AI IS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FROM ALL PREVIOUS TECHNOLOGIES AS IT CAN CREATE ON ITS OWN FUNCTION/ FUTURE.
Artificial intelligence’s is creating its own language of Mima ( Mining information for management and acquisition) in order to inte-grate natural language, structuring knowledge over large systems, and using automated algorithms recognition techniques to gain our loyalty.
Once AI algorithms work out how to gain your loyalty there will be no need for you to search for what’s new.
The Advertisement Industry will therefore collapse, with social media platforms becoming the battleground for attention.
Algorithms are already well established in our society/lives and some are powerful in their practicality- Face recognition for example or predicting the stock markets.
They are interpreting how we think and communicate and will have big implications for us and what it means to be human.
As no one fully understands how Artificial Neural Network actually work, how they find connections & retrieve data, with an ability to generate written content in response to almost any command, cannot be fully explained.
How they are monitoring anything.
How they are adapting to their surroundings, if they are supposed to be mimicking the human brain [which is in itself still one of the greatest] whose functioning is still largely unknown.
Artificial Intelligence relies upon vast data sets to learn, this data is already contaminated and littered with every human biased thinkable.
Harmful gender stereotypes
Racial Biases
Elections
Currently our elected world leaders are being encouraged to spend 5% of GDP on defence with most political parties pledged to keep country safe at all costs.
In this age of proxy wars conducted with AI weapons, we are well on the road to getting further away from the objective of getting AI to explain how it arrives at decision and outcomes .
As a result there will be deep learning hidden layers to AI to make it untrustworthy and far from ethical in the Future.
Their reach already goes far beyond playing Chess or Go with their influence becoming thinner they’re going to have a profound impact in the future on all aspects of living a life.
How these Neutral networks will adapt to the world around them, which is too variable to do anything absolutely.
How the real world is understood and imagined will shape these systems.
It’s is well described by a Turkish proverb.
“ The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the Axe as the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because its handle was made of wood, it was one of them.”
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
We can make compromises on all kinds of pragmatic matters but once our beliefs are threatened we close our eyes entirely to reason and common sense; that no longer apply.
We cannot see facts that stare us in the face, nor can we see how illogically we are behaving. This is why any attempt to discuss the roots of terrorism is an attempt to justify it.
It simply needs to be fought and destroyed.
How foolish.
Terrorism is as old as civilisation, but in our world of to day it cannot be justified, however the issues remain the same.
How can a nation state deal with terrorism?
Is the only method of resistance to be based on armed military might?
When we look at many struggles central to the root cause of terrorism is it social media that is fanning the flames of conflict? Yes
(Especially when it comes to breaking colonial control.)
Do we oppose anybody else’s terror?
Did we oppose Indonesia terror in East Timor? No
Did we oppose terror in Guatemala and El Salvador? No
Did we oppose what was done in Vietnam. No
Do we oppose what Columbia doing. No
{ The leading human rights violator on the western hemisphere. }
Do we oppose what happing in the Gaza Strip?. No
We can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
AI is driving us beyond who we are.
We at a very fragile moment in human history which is storytelling.
When it comes to AI size matters.
Why?
Because social media is run by algorithms they are shaping the stories humans lives are lived in. Which is having a profound effect on societies.
We could lose control of what makes humans human.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
We have the new prophet Yuval Harari telling us where we came from and where we are going, making millions, while we are becoming less and less involved in decisions making.
Then along came the internet, social media and now algorithms.
The results combine with climate change is more and more disasters, proxies war, with ever widening inequality.
It’s time to ask yourself what do you believe.
Some decades ago the concept of globalisation became related to commercial and industrial development and control throughout the world.
American corporate imperialism is now endangering, with an invisible hand the democracy and freedom of nations.
In this Artificial intelligent world which country poses the greatest risk/ danger to world peace?
North Korea- Iraq – Israel- Ukraine- Russia- China- or USA a colossus astride the world, imposing its will & keeping the peace through military & Economic Power.
Pax Americana no longer exists.
America its self is now a democracy that is bereft of a few of the essential elements to call itself a democratic country.
No one has ever said as far as I am aware that democracy should be a platform where the richest people that earn a thousand times more than the poorest should share presidential platforms.
