Intelligence often leads to a specific, dangerous kind of blindness and the first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
True intelligence isn’t relying on what you believe you know, justifying mistakes you have made, or letting certainty cloud your judgement.
It’s never being afraid to ask questions and never relying on answers to be untested truths. In fact, it’s best to test those answers again and again.
With the capitalist system ( which is based on the accumulation of material wealth) it is no wonder that we have 12 people in the world that own more than all the rest.
And it is no wonder that it has produced the Esptine’s and Mandelson’s of this world and will continue to do so as greed is more and more concentrated by profit seeking algorithms.
Peter Mandelson, it seems, helped Jeffrey Epstein and his associates to make money.
That money was used to run Mr Epstein’s paedophilic prostitution ring. A cesspit pit of privilege for the rich.
The Epstein files also brings into question.
Is it time for the UK to replace the Royals with a written constitution.
The UK is often said to have an ‘unwritten’ constitution, but this is not strictly correct; it is largely written, but in different documents with there foundations on a century old document called the Magna Carta.
Magna Carta (translated as Great Charter) was an agreement reached at Runnymede in 1215 between King John and a group of English barons who had been part of a rebellion against the King.
It has never been codified; brought together in a single document.
Your worth isn’t defined by titles – it’s your actions and decisions that makes the difference.
To day the king main functions as head of state are to appoint the Prime Minister, and all the other ministers; to open new sessions of parliament; and to give royal assent to bills passed by parliament, signifying that they have become law.
The cost of security for the royals to the tax payers is 150 million to turn a blind eye.
The Epstein affair does not just asks questions about the reputation of Andrew the Kings brother it shines a light on the institution called the Royal Family and all of us and the capability of the future.
For me, its significance goes way beyond that.
Its the public right to inquiry into the gilded circle surrounding these people and to demand the highest standards from those in the royal family office and from government ministers, otherwise there will be no accountability for their actions.
But it appears that this is incompatible with the power of wealth.
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We are stepping into the world of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—AI that can think, learn, and apply knowledge across multiple domains, much like a human.
What is called the zombie internet and social media is already full of rubbish and filth and it will have devastating consequences.
We now have the first social media site expressly for AI agents (with no moral compass) not humans.
Ethical dilemmas are arising as AI will transition from a tool that assists us to an entity that makes its own decisions.
Such as should AI be allowed to form emotional bonds with humans?
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The challenge will be ensuring AI aligns with human values, avoiding unintended consequences.
The way we develop, regulate, and interact with AI today will determine whether we enter a future of collaboration and prosperity or chaos and uncertainty.
AI will not replace human purpose—it will redefine it.
The worst part of all of this is that we as citizens are becoming increasingly invisible.
We now have virtually private net works that are avoiding regulations.
There is no doubt about it we are in a serious situation and need leaders not just the royals or the wealthy to start representing the sustainable, not social media, the gaming world, Netflix, apps, profit seeking algorithms and Trump and Putin profiteering from the lives of Ukraines.
The highest form of intelligence is being able to think about your own thinking.
Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.
There are billions of us alive all consciousness of each other but unable to explain why.
Perhaps this is why religions were created.
Consciousness is everything people experience.
However, there are different levels of consciousness and they can be related to other global changes in conscious level. All are private and inaccessible to observers.
(Conscious level (how conscious one is) and conscious content (what one is conscious of) are related to each other.)
So at what is a structure complex enough to become conscious.
Why am I human instead of a particle?
If we are particles we are no longer dealing with a purely material theory of consciousness because the source of the conscious particles cannot itself be material.
Its source requires an immaterial intervention.
I will return to consciousness later in the post.
The role that technology plays in human life is becoming an increasingly urgent question not just in tackling climate change but what will be considered in the future to be human.
Where we’re headed and what it will mean for humanity is a question seldom discussed.
Bioelectric implants, genetic modification packages, the ability to tamper with our very biology — there won’t be enough time to adjust or to reassess who we are and what it means to be human.
Our technology is developing so much faster than our culture and our institutions, and the gap between these things can only grow so far before society becomes dangerously unstable.
It’s hard to really know what we are becoming because so many of these changes are unforeseen or unpredictable.
At the moment computers and robots interact with the world without being conscious.
Are we at risk or are we becoming semi-machines who are like the marionettes of our own moment-to-moment experiences?
We’re losing our ability to be in the world in a way that isn’t mediated by some electronic appendage.
The more we live through screens, the more we are living in a narrow bandwidth, an abstract world that’s increasingly artificial the more we are becoming non-human.
The virtual world might be safe and controllable, but it’s not rich and unpredictable in the way the real world is.
What is all this doing to our habits, to our cultural sense of who we are?
With synthetic biology, which is basically human beings redesigning their biological structure we are distant to lose our connection to reality altogether.
