The drift toward authoritarianism rarely announces itself with a bang; it begins long before the public recognizes the danger.
It begins with language: the slow, deliberate reclassification of fellow citizens as lesser, suspect, or dangerous.
Once a government convinces people that some among them are unworthy of rights or empathy, the rest becomes frighteningly easy.
Authoritarian systems rarely begin with mass repression. They begin by redefining who counts as a threat.
In any situation, friction can never be eliminated, one can only increase or decrease the friction between two surfaces, or situations.
Friction does not depend on the area of contact, but in a world without friction it would quickly become a homogenous blob of elemental particles.
However in this post I am not talking about friction in its physical state, but friction between humans in the coming world of technology algorithms.
When earth is viewed from space there are no countries, we have carved them out of ideologies and blood.
The understanding of the human condition has been a mystery for millions of years. However if we started promoting understanding of environmental sustainability, empathy, and conflict resolution through education, we can cultivate a culture of peace from a young age and change direction to a caring world.
This has been true up now.
To day we have decisions been taken and made by machines, with no human understanding. So it’s essential that we have transparency if society is to be ruled by technology.
Humans Should Be in Control:
Algorithms should be tools that assist humans, not replace them entirely.
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Futurists have long debated the arrival of the singularity, when human and artificial intelligence will merge.
Some form of merger is inevitable and it is taking place right now.
Of course, this “Brave New World” of a hybrid AI-human existence brings with it a plethora of issues both political and personal.
What will humans do for jobs? Could we possibly live forever? Would that change the very idea of what it means to be human?
As long as we have countries it is inevitable that we will have friction. This is why the world needs a strong United Nations.
Authoritarian systems rarely begin with mass repression. They begin by redefining who counts as a threat. And that is precisely what we are witnessing now.
When administrations label their critics as victims of “evil,” “radicalized,” or part of a “terrorist network,” it is not engaging in politics.
It is engaging in dehumanization.
History shows that once a government normalizes this language, the slide accelerates.
The state becomes both narrator and arbiter of reality. Citizens become suspects. Violence becomes self‑defense. Democracy becomes optional.
The danger we face is not only the violence we see in the world.
It is the narrative that follows: That is the moment when democracies falter. It is the moment when the government stops speaking about its citizens as citizens.
Or we can recognize what history makes plain: once a government convinces the public that some people are enemies, it rarely stops there.
It’s time that the super wealthy were exposed. Thankfully Mr Donald Trump is doing just that.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Give 3 pounds a month, Give 5 pounds a month to save every thing from animal to children, provide hot meals and shelter, cancer research, you name it and it’s begging for funds.
Since the arrival of the internet, social media, algorithms not to mention climate change, our world has been desensitising to what really matters.
Our governments give billions to wars, and the millions airs of the world line their pockets shafting the underdogs with algorithms.
The US has carried out – or been a partner to – 622 overseas bombings in all, using drones or aircraft, since January 20, 2025, when Trump took office.
Russia is engaged in an aggressive campaign of subversion and sabotage against European and U.S. targets, which complement Russia’s brutal conventional war in Ukraine.
Actions below the threshold of conventional warfare have long been an important component of statecraft.
Such as gray zone activity, political warfare, asymmetric conflict, unconventional warfare, and low-intensity conflict.
These types of activities involve using tools of statecraft below the threshold of conventional warfare to shift the balance of power in their favor.
Examples include:
Information and influence operations, including psychological operations and propaganda.
Offensive cyber operations and electronic warfare.
Support to state and non-state partners, such as guerrillas and proxy forces.
Covert and clandestine actions by intelligence and special operations forces, including sabotage and subversion.
Economic coercion.
We need to wrap our heads around what is happening as this is another Titanic waiting to happen.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
AFTER THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF EVOLUTION) HERE IS THE WORLD YOU NOW HAVE.
A world with 8 billion of us, with rampant inequalities of opportunity, that is on the threshold EXTINCTION.
