decisions’—in some aspects of the criminal justice system, for example. However, technology companies are not all the same, and nor is technology the only part of the media ecosystem. It is essential to ensure a whole society response to tackle these important issues. You could require algorithms to have a trigger TO SHUT OF – to stop misinformation or terrorist groups using social media as a recruiting platform. BUT who defines what counts as misinformation? It is no longer possible for humans to fact-check so the only course of action is a world Independent Universal Algorithm that is designed to establish fairness.  While “fairness” is much vaguer than “life or death,” I believe it can – and should – be built into all AI using their algorithm. Therefore every Social network should display a correction to every single person who was exposed to misinformation if independent fact-checkers identify a story as false. (Google’s search algorithm is more closely guarded than classified secret documents with  Google Algorithm’s that now owns most of the largest data sets in the world stored in its cloud.)                                        ——————– We now have algorithms fighting with each other for supremacy on the market, prey on other algorithms in order to blunder the world exchanges for profit to such an extent that they now effectively in control of capitalism.  Take for instance, when someone says algorithmic trading, it covers a vast subject not just buying and selling large volumes of shares automatically at very high speeds by unsupervised learning algorithms. There are four major types of trading algorithms.  There are:
  • Execution algorithms
  • Behavior exploitative algorithms
  • Scalping algorithms
  • Predictive algorithms
Transparency must be a key underpinning for algorithm accountability. Why? Because it will make it easier for the decisions produced by algorithms to be explained.  (The ‘right to explanation’ is a key part of achieving accountability and tackling the ethical implications around AI.) We are only on the outskirts of mind science that presently knows little about how the mind works never mind consciousness.  We have no idea how a collection of electric brain signals creates subjective experiences however we are conscious of our dreams. 99% of our bodily activities take place without any conscious feelings. As neuroscientists acquired more and more data about the workings of the brain, cognitive sciences, and their stated purpose is to combine the data from numerous disciplines so as better to understand such diverse phenomena as perception, language, reasoning, and consciousness. Even so, the subjective essence of “what it means” to be conscious remains an issue that is very difficult to address scientifically. To really understand what is meant by the cognitive neurosciences, one must recall that until the late 1960s, the various fields of brain research were still tightly compartmentalized. Brain scientists specialized in fields such as neuroanatomy, neurohistology, neuroembryology, or neurochemistry. Nobody was yet working with the full range of investigative methods available, but eventually, the very complexity of the subject at hand-made that a necessity. The first problem that arises when examining consciousness is that a conscious experience is truly accessible only to the person who is experiencing it. Despite the vast knowledge we have gained in the field of mathematics and computer science, none of the data processing systems we have created needs subjective experiences in order to function. None feel pain, pleasure, anger, or love. These emotions are vanishing into algorithms that are or will have an effect on how we see the world but also how we live in it.   If not address now all moral and political values will disappear, turning consciousness into a kind of mental pollution. After all, computers have no minds. Take images on Instagram they can affect mental health and body image.  You might say so what that has always been the case. And you would be right up to now but because of Covid-19 government has given themselves wide-ranging powers to collect and analyze data, without adequate safeguards. If we are not careful they will have no notion of self, existing only in the present unaware of the past or future, and therefore will be unable to consciously plan for future eventualities. Unconscious algorithms in our brains rather than conscious images in a mind. If you are using a smartphone, it indirectly means that you are enjoying the AI knowingly or unknowingly. It cannot be modified unknowingly or can’t get disfigured or breakdown in a hostile environment. We should not be regulating technology but Artificial Intelligence. It is so complicated in behavior we need to be regulated it at the data level. In lots of regulated domains, there is this notion of post-market surveillance, which is where the developer bears the responsibility of how the technology developed by them is going to be used. As William Shakespeare wrote in – As you Like it.   ” All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and entrances. ”   Sadly with AI, Machine Learning Algorithms no one knows or for that matter will ever know when they enter or exit. Probably like AI learning is actually an ongoing process that takes place throughout all of life. It’s the process of moving information from out there — to here. Unfortunately with the brain, has its own set of rules by which it learns best, unlike AI, the information doesn’t always stick. Together, we have a lot to learn. Humanity is in contact with humanity.   All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the cloud bin.        

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THE BEADY ASKS. JUST HOW CLEVER DO YOU THINK THE HUMAN RACE IS?

12 Friday Feb 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Life., Pandemic, Post-Covid-19, Reality., Renewable Energy., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The essence of our humanity., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Twenty to Thirty-minute read)

Do not read this if you are depressed or are easily depressed.

If you do read it try not to click the moron like button, but comment.  

We, humans, believe that we are the most intelligent beings on the planet. 

We believed that are superior to the animals due to our exclusive ability to reason.

