Never in history is such a question more important. Unfortunately, we live in a world of distractions.
In my previous post to this one, (THE HARDEST THING OF ALL TO SEE IS ALREADY THERE.) I attempted to say that the truth has no past.
By this, I meant that the truth is reality, and therefore religion and the state must be separated.
Only then can one hope for value with the same value or worth for all, or almost all, people. A value is considered universal when it goes beyond laws and beliefs; rather, it is considered to have the same meaning for all people and does not vary according to the societies that have evolved.
In fact, cultural relativism is a belief that opposes the existence of universal values; proposes that a value can not be universal because it is perceived differently in each culture.
Given the ambiguity of the term, the existence of universal values can only be understood as the values that have to do with the basic requirements of the human being. Such as Fresh Air, Freshwater, Food, Clean Energy.
Now with AI infiltrating our lives, it seems that the faster we travel, the importance of there place is getting lost.
It seems because there are no universal moral values, our command of science simply can not coexist with morals, and our internet fed imaginations
We talk about the central issues of our times: A universal pandemic, an economic depression, continuing wars, climate change, migration, artificial intelligence, rising inequalities, erosion of the power of the vote, loss of individualism, loss of connection to ecosystems, to mention just a few of the problems to define any values that are universal.
We have many governments doubling down on the blame game and brinkmanship.
We have bioengineering which alone is now much greater danger than a nuclear war.
We have the maldistribution of wealth.
We have world leaders unwilling to see beyond the next election.
We have the extinction rebellion.
We have non-transparent digital data.
We have 10.000 to 130,000 species going extinct each year.
We have a population of 7.7 billion
We have extreme weather and biodiversity loss.
I ask myself why is it that with so many of us tryin’ to improve society, not that much changes but I hope that we don’t make changes to satisfy the noisemakers.
Rather than separating one problem from another, we need to connect them.
i.e. Climate changes to war and war to climate changes.
The question remains.
> How do we the current guardians of the planet achieve a balance between living our lives and the life of the planet, that allows us to live them in the first place.
It is no longer that logic alone will solve the problems, nor protests, or political will but within functional societies, we do still have the ultimate weapon – VIEWING AND BUY POWER and both are available in every type and form of human culture.
They must be added to the deep emotions of religion if we are to achieve change.
The life of now economies and pay later must come to an end if we are to avoid the hazards of the future.
If Extinction Rebellion wants to be heard, it will not do so on top of bamboo towers stopping newspapers to be deliveries, or sticking themselves to windows.
It must use social media digital platforms to encourage its supporters to use their buying power to attack profit for profit sake.
Certain human characteristics as valuable – life regardless of whether or not it is believed in said characteristic.
PROFIT WITHOUT CONTRIBUTION TO UNIVERSAL VALUES IS THE ENEMY.
With these weapons, we can effect change and avoid the hazards to come.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
As global citizens, the news is packed with statistics and updates on the challenges we face. Most of these challenges have existed from time memorial and are too large to be solved by one person at a time and if they affect huge numbers of people we are numb by their enormity.
Photographs can be effective for a while. They capture our attention — they get us to see the reality, to glimpse the reality at a scale we can understand and connect to emotionally. But then there has to be somewhere to go with it.
“There is no constant value for human life.”
Granted that certain global issues cannot be solved by on-the-ground, grassroots-style projects like human rights, climate change, wars, etc.
So is it a perception problem?
No matter how hard we try we are unable to perceive the whole earth never mind the Universe as one.
We witness this many times in history when the value of a single life diminishes against the backdrop of a larger tragedy and now we are once again witnessing it with COVID-19.
We all go to great lengths to protect a single individual or to rescue someone in distress, but then as the numbers increase, we don’t respond proportionally to that.
We don’t scale up, even when we’re capable.
There’s a hard limit to human compassion. The human mind is not very good at thinking about and empathizing with, millions or billions of individuals. As the number of victims increases, our empathy, our willingness to help, reliably decreases.
We seem unable to prevent our past from impacting our present?
However, our current behaviors are not shaped by past events but by mass media in the form of social media which is creating self-limiting beliefs.
They appear so real to the extent that we cant hardly tell whether its a self-limiting belief or a real one, as a result, we are unable to see the world correctly, so we look on as millions die.
Numbers simply can’t convey the costs, there’s an infuriating paradox at play.
We know that we must protect the Earth but are unwilling to pay the cost of doing so.
Our problem is to replace the false beliefs we acquired with the right one.
Which issues are the most urgent?
And can one person, really, truly, make that much of a contribution?
Here are some of the major issues all global citizens should be aware of if not there are living in coco land.
FOOD.
One in nine people in the world goes hungry each day.
It has been estimated that if women farmers could be given the same resources as men, millions of more people could be fed.
How can it be 2020 and people are still going hungry?
Nutritious food is often more expensive. Visit your local supermarket and compare the price of a punnet of strawberries to a chocolate bar.
Even though approximately 12.9% of the world is undernourished, about 30% of the adult population is overweight.
HEALTH.
In a world of more than 1 billion people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 per day) and 2.2 billion living on less than $2 per day (2011 data)
The reality is far more complex. Untold hundreds of millions of people lack access to essential health services, in fact over half of the world population do not have basic health care. We are a long way from the universal right to health.
Communicable diseases were responsible for 71% of deaths, and low-income countries are the most severely affected.
EDUCATION.
It’s estimated that approximately 600 million children are not mastering basic mathematics and literacy while at school.
HABITAT AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS. OCEAN CONSERVATION
The earth is full. Full of our waste, full of our demands.
The economy is now bigger than the earth, unimaginable, unattainable, and unsustainable. There is no infinite growth possible on a finite planet because nature sets the rules and individual issues mean nothing if they are not attached to nature.
