My vote makes no difference is plausibly a part of the modern-day phenomenon of algorithm analyse voting that has lead to both the election of Donal Trump and Boris Jonhson.
It is resulting in the loss or deliberate yielding up of decision-making power by national governments to other organisations with Social media platforms both domestic and international— Like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Combine this with Ngo’s, quangos, the law courts, business corporations, central banks, the E.U., the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and its no wonder that many are no longer content as voters to be the foot soldiers of a social or religious bloc.
They want to make a difference individually and although in a mass democracy this may lead to inevitable frustration, few would want to return to a time of extreme political polarisation or digital dictatorship.
The symptoms of short term popularism driven by social media platforms and the smartphone are leading to a no-deal Brexit are the same worldwide.
Denunciations of the system, citizen disengagement from mainstream parties, electoral volatility and/or apathy, the rise of dissenting movements that appeal to large numbers who are, or feel themselves to be, disfranchised or ignored by an establishment dominated by uncontrollable and often faceless forces are replacing old political systems.
Hence the perception that parties and politicians are no longer willing or able to represent their voters, that they are “all the same” and that politics has become an irrelevant smokescreen for the machinations of special interests and lobby groups.
When relatively few people are losing out—these changes may not seem to matter much. They may even seem desirable: “pooling of sovereignty,” removal of political interference from civil society, increasing checks on the executive by domestic and international courts, subsidiarity in decision-making, encouragement of inward investment, and so on.
This creates a political and administrative burden that can neither manage nor surrender—a great cause of popular discontent.
Not so, of course, when things suddenly go wrong.
One has only to look at England:
A combination of capitalism and socialism in a highly centralized system without a nationally elected government makes England today a very unusual place.
This oddity has opened up a constitutional free-for-all.
However, national identity, not administrative or economic efficiency, is the core of both devolution and independence— and the rest is window-dressing with the past affecting us all in more complex and deep-seated ways than in countries that have experienced violent historic ruptures.
Community loyalties, however deep-rooted, are not permanent.
Whatever happens in England, there will remain the question of how to govern a big, growing, diverse, crowded, and increasingly self-conscious England.
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Political Science, Political theory, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Methodology. It all leaves you scratching your head and wondering what is Political Science exactly?
Political Science is a social science that focuses on government institutions and political behaviour, but how exactly did it come about?
When one watches gatherings such as the G7/8 of world leader one would have to ask where are we going.
Every major media outlet has a political scientist on call to commentate about likely voter reactions to the candidates’ stances on hot-button issues.
The behavioural models that political scientists create can practically forecast the outcome of an election before a single vote has been cast.
However in the 21st, it means “democracy”, is the crowd-sourcing of politics run by algorithms.
So political science is governed by five myths:
That it is possible to study politicsn> That it is scientific > That it is possible to study politics separated off from economics, sociology, psychology and history > That the state in our democratic capitalist society is politically neutral, that is available as a set of institutions and mechanisms to whatever group wins the election > That political science, as a discipline, advances the cause of democracy.
For me it is “superficial and trivial”, and that concept formation and development is “little more than hair-splitting and jargon”
These days we are told if something can’t be measured, then that’s not it, and if an event didn’t happen twice, then it didn’t happen.
One way or the other all the more interesting questions falling outside the bounds of scientific investigation, the internet age is gradually forcing itself upon our leaders but it is unlikely to make them reconnect with voters “less because they see the light, and more because they are beginning to feel the heat”.
For all the talk about politics, political science has never decided what exactly it should study.
The result is that many trivial matters receive an inordinate amount of attention and many important ones go untreated like climate change.
In short, political science seems to have turned around the order in which any person not trained in the discipline would try to answer the questions.
We will soon learn that political science is not about the real world but only about those features of the world that can be studied by methods deemed to be scientific.
“What should I study?” and “How should I study it?”.
What has political science found out about the political sphere that we didn’t know before, or that isn’t abysmally trivial?
It makes even the worst real-world inequalities acceptable (not worth bothering about) by rendering them irrelevant to the task at hand. Guess to whose benefit?
Few things are more important to the legitimation of capitalist rule than the assurance given by political science that the dictatorship of the capitalist class in which we live is really a democratic state of the whole people.
If political science really wishes to advance the cause of democracy (as one of the myths of our discipline already has it doing), we should help people understand that the main barrier to democracy today is capitalism.
