( A ten minute read)
Some posts back I wrote a piece asking if there was any Intelligence between Donald Trump’s ears and a subsequent post on what a vote is worth. ( see previous posts)
We live in turbulent times and the structure of the source of power is changing.
Gathering political information via social media brings an increased risk of digesting information from questionable sources.
Why?
Because Facebook now dominates the news being read by young people and its domination is not just national – it is global.
It may well be time to think about what societies need to do to counter this growing, global news monopoly. Facebook may not be in the business of news production but its impact on news is already profound and not always positive.
Because it is provided by organisations or politicians that are paying Facebook for their attention. Gone are the days of the blind following the blind it’s now the misinformed following the distracted reading their news on their Facebook/Twitter feeds.
Ever since the so-called Facebook Obama election of 2008, our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens, where we find cover political campaigns more like a horse race, rather than focusing on the issues.
Donald Trump, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm.
Donald Trump got the equivalent of about $55 million in free advertising space from the eight major media outlets.
Trump a vast web audience—four million followers on Twitter alone.
The best way to dominate the online discussion is not to inform but to provoke which is the changing dynamics of political races. You’re only as relevant as your last tweet. What’s important now is not so much image as a personality that bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.
The more visceral the message, the more quickly it circulates and the longer it holds the darting public eye.
Elections are pivotal in shaping that world – for better or worse.
Up to recently elections were the voice of the people expressed by voting.
Hopefully this will remain so, however fears of a robot apocalypse mask the actual problems that we face by increasingly letting our lives be run by algorithms.
AIs will have and are having a knock-on effects that we have not prepared for.
When a computer spits out an answer we are typically unable to see how it got there.
There are algorithms all around us they may seem neutral and objective and unbiased but in a world of pervasive connectivity AI is the key to harnessing the power of electrical data prior to voting. It allows for millions of election related options that are posted online to be classified automatically and analysed to understand the pulse of an election.
Algorithms are now being used to make life-changing decisions such as when a prisoner should be given parole, or who gets elected. So it is time to forget everything you know about democracy.
Microsoft is building an A.I. empire and will appoint its leaders.
Twitter did exactly that : Producing a man who bankrupted his companies not once, not twice, but six times.
( The Trump Taj Mahal, 1991, Trump Castle, 1992,Trump Plaza and Casino, 1992, Plaza Hotel, 1992, Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts, 2004, Trump Entertainment Resorts, 2009,) and Trump America in 2020, which currently has a National Debt bordering on 20 trillion.
Since his election to be the next President of the US the media headlines are littered with the rhetoric of powerful people in the form of CRINGING WORLD POLITICAL LEADERS CHANGING THEIR SPOTS IN ORDER TO LICK UP TO A MAN THAT HAS MANY CHARACTERISTICS OF A FASCIST.
Mr Trump’s views are some of the most extreme in American politics.
[He has:
- advocated deporting nearly 11 million undocumented workers.
- called for a border wall to be built between the US and Mexico.
- said he would force Mexico to pay for the wall by threatening to ban Mexicans in the US from sending remittances home.
- Mr Trump changed his position on abortion at least five times, alarming many social conservatives. This flexibility has convinced many social conservatives that Mr Trump cannot be trusted to appoint a Supreme Court justice who would oppose abortion rights.
- Mr Trump has aggressively criticised international trade agreements.
- He has repeatedly said the US should rethink its commitments to Nato, saying other member countries do not pay their fair share of the organisation’s budget. He has also floated an idea that South Korea and Japan could arm themselves with nuclear weapons – eliminating the need for US protection.]
In the last few years the Internet has borne witness to and facilitated a great deal of social and societal change.
While undoubtedly carrying the potential to do great good, the Internet has been plagued with numerous impediments NONE WORSE THAN ITS ASSISTANCE IN THE ELECTION OF DONALD TRUMP.
I am aware that the Internet cannot be blamed in isolation.