There are countless studies and evidence all around you indicating that the coming crises are inevitable.
If an economy grows at 2% per year, it will double in 35 years.
Imagine twice as much human economic activity as we now have. Can our planet sustain this? Do we need to do this? Why would we want to? Why are we doing this?
Even though a lot of us know that it makes no sense to try to grow endlessly and outstrip the only planet we have.
What if anything can be changed?
We all know that the road to global decarbonization must involve renewable energy.
Although the Paris agreement’s goals are aligned with science, alarming inconsistencies remain between science-based targets and national commitments.
Its a no-brainer in the current emerging global political climate.
Rather than tackle mitigation measures economies are now due to Covid-19 returning to pumping more not less carbon into the atmosphere.
Climate stabilization must be placed on par with economic development, human rights democracy, and peace.
From a money perspective, we can’t help it—we live in a grow-or-die system.?
Currently, we have a system that provides humans to have an innate cost/benefit assessment tool called the smartphone operating at all times.
Here are a few suggestions.
It is now vital that we consider the motivation and funding sources of those who are shaping our worldview.
Money must be created without debt so it doesn’t force us to grow and consumer beyond our means.
New Money must no longer enter circulation as credit, that is, as debt.
It will simply be money spent into circulation by the government as a permanently circulating exchange medium to enable the country’s economy to function.
This money will be equity on the national balance sheet and be our commonwealth.
It will replace bank-created debt-money ending the privilege of commercial banks to create and issue what we use as money.
Then we have trillions in the form of pension investment funds that are nontransparently invested. If we demanded that these funds were moved from fossil fuel industries to green energy industries whose returns are going to be massive we would be reducing carbon emissions by millions of tonnes.
Next, we have the advertising industry.
All advertising that does not promote sustainability should be curtailed by law. We must turn the direction of humanity towards thriving not consumption for profit.
With the coming economic depression, we do have room for growth—the growth of community cohesion and commons conservation. We can grow our efforts to educate our children, care for our people, and care for the planet. We can grow into a more just, caring, sustainable society.
Because we are careering into a world of a few haves and billions of have -not.
Access to information owned by Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, to name a few, must become transparent and available to all as the interactions of all our individual worldviews shape the condition of humanity.
Lastly, we must address inequality.
There are now 65.3 million people displaced from their homes worldwide.
Think about that number: 65.3 million. Can you even imagine it?
It’s now or never that we make a profit for profit’s sake contribute to a World Aid fund.
(see previous posts)
As Mahatma Gandhi put it, “Earth has enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
We can’t eat drink or shit data.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
While the pandemic continues to turn the world upside down, new realizations are beginning to dawn on us, there’s no going back to normality.
There is no doubt that we are getting close to the “new abnormal”.
We are all in this together and no one really knows what the future holds but you only have to look at the advertising industry to see what is coming.
We are now in a digital dance in which the use of surveillance and testing to find and control outbreaks will eventually determine who gets to make or earn a living or not.
Under the cloak of preventing the virus from spreading governments are either already deploying, or actively considering, surveillance technology of such intrusiveness that it would have caused outrage and furious protests even a month ago.
As the human and economic impact unfold, how massive this change will become is still unclear.
Indeed, it is a real question as to whether normal or abnormal can be sensibly used at all, given their tremendous baggage and built-in biases and the general confusion they create.
However, there are a few new norms becoming clearer.
The current devastating pandemic is likely to happen again and again and the digital dance to avoid the next outbreak will not be to the tune of governments, but two powerful global corporations laying down the law to territorial sovereigns and restructuring the economic order.
Whole industries grossing billions of dollars are built on the words “normal” and “abnormal” and on the ideas of “well” and “disordered.”
It is therefore inconceivable that the right thing can be done and that the situation can change. Given that even the best and the brightest in the field of advertising are attached to an illegitimate naming game, from Bio this and Bio that there is probably no hope for change other than COVID free.
Add the coming World economic depression, with unemployment and climate migration one thing is clear, slowing the pace of climate change and adapting to its impacts, must become a central organizing principle of society at all levels, from local to global through national and regional.
The declarations of climate emergency must start meaning that, rather than being just an additional agenda item for busy executives and politicians.
Why?
Because climate change and the erosion of wildlife habitats will ensure a ready supply of zoonotic viruses.
Up to now, the emphasis is on lifting the lockdown has centered solely on the necessity of bringing the economy out of its cryogenic chamber to take in the world it has inherited.
We’re all online now, new conformity which is developing a serious digital divide between the young and older generations. And if the impact of Covid19 is another step in the collapse of modern societies, then it is likely it will have been another climate-driven step in that collapse.
The new normal, in other words, change what was wrong but keeps what was right with the old normal.
But if the old normal was wrong, then why did we call it normal?
The word “normal” appears straightforward enough itpossesses a certain kind of authority or “power to divide and distinguish things” since a person’s mental model of “what is normal?” is tremendously influenced by how society and its institutions define “normal.”
But like many of our words, as soon as we begin thinking about it, it starts to fall apart at the seams. The fact with which we started our process of categorization becomes the standard or norm, and everything that diverges from that norm is not just different but abnormal and therefore less than normal.
Our concept of normal pulls double duty; it tells us that what is, ought to be.
Nor can it mean “free of discomfort,” as if “normal” were the equivalent of oblivious.
Normality forces upon us are that “in most cases, no formal rules or standards indicate what conditions are normal” In the absence of such rules, those who wish to identify normality will normally turn to one of three different definitions.
The first is the statistical view, “where ‘the normal’ is whatever trait most people in a group display”. Normal is what is typical, what most people do – which means it is impossible for any individual to be normal.