In simple terms, this comes about when we select only the ‘survivors’ – those that outperformed the rest, whether people, machines, or companies – and come to conclusions based on their attributes, without looking more broadly at the whole dataset, including those with similar characteristics that failed to perform as well.

Our collective ingenuity has got us into the mess of Climate Change and now a Pandemic that is not just killing us but shining a light on our collective stupidity.

The Earth’s carrying capacity could absorb our endless acts of stupidity. 

So to answer this question one could go back over the history of humanity and pick out numerous examples since man emerged from his cave.

From the Nuclear bomb to stepping on the moon. From Michelangelo to Albert Enstine. From the Stone age to the Tec age we have put greed and power before looking after what we had in the first place – Earth. 

                                       ————————

As there is no escaping our interconnected world in this post I want to address the origins of Planetary realism when it comes to that interconnection.

Why?

Because we are now engaged in two possible futures for the world, the worst or the best. 

Are we going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot?

or  

Are we going to recognize that Human DNA is too similar to split us into subspecies or races of stupidity?  

Can we act like one? 

I firmly believe we know enough to solve our problems, I just doubt we have the collective will to work together to get the job done. We should be much better than our collective selves.

We have to start accepting our common vulnerability and therefore our common interest instead of just National Interests which is paramount to decisions that have to be on a global scale.    

When the stakes are high, we want those making decisions – whether they be machines or human, to be correct, trustworthy, and responsible.

However, now we are handing these decisions more and more to machine learning algorithms and neural nets. 

We implicitly grant artificial intelligence a degree of agency that not only overstates its true abilities but robs us of our own autonomy... It is always humans who choose whether or not to abdicate this authority, to empower some piece of technology to intervene on our behalf. It would be a mistake to presume that this transfer of authority involves a simultaneous absolution of responsibility. It does not.

Perhaps technology can be correct. But can it be trustworthy and responsible?

While it’s hard to judge even if another person is trustworthy or responsible, it may be even harder to judge something that thinks in such radically different ways as humans.

We once viewed ourselves as the only creature with emotions, morality, culture, which is not true, they can be found in the animal kingdom. 

Confucius:

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

This is to say that intelligence is the ability to recognize our weaknesses and one of our greatest weaknesses is the impenetrable barrier now being created right in front of our eyes between Artificial Intelligence and Capitalist Greed. 

If we measure the IQ of AI it would be against its capabilities of reasoning and its problem-solving ability and nothing else.

Rational thinking and intelligence don’t tend to go hand in hand. 

This measurement doesn’t measure curiosity or creativity.

Unlike the robotic world, people desperately believe they’re smart because they desperately want to see themselves as smart and sometimes because they really can’t tell.

Most of us measure our IQ as being five points higher than it actually is.

Thinking AI might work in the same way as a human brain is not only misleading but dangerous.

Up to now AI only takes orders and does not think by itself so there is a massive disconnect from biological networks. They, that is AI lacks some crucial components essential to navigating the real world…. they do recreate something like human intelligence that has the ability to analyze all matters from multiple angles while not or never will be prepared to take on responsible decision making.  

In short, Dunning and Kruger discovered that the less intelligent you are, the more confident you’re likely to be that you know what you’re doing and the more likely you are to be wrong. Being unsure, in this context, is often a mark of intelligence.

Without being curious, an intelligent person won’t ever use their intelligence to learn and form new ideas.

At the same time, a person without curiosity it seems, be less likely to question themselves or the world around them in the first place. As a result, it seems they would also be unlikely to ever use what intelligence they had to learn new things and question their own misperceptions.

But AI is learning to manipulate human behavior, creating more problems for the world. 

Of course, there is just one thing that nags away at the average man or woman in the street in amongst all this academic and government research and analysis, how safe is AI going to be for me – can I trust big business and government to behave ethically? 

It is already exploiting vulnerabilities in ways people make choices. Click like and the AI steer you towards particular actions by filtering your choices. 

WE now have  “behavioral modification empires.”

The purpose of organizations such as Google and Facebook ceased to be building connections, and instead became about adapting your habits and thought patterns in the name of profit.

With so much misguided thought and active disinformation online, it has become difficult for people with insight worth sharing to do so. Behind the anonymity of the web, anyone can claim to be an expert. When everybody is an expert, nobody is.

In other words, the AI learns how people make choices.

Broad, anonymous social networks breed collective stupidity.

This has enormous ramifications for the future as AI could be used to steer people away from stupid choices or to make them.  

AI can outwit us on the virtual battlefield so let’s not put them in charge of the real thing.

This is already happing with drones that identify, track and kill people without any human intervention. They have no moral capability to decide who lives or who dies, no empathy no compassion. 

However, if a machine can beat us at a game does it make them more intelligent than us?  

Despite the many warning raised not only will we see robots fighting wars they will be planning them too. 