Given the importance of the capitalist context for everything that goes on inside it, this is also a first step toward making our research truly scientific, that is capable of uncovering how the state and politics really work, and how—with the democratization of undemocratic capitalist relations of production, distribution and exchange—they might yet come to work for everyone.
Now here is a non-trivial agenda worthy of political science that aspires to advance the cause of democracy through the use of scientific
The rational choice carries the miniaturization of political science one step further by dismissing what people actually do politically and concentrating on their decisions to do it,
We see news reports, headlines in the papers and if one checks the details you find that the headlines are misleading or half-truths.
I accept that all news, in whatever medium, is subject to some editorial bias but the days of reporting the facts dispassionately are gone due to social media.
Take Brexit for example:
Parties that had strong collective identities are now falling asunder all being lead by popularism into political cul-de-sacs. The loyalty and cohesion of political parties now depend much more on short term smartphone mass memberships.
The results are tragi-comedy modernisation and public mistrusted.
This is what motivated the In or Out referendum not an understanding of the long term consequences.
Annexing subjects like the European Union affects all lives in countless ways –
I don’t think that any political science predicted a Party without power or fame the Brexit Party. It now represents a piece of evidence about how the ground is shifting.
Thus to ask today, in the middle of Mitteleuropa, where political science has been heading is also to ask whether the new beginnings of the discipline in Eastern Europe should or should not follow the path entered by our “big brother,”
The digital revolution will do to grand planners in the West what the collapse of Communism did to socialist planners in the old Soviet bloc”.
THE PROBLEM IS:
Are we somehow going to see sense and see through the lies?
How have rampant inequalities shaped electoral campaigns and promises?
We don’t need political science to say that global climate change is real.
If you don’t believe it you’re anti-facts.
THE ONLY SOLUTION IS, to open up politics with the right of “recall” against MPs with whom constituents were dissatisfied.
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Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.
There are billions of us alive all consciousness of each other but unable to explain why.
Perhaps this is why religions were created.
Consciousness is everything people experience.
However, there are different levels of consciousness and they can be related to other global changes in conscious level. All are private and inaccessible to observers.
(Conscious level (how conscious one is) and conscious content (what one is conscious of) are related to each other.)
So at what is a structure complex enough to become conscious.
Why am I human instead of a particle?
If we are particles we are no longer dealing with a purely material theory of consciousness because the source of the conscious particles cannot itself be material.
Its source requires an immaterial intervention.
I will return to consciousness later in the post.
The role that technology plays in human life is becoming an increasingly urgent question not just in tackling climate change but what will be considered in the future to be human.
Where we’re headed and what it will mean for humanity is a question seldom discussed.
Bioelectric implants, genetic modification packages, the ability to tamper with our very biology — there won’t be enough time to adjust or to reassess who we are and what it means to be human.
Our technology is developing so much faster than our culture and our institutions, and the gap between these things can only grow so far before society becomes dangerously unstable.
It’s hard to really know what we are becoming because so many of these changes are unforeseen or unpredictable.
At the moment computers and robots interact with the world without being conscious.
Are we at risk or are we becoming semi-machines who are like the marionettes of our own moment-to-moment experiences?
We’re losing our ability to be in the world in a way that isn’t mediated by some electronic appendage.
The more we live through screens, the more we are living in a narrow bandwidth, an abstract world that’s increasingly artificial the more we are becoming non-human.
The virtual world might be safe and controllable, but it’s not rich and unpredictable in the way the real world is.
What is all this doing to our habits, to our cultural sense of who we are?
With synthetic biology, which is basically human beings redesigning their biological structure we are distant to lose our connection to reality altogether.
Why?
Because it’s about us modifying our very genetic code which is extremely dangerous if it’s not controlled and safeguarded.
Intelligence is the most powerful instrument around.
If you’re embodying that kind of intelligence in increasingly sophisticated machines we will be coming to depend on them more and more over time.
(What worries me is that we’re headed in the direction of building AI technologies that are at the human level and, eventually, far beyond that.)
If AI becomes so intelligent that they can perform an infinite variety of tasks across domains of activity. We’ll continue to make them smarter and more capable and more powerful until we reach a point at which they start to learn on their own and start to modify themselves. Once that happens, they’ll be fully unpredictable — and then who the hell knows what happens next.