Second, the norm provided a concrete standard that, if followed, allowed the user to reproduce a specific pattern. Normal-as-ideal, then, might be in harmony with normal-as-ubiquitous, but it might be quite different.
What is normal for a human being, then, are all those behaviors that make it fit to thrive in its particular niche. The capacity to feel shame when betraying a loved one is normal in this scheme, as is the desire for one’s offspring to survive.
When it comes to defining normality, we start with what we think is normal before even considering what is abnormal with all three above end up sliding into each.
The new normal will mean that most of us will go back to most of what we were doing before the pandemic struck (1), but that our societies will make changes for the better (2), which will end up being good for the survival of our communities (3).
The question, then, is why would you use the word “normal” at all?
Normal is safe. It’s familiar. In the face of fear, people long to go back to a time before the fear set in.
Covid-19 causes us to experience a great deal of anxiety, and then we imagine a carefree time before these feelings set in. We don’t begin with normality and then categorize those instances where it is transgressed.
If we begin with all of those things that we instinctively feel are “abnormal” and then try to find comfort by erecting a norm that resolves our anxieties. We then locate this norm “in the past”, which gives us the benefit of claiming the norm as our own. This, after all, may seem easier to attain than one that requires all the hard work of creation.
It is not something we need to build from scratch; all that is necessary is that we return home to it.
We will all continue to face daunting challenges for which we are not prepared. Modern medicine, as advanced as it is, is still, in the grand scheme of things, relatively young.
We’re not sure what exactly the future will look like – which is why we prefer to discuss it in the familiar terms of the good ole’ days – but we know that it’s coming to greet us.
Bergson used the term élanvital to describe the mysterious impulse toward an open future that seems to animate all life. In fact, this impulse is what life is. Life, says Bergson, “since its origins, has been the continuation of one and the same impetus which separates itself into diverging lines of evolution”.
If we are careful two huge tech companies that control mobile phone technology will enable governments to build and deploy proximity-tracking apps on every smartphone in the world.
Your online appointments for everything IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER.
Here is a shortlist of Normal abnormalities in the world.
640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)
750 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)
In developing countries, some 2.5 billion people are forced to rely on biomass—fuelwood.
The wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 76.6% of total private consumption. The poorest fifth just 1.5%. In other words, about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s financial assets
A quarter of humanity — live without electricity.
51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.
A strong economy in a nation doesn’t mean much when a significant percentage (even a majority) of the population is struggling to survive.
THE NEW NORM.
Thinking about it, I much prefer the new COVID-19 normal, as I am certain you do too. After all, it has, in some bizarre way, opened our eyes to the infinite treasures that lie within us and in front of us, that we may have been too numb to notice until now.
What was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.
We can make the new normal any way we want providing we make it GREEN.
If “the new normal” means giving up to technology then THE NEW NORMAL MUST BE REJECTED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
These temporary measures are just that; temporary. They need to be observed, but NOT FOREVER. New normal or not, every day really is a miracle.
The new normal that activity tracks your steps, whether you are black or white, rich or poor, left or right-wing, gay or straight, Muslim or other, Facebook or Twitter, contaminated or not, is irrelevant to living life and appreciating the world we all live on.
It’s the powerful combination of humanity and values that count. We are living in a world of continuous change “Technology Rules The World.”
The new norm requires that we consider our systems as a platform for scaling value.
An investment that needs to be made by leadership. The time has passed for small commitments, hyperbole, and delays in embracing sustainable investing.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Post COVID-19 this will become a question that we will all have to ask yourselves.
Coronavirus came after a series of wake-up calls.
Perhaps the COVID-19 outbreak is the wake-up call the world needs to get people accustomed to the fact that because of climate change, we all now need to change our lifestyles to protect our lives.
The COVID-19 outbreak should be a wake-up call that the economic and social costs of climate change will likely be so catastrophic – potentially many times worse than what we’re currently witnessing – that as a nation and the community of nations, we can’t afford not to take massive measures to combat and mitigate the dangers.
Confronting climate change will take a global effort far beyond any that’s been on the table so far, and far beyond the voluntary commitments in the Paris Climate accord.
We don’t yet know how long the COVID-19 outbreak will last, how many people will get sick or die, or the ultimate cost to global wealth and to people’s jobs and homes.
However, it seems obvious to say that, if we can transform the economy for a virus, we can also do so to prevent climate change.
Acres of column inches have already been written about how the Coronavirus is going to change our economies, politics, and societies forever.
We can choose to prioritize something – in this case, human life – above the maximization of profit and even our individual freedom.
Unchecked, climate change will wreak far greater damage on our ability to live safe, profitable, happy, and free lives than COVID-19.
Despite the brief dip in emissions due to COVID-19, there is a risk that the pandemic – which is likely to dominate politics for months or even years to come – will overshadow environmental concerns.
Mortimer Adler Said ” To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is this fact that the liberal arts acquire their name.”
For most of human history, the only other reliable sources of information were other people.
We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. If we know that a fact is only a Google away, then we’re not going to waste precious synaptic space on it. Better to let a server remember.
Or is it?
Feel like you’re losing grip of your memory. Google it.
Every time we recall a memory we also remake it, subtly tweaking the neuronal details. (This is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.) Although we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them, they aren’t.
A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it.
The brain has no interest immaculate recall – it’s only interested in the past to the extent it helps us make sense of the future.
By having memories that constantly change, we ensure that the memories stored inside our mental file cabinets are most relevant.
Although our memories always feel true – as a literal recording of the past – they’re mostly not, since they’re always being edited and bent by what we think now. And now. And now.
And this is where the internet comes in. One of the virtues of transactive memory is that it acts like a fact-check, helping ensure we don’t all descend into selfish solipsism. ( Solipsism: The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified)
By sharing and comparing our memories, we can ensure that we still have some facts in common, that we all haven’t disappeared down the private rabbit hole of our own reconsolidations.