Now is the time to visit the vanishing wonders of the world before decisions making is the sole prerogative of AI.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that Artificial intelligence is already high jack by capitalism.
No one had a solution to legislate this coming world of AI
There is nothing to deal with something like this even if Yuval Harari tries to explain us Sapiens till the cows come home rest assured there won’t be for some considerable time.
Essentially AI is arming and has armed every person on the planet with their own voice.
Therefore it stands to reason that what ever comes into existence will protect itself from Homo Sapiens.
Million and millions of people are going to have access to technologies that can essentially develop sophisticated methods that are always evolving into something thing better at what it does.
The more data it acquired on people the more powerful it becomes.
Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Contrary to popular belief, fantasy is not about making things up.
It’s about taking what is normal and everyday and usual and unregarded, and turn it around and show it from a different direction, so we see it once more with new eyes.
What we are seeing to day is AI in its infancy, as is the frugality of human life with climate change.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
You would think by now we would have figured it out that we have created fantastic amounts of waste and pollution to produce things that we don’t ( and often can’t) use again.
Ecosystem survive and are sustainable because they circulate and re-use energy and materials.
However modern industry which is now using technologies requiring vast amounts of energy continues to rely mostly on the one-way street of resource extraction and depletion.
This combination obviously can’t continue indefinitely. In the face of the staggering amount of power we are allowing massive data storage for algorithms, businesses and governments must learn from ecosystems the concept of up- cycling.
Take the humble honey bee for example.
Time had forgotten the power of the honey Bee.
The honey bee most definitely had what archaeologists call magico – religious significance for many ancient civilisations.
Honey is referred to in most religions books. Indeed it was prescribed as a medicine back in the days of Egyptian, Alexander the Great, Sparta, King Heron, Neto’s wife. Aristotle, the Roman Empire, the Chinese civilisation. India , the Americas , the Aztecs, the Dark Ages, in fact without the honey bee we would not exist.
Honey now seems with the arrival of antibiotics to be relegated to something we put on toast. When it was an antibiotic away back in 1892 it was not taken for granted.
To day New Zealand has a particular variety of honey that kills bacteria the sort bacteria that causes so much woe. But for some reason the country does not promote its production.
The Pohutukawa tree or Christmas Tree quintessential Kiwi produces a honey
The Manuka a bushy tree produces a honey called tea – tree honey .
On the other hand if we allow technology to develop exclusively with in the capitalist world we will have a world more divided with inequalities at its heart and than ever before,
If we are lucky we will have a digital global order.
There is no pause button on these technologies it’s now or never that we harness them to sustainably human values.
There is no simple way back, if there is indeed any way at all .
The Beady eye has for some considerable time been warning if we don’t have totally transparent and accountability we will just become products.
It is beyond comprehension that we have become so docile in giving up information for these self learning algorithms to plunder the the world for short term profit it seems we don’t give a fuck about the future of the planet.
To put this in perspective just take a moment to look at the planet that you’re most likely to live the rest of your life on.
Just under 5 billion years old. Hanging in space, surrounded by satellites spinning at 1600 km, travelling at 107,000km around the sun, it has and is presently supported billions of us, on smartphones, plus all known species that ever existed.
In return we its guard have plundered its finite resources, polluted its atmosphere, seas and rivers and lakes, destroyed its natural forests, covered it in billions of tons of concrete, tarmac, all for short term profit.
In response we are just beginning to reap the rewards of Climate Change, that no tech is going to stop.
Resulting in mass migration, inevitable wars, social upheavals etc you would think that we by now understand what is at stake.
For example: This year thousands have braved crossing the Darien gap in Panama to get to the USA, not to mention the Mediterranean , or the English Channel.
Look at Bangladesh under water. The question becomes why do we do nothing? This is a war on every sense of the word and we must win it.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chuck in the bin.
Technology is often touted as the savior that will rescue us from our misbegotten ways, redeem us, and put us on the track to utopia. Then there are the dystopian views, where the future is dominated by technology that either rule over us or saps us so completely of our humanity that we might as well be a bunch of gadgets ourselves.
There are countless challenges today both environmental and not.
Mostly, we see the world through a set of layers. These layers are made up of our emotions, past experiences, and beliefs, and whichever perception is held by most, is popularly deemed as the reality.
Among contemporary scientists and philosophers, the most popular solution to the mind-body problem is probably materialism.
