Tag Archives: Internet

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHERE IT THE TRUTH TO BE FOUND? CERTAINLY NOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in Communication., Fake News., Google, Social Media, Technology, The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations.

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( A Fifteen minute read)

The internet has loosened our collective grasp on the truth.

It is a fact of the internet that ( with a new social media user, every 15 seconds,) every click, every view and every sign-up is recorded somewhere.

So what exactly is Social Media:Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of social media"

Is it a term relating to gatherings of people that prefer to exist in groups?

Or

Is it the dustbin of idle world gossip.

Not on your Nelly> With billions of people glued to Facebook, Whats App, We Chat, Instagram, Twitter, Weibo and other popular services, social media has become an increasingly powerful cultural and political force, to the point that its effects are now beginning to alter the course of global events.

This is what it is to-day:

Social networks earned an estimated $8.3 billion from advertising in 2015.

  • A 2011 study by AOL/Nielsen showed that 27 million pieces of content were shared every day, and today 3.2 billion images are shared each day.
  • On WordPress alone, 91.8 million blog posts are published every month.
  • It’s estimated that video will account for 74% of all online traffic in 2017.
  • Google processes 100 billion searches a month.
  • 91.47% of all internet searches are carried out by Google.
  • 60% of Google’s searches come from mobile devices.
  • To carry out all these searches, Google’s data centre uses 0.01% of worldwide electricity, although it hopes to cut its energy use by 15% using AI.
  • By 2014, Google had indexed over 130,000,000,000,000 (130 trillion) web pages.

    social sites

    Facebook statistics

    • Facebook adds 500,000 new users every day; 6 new profiles every second.
    • 79% of all online US adults use Facebook.
    • 76% of Facebook users check it every day.
    • The average (mean) number of friends is 155.
    • Half of internet users who do not use Facebook themselves live with someone who does.
    • Of those, 24% say that they look at posts or photos on that person’s account.
    • There are an estimated 270 million fake Facebook profiles.
    • The most popular page is Facebook’s main page with 204.7m likes. The most liked non-Facebook owned page is Christiano Ronaldo’s with 122.6m.
    • There are 60 million active business pages on Facebook.
    • Facebook has 5 million active advertisers on the platform.
    • Facebook accounts for 53.1% of social logins made by consumers to sign into the apps and websites of publishers and brands.

    Twitter statistics

    • 500 million people visit Twitter each month without logging in.
    • There is a total of 1.3 billion accounts, but only 328 million are active,
    • Of those, 44% made an account and left before ever sending a Tweet.
    • The average Twitter user has 707 followers.
    • But 391 million accounts have no followers at all.
    • There are 500 million Tweets sent each day. That’s 6,000 Tweets every second.
    • Twitter’s top 5 markets (countries) account for 50% of all Tweets.
    • It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to go from the first Tweet to the billionth.
    • 65.8% of US companies with 100+ employees use Twitter for marketing.
    • 77% of Twitter users feel more positive about a brand when their Tweet has been replied to.

    graph

    You tube statistics

    • 300 hours of video are uploaded to You tube every minute.
    • People now watch 1 billion hours of YouTube videos every day.
    • More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.
    • The average mobile viewing session lasts more than 40 minutes.
    • The user submitted video with the most views is the video for Luis Fonsi’s song ‘Despacito’ with 4.36 billion views.
    • YouTube sees around 1,148bn mobile video views per day.
    • In 2014, the most searched term was music. The second was Minecraft.
    • 9% of U.S small businesses use Youtube.
    • You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population).

    Instagram statistics

    • There are 800 million Monthly Active Users on Instagram.
    • Over 95 million photos are uploaded each day.
    • There are 4.2 billion Instagram Likes per day.
    • More than 40 billion photos have been shared so far.
    • 90 percent of Instagram users are younger than 35.
    • When Instagram introduced videos, more than 5 million were shared in 24 hours.
    • Pizza is the most popular Instagrammed food, behind sushi and steak.
    • 24% of US teens cite Instagram as their favourite social network.

    data chalkboard image

    Pinterest statistics

    • Pinterest has 200 million active users each month.
    • 31% of all online US citizens use the platform.
    • 67% of Pinterest users are under 40-years-old.
    • The best time to Pin is Saturday from 8pm-11pm.
    • In 2014, male audience grew 41% and their average time spent on Pinterest tripled to more than 75 minutes per visitor.

    LinkedIn statistics

    • LinkedIn has 500 million members.
    • 106 million of those access the site on a monthly basis.
    • More than 1 million members have published content on LinkedIn.
    • The average CEO has 930 LinkedIn connections.
    • Over 3 million companies have created LinkedIn accounts.
    • But only 17% of US small businesses use LinkedIn.

    Snapchat Statistics

    • Snapchat has 178m active daily users.
    • 60% of them are under 25.
    • In 2016, $90m was spent on Snapchat ads.
    • 47% of US teens think it’s better than Facebook, while 24% think it’s better than Instagram.

    That’s your fill of social media statistics for now, with just a tiny fraction of the weird and wonderful stats and facts available out there.

    It’s easy to get dragged into the drama and other negative aspects of social media.

    Social media is built for polarisation and extremes.

The basic engagement mechanisms of popular social media sites like Facebook drive people to think and communicate in ever more extreme ways.

Social media is a collective term for all the websites and online services that are erasing national borders and distances.

Social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.

They are used to spread information about dramatic events or to warn others about risky routes. When refugees reach a new country, they can also use social media to contact their fellow countrymen who are already there and find out about things like permits, authorities they can turn to or what things cost.

They have subsumed and gutted mainstream media.

They have undone traditional political advantages like fund-raising and access to advertising.

They are destabilizing and replacing old-line institutions and established ways of doing things, including political parties, transnational organizations and longstanding, unspoken social prohibitions against blatant expressions of racism and xenophobia.

They are helping to create surprisingly influential social organizations among once-marginalized groups. For Example : Brexiters in Britain to ISIS in the Middle East to the hacker collectives of Eastern Europe and Russia.

Each network in its own way is now wielding previously unthinkable power, resulting in unpredictable, sometimes destabilizing geopolitical spasms.

Through this new technology, people are now empowered to express their grievances and to follow people they see as echoing their grievances.

THE QUESTION IS:

IS SOCIAL MEDIA NOW THE JUDGE AND JURY AND THOSE THAT RUN ITS ALGORITHMS ARE NOW THE REAL WORLD POWER BROKERS.

If it wasn’t for social media, I don’t see TRUMP AS PRESIDENT OF THE US.

This has to be the scariest ACHIEVEMENT about Facebook/ Twitter.

Not that Facebook may be full of lies (a problem that could potentially be fixed), but that its scope gives it real power to change history in bold, unpredictable ways.

But that’s where we are.

It’s time to start recognizing that social networks actually are becoming the world-shattering forces that their boosters long promised they would be — and to be unnerved, rather than exhilarated, by the huge social changes they could uncork.

This should come as no surprise.

Facebook and Twitter have become the new TV, where businesses can’t control their messaging as they once were able to do with TV ads.

In a way, we are now living through a kind of bizarro version of the utopia that some in tech once envisioned would be unleashed by social media.

Online campaigns directed at GOVERNMENTS OR FOR THAT MATTER AGAINST BRANDS can be a lot more effective than writing. Pay-to-play strategy by letting posts run and gain organic traction before boosting them.

Efforts to fight this dismaying trend are obviously worth pursuing, but is it time to give our due to the new political activism – Social Media. The king of communication.

As it becomes increasingly commercialised there is a risk that people – particularly young people – will see social media content as being politically and commercially independent.

What it means to get caught in a Twitter storm. Facts tell, but stories sell.

In actual fact, the very opposite is true.

When you sign up for Facebook, you also accept a business model that can use information about what you do and how you feel, for example in marketing.

One terrifying example is how the terrorist group ISIS uses social media to recruit new supporters. Potential ISIS fighters can be invited to join private Facebook groups where they are put into contact with individuals who are active in Syria.