I don’t think it’s a sign that technology is rotting our cortex – I think it shows that we’re wise enough to outsource a skill we’re not very good at.
Because while the web enables all sorts of other biases – it lets us filter news, for instance, to confirm what we already believe – the use of the web as a vessel of transactive memory is mostly virtuous. We save hard drive space for what matters, while at the same time improving the accuracy of recall.
But if a fact stored externally were the same as a memory of that fact stored in our mind, then the loss of internal memory wouldn’t much matter.
External storage and biological memory are not the same things.
When we form, or “consolidate,” a personal memory, we also form associations between that memory and other memories that are unique to ourselves and also indispensable to the development of deep, conceptual knowledge.
The associations, moreover, continue to change with time, as we learn more and experience more.
The essence of personal memory is not the discrete facts or experiences we store in our mind but “the cohesion” which ties all those facts and experiences together.
What is the self but the unique pattern of that cohesion?
Our over-reliance on google and the smartphone search engines is destroying our memories – ‘digital amnesia’.
Google in its very nature is making us stupid, making us more likely to recallwhere the facts are rather than the facts themselves.
We hold the answers to just about all of life’s questions in our palms today. But that means our brains are feeling free to take some R & R.
If you have no working memory, you can have no longterm memory and you understand very little.
The growing reliance on the world wide web for fact-checking is rotting our memories.
We off-load memories to the cloud just as readily as we would to a family member, friend, or lover.
Almost all information today is readily available through a quick internet search. It may be that the internet is taking the place not just of other people as external sources of memory but also of our own cognitive faculties becoming an extension of our own intelligence, rather than a separate tool.
At this point, you might be asking why is any of this important.
Indeed, As the specter of creeping authoritarianism – as emergency disaster measures become normalized, or even permanent – it should be at the forefront of our minds.
Because the consequences of COVID-19 will reorder society in a dramatic way, and this combined with climate change we are witnessing a tipping point as to how the world is going to work.
Unfortunately, we constructed a world that could not be more suited to a Pandemic – density everywhere- inward rural migration and now Data harvesting.
We can expect greater efforts to digitally capture and record our behavior in urban areas – and fiercer debates over the power such surveillance hands to corporations and states.
One consequence of coronavirus could be an entrenchment of exclusionary political narratives, calling for new borders to be placed around urban communities – overseen by leaders who have the legal and technological capacity, and the political will, to build them.
In other words an intensification of digital infrastructure in our cities to track the spread of COVID-19 using “big data” analysis to anticipate where transmission clusters will emerge next.
This much is certain:
Just as this disease has shattered lives, disrupted markets and exposed the competence (or lack thereof) of governments, it will lead to permanent shifts in political and economic power in ways that will become apparent only later.
It will be a time of contradictions.
Internationally, many issues that appeared pressing prior to the pandemic will likely recede in prominence once the world begins its recovery. All non-coronavirus issues will be pushed aside.
Not only because of a shared experience but also because of the mutual assistance that will be required at the same time, democracies must prevent the emergence of a big brother-style intrusion into the personal sphere by the security apparatus.
Such a thing can only occur in the absence of massive civilian oversight.
Many countries will set up committees of inquiry to find out why they and their healthcare systems were caught unprepared, humanity is destined to return to its old self after the adjustment period ends. And that, on balance, is a good thing.
Coronavirus will not end globalization, but it will change it by disrupting our lives and causing painful tragedy —it may introduce a new acceptance of unpredictability into our thinking.
This is certainly not the last time that we’re going to have these kinds of disease eruptions if we deny, delude, and delay on climate change.
We know what to do to halt climate change, we just have to do it.
Our current sense of risk — such as when it is safe to cross a road — is insufficient to deal with threats that are so dire they must be minimized; we need a complete rethink.
If we don’t we will have unregulated algorithms run the world.
How much of life can now be conducted digitally?
If we can accept canceled flights, closed schools, postponed sporting fixtures now, perhaps we can accept restraints in the future.
If we can rely on international co-operation now, perhaps we can summon the same spirit again.
At some point, a nudge will be required. If the shock of coronavirus disruption isn’t enough for us to recalibrate, what will be?
Our Memories!
We have to recognize there will be other pandemics and be better prepared. We must also recognize that climate change is a deeper and bigger threat that doesn’t go away, and is just as urgent.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Emergency powers have a tendency to kindle emergencies.
Granted most of these powers adopted by countries to stop the spread of the coronavirus are needed.
At the moment we are not concerned and willing to give up liberties that were won by the sacrifice of millions of lives before us for the common good.
We also know that in order that contact tracing could be more effective if it wasn’t voluntary. But it is vital, that our governments, that these powers (granted to governments during times of crisis) do not continue once COVID-19 is over.
The COVID-19 pandemic is barely four months old and there is no doubt that when it is over that “big data” will present new challenges as well as opportunities.
The threat of a disease as a “pretense” to justify authoritarian impulses to amass power and that technology can be used as a tool in that process could create a Big Data surveillance machine.
One present-day example comes from South Korea, which introduced an electronic system that sends out an automatic alert to people living nearby a known COVID-19 case.
Or Chinese authorities that are using software to sort citizens into color-coded categories — red, yellow, green — corresponding to their level of risk for having the virus.
Or for instance what if Google introduces a smartphone App that monitors social distancing. It will know your whereabouts down to 2 meters -7/7.
Or Governments introduce GPS to track the movements of citizens without their consent to prohibit gatherings of other 250 people. But what if the governor used that measure to stop a rival’s political rally?
But more importantly, if consumers don’t trust a smartphone-based tracking system, they can simply leave their phones at home. That would render the technology useless.