David Dunning and Justin Kruger, “The miscalibration of the incompetent stem from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

This goes directly into how people view themselves and their abilities. For instance, most people think they’re above average when that literally cannot be true.

In any leadership role, you’ve got to establish trust.

It’s trusting that the person is going to do things and trusting that they’re telling the truth and being upfront and honest.

But how you go about doing that virtually is a little different – it’s a different skill set.

We have seen that Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter transform Donald Trump into one of the worst presidents of the USA and a proud country England into a whaling nation of Nigel Farage has beings.

Because of our collective stupidity, social media transformed both into remote winners with lies.

Therefore it is reasonable to say that with the current Coivd-19 Pandemic that hopefully, people are now more likely to be seen based on what they actually do, not based on who they are.

Why?

Because they simply don’t translate into anointing leaders by virtual leadership.

Neither of them got better at the skills, such as reasoning from given data. Indeed smart people are more prone to silly mistakes because of blind spots in how they use logic.

                                       ———————–

Considering the benefits accruing from AI.

Let’s start with how much data we produce globally.  

It’s about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced every day in the world. 

Next, if you Googled “how much energy do Google’s servers use?”  

Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot. An estimate in 2017 claimed that the amount of power required to run Google’s servers is 2.26 million megawatts per year – enough to keep 200,000 homes going for the same time. 

Facebook, in contrast, uses a wee bit more than Google, at about 3.43 million megawatts per year. Between them and Google they could power over 20% of the houses in Scotland.

When we come to the internet as a whole, it uses a bit more than 10% of the world’s energy consumption. 

All electricity generation systems have a ‘carbon footprint’, that is, at some points during their construction and operation carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted.  Then again all electricity generation technologies emit CO2 at some point during their life cycle. None of these technologies is entirely ‘carbon-free’.

While the energy involved in all bitcoin transactions in one year is 77.78 terawatt-hours – equivalent to the entire electrical consumption of Chile.

It’s no wonder that even without co2 emissions have climate change. 

We are going to have to find a way to generate more electricity to power the economies and societies of the future, but in a manner that doesn’t wreck the planet.

There is a saying that “Mad dogs and English men go out in the noonday sun.” 

Did you know the sun produces the equivalent of 38,460 SEPTILLION watts – that’s 3.846 x 1026 watts) PER SECOND.  That’s almost enough to power a Metallica gig.

So you would think that it is a no-brainer that we have solar panels to enable everyone to use this source of energy by giving nonrepayable grants to every home to install them.  To stop Co2 emissions. We have to fit our species into the energy flow of its biosphere.

That is the meaning of life in case you are so stupid still looking for a meaning. 

Instead, we have Paris Climate change conferences promises and the forthcoming Glasgow Zome dribble turning CO2 into a product – for profit.  

Introducing more change to Be-IT

One thing is certain:

The original purpose of the internet has been lost. It set the stage for a technological revolution that could harness human intelligence and advance our shared knowledge.

Its click-baiting algorithms and lack of regulation have brought with them chaos.

As social media came to dominate the landscape, it made using the internet for the purpose of collective intelligence increasingly difficult.

The rise of social media was supposed to bring us closer together but instead, I argue, it has done the opposite.

A system based on generating clicks and interactions has created an environment for the outlandish and bizarre to flourish, with expertise falling by the wayside. With so much content being generated, how can experts possibly stand out from the crowd?

Machines and AI are great, but we have to retain some capacity to think for ourselves. 

No matter how algorithms are retrained they will continue to impact the millions who use them.

The results will be that AI over time, will not categorize people into races on traits it thinks are most important – but into stupid or clever. 

For obvious reasons, this year is different.

The pandemic has, of course, transformed how most workplace in-person teams are now all or partially digital operations in the wake of the pandemic, removing Joe Soap from any say about the Future.

At the moment we have a warlike philosophy – if we continue to develop AI it might not overtake our individual stupidity but our collective stupidity, putting our very existence in danger.

Tech should never be any more than a tool that helps us to bring out the best in humanity. Many of the issues we throw billions at and attempt to solve with technology could be easily achieved if we were able to better utilize our collective intelligence.

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

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS: FORWARD TO THE WORLD CLIMATE CHANGE GATERING IN SCOTLAND IN NOVEMBER 2021

31 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Climate Change., Covid-19 Vaccines., Disaster Capitalism., How to do it., Humanity., Our Common Values., POST COVID-19., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Five-minute read) 



We are coming up to another god-wobbling Climate Change gathering in Scotland which by any account will be A ZOME GATHERING because of COVID-19 on the 1 – 12 November 2021.

This one is the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26).

A two-week showcase as to why the world is unable to come together to tackle the problems of climate change.  Remember that these conferences started in the 90th. 

chimney

 

This one is likely to include demonstrations of virtual reality technology; showcasing innovation helping to tackle global climate change and probably like the others will archive little or nothing. 