Why?
Because we put Growth of GDP higher than the true values that govern life – Fresh Air – Fresh water – Fresh food.
You would think by now that we would all realise that the protection of environment is paramount to our survival.
We know it, but we are unwilling to pay for it.
The risk that we may be on the path to extinction rises daly.
LETS START WITH. With climate change.
We all by now should be aware that the Earth is getting warmer and warmer due to our emissions of Co2.
Every year
Every year, countries who have joined the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meet to measure progress and negotiate multilateral responses to climate change. Today there are 198 Parties to the Convention.
COPs are crucial in bringing governments together while also mobilizing the private sector, civil society, industry and individuals to tackle the climate crisis.
However to date they achieve little to stop us using fossil fuels to generate energy.
Their main achievement is to turn the climate into a trading product.
One of the main stumbling blocks is who will finance the necessary conversion to green energy.
This problem as I have suggested in previous blogs. Can be solved with a world aid commission of 0.05% ( see previous blogs)
TURKEY will host the next Cop.
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Next we have rampant non regulated Artificial Intelligence algorithms, they are filling our media with false information/ videos, plundering the world for short term profit etc.
However rapid progress in AI is arousing fear as well as excitement.
Why?
Because should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?
Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart…and replace us?
Should we risk loss of control of our civilisation?
These are some of the questions yet to be answered.
Just as Prometheus brought fire to mankind, AI offers us unprecedented knowledge and the opportunity to revolutionize every field.
Sophisticated scams are on the rise, powered by advanced chatbots that can convincingly imitate human dialogue. Deepfakes blur the line between reality and fiction, threatening the very foundations of social trust.
Manipulation and propaganda pose even greater dangers when algorithms personalize content to the point that fakes appear real, subtly shaping opinions and decisions.
AI could become a modern oracle—pouring expertise and insights into problems where human progress is slow.
AI can be a living bank of ideas, connecting theories and data across generations, illuminating the path of science.
This is the vision I believe in:
AI as a tireless partner in research—analyzing, organizing, and sharing knowledge “like a river in flood,”
However what we got is a world drive by western data with power resting more and more with platforms that are monopolistic
Our world is now full of falsehoods, videos games promoting violence, and TV dummy games for money.
Cannabis- Induced ‘Scromiting’ Is on the Rise.
Education is shallow, not addressing AI and its consequences to society.
AI Governance is for all intensive purposes non existent.
The EU AI Act emerges as a pivotal legislation as it tries to regulate a technology that is rapidly advancing in its capabilities lately – and with it potential risks and harms.
That’s why I suggested a counter-cultural choice:
We put all conversations and support in the hands of real people.
We use AI solely to optimize our software—improving and refining the code behind our products—so we can maintain high standards without sacrificing the irreplaceable value of human contact and genuine interaction.
At the moment we are being sold everything as AI.
Maybe you’ve wondered: shouldn’t technology serve people, not replace them?
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The current set of problems facing the world is exposing as never before just how fragile we humans are.
We are facing three major challenges ( over which we have no control) CLIMATE CHANGE and ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE + SOCIAL MEDIA
The question is do we want to live or just exist in a world run by a few wealthy people.
These days it appears that we don’t want to hold powerful people to account.
They get a headline and thats it.
Take for example.
Prince Andrew who thought his privilege position would protect him till he became Andy.
Or
George Michel former US senator who played a critical role in Northern Ireland’s peace process once described his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a “blessing”.
He is now an old codger, but age should not excuse his crimes.
Donald Dump has gone to great lengths to sweep the whole Epstine thing under the carpet.
Epstine died by suicide.
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The fragility of humans was especially shown in the two world wars.
A prime example would be the 7th Panzer Division brutality (that should never be forgotten ) as it made its way to Normandy, massacring all that stood in its way.
Or the recent brutal force of Israel retaliation. Committing a Genocide in response to an attack that killed around 1000 it has wiped out 60,000 Palestines, as the world watched it do so with impunity.