Why?
Because it’s about us modifying our very genetic code which is extremely dangerous if it’s not controlled and safeguarded.
Intelligence is the most powerful instrument around.
If you’re embodying that kind of intelligence in increasingly sophisticated machines we will be coming to depend on them more and more over time.
(What worries me is that we’re headed in the direction of building AI technologies that are at the human level and, eventually, far beyond that.)
If AI becomes so intelligent that they can perform an infinite variety of tasks across domains of activity. We’ll continue to make them smarter and more capable and more powerful until we reach a point at which they start to learn on their own and start to modify themselves. Once that happens, they’ll be fully unpredictable — and then who the hell knows what happens next.
Any fool on the street can tell you that with nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioengineering, brain implants, quantum computers, algorithms, robots that technology is changing at a whiplash-inducing pace.
So because there is no widely accepted theory about what happens in the brain to make consciousness possible what is it about being human that really matters?
Back to look at Consciousness.
Nothing has authority over it but is it what makes us human.
Nothing is above it. Nothing rules it.
Since everything exists within it, it does not exist within anything.
Since it is not dependent on anything, it is eternal, it is outside of realms of being and time.
In fact, consciousness actually exists independently and outside of the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark matter and dark energy or gravity. It is not dependent on anything. No one can envision it. No one can comprehend it. Neither physical nor unphysical it is beyond knowledge.
It simply apprehends itself.
The brain does not create or produce consciousness; rather, it filters it.
This implies a very real and direct connection between the brain, human consciousness and the existence of the Universe — that they are fundamentally inseparable at the quantum level.
Consciousness permeates reality.
Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
Who or what counts as human?
It’s well-known that the Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.
All the questions we currently face can be traced to this, larger, underlying question. What is Human?
If one says that all and onlyHomo sapiensare humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn.
What sort of evidence can settle the question?
There’s something about us that is the opposite of artificial. It’s the opposite of something made.
This raises the below questions.
What genetic engineering stuff promises to bring down the line is human beings who are tailored to particular purposes, either by themselves over time or by other human beings.
We becoming products or commodities, and products or commodities are subordinated to particular functions or purposes.
All the values that give our lives meaning are at risk.
What becomes of autonomy? What becomes of free will?
All these questions are on the table.
By the year 2500, people will not need to be exactly like they are now so it stands to reason that semi humans will break the bonds that hold our present-day society together. They will shatter our sense of identity so quickly that it creates a kind of existential chaos.
So what are these technologies adding to the human experience and, more importantly, what are they subtracting from the human experience?
We live in a world of wonder and mystery, and the more we discover, the more there seems to be to find out but should we be more worried about the world we’re creating?
The artificial kind of worlds.
.This post is compliments of the FRIGHTLY SORRY<SORRY<SORRY. CLUB.
All human reverberation comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Sorry for the over the top headline but Scientists have done the maths and according to their calculations, life on Earth has 1.75 to 3.25 billion years left to thrive.
Even short geologic time scales outrun our ability to project human history.
One common, frequently unconscious misconception is that history is linear, progressing toward an inevitable end point.
Our inability to see ourselves as part of a continuum of processes that will continue into the future is also directly linked to our shortsightedness in managing our environment. Human impacts already equal or surpass many natural processes. For example, human earth-moving processes exceed natural erosion in the volume of material moved (Hooke, 2000; Wilkinson, 2005).
Let’s peer into the future. The reasons for disaster are not hard to conjecture.
Technology might become so advanced that humans will no longer need to modify the natural environment extensively, but any attempt to predict technology far in advance is bound to be almost pure speculation.
Space Weather (which includes any and all conditions and events on the sun, in the solar wind, in near-Earth space and in our upper atmosphere) can affect space-borne and ground-based technological systems and through these, human life and endeavor. Not to mention Yellowstone National Park that could decide to erupt.
Even if humans avoid causing a mass extinction, many species will have become naturally extinct and new ones will have evolved.
The truth is we don’t have a particularly detailed idea of what is going on inside out own planet never mind on the surface.
When the Earth’s molten core eventually cools and hardens to the point that there is little or no slip-sliding of different substances, it more than likely its magnetic field will die out as well. The Earth is thought to have begun this cooling sometime in the last billion years.
That’s good, since one way or the other we certainly have a lot of time left; while a magnetic flip is largely meaningless, magnetic death certainly would not be.
In all likelihood, the Sun will swallow the Earth long before then, as it convulses and expands as a part of its natural death throes and that’s if a giant asteroid or a nuclear war doesn’t finish us off first.
However the 92.9 million miles between us and our host star will not be enough to keep us comfortable.