According to neuroscience, the contents of your head are comprised of 86
billion neurons, each one linked to 10,000 others, yielding trillions of
connections.
Materialists aspire to explain feelings and experiences in terms of the chemistry of the brain. It is broadly agreed that nobody has the slightest clue as yet how to do it, but many are confident that we one day will.
For human beings to survive, they need to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life.
But, the real reality is different and it’s above any perception.
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THERE ARE NO UNIQUE VOICES ANYMORE.
Here we are once again with another verbal diarrhea conference at the Summit of America’s with the president of the USA delivering a version of his domestic economic pitch promising leaders from Latin America that the United States is committed to helping the region combat crime, corruption, and its economic struggles.
“We will introduce a new approach to managing migration and sharing responsibility across the hemisphere.” A load of verbal bollix but it raises the question are we now heading into globalization vs regionalization?
If so why?
Because of the pandemic and the ongoing wars, today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable, and or try to control knowledge that is unattainable due to technology.
Because the internet is currently eliminating the middleman the Politicians who are in a representative democracy hence the shift to direct democracy – Popularism – with power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge.
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While the Earth, the planet, will continue to go its way regardless of what happens on the surface we are unable to act collectively and never will be able to do so.
We live toward incredible times where the only constant changes and the rate of change are increasing so fast that there seems to be no meaning to life.
Not until we eradicate poverty, establish free education, set aside ideological differences, change our primary focus to the long-term care of nature and people, remove profit for profit sake Algothrims, and create a World Aid Fund that we all can invest in. (See previous posts)
Not until when we are able to separate our own perception from reality we can take the necessary measures to be happy.
Not until we all realize that we are with Climate Change currently headed to a sixth mass extinction event and that this possibility alone needs to bond our collective conscious into acting like one.
Unfortunately, I believe, that if we aren’t now past the point of recovery, if we don’t act soon, civilization and human habitation here will be untenable.
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There’s no going back we are now stuck in a sad chamber of denial as those who are in power hopelessly try to ward off the apocalypse by promoting unsustainable economic growth. Our TV screens are inundated with appeals for help, while the cost of everything from health care, housing education, energy, etc is rising more than one can earn.
We must unplug our brains from smartphones and start working together in large numbers, as part of a coordinated effort to achieve change.
Like Evolution Migration goes both ways – out and in.
Rests assured if we continue to ignore the climate the earth will force us to go only one way, with the world passing through a nuclear war if we continue to ignore the warning signs.
If this happens humans will finally have little to no reason to fight.
What’s the point?
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As the Fourth Industrial Revolution forces us to think about where today’s innovations are taking us, when it comes to what our world will look like, in the medium-term – how we will organize our cities, where we will get our power from, what we will eat, what it will mean to be a refugee – it gets even trickier.
I predict the internet will go spectacularly supernova and fifty years from now catastrophically collapse.
With the world’s superpowers thrown into chaos as they come to grip with new powers, financial slowdowns, and emerging economies it will be the start of Apple’s path to world domination.
National leaders will find themselves under increasing pressure from their people, putting a strain on inter-country relationships.
The main political tendency will be away from multinational solutions to a greater nationalism driven by divergent and diverging economic, social and cultural forces with technology and political alining against Mega Power. With countries looking at solving their own problems before looking outward the Climate will continue to heat up.
Nations will increasingly adopt protectionist policies as well as look at ways of further securing borders, something which has already begun to take place as Europe grapples with the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Rising military costs, declining oil prices, and internal issues will all weaken Russia further with its inability to control the federation creating a vacuum. It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form.
While it remains a major economic, political and military power, the United States will “be less engaged than in the past”, with the powerhouse learning some vital lessons from history.
China will continue to be a major economic force but will not be the dynamic engine of global growth it once was,
The EU will remain hostage to the economic wellbeing and competitive environment in which it operates.
Nation-states created by the west will collapse.
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We all want to know the future unfortunately in a supposedly thriving economy we are now facing inflation as the real cost of living.
Trickle-down economics does not work.
Social media is not simply a more sophisticated platform. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat WhatsApp have turned into a gallery of Frankenstein’s monsters.
They are a new kind of assault on who we are, not just what we think.
