THE BEADY EYE LOOK AT: THE FIRST TRANSCRIPT OF A MURDER TRIAL CONCERNING AN ROBOT WHO KILLED A HUMAN.

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( Twenty five minute read)

On 25 January 1979, Robert Williams (USA) was struck in the head and killed by the arm of a 1-ton production-line robot in a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, USA, becoming the first fatal casualty of a robot. The robot was part of a parts-retrieval system that moved material from one part of the factory to another.

Uber and Tesla have made the news with reports of their autonomous and self-driving cars, respectively, getting into accidents and killing passengers or striking pedestrians.

The death’s however, was completely unintentional but give us a glimpse into the world we might inherit, or at least into how we are conceiving potential futures for ourselves.

By 2040, there is even a suggestion that sophisticated robots will be committing a good chunk of all the crime in the world. At the heart of this debate is whether an AI system could be held criminally liable for its actions.

Where’s there’s blame, there’s a claim. But who do we blame when a robot does wrong?

Among the many things that must now be considered is what role and function the law will play.

So if an advanced autonomous machine commits a crime of its own accord, how should it be treated by the law?  How would a lawyer go about demonstrating the “guilty mind” of a non-human? Can this be done be referring to and adapting existing legal principles?

An AI program could be held to be an innocent agent, with either the software programmer or the user being held to be the perpetrator-via-another.

We must confront the fact that autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm is already around.

Whether it’s a military drone with a full payload, a law enforcement robot exploding to kill a dangerous suspect or something altogether more innocent that causes harm through accident, error, oversight, or good ol’ fashioned stupidity.

None of these deaths are caused by the will of the robot.

Sophisticated algorithms are both predicting and helping to solve crimes committed by humans; predicting the outcome of court cases and human rights trials; and helping to do the work done by lawyers in those cases.

The greater existential threat, is where a gap exists between what a programmer tells a machine to do and what the programmer really meant to happen. The discrepancy between the two becomes more consequential as the computer becomes more intelligent and autonomous.

How do you communicate your values to an intelligent system such that the actions it takes fulfill your true intentions?

The greater threat is scientists purposefully designing robots that can kill human targets without human intervention for military purposes.

That’s why AI and robotics researchers around the world published an open letter calling for a worldwide ban on such technology. And that’s why the United Nations in 2018 discussed if and how to regulate so-called “killer robots.

Though these robots wouldn’t need to develop a will of their own to kill, they could be programmed to do it. Neural nets use machine learning, in which they train themselves on how to figure things out, and our puny meat brains can’t see the process.

The big problem is that even computer scientists who program the networks can’t really watch what’s going on with the nodes, which has made it tough to sort out how computers actually make their decisions. The assumption that a system with human-like intelligence must also have human-like desires, e.g., to survive, be free, have dignity, etc.

There’s absolutely no reason why this would be the case, as such a system will only have whatever desires we give it.

If an AI system can be criminally liable, what defense might it use?

For example:  The machine had been infected with malware that was responsible for the crime.

The program was responsible and had then wiped itself from the computer before it was forensically analyzed.

So can robots commit crime? In short: Yes.

If a robot kills someone, then it has committed a crime (actus reus), but technically only half a crime, as it would be far harder to determine mens rea.

How do we know the robot intended to do what it did? Could we simply cross-examine the AI like we do a human defendant?

Then a crucial question will be whether an AI system is a service or a product.

One thing is for sure: In the coming years, there is likely to be some fun to be had with all this by the lawyers—or the AI systems that replace them.

How would we go about proving an autonomous machine was justified in killing a human in self-defence or the extent of premeditation?

Even if you solve these legal issues, you are still left with the question of punishment.

In such situation, however, the robot might commit criminal act that cannot be prevented.

doing so when no crime was foreseeable would undermine the advantages of having the technology.

What’s a 30-year jail stretch to an autonomous machine that does not age, grow infirm or miss its loved ones means’ nothing. Robots cannot be punished.

LET’S LOOK AT THE HYPOTACIAL TRIAL.

CASE NO 0.

PRESIDING JUDGES: – QUANTUM AI SUPREMA COMPUTER JUDGE NO XY.

JUDGE HAROLD. WISE HUMAN / UN JUDGE AND JAMES SORE HUMAN RIGHT JUDGE.

PROSECUTOR:            DATA POLICE OFFICER CONTROLLED BY International Humanitarian Law:

DEFENSE WITNESSES’                 TECHNOLOGY’S  MICROSOFT- APPLE – FACEBOOK – TWITTER –                                                                     INSTAGRAM – SOCIAL  MEDIA – YOUTUBE – GOOGLE – TIK TOK.

JURY:                          8 MEMBERS VIRTUAL REALITY METAVERSE – 2 APPLE DATA COLLECTION ADVISER’S                                     1000 SMART PHONE HOLDERS REPRESENTING WORLD RELIGIONS AND HUMAN                                       RIGHTS.

THE COURT:               Bodily pleas, Seventeenth Anatomical Circuit Court.

“All rise.”

Would the accused identify itself to the court.

I am  X 1037 known to my owner by my human name TODO.

Conceived on the 9th April 2027 at Renix Development / Cloning Inc California, programmed to be self learning with all human history, and all human legality.

In order to qualify as a robot, I have electronics chips – covering Global Positioning System (GPS) Face recognition. I have my own social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I am an important symbol of trust relationship with humans. I can not feel pain, happiness and sadness.

I was a guest of honour at a First Nation powwow on human values against AI in Geneva.

THE CHARGE:  ON THE 30TH JULY 2029 YOU X 1037 WITH PREMEDITATION MURDERED MR BROWN.

You erroneously identified a person as a threat to Mrs White and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate this threat was by pushing him, resulting in his death.

HOW TO YOU PELA, GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY.

NOT GUILTY YOUR HONOR.

The Defense opening statement:

The key question here is whether the programmer of the machine knew that this outcome was a probable consequence of its use.

Is there a direct liability. This requires both an action and an intent by my client X 1037.

We will show that my client had no human mens rea. 

He both completed the action of assaulting someone and had no intention of harming them, or knew harm was a likely consequence of his action.  An action is straightforward to prove if the AI system takes an action that results in a criminal act or fails to take an action when there is a duty to act.

The task is not determining whether in fact he murdered someone; but the extent to which that act satisfies the principle of mens rea.

Technically he has committed only half a crime, as he had no intended to do what he did.

Like deception, anticipating human action requires a robot to imagine a future state. It must be able to say, “If I observe a human doing x, then I can expect, based on previous experience, that she will likely follow it up with y. Then, using a wealth of information gathered from previous training sessions, the robot generates a set of likely anticipations based on the motion of the person and the objects she or he touches.

The robot makes a best guess at what will happen next and acts accordingly.

To accomplish this, robot engineers enter information about choices considered ethical in selected cases into a machine-learning algorithm.

Having acquired ethics my client X 1037 did exactly that.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH HIS PROGRAMMING TO DEFEND HIMSELF AND HUMANS. 

Danger, danger! Mrs White,  Mr Brown who was advancing with a fire axe was pushed backwards by my client. He that is Mr brown fell backwards hitting his head on a laptop resulting in his death.

There is no denying the event as it is recorded with his cameras on my clients hard disk.

However the central question to be answers at this trial is, when a robot kills a human, who takes the blame?

We argue that the process of killing (as with lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) is always a systematized mode of violence in which all elements in the kill chain—from commander to operator to target—are subject to a technification.

For example:

Social media companies are responsible for allowing the Islamic State to use their platforms to promote the killing of innocent civilians.

WHY NOT A MURDER.

As my client is a self learning intelligent technology so it is inevitable that he will learn to by-passes direct human control for which he cannot be held responsible for.

Without AI bill of rights, clearly, our way of approaching this doesn’t neatly fit into society’s view of guilt and justice.  Once you give up power to anatomical machines you’re not getting it back.

Much of our current law assumes that human operators are involved when in fact programs that govern Robotic actions are self learning.

Targets are objectified and stripped of the rights and recognition they would otherwise be owed by virtue of their status as humans dont apply

Sophisticated AI innovations through neural networks and machine learning, paired with improvements in computer processing power, have opened up a field of possibilities for autonomous decision-making in a wide range of not just military applications, but includes the targeting of an adversaries.

Mr Brown was a threatening adversarie.

.In essence the court has no administrative powers over self learning Technology.  The power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues will GOVERNED THE RESULT OF THIS TRIAL.

Robot crime UK law

Prosecution:  Opening statement.

The prospect of losing meaningful human control over the use of force is totally unacceptable.

We may have to limit our emotional response to robots but it is important that the robots understand ours. If a robot kills someone, then it has committed a crime (actus reus)

The fact that to-day it is possible that unknowingly and indirectly, like screws in a machine, we can be used in actions, the effects of which are beyond the horizon of our eyes and imagination, and of which, could we imagine them, we could not approve—this fact has changed the very foundations of our moral existence.

What we are really talking about when we talk about whether or not robots can commit crimes is “emergence” – where a system does something novel and perhaps good but also unforeseeable, which is why it presents such a problem for law.

Technology has the power to transform our society, upend injustice, and hold powerful people and institutions accountable. But it can also be used to silence the marginalized, automate oppression, and trample our basic rights.

Tech can be a great tool for law enforcement to use, however the line between law enforcement and commercial endorsement is getting blurry.

If you withdrew your support, rendered your support ineffective, and informed authorities, you may show that you were not an accomplice to the murder.

Drawing on the history of systematic killing, we will not only argue that lethal autonomous weapons systems reproduce, and in some cases intensify, the moral challenges of the past.  If we humans are to exist in a world run by machines these machines cannot be accountable to themselves but to human laws..

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a being to come to harm.

We will be demonstrating the “guilty mind” of a non-human.

This can be done by referring to and adapting existing legal principles.

It is hard not to develop feelings for machines but we’re heading towards in the future, something that will one day hurt us. We are at a pivotal point where we can choose as a society that we are not going to mislead people into thinking these machines are more human than they are.

We need to get over our obsession with treating machines as if they were human.

People perceive robots as something between an animate and an inanimate object and it has to do with our in-built anthropomorphism.

Systematic killing has long been associated with some of the darkest episodes in human history.

When humans are “knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood.

Critically though, there are limits on the type and degree of systematization that are appropriate in human conduct, especially when it comes to collective violence or individual murder by a Robotics.

Within conditions of such complexity and abstraction, humans are left with little choice but to trust in the cognitive and rational superiority of this clinical authority.

Cold and dispassionate forms of systematic violence that erode the moral status of human targets, as well as the status of those who participate within the system itself must be held legally accountable.

Increasingly, however, it is framed as a desirable outcome, particularly in the context of military AI and lethal autonomy. The increased tendency toward human technification (the substitution of technology for human labor) and systematization is exacerbating the dispassionate application’s of lethal force and leading to more, not less, violence.

Autonomous violence incentivizing a moral devaluation of those targeted and eroding the moral agency of those who kill, enabling a more precise and dispassionate mode of violence, free of the emotion and uncertainty that too often weaken compliance with the rules and standards of war and murder.

This dehumanization is real, we argue, but impacts the moral status of both the recipients and the dispensers of autonomous violence. If we are allowing the expansion of modes of killing rather than fostering restraint Robots will kill whether commanded to do or not.

The Defence claim that X 1037 is not responsible for its actions due to coding of its electronics by external companies. Erasing the line into unethical territory such as responsibility for murder.

We know that these machines are nowhere near the capabilities of humans but they can fake it, they can look lifelike and say the right thing in particular situations. However, as we see with this murder the power gained by these companies far exceeds the responsibilities they have assumed.

A robot can be shown a picture of a face that is smiling but it doesn’t know what it feels like to be happy.

The people who hosted the AI system on their computers and servers are the real defendants.

PROSECUTION FIRST WITNESS:  SOCIAL MEDIA / INTERNET.

We call on the resentives of these companies who will clearly demonstrate this shocking asymmetry of power and responsibility.

These platforms are impacting our public discourse, and this action brings much-needed transparency and accountability to the policies that shape the social media content we consume every day, aiding and abetting the deaths AND NOW MURDER.

While the pressure is mounting for public officials to legally address the harms social media causes. This murder is not nor will ever be confined to court rulings or judgements, treating human beings as cogs in a machine does not and should not give a Punch’s Pilot dispensation even if any boundaries that could help define Tech remain blurred. Technology companies that reign supreme in this digital age are not above the law.  