Why? 

Because they produce nonbinding promises without addressing the main problem of how or who is going to finance the changes needed.   

We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted to a global scale, with unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health threats.

The coronavirus pandemic may lead to a deeper understanding of the ties that bind us on a global scale., and there are, to a certain degree, parallels that can be drawn between the current COVID-19 pandemic and some of the other contemporary crises our world is facing. All require a global-to-local response and long-term thinking.

All need to be guided by science and need to protect the most vulnerable among us, and all require the political will to make fundamental changes when faced with existential risks. They all need Money. 

It’s rational for an individual country not to drastically reduce greenhouse gases, given most economies are heavily based on energy resources that emit them. Yet, if all nations act that way — indeed, that’s what’s happening — most countries would eventually be worse off due to the cumulative impacts of all our emissions, not to mention the hoarding of covid-19 vaccines.  

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Covid -19 is real and that Climate Change will wreak havoc on the planet. BOTH ARE ALREADY DOING SO.

Covid-19 has brought the entire world economy to its knees in a matter of weeks during a pandemic that scientists warned us would come.

While enacting policies today to cut greenhouse gas emissions won’t have a discernible impact on global warming for decades, if not centuries. That’s because we have already locked in significant warming due to our historical emissions. Unlike other policies, climate change is cumulative. The longer we wait to address it, the bigger the problem it becomes and the harder it gets to solve, fueling a feedback loop that makes solutions ever more difficult.

Although global emissions were not as high as last year, they still amounted to about 39 billion tonnes of CO2.  Covid-19 has changed this narrative to one that involves avoiding a rebound in emissions. 

The bottom line: Big climate policy would have to offer concrete benefits outside of its impact on emissions — think jobs or energy security — to overcome this time disconnect.

The bottom line: We are the first generation of humans to start paying the price for a warmer world, and we are also the first to face costs as we try to address it.

We’re paying now and later.

  • Cost No. 1: Responding to flooding, heatwaves, and other extreme weather that climate change is often making worse.
  • Cost No. 2: Enacting policies to reduce emissions, which would come in the form of higher fossil-fuel costs today.
  • Cost No. 3 will continue for decades, if not centuries, even in addition to Cost No. 2.
  • This is because of the aforementioned time disconnect: the amount of warming locked in already has also locked in associated costs — which will come in the form of not just money, but also health, lives, and nature losses.


This just might be the world’s greatest collective action problem, which is when rational, self-interested decisions of individuals make the circumstances of the group worse, and vice versa

Imagine getting taxed before you put that money into your fund and then not living long enough to reap the payoffs of your fund. That’s happening with climate change, on a global scale.

Even though climate change presents a slower, more long-term health threat, an equally dramatic and sustained shift in behavior will be needed to prevent irreversible damage.

When we eventually overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, we can hopefully hold on to that sense of shared humanity in order to rebuild our social and economic systems to make them better, more resilient, and compassionate

Joe Biden’s climate plan promises net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Biden would be pushing 110 years old when he’d have to check (likely from the afterlife) on how his policy did. I’ll be 65. How old will you be?

Essentially all organisms use weather cues to guide their lives, and when these change and fracture everyone takes a hit.

As I have said in previous posts there is only one way to finance the changes.

That is by making a profit for profit sake pay, by placing a World Aid Commission of 0.05% on all activities that are not sustainable. ( See previous posts.)  

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

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. IS IT TIME TO STOP ANONYMITY ON THE INTERNET.?

20 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Artificial Intelligence., Communication., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Democracy., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disconnection., Fake News., Freedom, Freedom of Speech, How to do it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Modern Day Communication., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Social Media, Social Media Regulation., Technology, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Internet., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Ten-minute read) 

Since the internet was in its infancy, the rights of users to use it to express their opinions were sacrosanct.

However, there is a price for “free” internet, and that we’ve given up more of ourselves than we ever intended to.

Concern already exists that Facebook and similar social media platforms act as echo chambers that validate opinions we already hold – fuelling precisely the type of extreme views that Facebook says it has a right to edit.

Might this new position simply result in more fake news?

The Internet has and is empowering masses of people by access to world-wide information sources, education, and communication but what is now considered permissible and acceptable online is shifting.

The question is with this newfound freedom, that is influencing every aspect of our lives for good or bad, should we be requiring people to register their identity when using the internet.?

If so how.

It would be true to say as we have become constantly connected, none of us are as anonymous as we think.

George Orwell presciently realized that if citizens don’t know what is true and what is false, they can’t make a judgment about what to object to in their lives.

Is it time to introduce an online digital passport to eradicate individual desires, such as credulity, abuse, gender-swapping, exploration, radicalizing, hacking, trolling, spreading false news, promoting popularism groups, bullying, racism, the list is endless? 

( Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says. 

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.”

The GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 give internet users the right to privacy and the right to withhold their personal details.

The Malicious Communication Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003 make it possible to prosecute “trolling” – and many other forms of online harassment are also now covered by the legislation. )

Platforms on the internet avoided liability by claiming they were “mere conduits” of these views and not “publishers” of them.  The argument goes that this includes protection for freedom of expression by the right to remain anonymous online.

So which should remain enshrined: freedom of speech or freedom from abuse?

The world feels smaller and we’ve celebrated this but in any human population, there will be people with irreconcilably different understandings of the truth.

Repressing speech has costs, but so does allowing it.

The world, however, has changed, and many of us may be in the time warp of old values. Human beings are poor witnesses, easily misled by a personal bias, profoundly influenced by their social environment.

As products of their society, social media and journalists are no exceptions. 

The world is now a much more dangerous place, not because of Covid -19 which is plunging it into a Depression with social media exposing a system of governance corseted by greed – profit before the people. Then, on the other hand, social media is like cancer at the heart of societies spreading the news, not what the facts are, but what men wish to see.

The press once seemed to have a conscience, thanks to history’s painful social conflicts and questions of war and peace.

Social media is not concerned with any historical lessons it being a wildfire of the short-term reactions of unfounded populism without any in-depth investigative journalism.      

It is becoming impossible to distinguish between paid news and actual, unbiased news.

You could say that the world has more pressing problems.

However, our current and future problems, like the internet, are all interconnected.

Shifting trends and the advancement in communication technology require a re-examination of the underlying principle and its application in new contexts.

There are attempts to get some control.

Free-speech advocates typically claim that the value of unfettered expression outweighs any harm it might cause, offering assurances that any such harm will be minimal.

Because like several other precious freedoms, free speech must be placed outside the reach of political exigency.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, it is impossible to pass binding regulations or laws that don’t restrict the sanctity of free speech.

Free speech or the freedom of expression is the modern civilization’s most precious gift to human society but it can’t be reaffirmed by drowning out its opponents.

                                                         ————

The issuing of Digital Passports could not be left to the whim of Facebook or any other internet providers.

Also “Digital identity solutions leave us open to data exploitation with the valuable data from these solutions (being) used for other purposes, so governments could not be involved in their issuing other than making supporting laws with large fines. 

The most obvious hitch in this plan is that not everyone has a smartphone,

With the current Pandemic and vacations, there will be an attempt to introduce Covid-19 free digital health certification (Of course, this would only be applicable to people with smartphones.) and they could become a prerequisite for some activities.

But for now, we’re many steps removed from that kind of streamlined process even becoming possible. Widespread adoption of so-called immunity passports would require a level of coordination and organization uncharacteristic of any country’s response to COVID-19 so far.

So here is the challenge. 

Is it possible to create a Digital Passport that is unhackable, that can be applied for online, that would combine your present Passport information, that you could use to vote, to register an internet identity, and carry your medical history. 

People would only accept such a thing if it commands public trust.

As evidence with the recent election in the USA entrusting your democracy to a black-box proprietary system that is subject to hacking, glitches, and errors, but NOT subject to scrutiny, analysis, or independent verification, is the surest and quickest way to lose your democracy. 

However, creating an internet user register could be possible not only authenticating the user but making it more transparent and ensure that users have the right to remedy when wrong decisions are made.

As for platforms, they know what they need to do because civil society has told them for years.

Just in case they have not got the message they should ensure that the decisions they make about speech are in line with global human rights standards, rather than making the rules up as they go.

 

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

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS. IN ORDER TO BECOME PROACTIVE AND NOT REACTIVE WE NOW SHOULD BE BUILDING A NEW LIST OF GLOBAL PRIORITIES.

12 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Capitalism, Civilization., Climate Change., COVID-19, Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Disaster Capitalism., Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., How to do it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Modern day Slavery, Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Reality., Robot citizenship., Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Technology., Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, THE NEW NORM., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, Viruses., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Ten-minute read) 

Why?

We cannot come back from Extinction.

BECAUSE  The world we now have is a tragic begging world. 

WE MUST BECOME PROACTIVE, NOT REACTIVITY.

Because humanity is entering a new age, where we are faced with not only existential risks from our natural environment but by those of our own creation. 

Two hundred years ago we didn’t understand the basic causes of a Pandemic. 

Because the world is now so interconnected (with a vastly increased population than any time in our history) pandemics have more opportunities not only to spread new diseases but to originate new sources.

Because we are reaching “The Precipice”  a time where we’ve reached the ability to pose an existential risk to ourselves, which is substantially bigger than the natural risks, the background that we were facing before.  

Because we need to understand our vulnerability and determine what steps must be taken to end this pandemic. 

Because just a few years ago more than one bomb was created.