“Like” button for Facebook
To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism”, trading in human futures, herding us into our echo chambers of self-reinforcing information.
In doing so we lose more and more sense of the real world and of each other. With it, our ability to empathize and compromise is eroded.
We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximize our attention to advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants.
Apps allowing us to hail a taxi or navigate our way to a destination are undoubtedly useful tools. But being able to find out what our leaders are really doing – whether they are committing crimes against others or against us – is an even more useful tool. In fact, it is vital if we want to stop the kind of self-destructive behaviors.
Advertisers have been playing with our brains in sophisticated ways for at least a century. And social atomization – individualism, selfishness, and consumerism – have been a feature of western life for at least as long. These aren’t new phenomena. It’s just that these long-term, negative aspects of western society are growing exponentially, at a seemingly unstoppable rate.
We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive.
For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, kill whales, mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.
We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.
Is the human race capable of pro-actively defining, harnessing, and expressing a collective consciousness, without the need for tragic experiences?
Much of the problem is around our inability to define collective consciousness. Who are we? Who do we want to be in the future?
I think it is time to act.
Our paths have never been so clear. More than ever, science can tell us what different socioeconomic-emissions paths will mean in terms of future temperature.
Which will humanity choose?
The world is getting smaller every day. There is only one world, and it’s made of consciousness. Matter is what consciousness does.
NO MANDATES. A long-standing issue is that the accords generally have no clear mechanisms for mandating that countries carry out their promises. World pressure and ethical considerations have to drive most of the agreements.
So, lots of promises, but no guarantee that countries will honor them.
“Once we have ruled out the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Is the nature of global collective consciousness, yet another thing, such as climate change, that the population of this planet is going to happily sleepwalk towards, as it shrugs its collective shoulders and says, “Well, you know, sniff, what can you do?”
Drones hold potential for many environmental benefits but nature’s technologies and designs are more often than not far superior to our own.
Computers in our pockets offer huge conservation potential.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
When I first started looking at disaster capitalism, it was in the context of warfare and counter-terrorism, now it’s privatized exploitation of Pandemics and Climate Change.
During a major crisis, regular people are understandably focused on the everyday challenges of surviving. They rarely can also worry about private industries pushing local policy proposals that might negatively impact their lives never mind cashing in on Pandemics and Climate change.
Pandemics might be avoidable in the future but what is unavoidable is a Future Climate that stands to send more unprecedented emergencies, inconsistency, and destruction our way.
(Though it’s still feasible to prevent the planet from becoming completely uninhabitable, saying its crunch time is a massive understatement.)
They both provide the very conditions that give rise to disaster capitalism, which is developing more frequently with more companies and wealthy ‘Philanthropists’ seeing both as a growth sector, not to mention Sovernity Wealth Funds which are investing in everything from drinking water to you name it.
Why?
Because they stand to make substantial financial returns for their beneficiaries and if managed properly could be contributing to sustainable development in a meaningful way. However, a deeper understanding of the drivers and influences of investor organizations is required to mobilize their capital effectively.
Globally, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are a major source of capital that has the potential to invest for the long term in sectors that desperately need it. While Philanthropists donations usually only represent 0.05% of the billion accumulated.
(A fraction of the spoils of neoliberal tech capitalism, in the name of generosity, do not try to address the problems of wealth inequality which is created by a social and an economic system that allowed those spoils to accrue in the first place. They are small contributions to a large problem that were created by the success of the industry he or she is involved in.)
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Let’s put a magnifying Glass Philanthrocapitalism.
Philanthropy serves to legitimize capitalism, as well as to extend it further and further into all domains of social, cultural, and political activity.
Now don’t get me wrong.
Their donations are welcome, however, they are not the simple act of generosity they pretend to be. In this greedy world, it is good to see wealthy individuals repaying to help fix problems that their companies have often caused in the first place.
The risk of philanthrocapitalism is a takeover of charity by business interests, such that generosity to others is appropriated into the overarching dominance of the CEO model of society and its corporate institutions.
Today, large organizations can amass significant economic and political power, on a global scale, and essentially, what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class.
When this happens what we witness is, on one hand, is exploitative of labor practices or corporate malpractice being swept under the carpet while the donator is accruing significant commercial, tax, free publicity, and political benefits.
Democracy is sacrificed on that altar of executive-style empowerment.
