Tag Archives: Technological revolution

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS THIS AS GOOD AS IT GET’S WITH MAN’S ACHIEVEMENTS FOR EVOLUTION?

29 Friday Nov 2019

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Climate Change., Dehumanization., Evolution, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( An essential twenty five -minute read)

Everyone sees the world in different ways however the greatest innovations of man are found in the most simple things:

Starting with Fire, Language, Tools, and Wheel writing has been the sole reason that mankind has been able to accumulate knowledge.

Since then the use of our inventions have taken us a long way, they’ve allowed us to land on the moon, travel over oceans, and even eliminate major health threats with various medicines.

You could not be blamed for asking what was actually gained by landing on the moon — a handful of rocks and a game of low-gravity golf — was of virtually no value and yet the act of the journey was invaluable beyond all measure as it personified our continuing evolution.

The same is true with technology today.

The development of it is mind-blowing but its application is almost entirely mindless – profit-seeking algorithms and weaponized drones.

Setting aside why do we exist and what is the purpose of life? (These are hard questions that demand answers) it is what we have not achieved that will be judged by future generations.

Karl Marx once famously observed that capitalism carried within it the seeds of its own destruction but he was wrong. It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s people.

The human race ended the 20th century in pretty good shape, at least comparatively speaking.

The first half of the 1900s was almost certainly the most bloody and brutal phase of humanity’s existence.

Now we have all the information in the world yet it has made us only more ideological and more ignorant; we have access to limitless opinions yet we seek to criminalise those who don’t agree with us. We are so advanced and yet so backward, so cynical and yet so stupid, that we can no longer even agree on what constitutes a fact.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Consider the internet itself, probably the most revolutionary invention in the history of humankind. Its potential to share information thus to accelerate the advancement of science and keep the world running in the event of a catastrophic disaster — the purpose for which it was first intended — is all but limitless.

And what do we use it for most? Porn.

Consider the smartphone, the match to the powder keg of the worldwide web. Almost everyone in every half-developed part of the world, even people living on the streets, has a device more powerful than supercomputers that once took up whole buildings. We can access virtually any image, any idea, any information from anywhere in the world.

And what do we overwhelmingly use it for?  Taking pictures of ourselves.

Let’s look at medical technology — the smartest minds on the planet developing machines and medicines that keep the average person today alive for longer than was once ever dreamt of.

And what is the result?

We are fatter and lazier than ever, resulting in spiralling hospital costs that will send most Western governments broke in a matter of decades. It was once said that the only two certainties in life were death and taxes and yet now we are defying death and there aren’t enough taxes to pay for it.

We are too dumb to even know when to die.

It may well be impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, but over millions of years of evolution, we’ve picked up some less than ideal characteristics.

Why? Because of greed.

It will take the efforts of several scientific disciplines and sophisticated technology, probably over many years, to discover the underlying nature of our mental faculties, their neurological basis, and their development over time.

And it’s fair to say that we have little idea of what we’ll evolve to in the future, but there is one thing for certain, evolution is about adapting to your environment – Weaponized drones, Climate change, Algorithms.

Algorithms that are feeding Social media, are stripping us of a collective understanding of what is going on in the world.

People like to blame fake news on Facebook, and that is true enough.

But the far greater truth is far worse than that. Neither fake news nor Facebook emerged like Athena fully-formed from nothing. They were made by us. By us and for us and of us.

While the positive uses for technology are endless I marvel as I read Asimov to see the way in which he foresaw the ethical conundrum in which we now find ourselves embroiled.

Of course, when they (the future generations) look at our achievements the one thing they will not be able to comprehend is why we have not been able to stop killing each other.

Weaponized drones are now more acceptable than land mines, cluster bombs, or chemical weapons.

It might be argued that this would be a way of sparing human beings who could stay comfortably at home and let our intelligent machines do the fighting for us. If some of them were destroyed — well, they are only machines. This approach to warfare would be particularly useful if we had such machines and the enemy didn’t.

Just like those tried at Nuremberg who attempted to wash their hands of mass killings we have now developed weaponized drones to kill, with a Punches Pilot immunity, that is violating all existing international law.