However if used in a responsible manner it s also a new tool for democracy.

More people can express their views and form opinions. There are also examples of individuals who have quickly succeeded in raising large sums of money for those in need.

The Impotence of Social Media is in its nucleus accumbens. 

People tend to follow the behavior of the group.” If other people have liked a post, new viewers will be more likely to like it too. And that popularity can feed on itself, changing their behavior to try to get social approval, respond to headlines without any in-debt knowledge of what the headline refers to. 

A single ‘like’ can make a social-media post more popular.

Many social media sites share more of the higher-ranked — or more popular — posts. As a result, “people are more likely to see what others have positively rated,”  what’s in those photos is socially acceptable.

Skip pictures with few likes.

Likes can have a subtle but significant effect on how teens interact with friends online.

The important take-home message here, is that Social media shapes how we perceive the world around us.

When people express themselves through social media, they communicate collectively.

Members of social media communities direct raw emotions into particular interests. These audiences show their interest and approval by liking, sharing and commenting. And those mechanisms drive future social media behavior all driven by algorithms that drive participation and attention-getting in social media, the addictive “gamification” aspects such as likes and shares, invariably favoured the odd and unusual.

What are the results?

How polarised and divided nations are becoming.

The smartphones and web applications were increasing people’s

passions while also driving them to polarising extremes.

Political figures around the world are more polarised.

Language is more crude.

Sharing is becoming competitive, pushing participants to one-up each other.

Where Facebook or Twitter (viewed on mobile devices) has become for many people the sole source of news. Article will have a MUCH higher chance of converting to a sale!

You’ve engaged them, you’ve educated them, you’ve entertained them with social networks. (Communities of people (or animals) that are interrelated owing to the way they relate to each other.)

In humans, this can involve sharing details of their life and interests on Twitter or Facebook, or perhaps belonging to the same sports team, religious group or school.

I rest my case.

The functions of social media have transformed into something we have never anticipated.

Social media has transformed into political tools, increased global awareness, and offered a quicker way to spread information.

People have the power to abuse social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to promote radical ideas. So what.

Once you gag people’s right to speak freely, you place a mental shackle on the subconscious mind.

If you want to influence others to act upon what you have to say, treat social media communications with the same degree of importance as those that are face-to-face.

Social media to a great extent is a reflection of life. Without education for the sake acquiring knowledge the mind looks for it else where.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: 2018 WILL BE THE BIG DETACHMENT YEAR.

29 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in 2018: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Climate Change., Environment, Evolution, Fake News., Google, Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Social Media, Sustaniability, Technology, The cloud., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The Obvious., The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations.

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( A four-minute New Year Read)

We live in a world that is being connected and disconnected at the same time.

Two related facts.

But don’t worry we now have Algorithms that both filter and recommend.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

The reality is that there’s no way of knowing where our generation is going in terms of technology and our reliance on it.

The year 2018 will be the year in which human interaction decreases the more technology increases. While social media fosters an environment of connectedness and belonging in the digital world, it also forces a disconnect between people in the real world.

With false news and social media, words are on their last legs, with print for the high jump, we will have more arse holes 2018 twittering shaping the world.

Where two or three words gather together there is a great danger that thought might be present. However we once again don’t have to worry because we have the option to log off and unplug anytime we want, so it’s up to us to decide if we want to engage with the actual world or the virtual one.Search results for "pictures of computer algorithms"

Technology may well be is a societal advancement that has enabled our generation to do things previous generations never would have thought possible.

However:

The biggest problem we have is accepting each other’s differences.

“Technology makes us forget what we know about life.”

82 per cent of smart phone users said they rarely (if ever) powered off their phones last year, while less than 43 per cent of 13- to 18-year-olds saw any value in ever going unplugged.Search results for "pictures of detachment"

Why?

This is the Eternal Question to which there is no answer, and yet the only one that has to be asked.

Take a look around you.

Every day we becoming more and more desensitized. Save this Save that while saving the planet is being left to technology.

Rapid progress in machine learning has raised the prospect that algorithms will one day be able to do most or all of the mental tasks currently performed by humans.

But the real problem is how one might design a highly intelligent machine to pursue realistic human goals safely.

This is very poorly understood.

Even if advanced machine intelligence does not get ‘out of control’, it is likely to be very socially disruptive and it is more likely it could be used as a destabilizing weapon of war.

It seems that most of us are in a mental wasteland inhabited by those upon whom the portcullis ( A sudden blotting out of all normal thought) has fallen.

How did we get to a place where the content on our phones is more interesting than the world around us?

In today’s society, scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram has taken precedence over the real events scrolling through our daily lives.

Being “connected” to machinery 24/7 is affecting our ability to connect with our lives and the people around us. 

Mechanical devices bait us into a make-believe life, as we are slowly being pulled away from a sense of who we are and what really matters.

Modern life is making us lonelier.

It’s not the technology that’s the problem; it’s us for abusing it.

We’ve become more and more antisocial by relying on technology too heavily.

Maybe if we look up and away from the flashing images and colors on our most recent Safari search, we will actually enjoy the company of those around us. So instead of counting the number of likes, count the memories in your life, because at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

For the foreseeable future, it won’t be possible to take people out of the decision-making process, but the year 2018 will with the power of Profit Seeking Algorithms push us further down the road of hypnotic trance.

Technology is a valuable tool when used correctly. However, the law has to catch up with privacy and safety issues, not mention profit seeking algorithms. Search results for "pictures of computer algorithms"

We’ve all heard about the power of algorithms—but Algorithms to Live is in my book to be avoided at all costs, if we are to value what is vital to us all. 

They are creating a world of such inequality that the scariest thing is the immense possibilities of these unregulated Algorithms will turn us and all that is necessary for a sustainable life into commodities to be exploited.

What can be done:

Education, Education is the only solution.

By this I mean education not for the market place but for the foundation of knowledge. Not just a narrow streamlined pipeline of mundane thoughts which doesn’t let you think outside the box and do things on your own.

Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Ecology, to name a few.

Dramatic changes are inevitable, we need to accept the fact on ground level that our education models are broken and paralyzed.

Perhaps we might well need computer algorithms to select the best candidate?

There’s no magic formula, freedom and dignity will not be found on social media, nor computed by algorithms.

There are too many parts of today’s conversations that can not be translated through technology.

Tearing apart the nation states and the world with ALGORITHMS is a

Disaster waiting to happen. No Robot with a brain full of algorithms is

going to have the the ability of an artist to have human empathy and an

appreciation of history; while also having the savvy self-awareness to

understand that their work merely takes its place in a greater culture

at large. Such art brings comfort in our modern secular world: where

spirituality seems to live in a foreign universe of yesteryear.

You’re more than a number.

how the mythical and quotidian usually overlap to

the point where the two become indistinguishable.

So join a club and organizations to make real friends.

Happy New year.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: THERE IS ONLY ONE NEW YEAR RESOLUTION WORTH WHILE.

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Facebook, Google it., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Innovation., Life., Modern Day Communication., Social Media., Technology, The Future, The Internet., The New year 2017, The world to day., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., WiFi communication.

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(Your New Year Resolution)

Good vs. bad. Right vs. wrong. Human beings begin to learn the difference before we learn to speak—and thankfully so. We owe much of our success as a species to our capacity for moral reasoning. It’s the glue that holds human social groups together, the key to our fraught but effective ability to cooperate.

We are (most believe) the lone moral agents on planet Earth—but this may not last. The day may come soon when we are forced to share this status with a new kind of being, one whose intelligence is of our own design.Afficher l'image d'origine

As awesome as the internet has been we are on the most part digital immigrants because it is destroying the sense of community.

The Internet is the forerunner of artificial intelligence which is set to change all of us and the very planet we all live on.

The survival of our species may depend on instilling values in AI, but doing so could also ensure harmonious robo-relations in more prosaic settings.

We are only just glimpsing the tip its potential. Our very DNA destiny is changing. (the root of intelligence)

We haven’t just been redefining what we mean by AI—we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. We’ll spend the next decade—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, constantly asking ourselves what humans are for.

