≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHAT IS A PANDEMIC?
(Three-minute read)
The World Health Organization (WHO) has just declared the Corona Virus a Pandemic.
Should we be concerned?
You bet we should Pandemic is just not a word from the Greek pan (“all”) and demos (“people”), they have killed billions.
In modern-day terms, it refers to the spread of a disease, not its potency or deadliness but to its self-sustaining lines of infection.
What does that mean?
Never mind the annual global cost to the world economy are we now to witness’s the uncontained global spread of this virus has obvious serious consequences.
It’s important to know the differences between these two terms.
Pandemic refers to an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.
The term Epidemic is often broadly used to describe any problem that has grown out of control.
From an epidemiologic standpoint, terms like these direct the public health response to better control and prevent disease.
Their usages are not inappropriate in the modern context, however, they can cause confusion.
While the level of disease occurrence can be described in many ways, it is primarily defined by the below measurable factors:
The pattern and speed by which a disease moves (known as the reproduction rate
the virus’s incubation period)
The size of the susceptible population (known as the critical community size)
While the terms may suggest that there is a specific threshold by which an event is declared an outbreak, epidemic, or pandemic, the distinction is often blurred.
Epidemic suggests a disease that is out of control.
Pandemic is the need for international cooperation.
By contrast, a plague is not an epidemiologic term but one that refers specifically to a contagious bacterial disease characterized by fever and delirium, such as the bubonic plague.
Smallpox is the only human disease that has been eradicated to date.
We now need to to know region by region with total transparency.
There are four coronaviruses that already circulate in human beings. They cause the common cold, and we don’t have vaccines for any of them.
All bullshit must be removed from social media.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
You don’t have to belive but it helps for something to be true.
Our modern society often seems geared towards quick fixes, superficial relationships, material things.
We are bombarded with advertising and social media images but below this superficial level of experience, there are deeper truths.
The problem of determining the truth in current events (and in other areas) when we’re faced with conflicting views from thousands of media and Internet sources seems insurmountable. Does this make sense? Is it likely?
While accepting that no one is going to get everything right all the time without the truth aiming for equality is a recipe for disappointment.
So we enter into our search for truth by asking these vital questions:
Is truth the property of verbal and written language, or is it now visual and as such by-passes the chaotic problem of human perception and interpretation?
Or is truth assumed to exist in an abstract realm of correctly conceived ideas?
Or is the truth the true knowledge of things as they are now, as they have been in the past, and as they will be in the future?
What does it mean to know the truth?
The most valuable asset you can have is trusting but to have trust it must be true?
Pragmatic proofs are paraded daily on TV and Social media which are both promoted by unregulated platforms with unchallenged Fake News making convincing claims to “knowing.”
Truth used to be conceived as a property of accurately stated words or accurately conceived ideas that correctly characterize world realities like the Corna virus outbreak that might turn out to be the modern-day catalyst to defining the truth.
Let’s start with death as it has a way of concreating the mind.
It is undeniable or is it.
We can’t know anything for certain, so the truth is in need of a God.
Without the Ressurection, Christianity would not exist.
We can’t imagine X being simultaneously true and false in the same manner. Another word if something is true, it’s not simultaneously false in the same way.
How to “prove” it.
All truth is empirically or scientifically testable.
There are no eyewitnesses who watched Big Bang so the assumption that something came from nothing is propositional truth. It has been the big question facing humanity since mankind crawled from the primordial ooze – where did the universe come from?
If we consider the hypothetical proposition of the impact of finding life on another planet or it arriving on this planet it will not prove anyone theological system right or wrong, so our confused view of what is true will remain.
For an example of this is.
If by deduction reasoning, verified against observed facts penguins exist.
But put another way, the claim “penguins exist” is itself a penguin.
That said if someone just refuses to acknowledge logic, it ends all rational discourse. You can’t logically prove anything to someone who denies logic.
So deduction depends upon the nature of assumptions.
These assumptions are not applicable universally because the premises from which they are deduced may not hold good at all time and places.
There is a part of the world that we can’t see.
Quantium Maths is a realm of reality that doesn’t consist of material things but of non-material forms. Quantum physics brings us a new kind of reality, provides us with direct suggestions of how we can live in accordance with the numinous realm of the universe.
But the meaning and purpose of our nature are anchored in the numinous realm of reality, not virtual reality. We usually take our thinking for granted, and the thoughts in our mind tell us a lot of things, but they say nothing about where they are coming from!
The word, “consciousness” derives from the Latin, “con” and “sciencia”, and it means a state of “knowing together” what is true and not true.
There is no plural form because there is only one consciousness.
Our concepts of truth evolve in the same way in which our bodies evolve.
For some reason, in our history, worldviews have always been accompanied by threats.
We believe that the evolution of concepts and their understanding is the true function of biological evolution. It is impossible to know, whether we are evolving with the cosmic mind, or whether it is merely our mind that has to evolve to a better understanding of a non-evolving cosmic order.
We are left with verifiable truth taking many paths based on observations which become intellectual toys that the real world may forget in the intellectual gymnastics and mathematical treatment of the observations.
The principle of noncontradiction cannot be established scientifically only by a witness.
Once you concede that *an* absolute truth exists, a whole slew of truth statements come with it:
It can’t be absolutely true since that would create a contradiction:
So if you remove all religious beliefs it is very easy subconsciously to absorb the truth.
An ascending process” in which facts are collected, arranged and then general conclusions are drawn in which we arrive at a generalisation on the basis of particular observed facts. This process is realistic because it is based on facts and explains to them as they actually are. But it can only show that the hypothesis is not inconsistent with the known facts.
In reality, the collection of data is not illuminating unless it is related to a hypothesis.
Either because it is committed to religion being false (e.g., they want to live a sinful lifestyle, so they need to convince themselves that God isn’t real, or at least, worth obeying), or because they’re too proud to admit defeat, or because they’re not really that interested in investigating the issue deeply, or simply because they don’t see things the same way that you do.
The narrower the problem on the basis of logical reasoning the truer it becomes verified by observation.
The penguin stands verified. It does not need a witness or scientifically proven.
But truth relies on the axiom that things are either true or false: things that are false cannot be true, and things that are true cannot be false.
There exists absolute and knowable truth, outside of the realm of the natural sciences, and not subject to empirical and scientific testing.