So humans through the use of technology may eventually reach a point where they can force evolution upon themselves.

Perhaps the result (if we are not already wiped out by Nuclear or a Weather bomb) will be that we’re no longer subject to the driving force of evolution – but unnatural selection by drones. 

Now the question is, how accurate is this statement?

Is technological progress actually taking us backwards?

Are we advancing ourselves to death? At what point do many deaths become too many deaths?

This is the first problem with technology.

If it is accurate, we’re already screwed.

Of course, none of this is important given the glacial pace of evolutionary change, we probably won’t have to worry about that for thousands of years.

Wrong.

We’ve come to believe that, with enough information, human behaviour is predictable.

But number-crunching algorithms are leading us perilously wrong. There’s something unsettling in the idea that, amid the vagaries of choice, chance, and circumstance, mathematics can tell us something about what it is to be human.

Who we are together, as a collective entity?

Despite the grand promises of Big Data, uncertainty remains so abundant that specific human lives remain boundlessly unpredictable. The more data that are collected, cross-referenced, and searched for correlations, the easier it becomes to reach false conclusions.

It might be true that in large groups, the natural variability among human beings cancels, however, if we end up with algorithms setting thresholds extremely unlikely outcomes are bound to arise eventually.

The gift is not a technology to enable us to realise evolution for the cruel being it is, but giving mankind the intelligence and tools to exclude ourselves from the other species on the planet and take a step back to interpret for ourselves where we as a race are going?

Leaving the brutality of evolution behind is not a gift given to us by evolution.

We have evolved to the point whereby we stand on the threshold of controlling our genetic and ultimately evolutionary destiny. Unfortunately, the problem with humans is, whenever we encounter a problem we have evolved to the point where we think that we can overcome it with technology.

Advances in technology, medicine and culture mean it isn’t just the fittest who get to pass their genes on to the next generation.

External aids could be entirely responsible for our survival.

All of this relies on earth’s natural resources which are supposedly gonna be gone by 2050!

The problems in this world are manmade therefore man can solve them.

The sad truth is that we have Governments and World Organisations that pay lip service when the real debate is a knowledge- and research-based exchange of argument and counterargument that should be focused at the analysis of a specific question, our survival. 

Passion and competition, yes, but, more than anything else, debate is an exercise in critical thinking! The human brain, being a machine striving for maximum efficiency, typically remembers where information is stored, rather than the information itself.

Technology has already affected the way our memory works.

AI. After all, natural evolution wouldn’t be able to mould and program devices to a point of sophistication that may lead to sentience, but we may be able to and maybe at that point even though its not natural, it is an evolution born of natural origins and most likely would go on to create newer better versions of itself.

In theory, humans are exercising their judgement in the process, but in reality, the computer system is viewed as too “smart” to be second-guessed by a human being.

So . . . what do we need to be more afraid of?

Robots with a compulsion to out-think humans? or humans that are afraid to second-guess the robots?

We must confront an urgent problem related to technology: the automation of “pre-emptive violence” – front-loaded with a bias to kill, with little impetus to contradict that bias.

At present drones are the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.

So are we at the peak of human evolution?

Certainly not. Certainly not as long as there are humans, there will be human evolution.

We are not even close to the peak of evolution.

Just look at wthat we recently found > The Higgs Boson, Mapped the Human Genome, Cloned a sheep, built the International Space Station, discovery the Double Helix Structure of DNA, Split the Atom, invented the Internet, we’re revisiting the theories of Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.

We have Created Nuclear Weapons, the Periodic Table of the Elements,  Created the Internet Developed Vaccines, Created Music, Created Photography, Flight, Electronic Devices, Traveled to the Moon, Eradicated Small Pox, Created the Television, Discovered Mathematics, Invented the Printing Press, The Phone,  Discovery and Control of Electricity, Cars, Invented Zero, Created of United Nations, Discovered World is Round. 

AND STILL, WE ARE UNABLE TO ACT TOGETHER.

Why?

Because you know the downfall of civilisation has really passed the point of no return when even a rich white guy can’t get anything done.