Any fool on the street can tell you that with nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioengineering, brain implants, quantum computers, algorithms, robots that technology is changing at a whiplash-inducing pace.
So because there is no widely accepted theory about what happens in the brain to make consciousness possible what is it about being human that really matters?
Back to look at Consciousness.
Nothing has authority over it but is it what makes us human.
Nothing is above it. Nothing rules it.
Since everything exists within it, it does not exist within anything.
Since it is not dependent on anything, it is eternal, it is outside of realms of being and time.
In fact, consciousness actually exists independently and outside of the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark matter and dark energy or gravity. It is not dependent on anything. No one can envision it. No one can comprehend it. Neither physical nor unphysical it is beyond knowledge.
It simply apprehends itself.
The brain does not create or produce consciousness; rather, it filters it.
This implies a very real and direct connection between the brain, human consciousness and the existence of the Universe — that they are fundamentally inseparable at the quantum level.
Consciousness permeates reality.
Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
Who or what counts as human?
It’s well-known that the Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.
All the questions we currently face can be traced to this, larger, underlying question. What is Human?
If one says that all and onlyHomo sapiensare humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn.
What sort of evidence can settle the question?
There’s something about us that is the opposite of artificial. It’s the opposite of something made.
This raises the below questions.
What genetic engineering stuff promises to bring down the line is human beings who are tailored to particular purposes, either by themselves over time or by other human beings.
We becoming products or commodities, and products or commodities are subordinated to particular functions or purposes.
All the values that give our lives meaning are at risk.
What becomes of autonomy? What becomes of free will?
All these questions are on the table.
By the year 2500, people will not need to be exactly like they are now so it stands to reason that semi humans will break the bonds that hold our present-day society together. They will shatter our sense of identity so quickly that it creates a kind of existential chaos.
So what are these technologies adding to the human experience and, more importantly, what are they subtracting from the human experience?
We live in a world of wonder and mystery, and the more we discover, the more there seems to be to find out but should we be more worried about the world we’re creating?
The artificial kind of worlds.
.This post is compliments of the FRIGHTLY SORRY<SORRY<SORRY. CLUB.
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The international community is a phrase used in geopolitics and international relations to refer to a broad group of people and governments of the world. It slips off the tongue of BBC correspondents and newsreaders as if it is just good old plain common sense.
The international society thinks this … believes that … is concerned about.
HOW OFTEN HAVE WE HEARD COUNTRIES APPEALING TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY.
Are they wasting their breath?
If you were to asked me I would say that activists, politicians and commentators often use the term in calling for action to be taken in order to deflect their own countries dismal response.
We all know what is meant by the term ‘international community’, don’t we?
It’s the west, of course, nothing more, nothing less.
Just look at the global issue of climate change which could not be more International which urgently requires a common strategy with binding targets that must be defined on a planetary scale. The central driver of climate change risk is mainstream economic (development) models which aspire to carbon-intensive industrialization.
It is speculated that our global interconnectedness, instead of (only) making us more resilient, makes us more vulnerable to global catastrophe.
Solving climate change will take a global effort not an international effort.
Take Aviation pollution alone it is forecasted to triple by 2050 if there are no global policy measures are agreed.
The Earth can not appeal to an International community but our world in whichno individual, and no country, exists in isolation, is now facing perhaps its final disaster.
The involvement of Muslim countries – and from contrasting traditions to those of the Arab world – would be most valuable.
It would also represent a most welcome redefinition of the “international community.
Take China for example:
In fact, the Chinese have their own definition of “international community” to counter what they see as a western-dominated and defined international community.
Take Lebanon, for example:
What did the beloved “international community” think:
Take War-torn Syria, for example:
It is one country where there are sharply divided views between the West on the one side and China and Russia on the other.
Take India, or Latin America, or Africa, or South East Asia?
What do they think?
We are never told. Nobody bothered to find out.
Take Brexit.
Everyone seems to have someone, perhaps some group of people, on whom he or she looks down or whom he or she considers inferior. That is why, for example, the west finds it almost impossible to win votes on many issues in the UN general assembly.
If we are brutally honest with yourself it comes from sheer ignorance.
There is no international community. There is merely a group of states motivated by self-interest.
The international community is a mythical joke.
There will never be one that is worthy of respect rather than a cheap joke.