All scientific knowledge is built upon a bed of metaphysical propositions that cannot be established scientifically. Where experiment is practically impossible, abstraction and analysis afford the only means of escape from those which complicate the problem so much.
So many people hold wrong opinions simply because they’ve never thought deeply on the subject. And our culture is absolutely toxic with wrongheaded philosophical and religious views and now false news.
I won’t say you are wrong if you won’t say I am. The argument depends totally on the rules of the logic game. Unfortunately because of Social media, our intellects are falling.
We established the truth of the claim by the witness and not those who hide behind logically incoherent arguments removing themselves from the field of logical discussion.
The only thing to do (I presume) is to attempt to lure them back by showing that they’ve transgressed logic and are simply appealing to emotion?
Assuming that the public square should be devoid of religion; assuming that faith is irrational; etc. “Absolute truth exists” is absolutely true.
On the other hand, no one can know anything for certain, is sceptic’s absurdity.
This statement is a broad (self-refuting) metaphysical and epistemological claim.
To achieve a trusted world it requires a compromise of the cultures.
At this point in our analysis, we might ask:
Does it all matter? Why should we care?
Our answer is the belief that happiness in this life can be found only by understanding the spiritual background of the universe, and by living in accordance with it.
This means that we have to recognize the invisible background of reality and accept the importance of spirit in our life. Denying the transcendent aspects of our nature can lead to serious problems for our physical health and spiritual well being.
The truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth or someone may claim the right to tell it for you.
Our task isn’t the task of slaves to technology, who have to serve their creator.
“If Materialism is false”, writes Imants Baruss “then what is true?”
What is true these days is that we economizing it.
Let people believe what they want, as long as those beliefs aren’t leading to hurtful or unlawful actions.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
With all aspects of our life made into a form of viewing entertainment. We live in a world that has become desensitized.
The result is that most if not all of us pay little attention to the state of Earth.
The drawn-out nature of many crises now facing us all underscores the importance of coming together to urgently resolve the root causes of a humanitarian crisis.
It is unlikely the situation will improve.
Where do you even start? Which issues are the most urgent?
So this post is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Rather, it serves as an overview of some of the major issues all global citizens should be aware of.
Sometimes it can seem as though there are too many – from climate change to inequality around the world, too many people living without access to medical care its not worth knowing.
But just in case here is why we are in such a mess.
12.9% of the world is undernourished, about 30% of the adult population is overweight.
Conflict continues to drive displacement and food insecurity but communicable diseases are still responsible for 71% of deaths.
The international community, and in particular wealthy nations, are failing to meaningfully share the responsibility for protecting people who have fled their homes in search of safety.
25.9 million refugees globally — the highest level ever recorded
Half of the world’s refugees are children
A third of refugees — 6.7 million people — is hosted by the world’s poorest countries
Driven by nearly two decades of conflict and political instability; 9.4 million Afghans (25 per cent of the population) need humanitarian assistance. There are almost 2.5 million registered Afghan refugees living outside the country.
4.6 million Venezuelans have fled the country as of November 2019.
There are over 2 million displaced Nigerians.
Eleven million Syrians (65 per cent of the population) are in need of humanitarian assistance.
The Democratic Republic of Congo 15.9 million people require humanitarian assistance.
Over 24 million Yemenis (80 per cent of the population) are in need of humanitarian assistance,
South Sudan 7.5 million people need humanitarian assistance.
600 million children are not mastering basic mathematics and literacy while at school.
Forests are key to producing the air we breathe, yet these are being depleted at a rate of 26 million hectares every year.
Extinctions are happening at what scientists estimate to be about 1,000 times the normal pace. Not only are we losing flora and fauna, but we are also damaging our ecosystems, and throwing them out of balance
Our oceans are under threat.
Sand and gravel are now the most-extracted materials in the world, exceeding fossil fuels and biomass.
Climate change is another issue.
There is actually not enough fresh water for each person currently living on the planet.
Population growth. The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60.
More than 61 million jobs have been lost since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, leaving more than 200 million people unemployed globally.
With 43% of the world’s population connected to the internet, regulatory frameworks are unable to keep up.
In this complex moment in history, in which so many are suffering and the Earth itself is in peril
The cloud of nuclear destruction hangs over each of our days.
But the question remains what kind of society do we want to have?
The reasons behind current trends are many and complex.
The detail of the information that we are beginning to capture about our world is mind-blowing. The granularity of the data we are beginning to collect through advances in technology. While improving our lives through cleaner energy sources, personalized nanomedicine and nano-engineered materials.
In all of these areas, progress will undoubtedly lead to a reduction in conventional jobs and inequality on a global scale not seen before.
But technology alone can not break the self-reinforcing mechanism that causes poverty to persist.
As highly innovative products emerging will, however, promote inequality if only a few have access to this new technology and the knowledge to master it.
Education is probably the single most important tool for turning technology into an engine for opportunities for all.
Public policies, which are currently mainly focused on fostering economic growth, should focus on providing further opportunities, less inequality and a more sustainable economic, social and environmental future.
Technology is not the solution but it is, for sure, a powerful tool towards achieving this ambitious objective.
Whether it’s turning promises on climate change into action, rebuilding trust in the financial system, or connecting the world to the internet there is an overall lack of long-term investment, which has serious implications for global growth.
But the most astonishing canvas is right in front of us if only we would listen with our ear to the earth we might see the light we cannot see.
In short, the world urgently needs a new, global plan based on genuine international cooperation and a meaningful and fair sharing of responsibilities.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE OPEN LETTER TO THE DELEGATES OF THE FORTHCOMING UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE IN GLASGOW: If you thinks they we have a problem with migration today … wait 20 years.
Although climate change undoubtedly posed an “existential threat to our world” it is not too late to take decisive action.
So far we had the Cop-out 15 to Cop 25, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 the Paris Agreement in December 2015 and now the 2020 United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow.
As you know dealing with climate change will require coordinated action by nations around the world.
Up to this point what we have seen are countries and industries trying to gut, block or water down all efforts, in a rearguard manoeuvre that mirrors President Donald Trump’s rollback of climate policy in Washington.
24 million people were displaced by weather-related disasters this year.
As climate change begins to alter patterns of disasters, we can imagine these figures will get worse. Understand how changing weather patterns and disasters will alter patterns of migration. This will be both difficult and almost impossible to predict.
