This is with the current Coronavirus might seem an academic question.
However we the world have ignored for the greater part all previous pandemics.
For example, the Spanish Flu killed more people than World War I.
World War One and its consequences are etched in our historical memories but the Spanish flu is hardly remembered.
Ebola was on our TV and Aids down to sexual ordination.
Over 70 million are now infected with Aids. All connected to each other.
(Aids can take up to ten years after transmission to show its self.)
Thanks to a massive effort with the drugs to manage it are now affordable Aids is now no longer a killer.
So over the years since then, we have come to believe that Aids is cured. This is not so there are over 2 million new cases yearly in the world.
That gives you an impression of what is going on in the world.
This is why we need to take global health to the top of our priorities.
What do they all these viruses have in common?
They all come from animals.
However, this is not the problem its now a combination of infections spreading in urban high density, the enormity of mobility, climate change, conflict, deforestation, food demand, population growth, which means that we are and will be more and more exposed to what see today. With the results that the overuse of antibiotics and vaccines the risks are getting bigger and bigger to antimicrobial resistance.
So what should we be doing?
It’s not the global response that is important.
We need to train rapid support teams that can be deployed to help any country with a network of back up volunteers.
We need obviously, to strengthen public health systems in the world.
We need more effective engagement with communities
WE need to share Data and samples of viruses worldwide.
WE need Research &Development systems with no market incentives.
We need to suppress fake news.
WE need a universal flu vaccine.
WE need to understand that the risk of this Pandemic is enormous, and that is is not the last.
The key is to invest in getting rid of Inequality world wide.
Promises are not worth the paper they are written on. Once they are broken sorry mean nothing.
We need International solidarity with individual responsibility. Actions speak louder.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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.
Having just posted an overview of Future of Artificial Intelligence it would be remiss of me not to address the Intelligence that is creating the AI in the first place.
So here another fascinating subject.
The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation.
It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.
This post will only scrap the skin of the subject Intelligence.
As I have said; Technology” in its broadest sense, include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions, and our intellects.
There are many questions like if Artificial Intelligence is to become self learning will it in turn accelerate our ability to improve human DNA and create even better minds or will we with our basic intelligence be left asking Google just what is Intelligence?
Perhaps we will experience a positive feedback loop from the behavior of these learning algorithms resulting in a enhanced human surrounded by vast machine intellects.
Or are we going to be looking at myriad types of intelligences at play:
With the ordinary human rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them; familiar humans interacting with ever-improving computer minds, are we going to experience a future with a diversity of both human and machine intelligences. For the first time, sentient beings of many different types will interact collaboratively to create ever greater advances, both through standard forms of communication and through new technologies allowing brain interfaces.
We may even see human minds uploaded into cyberspace, with further hybridization to follow in the purely virtual realm. These uploaded minds could combine with artificial algorithms and structures to produce an unknowable but humanlike consciousness.
This is just the beginning of “shared thought.” Far future vision is the spread of our non-biological intelligence to the four corners of the universe, infusing our deliberate will directly upon its fate.
If we are able to break the speed of light barrier we could have a universal omnipresence within a few centuries.
Human intelligence is disappearing into big data and large-scale network.
Is it our destiny?
In any case, let us all hope the boundaries of reality continue to expand the unknown at least as fast as our ability to consume and understand it, lest we be caught in the forever loop of The End is Just the Beginning.
So let me with my basic Intelligence ask you the reader.
What is Intelligence?
It is clear that human intelligence has changed since the emergence of the very first hominids.
Artificial Intelligence machines will soon be equaling the power of human thought-with all of its complexities and richness and perhaps even outstripping it.
General intelligence can be described as the ability of an individual to acquire and apply knowledge and thus, can be passed down from generation to generation.
Environmental and migrational factors have influenced human intelligence since we emerged for the caves but evolution has not yet had a chance to catch up to the rapid progress we have made as a society and might not due to human circumvention of natural selection.