One in the hands of a few decision-makers that could destroy civilization the other the Internet, not in the hands  

The current bombs are created by our continuing abuse of the planet we live on. They are not in the hands of deranged dictators or impeached presidents but in the hands of a system of exploitation called capitalism now becoming more and more driven by profit-seeking algorithms.   

Because we think everyone’s interests matter equally, approaches to improving the world should be evaluated mainly in terms of their potential for long-term impact.

Because there are vast differences between the effectiveness of working on different global problems we need better global prioritization.

Because as technology improves and the world economy grows or shrinks, it is getting easier to cause destruction on an ever-larger scale.

(New transformative technologies may promise a radically better future but also pose catastrophic risks.)

Because Covid-19 is showing us that there are many available avenues for improving the world, in terms of social value.

Because now there is much uncertainty around the value of specific options.

Because not enough cause prioritization is done, from the perspective of total social welfare.

The reasons are endless.

However to build the new field of ‘global priorities’ and to try to work out which global problems are most pressing and make progress on foundational questions about how best to address them we need to start understanding that just as the fate of gorillas currently depends on the actions of humans, the fate of humanity may come to depend more on the actions of machines than our own.

Rapid progress in machine learning has raised the prospect that algorithms will one day be able to do most or all of the mental tasks currently performed by humans. This could ultimately lead to machines that are much better at these tasks than humans.

(New transformative technologies may promise a radically better future but they also pose catastrophic risks. How one might design a highly intelligent machine to pursue realistic human goals safely is very poorly understood.)

Comparing global problems involves lots of uncertainty and difficult judgment calls.

If AI research continues to advance without enough work going into the research problem of controlling such machines, catastrophic accidents are much more likely to occur. Nonetheless, work on mitigating many risks remains remarkably neglected. 

Prioritization research appears to be in its infancy. With common prioritize interventions almost zero it remains impossible to assume some common world values.

Why is this? 

Once again the reasons are numerous – but they can be encapsulated in the word inequality, in all its forms.  

Causes have to be made before developing a deep understanding of an area that required prioritization – climate change for example.

Covid-19 is shining a light on the need to develop world health versus biological research – which received very little attention up to now. 

While billions are spent making AI more powerful, there are fewer than 100 people in the world working on how to make AI safe. 

AI could lead to extremely positive developments, presenting solutions to now-intractable global problems, but they also pose severe risks.

Humanity’s superior intelligence is pretty much the sole reason that it is the dominant species on the planet. If machines surpass humans in intelligence, then common beliefs could easily originate from websites.

This is why it is necessary that we create a list ranking of which problems we think are most pressing for people.  That promotes civilizational resilience, mitigating great power conflict, or laying the foundations for the governance of outer space. 

If you have read this post you could not be blamed for thinking that the idea of creating a new list of global problems is worthless. BUT ALL THE TALK, AND AGREEMENTS IN THE WORLD ARE WORTHLESS UNLESS THEY ARE FUNDED TO BECOME PROACTIVE.  

( See previous posts recreating such a fund – 0.005% world Aid Fund, before the current third revolution of Artificial Intelligence, invents the machine with intelligence that far surpasses our own.)

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

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. IF WE HAD TO CREATE AN ALTERNATIVE TO CAPITALISM WHAT WOULD IT BE CALLED.

05 Tuesday Jan 2021

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(Ten-minute read) 


We, humans, live on an ecologically fragile planet with limited resources that must be sustained for future generations we must move humanity to an alternative world system — one committed to social justice, deep democracy, environmental sustainability, a safe climate, and planetary health.

The COVID-19 pandemic contains the fuel for social change – verbal with little imagination as to what to change. 

History tells us that social changes can occur quickly once economic, political, social structural, and environmental conditions have reached a tipping point.

Humanity is now obviously at a crossroads or perhaps several crossroads: one is business-as-usual which is sure to result in dystopia; another is a shift to some variant of green capitalism, which is gaining considerable support; and finally an eco-socialist vision that, while muted at this time, will hopefully become stronger as the need for it becomes more apparent to the mass of humanity.

Thanks to Covid -19  the world is off-balance – and it will remain so for years to come.

Far from settling into a ‘new normal’, we should expect a COVID-19 domino effect, triggering further disruptions – positive as well as negative ­– over the decade ahead.

It has underscored the interconnectedness of our natural, social and economic systems, and provided a stark reminder of the scale of systemic risks that can build up when we allow weaknesses and negative impacts to accumulate over time.

Continuation on the current pathway will, over time, only lead to deeper and deeper crises, including an ever-escalating climate change crisis, the result of growing greenhouse emissions spewed by the capitalist treadmill of production and consumption.

Combating both climate change and global capitalism go hand-in-hand however the raw truth is that Capitalism will certainly not consciously permit the eventual demise of global capitalism and the emergence of an ecosocialist world system promoted by many. 