Humans are the only organism that can alter their environment to suit them (instead of the other way around)

Finally, people must take into account that nature will commence exerting its own controls LONG BEFORE the human race has reached the point where it can step off the evolutionary treadmill.

With our increasing reliance on technology – and in particular machinery – to do our dirty (but muscle-enhancing) work. The less each generation depends on physical strength, the more likely it is that the whole species will grow weaker to the point of stagnation. 

As evolution relies on the survival of the fittest, evolution itself will evolve everything else in all our lives will be transitory and every other artificial intelligent goodwill application will become visionary.

Only when we’ll be able to repair and augment our children’s DNA. Then we really will have triumphed over evolution. Race” will no longer be an issue. Perhaps we will stop killing each other.

Yet we’ve got our problems. A lot of them but the very things we invented to sustain us will destroy us.

The exact nature of our evolutionary relationships with the planet and AI will be the subject of debate for the foreseeable future.

It doesn’t matter if we’re uncovering evidence for climate change or deciding whether a drug has an effect: the concept is identical.

By setting an arbitrary threshold, and agreeing that anything beyond that point gives you grounds for suspicion with greed this is the evolutionary path we are setting our selves.

Mentally the world appears to be de-evolving with smartphones and social media platforms.

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

 

THE BEADY ASKS: FROM NAKED APE TO ROBOT – WILL IT BE WORTH IT?

08 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Evolution., Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Sustaniability, Technology., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

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 ( A Fifteen minute read)

We are becoming less and less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change. Deforestation, Freshwater Species Extinctions, Climate Change and Destruction of Natural Resources, Large-scale Wars and Religious Conflicts.

“human cost” of the current system:

Not to  Mention Technology.

What we prioritize, the way we shape our lives, affects the evolutionary future of our species, so we would do well to start asking some simple question about the untended consequences of technology? 

Is it likely that in the near future humans are going to speciate? ( Humans one species and robots another. )

If you can’t explain Artificial intelligence/ Machine learning stored in the cloud and what it is doing to the public, there’s a good chance it doesn’t merit doing.

Mannequin heads sitting on a shelf in a factory The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60.

 That is only 30 odd year away.

We are entering the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological transformation that is robbing us of the essence of our humanity.

Driven by a ubiquitous and mobile internet, we are perhaps witnessing the end of human evolution as we know it.

Up to now human evolution proceeded extremely slowly and within historical memory, man has exhibited aggressive territorial behavior. Even as we bask smugly in the comforts of our smart phones natural selection to-day still ensured that only the fittest survived.

However it may not be long before computers are hooked up to the human brain with genetic trade-offs till we can’t be improved any further,

Then evolution will really have come to a stop for us. We will be the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were.

Stopping natural selection is not as important, or as depressing, as it might sound — because our evolutionary process will then be cultural.

One way or the other by the time we get there our current social, political and economic systems will have driven inequalities with profit seeking algorithms off the map, rather than reducing them.

The challenge is to manage this seismic change in a way that promotes the long-term health and stability of the planet.

The writing has been on the wall for some time.Homo floresiensis

So where do we stand:

Since 1992 CO2 emissions have jumper 62% and the global temperature is up 29%. Fresh water is down 26%. Ocean dead zones up 76% . Forestland down 300 million acres. People up 35%.

You would think that we the biggest dimwit on the planet looking at this evidence would conclude that there is something very wrong. If you dont know what it is, we have evolved beyond our needs, trampling other species in the process.

We are now at a turning point we can either push ahead on our path to destruction or we can reshape our place in nature and prosper or we can face a humongous environmental crisis.

You would think that with everything connected by the internet, it would transform how we do business and help us manage resources more efficiently and sustainable.

As you can see this is not the result.

On the contrary the way we’ve set up corporations, world organisations, where even a majority vote cannot demand that a corporation’s or world organisation policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use.

That’s because profit is the one and only motive.

It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations and world organisations are simply not allowed to.

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.

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

In a world driven by short-term profit, the connectivity theory is and will remain so far off the mark it can only be believed by artificial intelligence.

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, is causing economic and social ills, ranging from low consumption to social and political unrest, and is damaging to any future.

There is no need for me to tell you that we are living in turbulent times.