Humanity had always been fragile and will remain so till it learns to live in peace.
In order to make any difference we have to change the way we protect our shared human values. Somehow we must place them beyond the reach of ourselves where they are protected against any technological advances, wars etc.
Ukraine Russia war which is now four years old.
This can only be achieved with universal agreement to tackle, control what is self evident.
Climate change is self evident. Humanity must choose profit or a liveable planet
Artificial intelligence is less self evident. Digital slavery or freedom.
Social Media is evidence in abundance. False information or the truth.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Well the crude Europeans in the name of GOD sacked its holy places in Jerusalem, stole Islam’s science, its mathematics, its art to bring about their Renaissance, rose to dominate most of the rest of the globe, and then scooped up the majority of Muslims into their European empires.
September 11 committed by a tiny minority of extremist misfits that killed over 300 people resulted in the Taliban been turfed out of power in Afghanistan with Saddam Hudson somehow replacing bin Laden as the most evil man of history.
Causing a pre- emotive war to get rid of him and his alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq occurred with no weapons of mass destruction only a pathetic man with a beard hiding in a hole.
Since then it seems the world has changed into isolation with Russia trying to take advantage of its disunity to grab the Ukraine back by force into is empire.
The more one reflects on what really matters in human existence the more you become alienated from a culture that is obsessed with materialism.
These days we barely have time to absorb one event before ten others replace it.
Society is now governed by Social Media which is incapable of expressing any critical thinking to tackle the real problems facing all of us in a world that needs to unite to have any hope against CLIMATE CHANGE or ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
It’s now or never that we need to come together, not isolation, not Donald Dump, nor Mr Putin, nor most of the Islam I am all right Jack world, while we watch inequality expand across the globe.
Insh’ Allah might descend a religious philosophy in one word however ever I prefer the word bolloxed.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The major of problems with Algorithms is just who owns them.
Who is responsible when something goes wrong.
A machine driven by a code that humans invented remains within the current laws of defending or prosecution.
But once a machine becomes conscious it steps out of any human made laws into a legal void.
Currently there are no legal requirements to declare either an owner or their usages.
The question is :,
If the machine is capable of being responsible for its own actions, is the original coder of the machine removed from any legitimate legal obligation, as the machine is now capable of making it’s own decisions without any further human interventions.
What is the point of having laws that govern a machine if it has no emotions, no sense of fear, no sense of anything biological, no laws will protect anything that comes in contact.
So how does one go about setting rules and regulations for conscientious machinery ?
What if such machine were to kill a human there is no human law that could be applied that would have any impact, or effect.
There is only one way.
That way is that all conscious AI no matter what form it or they take must have like all hospital beds an alarm button within its. A fail safe code that can be activated to turn it off
The password to this function comes with its purchase and there is a legal requirement that it is held on your mobile phone in a designated file called AI Emergency.
You might think this is over the top.
I say if we humans want to have any resiliency or control over future AI we must be able to shut down the power that is running any AI machine.
While one of us out of 11 goes hungry every day, we currently building data centres using so much water to keep them cool that there will be nothing left to drink.
There leadership for you.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAYS. IF WE REALLY WANT TO REDUCE POVERTY AND INEQUALITY – POVERTY IS GETTING WORSE, WE NEED TO ADOPTED A BASIC LIVING WAGE.
Just like climate change , this is an area where we have built an industry around the problem rather than a cure.
The results of Aid given to non rich countries shows that this kind of aids has little or no impact in tackling the growing inequality gap or poverty for that matter.
With the coming loss of thousands of jobs to AI,
Now is the time to introduce a Basic Living
Wage.
Direct Aid ensure dignity.
It acts as a stimulant to weak economy and encourage imagination.
Now we all know the arguments against a Basic Wage. Inflation! Just think what Donal Trump tariffs are doing.
It’s time to get rid of social welfare and equip people with the means to look after themselves.
To manage their own medical /educational and daily needs.
