The current set of problems facing the world is exposing as never before just how fragile we humans are.
We are facing three major challenges ( over which we have no control) CLIMATE CHANGE and ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE + SOCIAL MEDIA
The question is do we want to live or just exist in a world run by a few wealthy people.
These days it appears that we don’t want to hold powerful people to account.
They get a headline and thats it.
Take for example.
Prince Andrew who thought his privilege position would protect him till he became Andy.
Or
George Michel former US senator who played a critical role in Northern Ireland’s peace process once described his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a “blessing”.
He is now an old codger, but age should not excuse his crimes.
Donald Dump has gone to great lengths to sweep the whole Epstine thing under the carpet.
Epstine died by suicide.
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The fragility of humans was especially shown in the two world wars.
A prime example would be the 7th Panzer Division brutality (that should never be forgotten ) as it made its way to Normandy, massacring all that stood in its way.
Or the recent brutal force of Israel retaliation. Committing a Genocide in response to an attack that killed around 1000 it has wiped out 60,000 Palestines, as the world watched it do so with impunity.
Humanity had always been fragile and will remain so till it learns to live in peace.
In order to make any difference we have to change the way we protect our shared human values. Somehow we must place them beyond the reach of ourselves where they are protected against any technological advances, wars etc.
Ukraine Russia war which is now four years old.
This can only be achieved with universal agreement to tackle, control what is self evident.
Climate change is self evident. Humanity must choose profit or a liveable planet
Artificial intelligence is less self evident. Digital slavery or freedom.
Social Media is evidence in abundance. False information or the truth.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Well the crude Europeans in the name of GOD sacked its holy places in Jerusalem, stole Islam’s science, its mathematics, its art to bring about their Renaissance, rose to dominate most of the rest of the globe, and then scooped up the majority of Muslims into their European empires.
September 11 committed by a tiny minority of extremist misfits that killed over 300 people resulted in the Taliban been turfed out of power in Afghanistan with Saddam Hudson somehow replacing bin Laden as the most evil man of history.
Causing a pre- emotive war to get rid of him and his alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq occurred with no weapons of mass destruction only a pathetic man with a beard hiding in a hole.
Since then it seems the world has changed into isolation with Russia trying to take advantage of its disunity to grab the Ukraine back by force into is empire.
The more one reflects on what really matters in human existence the more you become alienated from a culture that is obsessed with materialism.
These days we barely have time to absorb one event before ten others replace it.
Society is now governed by Social Media which is incapable of expressing any critical thinking to tackle the real problems facing all of us in a world that needs to unite to have any hope against CLIMATE CHANGE or ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
It’s now or never that we need to come together, not isolation, not Donald Dump, nor Mr Putin, nor most of the Islam I am all right Jack world, while we watch inequality expand across the globe.
Insh’ Allah might descend a religious philosophy in one word however ever I prefer the word bolloxed.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The major of problems with Algorithms is just who owns them.
Who is responsible when something goes wrong.
A machine driven by a code that humans invented remains within the current laws of defending or prosecution.
But once a machine becomes conscious it steps out of any human made laws into a legal void.
Currently there are no legal requirements to declare either an owner or their usages.
The question is :,
If the machine is capable of being responsible for its own actions, is the original coder of the machine removed from any legitimate legal obligation, as the machine is now capable of making it’s own decisions without any further human interventions.
What is the point of having laws that govern a machine if it has no emotions, no sense of fear, no sense of anything biological, no laws will protect anything that comes in contact.
So how does one go about setting rules and regulations for conscientious machinery ?
What if such machine were to kill a human there is no human law that could be applied that would have any impact, or effect.
There is only one way.
That way is that all conscious AI no matter what form it or they take must have like all hospital beds an alarm button within its. A fail safe code that can be activated to turn it off
The password to this function comes with its purchase and there is a legal requirement that it is held on your mobile phone in a designated file called AI Emergency.
You might think this is over the top.
I say if we humans want to have any resiliency or control over future AI we must be able to shut down the power that is running any AI machine.