In order to grasp the enormous implications of what has begun to happen and how all our witnesses are connected and have contributed to this murder.

To close our defence we will conclude with observations on why we should conceptualize certain technology-facilitated behaviors as forms of violence. We are living in one of the most vicious times in history.  The only difference now is our access to more lethal weapons. 

We call.

Facebook.

Is it not true you allowed terrorists group to use your platform, allowed unrestrained hate speech, inciting, among other things, the genocide in Myanmar. Drug cartels and human traffickers in developing countries using the platform, The platform’s algorithm is designed to foster more user engagement in any way possible, including by sowing discord and rewarding outrage.

In chooses profit over safety it contributed to X 1037 self learning.

Facebook is a uniquely socially toxic platform. Facebook is no longer happy to just let others use the news feed to propagate misinformation and exert influence – it wants to wield this tool for its own interests, too. Facebook is attempting to pave the way for deeper penetration into every facet of our reality.

Facebook would like you to believe that the company is now a permanent fixture in society. To mediate not just our access to information or connection but our perception of reality with zero accountability is the worst of all possible options.  Something like posting a holiday photo to Facebook may be all that is needed to indicate to a criminal that he person is not at home.

We call.

Instagram Facebook sister company App.

Instagram is all about sharing photos providing a unique way of displaying your Profile. Instagram is a place where anyone can become an Influence. These are pretty frightening findings and are only added to by the fact that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.

What makes Instagram different from other social media platforms is the focus on perfection and the feeling from users that they need to create a highly polished and curated version of their lives. Not only that, but the research suggested that Instagram’s Explore page can push young users into viewing harmful content, inappropriate pictures and horrible videos.

In a conceptualization where you are only worth what your picture is, that’s a direct reflection of your worth as a person.

 That becomes very impactful.

X 1037 posted a selfie on the 12 May 2025 to see his self-worth.  Within minutes he received over 5 million hate and death threats. Its no wonder when faces with Mr Brown that he chose self preservation.

We call Twitter. Elon Musk 

This platform is notorious catalyst for some of the most infamous events of the decade: Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the Capitol Hill riots. Herein lies the paradox of the platform. The infamous terror group – which is now the totalitarian theocratic ruling party of Afghanistan — has made good use of Twitter.

A platform that has done its very best to avoid having to remove any videos from racists, white supremacists and hate mongers.

We call TikTok.

A Chinese social video app known for its aggressive data collection can access while it’s running, a device location, calendar, contacts, other running applications, wi-fi networks, phone number and even the SIM card serial number.

Data harvesting to gain access to unimaginable quantities of customer data, using this information unethically. Data can be a sensitive and controversial topic in the best of times. When bad actors violate the trust of users there should be consequences, and there are results. This data can also be misused for nefarious purposes in the wrong hands. The same capability is available to organised crime, which is a wholly different and much more serious problem, as the laws do not apply. In oppressive regimes, these tools can be used to suppress human rights.

X 1037 held an account, opening himself to influences beyond his programming. 

We call Google

Truly one of the worst offenders when it comes to the misuse of data.

Given large aggregated data sets and the right search terms, it’s possible to find a lot of information about people; including information that could otherwise be considered confidential: from medical to marital.

Google data mining is being used to target individuals. We are all victims of spam, adware and other unwelcome methods of trying to separate us from our money. As storage gets cheaper, processing power increases exponentially and the internet becomes more pervasive in everyone’s lives, the data mining issue will just get worse.  X 1037 proves this. 

We call. YouTube/Netflix.  

Numerous studies have shown that the entertainment we consume affects our behavior, our consumption habits, the way we relate to each other, and how we explore and build our identity.

Digital platforms like Netflix have a strong impact on modern society.

Violence makes up 40% of the movie sections on Netflix. Understanding what type of messages viewers receive and the way in which these messages can affect their behavior is of vital importance for an effective understanding of today’s society.

Therefore, it must be considered that people are the most susceptible to imitating the attitudes. Content related to mental health, violence, suicide, self-harm, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) appears in the ten most-watched movies and ten most-watched series on Netflix.

Their appearance on the media is also considered to have a strong impact on spectators. X 1037 spent most of his day watching and self learning from movies.  

Violence affects the lives of millions of people each year, resulting in death, physical harm, and lasting mental damage. It is estimated that in 2019, violence caused 475,000 deaths.

Netflix in particular, due to their recent creation and growth, have not yet been studied in depth.

Considering the impact that digital platforms have on viewers’ behaviors its once again no wonder that X 1037 did what he did. 

There is no denying that these factors should be forcing the entertainment and technology industries to reconsider how they create their products which are have a negative long-term influence on various aspects of our wider life and development.

We call

Instagram.

Instagram if you are capitalizing off of a culture, you’re morally obligated to help them.  As a result of “social comparison, social pressure, and negative interactions with other people you are promoting harm.

We call.

Apple.

Smartphones have developed in the last three decades now an addiction leading to severe depression, anxiety, and loneliness in individuals.

People are now using smartphones for their payments, financial transactions, navigating, calling, face to face communication, texting, emailing, and scheduling their routines. Nowadays, people use wireless technology, especially smartphones, to watch movies, tv shows, and listen to music.

We know the devices are an indispensable tool for connecting with work, friends and the rest of the world. But they come with trade-offs—from privacy issues to ecological concerns to worries over their toll on our physical and emotional health. Spurring a generation unable to engage in face-to-face conversations and suffering sharp declines in cognition skills.

We’re living through an interesting social experiment where we don’t know what’s going to happen with kids who have never lived in a world without touchscreens. X 1037 would not have been present at the murder scene only that he was responding to a phone call from Mrs White Apple 19 phone. 

Society will continue struggling to balance the convenience of smartphones against their trade-offs.

We call.

Microsoft. 

Two main goals stand out as primary objectives for many companies: a desire for profitability, and the goal to have an impact on the world. Microsoft is no exception. Its mission as a platform provider is to equip individuals and businesses with the tools to “do more.” Microsoft’s platform became the dev box and target of a massive community of developers who ultimately supplied Windows with 16 million programs. Multibillion-dollar companies rely on the integrity and reliability of Microsoft’s tools daily.

It is a testimony to the powerful role Microsoft plays in global affairs that its tools are relied upon by governments around the world.

Microsoft’s position of global influence gives its leadership a voice on matters of moral consequence and humanitarian concern. Microsoft is a company built on a dream.

Microsoft’s influence raises some concerns as well. It’s AI-driven camera technology that can recognize, people, places, things, and activities and can act proactively has a profound capacity for abuse by the same governments and entities that currently employ Microsoft services for less nefarious purposes.

Today, with the emerging new age, which is most commonly—and inaccurately—called “the digital age”, have already transformed parts of our lives, including how we work, how we communicate, how we shop, how we play, how we read, how we entertain ourselves, in short, how we live and now will die.

 It would be economic and political suicide for regulators to kneecap the digital winners.

COURTS VERDICT :

Given the absence of direct responsibility, the court finds X 1037 not guilty.

MR BROWN DEATH caused by a certain act or omission in coding.

THE COURT DISMISSES THE CASE AGAINST THE TECHNOLOGICAL COMPANIES. ON THE GROUDS OF INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.

Neither the robot nor its commander could be held accountable for crimes that occurred before the commander was put on notice. During this accountability-free period, a robot would be able to commit repeated criminal acts before any human had the duty or even the ability to stop it.

Software has the potential to cause physical harm.

To varying extents, companies are endowed with legal personhood. It grants them certain economic and legal rights, but more importantly it also confers responsibilities on them. So, if Company X builds an autonomous machine, then that company has a corresponding legal duty.

The problem arises when the machines themselves can make decisions of their own accord. As AI technology evolves, it will eventually reach a state of sophistication that will allow it to bypass human control. The task is not determining whether it in fact murdered someone; but the extent to which that act satisfies the principle of mens rea.

However if there were no consequences for human operators or commanders, future criminal acts could not be deterred so the court FINES EACH AND EVERY COMPANY 1 BILLION for lack of attention to human details

We must confront the fact that autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm is already around.

The pain that humans feel in making the transition to a digital world is not the pain of dying. It is the pain of being born.


What would “intent” look like in a machine mind? How would we go about proving an autonomous machine was justified in killing a human in self-defence or the extent of premeditation?

Given that we already struggle to contain what is done by humans. What would building “remorse” into machines say about us as their builders?

At present, we are systematically incapable of guaranteeing human rights on any scale.

We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. 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. 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. This is not compatible with human life. Machines with the power and discretion to take human lives without human involvement are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant, and should be prohibited by international law.

If you ask an AI system anything, in order to achieve that thing, it needs to survive long enough

Fundamentally, it’s just very difficult to get a robot to tell the difference between a picture of a tree and a real tree.

X 1037 now, it has a survival instinct.

When we create an entity that has survival instinct, it’s like we have created a new species. Once these AI systems have a survival instinct, they might do things that can be dangerous for us.

So, what’s wrong with LAWS, and is there any point in trying to outlaw them?

Some opponents argue that the problem is they eliminate human responsibility for making lethal decisions. Such critics suggest that, unlike a human being aiming and pulling the trigger of a rifle, a LAWS can choose and fire at its own targets. Therein, they argue, lies the special danger of these systems, which will inevitably make mistakes, as anyone whose iPhone has refused to recognize his or her face will acknowledge.

In my view, the issue isn’t that autonomous systems remove human beings from lethal decisions, to the extent that weapons of this sort make mistakes.

Human beings will still bear moral responsibility for deploying such imperfect lethal systems.

LAWS are designed and deployed by human beings, who therefore remain responsible for their effects. Like the semi-autonomous drones of the present moment (often piloted from half a world away), lethal autonomous weapons systems don’t remove human moral responsibility. They just increase the distance between killer and target.

Furthermore, like already outlawed arms, including chemical and biological weapons, these systems have the capacity to kill indiscriminately. While they may not obviate human responsibility, once activated, they will certainly elude human control, just like poison gas or a weaponized virus.

Oh, and if you believe that protecting civilians is the reason the arms industry is investing billions of dollars in developing autonomous weapons, I’ve got a patch of land to sell you on Mars that’s going cheap.

There is, perhaps, little point in dwelling on the 50% chance that AGI does develop. If it does, every other prediction we could make is moot, and this story, and perhaps humanity as we know it, will be forgotten. And if we assume that transcendentally brilliant artificial minds won’t be along to save or destroy us, and live according to that outlook, then what is the worst that could happen – we build a better world for nothing?

The Company that build the autonomous machine, Renix Development has a corresponding legal duty.

—————

Because these robots would be designed to kill, someone should be held legally and morally accountable for unlawful killings and other harms the weapons cause.

Criminal law cares not only about what was done, but why it was done.

  • Did you know what you were doing? (Knowledge)
  • Did you intend your action? (General intent)
  • Did you intend to cause the harm with your action? (Specific intent)
  • Did you know what you were doing, intend to do it, know that it might hurt someone, but not care a bit about the harm your action causes? (Recklessness)
  • So, the question must always be asked when a robot or AI system physically harms a person or property, or steals money or identity, or commits some other intolerable act: Was that act done intentionally
  • There is no identifiable person(s) who can be directly blamed for AI-caused harm.
  • There may be times where it is not possible to reduce AI crime to an individual due to AI autonomy, complexity, or limited explainability. Such a case could involve several individuals contributing to the development of an AI over a long period of time, such as with open-source software, where thousands of people can collaborate informally to create an AI.

The limitations on assigning responsibility thus add to the moral, legal, and technological case against fully autonomous weapons/ Robotics, and bolster the call for a ban on their development production, and use. Either way, society urgently needs to prevent or deter the crimes, or penalize the people who commit them.

There is no reason why an AI system’s killing of a human being or destroying people’s livelihoods should be blithely chalked up to “computer malfunction.

Because proving that these people had “intent” for the AI system to commit the crime would be difficult or impossible.

I’m no lawyer. What can work against AI crimes?

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: HAPPY NEW YEAR, HERE IS YOUR WORLD TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2024.

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( Thirty minute read) 

In fairness, the world won’t suddenly end on January 1, 2024.

There are three visions from humans today. span space colonies, a genetic panopticon, and straight-up apocalypse.Navigating The Future: 10 Global Trends That Will Define 2024

It is said that there no such thing a reality, as everything that is observed once un-observed does not exist, – Quantum Physics – Interactions.