We try all other routes so on the pre-text that the establishment of a BASIC WAGE has been try with small groups and found to have positive results why not explore it.
We can say poverty in all the languages under the sun and have done so since time memorial till AID foundation are blue in the face.
There is nothing to be lost to let people find their own footing within society,
Affect centuries of giving Aid that had not turned into happiness but into corruption.
This is not Wealth distribution. This is equipping individuals with the means to improve their lives.
Let’s be creative.
Happiest comes from self respect and self respect is obtained through pride.
There is often quite appalling disparity in social conditions and a hostility born of fear between against the privileged and the deprived, the exploiters and the exploited.
The privilege always use any surpluses to either improve or protect their position.
We can only try to reverse that position with taxes., or with what is called the triangle down capitalism, which we knew has not worked and will never work.
I know that there have been places where a basic wage has been tried, with some considerable success.
Let’s give back some pride.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
I know that there are already many opinions out there about the effects of social media, but they all seem to miss the most important fact when addressing the subject.
Social media or as I like to call it Living Algorithms Intelligence feeds on beliefs not truths, till these beliefs become collectively believable, turning Social Media into a new form of religion.
You might think that this is a heresy, but the definition of religion in regarding its association with science is on the whole misunderstood.
Just how does science/ technology relate to religion? They don’t know each other and never will.
However most religions argue that you simply cannot understand the world without them.
This is no longer true.
Social media is now woven into the texture of the relationships in people’s everyday lives.
Social media being used to actually reinforce traditional groups, such as family, castes, and tribes, and to repair the ruptures created by migration and mobility.
Religion is defined by its social function and is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. Religion asserts that humans are subject to a system of moral laws that we did not invent and that we cannot change.
Through filters Social media is becoming a toxic mirror of religion.
Social media favors the bitty over the meaty, the cutting over the considered.
It is not just us but our religious and political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. Time and again we are informed that the Internet is transforming human life towards a more enlightened and creative existence.
The public is constantly told that Big Data and the Internet of Things are about to revolutionize human existence. Claims that digital technology will fundamentally transform education, the way we work, play and interact with one another suggest that these new media will have an even greater impact on our culture than the invention of writing, reading and religion.
Just a few years ago, social media was a fairly obscure concept. Now Social media is a broad category that includes social networking sites, blogs, online review sites and photo- and video-sharing sites. It also includes sites where users can “check in” at their location, such as a restaurant or movie theater, and share their experiences and opinions.
Social media includes both sites run by the company, such as its own blog or website, and third-party sites where users can “friend” or “follow” each other.
Predictably the Internet is also an object of glorification by its technophile advocates.
The culture of everyday life has become entwined with the Internet. There is little doubt that the digital technology and social media has already a significant impact on culture.
(Take the example of radicalized jihadist youth in the West. In many cases the Internet has been represented as a powerful technology that incites young Muslims to become radicalized. Often the term“sudden radicalization” is used to highlight the power of social media to swiftly convert otherwise confused young Muslims into hardened extremist jihadists.
The social media provides a medium through which pre-existing sentiments can gain greater clarity, expressions and meaning. It provides a medium for the kind of interaction that can throw up new ideas, new symbols, new rituals and new identities. In this sense it has helped stimulate the emergent Western jihadist youth sub-culture and arguably its online expressions have exercised an important influence on its offline trajectory.)
Through the Internet the segmentation of social experience is refracted and given greater momentum through its powerful technological dynamic. This amplification and intensification of social trends constitutes the immediate impact of the Internet on the everyday culture. If the experience of printing serves as a precedent, it is likely that digital technology will not simply intensify prevailing cultural trends but also provide resources for reinterpreting its meaning.
Authority and respect don’t accumulate on social media; they have to be earned anew at each moment.
However today, with the public looking to smartphones for news and entertainment, we seem to be at the start of the third big technological makeover of modern life both politically/ electioneering and religious beliefs.
The Internet and the social media are powerful instruments for mobilization of people is not in doubt.