Reduction of carbon emissions has no chance of being reached through a voluntary cap and trade system utilizing the free market system. Why would countries strongly enforce caps and targets on their emissions if it puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the market place?
The fact is that if we are to save the planet from a devastating ecological meltdown, it is going to require an immediate and I mean immediate, reduction in greenhouse gases.
We must abandon the absurd notion that the invisible hand of the free market system will solve the crisis.
Why?
Because a market-driven voluntary system will not work.
Because they are traded for huge profits. There is no baseline from which true carbon reductions can be measured, verification is lacking.
Because it is cheaper to pollute and buy credits than it is to change production processes.
It is totally unrealistic to believe that carbon reductions on a large scale can be attained unless mandatory reductions are implemented and a full scale global.
While rewarding carbon-reducing technologies makes sense we will only be able to take worthwhile actions if they are funded by a self-perpetuating fund with outright non-repayable subsidies.
However, I don’t have to tell you that when it comes down to the wire as who and how we are going to fund the way forward to tackle fairly any actions the simple answer is that we do not have enough time to haggle about it.
It can be achieved tomorrow by placing a 0.005% commission on all world activities that seek profit for profit sake. ( See previous posts)
The world stock markets are 99% run by high-frequency algorithms. Exploiting market conditions that can’t be detected by the human eye.
Of course, this begs an important question will such a commission affect the free market and can it be applied worldwide.
Yes to both.
It will not be climate change that creates another refugee crisis.
Rather, it will be the attempts to stop this migration that will be creating a crisis.
Climate change will not wait. Neither can we for climate refugees.
Regardless of how fast we cut emissions, we are going to see more and more people on the move and there is no single global agreement that can be signed and ratified to change this fact.
Most of what you know about climate-linked migration is probably wrong.
We all know that climate change is the unpredictable ingredient in our rapidly changing world – and it’s potential to trigger both violent conflict and mass migration – needs to be considered as an urgent priority for policymakers.
As its effects spread, it will destabilise entire economies and overwhelm poorer countries lacking resources and infrastructure.
When added to existing social, economic and political tensions, it has the potential to ignite violence and conflict with disastrous consequences.
You cannot strike a bargain with Climate.
The choice faced by politicians and all of us is not about how to prevent climate-linked migration.
That possibility is gone, several decades ago.
There is now a stark choice between two very different options:
One: Trying to stop people from moving—which will lead to something that looks like a crisis—or helping people migrate out of the most badly hit areas.
Two: Is to facilitate climate-linked migration in a legal and organised way.
Support for migrants and refugees is at an all-time low. People are already using migration as a way of adapting climate change, with little or no help.
When migration isn’t illegal there is no need to do it secretly. No need for traffickers and smugglers. And no need for migrants to hide as soon as they arrive.
There is no simple law that could be passed that would “fix” climate-linked migration.
The problem is this won’t stop people moving so we need to start by defining exactly what a climate refugee is.
Droughts, hurricanes, floods and sea-level rise are all forcing people to move but picking out one group of people to call “climate refugees” is very difficult.
WHY?
Political responses to climate-linked migration are complicated, and it’s a field where the answers are often not simple.
Because if climate change plays a role in displacement it becomes difficult to draw the line.
What do we know about the links between climate change and conflict?
Climate-linked migration is very often from rural areas into cities.
So if the seas do rise to the predicted levels and people move within there own countries they will not be refugees climate or otherwise.
To be a refugee you have to have crossed an international border which is part of the official definition of what makes someone a refugee. But, as the impacts of climate change worsen, more people will want to migrate across borders.
Therefore there is only one course of action and that is to open approved channels into the EU and other world nations in order to determine who is a genuine refugee and who is not.
Few politicians will risk making bold statements about making provision for more people. Climate change is also a low priority for electorates in developed countries.
This is the climate crisis, not the coronavirus. tomorrow is too late.
These changes cannot take place tomorrow. They should have been implemented yesterday!
Capitalism caused the problem now it should pay to resolve it.
Climate change is unequivocal, that we are responsible, and that our choices before us matter”.
We were never going to get there in one go unless we spread the cost in a way that is acceptable to one and all.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IN THE PAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS WE HAVE ALL WORKED TOGETHER TO COME UP EVEN WITH MORE INNOVATIVE WAYS TO END LIFE ON EARTH..
The coronavirus story is breaking as you read this, causing what we think is a technologically developed connected world to be more polarised.
Social media has a huge role to play in helping people protect themselves in case of an epidemic.
There’s a need to evaluate how an important part of our daily interaction — the Internet — comes to play at a time like this.
While it is true that social media can be a reliable source for current trends, you may have to be careful about what you choose to believe.
It goes without saying that social media plays an important role during an outbreak, especially for information dissemination.
The Internet or social media, if not well managed will result in hysteria or cause panic.
Misleading information is the strong bane of the Internet.
So here are some hard facts.
We’ve forgotten that the biggest threat to human life isn’t nukes or anything else, but pandemics. Even with all our advanced technology – some of which may even work against us during this outbreaks – the threat of a virus coming from nowhere and ending human civilization as we know it is still as real as it always was.
So now, with vast, interconnected networks to transport people around the world but no way to tell if they’re infected, outbreaks can reach much further and develop defences before we can even detect them.
While it’s true that recent advancements in detection and treatment of pathogens have made us better at fighting them, there are also many more of them now, including strains that have never infected humans before.
For the death count, deaths from pandemics outnumber any other disaster event in history by a long shot.
The AIDS virus has killed around 40 million people by now. The influenza flu causes around 80,000 – 100,000 annual deaths in the U.S. alone, which is only a fraction of its global death count of 650,000.
The Spanish Flu killed over 100 million in a matter of months, which started during the four-year-long WW1
It just decided to get milder as time went by.
It begs the question; why do we find ourselves so unprepared for disease outbreaks every few years?
It’s simple, our medical technology is still not advanced enough to detect and find cures for new outbreaks. Previous medical knowledge doesn’t apply to new strains, which require new assessment and diagnosis. Every new outbreak still requires understanding the pathogen from scratch, which in turn affects our ability to effectively respond to the crisis
These outbreaks prove what biologists have been saying for years. Newer and more powerful strains of viruses evolving against our medicines are one of the biggest threats to human life.
Vaccines are making viruses – especially the deadly ones – even deadlier.