The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are. But on its present connectivity form of Capitalistic algorithms its trajectory is set to fail both people and the planet.

At the moment artificial Intelligence might seem banal and it may well remain so for some time to come, till we have Neuromorphic computers.

Algorithms live on the a diet of information.

They are black box of the future, impossible for outsiders to know what is going on inside them.

Whether you are black white, man or woman, over 60th, married or divorced, catholic or muslim, use an Apple phone or not, whether you are on Facebook, whether you have criminal record or not down to the zip code you live in they are deciding what price to charge you.

Facebook for instance has a dossier of more the 2 billion people.

Buried deep within its site is a setting called “Ad Preferences”

It logs everything. It also buys data about its users, and used all this data to target the very ADs you look at, which are follow you around with an algorithm from one site to the next.

Much of the current debate on algorithmic culture revolves around the role that humans play in the design of algorithms – that is whether a creator’s subconscious beliefs and biases are encoded into the algorithms that make decisions about us.

Accountability is the important issue here.

Do we want an echo chamber of our social media feeds that are creating a striking gap between our real interested and their digital reflection.

Ghettoizing all of us into prescribed category of demographically content.

Algorithmic determinism will be the curse of the globe.Afficher l'image d'origine

Our Identities are crucial to our survival. To day Artificial Intelligence algorithms are already embedded in almost every aspect of everyday living with thousands of algorithmic decisions being made about each of us every day.

The Question is: Are we supposed to keep track and be responsible for all of them.

What relationship between us and Ai do we want.?

So here is a worthwhile New year Resolution.

We still have a great deal of work to do to address the concerns and risks a foot with our growing reliance on AI systems.

Because AI algorithms are being asked to make high-stakes decisions, the impact of successful cyber attacks on AI systems could be much more devastating than you envisage. Before we put AI algorithms in control of high-stakes decisions, we must be much more confident that these systems can survive large-scale cyber attacks.

To promote its responsible use and “verification” of the behavior of software systems. That systems built automatically via statistical “machine learning” methods behave properly. To ensure good behavior when an AI system encounters unforeseen situations.

Send the Secretary General of United Nations an Email everyday.

Requesting a world people’s resolution:

That All Technology must carry a universal stamp of UN approval. Afficher l'image d'origine

The prospect of out-of-control super intelligences that threaten the survival of humanity will be down to where humans have failed to correctly instruct the AI algorithm in how it should behave.

Send an email (Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary General):sgcentral@un.org; dujarric@un.org; haqf@un.org; maestracci@un.org; kaneko@un.org; gillmann@un.org; palanivelu@un.org; contactnewscentre@un.org

Call the Secretary General’s office in UN Headquarter in New York

1-212-963-7162
Fax 1-212-963-7055

Send a letter to his office:
Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon
United Nations Headquarter
405 East 42nd Street
New York, NY 10017 USA

It is time for the United Nations to chart a sensible path for technology to create transparent and accountable AI in order to improve humanity’s collective future.

We must not put AI algorithms in control of potentially-dangerous systems until we can provide a high degree of assurance that they will behave safely and properly.

These issues are becoming increasingly important as more people discover the digital world and find the need for anonymity in this new society. Current rules regarding anonymity on the internet are not global and are severely dependent on the opinion of the service providers who run the servers. The international nature of the net simply makes it impossible to enforce the laws of every country individually. Freedom of expression must be enshrined in all forms of software.

That future national and international legislation on the internet allows the vital service of anonymity to remain. This will only function on an international scale if both lawmakers and net users work together and try to figure out a solution.

The ethical issues related to the possible future creation of machines with general intellectual capabilities far outstripping those of humans are quite distinct from any ethical problems arising in current automation and information systems.

Such super intelligence would not be just another technological development; it would be the most important invention ever made, and would lead to explosive progress in all scientific and technological fields, as the super intelligence would conduct research with superhuman efficiency. To the extent that ethics is a cognitive pursuit, a super intelligence could also easily surpass humans in the quality of its moral thinking.

However, it would be up to the designers of the super intelligence to specify its original motivations. Since the super intelligence may become unstoppable powerful because of its intellectual superiority and the technologies it could develop, it is crucial that it be provided with human-friendly motivations.

We will probably one day have to take the gamble of super intelligence no matter what. But once in existence, a super intelligence could help us reduce or eliminate other existential risks, such as the risk that advanced nanotechnology will be used by humans in warfare or terrorism, a serious threat to the long-term survival of intelligent life on earth.

If we get to super intelligence first, we may avoid this risk from nanotechnology and many others. If, on the other hand, we get nanotechnology first, we will have to face both the risks from nanotechnology and, if these risks are survived, also the risks from super intelligence.

The overall risk seems to be minimized by implementing super intelligence, with great care, as soon as possible.

Any Other suggestions welcome, all like button clicks will be put in the bind.

THE BEADY EYES TOP PREDICTIONS FOR THE YEAR 2017.

21 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Modern day life., Technology, The Future, The New year 2017, Unanswered Questions., Where's the Global Outrage.

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( A ten minute read if you are over fifty, a lifetime read for those under.)

I could go down the road of Predictions like: Afficher l'image d'origineIn Germany, Angela Merkel looks likely to win re-election or there will be a Climate-Change-Driven Refugee Crisis, or there will be a Cyber war the West v Russia or England will come to its sense and vote again, or that the United Nations and the European Union will reform.

But we are standing on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.Afficher l'image d'origine

Now it’s true that we do not yet know just how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.

However it is already changing not only what we do but also who we are.

It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships.

As the physical, digital, and biological worlds continue to converge, new technologies and platforms will increasingly enable citizens to engage with governments, voice their opinions, coordinate their efforts, and even circumvent the supervision of public authorities.

Governments will increasingly face pressure to change their current approach to public engagement and policy making, as their central role of conducting policy diminishes owing to new sources of competition and the redistribution and decentralization of power that new technologies make possible.

Given the rapid pace of change and broad impacts, legislators and regulators are being challenged to an unprecedented degree and for the most part are proving unable to cope.

It is already having a profound impact the nature of national and international security, affecting both the probability and the nature of conflict. The distinction between war and peace, combatant and non-combatant, and even violence and nonviolence (think cyber warfare) is becoming uncomfortably blurry.

It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. The breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.

The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.

More than 30 percent of the global population now uses social media platforms to connect, learn, and share information. In an ideal world, these interactions would provide an opportunity for cross-cultural understanding and cohesion. However, they can also create and propagate unrealistic expectations as to what constitutes success for an individual or a group, as well as offer opportunities for extreme ideas and ideologies to spread.

Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.

AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests.Afficher l'image d'origine

Our lives are accelerating even faster, but the largest beneficiaries of innovation tend to be the providers of intellectual and physical capital—the innovators, shareholders, and investors—which explains the rising gap in wealth between those dependent on capital versus labor. Yield greater inequality.

The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent.

Next year promises to be one of the most exciting and tragic in the history of the world with tech more overpowering, and the global climate more complex.

Populism will remain on the ballot, with great powers brace for change, challenges loom for news organizations, and the debate on automation and job creation will continue.Afficher l'image d'origine

We are in the midst of serious challenges that threaten the whole world, and which require collective responsibility: extreme poverty, climate change, and the refugee crisis.

Even after an opposition defeat in east Aleppo, President Bashar al-Assad may struggle to reassert control over a fragmented Syria.

The conflict in Ukraine’s east will remain unresolved.

The West will become even more flummoxed by Putin.

Nationalism, political uncertainty, and stunted trade will create new headaches in 2017.

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency represents a seismic shift in American politics, an event with implications nearly impossible to predict. A Trump White House may defy predictability.

Russia has been most blatant in supporting France’s far-right National Front, which received an 11 million euro loan in 2014 from a Moscow-based bank and wants another 27 million euros to fight next year’s elections.

In an increasingly connected world, the UK Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger Article 50.