However, it is not its own technological imperative that allows the social media to play a prominent role in social protest. Rather the creative use of the social media is a response to aspirations and needs that pre-exist or at least exist independently of it.
This technology ought to be perceived as a resource that can be utilized by social and political movements looking for a communication infrastructure to promote their cause.
Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to find and connect with just about anyone making it difficult for us to distinguish between the meaningful relationships we foster in the real world, and the numerous casual relationships formed through social media.
All this provides an illusion of control: The line between a “like” and feeling ranked becomes blurred.
It’s not about don’t spend time on Facebook, but just be aware of what it might be doing to you. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.
We have all witness the election of Donald Trump with a vast web audience—four million followers on Twitter alone is the first candidate and now president optimized for the Google News algorithm.
Even though the ease of social media communication brings major benefits to previously excluded populations, this may not have any overall impact on social differences, or oppression offline.
Poverty restricts the amount of time people can spend on the internet. People avoid political and religious postings. Social media serve local purposes, instead of breaking down international boundaries.
Populations in different parts of the world may use local or regional platforms and their own online “dialects” which keeps people separated and distinct, not united. For some people living away from their family, it can become the main place they live, where they spend most of their time.
Once you send out a message like this one via social media, you can’t take it back even if you delete it. In addition, anything you post is considered public information, and you could see it quoted in the media.
Yet, social media certainly adds crucial new elements: Technology, along with globalization and economic trends, has made “power easier to get, but harder to use or keep” and that brings us to the present dilemma. We now know how to disrupt, but we still have no clear formula for bridging the gap from disruption to legitimacy. Memes have become our moral police.
Power is no longer absolute, but must be grounded in shared principles. If the social contract is breached, there will be a heavy price to pay and social media will play a major part in exacting that price.
All comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the Bin.
There is no doubting that the influence of technology will go beyond new equipment and faster communications and that Science and technology are in danger of out running our morality.
The evolution of technology has morphed the relationship between consumer and creator forever. But life exists in individual moments and it is up to us to make sure those moments are vital to technology. Each of us has meaning, and it is us that bring these moments to life not the other way around.
This for me defines the dangers of Technology. There is a danger that we will end up starved for wisdom and individual wonder distorting the values of civilization.
Sharing may well be the mechanism that propels culture forward, but individualism driven by knowledge is what counts. Therefore we should be wary of falling into the trap of futurism. There may be a temptation to follow technological determinism, that is the idea that technology provides a logical sequence of development that pervades society regardless of its effects.
So it is necessary to study the relationship of science, technology, innovation and government. We need to stay attuned to the power dynamics at play.
Ultimately as we continue to develop and our technological capabilities even the stars will be open to our explorations.
Will humanity be prepared for the greatest discoveries of the history of our civilization? No
Will we find other intelligent civilizations far older and incredibly superior than our technological capabilities and collective wisdom? Yes
Our collective destiny could end with speculation on the values, ethics and consciousness of these civilizations and lessons they may hold for the future of humanity.
Recently I have concentrating on the effects of what Technology could do to Society and how we will behave or change as its influence grows.
We are already living in a world few could have imagined 50 years ago. In a new economy—powered by technology, fueled by information, without a sustainable Life-Plan.
As technology continues to spread, questions emerge:
What are we losing as a society? What is the effect on social relations? Work, after all, is more than just a job or paycheck. It is where we meet friends, share ideas, and build a common sense of purpose and a social network.
What happens if we all become Google Slaves. (see previous post) Is it creating an Hip-pro activity world designed by us that will not work. With voice mail, e-mail, and computer networks, how do we preserve the human network and the social interaction that work has helped to facilitate? What takes its place?
As I have said there may well be a strong link between technology adoption by society and its culture. But technology is never purely beneficial. It has negative and positive effects, There is a need to distinguish between desirable sustainable development and economic growth.
While it is not possible to foretell the future, it is useful to examine present trends and determine their possible consequences.
