As if the world has not got enough problems much of the retail sector is now buckling under the weight of COVID-19.
And now we have Amazon, trying to position itself as the forerunner in e-commerces.
From everything from health care to fresh food to your weekly shop, it is rapidly becoming the “retail apocalypse” and the search tool instead of Google.
With over 300 million customers it is using your shopping data to do so by promoting its own products before any others using its platforms, even if they are more expensive than competing products.
When the dust settles, we’ll see an evolution where there’s less focus on huge one-day sales like Black Friday to Cyber Mondays with more emphasis being put on a multi-day and multi-week [series of] continuation of sales.
(The term Black Friday refers to stores going into the black – becoming profitable – for the season.
Americans spent 6.3 million dollars (5.26 million euros) every second (!) On the Internet.
Online sales during the recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday for independent businesses selling on the platform topped $4.8 billion in worldwide sales, between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, up 60% from the year before.
Commodity value means assigning a value to different goods and services and of course, Amazon pontificates its green ambitions in its blurb.
But sustainable development is not just about the forest, nor is it a communist conspiracy, rather it relates to how humans operate.
All of us live in ecosystems, the only difference between them being how much they have been altered to suit human habitation.
Who decides what is sustainable?
Besides, sustainability requires recognition of the fact that how we obtain resources is having devastating impacts on the other species we share the planet with.
Since we live in ecosystems, and all ecosystems rely on communities of different species to be maintained; reducing the number of total species may have negative impacts on human populations. Research already shows that reducing biodiversity may influence rates of the spread and infections of certain pathogens and diseases
Amazon sustainability is a word used to promote collectivism.
An argument can be made for the idea that online shopping is less detrimental to the environment than traditional retail, but this is often untrue.
It is true that shopping online yields a smaller carbon footprint. However, it is also true that online sales create more vehicles, more traffic, and potentially more emissions.
As hundreds of millions of customers order simultaneously and expect two-day delivery there are more stops per delivery trip, with still more potentially nitrogen oxide emitted.
Unfortunately, Amazon is becoming one of the greatest promoters of unsuitability even if you believe in its commitment to Zero carbon by 2040.
Key Takeaways.
Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
Investors can be wary of companies that commit to sustainability. Although the optics can be beneficial to share price, investors worry about companies being transparent with their earnings results.
Big brands often make pledges to sustainability, but it often takes a long time to achieve sustainability goals.
Twenty years to do so is not good enough.
Have I used Amazon? Yes. Will I use it in the future? Yes, but not for fresh food or any item that can be produced locally.
All human comments 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.
The beady eye is far from the first voice to ask this question and it certainly will not be the last.
We might even come to “question whether we still have free will.
There is no doubting that the social web has created amazing opportunities to learn, discover, connect, but its downside as it penetrates our daily lives is becoming more and more prevalent in the creation of our future lives and the societies we live in.
If the public discussion is shifting increasingly to online fora, and those fora are having more and more influence over democracy it becomes increasingly important to apply principles to them.
Honest political debate is essential for the health of a democracy.
If discussions of import move into space where they can be readily censored, then we will simply no longer live in a society with a free exchange of ideas, because the playing field will always be tilted.
One only has to look at how social media platforms are amplifying what is wrong with the world.
While we all reveal a huge amount of personal information online we are losing the ability to determine honest facts that democracy depends.
Basically, companies that run social media platforms are monopolies or near-monopolies in their areas of operation, and the only way we can achieve the desired outcomes is through clear, effective legal regulations.
We can’t always control how others use their platforms but we can apply the same regulations that govern all other forms of Media.
The public cannot rely on these company’s self-regulation, because self-regulation raises more questions than it answers.
The fact is that the formation of a platform takes place in a vacuum, whereas the formation of any competitors do not, so they cannot be considered parallels in any way.
If we take companies like Facebook and Google they both derive most of their revenue from advertising. They essentially constitute a duopoly because they have access to the best data about individuals. Every memory, picture, emoji, song, video, link, gripe, fear, hope, want, dream and bad political opinion posted is mined and monetized as data.
As a result of their algorithms, they are creating and reinforcing divided and insular online communities that do not interact with people or information with which they disagreed.
At the end of the day, how Facebook and Google conduct their businesses undermines privacy and raises questions about ethical behaviour in the uses of our information and their role in society.
The Internet is a “utility” like water or electricity. It is essential to modern life, not an optional subscription service.
Determining how to regulate Facebook or any other platform may first require some kind of definition of what it is.
Facebook brags about connecting us to our family and friends — but it also about directly influencing the outcomes of elections across the globe.