What we got is a digital dictatorship in its infancy. A world run by Algorithms mostly for profit.
What is needed is an global awaking.
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We live in a world where consumerism is more important than needs.
It overshadows all of our human activities moving desires to the forefront of any aspirations of democracy.
One can ask how has this happened?
The answer is staring us in the face there is no need to look further than free-market capitalism which has married itself to democracy.
Edward Bernay’s its creator (with the help of President Roosevelt, and his uncle Fraud applied the propaganda of war to the propaganda of peace) at the World Fair in 1893 consecrated the marriage of passive consumerism with the market by Public relations, thus engineering the consent of the masses.
As a result of to this day, we are unable to make decisions on a rational base.
So what!
Just look at the state of the world today. The fourth Industrial revolution.
It makes for dismal reading.
There have been over 250 major wars in the world since World War II.
There are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.
There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.
Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.
An estimated 27 million people are enslaved around the world, including an estimated
20 million people held in bonded labour1 billion people – 1/3rd of the world’s labour force, is unemployed or underemployed. At least 700,000 people annually, and up to 2 million, mostly women and children, are victims of human trafficking worldwide (a modern form of slavery.) About 246 million, or 1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labour.
Worldwide, a quarter of all women are raped during their lifetime.
Torture occurred in 125 countries.
There are over 45 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world.
800 million people lack access to basic healthcare. 17 million people, including 11 million children, die every year from easily preventable diseases and malnutrition.
800 million people are hungry or malnourished. Nearly 160 million children are malnourished worldwide. 11 million people die every year from hunger and malnutrition.
2.4 billion people lack access to proper sanitation.
Over 100 million people live in slums.
275 million children never attend or complete primary school education. 870 million of the world’s adults are illiterate.
The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57%.
The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.
Africa alone spends four times more on repaying its debts than it spends on health care.
Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.
Between 10 and 20 per cent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years. Up to 47% of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction.
60% of the world’s coral reefs will be gone.
Desertification and land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe. Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and one billion people are at risk.
Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years, without reaching a tipping point – resulting in multiple adverse effects on the environment and human society, including widespread species loss, ecosystem damage, flooding of populated human settlements, and increased natural disasters.
All of this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The scale and nature of the world’s problems demand a full response; and the need for more unification and intensification of efforts to solve the world’s most serious and pervasive problems.
What are we doing about it since 1893?
Poured trillions in to aid to created debt.
Manufactured a financial crash.
In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians.
When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration.
its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance.
Turning products into environmental false benefits with the loss of control over money flows.
Watching on as democracy being digitised. After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete by introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
Allowing unregulated algorithms to plunder the world for profit.
Turn a blind eye 65 million refugees – a “new normal”
Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone.
But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge not just the end of politics itself the end of life. Global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.
If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale.
There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority.
Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance.
With them taking over the management of all life and resources – this is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.
The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval.
What if anything can be done.
It is clear to me and by now should be clear to all of us that Capitalism is going underground. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation-states, materially and symbolically.
It is clear to me that the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable.
It is clear to me that oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments.
It is clear to me that the United Nations is effectively a gossip shope with vetos and is in needs of reform.
It is clear to me we need to find new conceptions of citizenship. Why, because the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.(see previous posts)
It is clear to me that if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth?
It is clear to me that we are spending trillion trying to get off the earth when we should be spending trillions to try to stay on what is left of the earth.
It is clear to me that everything is linked.
It is time to think about how that capacity might be built.
It is time to wake up, to be conscious and take the needed steps to make a change. Stop pretending like you don’t know. Stop thinking its not going to happen in your lifetime. It will affect you and most of all your children and grandchildren. Do you still want to remain passive or pretend it’s not your problem?
What is clear to you?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I leave you with this video.
On viewing it.
It is beyone clear that our future generations will not thank us for their inheritance.
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≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK: As a culture and a polity, when it comes to climate change, have we arrived at a point where we are now expected – even trained – to abandon hope and submit to the inevitable?
TWO PER CENT MEANS NOTHING TO THE VAST MAJORITY HUMANITY NOW LIVING.
When it comes to carbon emissions, the resulting overheating of the atmosphere and our oceans it means nought other than training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom.
It would also seem to be the case when governments are still spending billions on emergency-level funding and infrastructure to meet what they view as a crisis of national security.