The migration of people to all areas of the earth along with the industrialization of modern society has abstracted modern man from our ancestors.
A greater importance has been placed on cognitive ability and intelligence to allow us to function in modern society. But to say that human intelligence has evolved to the point of stagnation is quite absurd.
I would say because of the need to work for survival is now greatly lessened we are now in a state of limbo where there is no evolutionary pressure, unless there is a dramatic change in the environment, or we are not able to support as many people living on the earth.
And I also believe that the evolution of human intelligence will cease some time in the distant future.
The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—or at least the human minds of today.
It may seem incredible, or even disturbing, to predict that ordinary humans will lose touch with the most consequential developments on planet Earth, developments that determine the ultimate fate of our civilization and species.
The human minds might not be capable of understanding the physics of the atomic realm. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.
Ordinary humans of the future will come to accept machine intelligence as everyday technological magic, like the flat screen TV or smart phone, but with no deeper understanding of how it is possible.
Today, no more than a fraction of a percent of the population has a good understanding of quantum physics, although it underlies many of our most important technologies:
So the potential for improved human intelligence is enormous. Cognitive ability is influenced by thousands of genetic loci, each of small effect.
The first thing to notice is that the longer the time scale we are considering, the less likely it is that technological civilization will remain within the zone we termed “the human condition” throughout.
Vaclav Smil – the historian of technology who has argued that the past six generations have seen the most rapid and profound change in recorded history – maintains that the 1880s was the most innovative decade of human history.
It has taken us so far as to change our little make-shift huts to buildings that touch the sky, and to change our raw meat into seven-course meals
Humanity has enough intelligence to move into outer space and explore other worlds on the other hand we don’t seem to have the Intelligence to see or resolve the problems confronting us today.
Why?
It’s not that we lack the Intelligence to do so.
People are unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.
If you look around you I am sure you will agree that we have an awful long way to go before we reach basic Intelligence in order to live in peace and cherish the world we live on.
Because the currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain but rather copies of DNA helixes.
The discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from our intelligence so far.
The problem these day is that it has become so complicated that we are not communicating but disconnecting. Without a physical presence its impossible to communicate other than send a message.
When I say Happy New year to you without any physical input I could be a computer that is wishing you happy new year with no understanding of happiness or time.
Let’s start with the digital world of Communication.
Like any other technology it undeniably makes parts of life so much easier and is here to stay.
We are bombarded by information, thanks in large part to the internet and its allied technologies.
But exposure to unlimited information is not the same thing as the ability to capture it as knowledge or synthesize it as understanding.
“We are living in a state of perpetual distraction,”
Everything is moving so fast that we’ve got to adapt to it, keep up with it!
It takes all of one’s energy & speed to simply remain in one place while running.
But what sort of life is that? How much depth does it really have?
Yet the digital world constantly makes us break life into discrete, interchangeable bits that hurtle us forward so rapidly & inexorably that we simply don’t have time to stop & think. And before we know it, we’re unwilling & even unable to think. Not in any way that allows true self-awareness in any real context.
We are fast arriving at the point of confusion of information and personal knowledge.
There’s no app that makes you tolerant — it happens person by person.
Different media encourage different ways of thinking, and helped tie together a number of broad ideas for me regarding the evolution of human cognition and the influence of the tools we use.
On one hand the Internet is short-changing our brain power. It is making us shallower creatures, diverting our attention and fragmenting of our thoughts.
On the other it has made the information universes of all of us much larger.
It has and still is altering the way we read, and the way we pay attention.
Our relationship with technology is just beginning, but we do not need to be the slaves of the predominant technology like the smart phone or be lead by the hypnotic Internet, where portals lead us on from one text, image, or video to another while we’re being bombarded by messages, alerts, and feeds.
Not only are we thinking differently with different media, the Internet is frying our brains?
Reconfiguring our brains, we are also forging a “new intellectual ethic”.
Greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge.