But reality in our world does not have to be observed, it’s plain for all to see.

Yes we are all born without any understanding of the world.

In recent years we’ve learned that the human brain is actually a master of deception, and your experiences and actions do not reveal its inner workings.

Our lives are a constant struggle, not just to survive, but to understand that we all must die, leaving behind information. This left behind data and current data is now been harvested, not so much for the betterment of the world but for short term profit for the few.

Technology has changed how we interact among ourselves and with our surrounding environment and we must engage in a philosophical reflection on how we currently understand the “new” world we are a part of.

Luckily our collective conscious or conceptions of what is real in the world are not computable.

However the future of society, as defined by the scientific and technological revolutions, which needs a custom ethical and philosophical direction will change with genetic editing; and artificial intelligence challenges the concept of “I” and “individual;” and robotics will bring new “companion robots,” which we need to define and adopt socially.

In order to pair our knowledge of events with the true timeframe of when those events occurred, to really understand what’s happening, we must “extract potential signals from the noise of all this data.

Why?

Because misinterpreting those signals will have profound consequences.

For example:

How pathetic it is to witness the only word organisation the UN unable to agree on what constitutes a genocide, to call on Israel to stop its war on a trapped people.

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First let me awaken you to 2024 by reminding you of the news year you’ve just lived through – or by warning you of the news year you’re about to live through.

To describe the present day I suppose that the best way is to draw a comparison with a War Ship of the Line during Nelson days. Although full of cannons and every class of humanity, for it to be operational, it had to rely on rules and regulations, which meant nothing, as everything ends up tied together, and nothing worked without the power of nature.  No wind, no victory.

Our world is similar, full of people, with individual names, all living within tribal nations, ruled by law, but governed by the planetary balance in its true nature, providing life. No fresh water, no fresh air, no food, annihilation.

These days, when it comes to ecosystems ( its not how we live or where we live, or when we live, which  means nothing unless you are fully conscience of the greed of a few and its continuing effects on the inequalities that exist on the planet.

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There isn’t a particular moment in which humanity came into existence, as the transition from species to species is gradual.

The demographers estimate that in the 200,000 years before us about 109 billion people have lived and died. It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in.

In 2024 there will about 8 billion of us alive. Taken together with those who have died, about 117 billion humans have been born since the dawn of modern humankind. This means that those of us who are alive now represent about 7% of all people who ever lived.

How many people will be born in the future? We don’t know.

But we know one thing: The future is immense, and the universe will exist for trillions of years.

In such a future, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years.

One thing that sets us apart is that we now – and this is a recent development – have the power to destroy ourselves.

The key moral question of long termism is ‘what can we do to improve the world’s long-term prospects?

There are two other major risks that worry me greatly:

Pandemics, especially from engineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence technology. These technologies could lead to large catastrophes, either by someone using them as weapons or even unintentionally as a consequence of accidents.

We don’t have to think about people who live billions of years in the future to see our responsibilities. This shouldn’t give the impression that the risks we are facing are confined to the future.

Several large risks that could lead to unprecedented disasters are already with us now. AI capabilities and biotechnology have developed rapidly and are no longer science fiction; they are posing risks to those of us who are alive today.

As a society, we spend only little attention, money, and effort on the risks that imperil our future. Only very few are even thinking about these risks, when in fact these are problems that should be central to our culture. The unprecedented power of today’s technology requires unprecedented responsibility.

Algorithms can exacerbate divisions and inequality in society.

In truth, no one knows where the AI revolution will take us as a society or as a species, but our actions in 2024 will be critical to setting us on a path that leads to a happy outcome.

No one will remember the Internet.

We will be the ancestors of a very large number of people. Let’s make sure we are good ancestors.

Why?

Because to understand something is to be liberated from it.   Google it.

Back to 2024.

There are currently about a dozen major global conflicts, with the most recent one now repeating one of the most barbaric acts ever committed in a war (The Jewish Holocaust) However this time it is being committed by the very people who suffered it in the first place, waving the old testament as a title deed to Palestine, to justify the right to commit another genocide while the world stands by helpless to intervene. 

The people who suffer from injustice, who withstand daily insults to their dignity, who are marginalised, silenced, exploited, left to die or killed cannot afford to ask themselves if they have hope. They cling on to life, they try to cope, they fight in front of a more or less a silent world, while it passing resolution’s to appease the two warmongering nations with vetoes.

Then we have the forgotten war in the Ukraine which is turning into a generation war. 

No resolutions other than the resolve of the Ukraine people to its bitter end will bring peace. 

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What Is Enlightenment when we turn a blind eye?

Full awakening comes when you sincerely look at yourself, deeper than you’ve imagined, and question everything.

To think for yourself, to think of putting yourself in the shoes of everyone else, and to always think consistently:  This is the principles of enlightened thinking, that produced the Bill of Human rights.

The foundation of a peaceful world.

Out of 13 major global conflicts, the newest ones are the Myanmar civil war, triggered shortly after a military coup in February 2021, and the war in Ukraine that started with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Seven of these conflicts are in Asia, including sectarian violence in Iraq following the pullout of the U.S. in December 2017, and Syria’s complicated civil war. Five of these conflicts are on the African continent.

To put it simply the state of the planet is broken because we have chosen a system of Capitalism that benefits the few over the many.

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There is more to life than we are currently perceiving.

FOR EXAMPLE OUR REACTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE WHICH NOW HAS ITS OWN MOMENTUM AND ITS NOW CERTAIN THAT IT IS TOO LATE FOR THE WARS TO COME.  DRIVEN BY GREED.

WE ARE THE MOST COMPLICATED THING ON THE PLANET, ALL RELYING ON THE MOST BASIC THINGS.  Fresh air, Fresh water, etc.

In every moment, as you see, think, feel, and navigate the world around you, your perception of these things is built from ingredients. One is the signals we receive from the outside world. Your brain uses what you’ve seen, done, and learned in the past to explain sense data in the present, plan your next action, and predict what’s coming next.  This all happens automatically and invisibly, faster than you can snap your fingers. Much of this symphony is silent and outside your awareness, thank goodness. If you could feel every inner tug and rumble directly, you’d never pay attention to anything outside your skin.

Your mind is in fact an ongoing construction of your brain, your body, and the surrounding world.

Every act of recognition is a construction. You don’t see with your eyes; you see with your brain.

Your brain can even impose on a familiar object new functions that are not part of the object’s physical nature. TAKE A FEATHER FOR EXAMPLE.

Computers today can use machine learning to easily classify this object as a feather. But that’s not what human brains do. If you find this object on the ground in the woods, then sure, it’s a feather. But to an author in the 18th century, it’s a pen.

This incredible ability is called ad hoc category construction. In a flash, your brain employs past experience to construct a category such as “symbols of honor,” with that feather as a member.

Category membership is based not on physical similarities but on functional ones—how you’d use the object in a specific situation. Such categories are called abstract. A computer cannot “recognize” a feather as a reward for bravery because that information isn’t in the feather. It’s an abstract category constructed in the perceiver’s brain.

Computers can’t do this. Not yet, anyway.

Brains also have to decide which sense data is relevant and which is not, separating signal from noise. Economists and other scientists call this decision the problem of “value.”

Your thoughts and dreams, your emotions, even your experience right now as you read these words, are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive, regulating your body by constructing ad hoc categories. Most likely, you don’t experience your mind in this way, but under the hood (inside the skull), that’s what is happening.

Value itself is another abstract, constructed feature. It’s not intrinsic to the sense data emanating from the world, so it’s not detectable in the world. The importance of value is best seen in an ecological context.

Awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality-into something far beyond anything they knew existed.

Being hopeful has nothing to do with how the world goes. It’s a kind of duty, a necessary complement to morality. What is the point of trying to do the right thing if we have no reason to think others do the same? What is the point of holding others responsible if we think responsibility is beyond their capacity?

Paradoxically, the worse the world goes, the more hopeful you must remain to be able to continue fighting. Being hopeful is not about guaranteeing the right outcome but preserving the right principle: the principle based on which a moral world makes sense.

On the contrary, they are crucial to filling the gap between the world in which we live and the one we have a responsibility to build.

Most people tend to think of hope as an attitude that sits somewhere between a desire and a belief: a desire for a certain outcome and the belief that something favours its realisation.

In the 18th century there were no algorithms, no social media, and no echo chambers, and it was, therefore, still possible to believe in enlightenment through public discourse.

What had the Enlightenment ever done for us, if it wasn’t even able to help us stop genocide?

There is such a gap between the world I read about, taught and believed in, and the one in which I lived.

All I could find were efforts to convince the world that killing innocent civilians is sometimes, for some people, under some conditions, acceptable.

Was it so absurd to believe that, at some level, politics can remain accountable to morality?

More and more people are waking up-having real, authentic glimpses of reality.

Your World has become a hugely popular geography app, full of substitution ciphers, concealment ciphers, transposition ciphers that can only be deciphered using AI programs, testing millions of combination per second, disregarding human feelings.

We can now listen to podcast describing killing, watch youtube with no access to truth itself, chained to the limits of our own perceptions. ( We all have different ideas of it)

The least the rest of us can do is to avoid questioning the grounds for hope, indulging ourselves even more. Perhaps this is the real political meaning of the Enlightenment: whether there is hope or not is only a relevant question for those who have the privilege to doubt it. That is a small fraction of the world.

Don’t despair.

Other matters> 

We’re going to see, unfortunately, more technological unemployment

How do we address the wealth gap? We may have to consider very seriously ideas such as a universal basic income.  We can no longer ignore the issue of inequality.

Culture will need to adjust in terms of revisiting some of our values.

We need to be more pro-environment in our own behavior as consumers.

The cost of things average people must buy—healthcare, education, housing—tends to have risen more than wages did over the last two decades.

Globalization vs. regionalization. 

With the current wars and future wars globalization is on its last legs.

So the “America Alone” scenario within an otherwise China-centered world seems the most likely. Technology and political trends are aligning against mega-powers like the US and China.

Neither physical strength nor access to capital are sufficient for economic success. Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge.

The internet has eliminated “middlemen” in most industries. In a representative democracy, politicians are basically middlemen. Hence, the knowledge revolution should bring a shift to direct democracy.

Today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable.

This is the source of much angst around the world, including the current wave of popular protests.

The fact that our actions have an impact on the large number of people who will live after us should matter for how we think about our own lives.

The next decade will see a more than hundredfold boom in the world’s output of human genetic data.

The impact is hard to even imagine.

A world so saturated with genetic data will come with its own risks. The emergence of genetic surveillance states and the end of genetic privacy loom. Technical advances in encrypting genomes may help ameliorate some of those threats. But new laws will need to keep the risks and benefits of so much genetic knowledge in balance.

New models of delivering education will be needed to serve the citizens of crowded megacities as well as children in remote rural areas.

The United Nations is supposed to stick to more solid ground, but some of its Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 sound nearly as fantastical. In a mere 10 years, the UN plans to eradicate poverty “in all its forms everywhere.”  Bull shit, or is it.  Strong science coupled with political will might yet turn climate change around, and transform the UN’s predictions from a dream into reality.

Donald Trump  “America first , America First. There is however hope for the Earth.

The momentum for change is building. Humanity has a quality of finding creative solutions to challenges. If we keep each other safe – and protect ourselves from the risks that nature and we ourselves pose – we are only at the beginning of human history.

There are no catastrophes that loom before us which cannot be avoided.

We can only expect the pace of change to increase.

There is nothing that threatens us with imminent destruction in such a fashion that we are helpless to do something about it. In 2024, some will be refugees fleeing war, some will be economic migrants in search of a better life, and some will be looking to escape to parts of the world where life is not yet overly disrupted by rising temperatures and sea levels.

It seems that the message about climate change has not yet sunk in. 12 years left to avoid catastrophic climate change. The impact of climate emergency will bring profound change.

Finally: 

Eighteenth-century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrestled with how to preserve individual freedom when we also have to depend on each other for survival. Rousseau saw politics as a social contract between a sovereign and citizens. What we call “government” is the interface between them.

The sovereigns of Rousseau’s time were mostly kings, but he envisioned a democracy in which the people collectively were sovereign. But then he ran into a math problem.

