( Thirty minute read) 

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

There are three visions from humans today. span space colonies, a genetic panopticon, and straight-up apocalypse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

Because misinterpreting those signals will have profound consequences.

For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two other major risks that worry me greatly:

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

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

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

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

Algorithms can exacerbate divisions and inequality in society.

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

No one will remember the Internet.

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

Why?

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

Back to 2024.

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

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

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

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

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What Is Enlightenment when we turn a blind eye?

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

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

The foundation of a peaceful world.

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

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

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There is more to life than we are currently perceiving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t despair.

Other matters> 

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

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

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

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

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

Globalization vs. regionalization. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The impact is hard to even imagine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can only expect the pace of change to increase.

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

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

Finally: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com