Even if voluntary it might provide people with a false sense of security if they don’t get an alert. Those who have opted out of tracking might be walking around with COVID-19 and infecting others without ever being picked up with the system.
Just think about it.
The potential in using new technology for public health surveillance to get ahead of an infectious disease outbreak must be tempting, so-called contact tracing,
There is a real danger that we could end up creating a society of untouchables. (The former name for any member of a wide range of low-caste Hindu groups and any person outside the caste system.)
Moreover, unless public health officials are involved, there’s potential to “game” the system by falsely claiming a person has the virus when they haven’t tested positive for it. That could lead to other harms, like a business intentionally undermining a rival or a political party suppressing participation.
A terror attack and a pandemic are vastly different, but both present opportunities for governments and the private sector to take on new powers in the name of keeping citizens safe.
The September 11th terror attacks led to the Patriot Act, in the USA, which gave the federal government vast new investigative powers that it claimed were necessary for the fight against terrorism.
During the HIV crises in many cases, public health officials would notify an HIV patient’s past sexual partners that they may have been in contact with somebody who had the disease, but never identified or named them.
One of the big issues at the time was the idea of doctors reporting the names of HIV patients to the states. Some states refused to accept name-based reporting so for years because they feared that it would discourage people from getting tested.
Public health and privacy rights do not need to be in opposition.
Good public health must respect civil liberties, and anything that advances human rights and civil liberties would advance public health.
So we are going to be faced with the rights of Individual freedoms against collectivism.
The behaviors that define individualism may also enhance the likelihood of pathogen transmission, and thus may be functionally maladaptive under conditions in which pathogens are highly prevalent.
By contrast, the behaviors that define collectivism may function in the service of anti-pathogen defense, and thus be especially adaptive under conditions of high pathogen prevalence.
The question is which one will we choose or will we have a choice when all this is over.
An open-air prison-like the Gaza Strip or Equality among all.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
If we are not vigilant we might by accident and neglect combined with the erosion of civil liberties and with the increasing disenchantment of politicians easily sleepwalk into a form of a totalitarian society.
You could say at present that the world has more pressing problems but I consider this as a very dangerous trend and, sadly, unlike climate change perhaps unstoppable.
Why?
Because corporations belong to no land, no country, no people and have no loyalty to anything apart from profit – their profits and the profits today are on an unimaginable scale.
Because individual liberty which our ancestors fought for generations to establish are now been blowing away in the wind with Artifical Intelligence turning our politics into a form of Digital Dictatorship.
Control of society above personality.
The modern sense of entertainment, for example, has led to the shallowness
of life that permeates all aspects of life, separates us from the seriousness of
existence, and fills this existence with false content.
What we are seeing is a widening of inequality, a rise in racism and ant semitic traits all of which are essential to a totalitarian society. Individualism itself is diminishing and in the end, people will embrace the totalitarian state’s ideology.
This fourth industrial revolution as it is called is presently without any AI laws other than the EU guidelines on the trustworthiness of AI – what data to use or not use to train other Algorithms.
The last industrial revolution taught us a lot about basic human rights and social values to wake us up, to help us prepare for the future however what we are seeing with smartphones is a form of doublethinking that leads to banality or to implicit acceptance of the standard of psychological normality, the lost of limits.
You are going to work with a digital colleague that has no set rules, no personal judgment.
The threat of climate change with the rise of stateless refugees is forcing millions around the world to realistically confront a future in which their lives, at a minimum, look radically worse than they are today.
At the same time, emerging algorithms are giving a small technocratic elite the power to radically alter our species to a point when it will no longer resemble itself.
They both will call into question the basic ideas of who are and how we think about ourselves.
There are technologies now already emerging that are asking this question with the very fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human.
Why is this?
Because by limiting the choices and activities that have given us our basic sense of identity we can’t express our own opinions because they fear individual power.
There is nothing we can really do to change the course of our civilization except to patiently and persistently saying the truth about false worldviews, both on climate change and materialistic algorithms for profit both of which are and will have dramatic consequences.
Take Climate change and Fossil fuel:
It seems that fossil fuel owners and technology only goals are to protect their business models at all cost.
Climate change will shrink the size of the world that is livable on. while allowing unregulated technologies to rule it.
Algorithms Data Apps are tools by means of which, once installed, they start making decisions on your behalf. They will enable governments to assert their ideological and intellectual authority over party members and employees of party-run institutions, including schools and media.
Their messages becoming inescapable.
The beauty of digital media technology — disquieting for those who care about privacy and freedom from intrusion — is that our smart apps know a great deal about our actual behaviour.
Technology now interacts with you and takes the measure of you. It can determine just how “smart” you are when it comes to your devotion and your grasp of the ideological essentials.
This is where we seem to be headed for compelling materialist reasons, not ethical reasons.
Habitual smartphone user was spending a great deal of time glued to the screen, as a result, the potential of the smartphone to be used as a tool through which authoritarian regimes can shape and reinforce dominance over the population is no longer a fantasy – China.
It is reinventing the process of ideological dominance for the digital era.
In China, censorship, is now largely automated, reaching “unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition. It has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras, with plans for 626 million surveillance cameras by 2020.
China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. For some, “social credit” will bring privileges — for others, punishment.
If successful, it will be the world’s first digital dictatorship.
The flawless totalitarian state, powered by digital technology, where the individual has nowhere to flee from the all-seeing eye of the Communist state. who has done what (and for how long)
They can leverage digital media products to reshape the whole process of ideological control in ways that are far more personal, and far more effective, than anything we have witnessed in the reform era.
We, on the other hand, need to find out once again how to make decisions not just as individuals but as a society. We need new economics theories of not top-down but bottom-up. Its isn’t capital that creates economic growth its people. It isn’t competition that creates prosperity its cooperation. The economics that is not inclusive will not allow modern society to thrive.