While one of us out of 11 goes hungry every day, we currently building data centres using so much water to keep them cool that there will be nothing left to drink.
There leadership for you.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.
We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?
We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions.
Is it to be human is to be one of us?
This begs the question of the class of creatures to which “us” refers.
In deciding that all and only Homo sapiens are humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn, rather than discovering where such a boundary lays.
We’re probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds.
In fact, one could know everything there is to know biologically about a human, but still not know what is unique to humanity now, what will be unique about humanity in the future, and what is important about humanity.
Why?
Because the steady growth of computing power and sheer reality-describing data will eventually give scientists an unprecedented understanding of biological systems, including the human body, and the ability to hack it in ways that may ultimately defy death.
All of this will lead to a point at which our tools are so proficient at making themselves that more-human-intelligences emerge, and this change is now so accelerated that we can barely make sense of it.
Cells might be persuaded to develop new collective goals and assume shapes totally unlike those that normally develop from an embryo.
A new type of creature—one “defined by what it does rather than to what it belongs to developmentally and evolutionarily.
————- What will the future mean for us, for our relationships with other people, for our hopes and strivings?
When we look at how ordinary people have used the term “human” and its equivalents across cultures and throughout the span of history, we discover that often (maybe even typically) members of other species are explicitly excluded from the category of the human.
For example, Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.
Generally, in wars, soldiers give nicknames to the enemy to dehumanize them.
And another example is provided by the seemingly interminable debate about the moral permissibility of abortion, which almost always turns on the question of whether the embryo is a human being.
But if we think of the human as an indexical expression – a term that gets its content from the context in which it is uttered – a very different picture emerges.
When we describe others as human, we are saying that they are members of our own kind or, more precisely, members of our own natural kind. ie natural kinds are to contrast them with artificial kinds.
If ‘human’ means ‘my own natural kind,’ then referring to a being as human boils down to the assertion that the other is a member of the natural kind that the speaker believes herself to be.
However, when it comes down to it, human beings have nothing special but our highly evolved brains that do something that other species can’t:
We remember, but so do elephants.
So our inquisitive, reflective, pondering minds are forced to wrestle with some big questions in one way or another.
We have cultures and ways of transmitting information, and I guess we may come to realize that it is just us in the future.
Rest assured humans will need humans to be human and the planet we presently call Earth will remain the only place that this is achievable.
You may be certain that AI will want to use satellites to look inside other cultures and will eventually create a human geography information system that uses satellite imagery as the baseline and overlays the satellite maps with datasets and other detailed information covering history, culture, education, economy, religion, weather, and political landscapes.
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Who gave EARTH its name? No one knows.
Earth is the only one in our solar system that does not come from Greco-Roman mythology. All of the other planets were named after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.
Also, there is no particular Homo sapiens individual that researchers recognize as the specimen that gave Homo sapiens its name.
Self-awareness is in its infancy with Artificial intelligence, and the identity and authenticity of an individual in this melted world ahead will be daunting as we don’t yet understand who we are.
Undoubtedly, in the case of humans, we are more creative than any other animals currently alive or pre-human descendants with the same genes, but the problem with evaluating creativity in extinct species is that you can’t talk to them.
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We don’t know everything about our own species—but we keep learning more as we are rendering a new world with new opportunities and perspectives that will either go in two directions.
Either we harness technology to human values or technology is turning us into products for exploration.
Presently to live a human life which in essence is determined by an accident of birth is becoming more and more expensive so that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born.
Moreover, we can scarcely go a day without using inventions and innovations that were once the stuff of science fiction. Cell phones, flat-screen TVs, airbags and antilock brakes, CT scans, digital video players, portable computers, and, of course, the World Wide Web were completely unavailable a few decades ago.
But of course, in a future world where accidents of birth and the fortunes of good genes are even more critical determinants of success than they are now, inequalities that persist will be especially galling.
Because social and positional inequalities already distort existing measures of income and wealth, many seemingly clean-cut economic debates are more intractable than one would imagine. And of course, social anxieties over the unavoidable differences will become even more troubling, the less we can constructively address these issues.