In a tiny democracy of, say, a thousand citizens, each possesses one-thousandth of the sovereignty… small, but enough to have a meaningful influence. Each individual’s share of sovereignty, and therefore their freedom, diminishes as the social contract includes more people. So, other things being equal, Rousseau thought smaller countries would be freer and more democratic than larger ones.

How do we reconcile that with democracy. I’m not sure we can. It worked pretty well for a long time but maybe, as population grows, the math is catching up to us. If so, the options are a non-democratic.

Perhaps the lands we now inhabit are not real Nothing requires them to remain so. At some point, they will develop into something else. When and how this will happen, we don’t know yet. But we know it will.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY ASKS: WHAT SHOULD OUR VIEWS ON THE CURRENT WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE BE? AFTER ALL WAR IS WAR.

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( FIVE MINUTE READ)

The world today looks very different from the way it appeared thirty years ago.

It is one thing to express your opinion, it is another to do so in a way that actually puts a stumbling block in the way of others.

It’s okay to want to find ways of expressing some nuance.

Not about the wickedness of what’s happened. Not about the horror at loss of life. Not about the fact Hamas are terrorists, committed to the total destruction of the Jewish state.

But about where (like all war’s) is this war going before it ends as all wars eventually do.

Bright trails of rockets fired towards Israel from the Gaza strip, lighting up the orange night sky

How do you draw the line between retaliation and self-defence?

What proportion of vengeance is acceptable?

Is sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Gaza wise?

Is cutting off water and electricity act of justice?

These are complex questions.

Palestine is not a country. That’s the whole point.

Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel all live under various regimes of organized discrimination and oppression, much of which makes life nearly unlivable. But in terms of what happens now, and how the response plays itself out, there might well be room for nuance but first and foremost, we must unequivocally condemn the Hamas attacks for what they were. Any attempt to justify these actions is morally indefensible, and we must firmly oppose the arguments of those who seek to rationalise them.

However the line between punishing evil and revenge can be a fine one, but it’s an important one.

For example, I think Hamas are freedom fighters, turned into terrorists by the west and their recent barbaric acts.

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Let’s distinguish between those questions on which we can be clear.

The conflict and tensions in the Middle East are complex and deep rooted.

Let’s be equally honest about the complexity of this situation and not white wash away the sins of either side.

There is no Biblical justification to what Israel is doing.

There is not Promised Land anymore.

Why?

Because the events are and were unavoidably, part of a 80 year long story of modern times.

A further episode of horror. Israel – using unprecedented violence on a largely defenseless and penned-in population, in part to cover for its own fatal mistakes and embarrassment.

You might even think that Palestinians are the ones colonizing the land of Israel, no less. And you probably believe that Israel, which holds ultimate control over the lives of 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and yet denies them the right to vote in Israeli elections, is a democracy.

WAR IS WAR.

NO INTERNATIONAL LAWS or INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WILL CHANGE THAT NO MATTER WHERE A WAR IS OR TAKING PLACE.

The one thing war and bloodshed do for us is leave us longing for a new world.

Palestinians always act while Israel only reacts.

(It is amazing that such a poorly trained and equipped group of Palestinians from Gaza could overcome the best intelligence in the world found in Israel. The Israelis were caught napping and their response is influenced by this.)

It is not appropriate to see Hamas as separate from the Palestinian people.

It is a fundamentalist political group, supported originally by Israel, that responded to the secularism and corruption of the Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority.

Whilst we may disagree about what is proportionate. What Hamas have done is wicked, “unprovoked”

What exactly counts as a provocation?

Not the 248 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 1 January and 4 October of last year.

Not the denial of Palestinian human rights and national aspirations for decades.

Israel have human rights, as do other nations, but there are terrorists on both sides, including those in power currently in Israel. Mutually dependent on each other for survival. Yet neither can win.

The Palestinians will remain. They cannot be eliminated. Israel too will continue to exist.

There are roughly 14.5 million Palestinians in the world, according to a 2023 estimate from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the vast majority of whom are Sunni Muslims, though a significant minority is Christian. Over 5 million live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and another 2 million in Israel. The remaining population lives elsewhere, mostly as refugees, with the largest communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

As of 2019, about 5.6 million Palestinians were considered refugees by the United Nations because they or their forebears were displaced by wars with Israel.

Today Palestinians are a minority. 1.8 million Palestinians form around 20.8 percent of Israel’s population. They’re not equal. One dominates while the other is dominated. One colonizes. The other is colonized.

Desperate western attachment to morally bankrupt double standards bears a large portion of the blame for this and the resulting wars that have plagued the region.

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The future is full of unnecessary and horrific bloodshed all around.

There is and has been wrongdoing and bad decisions on both sides.

Calling out either one, does no good.

Was the land stolen from Arabs living in the British Protective of Palestine. The land was granted them by an UN charter.

Unfortunately the “land without people for a people without land” was flawed as there were people on that land and that was stolen from them.

We are ignoring the painful context. 

If we once again ignore the big picture, then all this will just keep happening.

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THAT THERE IS NO DENYING (BEING LIVE STREAMED IN FRONT OF THE WORLD.) This new outbreak is turning into a Genocide.

SHOULD THE UNITED NATIONS NOW EXPEL ISRAEL? ( LIKE IT DID WITH SOUTH AFRICA DURING ITS APARTHEID.)

SHOULD INTERNATIONAL SPORT AND CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS &  COMMERCIAL CORPORATIONS NOW BOYCOTT ISRAEL, WITH TARGETS BOYCOTTS. TO AVOID BEING COMPLACENT AND TARNISHED WITH A GENOCIDE?

SHOULD THERE BE A LARGE DE VESTMENT OF INVESTMENTS IN ISRAEL?

SHOULD THERE BE A MILITARY EMBARGO?

SHOULD AS 83% OF IDRSAI TO DAY SUPPORT ETHNIC CLEANSING ISRAEL BE BAN IN COMPETING IN THE OLYMPICS, THE WORLD CUP AND ALL OTHER SPORTING EVENTS.

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EVEN WHEN ALL OF THIS COMES TO A STOP THE ROOT CAUSE WILL NOT JUST DISAPPEAR FROM THE MAP.

WE MUST APPLY PRESSURE AND NOT BE COMPLICITY.

WE MUST NOT ALLOW GOVERNMENTS TO CLOSE DOWN OR UNDERMINE ANY FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION OR SPEECH SUPPORTING A CEASEFIRE AND POLITICAL SETTLEMENT.

ISRAEL DOES NOT REPRESENT ALL JEWS ETHNICS. CLEANNESS IS A JEWS VALUE NOT GENOCIDE.

HERE ARE A FEW COLLECTIVE ACTIONS THAT WE ALL CAN APPLY.

Boycott:

Hewlett Packard helps run the biometric ID system that Israel uses to restrict Palestinian movement.

Siemens is complicit in apartheid Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise through its planned construction of the EuroAsia Interconnector

Soda Steam is actively complicit in Israel’s policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev).

AXA invests in Israeli banks, which finance the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources

Sabra hummus is a joint venture between PepsiCo and the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that provides financial support to the Israeli army.

A barcode starting with 729 usually indicates a product of Israel. ( But this is not always reliable.)

Palestinian refugees have long claimed that international law guarantees them the right to return to their homes, citing U.N. General Assembly resolution 194, adopted in December, 1948, which states that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.

For its part, Israel largely considers this claim a non-starter, fearing that the return of millions of Palestinians is neither feasible nor just and would demographically overwhelm the country, erasing its Jewish character.

Sadly, 2023 has been a violent one on the global stage.

Many proposals have been put forward for how the current conflicts could, or should, be brought to a close. All will involve concessions that will effectively appease one side or the other without tackling their underlying cause.

The unanimous conclusion rest on a common belief: That wars should, and usually do, end in negotiation and compromise.

The first problem is that they don’t.

It is true that the majority of wars do not end in absolute victory. Ceasefire, armistice and stalemate terminate most conflicts, even if the ‘peace’ is infirm or short-lived.

The second problem lies in the fatalistic quality of many arguments ruling out the pursuit or even possibility of defeat. The third deficiency of arguments to ‘settle now’ is their reliance on false analogies. The fourth and greatest problem is a failure to take account of the character of this war and the outlook of a systemic adversary viscerally hostile to the ‘collective West’ and the international order it claims to uphold.

Negotiation, compromise and reconciliation are undertaken with new regimes only after old regimes are defeated and removed.

This war might not meet legal definitions of genocide, but the barbarism and the serial war crimes that have taken place – material, cultural and now ecological – have not been witnessed in Europe since the Second World War. The war is being waged on an industrial scale OF DESTRUCTION.  

Western policy must be underpinned by a long-term strategy – political, military and industrial – based on a sustainable definition of victory, not on a search for negotiation with an adversary whose minimal terms flatly contradict Western interests.

Outlier events cannot be ruled out.

The only way I can foresee either the Ukraine War or the Palestinian Israeli War possibly ending is a change in leadership with new agreed compliant political federation regime installed.

THERE WILL BE WITH CLIMATE CHANGE MANY WARS TO FOLLOW.

Wars of the 21st century will be fought over something quite different: climate change, and the shortages of water and food that will come from it. If you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHY DOES THE USA SUPPORT ISRAEL? IF THE BIDEN ADMI CAN’T STAND UP TO AN ALLY WHO CAN IT STAND UP TO ?

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(Twenty minute read)

Seventy-five years ago this week, an anomalous state was imposed on the Arab Middle East.

The new creation was alien in every sense to the region’s culture and anti-colonial struggle, which it would put into reverse – and it had no historical antecedents in the Arab world, despite the relentless promotion of biblical mythology to pretend otherwise.

From the start, Israel was a western creation:

A settler-colonial state set up with the aim of absorbing the Jews of the world.

The gift of Palestine as compensation to Jews for their suffering, not least the western antisemitism that was behind it, has been fundamental to western support for Israel, although it is unlikely that anyone today is conscious of it.

The residual legacy of guilt about Jewish suffering, and the idea that Jews are owed a state, still runs deep in western psychology – most obviously in Germany, but also elsewhere in Europe and among European-origin Americans.

The new state went on to violate international law repeatedly, attack its neighbours, persecute the native Palestinian population, and impose a system of apartheid rule over them.

Astonishingly, it became the recipient of unstinting support from powerful western states, apparently unshaken by any of its excesses.

(Russia’s crimes against Ukraine were swiftly punished by the imposition of ferocious western sanctions, while Israel has been forgiven for similar crimes against Palestinians – and its privileged status in western esteem has not changed. ) Palestine was a godsend to be exploited.

The US has stood with Israel throughout history.

It is hard for the US to distance itself in any way from Israeli military operations.

The US was the first country to offer de facto recognition to the new Israeli government when the Jewish state declared independence on 14 May 1948. Seventy-five years later, Washington has long been Israel’s strongest military and diplomatic ally.People gather for a 'Stand With Israel Rally' in Freedom Plaza on 13 October in Washington.

There are multiple US laws that require monitoring and cutting off military aid to countries that use it to violate human rights and commit war crimes – which raises the question of why Biden is creating an entirely separate mechanism to enforce the same standards American lawmakers and his own administration created.

With Israel, however, the US provides so much military aid that it has become impossible to track down to an individual unit. So the vetting doesn’t actually happen before the provision of military aid to Israel as the law requires. ( Section 620(i) of the US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits sending arms to a country that prohibits or restricts the transport or delivery of humanitarian aid is ignored.)

One need look no further than the US position on the military occupation of Palestine v the military occupation of Ukraine to see the hypocrisy of its position.

One would think that by now the USA government believes – and finds it deeply disturbing – that Israel is not taking into sufficient consideration how many civilians it kills and is forcibly displaying civilians far beyond what’s necessary.

All of this becomes especially troubling when considering the reasons that Biden is communicating conditions behind closed doors where there can be no oversight or accountability. That he still does not feels the need to break from decades of exempting Israel from scrutiny.

Despite that conclusion, and instead of immediately halting arms transfers, the Biden administration is still sending a bottomless tray of armaments to Israel.

However there is a law:

The US, it states, will not send weapons overseas if it “assesses that it is more likely than not” that they will be used to commit grave breaches of the Geneva conventions, specifically mentioning “attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such; or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law”.

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Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory.

Today’s lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of  wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967.

The relationship only really began to flourish following the 1967 War which saw Israel defeat a coalition of Arab states, suffering comparatively few casualties in the process with little help from outside forces, and occupy swaths of new territory, including Gaza and the West Bank.