Unless we come up with an alternative way to build vaccines, a possible out-of-control pandemic that kills us all may just be one of its side effects we’d have to deal with.
A more pressing relationship between climate change and virus-related extinction events lies somewhere on the top of the world map. The permafrost set all over the Arctic – particularly in Siberia – is believed to house a number of dormant and dangerous diseases.
In a recent post addressing the subject of compliance by comparison, I highlight what Bacteria is to our existence on earth.
We simply have no idea how many types of microbes exist on Earth.
They recently found a type of bacteria in the human gut that the scientists had never seen before. It was so alien that they had to make a whole separate branch of life for it, which must have separated from ours in the early years of evolution.
It’s only one of the examples of many ways we don’t – and never will – fully understand the almost-alien world of microbes, which is crucial to fighting serious, civilization-threatening pandemics.
Realize that no other creature compares to microbes in numbers, diversity, types of habitat they live in etc. You’d find microbes living everywhere you can imagine; from the most inhospitable depths of the ocean to outer space. While there’s no doubt that they’ve done for themselves, their diversity makes them difficult to study and counter for us.
If there’s one thing that the coronavirus outbreak proves, it’s that we’re still highly dependent on nature’s mercy to keep us alive.
This will remain so untill inequalities in the world are address and we become intelligent enough to realise that we all live on the same planet.
We live in an age of connectivity and exteriority.
Interior thoughts are plastered across our phone screens and transparency is, at this point, mandatory.
The result of this is if not controlled which is the responsibility of the platform owners the continual spreading of rumours and suspicion via social media will breed uncertainty, falsehood and panic.
Social media can be a wonderful tool that increases global connectivity and understanding, yet in the case of the coronavirus and other potential crises, it tends to breed uncertainty, falsehood and panic.
The fact that people on sites such as Twitter and Facebook are so susceptible to random pieces of clickbait and cannot be satisfied with the official reports, suggests a general mistrust of the institutions at the forefront of this global health emergency.
The Corona virus does not ask you what politics you are nor does it ask you what religion or color you are. It couldn’t care who is in power.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Our thoughts and actions are triggered by neurological processes we don’t
control. Paradoxically, the more we integrate mindfulness with our daily
lives we realise that the only reality we have is the present moment, the more
life may seem somewhat pointless – because we are living as if this is all
there is.
Richard Dawkins, “life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA…life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference”
As per his perspective of a human being, we are born, we grow old and older and die.
Survival is just a part of your life.
Other words after I am gone, there is no world because there is no ‘me’ to behold it.
So, my purpose of life should be to enjoy and stay happy in those 100 years instead of worrying to make the world “a better place.”
However, I say the last thing you want to do is die and realise you haven’t truly lived.
We might not be able to help live our lives in denial of death like a flower that dies and is blooming next spring.
Of course, the Theory of Evolution does not explain the origins of life.
It explains how life, once created, changes over time. Although origins of life are related to evolution. It is an accessory topic and area of study on a planet that will come of age when it works out the reason for its own existence.
As it appears with the present virus Corona that is affecting the old and weak, sparing the young and strong there are many different ways that evolution can happen in a population, including both artificial selection and natural selection.
The realisation that we are technically on autopilot and without free will, adds another new dimension to the question – What is the point of life if not survival?
Members of the public might be able to describe natural selection as survival of the fittest but pressed for further explanation of the term, however, most answer incorrectly.
Someone not familiar with what natural selection really is might take “fittest” to mean the best physical specimen of the species and that only those in the best shape and best health will survive in nature.
That isn’t always the case.
By that definition, then, the survival of the fittest might not be the best way to describe natural selection as it applies to evolution.
Now that this idea is stuck in our lexicon, there isn’t much that can be done to help others understand the actual meaning of the phrase beyond explaining the intended definition of the word “fittest” and the context in which it was said.
It follows that individuals with favourable adaptations will live long enough to pass their genes to their offspring.
I can take full control of my life right this second. I can act in full awareness of a particular thought of my choice. I can seize this moment to take action.
I’m not fully in control of my actions in this one; then truly, what is the point to all this doing, competing, struggling, striving, working, accumulating, etc.
Both impart that our species can adapt and change in order to survive.
On the face of it survival seems like the most unanswerable question there is, a question that nags our existence from start to finish. However natural selection will “select” the trait that is more beneficial for the species’ survival.
That’s the only answer we have available.
None of us will be travelling to any distant planets so its time we started to share what is left of this one.
It is not that there’s nothing to hope for in the future; because it doesn’t exist, but everything to perceive in the now.
The Coronavirus is one of those circumstances that can drive divergent evolution include natural disasters like volcanoes, weather phenomena, the spread of disease, or an overall climate change in an area in which the species lives.
Divergent evolution becomes necessary for survival in a changing environment.
After we die what is truly reminiscent of our existence- our progeny.
I hope my guide will enlighten you because survival is not the purpose of life, it is only a necessity!
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We must reclaim reality if not reality will reclaim us.
In a profound and globally interconnected world all our actions and in-actions matter. Nothing on this planet happens in a bubble.
Honesty is truth and the truth sets us free.
To be honest, everything you do directly affects everyone around you and everyone on the planet; and not just what you do, but also what you think, say, feel and believe.
We must all become completely responsible for ourselves and the global society we live in, and especially for all the problems that our global society has created and perpetuated. We don’t solve the problems of the world by blaming others, punishing them or shifting responsibility on to them or others who appear to be in charge, including governments, countries, religions, political systems, economic systems or anything else.
Perhaps with the Corona Virus, we are just beginning to learn this long and hard lesson.
What does it take to be honest?
To be free from deceit.
William Shakespeare ” No legacy is so rich as honesty”
Although often invoked, the concept of honesty is quite tricky to characterize in a world that is driven by inequality, inflicted by false news-Social media, plundered by unregulated profit-seeking algorithms, torn apart by wars, facing mass climate immigration, undermined by world institutions that are out of date.
George Grant, the Canadian philosopher, said ” “values language is an obscuring language for morality, used when the idea of purpose has been destroyed.”
The German philosopher Nietzsche saw all this last century but in all disciplines and at all levels (judges in law, ethics professors in medicine, university professors in a host of disciplines, politicians in all parties and, alas, religious leaders in all traditions) have not realized this point and continue to speak about “values” when they often seem to be discussing something they believe is true.