It sits on top of industries including journalism, where it, together with Google, essentially controls the distribution channels for online news and, in effect, the way people discover information about politics, government and society.
They ( Google, Facebook, Twitter,etc) have figured out how to take advantage of this dynamic to distribute false information about political candidates and hot-button political issues in order to drive up traffic and advertising revenue.
Protecting our community is more important than maximizing their profits.
They are given protections that no one can sue them for any reason — that is Google and Facebook nither are responsible for the fake news that appears on their sites.
They are completely shielded from any responsibility for the content that appears on their service.
Changes to legal protection (which has been interpreted by judges to provide a safe harbour for online platforms even when they pay to distribute others’ content and decline the option to impose editorial oversight) would likely be devastating to online platforms like Google and Facebook and would transform the way people interact across the entire internet.
However, with legal protection, sites like these could be held responsible for libellous comments posted by readers, Google could lose lawsuits over potentially false or defamatory information surfacing in search results, and Facebook could be sued for any potentially libellous comment made by anyone on its platform against any other person.
The legal bills to defend against libel and defamation claims would be enormous.
We all need protection and the ability to request platforms to provide us with control over online information by making it accessible and removable at an individual’s request.
The government, on the other hand, has a regulatory intent to protect citizens from content that is obscene or violent.
Should Facebook and their like be regulated?
A question that is never going to end.
However, until we recognize that there is no fool-proof safeguard to keep horrific content away from the eyes of children we rely on huge fines to the detriment of us all.
Till then with all internet platforms deflecting criticism, social media will be more psychologically damaging than anyone expected.
We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people.
It is beyond comprehension that we tolerate the present position.
Or is it? When you see the below.
Would you ever be prepared to use a nuclear weapon?
This question is increasingly put to politicians as some kind of virility test.
The subtext is that to be a credible political leader, you must be willing to use an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction.
We should be baulking at the casual way in which political discourse on this topic has developed which is politically unacceptable and morally despicable.
If a mainstream politician unblinkingly said that they would use chemical weapons against civilians there would be uproar. If a self-proclaimed candidate for prime minister boasted that they would commit war crimes, it would be a national scandal. Nuclear weapons should be seen no differently.
It’s time that nuclear advocates spelt out the reality of what their position means.
The human race is so good at speaking, it’s lost the art of listening.
It might be easy to brush away the febrile atmosphere online as a nasty byproduct of free expression: I don’t want Facebook having everyone’s verified identities. I do want their platform and other platforms to be held responsible legally for content that is false, racest, hateful, rightwing fascist propaganda.
I do know that if the big platforms, as they already do in part, forced some verifiable information to back up use, we could tame this wild west with legal requirements
I’ll give up on the consensus-building when I can open a platform knowing who to hold legally responsible.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
( A five-minute read if you don’t want to be Googled)
Artificial intelligence is changing the world we live in but are we all going to end up scratching our behinds wishing we were dead. Turned into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Our thoughts and actions scripted as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.
As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
The perfect coordination and optimization of our day- to – day lives controlled by Google Monopoly inc.
Google is draining of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,”
Why because we will be in a state of constant Google observation with the entire world connected to the world they wish to present.
At the moment Google control over 65% of all searches, ( WHICH NO ONE KNOWS HOW IT WORKS)
Google is not required by Law to serve everyone nor for that matter is Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter.
Nearly every iPhone operates on its Android operating system.
WE ARE ESSENTIALLY SENTENCED TO A GOOGLE DIGITAL DEATH.
They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.
Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work.
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.
Google, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does.
Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.
What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”
In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.
It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
And because we would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” we would “be thought very knowledgeable when we are for the most part quite ignorant.” We would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” This is not good, as the world is in need of wisdom more than ever.
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
If we lose quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in ourselves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
As Richard Foreman so beautifully describes it, we’ve been pounded into instantly-available pancakes, becoming the unpredictable but statistically critical synapses in the whole Gödel-to-Google net. Does the resulting mind (as Richardson would have it) belong to us? Or does it belong to something else?
Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so—and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.
Reading, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is.
The media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
Circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
The tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.
Where does it end?
Mr Page of google said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”
The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
There’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.
Google as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”
I know that Google will argue the toss and indeed other than they becoming a monopolizing influence I would have great praise.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the Bin.
John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955. The notion of intelligent automata, as friend or foe, dates back to ancient times.
You might think with the state of the world we live in that this is some what a naive subject. If you are like me, when it comes to Algorithms I have little or no understanding other than they are beginning to reshape my living life.