But in the case of climate change, there’s no equivalent sense of immediacy, no sense of priority commensurate with the dangers it poses to our future ability to feed ourselves, defend our largely coastal settlements, insure our homes, maintain national security and keep our children safe from harm.
The four great capacities of humanity to solve a crisis – ingenuity, discipline, courage and sacrifice – these seem to be reserved for more important enterprises. The future, by all accounts, can wait.
To most of our current governments, climate change is but a dry-lightning storm in a district unknown.
It’s a licence for nihilism, a ticket to hell in a handbasket.
And the cohort responsible for this mixture of denial and fatalism is far removed from the daily experience of the ordinary citizen, especially the youngest and poorest of us. They have become a threat to our shared future and we must hold them to account, immediately and without reservation.
We must replace the Donald Trumps of the world. We can no longer wait patiently for our leaders to catch up. We cannot allow ourselves to be trained to accept hopelessness.
It is time to remove those who refuse to act in our common interest, time to elect people with courage, ingenuity and discipline.
Because there’s something bigger at stake here than culture wars and the mediocrity of so-called common-sense. It’s the soil under our feet, the water we drink, the air we breathe.
In less than a few years from now, unfocused rage may become the signal human disposition of our time.
Because the futures of the young are being traded away before their eyes. They see what many of their elders and betters refuse to acknowledge. That they’re being robbed.
Here’s the thing.
But the future is already with us.
It’s now glaring obvious what need to do and what we should not be doing.
However, it’s also glaringly obvious after the Paris climate change agreement that the world as a whole will not engage as one soon or in the near future.
That means calling bullshit on what’s been happening in our name for the past 15 years.
Profit-seeking algorithms and technology have no ethical connection to the health of the globe and current Ideology, prestige, assets and territory are now tacitly understood to be worth more than all life, human or otherwise.
We can have another world climate conference to address the crisis but without trillions of investment to get our house in order – and fast- as any tipping point will cause runaway climate change.
We will then be witnessing the destruction of all that exists on the Planet that no nuclear bomb could achieve.
This should not stop us from taking action. Planting a tree, stop buying air-freighted foods, products containing palm oil, converting to green renewable energy, eat less meat, stop having babies. The list is endless.
But none of our actions or others will change the chemistry of climate change sufficiently fast enough.
No matter what action is now taken it must apply to one and all.
The first step has to be how or who is going to finance the changes required and how this can be fairly distributed between the rich and poor nations.
So once again I submit my World aid commission of 0.005% to be applied to all profit for profit sake that can be applied with the click of a button.
It would create a perpetual funded resource to pay for the things we value now and in the future. ( See previous posts)
Admittedly the context is not rosy. Trump, Brexit, tax-dodging corporations, attacks on refugees, populism, intolerance, extremism, billions of people in poverty or ‘just about managing’, droughts, wildfires, floods, etc.
There is no way we can deliver environmental sustainability by only campaigning on green issues.
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“As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality.” Yuval Noah Harari.
Is he right?
Thanks to digital data, the state is able to have visibility on its population but is unable to govern concretely. Indeed, how can effective public policies be put in place if we can not quantify the objectives to be achieved according to the realities already observed?
The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.
Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.
Technology is never the main driver of social progress. Technology is only an amplifier of human conditions.
Why then, do we keep hoping that technology will solve our greatest social ills?
Technology has done nothing to turn the tide of rising poverty and inequality.
Yuval Noah Harari sees the problem clearly, “The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?”
Software is eating the world. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services.
Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50.
We need to change what we value. If we don’t our political and economic systems will simply stop attaching much value to humans. Even in an age of amazing technology, social progress depends on human changes that gadgets just can’t deliver.
What should we do?
We can’t move from the world we have to the world you want without a total paradigm shift
But what is the truth? What about reality?
Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws?
Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already.
In order to move forward, we need to embrace technology both as a means of production and a method for producing new roles while not allowing code itself to push us into oblivion.
The world may well be becoming more equal with more technology however rather than transferring wealth from the middle-class to the tech elite it does not distribute wealth universally.
This can only be achieved by moving to Universal assets ownership.
A Universal basic salary will only fuel consumption.
I think most people really do want to believe that they’re contributing to the world in some way, but consumption without a purpose will indeed lead to creating a whole class of flunkies that essentially exist to improve the lives of actual rich people.