Its painfully obvious that the fundamental assumptions of neoliberal economics are wrong.
The market now with profit-seeking algorithms can never distribute wealth because there is no equilibrium.
So is there any way of combating the technological growing algorithm market.
Inclusion will be the only brake.
We must allow people to get involved while improving all stakeholders in the market. The laws of economics are a choice.
So give people the choice to invest in the future by the creation of Nation backed non-trading Green deal bonds. ( See previous posts) This is about creating a platform for real and measurable engagement.
Algorithms all ready control 99.9% of stock exchanges.
Taking self-responsibility and living life the fullest will not only enrich our own lives but as well the lives of others.
Then the question arises:
No government in what used to be called “the free world” seems prepared to take the steps that can stop this inexorable decline.
Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life.
Big data: The length of time that it took them to use unfettered free speech to subvert and undermine all of our core institutions. Thus we arrive at the present situation where the brief a historical version of freedom of speech has reverted back towards what the state deems controversial today might be very different to what it deems controversial tomorrow.
Take Brexit for example. Nostalgia is that it’s become a political weapon. Politicians are creating nostalgia for an England that never existed and selling it, really, as something we could return to.
Do we want to be told what to think and do? Or are we ready to come up with our own solutions for the consequences we’ve caused?
The idea of the totalitarian state can never be a true and effective form of government rule. Increasing state interference, a crumbing electoral system, the loss of a free press and loss of freedom of speech are grave threats to our democratic system.
The potential consequences that come from using AI, such as giving up privacy are only the ice cubes in the bucket.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Is it time we started to demand that if you use my personal data it’ill cost you because I am worth it.
We all make a trade-off between security and convenience, but there is a crucial difference between security in the old-fashioned physical domain, and security today.
Security is done digitally with algorithms exploiting and analysing your very mood.
In this digital lifestyle, it is nearly impossible to take part in the web world without leaving a trail behind.
Personal privacy is dead.
We have no clear sight into this world, and we have few sound intuitions into what is safe and what is flimsy – let alone what is ethical and what is creepy.
We are left operating on blind, ignorant, misplaced trust; meanwhile, all around us, without our even noticing, choices are being made.
With the increasing ownership of mobiles, marketing companies now have unlimited access to our personal data. Every site one opens has an agreement form to be ticked with terms and conditions that are all but unreadable on small screens.
It’s not a choice between privacy or innovation, it is the erosion of legally ensured fundamental privacy rights interfacing with apps.
Nuggets of personal information that seem trivial, individually, can now be aggregated, indexed and processed.
When this happens, simple pieces of computer code can produce insights and intrusions that creep us out or even do us harm. But most of us haven’t noticed yet.
Since there’s no real remedy, giving away our most sensitive and valuable data, for free, to global giants, with completely uncertain future costs, is a decision of dramatic consequence.
iCloud and Google+ have your intimate photos; Transport companies know where your travelcard has been; Yahoo holds every email you’ve ever written and we trust these people to respect our privacy.
You only have to be sloppy once, for your privacy to be compromised.
With your Facebook profile linked, I could research your interests before approaching you.
Put in someone’s username from Twitter, or Flickr and Creepy will churn through every photo hosting service it knows, trying to find every picture they’ve ever posted.
Cameras – especially phone cameras – often store the location where the picture was taken in the picture data. Creepy grabs all this geolocation data and puts pins on a map for you.
Then comes an even bigger new horizon.
We are entering an age of wireless information. The information you didn’t know you were leaking.
Maybe the first time you used a new app.
Every device with Wi-Fi has a unique “MAC address”, which is broadcast constantly as long as wireless networking is switched on.
Many shops and shopping centres, for example, now use multiple Wi-Fi sensors, monitoring the strength of connections, to triangulate your position, and track how you walk around the shop. By matching the signal to the security video, they get to know what you look like. If you give an email address in order to use the free in-store Wi-Fi, they have that too.
Once aggregated, these individual fragments of information can be processed and combined, and the resulting data can give away more about our character than our intuitions are able to spot.
When I realised that I’m traced over much wider spaces from one part of town to another I asked myself what is the point in giving you information away when you could franchise it out and get something back in return.
Public debate on the topic remains severely stunted.
Through the current trends in the globalization of technology is in the knowledge society, we have to start asking where is the world moving to?
The concepts and applications of biocomputing, medical informatics, anthropocentric computing, high-performance computing, technological diffusion, predictive analysis tools, genetic algorithms, and cultural informatics all in new or little known fields of information technology.
Many organisations create, store, or purchase information that links individuals’ identities to other data. Those who can access and analyse this personal data profiles can take deep insights into an individual’s life.
A law-abiding citizen might say “I have nothing to conceal.” This is a misconception.
In any debate, negotiation or competitive situation, it is an advantage to know about the other party’s position in order to achieve one’s own desired outcome.
Data brokers – buy and combine data from various sources (online and offline) to deliver information on exactly defined target groups to their customers.
“Click-world” merchants know a lot more about their clients’ private and financial habits than the individual knows about the merchant company or its competitors.
You, therefore, could not be blamed for asking -given the increasing bargaining position of merchants, is the consumer still getting a good deal?
It would be interesting to know how good a deal consumers get when they exchange their data for free-of-charge online services.
Data has become an economic good for which the “producer” is usually not remunerated.
Data privacy is a matter of choice and individuals should have the right to decide if a company can collect information on them.
Is there a solution:
Of course if you Google it what you will get will be all sorts of advice such as, avoid cookies, use the VPN or disabling the location tracking in your devices and use Browsers that don’t track your activities.