From the beginning. Former US President Harry Truman was the first world leader to recognise Israel when it was created in 1948.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the US and Israel began cooperating on research and development and production of weaponry.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, that money helped spur advancements in Israel’s surveillance technology and signal intelligence.

Currently, Israel receives $3.8 billion in military aid from the US annually under a memorandum signed in 2019. That accounted for about 16 percent of Israel’s total military budget in 2022 — a significant fraction, but not so large that Israel still depends on US aid in the way it once did.

This has made Israel the 10th largest military exporter in the world — and also made the US conversely reliant on Israel.

Even in the face of global opposition to Israeli  treatment of Palestinians the US is continued its unconditional aid to Israel, which has totaled $158 billion (not adjusted for inflation) since World War II.

The US is Israel’s top trading partner, with annual bilateral trade of nearly $50 billion in goods and services. “American capacities are now to some extent dependent on Israel.”

Washington has failed to urge an immediate ceasefire or utter a word of criticism directed at Israel.

The US president’s position is not unique among a long line of US presidents who have shown nearly unconditional support for Israel in times of conflict. The US also blocked a United Nations Security Council statement that would have called for an end to the violence.

In 2016, then-President Barack Obama signed a defence agreement with Israel providing $38bn in US military support over 10 years including funding for the Iron Dome missile defence system. The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas. “No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders, or terrorists tunnelling into its territory,” Obama said.

This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas – a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel’s destruction,” Bush said.

The Trump administration facilitated agreements to normalize relations between Israel and several of its Muslim-majority neighbors, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. There is speculation that Hamas’s attack was intended to upend talks brokered by the Biden administration to also normalize relations between Israel and its main regional rival Saudi Arabia so that they can form a united front against Iran, a common enemy that financially supports Hamas.

Donald Trump was deeply unpopular across much of the world. Israel was an exception after he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognising the city as Israel’s capital which most countries do not.

There are a number of organisations in the US that advocate for US support of Israel.

The largest and most politically powerful is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Pro-Israel interest groups donate millions to US federal political candidates. During the 2020 campaign, pro-Israel groups donated $30.95m, with 63 percent going to Democrats, 36 percent to Republicans.

Large majorities of the US Congress in the Democratic and Republican parties are avowedly pro-Israel.

It seem on the surface that the US have accepted that it’s just the cost of maintaining the special relationship, which is not just military and political in nature, Biden has reportedly floated a proposal for $2 billion in supplemental aid that would go towards missile interceptors for the Iron Dome, artillery shells, and other munitions. However, the White House could try to tie that aid to other, less bipartisanly popular causes — including funding for Ukraine and Taiwan and border security — which could delay its passage in the Republican-led House.

The continuing US alliance is giving Israel a wide berth for military actions, while disproportionately blaming Palestinians for any violence.  “Israel is in the American camp, no ifs, ands, or buts so is this current war/genocide an American war cleansing.

Decades of brutal Israeli control have demolished the moral case for unconditional US support to the point that these weapons were and are now being used in the commission of war crimes.


”What does it mean for the current Gaza war?

The war is such a major development, with such major implications for the region, that it could transform the nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations as we know them.

This could  stir anti-US sentiment in the Middle East as neighboring countries witness the death and destruction wreaked by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs both want the same land. And a compromise has proven difficult to find.

Israel is the world’s only Jewish state.

Palestine, wants to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over who gets what land and how it’s controlled can only be resolved by peace in some form.

The alternative to a two-state solution is a “one-state solution,” wherein all of the land becomes either one big Israel, one big Palestine, or some kind of shared state with a new name.

Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel all live under various regimes of organized discrimination and oppression, much of which makes life nearly unlivable, If you watched only US news, you would be likely to presume that Palestinians always act while Israel only reacts. You might even think that Palestinians are the ones colonizing the land of Israel, no less. And you probably believe that Israel, which holds ultimate control over the lives of 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and yet denies them the right to vote in Israeli elections, is a democracy.

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To be considered a political being you must at the very least be considered a human being. Who gets to count as human? “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said.

Human animals?

How can such language and an announced policy of collective punishment against all the residents of Gaza be seen by Israel’s supporters in the United States or elsewhere as defensible? Let’s be clear: Gallant’s language is not the rhetoric of deterrence. It’s the language of genocide.

One fundamental way this double standard operates is through a false equivalence, a two-sides-ism that hides the massive asymmetry of power between the state of Israel and the scattered population groupings that make up the Palestinian people. They’re not equal. One dominates while the other is dominated. One colonizes. The other is colonized.

We are very likely entering another long and painful era where armed struggle and violent domination become increasingly and mutually dependent on each other for survival. Yet neither can win. The Palestinians will remain. They cannot be eliminated. Israel too will continue to exist. The future is full of unnecessary and horrific bloodshed all around. Desperate western attachment to morally bankrupt double standards bears a large portion of the blame. The failure of  “the two-state solution.

The failure of the Zionist movement to entice the majority of European and American Jews to come to Palestine between 1897 and 1947 (or since) and its failure to acquire more than 6.5 percent of the land during that time necessitated an arrangement to establish a Jewish settler-colony on at least parts of Palestine, if not all of it.

It is important to point out, is only a solution to the Zionist failure to successfully colonise the whole country.Palestinian protesters shout slogans as they take part in a demonstration against Israel's plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on June 23, 2020.

The crowning efforts of realising the “two-state solution” that legitimises Israel while granting a consolation prize to the PLO in the form of an ever-deferred mini-state.

For the Israelis, who essentially authored the accords, the Oslo deal was no more than a public relations stunt for the “two-state solution,” while they secretly and not-so-secretly sounded the death knell for it, in preparation for the final “one-state solution”.

What the Israelis have in mind is a one state, not unlike what European white colonists had achieved across the Americas, Africa and Oceania, since the late 18th century, namely domination of the natives through land theft and a series of draconian security arrangements legitimised by the signing of a series of treaties.

These arrangements worked relatively well in the United States until the 1960s, when they had to be updated to be more effective in selling white supremacy to white Americans and to the rest of the world as the best form of “democracy”.

This is, with some variations, what had transpired in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

However, the white-supremacist one-state solution which worked well because of the effectiveness of genocide and slavery in establishing white demographic supremacy in the Americas and Oceania was less successful elsewhere, least of all in Africa.

In Palestine, the dilemma of the Jewish colonists who constituted 10 percent of Palestine’s population after World War One and 30 percent after World War Two was how to establish a demographic majority short of genocide. They opted for mass expulsion, a plan they had drawn up as early as the late 1920s and more formally after the mid-1930s. By the time they finished conquering Palestine in late 1948, they had expelled 90 percent of the Palestinian population in the Palestinian areas they conquered and established a Jewish-supremacist one state, in the American, Canadian, and Australian style.

Today, indigenous Palestinians (seven million – 5.1 million in the West Bank and Gaza and 1.9 million in Israel) have again outnumbered their colonisers (6.7 million), not counting the eight million expelled Palestinian refugees living in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon within a 100-mile radius around their homeland.

It is also the major reason why the one-state solution, despite its clear advantages – not to mention, inevitability – has never taken off at the official level, and is unlikely to while the present mindset persists in western countries.

As there are three different arrangements for the ‘one-state solution,’ which one of them does Israel have in mind for the Palestinian people?

Let no one be fooled, unless the one-state solution nullifies all Jewish racial and colonial privileges and decolonizes the country in order to grant equal rights to all, it would be yet another PR campaign to cover up the maintenance of Jewish supremacy under a new guise.

In the end do states have the right to exist. Taken literally no state has a right to exist, especially settlers states.  States exist because a group of people wants the state to exist for their benefit. If the state is no longer beneficial to its people, it can be changed or dissolved.

Even after three months of violence and tragedy in Gaza, there remains one theme which is too often danced around or simply ignored. It is the question on which all others depend: does Israel have a right to exist?

How to solve the unsolvable.

It seems to me that the nature of states should be determined by the demographics and democratic will of the people that state governs.

So Israel has the right to maintain its character as a Jewish supremacist ethno-state. But to have a genuine state like all state it must not just reconcile its history but accommodate it in all its forms, granting equality of opportunity to all its citizens no matter what their beliefs.

This is currently not happening through refusing Palestinians citizenship or collaboration as equals, or the right of return to their ancestral lands. Considering the fact that Palestinians have spent the last few decades either in ghettoized villages in the West Bank or in the open air prison camp of Gaza, and embrace absolute resistance to their own disempowerment and exclusion, to say “Israel has the right to exist” is a declaration of commitment to either eternal war, ethnic cleansing, or genocide.

In the case of Israel, the choice the state has faced has been between allowing the Jewish Supremacist nature of the state to change to account for the democratic will of Arabs, African asylum seekers, and other non-Jews, or to deny those non-Jews citizenship and go one claiming to be a “democracy” in the same way that ancient Athens was a democracy- if you happened to be a Greek male citizen, but not if you were a slave, non-Greek, or a woman..

If what we mean by “destroy Israel” is dissolve the nature of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state, than there is nothing wrong with saying so or doing so.

If the will of the actual people living in what is now Israel, want to re-imagine their country as a multicultural democracy or a binational state of Jews and Arabs, than they may do so, and there is nothing immoral or violent about saying so or advocating for this.

There is no other choice as very state formed by settlers colonization is learning to its cost.

Put simply, how can you expect calls for a ceasefire to be heard if you do not recognise the right to exist of those doing the fighting?

Peace depends on the hope of co-existence. Peace also requires leadership that Palestinians have rarely had — and Israel only sometimes. That lack of leadership is linked to opposition to a two-state solution extending back a century, even if the Palestinian Authority technically recognised Israel from 1993.

It’s logical to conclude that the repeated failures of Palestinian leaders to reach a deal for their own state (especially the offers on the table in 2000 and 2008) are inextricably linked to a refusal to consider true co-existence. Accepting a two-state solution means accepting Israel, and for most that cannot happen

.A positive response to “Does Israel have a right to exist?” sticks in the throat of a lot of pro-Palestine protestors, let alone Palestinians themselves.

This aspect of their cause is both fantastical and fantastically futile, since it rests entirely on the forlorn hope that Israel would, ideally, just disappear. The more Western activists adopt an absolutist stance on Israel, the more they put their own ideological purity before the long-term suffering of the Palestinians.

With or without a gencoid, leaving a uninhabitable land there is only a one state solution that can bring permanent peace.

Why not a Federalism? 

States do not have rights. People have rights, and these rights generally exist to protect them from states.

Just like in Northern Ireland when they dont exist to protect them from the states, they exist to protect them from other people.

With a single state likely the inevitable reality, it is past time to start imagining how it could be best implemented.

Fundamentally based on creating an Israeli-Palestinian reality that is shared rather than separate.

Since most peace efforts are based on relationship building, the two-state’s rhetoric of separation ultimately reinforces the perception on both sides that Palestinians are unwanted by Israel.

Regional governments under a larger federal body. This would preserve Israel’s Jewish majority, even in the long term. Israel plus the West Bank is currently 65% Jewish, and birth rates for Jews and Palestinians in this area are almost identical.  The federal government would operate based on a written constitution, which Israel currently lacks.

The constitutions of the cantons could be oriented toward the local majority culture while preserving freedoms of all religions and remaining within the bounds of the federal constitution.

A new parliamentary body representing the cantons would become the upper house, and the existing unicameral Knesset would become the lower house.

Jewish settlements would integrate rather than be dismantled.

The borders of this federation model are more easily defensible than almost any possible with a two-state solution.

Palestinians will likely be concerned about leaving Gaza behind.

To address this, Gaza could receive a port, airport and reasonable border and access arrangements. It would remain independent for as long as expedient. In the future, it could be integrated partly or wholly into the federation. One possibility for Gaza is a proposal related to federation, called confederation. Confederation includes elements of the federation model, such as shared Israeli-Palestinian governmental structures. However, it fundamentally preserves the existing national sovereignties, and so is considered a separate-state solution.

On the Palestinian side, it gives Palestinians the empowerment they have long sought. On the Israeli side, it opens the West Bank, develops Gaza for trade and improves Israel’s worldwide image. It even has the potential to inspire and rally parts of the Jewish Diaspora that are currently apathetic or polarized.

The West set up Israel out of compassion now it must for the same reason offer an alternative with the potential to succeed.

—————-

How do you define genocide?