Deeply entrenched mindsets and beliefs sustain the culture of violence and impunity – the need to radically shift the consciousness of people is what the world has been missing.

We must release the tentacles of our false securities and interrupt the world as we know it. We must assume that anywhere we live or anything we are doing can change or disintegrate.

Widespread government access to encrypted communications has the potential to demolish internet privacy and devastate security.

It’s not all doom.  There will be new food retailers with brands to speak to and advertise to consumers. There will be edible cannabis for medicinal use. Drones Will Deliver Pizza (but Not Toilet Paper)

There will be a shift in focus from broad-based attacks to more targeted attacks against specific firms or individuals. New rules for U.S. internet service providers will unleash a flurry of lawsuits.

There will be a new kind of consciousness – one where violence will be resisted until it is unthinkable.

I wonder whether the inexorable integration of technology in our lives could diminish some of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation. Our relationship with our smartphones is a case in point.

Constant connection may deprive us of one of life’s most important assets: the time to pause, reflect, and engage in meaningful conversation.

We need to shape a future that works for all of us by putting people first and empowering them.

Debates about fundamental issues such as the impact on our inner lives of the loss of control over our data will only intensify in the years ahead.

Barack Obama Will Get a $20 Million Book Deal.  The transparency in the UN will be vetoed.  The UK will have to vote again  between being a British citizen, serving our local community and people, and being a Global Citizen, taking responsibility for their world as a whole?

Technology it’s here to stay.

The global dance of connection is both a disruption, a curse, with all beat, no heart.  

Internet, artificial intelligence, robotics… all lead to one fundamental trend almost absent from the political debate despite its potential social impact.

These transformations (the premises of which we already feel) will produce their full effect after one or two decades, so there is still time to rationally analyze their consequences, without showing complete panic in regard to their extreme evolutionary perspectives.

Since there is still time to calmly consider the problems of AI, which is perhaps one of the most serious that humanity has ever faced.

I recommend the rapid creation of think-tanks focused on this technological revolution, groups composed of citizens, politicians, scientists, psychologists and … why not even science fiction writers, who will consider uninhibited possible future ways to keep human beings at the heart of our future.

From human enhancement to human … obsolescence?

This is no time for Amen. The only way forward is with a technologist’s mindset.

Happy new year.  

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THE BEADY EYES: 2017 WILL BE THE YEAR WHEN DEMOCRACY WILL BE UNDER ATTACK FROM ENTRENCHED POWER MORE THAN EVER.

20 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Brexit., Capitalism, Climate Change., European Commission., European Union., Humanity., Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Politics., Social Media., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future, The Internet., The New year 2017, The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations.

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As Digital technologies and digital communications are permeating every aspect of life we seem to be living in both a hopeful but also difficult times.

The instinctive tendency to categorise the world into “us”and “them” is becoming more and more difficult to overcome but traditional power structures are changing.

Current institutions and political systems are out of date.

People are taking matters into their own hands and are taking the initiative to organise public affairs themselves. On the one hand, this is because they are losing confidence in politics; and on the other hand, it is because some issues are simply not being dealt with by governments any more. Afficher l'image d'origine

Thanks to the internet, artificial intelligence, google, facebook, twitter, globalisation, and or inability to plan for the long term future the relations between culture and power IS BREAKING DOWN world wide.

The new terrain of global governance by artificial intelligence is making up its own rules on the fly or going about its activities without even any regard for rules of procedure.

It is amply clear by now that the so-called digital divide cannot be bridged through technological means alone, as it must be understood within broader systems of entrenched social and economic exclusion.

It is then timely for a broader range of other social groups, particularly those most adversely affected by globalisation, to re-think how they believe global governance should work.

Our present global structure of patriarchy and capitalist greed with all its connectivity is still a long way off establishing a new world with justice and freedom at its core.

For example:

The Syrian Civil war precipitated by drought in the region. The Iraq, the Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan

Nuclear power plants require grid-tied electricity, cooling water and people getting paychecks. Without all these, they melt down, thus immersing all life on earth in ionizing radiation.

1 in 3 women across the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime.

That’s ONE BILLION WOMEN AND GIRLS.

We’re driving to extinction at least 150 species each day.

There’s more. Much more. The violence of poverty, racial violence, gender violence, violence caused by corruption, occupation and aggression, violence caused by environmental disasters, climate change and environmental plunder.

We seem to be living as if there is no future but the one we are creating.

There is nothing guaranteed but our willingness to live as pioneers of a new consciousness and way.

The past five or six years have seen an explosion of political initiatives around the globe in which tech-minded actors of various kinds (including geeks, hackers, bloggers, tech journalists, digital rights lawyers, and Pirate politicians) have played leading parts.

(Not forgetting capitalist greed in all its forms.)

There is a terrible irony in the assumption that we can transcend our parochial tendencies with artificial intelligence.

There is growing public awareness of the concentration of economic power in the world. The richest 85 people in the world, who could fit onto a single double-decker bus, have just as much wealth as the poorest half of world.

Absolute universalism, is impossible. Morality cannot be everywhere at once.

So culture and power is breaking down.

Perhaps it is time to have a data-based approach and ranking of universal values.

This will not work.

Because culture is a key arena for struggles and has provided dynamism and force to the most effective social movements; and one could argue is the most important area for work if we are to really embed and sustain transformative practices in our communities and states over the long-term.

We are fast approaching foregoing the unrealistic concern of respecting different cultures with their moral diversity at any cost because of the economic exploitation globally enforced by imperialist and capitalist states that place profit over people.

We must start thinking of what a post-venture capitalism age of socio-technical innovation might look like, and how it could contribute to democratic renewal in different cultural contexts.

Digital rights are not only human rights, as we often hear in net freedom circles: digital rights are social rights.

Politics, or rather political parties, seem to have an inherent tendency to close in on themselves – maybe in search of traditional forms of certainty, and linked to this predictability and with it a controlling, monopolistic conception of agency.

Its back to I am alright Jack.

The Election of Donald Trump, the English referendum on in or out European Union are shining examples.Afficher l'image d'origine

Afficher l'image d'origineBoth driven by genuine and false concerns. Both altering millions of Europeans to the way Europe is run and to how the USA                                     might be run.

Both models of politics have been based on nation-specific political parties. Both with consensus-centred policies that have reproduced the crisis now faces in 2017 in the United states which will push Europe into a path that will lead to disintegration with each needing to take a new look at the current rules of engagement in international affairs.

Europe can only work if we all work for unity and commonality, and forget the rivalry between competences and institutions. Europeans want common decisions followed by swift and efficient implementation.

At the moment it is viewed as a cartel:

The Eurozone may be supremely powerful as an entity but where no one is in control.

The whole Euro currency project disempower almost every player that has anything to do with democratic legitimacy. It created a monetary union that was designed to fail and which guaranteed untold hardship for the peoples of Europe. ( see previous post)

The nation-state is dead and democracy in the EU has been replaced by a toxic algorithmic depoliticisation that, if it is not confronted, will lead to depression, disintegration and possibly war.

While politics (the ability to decide which things ought to be done) is confined to the level of the nation-state, power (the ability to get things done) has shifted to a supra-national level.

The concept of sovereignty doesn’t change, but the ways it is applied to multi-ethnic and multi-jurisdictional areas like Europe has to be rethought.

There is no point in a slew of treaties, organisations and agencies that form the scaffolding of the emerging global governance structure regulating and superintending everything from nuclear weapons to the fishing of halibut, and all of them embody election less intergovernmentalism.

What European citizens need much more is that someone governs. That someone responds to the challenges of our time.

The Council is the heart of the problem.

The Council operates as a senate-like legislative chamber, yet there are no elections to this body. It is as if you were permitted to vote for your local MP, but there were never any general elections.

Unless institutional bodies can be censured or dismissed as a body by one common parliament, you don’t have sovereign democracy. So that should be the objective in Europe.