Even if biology could somehow be conquered to the point that genetic good fortune could be parceled out equally to all, the minor differences that remained would loom ever larger.
Whether you view such an eventuality as desirable or irrelevant, more of our intellectual effort should be devoted to this future scenario. Not simply because we are heading there, but in many ways, because parts of that world are already here.
Even today, we routinely exaggerate the extent of material inequality and make foolish comparisons between different time periods and between countries at different levels of development. This does not mean that inequality has disappeared, or that it is unimportant
And as COVID-19 pulls the rugout from under economic growth, money will have so much power that it with AI will control society.
As the need for money grows, so does the greed of it.
Ever since money was introduced as a value to exchange goods, every action that we take exacts a cost and produces consequences and none will be bigger than climate change.
In the economy of the future where knowledge is the most valuable commodity, a person or a country will have to offer more than just money.
Money should never be the master of anyone it is a tool to be used to accomplish the things you want in life.
Even if money does not buy happiness, raising as many people as possible to a middling level of prosperity (an important first step to endure day-to-day economic agony of inequality we are still creating a recipe, not just for disaster but exiting this world.
People are waking up to a story that was already there.
This Recipe for the human stew we are in.
Viruses have been on the planet for millions of years, much longer than Homo sapiens. After a year COVID has infected more than 115 million people and caused over 2.5 million deaths, with over half a million in the US alone.
The world population of 8 billion is doubling every 61 years with 55 percent of us living in urban areas or cities, which is set to rise to 68 percent over the coming decades. Currently, Cities house more than half of the world’s population and are expected to see another 2.5 billion new residents by 2050.
Cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions.China’s co2 emission exceeded those of all developing countries. 14 gigatons, 25% of global emissions.
Producing enough food to feed the world includes raising large numbers of animals in close quarters, and they represent breeding grounds for viruses and infectious agents that can jump to humans. The spillover from animals to humans is closely linked to environmental change such as Climate change.
60% of all Mammals are livestock. Unsustainable.
80 % of all birds are Poultry. Unsustainable.
83% of wild animals are exterminated along with 50% of plants.
Because of selective breeding, future generations of selectively bred plants and animals will all share very similar genes which will reduce variation perfect for future Pandemics.
Mix all of this with Profit for Profit sake and we got a recipe for the future that will rise quicker than you can say I am all right Jack.
And I’m not saying we should go back and live like nomads. But when you put it all together — population pressure, urbanization, agricultural practices, deforestation, high mobility . . . and then climate change is going to make all these things worse.
Whatever the next event will be — and we know there’ll be another event — it’s already out there. A wake-up call is an understatement.
The Dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth – is unsustainable and we must have pandemic memory, even if we want to forget the past year.
What if anything can be done to reverse centuries of mismanagement?
The future of automation is only possible with the Internet of Things (IoT), the hub of collected data where devices interconnect. To get the most from automation, it’s essential to look beyond convenience toward efficiency.
416.2 terawatt-hours of electricity are used by data centers equaling 1% of world energy.
There is now a great urgency for the world to convert to green energy but solar panels and wind farm electrical cars are not the solutions unless they all operate on Hydrofusion. Yet commercial electricity generation from fusion still remains a goal rather than a reality and it’s a solid bet that it will not arrive on the grid before the 2030s and it will be expensive.
We are left with our whole system of living that requires radical structural change away from profit to beneficial sustainability.
This change requires giving the means to Humans to live their lives with dignity while protecting what is left of our planet.
There are other, more ethical ways to provide social services.
At the moment we have sales taxes, gasoline taxes, poll taxes, food taxes (yes, they tax what you need to survive), sin taxes (cigarettes, alcohol, gambling), “fat taxes” (taxes on unhealthy foods), housing taxes, Social Security taxes, payroll taxes, and income taxes…taxes galore! All harm the poor more than they do the rich. And of course, we have the income tax, which is a progressive tax, a tax that affects the rich more than the poor.