In previous posts, I have advocated that without funding all alternatives will fail whether they are green capitalism and existing climate regimes, including the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, which is not sufficient to mitigate climate change in any serious way.  

How can we expect the system that created the problem to solve the problem?

Despite the daunting difficulties that much of humanity currently faces, and will continue to face over the course of this century capitalism today continues unabated to pump Co2 into the atmosphere and will continue to do so after the Climate Summit this year in Scotland.  (By the deadline of December 31, 2020, only 70 out of 192 countries had presented their new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs): the individual commitments made to fight against climate change.)

One doesn’t have to have to be a delegate to this summit to know that if we manage to get on top of the current Pandemic which is bleeding the coffers of countries endeavoring to save their economies the emissions will triple on returning to anything that looks like normal. 

Of course, we will be told that we have learned the lesson that Green is the way forward.  It is true to say that the construction of ecosocialism needs to be based upon a commitment to a long-term sustainable balance between sociocultural systems and the natural environment but it is also true to say that the capitalist world system continues to self-destruct due to its exploitative, oppressive, socially unjust, and environmentally unsustainable practices – this will continue with artificial intelligence to plunder the earth for a profit with machining mining called data, fed to machine unregulated algorithm, making us all but powerless. 

Ecosocialism constitutes a vision against the mal-distribution of resources on a global scale that capitalism produces is bound to keep alive, notions of social justice and equality, deep democracy, and socialism in oppressed classes.

It is only by spreading the cost of change fairly that we can reinvent capitalism.

We could adopt a universal wage and let people fend for themselves but this won’t change our habits.  

It is time to envision future scenarios and strategies for achieving an alternative world system.

Once again here’s how. 

Because we live in different cultures, transparency is vital to address the main problem –  Inequality in all its forms. 

To do this the cost of change has to be spread fairly.

This can only be achieved by making a profit for profit sake contribute.

Not by taxation, IMF loans, foreign aid, or begging charity aid programs. 

The UN is now relied upon by the international community to coordinate humanitarian relief operations due to natural and man-made disasters in areas beyond the relief capacity of national authorities alone.

We currently have the technology that maximizes profit and future profit, like high-frequency trading that runs 90% of world stock exchanges. 

THERE IS NO REASON NOT TO PLACE A WORLD AID COMMISSION OF 0.05% ON ALL ACTIVITIES THAT ARE NOT SUSTAINABLE TO CREATE A PERPETUAL FUND TO TACKLE CLIMATE CHANGE AND OTHER PRESSING WORLD PROBLEMS.

ALL OF ITS AID WOULD BE GRANTED NON-REPAYABLE. 

THIS FUND COULD BE ADMINISTERED BY ELECTED MEMBERS. 

ALL PROJECTS OTHER THAN DISASTER RELIEF WOULD BE SUBJECT TO APPROVAL AGAINST A WRITTEN EARTH CONSTITUTION THAT TRULY ALIGNS MARKETS WITH THE NATURAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS ON WHICH WE ALL DEPEND.   

It is about building real resilience, driving equitable and sustainable growth, and reinventing capitalism itself.

PROJECTS THAT MEET THE REQUIRED PERMATERS WOULD THEN BE ELIGIBLE FOR FUNDING.

TO AVOID CORRUPTION AND LOBBYING ALL APPROVED PROJECTS ARE PLACED IN A TELEVISED YEARY DRAW. 

50,000 – 100,000

100,000 – 250,000

250,000 – 500,000

500,000 – 1 MILLION

1 MILLION AND GREATER.  

Here is a suggestion that could be funded. 

Products Labeling. 

Marketers use labeling for their products to bring identification to impart information to the consumer about the product.  They allow customers to know about the item and give necessary messages including ingredients, instructions, and uses. 

Why not their carbon footprint with a symbol showing their contribution to Carbon emissions. 

Human and nonhuman, have a natural right to sustenance.

( See the previous posts on a world aid commission.)

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

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THE BEADY SAYS; THE TIME HAS COME TO COMMENCE CREATING A NEW IDOLOGY TO LIVE ON AND WITHIN EARTH.

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2020: The year we need to change., 2021. The year for change., A Constitution for the Earth., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Civilization., Climate Change., COVID-19, Disaster Capitalism., Earth, Environment, Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Fresh Water., How to do it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Inequality, Life., Natural World Disasters, Our Common Values., Pandemic, Paris Climate Change Conference 2015, Political Trust, Politics., Populism., Post-Covid-19, Privatization, Reality., Sovereign wealth fund, Survival., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., Trade Agreements., Truth, Truthfulness., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Wealth., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Economy., World Leaders

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( A seven-minute read) 


IF THERE IS ANYTHING TO LEARN FROM COVID IT IS THAT WE HUMANS MUST CHANGE THE WAY WE LIVE COLLECTIVELY AND INDIVIDUALLY ON THIS PLANET.