It’s tempting to just play ostrich and put our heads under the sand however data collection is affecting and will affect your life.
This is why we must preserve the right of individuals to know what kind of information is being collected and what is being done with that information.
You could say that the most valuable thing on your computer or network is the data you create. After all, that data is the reason for having the computer and network in the first place.
The first thing to understand is that there is very little that can “prove” that any company (whether an individual, government entity, corporation, etc.) is engaged in safe or adequate data handling processes.
Therefore :
We must retain the right to define our own privacy boundaries and then advocate for those boundaries before invasions in our daily lives become out of control and irreversible.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
These days in the higher ethylene of the political world it seems you must be an accomplished liar and not a far-seeing planner to be successful.
With the advent of social media people’s day-to-day exposure to political discussion and disagreement has increased dramatically.
However what is worrying is that technology in the form of social media, the smartphone is continuing to create a contemporary problem that large sections of the public want ‘democracy’ but without the ‘politics.
As a result, were are seeing fake news driving populist politics that has no longterm objectives.
There is nothing new about fake news it has been prevalent down the ages but the days when a lot of us believe that many of the major world events that are shaping our destinies occur because somebody or somebodies have planned them that way are all but disappeared.
However, with the media making very little effort to explain political decisions, rather than just jumping on any perceived gaffe or conflict ‘democracy’ remains an incredibly positive notion.
With the public no longer thinking about the world within the silos of government departments governments need to engage people in solutions rather than top-down ‘vote for us and we’ll provide the answers.
Younger people don’t just copy their parents’ tribal loyalties. Voting is more like shopping, with preferences changing on a quim of twitter on social media.
Unfortunately, our present-day political system has not yet caught up, it offers limited choice. What happens in between elections is for all attentive purposes driven by the smartphone that are monitored by unregulated algorithms owned by you know who.
What is been ignored is that this digital space in all its diversity represents a huge opportunity with the power to engage people in new ways. Online participation in local decision-making is one possibility. This would involve citizens outside election time-.
So we need to understand all the ways people behave and respond in the digital space and set clear and realistic goals for what they hope to accomplish.
However, people are now becoming slow and slower to engage with the internet due to the lack of security/ privacy/and a source of truth.
Why?
Because Capitalism is spending billion on digital marketing each year, and for good reason. Digital media has enormous power to reach and influence people. Over 2 billion people—about one-third of the global population—now access the Internet.
We all know if we are to avoid extinction due to climate change which poses real risks to our collective future we need a green energy transformation.
The problem is that behind a veneer of objectivity, Capitalism as always sees an opportunity to make a profit – Carbon Credits for instance, with more and more consumerism products being promoted as good for the environment
With all the political goodwill the transfer to low carbon emission can only be achieved by offering citizens a means to get involved other than protesting.
How can this be done?
We must allow people to exercise democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions and environment ie De-politicising decision-making by limiting capitalism’s worst failing- profit for profit sake.
To have authentic democracy!
Citizens must be afforded the opportunity to get involved not just politically, but financially by creating Green Energy European Bonds that cannot be traded.
These bonds will allow citizens to regain control over unaccountable ‘technocrats’, complicit politicians and shadowy institutions.
They can be sold like lotto tickets. Forging a common agenda.
Emancipating citizens from all levels of government from bureaucratic and corporate power. Allowing direct investment into shared, green prosperity.
Politics has never been popular and never will be:
The more disengaged, the less likely that political parties will deliver.
We’re able to measure things in a way that we’ve never been able to measure them before. So why not measure the wealth of a nation by the financial investment support it gets from its citizen’s. Rather than encompassing every possible thing that can go under the rubric of “green.
I suppose my goal here is to propose something vague enough that no one will object to it.
Have you wondered how you got to where you are today?
Greed.
Is technology taking control of our lives or our destiny?
Yes. We’ve ditched reality.
The very data on which we measure the economy is disconnected from
the reality, with political leaders using high soaring” words “which often
imbibe emptiness.
Communication and leadership are key elements in elections these days
but you can’t sell a bad product, can you?
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Right now nobody knows for sure but it is going to radically upend many aspects of our lives, as it is a technological paradigm shift.
3G or 4G was just a trailer, and the movie is about to begin.
Why?
Because it is going to marry data collection and computation with billions of devices.
But there is a debate on the necessity for it, considering human physical and mental limitations.
It will become the underlying fabric of an entire ecosystem of fully connected intelligent sensors and devices, capable of overhauling economic and business policies, and further blurring geographical and cultural borders.
It will create a world populated by digital citizens in continual interaction with their surroundings, their peers and public services.
It will enable communications & computing power to come together creating a hyperconnected ‘Internet of everything’ world.
It will release the spectrum for mobile devices, bring about dramatic transformations in our daily lives.
It is going to change everything about everything else.
It will rock the world economy over the next decade as we haven’t yet
conceived that will be tied into the 5G network.
For example:
Your car will know your every move faster than your mind. Cars will be able to use 5G to talk to other cars and sensors built around cities, from street lamps to gas stations.
Think about your relationship between the smart city and an autonomous car.
Think about predictive care. It will enable advanced data transfer from wearables and sensors, facilitating remote clinical decisions and robotic surgery
Think about bring virtual reality into the classroom, allowing students to face real-life situations without real-life consequences.
Think about living in a world of always-on, always-sharing, cloud applications and services.
Think about it leading to seamless and ubiquitous information control.
It will potential to unlock trillions of revenue across a broad range of industries creating a different hidden economy with wireless consumption.
This revenue will be equivalent to total U.S. consumer spending in 2016, and more than the combined spending of China, Japan, France, Germany, and the U.K. This revenue also represents about 4.6 per cent of all global real output in 2035.