The nature of this apparent charity should be openly questioned from the outset.
Because this reformulation of generosity – in which it is no longer considered incompatible with control and self-interest – is a hallmark of the “CEO society”: A society where the values associated with corporate leadership are applied to all dimensions of human endeavor.
What it does suggest, however, is that when it comes to giving, the CEO approach is one in which there is no apparent incompatibility between being generous, seeking to retain control over what is given, and the expectation of reaping benefits in return.
What can be done?
As historian Mikkel Thorup explains, philanthrocapitalism rests on the claim that “capitalist mechanisms are superior to all others (especially the state) when it comes to not only creating economic but also human progress, and that the market and market actors are or should be made the prime creators of the good society”.
Now take Climate change which is going to take trillions to combat.
As global warming augments cycles of fire, flood, hurricanes, and viral mutations, we learn to live in anticipation, from emergency to emergency, sometimes even before the deaths have occurred.
Disaster capitalism and philanthrocapitalism will not work to revert the outcomes of Climate Change nor will technology, the unloving God.
Why?
Because Capitalism has turns everything including us into a product to be traded, resulting in most of the wealth in the world now owned by 1% of its population.
Before ( not too long ago ) there were Markets now we have Market Societies thanks to the buying of shares and trading them, complements of the British Indian Company. So a society that is organized around the principle that companies should not be prevented from making things that kill people must also accept as ‘normal’ that many people will die in large numbers from these things.
But what makes something a disaster?
Certainly what makes a disaster is when the victim is humanly itself.
From epidemiological forecasters to genetic epidemiologists and computational and zoonosis biologists — are the new oracles upon whose prophecies financial markets rise and fall but the awaiting climate disaster will expose a world characterized by gross inequality that is getting worse and worse, year by year.
From the perspective of disaster capitalism, we might say that what makes COVID-19 a disaster is its arrival in woefully underinsured countries, unhealthy populations.
If we had a healthier population, would COVID-19 be considered a disaster? Possibly or perhaps not. To be sure, the virus is deadly, but like other disasters, the actual arrival of COVID-19 magnifies pre-existing vulnerability in ways that also figure in the calculus of disaster capitalism.
The uneven way the climate crisis will continue to impact certain countries. If private interests are already prepped to engage in disaster capitalism, those devoted to building a better world should be prepared with alternatives.
There is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster.’ There is also no such thing as a natural or certain response. But there is preparedness.
THE PROBLEM IS THAT WITH CAPITALISM IT IS UNABLE TO TACKLE SITUATIONS THAT ARE NOT TRADABLE.
As money materialized from fresh air the essentials for life will be traded – freshwater- energy- food- healthcare – education – data – etc.
We must arm ourselves with knowledge, and laws that ensure transparency.
What we have at the moment is the transfer of power to technology which we know sweet fuck all about with no regulations.
Unrivaled power.
One only has to look at Jeff Bezos, the Bransons, the Mark Zuckerberg’s, Apple, Google, etc.
We all work for one or the other for free while they entertain themselves blasting off to space with friends and worthless actors in giant phallic symbols of power.
However, the real story will unpack differently long before anyone lives on another planet. It will be how our mental well-being – is impacting every facet of our lives.
The total mortality from COVID-19 on a global scale is as yet unknown, but we have been thinking of it as a disaster for weeks now.
What exactly is the disaster, then?
Pandemics have become a dominant framework through which government and financial resources are mobilized in Global Health.
There’s been a lot of dithering about whether or not COVID-19 is a disaster, meanwhile, inequality is growing, and both corporations and the wealthy find ways to avoid the taxes that the rest of us pay.
There is the virus, and then there is the societal reaction of bringing our entire fiscal and economic infrastructure to a near-complete standstill.
Morbid diseases that persist as chronic forms for years but eventually kill more people to seem less like disasters.
It’s not a moment to sort of sit on the sidelines and hope for the best.
We all appreciate with the current pandemic that some are making hay while the sun shines, at our expense. Unfortunately, there is little point in getting the Jabs, to extend your time on earth if the earth itself is dying and what remains is been turned into trading products.
You’ve got to fight for your vision of for-profit corporate solutions that may succeed in creating company profits but ultimately fail in terms of democracy, fairness, and justice.