The sovereignty of parliaments has been dissolved by the Eurozone and the Eurogroup; the capacity to fulfil one’s mandate at the level of the nation-state has been eradicated and therefore any manifestos addressed to citizens of a particular member state become theoretical exercises.

If we want a Commission that responds to the needs of the real world, we should encourage Commissioners to seek the necessary rendez-vous with democracy.

But a vision alone will not suffice.Afficher l'image d'origine

(Each is a famous European then whose reach extended much further than their time or their geography, and helped to shape the world we live in today.)

The European Union was never meant to be the beginning of a republic or a democracy where ‘we, the people of Europe’ rule the roost.

When democracy produces what the establishment likes to hear then democracy is not a threat, but when it produces anti-establishment forces and demands, that’s when democracy becomes a threat.

The left has for decades, perhaps hundreds of years, argued that one day, global democracy would be achieved, but until now this has always been something for the far-off future, an abstract dream.

In the era of globalisation, the steady removal of decision-making from democratic chambers by EU elites is serving as a blueprint for post-democratic governance around the world.

The question is how can we harness the discontent it is creating?

Gone is the elites view that elections cannot be allowed to change established economic policy. In other words, that democracy is fine as long as it does not threaten to change anything!

The network of post-democratic intergovernmental structures must be replaced with true global democracy.

If not achieved we will have disintegration and a bleak future.

The central question of the debate will be how to share power, build alliances and establish not only a genuine dialogue, but an equitable distribution of responsibilities between the State, market and ‘community’ at the local, national and European level.

Most of all, at a time when the world seem beset by multiple crises and the disturbing rise of reactionary forces, it seems apt to remember what Antonio Gramsci once wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new is yet to be born. And in the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

How ultimately can social movements assert their own power through cultural forms to reject the dangerous symptoms of morbidity and bring the new into being?

What role has the technology industry played in reinforcing power or confronting power?

How has the concentrated power in the ‘Silicon Valleys’ of the world used cultural exchange and shaped culture to further increase their power – and the power of other elites?

How can we build a culture that reinforces values of the commons, solidarity, and harmony with nature?

With what can we replace the legal, political and international processes that have facilitated this power grab. Rather than an ideology that has been designed to benefit certain interests.

Cultural hegemony has also sustained powerful structures from the military through to the banking sector. However, power only becomes hegemonic when it is reinforced continuously through cultural processes that make the exercise of power seem ‘natural’ and irreversible.

The idea you can have the Single Market without political union clashes with the political reality that the only way to have free trade these days is by having common legislation on patents, industry standards, competition rules etc.

Now is the time to begin discussing what global democracy would look like concretely and to start to build it. The network of post-democratic intergovernmental structures must be replaced with true global democracy.

We could start with the United Nations. It has more than 30 affiliated organizations — known as programs, funds, and specialized agencies — with their own membership, leadership, and budget processes. (see previous posts)Afficher l'image d'origine

After World War II, the most powerful governments created the UN Security Council with special seats for themselves.

The option is to rebuild the UN system, giving economic, environmental, and social decision-making the same legal mandatory status as decision-making in the Security Council, so that multilateralism could govern globalisation;

The innovations, enhanced by the new information and communication technologies, of the new movements (culturally rooted in the 1960s’ break of the historic bond between knowledge and authority), has been an ability, creatively to deal with uncertainty, to let go of control without losing the possibility of collaborative agency on the basis of shared principles and a broadly agreed purpose.

It does not matter how wealthy, successful, or famous one has been on earth.  All the money and prestige in the world will be useless on your departure.

Merry Christmas.

THE BEADY EYE SAYS: DON’T BRING YOUR IPAD TO BED.

07 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Google Knowledge., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Life., Modern Day Communication., Modern day life., Social Media., Technology, The Future, The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World

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(This is a short follow-up read)  Re the post:

The Beady Eye Asks: Where does it end? Google.)Afficher l'image d'origine

More and more people are taking their tablets to bed with them to surf the web, check Facebook or email before switching off the light.

Few of us need to live our lives accessible to others at all times of the day.

Text alerts, Facebook notifications, Twitter mentions, and emails are often nothing more than distractions that keep us from the world right in front of us.

They clutter our mind with nonessential information. Technology ought to serve us, not the other way around.

However technology is altered human physiology. It makes us think differently, feel differently, even dream differently. It affects our memory, attention spans and sleep cycles.

We are now hard-wired to assume our phones are ringing, even when they’re not.

In a Google-happy world, when virtually any scrap of information is instantly at our fingertips, we don’t bother retaining facts.

Some cognition experts have praised the effects of tech on the brain, lauding its ability to organize our lives and free our minds for deeper thinking. Others fear tech has crippled our attention spans and made us uncreative and impatient when it comes to anything analog.

If there are areas of our life where technology is doing more harm than good it’s bed but the idea of a technology-free bedroom is a counter-cultural thought.

However the benefits of a technology-free bedroom should not be overlooked and dismissed so quickly. The most important, intimate conversations take place in your bedroom. Couples who keep a TV OR IPADS in the bedroom have sex half as often as those who don’t.  Besides, most of our excuses can be overcome with some creative thinking.  People who spend time on social media tend to experience higher levels of envy, loneliness, frustration, and anger.Afficher l'image d'origine

Social media interaction holds some benefit. But if we can intentionally remove these unhealthy emotions from our bedroom, it allows space for our minds to separate from the day’s activities.

Keeping your bedroom as a notification-free zone results in a more peaceful, engaged, calming environment.

Checking Facebook/Twitter before putting your feet on the floor is not living.

If you don’t want to feel like a zombie during the day, the findings are clear:

Read an actual, printed book if you must stimulate your mind before bed.

So if you’re having trouble sleeping, consider actually putting all those pesky electronics away and give your brain a chance to fully shut itself down when you’re looking for some shuteye.

To understand what critical and creative thinking is, an individual first must understand what thinking is.

Thinking is any mental activity that helps formulate or solve a problem, make a decision, or fulfill a desire to understand. It is searching for answers, a reaching for meaning that includes numerous mental activities throughout the process.
or
Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized.
or
Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting.
Thinking is critical to a person everyday life. 
People often fear the worse and manage their life’s around news or information they hear; therefore, it is very important to use critical thinking when analyzing issues, solving problems, and making everyday decisions. 
Today’s technology is target and customize ads with unparalleled precision. In fact, advertising is getting more personal, more engaging, more interesting and more thought-provoking than ever. It will result in your children having their brains wired in ways that may make them less, not more, prepared to thrive in this crazy new world of technology.
On the other hand:
Given the ease with which information can be found these days, it only stands to reason that knowing where to look is becoming more important for children than actually knowing something. Not having to retain information in our brain may allow it to engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem solving.
This may be so;
Truth is so about something, the reality of the matter, as distinguished from what people wish were so, believe to be so, or assert to be so.
Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years. More than 85 percent of video games contain violence.
The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring.

There is no hard and fast rules concerning the source of creativity.

Morning people have more insights in the evening. Night owls have their breakthroughs in the morning.

Your Best Creative Time Is Not When You Think.

Dreams aren’t supposed to make any sense.

They’re just what happens when you put your head down for the night and your brain decides to bullshit you for eight hours about getting chased by Bigfoot while your teeth fall out.

With that said, dreams have been responsible for some major creative and scientific discoveries in the course of human history. A surprising number of society’s innovations have come from dreams, proving that sometimes there is the method to your brain’s madness.

For example …

The tune for “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney in a dream..

Larry Page and Sergey Brin got the idea for “downloading the entire web onto computers”.dreamed it one night when he was 23 years-old.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Frankenstein was inspired by a dream.

Otto Loewi (1873-1961) won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses came to him in a dream.

Edison took short trips into the subconscious mind. There, he accessed ideas. Or perhaps, he bypassed the conscious mind and all its barriers to creativity

Elias Howe invented the sewing machine in 1845 dreamt it.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was one of India’s greatest mathematical geniuses. He made substantial contributions to the analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptical functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.  According to Ramanujan, inspiration and insight for his work many times came to him in his dreams..