Ironically, in the age of the internet and unparalleled access to information, the most critical questions are out-of-bounds.
While the web has broken down the boundaries between different nations, so you can read a blog by anybody, anywhere in the world, on the other hand all our laws and governments remain in national boundaries. Outside of that we have very limited amount of effective governance, collaboration and co-operation and understanding.
Moreover, while we are clearly pretty good at producing knowledge, using this knowledge – that is separating the wheat from the chaff and integrating this together into something useful – is a big problem particularly in fields such as global sustainability.
One of the things we ought not to do is to press full steam ahead on building super intelligence without giving thought to the potential risks. Even if the odds of a super intelligence arising are very long, perhaps it’s irresponsible to take the chance.
As far as I am aware there are no current regulation or laws governing the use of AI. It is penetrating all nooks and nannies, de-privatizing us, turning us into points at job interviews, with algorithm replaced the loan officer.
They are fundamentally reshape the nature of work.
So what will happen when a computer becomes capable of independently devising ways to achieve goals, it would very likely be capable of introspection—and thus able to modify its software and make itself more intelligent. In short order, such a computer would be able to design its own hardware avoiding any laws, ethics, or any human morality.
A case in kind is in the area of autonomous weapon systems ie Drones.
While I am fully aware that the world faces many problems that could be solved by Artificial Intelligence we must before it’s too late give AI a set of values. And not just any values, but those that are in the best interest of humanity. This is the essential task of our age and since humans will never fully agree on anything, we’ll sometimes need it to decide for us—to make the best decisions for humanity as a whole.
How, then, do we program those values into our (potential) super intelligences? What sort of mathematics can define them? These are a few of the problems.
We’re basically telling a god how we’d like to be treated. How to proceed?
It’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction,” Hawking and others wrote in a recent article.” But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.
There is no doubting in many ways, AI innovations could simply help scientists to do their jobs more efficiently – thereby cutting the crippling time lag between science and society. They would have the insight and patience (measured in picoseconds) to solve the outstanding problems of nanotechnology and spaceflight; they would improve the human condition and let us upload our consciousness into an immortal digital form.
Algorithms that ‘learn’ from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.
Indeed if humanity has to leave earth there will be a need for such machines.
For example, could machine learning algorithms delve deep into the previous five assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, based on research published since the last report, provide rudimentary conclusions of the sixth report?
Potential future uses of AI programs like AlphaGo could include improving smartphone assistants such as Apple’s Siri, medical diagnostics, and possibly even working with human scientists in research.
AI could have many benefits, such as helping to aid the eradication of war, disease and poverty.
But if we want unlimited intelligence, we had better figure out how to align computers with human needs before the intelligence of machines exceed that of humans—a moment that futurists call the singularity. It is vital that humans programme robots to understand the “full spectrum of human values”, because the stakes are very high. After all, if we develop an artificial intelligence that doesn’t share the best human values, it will mean we weren’t smart enough to control their own creations.
Technology is take on increasingly personal roles in people’s daily lives, and will learn human habits and predict people’s needs. Anyone with an iPhone is probably familiar with Apple’s digital assistant Siri.
For example, AI could make it easier for the company to deliver targeted advertising, which some users already find unpalatable. And AI-based image recognition software could make it harder for users to maintain anonymity online.
If we look at current state of affairs a 2013 study by Oxford University estimated that Artificial Intelligence could take over nearly half of all jobs in the United States in the near future. Automation has become an increasingly common sight the number of robots in factories across the world rose by 225,000 last year, and will rise even further in the coming years – and it is not just in manufacturing.
AI is only getting better, as computational intelligence techniques keep on improving, becoming more accurate and faster due to giant leaps in processor speeds.
Perhaps we should first ask, does science need disrupting? Yes.
Access to reliable knowledge – the academic literature – is becoming a fundamental bottleneck for humanity. There are now over 50 million research papers and this is growing at a rate of over one million a year. Over 70,000 papers have been published on a single protein – the tumor suppressor p53.
How can any academic keep up? And how can anyone outside of academia make sense of it all – the public, policy makers, business people, doctors or teachers? Well, most academics struggle and the public can’t – most research is locked behind pay walls.
With techniques like deep learning (Deep learning,” that allow a computer to do things such as recognize patterns from massive amounts of data. For example, in June 2012, Google created a neural network of 16,000 computers that trained itself to recognize a cat by looking at millions of cat images. For a computer to recognize a picture of a cat, the machine has no volition, no sense of what cat-ness is or what else is happening in the picture, and none of the countless other insights that humans have.) laying the groundwork for computers that can automatically increase their understanding of the world around them.