– An ever-increasing plethora of facts & data is not the same as wisdom.
– Breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge.
– Multitasking is not the same as complexity.
What are the consequences of new habits of mind that abandon sustained immersion and concentration for darting about, snagging bits of information? What is gained and what is lost?
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
It can be reshaped, and the way that we think can be reshaped, for good or for ill.
Thus, if the brain is trained to respond to & take pleasure in the faster pace of the digital world, it is reshaped to favor that approach to experiencing the world as a whole. More, it comes to crave that experience, as the body increasingly craves more of anything it’s trained to respond to pleasurably & positively. The more you use a drug, the more you need to sustain even the basic rush.
It comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at our capacity for concentration and contemplation. Our mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
Once you were a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now you zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
The individual seeks out ‘virtual worlds’ that simplify interactions because the ‘real world’ is difficult to access, but when confronted with the ‘real world’ problems, that’s when the individual becomes turned off from dealing with their ‘real’ life, further perpetuating this vicious cycle towards isolation.”
Our future tools and tech may offer a new playing field, but we’re the same old players. Sure, we may wear robotic fighting exoskeletons — but we’re still going to war and falling in love and arguing with our moms.
When relationships become out of balance, would technology really fill the void or is it a vapid substitution?
While fully recognizes the usefulness of the Internet are we buying into the attractive fashionable modern viewpoint that just being exposed to a lot of information via technology will make us smart.
I am afraid not. There is a sleazy, materialist shallowness about it that most of us don’t enjoy called Porn.
Foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
The Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through your eyes and ears and into your mind.
The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.
However it’s not communication.
Thinking, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way we quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.
“I can’t read War and Peace anymore, I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
As our reliance on ever brighter and faster Internet content increases, a new force is taking hold across the culture of the Web-connected world, leading to changes in reading habits and even in human brains.
The Internet trends of today foreshadow the surfing, the teaching, learning, and thinking of tomorrow.
The picture of our intellectual future, rendered thoroughly, convincingly, and often beautifully
I suppose it all boils down to so long as we aren’t stupid enough to stop cultivating our individual minds regardless of technology changes, media itself will not make us stupid.
The wisest will still turn off the TV and other distractions when sustained concentration is called for, and they will understand the difference between various conditions and different kinds of media in general and will use each to its best advantage.
They though when the printed word was invented or the radio, or Television there would be adverse consequences. However none of these things has had the dire consequences that culture critics predicted, we have adapted in turn in some way to each of them, more or less successfully.
Then again if all knowledge ends up store in the Cloud along with our modern-day History. ( History illustrates our failures, and without history, we do not have the tools to create a successful future.) and we have deserts of Technology the art of communication will be lost to generations to come ruled by Holograms and Algorithms of the Internet.
But to think that we “learn” from history is somewhat of an illusion when you look around the world. I feel that we only learn selective elements in history and probably pay more attention to history when it cost resources such as time, money or material. Think of the number of times genocide has happened in our recorded history and despots–even today–continue genocidal practices falsely believing that their regime is justified.
The neurological effects of the Internet are still to come. This is why we should incorporating the best of the latest technology in a way that improves education.
Education is Communication.
Will we do anything? Are we capable of recognizing the dangers? We should be look at the world. We all living in our private clouds designed by The Smart Phone Communication.
If we want a more rewarding life we have to let the whole world know. (see previous posts)
I hope this post is not too long for you to leave a comment rather then pressing the like button.
Is Social Media going to turn out as the Ultimate Betrayal.
In a hundred years time there are going to be hundred of thousands on Facebook without any emotions, hundred of thousands of extinct Twitters, hundred of thousands of people linked to the dead, hundred of thousands Google searches never to be repeated, and billions and billions of e-mail that will never contribute to world history.
That’s BIG DATA: ( See previous blog)
Now it’s not possible here to cover all aspects of Social Media so I am going to concentrate on the most popular FACEBOOK.