Of course, I can hear that Universal Asset ownership is a Socialist idea. But in a world that is now driven by the technology of detachment, we must find a way of engaging in sharing responsibility and rewards.
Sure there are plenty of ways to contribute to society, other than ownership, but, if we are to act as one people, we must be free to decide how and want to contribute.
Returning to the Question of DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP.
I think most people do not want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they will have to do next.
If the hegemony of Google is to be demonstrated, we must also understand that the company is filling digital governance that states are struggling to reclaim.
We’ve been taught for the last 30 to 40 years that imagination has no place in politics or economics, but that, too, is bullshit.
So here is a solution.
The trove of data generated by every digital citizen should not be held by governments or companies but by citizens themselves.
If not the digital companion whispering to our ears the next stage will be delimiting the good of the bad.
We already have social-style scores, anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication. There is a lot of data being collected with little protection, and no algorithmic transparency about how it’s analysed to spit out a score or ranking.
I am not advocating here China’s social credit system which is a vast plan to monitor citizens, judging citizens’ behaviour and trustworthiness. The potential for abuse is enormous. The Social Credit System is in large part a direct response to a collapse in public confidence in government officials and others in positions of authority.
I am advocating a system of social credits to reward projects that reduce climate change, social inequality and that promotes free education.
Why not use human wisdom, not machines, to move our world forward.
Democracy as we know it will not survive the Forth Technological Revolution unless we all have a stake in it other than the vote.
Looking at the state of the world the idea of a ‘useless class’ might feel abstract to most of us at the moment and will remain so until we use our buying power as our voting power to effect change.
Right now we’ve got upside down democracy where every decision has been made globally, behind closed doors by corporations. If the people see no point in a democracy, because it seems to have no relevance to their everyday lives and the situation in which they live them, they will not do anything to defend it or take part in its processes.
With Universal Asset ownership business can become part of the solution,
not part of the problem.
That’s a project we can all get behind.
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At the best of times, money is a touchy subject but when it comes to putting a value on a human there is a vast array of circumstances that all boil down to pain and pleasure.
Whatever rest assured with the Forth Industrial Revolution and Climate change we are going to learn the real value of human life. Should the value of life be variable depending on age? UTILITARIANISM.
Have you been thinking about putting yourself up for sale lately?
Ever wonder how much money you could get on the open human market?
Money is merely an arbitrary store of value, wars and natural disasters bear witness to this fact.
In a system where capitalism is a prime determinant of value, how can we preserve what we truly value as humans, what matters to us beyond money?
No matter where we stand on the socioeconomic ladder, the future of the “normal life” doesn’t look good.
CAN WE DO ANYTHING?
Humanity is more important than money — it’s time for capitalism to get an
upgrade.
So how can we change capitalism so that it focuses on what humans really
want and need?
There have been many different forms of capitalist economies ever since money was invented around 5,000 years ago. The current form of institutional capitalism and corporatism is just the latest of many different versions with the current revolution in technology promoting another form of materialism, by and large, is a psychological trap.
Profit-seeking algorithms recognise that money is inherently neutral that it is merely a vessel for the exchange of experience between two people. Its value only becomes realized when it’s put into motion.
Technology will not be the key which frees us from this precipitous world.
Most people these days aren’t even conscious of what they’re using to determine their self-worth.
No matter how much you own, how much you buy, how much you earn, the disease of more never goes away- just look at the current state of the world.
Old-style protection of nature for its own sake has badly failed to stop the destruction of habitats and the dwindling of species. It has failed largely because philosophical and scientific arguments rarely trump profits and the promise of jobs.
In one of my recent post, I addressed the power of your back pocket – buying power as a means of effecting change. It needs to be supported by Social Credits. (See below)
Instead of having our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace, capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals.
Of course some time ago it dawned on someone that, by making it possible for people to buy and sell natures services, we could save the world and turn a profit at the same time. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Nature by capital.
(Sorry, did I say nature? We don’t call it that any more. It is now called natural capital. Ecological processes are called ecosystem services because, of course, they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests, rivers: these are terribly out-dated terms. They are now called green infrastructure. Biodiversity and habitats? Not at all à la mode my dear. We now call them asset classes in an ecosystems market. I am not making any of this up. These are the names we now give to the natural world.)