What if we had a cutoff point where at a certain income you pay no taxes, and those below that income get money back from the government. A Universal income.
This alone would be revolutionary for the poor and working-class! Coupled with the removal of all regressive taxes, it would be even better.
Instead of using hundreds of billions to fund programs like Social Security and free medical care, food banks, those who would require those programs would probably just be able to afford most of what they need anyway!
The demands for all goods would skyrocket as people now have free money to put into the market.
On top of this, all education including University should be made free.
If we want humans to protect, the ecosystem we have to make it more profitable to protect than destroy. Pay them to protect it.
To do this see previous posts – A 00.05% World Aid commission.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Remember when people use to initially judge you by your handshake. It formulated a picture of a person we were meeting for the first time.
In the span of a few seconds, it lay the foundation for how others perceive and feel about us — and we about them.
“It was wet,” “It was creepy,” ” It was firm,” It was crushing,” “It a Mormon handshake,” “It a Mason probing handshake”, enthusiastic, vigorous, prolonged, high-fives to fist-bumping.
A handshake was a globally widespread, brief greeting or parting tradition in which two people grasp one of each other like hands making impressions that have a very long shelf-life based on a brief but important meeting.
Your handshake is the business card you leave behind.
Believed by some to have originated as a gesture of peace by demonstrating that the hand holds no weapon.
It is a reassuring tactile touch that we as social animals share is essential for social interaction, social harmony, health, survival, and security, as well as for communicating our true feelings.
It serves as a means of transferring social chemical signals between the shakers.
What is even more startling is how long we remember those bad handshakes — sometimes we remember for decades.
Today we pay for items with the swipe of our phone or by inserting a small plastic card into a reader. The old handshake just doesn’t have its place anymore.
We can also spend thousands of hours clicking a mouse over a small image on a computer screen. Nothing is real, nothing is said – only ones and zeros racing around the globe in small packets of data.
The world of technology continues to tractor us into a world absent of looking at one another in the eyes the Art of the handshake is dead.
With, Social media, Face recognition, Instagram, Facebook, Smartphones, Emails etc our most valuable currency of the handshake is evaporating and being replaced by digital signatures or passwords, that are undermining our trust in each other.
It’s no wonder that so many people get something so simple as a handshake wrong.
Take the Politician’s Handshake:
Two hands to cover or cup the other person’s hands twisting the other person’s hand so that yours is superior or playing hand jujitsu to let the other person know you are in charge is just rubbish.
In the real world-shaking a person’s hand allows you to establish your friendliness and accessibility.
For example meeting your future in-laws for the first time, your first job interview.
It might be true that in the future daily and weekly media will be more and more electronic, but physical media will always exist.
Stand in front of the webcam and send a digital emoji and you could be shaking hands with the devil.
You cannot reproduce a handshake with meaning electronically.
This is a part of the beauty and the freakiness of the internet no handshake required.
Its no wonder there is grooming.
There was a time that a person had to put on nice clothes and go out into the real world to meet a love interest.
Today, you can be “out there” without ever having to go out- online dating.
You can even engage in a virtual relationship by using email or instant messaging. It is possible to get to know a person on a relatively deep level without ever meeting at all.
Customs surrounding handshakes are specific to cultures and can offer some real benefits. Take Brazilan negotiators they touch each other almost five times each half-hour where there is no physical contact between American negotiators.
In postmodern society, superstitions don’t have much of a place, for most of history they have a played a huge role in shaping culture and society before the arrival of the handshake.
The internet cares not what you do. You miss out on real contact with people.
It is affecting our ability to connect with others as equals. Not being able to manage the normal tasks of adult living resulting in more and more limper handshakes. Which leads them to problems with society and unable to get along with others.
Although teens are staying in constant contact via the Internet and texting, these friendships do not foster trust and intimacy the same as face-to-face contact.
The century’s old practice to seal a deal may seem quaint but its importance in the future will tell us whether its a robot or not.
As the appreciation of small things disappears; nature loses its brilliance.