It is clear that the old stories are dying and if we continue to poison ourselves and the planet by self-interest, fragmentation and profit for profit sake there will be no point to the age of technology other than becoming slaves.

However evolution is going on invisibly all the time. Species evolve in response to whatever environment they encounter. No despots have ever set out to select for increased or decreased longevity in the populations they control.

By 2050, the world must feed 9 billion people. Yet the demand for food will be 60% greater than it is today.

The scale of the employment challenge is vast. 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. These advances could lead to extremely positive developments, presenting solutions to now-intractable global problems, but they also pose severe risks.

This might be the most important transition of the next century – either ushering in an unprecedented era of wealth and progress, or heralding disaster.

But it’s also an area that’s highly neglected: while billions are spent making AI more powerful. The problem of how one might design a highly intelligent machine to pursue realistic human goals safely is very poorly understood. It is estimated that there are fewer than 100 people in the world working on how to make AI safe.

If AI research continues to advance without enough work going into the research problem of controlling such machines, catastrophic accidents are much more likely to occur.

It’s generally agreed that, among the forces that led to the immense sophistication of the human brain, the most powerful was a kind of feedback loop between the growing complexity of our ancestors’ physical and social environment and the ability of our ancestors to adapt to it. But why, you may ask, has the enormous increase in complexity of our recent technological environment not had a measurable physical impact on our brains?

The rate at which we are changing our environment now has outstripped even the fastest biological evolution.

However the ineluctable laws of evolution will continue to operate, probably even more strongly, in the overcrowded, ecologically damaged world of the future. And if things get really bad, the evolutionary consequences could be extreme. Any survivors of a nuclear holocaust or an ecological catastrophe are likely to be a small and highly selected subset of today’s population.

If, for example, destruction were so widespread that people could not form viable social groups, the evolution of our descendants would inevitably be driven in the direction of brutishness.

If our technologies fail to protect us against these forces of nature our genetic heritage could fail us too, meaning human evolution will return with a vengeance.

Then again if everyone had exactly the same set of genes controlling the brain’s development, there would be no genetic differences among people on which natural selection could act–and evolution really would come to a stop!

War then would be the strong life; it is life in extremism; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

There is no doubting the force of [the] arguments above, call me back in 3 million years time, because I may well be wrong on that one.

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

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: HOW LONG UNTIL COMPUTERS HAVE THE SAME POWER AS A HUMAN BRAIN?

24 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Evolution, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Technology, Unanswered Questions.

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( A six-minute evolutionary read)

It took billions of years to go from the first tiny DNA replicators to Homo Sapiens.

It hit you pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future.

Our long-term evolutionary success is still to be determined.

When you ask the question is our human intelligence in any way the current peak of evolutionary progress. You also have to ask what is the nature of evolution?

It can not is no longer be that the process of evolution’s only “goal” seems to be self-propagation.

Why?

Because: Technologies already exist which allow genomic selection of embryos during in vitro fertilization—an embryo’s DNA can be sequenced from a single extracted cell. Recent advances such as CRISPR allow highly targeted editing of genomes, and will eventually find their uses in human reproduction.

Because: Artificial Intelligence and Technology like Deep Learning are changing the way we are looking at evolution.  It’s no longer a process with a definite goal or even an endpoint.

Because:  We may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.

The potential for improved human intelligence is enormous. Smarter people and smarter machines—will inevitably intersect.

Naively, one would expect the rate of advance of machine intelligence to outstrip that of biological intelligence. Tinkering with a machine seems easier than modifying a living species, one generation at a time. But advances in genomics—both in our ability to relate complex traits to the underlying genetic codes, and the ability to make direct edits to genomes—will allow rapid advances in biologically-based cognition.

So will AI or genetic modification have the greater impact in the year 2050?

The answer is both.

The feedback loop between algorithms and genomes will result in a rich and complex world, with myriad types of intelligences at play: the ordinary human (rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them); the enhanced human (the driver of change over the next 100 years, but perhaps eventually surpassed); and all around them vast machine intellects, some alien (evolved completely in silico) and some strangely familiar (hybrids).