The use of computers and the Internet in workplaces is become more pervasive as work and skills are being redefined and reorganized.
The demands of the future will require increased efforts to include these workers who have been left behind and have not shared in our prosperity.
It will also require successfully integrating millions of immigrants into the workplace.
If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity.
The problem with technological evolution is that it is under our control and, unfortunately, we don’t always make the best decisions.
Does Technology want what life wants: Increasing efficiency; Increasing opportunity; Increasing emergence; Increasing complexity; Increasing diversity; Increasing specialization; Increasing ubiquity; Increasing freedom; Increasing mutualism; Increasing beauty; Increasing sentience; Increasing structure; Increasing evolvability. I think not.
Technological evolution has a different motive force. It is self-evolution, and it is therefore driven by what we want as opposed to what is adaptive. In a market economy, it is even more complex: for most of us, our technological identities are determined by what companies decide to sell based on what they believe we, as consumers, will pay for.
When it comes to technologies, we mainly want to make things easy. We are at a time of great creativity, of great potential for change for better or worse.
Technology is not the only cause of these changes, but scientists have made clear that it is a driving factor.
It is already dispensing death by algorithms.
Assuming that we really are evolving as we wear or inhabit more technological prosthetics—like ever-smarter phones, helpful glasses, and brainy cars—here’s the big question:
Will that type of evolution take us in desirable directions, as we usually assume biological evolution does?
The technology industry, which does so much to define us, has a duty to cater to our more complete selves rather than just our narrow interests. It has both the opportunity and the means to reach for something higher. And, as consumers, we should remember that our collective demands drive our destiny as a species, and define the post human condition. Both Google and Apple would do well to keep this in mind.
All of these factors have contributed to rising inequality. The development of a hierarchy of knowledge, a prejudiced vision towards a desired future rather than recognition of more plausible realities.
We all want a future defined not by an evolution toward super intelligence but by the absence of discomforts.
In general, humans have a tendency to always choose the easiest option without
stopping to think that maybe, to think another perspective would open other
possibilities.
In my last post ” You are not a Gadget. Yet ” I attempted to outline how society is being reinvented by the internet, our connected devices – the internet of things.
You might not agree that they are having an effect. If not, you need to wake up.
As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.
The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself it is the storage of Data that will shape the future.
Big Data is used almost anywhere these days; A vast subject- from news articles to professional magazines, from tweets to YouTube videos and blog discussions, impacting across virtually all academic disciplines.
Every minute of your existence is being stored and this vast storage is the most relevant subject of our times.DATA NOW STREAM from our daily life:
Today, machines seem to get better every day at digesting vast gulps of information from phones and credit cards and televisions and computers; from the infrastructure of cities; from sensor-equipped buildings, trains, buses, planes, bridges, and factories, you name it —
And they remain as emotionally inert as ever. But for how long.
It is estimated that if all the data used in the world today were written to CD-ROMs and the CD-ROMs piled up in a single stack, the stack would stretch all the way from the Earth to the Moon and a quarter of the way back again.
The data flow so fast that the total accumulation of the past two years—a zettabyte—dwarfs the prior record of human civilization.
A report by the International Data Corporation in 2010 estimated that by the year 2020 there will be 35 Zettabytes (ZB) of digital data created per year.
All of what we do today leaves a digital trail:
Every bit of that information is being stored—but by whom? for what?
The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total.
Kilobyte 1,000 bytes
Megabyte 1,000,000 bytes
Gigabyte 1,000,000,000 bytes
Terabyte 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
Petabyte 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
Exabyte 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
Zettabyte 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
Yottabyte 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
Just in case you have no concept of a byte. A byte is a sequence of 8 bits (enough to represent one alphanumeric character) processed as a single unit of information. A single letter or character would use one byte of memory (8 bits), two characters would use two bytes (16 bits).
So you would want to be certified to think that Society as we know it is not a changing.
The question is: What is all of this information going to produce.