CURRENTLY, WE ALL LIVE WITHIN IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE BROKEN.

SOME VISIBLE SOME NOT. 

(An ideology (/ˌʌɪdɪˈɒlədʒi/) is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially as held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which “practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones.” Wikipedia. 

There are many different kinds of ideologies, including political, social, epistemological, and ethical.

  • “We do not need…to believe in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities. The need for a sense of universal responsibility affects every aspect of modern life.” — Dalai Lama.
  • “The function of ideology is to stabilize and perpetuate dominance through masking or illusion.” — Sally Haslanger
  • “[A]n ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man.” — Hannah Arendt)

At the root of all these ideologies is the value of money.

HOW IT IS ACQUIRED AND DISTRIBUTED IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED.

A religion may present a vision of a just society, but it cannot easily have a practical political program with or without money.  

All idea systems have a class basis. This class bias is defined by the acquisition of wealth in one form or another – assets, power, etc. Nither however can any longer dominate the state through an appeal to the populace, and then use the powers of the state to control both the economy and the private lives of the citizen’s work.

No longer can politics itself, acquire certain ideological characteristics whose true nature is concealed.

All forms of isms that belong to the 19th or 20th century may suggest that ideologies are no older than the word itself—that they belong essentially to a period in which secular belief increasingly replaced traditional religious faith.

So let’s ask the question.   

Where are we?

In terms of truth we now in a world both connected and disconnected in the extreme sense of the word connected.

IT IS CLEAR THAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO MOVE BEYOND SLOGANS.

A system that rewards those with capita while taxpayer’s money is used to support food banks for those out of work is not sustainable.

The economic injustices are plain to see with historic debt the inheritance of the young along with irreversible climate change and biodiversity collapse.

We now need an ism that shifts human values to a different set of values by placing the earth’s healthy existence at the forefront of all our values.

WE MUST NOT ONLY CONFRONT OUR MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE NATURAL WORLD WE MUST USE KNOWLEDGE NOT AS A MEANS TO CREATE WEALTH BUT AS A GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING WHERE WE ARE AT. 

WE CAN NO LONGER STAND BYE AND WATCH BIG TECH MONOPOLIES COMPANIES SWALLOW WHAT IS LEFT OF COMPETITION.

WE CAN NO LONGER STAND BYE AND WATCH A MARKET PLACE THAT CREATES WINNERS AND LOSERS ON THE BASES OF WEALTH. 

WE CAN NO LONGER WATCH WORLD ORGANISATIONS GOVERNED BY VETOES.

WE ALL DEPENDENT ON EACH OTHER AND OTHERS AND MUST COLLABORATE WITH ALL THAT SURROUNDS US.  

No longer is it possible for any system whether it’s socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism to be FREE OF INTERFERENCE FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MACHINE LEARNING, AND UNCONTROLLED ALGORITHMS.

THESE TECHNOLOGIES IN THEIR PRESENT STATE ARE SIGNALING THAT INTERPRETATIONS OF IDEOLOGIES ARE OUT OF DATE. 

You only have to look at the world to see the inequalities created by the pursuit of growth at any cost. This pursuit has turned all of earth’s resources into products to produce more products sold in a marketplace governed by short term profit. 

No longer is it possible to take fresh air, fresh water for granted. 

If we don’t want a world where from birth to death is viewed as an opportunity to exploit our weaknesses and essential needs to live out our lives in the first place,  we need AN NEW IDOLOGIE CALLED REALISM, NOT ESCAPISM, NOT APATHY, OR ANY MONOTHEISM, OR NEOREALISTS

“ Rather a collective meanings that constitute the structures which organize our actions.”

There is only one solution.

That is as advocated by this blog in several posts to Harness PROFIT FOR-PROFIT SAKE.

High-frequency trading with algorithms, sovereign wealth funds buying earth resources – land, water, energy, futures/ hedge funds – betting on demand, currency exchanges manipulating value, trade deals excluding fair trade, the list is endless. 

ALL ACTIONS THAT ARE NOW REQUIRED TO CHANGE COURSE REQUIRE FUNDING.

A 0.05% WORLD AID COMMISSION ON ALL ACTIVITIES THAT ARE NOT SUSTAINABLE WILL CREATE A PERTUTIAL FUND OF TRILLIONS TO CREATE A WORLD THAT’S WORTH LIVING ON.  

There is one thing for certain change is happing but the window for change is closing.

Climate change is not something that might happen in the future. 

We need a new relationship, to a more sustainable relationship with the natural world.

Creative imagination is what’s required so if you read this post let’s hear your comments.  

 https://youtu.be/GCwHki1q_I8

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Social unrest in the long tall grass while a few billionaires laugh there a way to the bank