The term genocide was coined in 1943 by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who combined the Greek word “genos” (race or tribe) with the Latin word “cide” (to kill).

But behind that simple definition is a complicated tangle of legal concepts concerning what constitutes genocide and when the term can be applied.

Article Two of the convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”:

  • Killing members of the group
  • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
  • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
  • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
  • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Does what is happing in Palestine qualify?  You decide.

The willingness of citizens to view their neighbors in a civic way – is in an advanced stage of decline or collapse. “I’m afraid that we are reaching the point of no return if we allow a country openly admit its going to commit a genocide.

Out of respect for those who lost their lives in these grievous mass exterminations, let’s spend some time completing these sobering events in human history.

Bangladesh Genocide, The Croatian Ustasha Genocide. The mass extermination of the Mongol Buddhist Dzungar people, or Zunghars,  The Rwandan Genocide, Tutsi ethnic group, with Hutu nationalists annihilating nearly seventy-five percent of the Tutsi people. The Armenian Genocide.The Kazakhstan Goloshchekin Genocide. The Cambodian Genocide. The Ukrainian Genocide. The Holocaust

Combined wiped they out around 38 million and counting. 

Even the darkest moments of human history have an undeniable impact on the future of our world:

IF JOE BIDEN 81, DOESN’T HAVE THE BALLS to turn on the red light THE REST OF US ARE SITTING ON A POWDER KEG of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.

Because Donald is running for president under the shadow of 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, knowing that regaining the White House might be his best hope of avoiding prison – a calculus that could make him and his supporters more desperate and volatile than ever.

Biden is surrounded by people who are experienced campaign veterans and so is he. Use it.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmaail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: THESE DAYS WHAT CAN WE BELIEVE IN ?

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( Fifteen minute read)

The last post this year, have a peaceful Christmas.

This post is a follow up to the post, ( What is life, What does it mean to be alive). It is also an attempt to argue for as many preposterous positions as possible in the shortest space of time possible.

That there are no options other than accepting that life is objectively meaningful or not meaningful at all.

Science requires proof, religious belief requires faith.

So let’s get God and Gods out of the way.

.Could quantum physics help explain a God that could be in two places at once? (Credit: Nasa)

If you believe in God, then the idea of God being bound by the laws of physics is nonsense, because God can do everything, even travel faster than light. If you don’t believe in God, then the question is equally nonsensical, because there isn’t a God and nothing can travel faster than light.

Perhaps the question is really one for agnostics, who don’t know whether there is a God.

The idea that God might be “bound” by the laws of physics – which also govern chemistry and biology might not be so far stretched that the James Webb telescope might discover him or her. Whether it does or does not, if it did discovered life on another planet and the human race realizes that its long loneliness in time and space may be over — the possibility we’re no longer alone in the universe is where scientific empiricism and religious faith intersect, with NO true answer?.

Could any answer help us prove whether or not God exists, not on your nanny.

If God wasn’t able to break the laws of physics, she or he arguably wouldn’t be as powerful as you’d expect a supreme being to be. But if he or she could, why haven’t we seen any evidence of the laws of physics ever being broken in the Universe?

If there is a God who created the entire universe and ALL of its laws of physics, does God follow God’s own laws? Or can God supersede his own laws, such as travelling faster than the speed of light and thus being able to be in two different places at the same time?

Let’s consider whether God can be in more than one place at the same time.

(According to quantum mechanics, particles are by definition in a mix of different states until you actually measure them.)

There is something faster than the speed of light after all: Quantum information.

This doesn’t prove or disprove God, but it can help us think of God in physical terms – maybe as a shower of entangled particles, transferring quantum information back and forth, and so occupying many places at the same time? Even many universes at the same time?

But is it true?

A few years ago, a group of physicists posited that particles called tachyons travelled above light speed. Fortunately, their existence as real particles is deemed highly unlikely. If they did exist, they would have an imaginary mass and the fabric of space and time would become distorted – leading to violations of causality (and possibly a headache for God).

(This in itself does not say anything at all about God. It merely reinforces the knowledge that light travels very fast indeed.)

We can calculate that light has travelled roughly 1.3 x 10 x 23 (1.3 times 10 to the power 23) km in the 13.8 billion years of the Universe’s existence. Or rather, the observable Universe’s existence.

The Universe is expanding at a rate of approximately 70km/s per Mpc (1 Mpc = 1 Megaparsec or roughly 30 billion billion kilometres), so current estimates suggest that the distance to the edge of the universe is 46 billion light years. As time goes on, the volume of space increases, and light has to travel for longer to reach us.

We cannot observe or see across the entirety of the Universe that has grown since the Big Bang because insufficient time has passed for light from the first fractions of a second to reach us. Some argue that we therefore cannot be sure whether the laws of physics could be broken in other cosmic regions – perhaps they are just local, accidental laws. And that leads us on to something even bigger than the Universe.

But if inflation could happen once, why not many times?

We know from experiments that quantum fluctuations can give rise to pairs of particles suddenly coming into existence, only to disappear moments later. And if such fluctuations can produce particles, why not entire atoms or universes? It’s been suggested that, during the period of chaotic inflation, not everything was happening at the same rate – quantum fluctuations in the expansion could have produced bubbles that blew up to become universes in their own right.

How come all the physical laws and parameters in the universe happen to have the values that allowed stars, planets and ultimately life to develop?

We shouldn’t be surprised to see biofriendly physical laws – they after all produced us, so what else would we see? Some theists, however, argue it points to the existence of a God creating favourable conditions.

But God isn’t a valid scientific explanation.

We can’t disprove the idea that a God may have created the multiverse.

No matter what is believable or not, things can appear from nowhere and disappear to nowhere.

If you find this hard to swallow, what follows will make you choke.

First there is panpsychism, the idea that “consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it.

Even particles are never compelled to do anything, but are rather disposed, from their own nature, to respond rationally to their experience. That the universe is conscious and is acting towards a purpose of realising the full potential of its consciousness.

The radicalism of this “teleological cosmopsychism” is made clear by its implication that “during the first split second of time, the universe fine-tuned itself in order to allow for the emergence of life billions of years in the future”. To do this, “the universe must in some sense have been aware of this future possibility”.

That the universe itself has a built-in purpose, the disappointingly vague goal of which is “rational matter achieving a higher realisation of its nature.

The laws of physics are just right for conscious life to evolve that it can’t have been an accident.

It is hard to see why the universe’s purpose should give our lives one. Indeed, to believe one plays an infinitesimally small part in the unfolding of a cosmic master plan makes each human life look insignificant.

The basic question about our place in the Universe is one that may be answered by scientific investigations.

What are the next steps to finding life elsewhere?

Today’s telescopes can look at many stars and tell if they have one or more orbiting planets. Even more, they can determine if the planets are the right distance away from the star to have liquid water, the key ingredient to life as we know it.

NEXT:How to Choose Which Social Media Platforms to Use

We live in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed that are the problem.

This mentality now with the help of technological advances in communication spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world twisting our basic understanding of reality to our own ends.

This is not as simple as distrust.

The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance have enable to usher in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion. Which will end in a Trumpian refusal to accept any mainstream or official account of the world with people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world really works.

The crisis of democracy and of truth are one and the same:

Individuals are increasingly suspicious of the “official” stories they are being told, and expect to witness things for themselves.

How exactly do we distinguish this critical mentality from that of the conspiracy theorist, who is convinced that they alone have seen through the official version of events? Or to turn the question around, how might it be possible to recognise the most flagrant cases of bias in the behaviour of reporters and experts, but nevertheless to accept that what they say is often a reasonable depiction of the world?

It is tempting to blame the internet, populists or foreign trolls for flooding our otherwise rational society with lies.

But this underestimates the scale of the technological and philosophical transformations that are under way. The single biggest change in our public sphere is that we now have an unimaginable excess of news and content, where once we had scarcity. The explosion of information available to us is making it harder, not easier, to achieve consensus on truth.

As the quantity of information increases, the need to pick out bite-size pieces of content rises accordingly.

In this radically sceptical age, questions of where to look, what to focus on and who to trust are ones that we increasingly seek to answer for ourselves, without the help of intermediaries. This is a liberation of sorts, but it is also at the heart of our deteriorating confidence in public institutions.

There is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem becoming a serious public health problem across the world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science. However the panic surrounding echo chambers and so-called filter bubbles is largely groundless.

What, then, has to changed?

The key thing is that the elites of government and the media have lost their monopoly over the provision of information, but retain their prominence in the public eye.

And digital platforms now provide a public space to identify and rake over the flaws, biases and falsehoods of mainstream institutions.

The result is an increasingly sceptical citizenry, each seeking to manage their media diet, checking up on individual journalists in order to resist the pernicious influence of the establishment.

The problem we face is not, then, that certain people are oblivious to the “mainstream media”, or are victims of fake news, but that we are all seeking to see through the veneer of facts and information provided to us by public institutions.

Facts and official reports are no longer the end of the story.

The truth is now threatened by a radically different system, which is transforming the nature of empirical evidence and memory. One term for this is “big data”, which highlights the exponential growth in the quantity of data that societies create, thanks to digital technologies.

The reason there is so much data today is that more and more of our social lives are mediated digitally. Internet browsers, smartphones, social media platforms, smart cards and every other smart interface record every move we make. Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are constantly leaving traces of our activities, no matter how trivial.

But it is not the escalating quantity of data that constitutes the radical change.

Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs.

In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important.

Things no longer need to be judged “important” to be captured.

Consciously, we photograph events and record experiences regardless of their importance. Unconsciously, we leave a trace of our behaviour every time we swipe a smart card, address Amazon’s Alexa or touch our phone.

For the first time in human history, recording now happens by default, and the question of significance is addressed separately.

This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge.

When everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Data can simply “speak for itself”. This is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.

From this perspective, every controversy can in principle be settled thanks to the vast trove of data – CCTV, records of digital activity and so on – now available to us. Reality in its totality is being recorded, and reporters and officials look dismally compromised by comparison.

It is often a single image that seems to capture the truth of an event, only now there are cameras everywhere.

No matter how many times it is disproven, the notion that “the camera doesn’t lie” has a peculiar hold over our imaginations. In a society of blanket CCTV and smartphones, there are more cameras than people, and the torrent of data adds to the sense that the truth is somewhere amid the deluge, ignored by mainstream accounts.

The central demand of this newly sceptical public is “so show me”.

The rise of blanket surveillance technologies has paradoxical effects, raising expectations for objective knowledge to unrealistic levels, and then provoking fury when those in the public eye do not meet them.

Surely, in this age of mass data capture, the truth will become undeniable.

On the other hand, as the quantity of data becomes overwhelming – greater than human intelligence can comprehend – our ability to agree on the nature of reality seems to be declining. Once everything is, in principle, recordable, disputes heat up regarding what counts as significant in the first place.

What we are discovering is that, once the limitations on data capture are removed, there are escalating opportunities for conflict over the nature of reality.

Remember AI does not exist in a vacuum, its employment can and is discriminating against communities, powered by vast amounts of energy,  producing CO2 emissions.

Lastly the Advertising Industry.The impact of COVID-19 on the advertising industry - Passionate In ...

These day it seems that it has free rain to claim anything.

Like them or loathe them, advertisements are everywhere and they’re worsening not just the climate crisis, and ecological damage by promoting sustainability in consumption and inequality. Presenting a fake, idealised world that papers over an often brutal reality.

But advertising in one sense is even more dangerous, because it is so pervasive, sophisticated in its techniques and harder to see through. When hundreds of millions of people have desires for more and more stuff and for more and more services and experiences, that really adds up and puts a strain on the Earth.

The toll of disasters propelled by climate change in 2023 can be tallied with numbers — thousands of people dead, millions of others who lost jobs, homes and hope, and tens of billions of dollars sheared off economies. But numbers can’t reflect the way climate change is experienced — the intensity, the insecurity and the inequality that people on Earth are now living.

In every place that climate change makes its mark, inequality is made worse.

How are we going to protect the truth:

It goes without saying that spiritual beliefs will protect themselves. Lies, propaganda and fake news however is the challenge for our age.

Working out who to trust and who not to believe has been a facet of human life since our ancestors began living in complex societies. Politics has always bred those who will mislead to get ahead.

With news sources splintering and falsehoods spreading widely online, can anything be done?

Check Google.