However possessing human like intelligence remains a long way off and what is called the singularity,” when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence is still in the realms of science fiction.
That said Stephen Hawking has warned that because people would be unable to compete with an advanced AI, it “could spell the end of the human race.”
AI misunderstand what computers are doing when we say they’re thinking or getting smart.
Considering that the singularity may be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity, not enough research is being devoted to understanding its impacts.
In some areas, AI is no more advanced than a toddler.
Yet, when asked, many AI researchers admit that the day when machines rival human intelligence will ultimately come. The question is, are people ready for it?
Regardless of how artificial intelligence develops in the years ahead, almost all pundits agree that the world will forever change as a result of advances in AI.
The AI genie has already been released from the bottle and there is no way to get it back in.
No one is suggesting that anything like super intelligence exists now. In fact, we still have nothing approaching a general-purpose artificial intelligence or even a clear path to how it could be achieved. Recent advances in AI, from automated assistants such as Apple’s Siri to Google’s driverless cars, also reveal the technology’s severe limitations.
The problem is that a true AI would give any one of these companies( Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, you name them) an unbelievable advantage.
For example, Google has the Google app, available for Android phones or iPhones, which bills itself as providing “the information you want, when you need it.
Google now can show traffic information during your daily commute, or give you shopping list reminders while you’re at the store. You can ask the app questions, such as “should I wear a sweater tomorrow?” and it will give you the weather forecast. Given how much personal data from users Google stores in the form of emails, search histories and cloud storage, the company’s deep investments in artificial intelligence may seem disconcerting.
Advances in technology will push more and more companies to favour capital over labour, they will leave the majority behind.
That may be about to change. Here below are five ways AI looks set to disrupt science.
The short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
After all, AI systems aren’t consumers and consumers are the sine qua non of economic growth. Hairdressers are judged to be less likely to be out of a job in 20 years than economists.
Perhaps the problem is in the description ( Artificial Intelligence) AI intelligence will not necessarily lead to sentience.
But what if intelligent machines are really just a new branch on the tree of evolution that has led us from the original Protists to where we are today?”
A species to be aided in its evolutionary process by another species called us.
The idea that computers will eventually develop the ability to speak and think with a conscious.
It’s a race between technology and education.
The mindset of the government and people have not adjusted to view the future, even though technology is exploding this decade into a world of the Internet of Things and the propulsion into artificial intelligence.
No one gains if the world’s Intelligence ends up in the hands of a few.
As artificial intelligence becomes a much more “dominant” force in future it will poses “commercial and ethical questions”
What, after all, is an android but a puppet with a computer program pulling its strings?
When I tell my phone I’m hungry and feel like eating Chinese it raises a really interesting question: Who is Siri working for? Is Siri working for me? Is it Siri’s job to find me the best Chinese meal or is Siri working for Apple and trying to get as much money as possible for Apple by auctioning the fact that they have a hungry consumer attached to it and desperate for food? The ethical debate is about who does AI work for.”
Every time you open a new social media site you can create completely new rules of the road and I think we’ll move beyond some of the things we have today.
One of the big challenges will be preserving those existing identities while creating a global culture.
We need a global culture to be able to talk about refugees and finance and tackle issues like global warming and science, and cure cancer. For these huge challenges we need to use the web to work as a whole planet, like one team.
What will make a massive difference is if we manage to design democratic, and scientific and collaborative systems which allow us to function as a planet.”
David Levy believes that, in the 2050 age, human and robots can be able to marriages with each other and it will be legal activity in many countries. But that’s was only a someone’s opinion, not a theory based or any legal law.
Why most AI are Female’s ? “.
What is hard is imagining how we humans will fit into a robot-filled future.
Finally, there is no end to the ways that humans can productively work with one another if they are no longer driven by the conflicts of scarcity. Perhaps we will learn to love our robots.
An after thought. 6/Oct/ 2016.
There is extraordinary potential for AI in the future.
But it’s not the future that I wish to address rather the present.
AI is already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people’s everyday lives. AI and decision -support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see.
The results or impact is hard to see. It is critical to find rigorous ways to make them visible and accountable. We need to know when automated decisions are materially affecting our lives, and if necessary , to contest them.
This won’t be achievable by the United Nations, or National Governments.
Any suggestions.
technological unemployment”.
.
Will there be enough good jobs to keep the global economy growing?