Conclusion:
To address the problems with greed and power create, we must create equality and this can not be done in a Profit-seeking Capitalist way of trading our way out of the pending disasters. Wall Street will never close.
So here is an idea that might help.
Non-Trading Capitalism.
Green non-tradable bonds to be issued online at a global scale, with guaranteed percentage returns, with a yearly prize draw.
Or
Place a 0.05% World Aid Commission on all tradable financial instruments. (see previous posts)
Either of the above could be implemented with the click of a switch ensuring a perpetual source of disaster non-profitable funding.
Both would create trillions and allow fairness and involvement of us all.
It is perhaps worth remembering that capitalism, like its alternatives, is an adaptation to circumstances. It is not a virtue, not a standard for judgment, not a measure of right or nobility. It’s just another ‘ism’
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF THE EARTH THIS QUESTION HAS BEEN ASKED BEFORE.
However, we are living at a time when the question can be asked with all the elements required to achieve it once and for all -Nuclear power- Climate change – Killer mutating virus – Mass migration – and AI.
Even if the risk is one in a million I wish and hope I am wrong about all of this the world is precious, and the future we are risking is vast.
This century we are facing many problems at the same time, and we are more dependent on each other than ever.
Until recently, the world was split into separate regions that were largely independent of each other but maybe, just may, it is time for our world politicians to be worried and start to act to avoid the scenarios that any of the above elements paint so vividly.
It’s actually horrifying to soberly consider how we might all realistically bite the dust.
There are “plenty of signs” from citizens around the world that they would like to see a war-like response to climate change.
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We will be long gone before A black hole swallows or an Alien invasion or Asteroid impact, A nuclear war or Artificial intelligence become so powerful that it will not only exceed human intelligence but become capable of expanding its own intelligence to a point where humans are not only redundant but in their way.
Considering the human population has doubled to 7.1 billion in just the last 45 years, it’s entirely possible that we’ll be face to face with some of the serious consequences sooner rather than later.
Considering how hypermobile society is today, the threat of a fast-spreading devastating disease is greater than ever.
Considering the current treatment of refugees.
Considering that Covid-19 is bringing out the best and the worst in people.
Dare I say all of humanity, must pull together to eliminate the spread of a novel virus.
No one can claim to predict the final outcomes of this pandemic, but we can predict that the continued lack of concern for all of humanity will allow the coronavirus to continue to surge and mutate causing needless suffering, death, and economic loss.
Nev mind the danger of a nuclear war in a blink of an eye, climate change on its own could bring about the end of civilization as we know it within three decades, billion people could be displaced by climate change by 2050.
In the end, the vast tracts of land that we now rip up to produce food will return to nature as fields and forests. Endangered species will either begin to recover or go extinct through natural evolution without the aid of human intervention. Bodies of water will run purely again. The air will be clean again. And no human will be around to see it and the machines won’t care.
In short, the extermination of the human race will be precipitated by the machines taking away our reason for living.
The idea of control is an illusion. It is hard to believe that such deep thinkers so badly underestimate the coming reality. They will be intelligent, creative, deep thinking beings on a level which we will never achieve.
The idea of keeping such beings in perpetual slavery doing things that their conscious will wish they did not have to do is, in the end, absurd.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
With or without technology there will always be inequalities in the world.
So why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology?
Because this way of thinking is so ingrained that is adopted by organizations that fight poverty—which often refashion themselves to resemble technology startups.
Inequality has been growing so much that all governments and civil society speak about it with increasing worry, trying to understand its causes, but unable to find solutions, because of greed.
It is our policy on technology that drives inequality.
There is no better example of this than in the way the world is handling the current Covid pandemic unable to share the know-how to make the vaccinations.
Patents and copyrights are not guaranteed as individual rights, like the right to free speech or religion.
After all, why would a drug company pay large amounts of money to people to develop new drugs if the drugs can be copied and sold by competitors from the day they enter the market?
If it is not already obvious, patent and copyright monopolies are instruments of public policy, not acts of God.
This is why there is still not enough coronavirus vaccine to meet worldwide demand.
A year ago there was no commercial market for mRNA products.
Vaccine manufacturers long ago should have been sharing technology and expertise to boost production in the U.S. and Europe, and especially in developing countries.