There is already an algorithm to detect when women were pregnant by tracking purchases of items such as unscented lotions—and offered special discounts and coupons to those valuable patrons. To plunder the Stock Exchange/Foreign Exchange. (See previous Posts)
Credit-card companies have found unusual associations in the course of mining data to evaluate the risk of default: people who buy anti-scuff pads for their furniture, for example, are highly likely to make their payments.
They are trained computers to identify deep patterns in vocal pitch, rhythm, and intensity; their software can scan a conversation between a woman and a child and determine if the woman is a mother, whether she is looking the child in the eye, whether she is angry or frustrated or joyful.
Other machines can measure sentiment by assessing the arrangement of our words, or by reading our gestures. Still others can do so from facial expressions.
Before you think about anything it has already being done. Good bye to the Present.
Big data is not just about helping an organization be more successful – to market more effectively or improve business operations. It reaches to far more socially significant issues as well. It is transforming science, engineering, medicine, healthcare, finance, business, and ultimately society itself.
The first full human genome sequence took five to 15 years to complete, and cost $1 billion to $3 billion. Now a genome sequence takes a little more than 24 hours and costs about $1,000.
NASA receives over 4 TB of new Earth Science data each day.
It Uses THE SHADOW Internet THAT’S 100 TIMES FASTER THAN GOOGLE FIBER.
Like me you problem never hear of it and will never get to use it.
So what am I exactly trying to say here.
I suppose the best starting point is the Human Brain.
Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons.
There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories. Just to give you some perspective on the storage capacity of your brain: It has a storage capacity of some estimates come in as low as 1 terabyte, or approximately 1,000 gigabytes.
You can easily buy a 1 gigabyte USB drive for under £15. A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, so that means you’ve got three brains right there.
For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.
Now consider this:
A sweet little external hard drive can give you an entire terabyte of memory for about £70. That’s 1000 gigabytes, and roughly 3333 human brains. So for £70 bucks, you could store 3333 people’s brains in your backpack. Nice!
If you want to back up your brain and upload it to a cylon body, IBM’s “neurosynaptic” chips are the closest thing to a synthetic brain yet.
Also, consider this:
A typical 3-minute song takes up about 5 megabytes of space. So that means your brain, can hold about 60 songs.
Now don’t get me wrong I acknowledge that every major scientific revolution has been driven by one thing, and that is data.
Data is pouring in from every conceivable direction: from operational and transactional systems, from scanning and facilities management systems, from inbound and outbound customer contact points, from mobile media and the Web.
Organizations are inundated with data – terabytes and petabytes of it. According to IDC, “In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by a factor of nine in just five years.
That’s nearly as many bits of information in the digital universe as stars in the physical universe.
I have nothing against the collection of Data nor with sharing the data, which ultimately could improve the lives of the millions of people who are generating it—and the societies in which they are living – to provide a beneficial impact on society as a whole.
The potential for doing good is perhaps nowhere greater than in public health and medicine, fields in which, “People are literally dying every day” simply because data are not being shared.
There are over 200 satellites in orbit continuously collecting data about the atmosphere and the land, ocean and ice surfaces of planet Earth which might save us from Climate Change.
Some of this data is held in transactional data stores – the byproduct of fast-growing online activity. Machine-to-machine interactions, such as metering, call detail records, environmental sensing and RFID systems, generate their own tidal waves of data. All these forms of data are expanding, and that is coupled with fast-growing streams of unstructured and semi structured data from social media.“
The challenges facing big data today and going forward including, but not limited to: data capture and storage; search, sharing, and analytics; big data technologies; data visualization; architectures for massively parallel processing; data mining tools and techniques; machine learning algorithms for big data; cloud computing platforms; distributed file systems and databases; and scalable storage systems.
In bio medicine the Human Genome Project is determining the sequences of the three billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA.
Big Data is further expected to add more than €250 billion a year to the European public sector administration. Thus, the whole European Union could benefit from the cumulative financial and social impact of Big Data.