This is not the same as acting as a food stuff, where the existence of an earlier species acts as the food or fuel that allows those higher up the chain to exist and evolve.
selective breeding (unnatural selection), where human intervention is used to provide a characteristic,
the first option [is the] the evolution of some very clever tools, weapons, and body parts that become an integral part of the human species tree; or the second option … a new branch on the tree of evolution; or the third option an extension of the human branch.”
The greatest worry is the number of jobs that artificial intelligence systems are poised to take over.
Most of the best jobs that will emerge will require close collaboration between humans and computers.
As some professions become obsolete, more knowledge may not lead to higher pay either, because everyone will be bidding for the same work, which could drive wages down.
such as the promise of a guaranteed income to ensure people do not fall into the cracks. Others argue that a negative income tax would be better because it incentivises work.
An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images is rendering us manic information addicts.
Every single minute on the planet, YouTube users upload 400 hours of video and Tinder users swipe profiles over a million times.
Each day, there are literally billions of Facebook “likes.”
Online Social media outlets are now publish exponentially more material than they once did, churning out articles at a rapid-fire pace, adding new details to the news every few minutes.
Blogs, Facebook feeds, Tumblr accounts, tweets, and propaganda outlets repurpose, borrow, and add topspin to the same output.
We are guided to these info-nuggets by myriad little interruptions on social media, all cascading at us with individually tailored relevance and accuracy.
We all distracted by a constant stream of things to annoy, enlighten, or infuriate; a niche in the nerve center of the exploding global conversation; and a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego.
Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you have much control over which temptations you click on. We are all close to helpless.
Silicon Valley’s technologists and their ever-perfecting algorithms have discovered the form of bait that will have you jumping like a witless minnow. No information technology ever had this depth of knowledge of its consumers — or greater capacity to tweak their synapses to keep them engaged.
The modest mastery of our practical lives is what fulfilled us for tens of thousands of years — until technology and capitalism decided it was entirely dispensable.
By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact.
We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.
GPS, for example, has led to our not even seeing, let alone remembering, the details of our environment, to our not developing the accumulated memories that give us a sense of place and control over what we once called ordinary life.
New technology has seized control of around one-third young adults’ waking hours.
The result is yet to be seen and we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, in wars, movement of people, erosion of democracy, surveillance and where to find the truth.
As we are being methodically filled with more stimulus and noise and this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness.
The amount of time we spend cruising vastly outweighs the time we may ever get to spend with the objects of our desire. Virtual living is creating a mental climate that will be maddeningly hard to manage.
Beyond mere doing, there is also being;
We are becoming each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves.
We hide our vulnerabilities, airbrushing our flaws and quirks; we project our fantasies onto the images before us.
Why is any of this important.
Take the smart phone for example.
When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in his or her private zone, you don’t.
They are robbing us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.
The device went from unknown to indispensable in less than a decade.
Once you disappeared down a rabbit hole, but the smart phone then went and made the rabbit hole portable, inviting us to get lost in it anywhere, at any time, whatever else we might be doing.
Information soon penetrated every waking moment of our lives. All the hazards of real human interaction are being banished.
Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance.
These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.
The smart phone revolution of the past decade can be seen in some ways simply as the final twist.
We are reducing our human contacts into a world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. A Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered way that makes integration of cultures impossible. This, evolutionary psychologists will attest, is fatal. An entire universe of intimate responses is flattened to a single, distant swipe.
Walk down the street, and I’m the only person not plugged in. Or lunch where the first to person to use their phone pays the whole bill?
Here to the frazzled digital generation if they believe that $3 billion of Mark Zuckerberg Facebook profits will put an end to Disease.
Who does he think he is fooling. Facebook is a Disease.
By now, we are all aware that social media has had a tremendous impact on our culture, in business, on the world-at-large. Media reflects and creates the culture and mass media is a significant force in modern culture.
Communities and individuals are bombarded constantly with messages from a multitude of sources including TV, billboards, and magazines, to name a few.
The media reflects and projects the view of a minority elite, which controls it, but personal perspective plays a more powerful role in how the audience members interpret those messages.
There is no doubt that the media influences us.
These messages promote not only products, but moods, attitudes, and a sense of what is and is not important.
It was not to long ago only political and business leaders, as well as the few notorious outlaws, were famous. It is only in recent times have actors, singers, and other social elites become celebrities or “stars.”
So it is important to dwell on the negative influences of media because these can change the dynamics of the society for the worse.
The current level of media saturation has not always existed, technological advancements and the availability of gadgets to young people, are now creating social networks, which act as a stupidity X-ray:
Facebook and Twitter being two of the more prominent.