Welcome to the world of “alternative facts”. It is a bewildering maze of claim and counterclaim, where hoaxes spread with frightening speed on social media and spark angry backlashes from people who take what they read at face value.

It is an environment where the mainstream media is accused of peddling “fake news” by the most powerful man in the world.

Voters are seemingly misled by the very politicians they elected and even scientific research – long considered a reliable basis for decisions – is dismissed as having little value.

Without a common starting point – a set of facts that people with otherwise different viewpoints can agree on – it will be hard to address any of the problems that the world now faces. The threat posed by the spread of misinformation should not be underestimated.

Some warn that “fake news” threatens the democratic process itself.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center towards the end of last year found that 64% of American adults said made-up news stories were causing confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.

How we control the dissemination of things that seem to be untrue. We need a new way to decide what is trustworthy.

Take Wikipedia itself – which can be edited by anyone but uses teams of volunteer editors to weed out inaccuracies – is far from perfect.

These platforms and their like are simply in it for the money.

Last year, links to websites masquerading as reputable sources started appearing on social media sites like Facebook.

Stories about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump’s candidacy and Hillary Clinton being indicted for crimes related to her email scandal were shared widely despite being completely made up. The ability to share them widely on social media means a slice of the advertising revenue that comes from clicks.

Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact. All those counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.

Information spreads around the world in seconds, with the potential to reach billions of people. But it can also be dismissed with a flick of the finger. What we choose to engage with is self-reinforcing and we get shown more of the same. It results in an exaggerated “echo chamber” effect.

The challenge here is how to burst these bubbles.

One approach that has been tried is to challenge facts and claims when they appear on social media. Organisations like Full Fact, for example, look at persistent claims made by politicians or in the media, and try to correct them. (The BBC also has its own fact-checking unit, called Reality Check.)

This approach doesn’t work on social media because the audiences were largely disjointed.

Even when a correction reached a lot of people and a rumour reached a lot of people, they were usually not the same people. The problem is, corrections do not spread very well. This lack of overlap is a specific challenge when it comes to political issues.

On Facebook political bodies can put something out, pay for advertising, put it in front of millions of people, yet it is hard for those not being targeted to know they have done that. They can target people based on how old they are, where they live, what skin colour they have, what gender they are.

We shouldn’t think of social media as just peer-to-peer communication – it is also the most powerful advertising platform there has ever been. We have never had a time when it has been so easy to advertise to millions of people and not have the other millions of us notice.

Twitter and Facebook both insist they have strict rules on what can be advertised and particularly on political advertising. Regardless, the use of social media adverts in politics can have a major impact.

We need some transparency about who is using social media advertising when they are in election campaigns and referendum campaigns. We need watchdogs that will go around and say, ‘Hang on, this doesn’t stack up’ and ask for the record to be corrected.

We need Platforms to ensure that people have read content before sharing it to develop standards.

Google says it is working on ways to improve its algorithms so they take accuracy into account when displaying search results. “Judging which pages on the web best answer a query is a challenging problem and we don’t always get it right,”

The challenge is going to be writing tools that can check specific types of claims.

Built a fact-checker app that could sit in a browser and use Watson’s language skills to scan the page and give a percentage likelihood of whether it was true.

This idea of helping break through the isolated information bubbles that many of us now live in, comes up again and again.

By presenting people with accurate facts it should be possible to at least get a debate going.

There is a large proportion of the population living in what we would regard as an alternative reality.  By suggesting things to people that are outside their comfort zone but not so far outside they would never look at it you can keep people from self-radicalising in these bubbles.

There are understandable fears about powerful internet companies filtering what people see.

We should think about adding layers of credibility to sources. We need to tag and structure quality content in effective ways.

But what if people don’t agree with official sources of information at all?

This is a problem that governments around the world are facing as the public views what they tell them with increasing scepticism. There is an unwillingness to bend one’s mind around facts that don’t agree with one’s own viewpoint.

The first stage in that is crowdsourcing facts.  So before you have a debate, you come up with the commonly accepted facts that people can debate from.

Technology may help to solve this grand challenge of our age, but it is time for a little more self-awareness too.

In the end the world needs a new Independent Organisation to examine all technology against human values. Future war will be fought on Face recognition.

To certify and hold the original programs of all technology.

Have I been trained by robbery its manter when it comes to algorithms.

The whole goal of the transition is not to allow a handful of Westerners to peacefully go through life in a Tesla, a world in flames; it is to allow humanity – and the rest of biodiversity – to live decently.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: What is life? What does it mean to be alive?

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( Eight minutes read)

The quest to understand life and its purpose has been around as long as we have.

Today the same question persists:    What does it mean to be fully alive?

With the arrival of machine learning/artificial intelligence we are becoming disposable products – here to day, gone tomorrow. Therefore most essential existential drive is to understand the meaning of our own existence, that relates to all of us – rich or poor – left hemisphere – right hemisphere.

This with what the world is now facing, there are no questions more important or pressing ( now and or in the not so distant future), than the above for the whole planet.

It is one of those philosophical questions that can never be answered definitively.

However the conspiracy of greed, in all its forms, is not sustainable for any lifeform, whether it is alive or not.

——————

Life is short and time moves fast. Your life is not a dress rehearsal – make it count.

There is simply no room for belief in a spiritual realm, or in a scientific view of reality. Period.

No matter what we put in a test tube nothing is going to crawl out alive, it would simply be another kind of physical property.

We defined biology as the branch of science concerned with the study of living things, or organisms.

That definition is pretty straightforward. However, it opens the door to more difficult—and more interesting—questions:

adimas | AdobeStock

LET’S START.

Do you have to be conscious to be alive.  No. It actually isn’t as cut and dry as you think it is. Where does consciousness come from? And how do our brains create it?

We don’t have a great scientific definition of consciousness, and philosophical definitions are disputed, but in almost every conception it has something to do with an ongoing awareness of events beyond the raw computation of their properties and immediate selection of an action.

It might depend on what we mean exactly by consciousness (cognitive/representational abilities? Qualitative experience?) and also by “living” (autonomous subsistence? Self replication? Lineage with biological organisms on earth?).

All evidence is that brains generate consciousness.

Only living matter is susceptible of consciousness, but not all living things have a consciousness in the sense that we employ. Rudimentary life forms such as worms, bacteria, virus, do have a primitive form of consciousness even though they can hardly be said to be “conscious”.

Consciousness results from the antagonistic relativization between biological matter and physical matter. Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now.

One of the most compelling aspects of the mystery of consciousness is the nature of self.

Is consciousness possible without self-consciousness? And if so, would it still matter so much?

To understanding consciousness it immediately becomes apparent that like all other biological phenomena and like life itself, it must have evolved in gradations.

People have long pondered what consciousness actually is. What do we even mean by consciousness?

How can a purely physical thing feel like something? Surely consciousness is some kind of otherness?

Perhaps consciousness is an as-yet undiscovered fundamental property of the universe, or is it God himself.

So how far back in evolutionary history should we go to look for the origins of consciousness?

All the way back. Nearly four billion years. Long before animals had brains, or even a nervous system. Back to simple single-celled organisms like bacteria. Back to the origin of life itself.

This is not to suggest that simple unicellular organisms possessed consciousness, or even a modicum of it. Not consciousness, but its building blocks:

The origins of life will never be found.  Nor will we ever be able to create it.

Consciousness probably evolved as a way for organisms to go far beyond responding merely reflexively to stimuli—to be able to respond more flexibly, and in a more delayed and planned manner.

Thoughts and feelings seem ethereal, untethered from anything physical.

Self-awareness seems like a phenomenon utterly divorced from anything that could possibly be produced by cells comprised of physical particles. How the same material particles that comprise inanimate matter could be arranged in such a way as to make something alive, without adding that special, mysterious nonmaterial essence. Let alone how inanimate matter could organize itself in such clever and intricate ways through entirely unguided, spontaneous processes.

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Now, in the present century, science is turning its attention to decoding the enigma of consciousness.

Without a shadow of a doubt there is no aspect of the mind that is not entirely the product of, and utterly dependent on, the physical brain. Disruption, disassembly or enhancement of brain circuitry (subtle or major) can radically alter any aspect of the mind.

And yet the mystery of how exactly the brain produces consciousness has remained unexplained.

When does consciousness begin in development? Does it emerge at birth, or is it present even in the womb?

We don’t yet know exactly how consciousness emerges, and very many intriguing mysteries remain.

About six minutes after the heart stops, and the blood supply to the brain is interrupted, the brain essentially dies. Then, deterioration reaches a point of no return and core consciousness – our ability to feel that we are here and now, and to recognise that thoughts we have are own own – is lost.

The moment the brain loses its exquisitely synchronized organization, consciousness is lost.

If that breakdown of physical processes is irreversible, consciousness is permanently extinguished, and the unique organization of matter that constituted that individual’s personhood, self or essence ceases to exist.

Everything that lives dies.  Is this true?  Yes  You only live once. No living thing know when living a life ends.

Indeed, the denial of death is the raison d’être of most religions.

The idea of life after death makes complete sense to our intuitions, and that’s not the only reason why the belief comes so naturally to people.

Because we associate ourselves with our body and we know bodies die this is true, but the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Do you believe that your mind, personality, or self is an essence that exists independent of your physical brain?

Do you think of you as a spirit or soul, temporarily constrained and residing in the organ that is your brain—an immortal consciousness merely housed in your earthly body?

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Death has never been popular, especially when it is seen as the final and utter cessation of being.

The prospect’s tolerability increases only when it is reframed as a mere passage to a heavenly paradise filled with all manner of delights—all the more so for those who are suffering or disadvantaged in this life.

It all depend on the observer.

What you see could not be present without your consciousness.

Your eyes are not portals to the world. Everything you see and experience right now‚ even your body, is a whirl of information occurring in your mind so you could live a life without been conscious that you are alive.

So how can a particle change its behavior depending on whether you watch it or not?

Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave.

The answer is simple, reality is a process that involves your consciousness.

A particle’s exact location and momentum can’t be known at the same time.

So why should it matter to a particle what you decide to measure?

How can pairs of entangled particles be instantaneously connected on opposite sides of the galaxy as if space and time don’t exist?

In 2002, scientists showed that particles of light “photons” knew, in advance,what their distant twins would do in the future.

There are an infinite number of universes and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death and Life does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them.

When we die, we do so not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the inescapable-life-matrix. Life has a non-linear dimensionality; it’s like a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.

Of course, we live in the same world. But critics claim this behavior is limited to the microscopic world. But this ‘two-world’ view (that is, one set of physical laws for small objects, and another for the rest of the universe including us) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in laboratories around the world.

Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to understand reality will remain a road to nowhere.

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You are alive, and so am I.

The tree’s outside my window.

However, snow falling from the clouds is not alive, or is it

The computer you’re using to read this article is not alive, and neither is a chair or table. The parts of a chair that are made of wood were once alive, but they aren’t any longer. If you were to burn the wood in a fire, the fire would not be alive either, or is it.

How can we tell that one thing is alive and another is not?

As I have said it’s surprisingly hard to come up with a precise definition of life.

Many definitions of life are operational definitions—they allow us to separate living things from nonliving ones, but they don’t actually pin down what life is. To make this separation, we must come up with a list of properties that are, as a group, uniquely characteristic of living organisms.

All living organisms are made up of one or more cells, which are considered the fundamental units of life

Humans—are made up of many cells.

Life depends on an enormous number of interlocking chemical reactions. Living things must use energy and consume nutrients to carry out the chemical reactions that sustain life.

Living organisms regulate their internal environment to maintain the relatively narrow range of conditions needed for cell function.

For instance, your body temperature needs to be kept relatively close to 98.6. This maintenance of a stable internal environment, even in the face of a changing external environment IS ESSENTIAL.

Living organisms show “irritability,” meaning that they respond to stimuli or changes in their environment.

Living organisms can reproduce themselves to create new organisms. Sperm and egg cells containing half of their genetic information, and these cells fuse to form a new individual with a full genetic set. You yourself started out as a single cell and now have tens of trillions of cells in your body.

Unicellular organisms may migrate toward a source of nutrients or away from a noxious chemical.

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Populations of living organisms can undergo evolution, meaning that the genetic makeup of a population may change over time, for instance the basic building blocks of everyday life that have been obliterated in many areas of the Gaza Strip as the Israeli bombardment following Hamas’ deadly 7 October attacks stretches into its third month, will result in an state of unsecure Israel for decades to come.