For those of you that need to use Google the Sun is a magnetic variable star at the center of our solar system that drives the space environment of the planets, including the Earth. The distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 93 million miles. At this distance, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds. The Sun has a diameter of about 865,000 miles, about 109 times that of Earth. Its mass, about 330,000 times that of Earth, accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. About three-quarters of the Sun’s mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. Less than 2% consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, and others. The Sun is neither a solid nor a gas but is actually plasma. This plasma is tenuous and gaseous near the surface, but gets denser down towards the Sun’s fusion core.
Where was I? The earth will become inhospitable to humans long before the planet enters the hot zone ( Stars like our Sun shine for nine to ten billion years. The Sun is about 4.5 billion years old, judging by the age of moon rocks. Based on this information, current astrophysical theory predicts that the Sun will become a red giant in about five billion (5,000,000,000) years. So there is not much to worry about.
However I am pushing on in years and I often wonder how my generation will survive the impending climate crisis never mind the future of our planet. There is a tragic alienation between us and nature.
There’s not much money in the end of civilization, and even less to be made in human extinction.” The destruction of the planet, on the other hand, is a good bet, because there is money in this, and as long as that’s the case, it is going to continue. The amount we consume each year already far outstrips what our planet can sustain, and the World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2030 we will be consuming two planets’ worth of natural resources annually.
Over the course of this century, the relationship between the human world and the planet that sustains it has undergone a profound change. When the century began, neither human numbers nor technology had the power radically to alter planetary system.
We know that in two billion years or so, an expanding sun will boil away our oceans, leaving our home in the universe uninhabitable—unless, that is, we haven’t already been wiped out by the Andromeda galaxy, which is on a multi billion-year collision course with our Milky Way. Moreover, at least a third of the thousand mile-wide asteroids that hurtle across our orbital path will eventually crash into us, at a rate of about one every 300,000 years.
Perhaps Google is a good idea after all to prepare a copy of our civilization and move it into outer space and out of harm’s way—a backup of our cultural achievements and traditions.
There is hope on the horizon during my Nuclear Warheads reading ( See The Series of Posts) I learned that a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan could decrease global surface temperature by 1°C–2°C for 5–10 years and have major impacts on precipitation and solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. No much help. We will hit the average of 400 ppm…within the next couple of years. Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 pentagrams of it (a pentagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth’s soils.
In the short-term, we need to make it in the economic interests of people to do the right thing. The chances of that happening in a Capitalist world I will leave up to yourself to decide.
Here is what is happening.
The signs of a worsening climate crisis are all around us, whether we allow ourselves to see them or not.
Unintended changes are occurring in the atmosphere, in soils, in waters, among plants and animals, and in the relationships among all of these.
Life-threatening challenges of desertification, deforestation, and pollution, of toxic chemicals, toxic wastes, and acidification of carbon dioxide and of gases that react with the ozone layer, and from any future war fought with the nuclear arsenals including increasingly powerful floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and storms are underway. Evacuations from low-lying South Pacific islands have already begun.
The onslaught of droughts, earthquakes, epic rains and floods over the past decade is triple the number from the 1980s and nearly 54 times that of 1901, when this data was first collected.
Yet we are aware that such a re-orientation on a continuing basis is simply beyond the reach of present decision-making structures and institutional arrangements, both national and international and endure most of the poverty associated with environmental degradation.
The rate of change is outstripping the ability of scientific disciplines and our current capabilities to access and advise. It is frustrating the attempts of political and economic institutions, which evolved in a different, more fragmented world, to adapt and cope.
This planet has not experienced an ice-free Arctic for at least the last three million years. Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of evolutionary biology, natural resources, and ecology at the University of Arizona ” the implications are truly dire and profound for our species and the rest of the living planet.”
We are currently in the midst of what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, with between 150 and 200 species going extinct daily, a pace 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” extinction rate.
The ability of the human psyche to take in and grasp such information is being tested. And while that is happening, yet more data continues to pour in—and the news is not good.
Thanks to climate change oceans have already lost 40 percent of their phyto plankton, the base of the global oceanic food chain, because of climate-change-induced acidification and atmospheric temperature variations.
So you might well ask if some version of extinction or near-extinction will overcome humanity.
It deeply worries many people who are seeking ways to place those concerns on the political agendas.
Climate-change-related deaths are already estimated at five million annually,
We’ve still got plenty of time left to enjoy planet Earth but we need to know how to respond, to changes that are already happening—and to those coming in the near future. It’ll happen very fast.
It appears that there is not much hope for the future, nor for a governmental willingness to make anything close to the radical changes that would be necessary to quickly ease the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; nor can we expect the mainstream media to put much effort into reporting on all of this because we are all more interested in leaving a legacy of material wealth that will be totally worthless.
Climate change and other human influences are altering Earth’s living systems in big ways, such as changes in growing seasons and the spread of invasive species,”
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