The history of science is full of stories of scientists claiming a “flash of inspiration” which motivated them. One of the best known is from the chemist August Kekulé (1829-1896), who proposed that structure of molecules followed particular rules. Kekulé recounted that the structure of benzene came to him in a dream, in which rows of atoms wound like serpents before him; one of the serpents seized its own tail: “the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. I came awake like a flash of lightning.

Hannibal, who many described as a military genius, based his battle plans against the Romans on his dreams.

The Periodic Table:
Nineteenth-century Chemist Dimitri Mendeleyev fell asleep while chamber music was being played in the next room. He understood in a dream that the basic chemical elements are all related to each other in a manner similar to the themes and phrases in music.

A young Albert Einstein conceived the theory of relativity in a dream.

Modern Robotics:
Dennis Hong, genius innovator at University of Virginia uses the interface of sleep and waking to access ideas.

Jack Nicklaus’ Golf Swing came to him in a dream.

Insulin, came to Frederik Banting,in a dream.

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined to such an extent that the world is now in dire need of readers intellects – imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking.

Social media may well promote a culture of sharing, but there is little point in sharing trivia. So share this post. Your brain will thank you. 

Just in case you get the impression that I am totally against Technology. I believe technology can actually increase your intelligence.

The best way to make technology work for you instead of against you is to be smart about it—utilize it in order to allow you the time and mental energy to engage in higher-level cognitive activities, not as a crutch because you don’t feel like activating your neurons.Afficher l'image d'origine

But don’t ask your device how to make that happen—figure that one out for yourself.

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET.

18 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by in Humanity., The Future, The Internet., The world to day.

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( A Rather long read 20th to 30th minutes)

This is a sort of follow on from the Post – These days what it means to be Human.

Today, 43% of the world’s population are connected to the internet, mostly in developed countries. 

The ubiquitous presence of digital technologies and, along with it, ongoing connection of people, information, smart devices, sensors, objects etc, across intelligent networks, various types of clouds and processes is sometimes called The Internet of Everything.

By approaching it as a “thing” we risk losing ourselves in a Babylonian confusion.

That consumer fascination/applications aspect comes on top of all the real-life possibilities as they start getting implemented right now and the contextual and technological realities, making the Internet of Things one of those many pervasive technological umbrella terms, leading to genuine digital transformation opportunities in several areas, digital disruptions and, simply, business opportunities in the broadest sense.

There is no doubt that the internet is changing the way we live, work, produce and consume.

Smart meters:  To improve efficiency in energy, from a household perspective (savings, better monitoring etc.) and a utility company perspective (billing, better processes and of course also dealing with natural resources in a more efficient way as they are not endless).

Retail:  In an ongoing effort to digitize the consumer experience. Digital signage in retail outlets is in fact the big driver in 2015.

Whether our species evolves or collapses depends on what we do now with With such extensive reach, digital technologies cannot help but disrupt many of our existing models of business and government.

We become weaker when we keep giving away our power to technology–that is, to external objects. We then become dependent upon these objects, and soon get to the point where we can’t do anything for ourselves.

The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60.

We are entering the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological transformation driven by a ubiquitous and mobile internet.

Within the next decade, it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet.

By 2025, 10% of people are expected to be wearing clothes connected to the internet and the first implantable mobile phone is expected to be sold.

The question is :

If almost everything is connected, will it transform how we do business and go about our daily lives and will it help us manage resources more efficiently and sustainably or will it turn all of us into Google Dummies / Amazon Consumers and how will this affect our personal privacy, data security and our personal relationships?

It is changing our ability to cross the great divide of otherness and really speak to each other in unique and powerful ways.

The growth of the digital economy, the rise of the service sector and the spread of international production networks have all been game-changers for international trade.

If the internet is not made available to all earth’s inhabitants at an affordable cost the miraculous healing awaits this planet will never happen.

Just look at the growing unease over globalization, which is evident from the number of questions being asked about the power of corporations and the adequacy of the regulations governing employment, environmental issues and taxation. All distracting us from  long-term investment, which has serious implications for global growth.

We’re already seeing and feeling the impacts of climate change with weather events such as droughts and storms becoming more frequent and intense, and changing rainfall patterns.

Insurers estimate that since the 1980s weather-related economic loss events have tripled.

There is only one way of achieving change. We must accept our new responsibility to collectively tend the garden rather than fight over the turf.

One thing we can agree on is that the internet of Things still has a long way to go and that growth of connected devices or “intelligent things” will indeed grow exponentially over the coming years. 

There is a LOT that can still be connected.

There are numerous reasons for the growing attention for the Internet of Things.

While you will often will read about the decreasing costs of storage, processing and material or the third platform with the cloud, big data, smart (mobile) technologies/devices, etc. there certainly is also a societal/people dimension with a strong consumer element.

Experts predict the Internet will become ‘like electricity’ — less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people’s lives for good and ill.

The world is moving rapidly towards ubiquitous connectivity that will further change how and where people associate, gather and share information, and consume media.

The experts agree on the technology change that lies ahead, even as they disagree about its ramifications. Most believe there will be:

  • A global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment built through the continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases, and massive data centers in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things.
  • “Augmented reality” enhancements to the real-world input that people perceive through the use of portable/wearable/implantable technologies.
  • Disruption of business models established in the 20th century (most notably impacting finance, entertainment, publishers of all sorts, and education).
  • Tagging, databasing, and intelligent analytical mapping of the physical and social realms.

Here is what I see.

It is revolutionizing most human interaction, especially affecting health, education, work, politics, economics, and entertainment.

On the downside:

Interpersonal ethics, surveillance, terror, and crime, may lead societies to question how best to establish security and trust while retaining civil liberties.

More and more, humans will be in a world in which decisions are being made by an active set of cooperating devices. The Internet (and computer-mediated communication in general) will become more pervasive but less explicit and visible.

It will, to some extent, blend into the background of all we do. It will be a world more integrated than ever before.

We will see more planetary friendships, rivalries, romances, work teams, study groups, and collaborations.

We will become far more knowledgeable about the consequences of our actions; we will edit our behavior more quickly and intelligently.

It will change how we think about people, how we establish trust, how we negotiate change, failure, and success.

We will grow accustomed to seeing the world through multiple data layers. This will change a lot of social practices, such as dating, job interviewing and professional networking, and gaming, as well as policing and espionage.

With mobile technologies and information-sharing apps becoming ubiquitous, we can expect some significant improvement in the awareness of otherwise illiterate and ill-informed rural populations to opportunities missed out by manipulative and corrupt governments. Like the Arab Spring, we can expect more and more uprisings to take place as people become more informed and able to communicate their concerns.

There will be increased awareness of the massive disparities in access to health care, clear water, education, food, and human rights.

The power of nation-states to control every human inside its geographic boundaries may start to diminish.

The problems that humanity now faces are problems that can’t be contained by political borders or economic systems. Traditional structures of government and governance are therefore ill-equipped to create the sensors, the flows, the ability to recognize patterns, the ability to identify root causes, the ability to act on the insights gained, the ability to do any or all of this at speed, while working collaboratively across borders and time zones and sociopolitical systems and cultures.

From climate change to disease control, from water conservation to nutrition, from the resolution of immune-system-weakness conditions to solving the growing obesity problem, the answer lies in what the Internet will be in decades to come.

By 2025, we will have a good idea of its foundations.

The Internet will generate several new related networks. Some will require verified identification to access, while others will promise increased privacy.

The biggest impact on the world will be universal access to all human knowledge.

Will the Internet make it possible for our entire civilization to collapse together, in one big awful heap? Possibly.

But the Internet has already made it possible for us to use one of our unique graces — the ability to share knowledge — for good, and to a degree never before possible.

We have to think seriously about the kinds of conflicts that will arise in response to the growing inequality enabled and amplified by means of networked transactions that benefit smaller and smaller segments of the global population.