The inequalities of the Capitalist system is a major contributor, but the dumbing down by the smart phone Apps are also influencing the reasons why we cast a vote.
If you not convinced the only thing that might be more perplexing than the psychology of Donald Trump is the psychology of his supporters. It isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed.
We now find ourselves looking a man and his team of advisors that has an ultimate goal to pursue national greatness in disrespect of the cost which will take the form of a state that will be anti-democratic and totalitarian. The state needed to fulfill this goal is a state that breeds ( As did all major fascist regimes that have ever existed) political parties that spend more time arguing than implementing policies.
At the same time, there is a paradoxical here with a resurgence of interest in universalism within the international legal context and the discourse of human rights, which at this point lack a firm philosophical foundation.
With a world facing problems that requires a vast resurgence of interest in universalism.
Power use to be what goes on in the head, and what goes on is a recognition of a reason – or better and more often: various reasons – to act differently than one would have without that reason…Power rests on perceived and recognized justifications – some good, some bad, some in between. A threat can be seen as a justification, as can a good argument.
We are turning a blind eye to the day when we will have websites that are themselves artificially intelligent .
This type of power is not accountable and nobody can make it accountable. All AI decision-making is by definition, unknowable and will remain so till 2018 when a new European union comes into force giving citizens – right to an explanation.
This however will not be of much use as AI processes data in ways we can’t. Ask its creator how it achieves a certain result and you get a shrug.
These AIs brain responses are automatic, and not influenced by logic or reason.
What does it mean to act, and to act well?
We now have software writing software and soon we have unsupervised learning.
Even with all the technological advances we have seen over the last few years there still remains a large disconnect between technology and the general public.
How do we determine which actions are those which are moral, and which fall outside this sphere? And how do we negotiate the priority of all of these questions?
In fact, digital technology, particularly the internet, offers potential complications into human beings’ discussion and understanding of free will; even as the internet appears to open up options and capacities for individuals to exercise increased autonomy, it also has the potential to change the very ways in which human beings think, thereby impeding human capacities for meaningful self-reflection, a necessary if not sufficient criterion for rational autonomy.
The Internet, we’ve often been told, is a force for “democratization.
It’s worth asking, though, what kind of democracy is being promoted.
People skimmed headlines and posts, seeking information that reinforced their biases and rejecting contrary perspectives. The Internet inspired “participation,” but the participants ended up in “cloistered cocoons of cognitive consonance.”
The social networks operated by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google don’t just regulate the messages we receive. They regulate our responses. They shape, through the design of their apps and their information-filtering regimes, the forms of our discourse.
All social networks impose these kinds of formal constraints, both on what we see and on how we respond. The restrictions have little to do with the public interest. They reflect the commercial interests of the companies operating the networks as well as the protocols of software programming.
With the instantaneous transmission of information, the internet has revolutionized the way we do business, obtain knowledge, vote, and communicate with others. Instead of a one-way relationship in which the human agent has total control as the sole actor and the tool is merely the object acted upon – a mere means to an end which the human agent has in mind, it would be more accurate today in the face of digital technology, specifically the internet, to recognize that tools also act on their users. When we create things to use for our own purposes, these tools can and do indeed act back on us, in some cases changing the very ways we think.
It is especially poignant to make this observation in the face of the development of the internet because of information technology’s potential to dramatically augment or infringe on human autonomy.
While the internet may indeed open up choices and opportunities to people that were never there before, it also has the potential to degrade individuals’ deep reading capacities, which is a dangerous threat to these individuals’ claims to free will since deep reading is necessary for meaningful introspection which is necessary to claims on rational autonomy.
On the other hand as we continue to enter the digital age, the neutrality of the internet becomes a resource that we must fight to protect, or we risk our further advancement.