What is interesting is, these things are not simply, “you have yours, I have mine.” They are not values. They are a world away from “values.” We cannot say, “you have your courage and I have mine.”
I say we “cannot have a meaningful notion of “tolerance” “respect” or “dignity” or “honesty” based on an incoherent base of “values.”
That is why we no longer have any confidence that there are any shared purposes for human life.
To tell the truth is one thing, but the whole truth requires far more detail and doesn’t allow for the omission of anything, including the thought process associated with action or conclusion.
Despite its centrality in ordinary life as well as ethics and philosophy of psychology, honesty is not a major trend of research in the contemporary philosophical debate.
We have become so complacent that the conduct of elected governments is questionable.
Telling the truth — the whole truth — is, at times, practically and theoretically impossible as well as morally not required or even wrong.
Hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty are character traits so deeply embedded in our Political worlds that we no longer even take notice.
But honesty means more than not lying it is the language of values.
It is not “imposing values” but “teaching in truth”
These day’s honesty is on an entirely different level.
As we have seen with Julian Assange revealing what is actually happening can be less than ideal to the ego-mind.
If honesty is not telling the whole truth, what is it?
That is indeed a major question, who in this world of false news is to say which particulars are relevant?
What we need is a TRANSPARENT society, where all the values and virtues of democracy and the free market are really at the service of all of us.
This is what democracy is supposed to be.
But this concept is so far from reality, even in the perceptions of the people in the most consolidated political democracies, that we really need to question what is wrong with our society.
Not just changing this single moment in time but rather gifting all future generations to come.
We Are Living in “The Time of Great Awakening!”
What will our descendants in 200 years say about us?
That our lives were terrible because our cars could not fly, our computers had no protobio-chips and so could not think like humans, our planes could not fly around the planet in 30 minutes?
I think not.
The honest truth is that it is too complicated.
All the virtues are shared as objectively true but they are personal in how they apply to us as persons.
Does it even make sense to say that most of us are not honest and also not dishonest?
We assume, that most of us go through our day with the best intention of being truthful. All our conduct, in a sense, hinges on justice, wisdom/prudence, temperance/moderation, and courage/fortitude.
Only those who can face themselves, in all their own peculiarity, seem to be capable of developing a persona that is true to the self — hence, authentic if not honest.
It appears that much of our learning and education is to learn what the word means.
It is not simply or at all a question of “you have yours, I have mine”?
The day we will be able to push our evolution towards a point to achieve these goals, these values, that day and only that day, we can ask ourselves again: “Is our world we live in really better?”
To be honest, as this world goes its one truth at a time at the point of a gun that
makes honesty into a disposition?
Consequently, we cannot order any human action towards an end, because all means are related to ends.
Is honesty genetic?
Honesty comes with a different lens, and it has a knack of revealing certain truths and they come with different levels of discomfort attached to them. So there comes a point at which honesty becomes something else.
That something else is survival.
The kind of world we are living in, there are economic/social benefits of dishonesty. Given this, and the concept of natural selection, will the truth gene(s), gradually become extinct?
It may take years of science to discover.
As the man-made “lie-gene” is still blessed by every government in every nation.
WE’VE LONG BEEN TOLD OUR GENES ARE OUR DESTINY AND THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS THE GENETIC CODE CAN BE ALTERED.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Our egos are the parts of our identities created by external influences to boost their own sense of self.
posting about it all over social media. which closes us off from the world
It’s pandering to a market the world seems to want right now.
Were sold algorithms that only add to the materialism.
An honest action is that with no intent of harm.
One primary reason is the influence of social media despise the truth from life,
can’t get away with lying
There are a few ways to tell if you’ve fallen victim to this superficial, materialistic spirituality. We’re told we need stuff in order to be the best, but no one tells us there is no best.
I suppose it is fair to say that when it comes to biological factors that tear thought entire species, humans can’t take all the credit.
History has shown that a pandemic now and then can be a good thing, at least for the survivors.
THE CURRENT CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK IN PROGRESS HAS THE POTENTIAL TO ALTER HOW SOCIETIES FUNCTION. TAXING INFRASTRUCTURES WELL BEYOND THEIR TOLERANCES.
A disease that kills 80/90% of all people on earth could and will tip us to an unrecoverable social and technological crash.
But real disasters aren’t lone events born of simple, soluble problems, and they don’t end when the credits roll. Nor are they necessarily a question of scale.
The line that divides an incident from a disaster is defined by a society’s preparedness and capacity to deal with the aftermath.
For good or ill, the technology and unprecedented control over life and death we have will likely allow future disasters to unfold along lines unique in world history.
Do we who are in the know care?
Other than verbal diarrhoea it seems not so.
So here a few disasters to look forward too.
Genetic Manipulation Gone Wrong.
Our genetic ambitions will outpace our safeguards.
Put simply, we can now wipe out entire species with a single mistake. Bioethical standards tend to lag behind technology, and who can say what a less ethical party might attempt?
Coronal Mass Ejection or bursts of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s corona.
They follow a cycle, like pandemics albeit a far more regular one (the conditions are ripe every 11 years or so) [source: NASA]. They also cause variable but potentially ruinous damage, and their destructive scales depend, in part, upon humans’ connectedness.
We’ve been lucky so far.
Such an event could last a few weeks. But a quick about-face would prove impossible if, as some people fear, the CME’s ground current cooks all the transformers. In that case, the risks of social breakdown and mass starvation become quite real.
Peak Phosphorus.
There’s a theoretical limit to how many people the planet can support? It’s mainly limited by available solar radiation, but there are other limits we would reach well before that one.
Our bodies need phosphorus to move energy around and to build cells and DNA. But our demand will likely outstrip our known supply within 30 to 40 years. Currently, a large amount of phosphorus is lost in human and animal waste. Much of what remains end’s up in the trash or washes away as farm runoff.
The push for biofuel options will only deepen the crisis. Everything has its limit — even the bounty of the earth.
The Thermohaline Circulation Shuts Down.
The melting poles.
As the resultant freshwater spreads across the North Atlantic Ocean, it shuts down a looping global current vital to global climate called the thermohaline circulation (THC).
But push past that point, and forcing factors, or environmental processes that affect climate, take over. This could create feedbacks that will alter climates for decades or centuries to come.