Our planet is in a tight spot lets shake hands on that.
As we know there can be no peace no universal action on anything without it.
All the verbal diarrhoea in the world cannot replace it.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
With technology and new technique in artificial intelligence redefining how life can be created opening a research window into the early moments of a human life perhaps the above question is not so farcical, despite some thorny ethical constraints like artificial embryos.
In a breakthrough that redefines how life can be created, embryologists working at the University of Cambridge in the UK have grown realistic-looking mouse embryos using only stem cells. No egg. No sperm. Just cells plucked from another embryo.
What if they turn out to be indistinguishable from real embryos?
Then there are advances in genomic biotechnology presenting the possibility of bringing back long-extinct species.
To get from the genome work in the lab to herds of Woolly Mammoths would definitely bring the survival of the fittest into question.
Generative adversarial network, or GAN, takes two neural networks—the simplified mathematical models of the human brain that underpin most modern machine learning—and pits them against each other in a digital cat-and-mouse game. It is endeavouring to give machines imagination.
DNA has linked 206 variants to intelligence. One day, babies will get DNA report cards at birth.
Herbert Spencer coined the term “Survival of the Fittest” in 1864.
Darwin intended “fittest” to mean the members of the species best suited for the immediate environment, the basis of the idea of natural selection.
Darwin’s distinctive idea was to emphasize natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution: if certain heritable traits increase or decrease the chances of survival and reproduction in the struggle for life, then those traits that favour survival and reproduction will increase in frequency over generations, and thus organisms will become more adapted to their environments, and over a long period of time the differences between varieties of a species can become so great that the varieties become new species.
On the one hand, he tells the reader to disregard his metaphorical personification of Nature as implying “conscious choice” or “intelligent power,” because nature should be understood as “only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws.”
On the other hand, he refuses to give up his personification of Nature, apparently because he senses that this engages the mind of the reader through the poetic imagery of Nature as a person.
The survival of the fittest that determines everything is stuck in our lexicon. With the phrase today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended.
When it comes to technology “Survival of the fittest” is inaccurate for two important reasons.
First, survival is merely a normal prerequisite to reproduction.
Second, fitness has specialized meaning in biology different from how the word is used in popular culture. In population genetics, fitness refers to differential reproduction. “Fitness” does not refer to whether an individual is “physically fit” – bigger, faster or stronger – or “better” in any subjective sense.
It refers to a difference in reproductive rate from one generation to the next.
But in evolutionary terms, survival is only half the picture; you must also reproduce to be “fit” in the Darwinian sense.
The influence of the environment on life expectancy in the future will be far greater political, not a biological issue. It will be the survival of those best able to adapt to change.
Resources, especially those necessary for survival, will become more valued.
Artificial intelligence may gain, along with a sense of imagination, a more independent ability to make sense of what it sees in the world but is the technology ready?
If the AI revolution is going to spread Darwin natural selection it will have to be updated, then the real AI revolution can begin. Darwin always brought in information and made a whole new picture out of it.
Is Darwin still relevant today? Yes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a biology class that isn’t based on evolutionary biology. Yet the explanatory power of the evolutionary theory is not bound to biology.
Why? Because the theory of evolution is still evolving.
As the late Russian Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Darwin not only made us aware of how nature works, but also of our place within nature. ( Unfortunately for him the discovery of DNA and that Quantum Mathematics governs all biology had not been discovered)
Evolution now needs to be critically evaluated in the classroom, rather than dogmatically indoctrinated.
Artificial intelligence is and will take both to a whole new level and transform them into something relevant to our time and our discoveries.
Thus, we say that all the individuals of a species comprise a gene pool from which selection (either artificial or natural) can select. The important point is that we cannot select for genes that are not in the gene pool of the species. Only clones have the same genes and are essentially identical—including the same sex.
In the future, the evolutionist must look to mutations, their most ludicrous mechanism of all.
A new DARPA research program is developing brain-computer interfaces that could control “swarms of drones, operating at the speed of thought.” What if it succeeds?
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