The first and most important thing to make clear is that FACEBOOK is a Company, a public company for that matter and it has to find ways to become more profitable with each passing quarter.
What concerns me is the increased silence of what it will mean for a public who has no clue of what’s being done with their data.
I want to see users of Social Media have the ability to meaningfully influence what’s being done with their data.
I hate the fact that Facebook thinks it’s better than me at deciding which of my friends’ posts I should see or to suggest he or she wants to be a friend.
That Facebook algorithmically determines which of your friends’ posts you see.
That their everyday algorithms are meant to manipulate your emotions.
What factors go into this? We don’t know, but it is obvious that they have some algorithm that show the content that people click on the most.
Anyone who clicks on a “like” button is considered to have “liked” all future content from that source. Anyone who “likes” a comment on a shared link is considered to “like” wherever that link points to.
This is a form corrupt personalization. They can be taught what to want.
Facebook is making these choices every day without oversight, transparency, or informed consent.
I hate that I have no meaningful mechanism of control on the site.
I also hate the fact that it is generating billions in profit without contributing ( other than taxes) to the relief of world poverty, to the environment problems, and any other Social problem you wish to name.
Yes of course it gives a platform to talk on these subjects only because Facebook wants to keep people on Facebook. It’s in Facebook’s better interest to leave people feeling happier.
The problem is that Facebook is a black box.
Here are a few of the questions to be answered when it comes to Social Media.
A ) Should we be worried that software tracks us through social media?
B) Should postings on social media be considered free speech?
C) How does social media facilitate mass demonstrations (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall street)?
D) Have social networks caused teens to become anti-social in the real world?
E) Should schools ban teachers from interacting with their students on social networks?
F) Does social media encourage democracy?
The term “social networking” does not exclusively belong to digital technology on the Web. On the contrary, social networks had been studied from the beginning of 20th century with the aim to comprehend how the members of a certain community interact and which mechanism can determine the interaction itself.
Social Media is a tool of direct marketing where the customers and consumers have the opportunity to participate in the process of exchange.
It’s a blurring of work and private life
Social Media is only just emerging, meaning that codification of acceptable and unacceptable practices has not yet taken place. The ability to collect and analyze information from the past as well as in real-time, as it is generated has far reaching consequences.
Though it commonly is understood that conversations are generally public and open to viewing by almost anyone. It can have a profound effect on the thoughts, attitudes and beliefs of individuals who have no idea that they are under observation in the first place.
This is what drives media entities to produce listicals, flashy headlines, and car crash news stories. To manipulate people’s emotions through the headlines they produce and the content they cover, regardless of the psychological toll on individuals or the society they represent.
You might say bull shit.
That technology companies can secretly influence our emotions?
Apparently so.“Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.” The question is when does data science become human subjects research?
”A social network proprietor can engineer emotions for the multitudes to a slight degree”
The Arab Spring as it was called. The recent Vote on Independence in Scotland, President Obama election, ISIS one beheading. There’s no stable metaphor that people hold for what the news feed is. Emotions are being manipulated all the time, without informed consent, without debriefing.
Information is being presented and it’s being manipulated [through social media interfaces] by definition.
The reality is, when it comes to studying human interaction or behavior (for profit or scientific glory), it is no more (or less) complicated whether we’re interviewing someone in their living room, watching them in a lab, testing them at the screen, or examining the content they post online.
So the answer the questions posed above:
A) YES.
B) NO.
C) BY manipulation of Emotions.
D) YES&NO
E) YES
F) NO
What do you think? And O! just in case you think this was typed by one of our departed I want to be your friend.
If you e mail me your cannot be sure. The only way is living human contact.
Remember Like me at some point you will be the next person on earth to die.
Then Who or What will own your data? and what’s Social about that.?
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Like any other technology it undeniably makes parts of life so much easier and is here to stay.
Everything is moving so fast that we’ve got to adapt to it, keep up with it!
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