Whether such a shutdown will occur because of climate change remains unclear, but the bulk of data says the THC will more likely experience a slowdown. In the unlikely worst case, however, the effects of a mini-ice age combined with other climate change stresses could be nothing short of seismic.
The Cascadia Superquake.
An earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater.
In 2011 the 9.0-magnitude Tohoku quake and resultant tsunami killed 18,000 people, triggered the Fukushima meltdown and caused more than $200 billion in damages. All this happened in a region prepared for quakes, just not ones of such scale.
A Killer Asteroid.
Take Apophis, an apartment-building-size asteroid due to kiss our atmosphere in 2029 and possibly smack right into us on its 2036 return trip. If it does it will pack the wallop of a 300-megaton atom bomb, to say nothing of the ensuing fires, disruption of solar energy and famine.
Global Economic Collapse.
Economists still struggle to unravel collapses that already occurred.
This one might already be happing as we watch the out brake of CORONAVIRUS in China spread it seems likely that problems will only worsen under global climate change scenarios or energy-asset depletion.
All we can really say, as we watch China prop up its ailing stock market and the European Union struggle to define a set of economic policies suited to the diverse needs of its member states, is that indicators look more than a little dodgy..
The Singularity.
This is my favourite the steely grip of self-improving superintelligence born of human hubris. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
On one hand, it’s hard to imagine we’d be so foolish as to create a Frankenstein’s monster without a fail-safe. But do you know what’s not hard to imagine? That some garage hackers or industrialists, driven by rivalry, revenue or (Asimov help us) fetish, will sit nose-to-breadboard until they’ve created artificial intelligence or some weird imitation of it
Even ignoring the risk that superintelligent machines will rise, self-improve and decide a femtosecond later to eliminate humans, we’ll still face one of the most transformative moments in social and psychological history. Because however, it shakes out, it’ll be something we’re not prepared for, and that alone will make it a disaster.
World War III.
The reasons are deeply enmeshed: Food and water insecurity, climate change, financial crises, infectious diseases and profound social instability.
Add rising nationalism, weaponising technology, Donal Dump, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, South Sudan, the international order that has been thrown into turmoil. Multilateralism and its constraints are under siege, challenged by more transactional, zero-sum politics.
A paralysed United Nations who’s collective accountability, including the International Criminal Court, are ignored and disparaged.
Dubious territorial claims by major powers like China and Russia, Japanese militarization and a pinch of terrorist pseudo-states, and a fearsome picture begins to emerge.
President Donald Trump’s contempt for traditional allies and Europe’s struggles with Brexit and nativism, leaders across the world are probing and prodding to see how far they can go.
Socially or ecologically, there is growing concern among experts that change today occurs at a rate that far outstrips our ability to cope with it.
The international order as we know it is unravelling, with no clear sense of what will come in its wake. The danger may well lie less in the ultimate destination than in the process of getting there.
Moreover, in a world characterized by ever-growing connectedness, it’s unlikely that some types of disasters — economic, political, ecological and epidemiological — will remain geographically confined.
The same globalization and mass communication that transform the world may just as easily doom it if we’re not careful, and perhaps even if we are.
Anyone will ensure that nobody will remember the Internet.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Most of us struggle with seeing things from a different perspective but our perception of how the world is changing matters for what we believe is possible in the future.
So the purpose of this post is an attempt to take the complexity of the world and simplify it into some sort of graphic that will either help you understand it or motivate you to do something differently.
Dire predictions for the future are nothing new. There is a connection between our perception of the past and our hope for the future.
When one considers our world from a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.
The state of the world today with Social media and profit-seeking algorithms is one of distrust. There are things that are certain in this world and there are lots of uncertainty attached to many things. Sometimes the only way to understand the world at its extremes is to put it in terms we use every day.
The fact is that at least two of the world’s largest powers have been at war with each other more than 50% of the time since about 1500.
The only problem we have here is us and therefore we cannot kill our way to a solution.
The Earth is about 3.5 million times larger than a human.
If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.
Here’s what we’ve got.
We see our earth as big, and in a relative way, it is.
There are about 7 billion people currently on Earth. Over its existence, around 106 billion people have lived on Earth.
It exists on a blue dot, 24,901 miles in circumference that is over 4 1/2 billion years old, weighing in a 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds (or 5,974,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms)
(Since Earth is too big to be placed on a scale, scientists use mathematics and the laws of gravity to figure out Earth’s weight.)
It has a solid iron ball in the middle that is 1,500 miles wide.
It makes up about 0.0003% of the total mass of our solar system.
75% of the Earth is covered in water only 2.5 per cent of it is fresh essential for producing food, clothing, and computers, moving our waste stream, and keeping us and the environment healthy.
About 321 billion gallons per day of surface water is used by humans.
Humans who are just 0.01% of all life have destroyed 83% of wild mammals.
Plants overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world’s biomass.
It takes light a little over 8 light-minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth and it can circle our planet about seven and a half times in a single second.
Our closest star is Proxima Centauri at a distance of four light-years.
The Milky Way itself is about 100,000 light-years across and is home to about 400 billion stars.
(A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!)
According to the Big bang theory which happened about 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the universe came into existence at the same time.
So anything can serve as a symbol as long as it refers to something beyond itself.
In our daily activities to give such things more than a passing glance.
However, our planet only seems large until we take a look at the rest of the cosmos around us.
Where do start? Its age., its place in the cosmic, or it’s future.
“Statistical facts don’t come to people naturally. Quite the opposite.
We’re visual creatures.
So perhaps a sense of scale might help.
Let’s start with a few comparisons
Life on Earth first emerged about 600 million years and we are the first generations whose decisions will determine for good or ill the future of human life on this planet, and we seem stuck in a way of thinking that is obsolete in a globalized world of growing populations. The widespread ignorance about these truly important changes in the world feeds into a general discontent about how the world is changing.
To our brains, a million, billion, and trillion all seem like large, vague numbers.
Today (January 2020) Bill Gates fortune amounts to around $108,5 billion around 0.5% of the GDP of the United States. By the time I complete this post, $1436400 amount will be added to his net worth and is predicted to hit the trillion mark by the age of 86.
If you are one of the so-called “rich” and you were lucky enough to make a million dollars per year, it would take you almost 80,000 YEARS to catch up.