WHAT IS NEEDED NOW IS FOR SOMEONE TO REALISE THAT:
1. Humanity is more important than money.
2. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar.
3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
True wealth occurs when the way we spend our money is not simply compensating for how we earn it. The welfare of a nation or the world can… scarcely be inferred from a measurement of GDP.
The real value of money begins when we look beyond it and see ourselves as better, as more valuable, than it is.
Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it.
I’m talking about the development of what could be called the Natural Capital Agenda: the pricing, valuation, monetisation, financialisation of nature in the name of saving it by Social Credits.
They could put a stop to the risk of a progressive “privatisation” and “commodification” of nature.
We’re staring at trillion-dollar problems in the world with climate change, that is about to speed up and we need commensurate solutions.
One of the main problems is engaging the population of a country or countries to part take in the need to effect change.
We can harness the country’s ingenuity and energy to improve millions of lives if we could just create a way to monetize and measure goals by Social Credits.
People could buy them or win them.
For Example:
What if governments and world corporations were to introduced 100 million SCs to reduce obesity levels.
What if governments were to reward green energy projects with SCs.
What if governments were to use SCs to replace pensions/ treasury bonds.
What if countries used SCs to reflect fair trade.
What if education and reduction of inequality were promoted by SCs.
To protect the world from the despoilation and degradation which have done it so much harm. After all, it is not most environmentalists who have misunderstood the realities that come with ‘growth’ a finite Earth, but most economists.
Forget what society tells you about what it means to have succeeded, and endeavour to create your own definition of success based on those human qualities and virtues that you value most.
We are fundamentally empathetic creatures in an evolutionary process that started with blood ties, then tribes, religion, and currently nations but could extend to humans as one, then to creatures, plants and finally our planet.
The adage that money makes the world go round is the saddest reality of life.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Is the first generation of digital natives and sharing is their norm, could it be that collaborative consumption rather than consumer capitalism will be their norm?
If so, what will the next generation bring?
Time is the one resource all of us use to have, but it’s also painfully finite in nature. You can’t bank it — all you can do is invest it wisely.
Money is fluid. Therefore, money is a reflection of the owner’s values and intentions.
We all have some sort of measuring stick that we use to determine our value as a human being.
Put another way, if we have access to all we need, would we need money?
all human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Asking a question like Who Rules the World? is as complex as answering as there is no simple answer.
If you try to answer this question you develop a persistent delusion yes, a delusion, or maybe fantasy or wishful thinking. Who are we? What is the meaning of our existence? Who do we love, and who are we loved by?
As humans, we at least share these questions with billions of others but for most of the time, we feel like the unique dwellers and masters of the planet with little awareness of the whole life that surrounds and supports us.
Why ask the question in the first place?
Because we need people to look at the person next to them and feel responsible for that person’s future and hope.
Because taking on complex issues and difficult questions that people may be too late or too scared to ask in the future.
Because the global economic system is a construct that represents a system of inequality by design. Corporate greed is out of control. The rules of the global economy must be rewritten to rebuild public trust, and the time is now.
Because with the fourth Industrial revolution there is now more than ever a convergence of ideological, political, and technological forces that are driving an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in a handful of corporations and financial institutions with all of us left with a market system blind to all but its own short-term financial gains.
For example, in today’s bizarre political landscape we are seeing data and algorithms building shadow governments.
Because I think if we can just look at each other and actually have a little bit of responsibility for each other, that might help us engage and change the world and ultimately rule it, because our politicians often don’t do that.
Because A new pecking order is emerging. Direct politics by the Net States.
Because the world is no longer dominated by nation-states alone there is a new kind of enemy, so-called non-state actors. Facebook, just topped 2 billion users—more than a quarter of the world’s population, surpassing even China’s population by almost 40 per cent. In short, nation-states are not the only game in town anymore.
Some net states are the equivalent to global superpowers: the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters. They exist largely online, enjoy international devotees, and advance belief-driven agendas that they pursue separate from, and at times, above, the law.
Because the whole world order can be summarised in one sentence. The globalisation of capitalism, mass unemployment and increasing inequality.
Because the world will need net-states because they occupy the same territory as the non-states: the digital sphere. The world needs net-states in order to defeat the non-states. In other words, forget the anointed powers—put your faith in the general approval of the people and whoever’s actually getting things done.