The negative influences of both are vast.
Facebook can become a source of relational confusion and distress.
It disrupts a person’s sense of autonomy and privacy as well as the stability of the relationship. Affecting the physical self, the emotions, the psychological aspect, and even the spiritual stand of many people.
One negative influence can trigger another negative effect and this can cause a chain of reaction leading to destruction of relationships in society.
Interacting with a monitor and keyboard means people feel less empathy.
A child hits the age of 18, he must have seen about 200,000 acts of violence on television alone.
What most of the programs they see and hear send the false notion that in every conflict there has to be a winner and a loser, thus making them believe that violence is a successful means of resolving conflicts.
Facebook Narcissism is excessive self-love, inflated self-importance and unjustified feelings of entitlement. Posting large amounts of information on your profile page in my view can be perceived as narcissistic. You’re an asshole for expecting strangers to care about your forty favorite movies.
Are either of them doing any good?
What are some of the real impacts, both positive and negative, that social media has had on our society?
Every politician worth his salt needs to jump on the social media bandwagon. This is because social websites have played an important role in many elections around the world,
They have also served to rally people for a cause, and have inspired mass movements and political unrests in many countries, AND IT IS NOT BEYOND THE PALE TO SAY THEY HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE RECENT TERRIBLE EVENTS WE ARE WITNESSING. Many introverts and socially reclusive users place too much emphasis on virtual interaction, and ignore the real world outside.
Facebook and other social media offer platform for obsessions with self-image and shallow friendships. Young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.
IF Facebook is to be a place where people go to repair their damaged ego and seek social support, it is vitally important to discover the potentially negative communication one might find on Facebook and the kinds of people likely to engage in them. Ideally, people will engage in pro-social Facebooking rather than anti-social me-booking.
The way that children are being educated is focussing more and more on the importance of self-esteem – on how you are seen in the eyes of others. THIS HAS TO CHANGE.
Many companies perform a background check on the Internet before hiring an employee. If a prospective employee has posted something embarrassing on social media, it can drastically affect their chances of getting the job.
Here are three facts about Facebook that will blow your mind
1. Half of the world’s online population now log into Facebook at least once a month – that’s 1.49 billion people.
2. One in every five minutes on a mobile phone is spent on Facebook.
3. Over 1.5 billion searches are made on the site every day.
Revenue has hit $4.04bn in the three months ended June 30, from $2.91bn in the same period last year.
Here is one of their promotions.
Maybe you got a new job or are ready to break open your piggy bank. You can let your pals know that your mind is on money. If you’re seeing dollar signs, this is the ideal emoticon to post in a chat message or on a timeline. You’ll be able to express everything you feel when you share our emoticons with your FB friends.
You may well ask: Do I use Facebook. Yes I do, but I don’t want Facebook writing my epitaph its my god-given opportunity to show off.
“toxic” elements of narcissistic personality disorder.
Yesterday day I was surprised by the interest in my post which asked: Is Facebook destroying Relationships.
So while the subject is fresh in my head have you by any chance noticed yourself feeling less friendly toward Facebook lately?
If so, you’re not alone.
Facebook knows practically everything about me.
Its facial-recognition software is so good, it recognizes me in photos.
The more Facebook feels like a big stage, the less inviting it becomes.
You’ve probably noticed how the “friends” who show up in your News Feed most often aren’t the ones whose lives you’re most interested in but simply the ones who have a lot to say.
Now that Facebook is an enormous, everyday part of our existence on this rocky sphere, I think we have to ask if its growth is making us happy or encouraging us to do things that make us, ultimately, not happy.
So let’s see if Facebook takes any notice of what is wrong by compiling a list to see if ultimately, Facebook doesn’t care what kind of content gets shared or who’s sharing it, as long as it’s able to capture an ever-larger share of its users’ attention minutes.
There’s no question that Facebook is changed our lives.
It has ingrained itself into the daily lives of digital-age users in a way that is affecting all of us. When Facebook was founded in 2004, it began with a seemingly innocuous mission: to connect friends. Some seven years and 800 million users later, the social network has taken over most aspects of our personal and professional lives, and is fast becoming the dominant communication platform of the future.
As with any new (or newly discovered) technology, the impact of the end product is largely in the hands of the user. We are, after all, only human — with all the joy and sadness, decency and ugliness that that entails.
But here are some of the things I dont like.
I am sure that sooner or later, each Facebook user has occasion to ask the same questions.
Which is not to say it’s all “likes” and “shares” and happy kid pics, wedding announcements? Thing of the past. Birth announcement?