We share the Earth with an estimated 1 quadrillion ants. Insects outweigh us by a factor of 17.
For every human, there are about one million ants and the total weight termites are more than the weight of all the humans in the world. They alone make up 10% of all animal biomass and 95% of soil and insect biomass in tropical regions.
Bacteria were one of the first life forms to appear on Earth, about 3.8 billion years ago, and they will most likely survive long after humans are gone.
The number of bacteria on our planet is estimated to be five million trillion trillion – that’s a five with 30 zeroes after it.
All the bacteria on Earth combined are about 1,166 times more massive than all the humans. For every human walking over the face of the planet.
Bacteria are the huddled masses of the microbial world, performing tasks that include everything from causing diseases to fixing nitrogen in the soil.
The number of bacteria makes the globe’s human population look downright puny.
Because the number of bacteria is so large, events that would occur once in 10 billion years in the laboratory would occur every second somewhere on the Earth.
We may have been underestimating our own humanness for the past several decades when it comes to Bacteria. The average human has over 100 trillion microbes in and on their body microbial cells outnumber human cells in your body by a ratio of around 10:1.
Our modus operandi was to kill them, rather than synchronize with them.
Bills and coins are the best way to transfer bacteria between people worldwide;
The debate over the microbiome will rage on, as the fear of the invisible and little understood will drive the masses in the short-term.
It is a fact that bacteria live in a whole series of worlds which stretch our imagination, be it the clouds in the sky, an Antarctic ice flow, a 100 degree C hot sulphur spring, 10 km down at the bottom of the sea, 1500 m below the surface of the earth in solid rock, in a rotting peach, in the roots of plants, the stomachs of animals and even your mouth, bacteria can be found there.
The vast majority of life is land-based and a large chunk – an eighth – is bacteria buried deep below the surface but bacteria also now found circling the Earth in the most upper layers of our atmosphere.
Recent findings on animal-bacteria interactions will likely require biologists to significantly alter their view of the fundamental nature of the entire biosphere.
“And that’s the way it is.”
My preference would be to avoid mentioning any ratio at all – you don’t need to it convey the importance of the microbiome.
Some 70 per cent of the global consumption of the drugs are used in animal and fish farming and to spray on crops.
Antibiotics in the environment do not do any good, they only contribute to risks which we are now witnessing with the Coronavirus. A rapidly spreading virus that is establishing itself across the world through international travel, trade and tourism.
We are now living in a bacterial world, and it’s impacting us more than
previously thought. No matter what process you think you are studying, you
must look for and consider a major role for bacteria.
The World Bank has estimated that drug-resistant infections could cost the world economy $1 trillion every year after 2030.
By 2050 costing the world around $100 trillion in lost output: more than the size of the current world economy, and roughly equivalent to the world losing the output of the UK economy every year, for 35 years not to mention killing an extra 10 million people across the world every year.
Back to earth.
This is what a quadrillion looks like written out: 1,000,000,000,000,000.
If it survives us it has 6.5 billion years before the sun (which is 92,960,000 miles away) about 109 times larger than the earth. That means you could fit around 1.3 million earth’s inside the sun which is actually considered a dwarf star — By contrast, UY Scuti is the largest star we humans are aware of; it is a hypergiant around 1.7 billion miles in diameter. UY Scuti is around 5 billion times larger than our sun.
Its no wonder we a pixel.
The diameter of our solar system is around 5,580,000,000,000 miles — that is, about five and a half trillion miles across. Expanding outward from here, we have to start talking about things in terms of light-years, as the scale is just too massive to discuss in miles. (One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km).
Our Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light-years in diameter of which since the dawn of man we have observed the equivalent of the top of rubber on a pencil.
This is about one 24-millionth of the entire night sky visible from earth.
The diameter of the observable universe is estimated at about 28 billion parsecs (93 billion light-years).
Ok, the numbers are pretty hard to comprehend even when you know what each unit represents. To even think of how long 10 trillion kilometres might be, let alone 93 billion times that distance, can cause your brain to hurt.
Earth, in turn, is nothing more than a molecule in the incomprehensibly vast cosmic ocean.
Without a global jurisdiction, no government can enforce any kind of coherent rights doctrine, particularly in the face of borderless problems like terrorism or environmental crisis.
It is up to the people of earth to dissolve the strains between each-other in an equitable, harmonious way.
The planet you were born on is dying.
We’re on a timeline that leaves little space for politicians to gamble. This is a world that requires nations, corporations and individuals to think not in terms of quarterly reports or midterm elections, but in decades.
For transformative change to be possible, we sometimes need marginalized peoples to speak out, in a loud voice, against the status quo.
The guardians for future generations, representing the children of 2050, can be that voice that says we are spending too much on conflict and too little on peace.
Thus as Irving John Good said, “The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultra-intelligent machine.”
“The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
If I took a personal guess the way we are going there will be no need for such an intelligent machine as there will be nothing to be intelligent with.
ALL HUMAN COMMENTS APPRECIATED. ALL LIKE CLICKS AND ABUSE CHUCKED IN THE BIN.
If humanity stopped fighting and competing against one another; if we bound together in a common cause, we could accomplish spectacular things.
Not true.
We would basically become mindless drones of no culture because it’d all just be one culture with no distinct forms.
If this were to become a reality, Ummm how would govern it.
China’s premier Wen Jiabao put forward the following equation in a speech: “Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth.”
How wrong he was, however, by 2025 there will be 1 trillion networked devices worldwide in the consumer and industrial sectors combined.
He should have said, “Internet + Internet of Things = Becoming what we do not think? Because people are truly not that intelligent.
In our houses cars and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives.
Intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities.
Coffee pots that talk to alarm clocks. Thermostats that talk to motion sensors. Factory machines that talk to the power grid and to boxes of raw material.
We might be seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before? This intelligence once locked in our devices will flow into the universe of physical objects.
We are already struggling to name this emerging phenomenon.
Some have called it the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet—despite the fact that most of these devices aren’t actually on the Internet directly but instead communicate through simple wireless protocols.
Others are calling it the Sensor Revolution.
I call it the Programmable Profitable in a World of profit-seeking algorithms.
It’s the fact that once we get enough of these objects onto our networks, they’re no longer one-off novelties or data sources but instead become a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance in the era of the cloud and apps and the walled garden— of Google, Apple, etc, which connotes a peer-to-peer system in which each node will not be equally empowered.