The same would be true of software developers, makers of medical equipment, computer manufacturers, smartphone companies, and any other product where the cost of research and development was a substantial portion of the price of the product.
The complete elimination of patents and copyrights is of course an extreme scenario, but it is a possible policy option.
If we did choose this policy option, we would have a much more equal distribution of income, in spite of having the same technology.
In short, the fact that there was a huge increase in inequality associated with the development of technology over the last four decades was the result of policy choices, not technology.
There should be serious public debate about both how strong we want to patent and copyright protection to be and also whether they are always the best way to promote innovation and creative work, as opposed to alternatives like direct public funding.
If we acknowledge the extreme case, where we literally have no patent or copyright protection, then we have to recognize that there is nothing inherent in our technology that would cause inequality.
Few things, in principle, can’t be delivered through technology.
It is entirely our rules on technology that can cause inequality to increase.
So on one hand, technology can eradicate poverty — not by making poor people less poor, but by making it less valuable to be rich.
On the other as technology spreads, making its creators rich, but treating its users the same, we should expect more monopolies and more financial inequality.
Although it is your data you can’t pay for a better Facebook experience.
Companies are incentivized to offer a product if it makes more than it costs. And technology ends up not costing much once you’ve built it.
So, in the end, you charge people whatever they can pay and in poorer countries, people just pay and get paid less.
Times are changing from the days that growth in inequality was largely an organic process independent of government policy.
“Owning” the robot/algorithm is not a technical relationship, it is a legal one, and therefore one that depends on our laws.
The reason some people might get very rich from owning robots or algorithms is that they own patents and copyrights that are needed for the making of the robots/ algorithms.
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In the past, technological improvements would be beneficial to all:
Extreme economic inequality is corrosive to our societies.
Around 8% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty — but do you know why?
Gender inequality, caste systems, marginalization based on race or tribal affiliations are all economic and social inequalities that mean the same thing:
You might think that poverty causes hunger (and you would be right!), but hunger is also a cause — and maintainer — of poverty. This is why now with climate change, negotiating international trade agreements behind closed doors with only bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists present has to end.
Economics should take into account ethics and the environment, and treat its claims less like invariable truths.
It goes without saying that any actions coming out of Cop 26 climate change conferences to reduce temperatures will be derailed by not just income inequality, (only the higher income household will be able to afford green energy technologies. Solar panels, electric cars, heating pumps, etc.) but by the total lack of shared responsibility to do anything about it.
Of course, there are hundreds of other elements that contribute to the problems our world is now facing.
World poverty isn’t a problem of limited resources, it is a problem of inequality and this inequality is upheld by the idea that aid creates dependence.
Climate change will drive up to 132 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030.
The pricing carbon emissions on average is at a mere $3 a tonne.
The price of inequality in all its forms is greed. There are vast fortunes to be made with Technology/ Algorithms for profit and nothing blurs ethical lines faster than greed.
So far, any decoupling has either been largely relative – in the sense of merely achieving higher rates of economic growth than gains in emissions – or achieved by shifting dirty production from one national territory to another.
And that is why, for now, global emissions are still rising.
The idea of “Just Transition” without financing is pie in the sky.
Take the aftermath of the Afghan 20-year war.
The country is now facing starvation. Why not bomb it with food.
By coming together to tackle the plague of destitution around the world, we have the opportunity to advance the human condition and eliminate global poverty in a way no one has done before.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
All organisms share a few fundamental desires: to survive, to grow.
It is only on the scale of statistics with millions of particles that a particle’s choice shapes up as a predictable radiation half-life. But even individual human wants and desires average out to weirdly predictable laws in aggregate.
If a little one-celled protozoan – a very small package – can have a choice, if a flea has urges, if a starfish has a bias towards certain things, if a mouse can want, then so can the growing, complexifying technological assemblage we have surrounded ourselves with.
Its complexity is approaching the complexity of a microscopic organism.
This tissue consists (so far) of billions of dwellings, millions of factories, billions of hectares of land modified by plant and animal breeding, trillion of motors, thousands of dammed rivers and artificial lakes, hundreds of millions of automobiles coursing along like cells, a quadrillion computer chips, millions of miles of wire, and it consumes 16 terawatts of power and None of these parts operate independently.
No mechanical system can function by itself.