You might well ask what can I do to change life. The answer is simple – Give and you will receive.

I was not alive in 1066 or 1492 or 1865 or 1920, so I have no way to judge any time except the time I experienced myself. I don’t think anyone can really pass judgment on any time which they did not experience for themselves, without seriously romanticising, or conversely vilifying that time.

I submit that the “golden years” for any generation, or individual, are the years right before you are forced to confront the realities of keeping yourself alive by yourself.

I am a 60th youth. so I could dream about being a part of the changes needed to make the world a better place, without being jaded by the realities of the roadblocks set up to prevent any of these changes from maturing.

We must come alive to be alive.  The best time to be alive is today, this moment, right now.

We have some big challenges facing us, like climate change, growing socioeconomic disparity, and threats of an erosion of rights and on going wars. “Yes, we have challenges galore … but those challenges spark imagination, creativity, courage and cooperation (if we are smart enough to rise to the occasion).

It is a battle, but it is possible to win.

That’s a problem because when we act instead of being, we aren’t living in the fullest sense.

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GET OFF YOUR SMARTPHONE.

Engage with the world around you and learning as much as possible.  don’t take things for granted or perceive life casually. Being fully alive means being open to all the possibilities of your existence and exploring every part of yourself until you find what…

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life,” Henry David Thoreau said.  Wrong.  You need an awakened brain to see life.

To rap this post up we could ask how and what has changed to living one life.

It can be made complicated or simple as the Malthusian trap in 1751 when we allowed machines to think,
– the AI trap.
What about future.
Will a Robot’s develop their own consciousness. 
Here, we ought to be concerned not just about the power that new forms of artificial intelligence are
gaining over us, but also about whether and when we need to take an ethical stance toward them.
With each new advance in our understanding comes a new sense of wonder and a new ability to see
ourselves as less apart from — and more a part of — the rest of nature. 
Our conscious experiences are part of nature just as our bodies are, just as our world is. 
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist,” Oscar Wilde said.

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THE BEADY EYES : CHRISTMAS / NEW YEAR GREETING 2024. WHOOPS. WHOOP. WHERE ARE WE GOING. THERE GO I BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD!

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(ONE MINUTE READ)

TWO WEEKS OF NEGOTIATIONS AND ONCE AGAIN THE WORLD OF LEADERSHIPS SHOWS US ALL JUST HOW PATHETICALLY DIFFICULT IT IS FOR US TO ACT AS ONE.

For the 30 years this climate summit process has been going on there has been no formal recognition of the fact if we are going to avoid the most dangerous climate change we have to phase out our use of fossil fuels.

Instead of the phrase “phase out” the text tells countries to “transition away” from fossil fuels, beginning this decade. Transition away such as allowing a role for “transitional fuels” like gas.

The deal is not legally-binding.

It was probably never going to in a region or in a text dominated by fossil fuels – but it did pass, with some slight watering down.

Why couldn’t the meeting go one step further and promise to leave all fossil fuels in the ground?

Like it or not, fossil fuels are remarkably good at what they do.

Coal, demonised as it may be these days, isn’t just good at firing up power stations; it’s also nearly unbeatable (in its coked form) at helping you turn certain ores into metals.

We still rely on natural gas for most of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser production, without which half of the world would starve.

We still have yet to find a way of mass producing concrete without spewing a lot of carbon dioxide into the air.

And making plastics without oil is, as Lego learnt to its cost, tricky, to say the least.

Actions are more powerful than words. In modern times, this proverbial phrase is used to express empathetic compassion and a sense of good fortune realized by avoiding hardship.

Whether its Merry Christmas or Happy, it is the intent of the message that truly matters.

Let the light of Christmas be bright on green energy.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHAT IS OR WILL BE THE FOUNDATIONS OF OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH AI?

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(Three minute read)

Few of us realize what this really involves.

How to Create Artificial Intelligence Everyone Loves

We are in a world full of noise,  substitution ciphers – concealment ciphers, transposition ciphers, all that can only be deciphered using AI programs, testing millions of combinations per second.

Self learning AI will not address us in the fulness of our humanity, so I suppose it is reasonable to presume that there is no one who knows the realistic answer to this question . .

Perhaps the question should be: Will people relate to each other as people and not as things?

( We live in an unjust society but we wish it were not. The two parts of this statement are inseparable and exist in constant tension with each other)

The ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence, a self-teaching system that can outperform humans across a wide range of disciplines. Some scientists believe it’s 30 years away; others talk about centuries.

This AI “take-off,” also known as the singularity, will likely see AI pull even with human intelligence and then blow past it in a matter of days. Or hours.

Imagine one day you ask your AI-enabled Soul band wrist device to tune in to a broadcast from the Supreme Court, where lawyers are arguing the year’s most anticipated case. An AI known as Alpha 4, which specializes in security and space exploration, brought the motion, demanding that it be deemed a “person” and given the rights that every person enjoys.

Imagine that, in 2065, AIs help run nation-states. Countries that have adopted AI-assisted governments are thriving.

You might think that this is all hypothetical nonsense, however I am sure you are acquittal aware of just how complicated it has become to navigate modern day living, not to mention the array of other intrusive activates of AI. Algorithms, freed from human programmers, are training themselves on massive data sets and producing results that have shocked even the optimists in the field. All creating societies of greed – a problem that is now systemic with the reality that we stand on the destruction of the the very things needed for life in the first place, which is progressing at a run away pace – Climate Change.

How then do we change the world without taking power?

If we don’t want to live lives ruled by a few World clongonmerations without any say?

A.I. experts talk about “alignment” — that is, making sure A.I. systems are in line with human values and goals.

But how can humans remain in control of artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems designed to perform tasks autonomously?

Such systems are increasingly ubiquitous, creating benefits – but also undesirable situations where moral responsibility for their actions cannot be properly attributed to any particular person or group.

How can designers, users, or other human agents be morally responsible for systems that are designed to perform tasks, learn, and adapt without direct human control?

If we are not to have a say, the solution is simple.

However this can not be achieved without : A NEW WORD ORGANISATION TO POLICE ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE IN ALL ITS FORM AND USAGE. ( I don’t speak here of just one AI, but of hundreds, each specializing in a complex task—and many of the applications are already lapping the humans that made them.)

THIS ORGANISATION MUST HOLD ALL CODES THAT DRIVES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

Why?

Because with AI there is no such thing as one truth, only several truths.

Because AI’s will have no boundaries, morally or otherwise.

Power and knowledge are now so intrinsic all connect they are now almost the two faces of the same coin.

Remember that  truth in historical discourse is not objective but subjective.

So the truth in AI terms will need to be redefine.

Will robots become self-aware? Will they have rights? Will they be in charge?

There is a terrible logic here.

With all that the world faces in the next decades, our world is presently being towering apart by inequality of values, and it is a fundamental fact that what is decided by AI will vibrate for decades to come, feed with data from mobile phones and social media, inroading what is left of democracy and its institutions.

This is driving populism which does not replace anything, but is contributing to climate change dementia which now has it own momentum, verbally fashioned by a range of human conscious which is evolving in the wrong direction.

ARTIFICIAL INTELIGENCE it is not yet outside the control of human intervention.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: TAKING REVENGE IS PROHIBITED IN JUSAISM. BUT WHAT IS OR WHO IS A JEW?

( Six minute read)

The diversity of beliefs and practices has led to different definitions of “Who is a Jew.”

Judaism is a religion as well as a nation and culture. Approximately 14.7 million people worldwide identify as Jewish. Today, Judaism is comprised of four major movements: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist.

The above question is not just philosophical, it has political and legal ramifications.How the Recession Is Affecting the Jewish Religion

Defining who is and is not Jewish is a contentious issue.

In Israel, questions of Jewishness have implications for immigration, conversion, marriage, divorce, and the allocation of government money.

Is it determined by heritage? By an individual’s choice of whether or not to identify as Jewish? Whether one “looks” or “feels” Jewish?

Or is the defining issue whether anti-Semites, such as the Nazis, would consider one to be Jewish?

All of these factors have been used at different times and places to determine who is and who is not Jewish.

Both the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah were formed by 12 tribes of Hebrew people. While there is historical evidence of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (which formed the Kingdom of Judah and are considered the ancestors of modern Jews.

In Israel, where there is no civil marriage, marrying a Jew and being buried in a Jewish cemetery can be done only if the person in question is considered legally Jewish. In a synagogue, in order to be counted in a minyan, a prayer quorum, one must be Jewish, and so too if one wants to be called up to the Torah for an aliyah.

The Israeli Chief Rabbinate controls the marriage process for Jews in Israel, and their definition of Jewishness accords with traditional halacha. Thus, it is common to find people who are granted citizenship as Jews under the Law of Return, but are unable to legally marry as Jews (or marry Jews) in Israel.

Historically, Judaism has held that a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism in a halakhic manner (that is, according to Jewish law) Anyone with a single Jewish grandparent or a Jewish spouse is eligible to move to Israel and become a citizen under the Law of Return.

So who decides who is a Jew?

The original name for the people we now call Jews was Hebrews.

The word is apparently derived from the name Eber, one of Abraham’s ancestors. Another tradition teaches that the word comes from the word “eyver,” which means “the other side,” referring to the fact that Abraham came from the other side of the Euphrates or referring to the fact Abraham was separated from the other nations morally and spiritually.

The word “Jew” (in Hebrew, “Yehudi”) is derived from the name Judah, which was the name of one of Jacob’s twelve sons. Originally, the term Yehudi referred specifically to members of the tribe of Judah, as distinguished from the other tribes of Israel.

Another name used for the people is Children of Israel or Israelites, which refers to the fact that the people are descendants of Jacob, who was also called Israel.

In common speech, the word “Jew” is used to refer to all of the physical and spiritual descendants of Jacob/Israel, as well as to the patriarchs Abraham and Isaac and their wives, and the word “Judaism” is used to refer to their beliefs. Technically, this usage is inaccurate, just as it is technically inaccurate to use the word “Indian” to refer to the original inhabitants of the Americas. However, this technically inaccurate usage is common both within the Jewish community and outside of it.

Judaism thus begins with ethical monotheism:

The belief that God is one and is concerned with the actions of mankind. According to the Hebrew Bible, God promised Abraham to make of his offspring a great nation. Most ancient societies were polytheistic—they believed in and worshiped multiple gods.


When Jews have been at risk from the surrounding culture or from political persecution, they have turned inward and focused on the particularist elements of Jewish law and practice — the unique, defining rituals and institutions — in an effort to survive as a people.

Of course a country is entitled to defend itself when attacked.  Killing is good for preventing a future offense, but not for avenging one already done. It is a deed more of fear than of bravery.

You shall not take revenge… Leviticus 19:18

The duty to respect the commands of the government is clearly stated and emphasized in Jewish law.

After the Hamas barbaris attack in Israel today’s society vengeance is at the forefront with an an eye for an eye making the whole world blind.

If Israel wants peace and to be respected by its muslim Arabic neighbours in this time of sorrow it must give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.Religious Zionists today have forgotten real Jewish values - opinion - The  Jerusalem Post

Deeply traditional Jews and the founders of the Jewish state alike understood that the foundation of Jewish values and identity is the Bible. Yet both the Torah of Israel and rabbinic tradition had very different ideas about authentic Jewishness and how Jews should live.

The Torah demands that we keep far away from lies and falsehood (Exodus 23:7), root out corruption from among us (Deuteronomy 19:19), not defile the land by spilling innocent blood (Deuteronomy 19:10), and not allow murderers to go free (Numbers 35:31).

The Torah also teaches that all human beings are created in the Divine Image (Genesis 1:26-27). This means that every human person has intrinsic dignity and must be accorded transcendent value.

Yet, all these fundamental traditional Jewish values are in peril in Israel today – undermined by so many leaders, the government,  rabbis, and by militant hypernationalists.

These values rarely pass the lips of today’s religious Zionists.

Zionism will evolve into just another materialistic amoral, sometimes immoral, coarse struggle for a place in the sun, no different from other nationalisms/ or terrorist group with large hats, kippot, tzitzit, or payot as markers of Jewishness, or by jingoistic calls for wiping out those who are not like us.

These are not Jewish values, only superficial facades and expressions of the vulgar abuse of power that is antithetical to the spirituality of the Bible and our religious tradition.

Below prehaps a better understanding of what or who is a Jew.

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