These connected objects will act more like a swarm of drones, a distributed legion of bots, far-flung and sometimes even hidden from view but nevertheless coordinated as if they were a single giant machine, relying on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention.
So the world will act as one. Or will it?
Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a designable environment, a playground for coders and engineers.
It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical putting intelligence from the cloud into everything we touch.
Call it “smart exploration.”
The rises of the smartphone have supplied us with a natural way to communicate with those smart objects. So far they include watches, heart rate monitors, and even some new Nike shoes. Smartphone making payments to merchants wirelessly instead of swiping a card, and some billboards are using the protocol to beam content to passersby who ask for it. As a way to sell more products and services—particularly Big Data–style analysis—to their large corporate customers.
The yoking together of two or more smart objects—is the trickiest, because it represents the vertiginous shift from analysis, the mere harvesting of helpful data, to real automation.
In my view no matter how thoroughly we might use data to fine-tune our lives and businesses,it’s scary to take any decisions out of human hands.
It can be hard to imagine the automation you might someday want or even need, in your daily life. There are all sorts of adjustments you make over the course of any given day that is reducible to simple if-then relationships.
Facebook, which has famously described the underlying data it owns as a social graph—the knowledge of who is connected to whom and how.
Would you want to automate all of these relationships?
A world where every one of us would have a sensor on us. “Presence” tags—low-energy radio IDs that sit on our keychains or belt loops and announce our location, verify our identity.
This is the principle behind Square Wallet and a number of other nascent payment systems, including ones from PayPal and Google. (When you walk into a participating store today, Square can let the cashier know you’re there; you pay simply by giving your name.)
A tracking tool that monitors not just your pet’s movements, but your movements.
GPS reliably know our location within 100 feet, give or take, and that knowledge has and is transforming our lives immeasurably: turn-by-turn driving directions, local restaurant recommendations, location-based dating apps, and so on.
With presence technology, Google has already the potential to know our location absolutely, down to a foot or even a few inches. That means knowing not merely which bar your friend is at but which couch she’s sitting on if you walk through the door.
It means receiving a coupon for a grocery item on the endcap at the moment you walk by.
Think about a liquor cabinet that auto-populated your shopping list based on the levels in the bottles—but also locked automatically if your stock portfolio dropped more than 3 per cent.
Think about a home medical monitoring system that didn’t just feedback data from diabetic patients but adjusted the treatment regimen as the data demanded.
Think about how much more intelligent your sprinklers could be if they responded to the weather report as well as to historical patterns of soil moisture and rainfall.
It does not stop just there think about applications on top of these connected objects.
This means not just tying together the behaviour of two or more objects—like the sprinkler and the moisture sensor—but creating complex interrelationships that also tie in outside data sources and analytics.
Plugged into that information, your system wouldn’t just know how much water is in the soil it could predict how much there will be, based on whether it’s going to rain or the sun will be baking hot that day.
It means walking through an art museum and having your phone interpret the paintings as you pause in front of them.
This simple link—between a tag on us and a tag in the world—stands to become the culmination of the location revolution, delivering on all the promises it hasn’t quite fulfilled yet. A simple link—between a tag on us and a tag in the world—will complete the location revolution.
The treasure that it digs up could be considerable.
This is obviously true for retailers:
It’s a future where the intelligence once locked in our devices will now flow into the universe of physical objects. Users and developers can share their simple if-then apps and, in the case of more complex relationships, make money off of apps, just like in the mobile marketplaces.
Processing it all in the cloud in a language unheard of.
On Google Maps, you can now navigate inside certain airports and stores, with Wi-Fi triangulation helping out your GPS.
And according to a mobile couponing firm called Koupon Media, some 80 per cent of customers who buy gas at one major convenience-store chain never walk inside the store, so presence-based coupons could make a huge impact on the bottom line.
But it’s also true for our everyday lives. Have you ever lost an object in your house and dreamed that you could just type a search for it, as you would for a wayward document on your hard drive? With location stickers, that seemingly impossible desire has become a reality:
A startup called StickNFind Technologies already sells these quarter-sized devices for $25 apiece.
Think about a thermostat app pulling in readings from any other device on that platform—motion sensors that might say which room you’re in, presence tags that identify individual family members (with different temperature preferences)—as well as outside data sources like weather or variable power price.
An even more natural category for apps is security. It locks itself up, shuts down the lights and thermostat, and activates an alarm system complete with siren, flashing lights, and auto-notifications, and notifications with an on-call platoon of off-duty cops all coordinated through the SmartThings.
This, finally, is the Programmable World, the point at which the full power of developers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists are brought to bear on the realm of physical objects—improving it, customizing it, and groping toward new business plans for it that we haven’t dreamed of yet. Indeed, it will marshal all the forces that made the Internet so transformational and put them to work on virtually everything around us.
However, there are obviously some pitfalls lurking in this future of connected objects.
As a sanity check.
Our fears about malicious hackers preying on our email and bank accounts via the cloud might pale in comparison to how we’ll feel about those same miscreants pwning our garage doors and bathroom light fixtures.
The mysterious Stuxnet and Flame exploits have raised the issue of industrial security in the era of connected devices.
Vanity Fair recently detailed nightmare scenarios in which hackers could hit connected objects, from our high tech cars (university researchers have figured out how to exploit an OnStar-type system to cause havoc in a vehicle) to our utility “smart meters” (which collect patterns of energy use that can reveal a great deal about our activities at home) to even our pacemakers.
The idea of animating the inanimate, of compelling the physical world to do our bidding, has been a staple of science fiction for half a century or more.
No, the main existential threat to the Programmable World is the considerably more mundane issue of power. Every sensor still needs a power source, which in most cases right now means a battery; low-energy protocols allow those batteries to last a long time, even a few years, but eventually, they’ll need to be replaced.
Just as with social networking, the privacy concerns of a sensor-connected world will be fast outweighed by the strange pleasures of residing in a hyperconnected world.
A bigger concern, perhaps, is simple privacy. Just because we’ve finally warmed up to oversharing in the virtual world doesn’t mean we’ll be comfortable doing the same in the physical world, as all our interactions with objects capture more and more data about where we are and what we’re doing.
What’s coming is ubiquitous connectivity that will accelerate how people collaborate, share, learn, gather, do business, and exchange knowledge.
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