Another words countries without 5G will become less competitive globally, spreading inequality on a scale not seen before. This inequality leads to more than just differences in consumption and wealth distribution. It affects access to healthcare, education, nutrition, employment, financial and technological platforms; it exacerbates poverty, exclusion and violence.
By 2020, analysts estimate that there will be more than 20 billion installed IoT devices around the world, supporting 22 million jobs generating massive amounts of data.
With access to this kind of information, industries of all kinds will be able to reach new levels of efficiency as they add products, services, and capabilities.
It will mean that a surgeon may not need to be in the same room as a patient in the future. A surgeon could use a VR headset and special glove to control a robot arm that would perform an actual operation in another location.
With haptic feedback, you’ll be able to transmit the tactile sensation of experience, enhancing the sights and sounds of a video experience.
It will make drone warfare affordable and drone defence essential.
It will make consumption and production distant and broad concepts that are somehow unattached from us.
So what can we, as consumers, do, instead of feeling powerless and distraught?
We must ensure that 5G respect nature, and the interconnectedness of everything that matters for humanity.
An unofficial trade war is already afoot in the tech industry due to the imminent rise of 5G technology.
But it will not happen overnight. Think in terms of a decade or more for it to fully unfold.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.
There are billions of us alive all consciousness of each other but unable to explain why.
Perhaps this is why religions were created.
Consciousness is everything people experience.
However, there are different levels of consciousness and they can be related to other global changes in conscious level. All are private and inaccessible to observers.
(Conscious level (how conscious one is) and conscious content (what one is conscious of) are related to each other.)
So at what is a structure complex enough to become conscious.
Why am I human instead of a particle?
If we are particles we are no longer dealing with a purely material theory of consciousness because the source of the conscious particles cannot itself be material.
Its source requires an immaterial intervention.
I will return to consciousness later in the post.
The role that technology plays in human life is becoming an increasingly urgent question not just in tackling climate change but what will be considered in the future to be human.
Where we’re headed and what it will mean for humanity is a question seldom discussed.
Bioelectric implants, genetic modification packages, the ability to tamper with our very biology — there won’t be enough time to adjust or to reassess who we are and what it means to be human.
Our technology is developing so much faster than our culture and our institutions, and the gap between these things can only grow so far before society becomes dangerously unstable.
It’s hard to really know what we are becoming because so many of these changes are unforeseen or unpredictable.
At the moment computers and robots interact with the world without being conscious.
Are we at risk or are we becoming semi-machines who are like the marionettes of our own moment-to-moment experiences?
We’re losing our ability to be in the world in a way that isn’t mediated by some electronic appendage.
The more we live through screens, the more we are living in a narrow bandwidth, an abstract world that’s increasingly artificial the more we are becoming non-human.
The virtual world might be safe and controllable, but it’s not rich and unpredictable in the way the real world is.
What is all this doing to our habits, to our cultural sense of who we are?
With synthetic biology, which is basically human beings redesigning their biological structure we are distant to lose our connection to reality altogether.
Why?
Because it’s about us modifying our very genetic code which is extremely dangerous if it’s not controlled and safeguarded.
Intelligence is the most powerful instrument around.
If you’re embodying that kind of intelligence in increasingly sophisticated machines we will be coming to depend on them more and more over time.
(What worries me is that we’re headed in the direction of building AI technologies that are at the human level and, eventually, far beyond that.)
If AI becomes so intelligent that they can perform an infinite variety of tasks across domains of activity. We’ll continue to make them smarter and more capable and more powerful until we reach a point at which they start to learn on their own and start to modify themselves. Once that happens, they’ll be fully unpredictable — and then who the hell knows what happens next.
Any fool on the street can tell you that with nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bioengineering, brain implants, quantum computers, algorithms, robots that technology is changing at a whiplash-inducing pace.
So because there is no widely accepted theory about what happens in the brain to make consciousness possible what is it about being human that really matters?
Back to look at Consciousness.
Nothing has authority over it but is it what makes us human.
Nothing is above it. Nothing rules it.
Since everything exists within it, it does not exist within anything.
Since it is not dependent on anything, it is eternal, it is outside of realms of being and time.
In fact, consciousness actually exists independently and outside of the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark matter and dark energy or gravity. It is not dependent on anything. No one can envision it. No one can comprehend it. Neither physical nor unphysical it is beyond knowledge.
It simply apprehends itself.
The brain does not create or produce consciousness; rather, it filters it.
This implies a very real and direct connection between the brain, human consciousness and the existence of the Universe — that they are fundamentally inseparable at the quantum level.
Consciousness permeates reality.
Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
Who or what counts as human?
It’s well-known that the Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.
All the questions we currently face can be traced to this, larger, underlying question. What is Human?
If one says that all and onlyHomo sapiensare humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn.
What sort of evidence can settle the question?
There’s something about us that is the opposite of artificial. It’s the opposite of something made.
This raises the below questions.
What genetic engineering stuff promises to bring down the line is human beings who are tailored to particular purposes, either by themselves over time or by other human beings.
We becoming products or commodities, and products or commodities are subordinated to particular functions or purposes.
All the values that give our lives meaning are at risk.
What becomes of autonomy? What becomes of free will?
All these questions are on the table.
By the year 2500, people will not need to be exactly like they are now so it stands to reason that semi humans will break the bonds that hold our present-day society together. They will shatter our sense of identity so quickly that it creates a kind of existential chaos.
So what are these technologies adding to the human experience and, more importantly, what are they subtracting from the human experience?
We live in a world of wonder and mystery, and the more we discover, the more there seems to be to find out but should we be more worried about the world we’re creating?
The artificial kind of worlds.
.This post is compliments of the FRIGHTLY SORRY<SORRY<SORRY. CLUB.
All human reverberation comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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