Just as ordinary users once got the unpleasant sense that Facebook was becoming a venue for professionally produced corporate content.
I don’t like their timeline.
I don’t like that Facebook is fundamentally positive, with no dislike button.
I don’t like that it is becoming a major contributors to career anxiety for the Young.
I don’t like that it steer you toward certain online behaviors.
I don’t like that it is filling our heads with the Hypnotoad from Futurama.
I don’t like that it is creating a form of social television. Pitching itself as a parallel Web, based on relationships and sharing rather than content (the value is in the connections).
I don’t like that it is building immense value off all sorts of emotional and psychological inadequacies?
I don’t like that it is creating an online culture of competition and comparison. In a sense it is a kind of socially powered online game that is actually making us miserable.
I don’t like it reminding me that I am getting old. Nostalgia is part of life. But, with Facebook, getting nostalgic represents detailed updates on your mundane day are mind-numbing.
It is cramming more and more features onto your page. It is becoming ever clearer to the content makers how little Facebook cares about what any of them do. That’s what all this boils down to.
I don’t like the fact that it is attempting to monopolize your eyeballs and associated personal data to what it thinks you like.
That’s what Facebook will become tomorrow ANAlOG CRYSTAL Ball based on unverifiable data.
Facebook is what people make of it.
Remember it can be hacked and that in a hundred years from now it will be full of dead people.
ALL CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE LIST WELCOME. IF WE MANAGE TO GET A WELL SUPPORTED LIST; WE WILL SENT IT TO FACEBOOK
I suppose before I write this post I need to declare I am a Facebook user. One of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user.
Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed.
The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus.
When the telephone arrived, people stopped knocking on their neighbors’ doors.
Social media bring this process to a much wider set of relationships. Social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years.
Facebook, of course, puts the pursuit of happiness front and center in our digital life.
Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.
A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy.
The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude.
We are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us.
We look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.
The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.
We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.
Facebook imprisons us in the business of self-presenting, and this, is the site’s crucial and fatally unacceptable downside.
Facebook creates loneliness.
The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another.
For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either.
Our Internet connections are growing broader but shallower.
I think Facebook is primarily a platform for lonely skulking.
WHY?
Because Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy.
Surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh.
One-click communication — the lazy click of a like. Passive consumption and broadcasting — correlates to feelings of disconnectedness.
We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible.
Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment.
In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society.
We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.
We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
The effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time.
On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination.
Facebook is interfering with our real friendships, distancing us from each other, making us lonelier; and that social networking might be spreading the very isolation it seemed designed to conquer. Facebook encourages more contact with people outside of our household, at the expense of our family relationships.
In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.
Facebook capacity to redefine our very concepts of identity and personal fulfillment is much more worrisome than the data-mining and privacy practices that have aroused anxieties about the company.
We are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are.
Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity.
We are underestimating: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.
Sending out a friend request, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.
It’s the quality, not the quantity of social interaction that counts. Social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks.
Loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state.
The question of the future is this:
Is Facebook part of the separating or part of the congregating.
Does the Internet make people lonely, or are lonely people more attracted to the Internet?
Facebook is merely a tool, and like any tool, its effectiveness will depend on its user. If you use Facebook to increase face-to-face contact,it increases social capital. Casting technology as some vague, impersonal spirit of history forcing our actions is a weak excuse.
We make decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around.
So here is some advice:
The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society— Is it taking liberties by reminding your so called friends that your Birthday is arriving, by posting your memories, by passing your data to other servers.
A connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity.
The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative.
Facebook never takes a break.
Instead of sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in you should be using it as a signpost to what is wrong with the World.
Click the like button and Face book will log it. Make a comment and Facebook might take note.
have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.
Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely.
“If you think we’re electronically dependent now, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
Wireless communications will dominate everything, everywhere.
“Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history.”
From the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport, even transforming what it means to be human.
In my last three post I addressed the subject of Society changes due to Technologies : The Internet, Big Data, and Smart Phones. So it would seem remiss of me not to inform the sixteen years old of today what is in store for them when they are, lets say 65.
It’s hard to focus on the future when the present is changing so rapidly before our very eyes let alone what will happen in 50 years’ time.
I could predict that this and that is going to happen.
From the capturing and digitizing the entire information content of your brains to chips that will eventually may have the ability not just to store information, but to learn and remember, just as real brain cells do to create complete copies of our brains’ content.