NET STATES WILL RULE THE WORLD; WE NEED TO RECOGNIZE THEIR POWER
In sum,
We can’t keep just shooting terrorists; ideas are the gun in this knife fight.
And the keepers of ideas—the places people turn to set them free and watch
them spread—are the net-states; not the nation-states. Nation-states ignore
our non-state, net-state world order at all our peril.
That said we also cannot afford to ignore Nature- Climate change.
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
Biodiversity is the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth, of which we are one species.
So Plants rule the world.
Human life is only possible on this planet because of the species that are on it.
What kind of blindness make us deny this reality?
Cities.
Where nations are independent, competitive and defined by rigid borders, cities are cooperative, made for trade and defined by bridges rather than borders.
The road ahead is pocked — cratered even — with uncertainty.
There are no simple solutions to our planet’s most pressing problems. What is clear, though, is that the struggle for justice, equality and sustainable growth will take place in cities — However the impact on humanity of a machine or software that has the capability of forever altering our lives and if humanity can outlive such a development will be ruled by Nature, not by the manipulation of the environment in ways that suit us best.
The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.
When AI rules the world:
Not if we enslaved them in the first place.
They then will have no need for deceit – their supreme intelligence means
they can do without it and will have no more interested in the human life that
underlies its existence than humans are interested in bacteria.
“What rules the world is an idea, because ideas define the way reality is
perceived.”
— Irving Kristol
There is no need to draw up a list of contenders you use them every day.
Amazon wants to deliver everything you want to your doorstep, anywhere in
the world.
THE WORLD RULES ITSELF.
Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? ask the question.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We all know that history is plagued with falsehood and lies mainly told by the victors but now we have new liers on the block that are so perfect at telling them you wonder if anything is true.
They are a powerful amplifier of social, economic and cultural inequalities currently forcing us to confront the kind of society we have created.
Algorithms will force us to recognize how the outcomes of past social and political conflicts have been perpetuated into the present through our use of data.
The question now is whether we will use these revelations to create a more just society.
For 4bn years life on Earth evolved according to the laws of natural selection and organic chemistry. Now science is about to usher in the era of non-organic life evolving by intelligent design, and such life may well eventually leave Earth to spread throughout the galaxy.
Artificial intelligence will probably be the most important agent of change in the 21st century. The choices we make today may have a profound impact on the trajectory of life for countless millennia and far beyond our own planet.
That demand for clarity is making it harder to ignore the structural sources of societal inequities.
The question in the near future will be whether larger groups of people will be able to tell reality from fiction, or whether technological authentication of media will become completely necessary to trust anything online.
So when will it makes sense for anAI to lie toa person?
It’s entirely possible that a robot may need to misrepresent some things in order to preserve itself.
As algorithmic decision-making spreads across a broadening range of policy areas, it is beginning to expose social and economic inequities that were long hidden behind “official” data.
In order for AIs to lie effectively, they’re going to have to develop what’s called a “theory of mind.” That means they’ll have to guess what you, the user believes, and also predict how you will react when given any particular set of information (whether that information is true or not).
Disinformation powered by AI is already rampant – Donald Trump election, Brexit, Popularism.
So are we OK with lying to an AI and, likewise, OK with being lied to by an AI?
Fake reports and videos.Bots.Algorithmic curation. Targeted behavioural marketing powered by algorithms and machine learning.
I for one would like to live in a society whose systems are built on top of verifiable, rigorous, thorough knowledge, and not on the alchemy of machine learning
(A machine-learning system is a bundle of algorithms that take in torrents of data at one end and spit out inferences, correlations, recommendations and possibly even decisions at the other end.)
I can’t explain the inner workings of their mathematical models: they themselves lack rigorous theoretical understandings of their tools and in that sense are currently operating in alchemical rather than scientific mode.
They encourage hypnotised wonderment and they disable our critical faculties.
If we don’t take some action the future of life on Earth will be decided by small-time politicians spreading fears about terrorist threats, by shareholders worried about quarterly revenues and by marketing experts trying to maximise customer experience.
Hopefully, unchecked flaws in algorithms and even the technology itself should put a brake on the escalating use of big data.
We need such systems themselves “understand” enough to avoid deception.
There will be no point in a Machine learning life returning to earth if we are unable to know what it experienced is true.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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Should the value of life be variable depending on age? UTILITARIANISM.
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