One clear example of Big Data is the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) (www.skatelescope.org) planned to be constructed in South Africa and Australia. When the SKA is completed in 2024 it will produce in excess of one exabyte of raw data per day (1 exabyte = 1018 bytes), which is more than the entire daily internet traffic at present.
Another example of Big Data is the Large Hadron Collider, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which has 150 million sensors and is creating 22 petabytes of data in 2012 (1 Petabyte = 1015 bytes).
Smart cities, data gathered by sensors integrated with transport data, financial transactions, location of users, social network interaction will provide an entirely new dimension to thinking about how cities function.
These three examples are only scratching the surface.
Google almost certainly has more data storage capacity than any other organization on Earth. Their biggest data centers cost half a billion to a billion dollars, so they can’t have more than 20 or so of those. These are the storage centers we know about.
Berkeley County, South Carolina
Council Bluffs, Iowa
Atlanta, Georgia
Mayes County, Oklahoma
Lenoir, North Carolina
The Dalles, Oregon
Hong Kong
Singapore
Taiwan
Hamina, Finland
St Ghislain, Belgium
Dublin, Ireland
Quilicura, Chilie
Eemshaven, Netherlands
Groningen, Netherlands
Budapest, Hungary
Wrocław, Poland
Reston, Virginia
Additional sites near Atlanta, Georgia
In 2010, they were operating around a million servers, with close to 10 exabytes of active storage attached to running clusters. Google has a hard drive die every few minutes.
Let’s assume Google has a storage capacity of 15 exabytes, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Amazon (They’re huge, but probably not as big as Google.)
Facebook (They’re on the right scale and growing fast, but still playing catch-up.)
Microsoft (They have a million servers, although no one seems sure why.)
However, it’s nothing compared to the ridiculous claims by some news reports about the NSA datacenter in Utah. This facility could hold “between an exabyte and a yottabyte” of data.
Apple tends to make between three and five times as much revenue as Google does. Whether it is Apple or Google at the top of the heap, you cannot deny that they are both building platforms and business models that will shape the next decade in the tech industry.
Computing is definitely moving to the cloud, and Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all in it to win it by manipulate us all.
Because the shifts in both the amount and potential of today’s data are so epic, businesses require more than simple, incremental advances in the way they manage information.
Public Sector Information (PSI) is the single largest source of information in Europe. Its estimated market value is €32 billion.
The value of Big Data to the UK economy alone, being £216 billion and 58,000
jobs in the next 5 years.
Data traffic is expected to grow to 10.8 Exabyte per month by 2016.
Could we have foreseen the mortgage meltdown, the financial institution crisis and the recession, if only we had gotten our arms around more data and done more to correlate it?
Could we trim millions of dollars in fraud from government programs and financial markets?
But big data wants more.
Not satisfied with seeing everything about everybody it wants to store your spoken words which for thousands and thousands of year were private and should remain private.
For us to allow or turn a blind eye to this kind of monitoring and storage would be the first steps to towards slavery.
Such a move by Governments under the cloud of spotting terrorists plots is a form of terrorism on free speech. All Smart Phone should be be encrypt to ensure the freedom of mankind.
So I will leave you with this.
Modern science demands the use and understanding of numerical methods.
Data is like an object approaching a fixed point. It is travelling at a constant speed, such that, after one second, the distance is halved: after 1.5 seconds, the distance is halved again; after 1.75 seconds, it is halved again and so on. So data will never actually reach the fixed point, because with each fraction of a second it only halves the distance remaining. Both the Data and the distance can theoretically be split infinitely.
Big Data technologies to analyse and properly compare disperse and huge data sets would provide huge benefits in terms of discoveries in experimental sciences.
And you think you live in the Present- think again.
Exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes definitely are on the horizon.
But tell me where is hindsight located? Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time.
No single person can make sense of what a billion other people are saying. The best way to Safeguard personal data is not to give it in the first place.
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