Maintaining net neutrality is not simply a matter of protecting existing standards and preventing the extension of authoritative powers, but instead is a matter of establishing a new fundamental human right in the digital age. We can only hope that in unity we can break the barriers which stand between us, and in so doing, provide a living and evolving blueprint for our mutual future.
The Internet is changing the way we think about power and its interaction with economic and international relations.
A blind acceptance of a narrative provided by the Algorithmic world is not acceptable.
Therefore before the names of just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant, and to make good that propriety which by mutual contract men acquire in recompense of the universal right they abandon.
As a matter of urgency must establish a world governing body to overlook all technology. ( see previous posts)
When it comes to Algorithms the stakes for society are too high because AI may have arbitrarily negative consequences. Algorithms are a source of power and how they manifests themselves in the world cannot be let to the wimp of Capitalism.
If we are to read beyond the archaic dichotomous representation of international conflict, daring to create your own mind on the matter, doing so involves more than simply good intentions and determination.
It requires obtaining a new type of dignity as “selfs.”
Moreover, a willingness to engage in a dialogue concerning Being will allow for a creative and broad interpretation of man’s relationship to his world, and the responsibilities and interconnectedness that characterize it when it is not defined simply as an atomistic “standing reserve.”
This shallow consideration of the context plagues the headlines and propagates a facile belief in domineering great powers as the ‘be all and end all’ saviors of world conflict. The two leading competitors for the prize of… (peace?) in Syria leads one down a dangerous path that bolsters a bellicose Waltzian ‘balance of power’ attitude and neglects the voice of the people. This can be seen in the unacceptable bloodstains of millions around the world to this day.
The implications of Internet Freedom and its assistance or impediment has a knock on effect for International Relations as a whole.
The internet has become such an indispensable part of our everyday life that it is incredibly difficult to imagine life before it. Luckily the general public can align with interest groups via the web, thus making such groups much larger and more powerful than ever before. Unfortunately Ethicists are still confronted by the traditional questions that have plagued them since the ancients. They have been cut adrift from the context out of which they developed, searching for a foundation which is not forthcoming.
The disproportionate impact of the internet on the presidency and special interest groups only furthers the gap of influence between the public and the president.
As we move forward into an era of increasingly powerful digital technologies we have to ask the question WHY IT IS that the electrical system of one of the most powerful country can only produce two candidates that endeavored to buy with billions of $ the position of USA President.
WHEN YOU OBSERVE what are the power dynamics and systems of knowledge in our modern world, and what are their relationships to concepts of morality in general? All men having right to all things: power only exists when such an acceptance exists. Therefore where there is no commonwealth, there nothing is unjust.
The power to decide how things shall be done, the power to shape frameworks within which states relate to each other, relate to people, or relate to corporate enterprises, control over security, production, finance, and knowledge.
What is authenticity? In that respect, like all forms of honesty—intellectual and other— a principle of authenticity stems above all from a powerful sense of universal respect and love.
Charismatic’ domination derives from a population that perceives their leader to be virtuous and deserving of their dedication.
Furthermore, because people perceive their leader’s charisma as being the basis for the validity of the state’s legitimacy, one may infer that they also view their leader as a virtuous person who they understand has an inner calling to lead.
That the supporters and friends of a charismatic leader orient their interests to be in line with his/hers because they genuinely believe in the allure of their leader’s personal qualities.
Hence, because a charismatic leader is someone who many people favor, and due to them believing in his/her devotion to the state, it follows that the validity of a state’s authority under a charismatic leader is dependent on their charisma.
Efforts to engage the public are meant to sidestep the special interest groups that have dominated governmental discourse over the past several decades. The dominant theme according to the “We The People” rollout is to open a dialogue directly between the people and the administration, one that will meaningfully impact policy and legislation. Yet, the website has not led to any significant legislation at present and so far it has failed to promote meaningful interaction between the people and the presidency.
Parliament is problematic because This weakens the state and, ultimately, the nation
This writing has merely touched the surface of the issues at hand.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37999969
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37999969
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