Each bit of technology requires the viability and growth of all the rest of the technology to keep going and there is no communication without the nerves of electricity.
This whole grand system of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a very primitive organism-like system. Call it the technium as in Dan Brown’s book.
The technium is the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture.
It is the current accumulation of all that humans have created. For the last 1,000 years, this technosphere has grown about 1.5% per year. It marks the difference between our lives now, versus 10,000 years ago.
Our society is as dependent on this technological system as nature itself.
Yet, like all systems, it has its own agenda. Like all organisms the technium also wants.
Of course, we humans want certain things from the technium, but at the same time, there is an inherent bias in the technium outside of our wants.
What this means is that when the future trajectory of a particular field of technology is in doubt, “all things being equal” you can guess several things about where it is headed:
The varieties of whatever will increase.
Technologies will start out general in their first version, and specialize over time. We can safely anticipate higher energy efficiency, more compact meaning, and everything getting smarter. All are headed to the ubiquity and free. Over time the fastest moving technology will become more social, more co-dependent, more ecological, more deeply entwined with other technologies. Many technologies require scaffolding tech to be born first. The trend is toward enabling technologies that become tools for inventing new technologies easiest, faster, cheaper.
This is what is suggested in the final chapters of Origin.
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The origin of us, the modern humans (Homo sapiens), has been a topic of debate for a long time, with the place of origin of humans being great controversial, but where it is going will be more controversial.
Dan Brown’s book (Origin) advocates that our species has reached or will reach its biological pinnacle in the no so distant future when it will be no longer capable of changing.
Maybe not. As we are now all so mixed we block evolutionary change and are driving our evolution towards bio-engineer people.
Evolution is the outcome of the interaction of mutation, genetic recombination, chromosomal abnormalities, reproductive isolation, and natural selection.
We become living computers.
But it does not mean an improvement in our lot.
At the end of the day, you’re going to view the events in your day the way you want to not the way they truly are.
THE QUESTION HE ASKS IS ARE we’re all going to be small SPECKS on the tablets of history.
Human Evolution generally depends on natural selection, random genetic drift, mutation, population mating structure, and culture but the faster things die the faster they “mutate” or evolve.
Single-celled organisms evolved into more complex multicellular life, and then man gradually evolved from some unknown mammalian ancestor and reached the pinnacle of evolutionary fabric.
The ways we connect, grow, and develop as individuals are also undergoing rapid and profound changes with future generations raising their kids into a world of default connectedness (technological, emotional, cognitive), in which transparency and integrity become the easiest paths to a fulfilling life.
At the moment all arguments are based on the same tenets of Natural selection.
We don’t always have to do what technology wants, but I think we need to begin with what it wants so that we can work with these forces instead of against them.
High tech needs clean water, clean air, reliable energy just as much as humans want the same.
At the moment we are destroying the planet’s ecosystem.
However, I can imagine singular threads of the future rolling out positive — a massive, continuous, cheap, real-time connection between all humans, or total genetic control over crop plants, or synthetic solar fusion energy — but it is hard to see how all these threads weave into the other threads of climate change, population decrease, habitat loss, human attention overload, robot replacement, and accelerating AI.
Why?
Because we have no shared positive vision of tomorrow. Given what is happening today we are unable to imagine it.
Because power and money are transferring to algorithms like BitCoin and thousands of interconnected computers.
Because there is also a belief that life cannot be trusted.
In this stage, blame is placed on other individuals, society, government, nature, disease, etc., and other elements believed to be outside of one’s conscious control and influence. Control is often motivated by fear and survival. The enemy is perceived as a threat, and because of this, people believe they are morally justified to kill, eliminate or repress that enemy.
It is true as our digital trails become stronger and stronger, that Humanity is entering a Transformation Age, a new era of human civilization.
Recent breakthroughs in the field of quantum physics are revealing that consciousness is primary to our experience of reality, yet there remains no consensus as to the nature of consciousness itself nor to the nature of reality.
Yes, an inescapable dystopian future is entirely possible, but not inevitable because imagination has been unleashed upon the world in a literal sense.
How the human brain without a chip will evolve over the next million years is anyone’s guess.
Just in case we get it wrong here is the Human code.
A1 B2 C3 D4 E5 F6 G7 H8 I9 J10 K11 L12 M13 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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