Social media will facilitate and amplify the feelings of loss and abuse. They will also facilitate the sharing of examples and instructions about how to challenge, resist, and/or punish what will increasingly come to be seen as unjust.

Cyber-terrorism will become commonplace.

Privacy and confidentiality of any and all personal will become a thing of the past.

Online ‘diseases’ — mental, physical, social, addictions (psycho-cyber drugs) — will affect families and communities and spread willy-nilly across borders.

The digital divide will grow and worsen beyond the control of nations or global organizations such as the UN. This will increasingly polarize the planet between haves and have-nots. Global companies will exploit this polarization. Digital criminal networks will become realities of the new frontiers. Terrorism, both by organizations and individuals, will be daily realities. The world will become less and less safe, and only personal skills and insights will protect individuals.

There will be greater group-think, group-speak and mob mentality … More uninformed individuals will influence others to the detriment of standard of living and effective government.

Governments will become much more effective in using the Internet as an instrument of political and social control. That is, filters will be increasingly valuable and important, and effective and useful filters will be able to charge for their services. People will be more than happy to trade the free-wheeling aspect common to many Internet sites for more structured and regulated environments.

The information we want will increasingly find its way to us, as networks learn to accurately predict our interests and weaknesses. But that will also tempt us to stop seeking out knowledge, narrowing our horizons, even as we delve evermore deep.

The privacy premium may also be a factor: only the relatively well-off (and well-educated) will know how to preserve their privacy in 2025.

The most neglected aspect of the impact is in the geopolitics of the Internet. There are very few experts focused on this, and yet the rise of digital media promises significant disruption to relations between and among states. Some of the really important dimensions include the development of transnational political actors/movements, the rise of the virtual state, the impact of digital diplomacy efforts, the role of information in undermining state privilege (think Wikileaks), and … the development of cyber-conflict (in both symmetric and asymmetric forms).

It is going to systemically change our understandings of being human, being social, and being political.

It is not merely a tool of enforcing existing systems; it is a structural change in the systems that we are used to. And this means that we are truly going through a paradigm shift — which is celebratory for what it brings, but it also produces great precariousness because existing structures lose meaning and valence, and hence, a new world order needs to be produced in order to accommodate for these new modes of being and operation.

The greatest impact of the Internet is what we are already witnessing, but it is going to accelerate.

More people will lose their grounding in the realities of life and work, instead considering those aspects of the world amenable to expression as information as if they were the whole world.

The scale of the interactions possible over the Internet will tempt more and more people into more interactions than they are capable of sustaining, which on average will continue to lead each interaction to be more superficial.

Given there is strong evidence that people are much more willing to commit petty crimes against people and organizations when they have no face-to-face interaction, the increasing proportion of human interactions mediated by the Internet will continue the trend toward less respect and less integrity in our relations.

The Internet, automation, and robotics will disrupt the economy as we know it.

How will we provide for the humans who can no longer earn money through labor?

The opportunities are simply tremendous. Information, the ability to understand that information, and the ability to act on that information will be available ubiquitously … Or we could become a ‘brave new world’ where the government (or corporate power) knows everything about everyone everywhere and every move can be foreseen, and society is taken over by the elite with control of the technology…

The good news is that the technology that promises to turn our world on its head is also the technology with which we can build our new world.  It offers an unbridled ability to collaborate, share, and interact.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

It is a very good time to start inventing the future.

The most significant impact of the Internet is getting us to imagine different paths that the future may take. These paths help us to be better prepared for long-term contingencies; by identifying key indicators, and amplifying signals of change, they help us ensure that our decisions along the way are flexible enough to accommodate change…Afficher l'image d'origine

That billions more people are poised to come online in the emerging economies seems certain. Yet much remains uncertain: from who will have access, how, when, and at what price to the Internet’s role as an engine for innovation and the creation of commercial, social, and human value. As users, industry players, and policymakers, the interplay of decisions that we make today and in the near future will determine the evolution of the Internet and the shape it takes by 2025, in both intended and unintended ways.

Regardless of how the future unfolds, the Internet will evolve in ways we can only begin to imagine. By allowing ourselves to explore and rehearse divergent and plausible futures for the Internet, not only do we prepare for any future, we can also help shape it for the better.

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. ARE WE ALL BEING DUMBED DOWN?

09 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by in Humanity., Modern Day Democracy., Politics., Social Media., The Future, The Internet., The USA., The world to day., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Politics

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Some time ago I posted are we all being Googlified.  

We use the internet and social media is not so much to expand our minds as to lose them.

Social media does not democratise debate. It limits it to the resilient, offering tweet-size solutions.

We tend to validate what we already believe, wish or suspect is true as opposed to challenging our way of thinking.

In this overheated world fulled by attack ads, and social media frenzies, the only think that matter is how an individual feels about something. Feeling validates itself and anything else is an establishment conspiracy.

It is well-known that if you want to rule a people keep them ignorant.

Take the USA for instance.

One has only to look at the rise of Donald Trump, the Tea Party, Climate change deniers, Creationists, and the hold these have and the lengths believers go to push their agendas, contrary to tangible, scientific proof, to understand that ignorance is something people invest in heavily.

In a country that was founded on Immigration the USA that has built some 650 miles of wall along the 1,954-mile US-Mexico boundary. There are around 16,238 murders per year in the United States; this averages out to around 44 murders per day. There were 2.24 million prisoners in the United States as of Dec. 31, 2011. That accounted for about 22 percent of the global prison population.

“It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population.” 

America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance.

Here as elsewhere we see politicians more concerned with appearing approachable than smart or engaging in genuine political discourse.

Celebrity gossip dominates news feeds and cycles.

We have a generation that have not read a book since leaving school. How take selfies posted on Facebook to say look at me I did this or I am here, got the t-shirt. Who cares. Almost all of us have been there before you.

Topical TV discussion ( on this side of the pond Question Time, Hard Talk, News Night and the like) shows use celebrities, sportspeople, or some one from the station’s stable of stars to discuss controversial issues eschewing experts and reducing complex subjects to clickbait.

Shrinking government funding for Education, and other artistic, creative, literary and scientific endeavors, works to erode the significance of scholarship and creativity and all they entail as respectable and seriously useful occupations or pastimes.

Universities are changing as a consequence of fee charging and anti-intellectualism. Instead of teaching students the joy of learning and critical thinking, we train them for jobs.

Ignorance should never be held up as inspirational, convenient fictions, don’t replace facts, and aggressive cyber trolls never silence the truth.

A clever country is where intellectuals are not scorned as elite, but recognised as essential.

If we want inequality to disappear our Leaders must educate for free and capitalism with its unrelenting greed must pay. ( see World Aid commission of 0.05%)

 

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE IN THE WORLD: PART TWO: EDUCATION.

30 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Education, Humanity., Modern Day Communication., Social Media., Technology, The Future, The Internet., Unanswered Questions., Where's the Global Outrage.

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Education can contribute significantly to the promotion of mutual understanding and tolerance.

Today’s revolution in social communications involves a fundamental reshaping of the elements by which people comprehend the world about them, and verify and express what they comprehend. The internet has significant effects on communicating, teaching and learning.

What today is called the digital divide, will be the Educational Disaster of the Future.

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It takes a wide range of different communication styles to get across to all the different learning styles that exist, but as our modern world evolves and becomes more sophisticated, so must our learning institutions.

Technology enthusiasts have long heralded the power of technology—from the printing press, to blackboards, to the laptop—to transform education.

The potential of technology to help improve education has significance beyond teaching children reading and math.

Quality education plays an important role in promoting economic development, improving health and nutrition and reducing maternal and infant mortality rates. Economic growth, for example, can be directly impacted by the quality of the education systems in developing countries.

Our first problem is that the internet is not always accessible by all learners and teachers. The second problem is though English all over the world is taught widely as a second language its is the primary language of the internet.

As a result in most of the non-English speaking parts of the world the internet it is only a tool for educational activities.

In my previous post in this series we looked at Communication.

I ended that post by stating that Education is Communication.