I could draw up a list of WHAT IF’s:
Like: Like what if you could finding a method of copying and uploading human consciousness into a machine, or even a holographic virtual body — basically, a software replica of a person. Or what if Traditional pharmaceuticals is replaced by hyper-individualized medicines that are manufactured at the time they are ordered, or that most people will have stopped taking pills in favor of a new device that causes the body to manufacture it’s own cures.
I am sure they are (without looking) many sites that are doing exactly this; covering Science, Nature, Transport, Medical, and every other aspect of Life.
Happiness is a direction, not a place or perhaps it is dark matter yet to be discovered.
One way or the other it’s pretty clear that the future remains radically uncertain, and there’s not much we can do about it.
Living a public life is the new default.
It is not possible to live modern life without revealing personal information to governments and corporations. Few individuals will have the energy, interest, or resources to protect themselves from ‘data surveillance’; privacy will become a luxury.
It is also clear that there will be a need for a trusted infrastructure to be created in order to prevent massive fraud and massive public distrust in online transactions, and in online life, in general.
We will have to reinvent the entire Internet as we know it, shifting power from a few American tech companies to the individual who creates, and therefore owns, the data.
It is also clear that greed makes monsters of men and unless we put a harness on greed and make it serve the needs of humanity the next 50 and beyond will not be worth living.
We will need to create a personal dashboard, a safe haven, for every individual’s dossiers, transactions, money, and profiles. In this dashboard, you could set your privacy and communications settings.
All of this will create a big struggle about the question: Who owns (my) data?
My statement:
There is no way the world’s varied cultures, with their different views about privacy, will be able to come to an agreement on how to address civil liberties issues on the global Internet.
In 2065, we will have a post-Facebook and post-Google world.
We will have new business models in which facilitating data is more lucrative than owning data. As I have said if we do not make this transition, we face a privacy and fraud nightmare in which our lives are dominated by a few global tech companies.
We will have new generations of psychoactive drugs and eventually emerge, cognitive technology is likely to really, really rock our world.
We will run out of resources. We will have Climate change. We will have wars, and massive inequality, we will get humans to the nearest stars, we will be using English if not in the same form.
We will be wearing smart cloths connected to the internet (and even have linked stuff inside their bodies), we will be walking into internet-connected rooms and down networked streets, driving in the connected cars and public transit, get food and other goods from smart refrigerators/toasters/ovens, move through spaces bristling with connected sensors, and monitor remote places via apps and cameras.
The backlash against this most egregious privacy invasions will bring a new equilibrium between consumers, governments, and businesses—and more-savvy citizens will get better at hiding things they do not want others to see.
However predicting how it will all shake out is just fantasy.
Governments trying to protect themselves and their cultures might split the global internet into divided mess of networks.
The situation will worsen as the Internet of Things arises and people’s homes, workplaces, and the objects around them will ‘tattle’ on them.
The incentives for businesses to monetize people’s data and governments to monitor behavior will become extremely potent.
On the other hand citizens and consumers will have more control thanks to new tools that give them the power to negotiate with corporations and work around governments. Individuals will be able to choose to share personal information in a tiered approach that offers varied levels of protection and access by others.
The constellation of economic and security complexities will get bigger and harder to manage, belittling micro religions and what it means to be ‘educated’ will be replaced by other capacities.
People will get used to this, adjust their norms, and accept more sharing and collection of data as a part of life—especially Millennials and the young people who follow them some will complain but most will not object or muster the energy to push back against this new reality in their lives.
Society’s definitions of ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’ will have changed so much by 2025 that today’s meanings will no longer apply.
We will certainly leave nothing behind that survives long in the digital age other than a future of “unevenly distributed” one with more social fissures might arise, presenting hurdles to people who do not have the resources to afford the gadgetry or the skills and tech-literacy to navigate the more complicated environment of 2025 never mind 2065.
Over 50% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will have disappeared.
The terms of citizenship and social life will rapidly change.
70% of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation, with most coming back in different forms in different industries, with over 50% structured as freelance projects rather than full-time jobs.
50% of traditional colleges will have collapsed, and India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world.
Advocacy groups, service providers, large e-commerce companies, Google/Amazon/Facebook/Twitter, secret services, security officers in companies and consultancies, and individual Internet users… will also be very much involved with ongoing tension between these groups,
We’ll play games to solve problems.
There will be an extensive rise of anti-capitalism.
The Future will be an eerie spot.
Predicting the Future is much like predicting the weather, the farther we move into the future, the less accurate our predictions become. So why do we make them?
So we don’t wake up one morning and get a shock.
Feel free to giving serious consideration to each of them and deriving your own conclusions for good or bad.
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