With most of the world deprived of any Internet connection we are WiFi our way to a digital divide that will have more than serious consequences for those countries but for all of us. 

Of course, education has used technology for centuries, from blackboards to textbooks, yet in recent history very little has changed in how education is delivered.Afficher l'image d'origine

Modern information and communications technology holds great promise in helping bring quality learning to some of the world’s poorest and hardest to reach communities. But it is highly unlikely that this will happen.

Many emerging and developing nations will be left out of the internet revolution entirely.

Indeed, in some of the most remote regions of the globe, mobile phones and other forms of technology are being used in ways barely envisioned in the United States or Europe.

Here are a few examples.

About half of online Chinese (52%) have used the internet to buy products in the past 12 months.

Majorities of internet users in Bangladesh (62%) and India (55%) say they have looked for a job online in the past year.

54% of internet users across emerging and developing countries use the internet to get political news and information.

In Venezuela, three-quarters of cell phone owners (who constitute 88% of the adult population) use their device to take pictures or video.

More than six-in-ten internet users in Poland (64%) say they have gotten health information online in the past 12 months.

Over half of the reduction in child mortality worldwide since 1970 is linked to “increased educational attainment in women of reproductive age.”Internet Has Most Positive Influence on Education, Least Positive on Morality

Back to Education.

Four years ago the iPad didn’t even exist.

We don’t know what will be the current technology in another four. Perhaps it will be wearable devices such as Google Glass.

You don’t have to be a genius or a clairvoyant to see that Education as we know it is rapidly becoming obsolete.

So what is the future?

On the possibilities of recent forms of technology, often known as Information Communication Technology (ICT). ICT refers to technologies that provide access to information through telecommunications. It is generally used to describe most technology uses and can cover anything from radios, to mobile phones, to laptops.

The future is about access, anywhere learning and collaboration, both locally and globally.

But the questions are:

What will education be? Who or what will be doing the Education? For what purpose?  Is it desirable that we all end up being educated by the cloud if the future of education technology is all about the cloud and anywhere access. 

Thanks to the cloud and mobile devices, technology will be integrated into every part of school. In fact, it won’t just be the classrooms that will change. Games fields, gyms and school trips will all change. Whether offsite or on site the school, teachers, students and support staff will all be connected.

In my ideal world, all classrooms will be paperless.

Unfortunately educators working in and with developing countries rarely have an expertise or even a basic grounding in the wide range of technological innovations and their potential uses for education.

Even the most seasoned education expert is likely to stare blankly if terms such as ‘cloud computing’, ‘m-learning’, or ‘total cost of ownership’ are introduced into the conversation.

Students will take ownership of their own learning. Rather than being ‘taught.’

Students can learn independently and in their own way. They could be in the same room or in different countries.

Will this form of education be mass brainwashing?

The cloud will set, collect and grade work online. Students will have instant access to grades, comments and work via a computer, smart phone or tablet.

The great disadvantage will be the lack of oral communication.

The iPads and other mobile technology are the ‘now’.

Reflecting western style democracy.

Schools of the future could have a traditional cohort of students, as well as online only students who live across the country or even the world. Things are already starting to move this way with the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Infrastructure is paramount to the future of technology in education.

This should be happening now.

Teaching and learning is going to be social but people are even more leery of the internet’s effect on morality. It is should be driven by the question: How is this changing your capacity to engage the world effectively?

Universities should teach students how to deal with a world in constant motion, a world that doesn’t come labeled and arranged for you, a world in which you have to work with a lot of other people both because you need their help and because they need to understand why you think what you’re doing makes sense.

This is what is going to be importance to our world which is reminding us so every day of the week that Inequality is at the source of all our troubles.

We’ve lost sight of this, but we can reclaim it through education. 

It is possible to say that technology is not a purpose but only a tool for all humanistic necessities. This at the moment is totally untrue.

If you don’t believe me, look a Wall Street.

 The winner in this process will be humanity as a whole” and not just “a wealthy elite that controls science, technology and the planet’s resources”;

The Internet transmit and help instill a set of cultural values—ways of thinking about social relationships, family, religion, the human condition—whose novelty and glamour can challenge and overwhelm traditional cultures.

The Internet far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here in Education that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come”

The Internet can make an enormously valuable contribution to human life. It can foster prosperity and peace, intellectual and aesthetic growth, mutual understanding among people’s and nations on a global scale. If it is married into Education for all.

 

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Wall Street : Every trillionth of a second shares, stock, currency, futures, are bought and sold for profit by Computer programs.

It’s no wonder that a median of only 29% say the internet is a good influence on morality, while 42% say it is a bad influence.

There’s still a way to go to ensure all schools are ready for the future of technology.

So go now, and look with your newly educated eyes at this world.

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If students aren’t proficient in their studies to begin with and technology is used incorrectly, a whole mess of problems will arise.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WE ALL BEING BRAINWASHED. THE WAY YOU THINK IS BEING CHANGED.

11 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by in Google it., Google Knowledge., Humanity., Life., Social Media., Technology, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized

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A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.Afficher l'image d'origine

THE INTERNET IS CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK.

There’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.

For me, as for others, the Net 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 my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

When we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

It is replacing real wisdom with the conceit of wisdom.

It is filling us up with “content,” to the point that we are sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

It is destroying deep thinking, and eroding quiet spaces.

It is replacing compassion with selfishness. It is partly to blame for the current world conflicts.

Our thinking, has taken on a “staccato” quality. A form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source we have already visited.

Smartphones  have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight.

They are  becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through our eyes and ears and into our minds.time from human events.

We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.

But there comes a design point when there are so many tools available that our environments lose their simplicity and the cost in added complexity outweighs the benefits of convenience.

In fact it is makes us demonstrably less efficient. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV, our conscience.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s imageDaniel J Levitan

Email, telephone calls, electronic discussion groups, websites, pushed intranet news, letters and memos, faxes, stick-ems, calendars, pagers, and, of course, physical conversations and meetings, are just a few of the communicative events that bombard today’s knowledge worker. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

Printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.

Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.

It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our

We can turn the ringer off our phones, we can close our doors, we can auto-filter our email, we can personalize search engines, ask people to honor privacy, and so forth. But blocking out sacred time segments or sealing ourselves off from outside contact and even filtering email is not a serious solution. 

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Google carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers. Which is totally untrue.

Their desire is to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter.”If you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

A load of cobblers. To solve problems that have never been solved before, and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there.

If our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence it would be more than unsettling. We would drain of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” turning  our thoughts and actions into scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.

Weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

Remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.  Every information technology carries an intellectual ethic. We stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

What the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

The missing premise is quality: The ratio of high quality to low quality information is falling.

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large-scale.

Information is relentlessly pushed at us, and no matter how much we get we feel we need more, and of better quality and focus.

  • Pushed information is information arriving in our work space over which we have little short-term control – the memos, letters, newspapers, email, telephone calls, journals, calendars etc. that land in one of our in boxes. To deal with it we have to make decisions. Is this garbage? Might it be useful? When? Where should I put it? Must I make a new file or new category for this?
  • Pulled or retrievable information is information we can tap into when we want to find an answer to a question or acquire background knowledge on a topic. Most people harbor a lingering belief that even more relevant information lies outside, somewhere, and if found will save having to duplicate effort.

Our lives ought to get easier in information rich environments but the question is at what cost.

He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement is as good as dead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet no search engine seems to return hits with sufficient precision to save us from having to browse dozens of useless pages in our effort to berry pick the best items. The result is that we spend more time searching

more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them.

we need a new theoretical understanding of our activity space and our dynamic relation to our environments.Cognitive overload is a brute fact of modern life. It is not going to disappear. In almost every facet of our work life, and in more and more of our domestic life, the jobs we need to do and the activity spaces we have in which to perform those jobs are ecologies saturated with overload.

As technology increases the omnipresence of information, both of the pushed and pulled sort, the consequence for the workplace, so far, is that we are more overwhelmed. There is little reason to suppose this trend to change.