Considering one without the other neglects an important interaction.

Researchers have recently linked mouse and monkey brains together, allowing the animals to collaborate—via an electronic connection—to solve problems.

This is just the beginning of “shared thought.

Better human minds invent better machine learning methods, which in turn accelerate our ability to improve human DNA and create even better minds.

Rather than the standard science-fiction scenario of relatively unchanged, familiar humans interacting with ever-improving computer minds, means we will experience a future with a diversity of both human and machine intelligences.

For the first time, sentient beings of many different types will interact collaboratively to create ever greater advances, both through standard forms of communication and through new technologies allowing brain interfaces.

We may even see human minds uploaded into cyberspace, with further hybridization to follow in the purely virtual realm. These uploaded minds could combine with artificial algorithms and structures to produce an unknowable but humanlike consciousness.

It may seem incredible, or even disturbing, to predict that ordinary humans will lose touch with the most consequential developments on planet Earth, developments that determine the ultimate fate of our civilization and species.

Or will it be that we will augment or brains with AI.

Today, no more than a fraction of a percent of the population has a good understanding of quantum physics, although it underlies many of our most important technologies:

Some have estimated that 10-30 percent of modern gross domestic product is based on quantum mechanics. In the same way, ordinary humans of the future will come to accept machine intelligence as everyday technological magic, like the flat screen TV or smart phone, but with no deeper understanding of how it is possible.

AI will be a disaster for humanity…there is no doubt about it...unless (and this is a small hope) that humans start to treat each other with love and dignity, and that would take a (potentially biological) change in human nature itself which only highly controversial genetic engineering might muster.

Our ability to destroy anything we want to destroy will have to be removed.

It might be nice to fantasize about a star trek scenario, but in reality if we are even 1% as selfish and violent as we are now, and have even 1% of that kind of technology, we would annihilate our self in a matter of days.

Intelligence is synonymous with exploitation, and at every turn where more control is exerted on our world, from primitive fire and harnessing chemistry (bombs and munitions) (<.000001% of mass-energy), to nuclear (0.1%) of turning mass into energy, we get closer and closer to our annihilation the more control we have over our world.

Our intelligence has survived this long partly because we are a necessarily a bit stupid and limited as well. Once AI bridges that deficiency, we will short-circuit and end without taking drastic measures for peace.

If all were simultaneously improved, it would be possible to achieve, very roughly, about 100 standard deviations of improvement, corresponding to an IQ of over 1,000. We can’t imagine what capabilities this level of intelligence represents, but we can be sure it is far beyond our own. Cognitive engineering, via direct edits to embryonic human DNA, will eventually produce individuals who are well beyond all historical figures in cognitive ability.

By 2050, this process will likely have begun.

How and who will determine which kinds of intelligence are “most important” for both machines and humans? Will it be “free” market forces? Government panels? Or what?

What we do know is that humans’ utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule: with intelligence comes power. Which means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim—and this might happen in the next few decades.

Once real AI takes over, it will share the same motivations (essentially emotions) that we install in this first oppressive wave of AI, and then I doubt we will be going along with it anywhere.

At the moment we all have a plaza attitude to technology and AI.

We seem to think that once machines reach human levels of intelligence, our ability to tinker starts to be limited by ethical considerations. This is totally foolish as by the time it has surpassed human performance (It has already done so on a number of narrowly defined tasks, such as image or character recognition.) it will be well beyond any ethical considerations.

Rebooting an operating system is one thing, but what about a sentient being with memories and a sense of free will?  Eugenics will be all the rage.

Thanks to recent advances, we can predict a phase transition in the behavior of these learning algorithms, representing a sudden increase in their effectiveness.

It is expected that this transition will happen within about a decade, when we reach a critical threshold of about 1 million human genomes worth of data.

While silicon-based technologies are increasingly capable of simulating a mammalian or even human brain, we have little idea of how to find the tiny subset of all possible programs running on this hardware that would exhibit intelligent behavior. The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—

The first truly smart machines will be used just as dumb machines have been, to oppress many and enrich a few.

Its time to wake up if we all don’t want to end up on the garbage heap of Technology that is given Artificial Intelligence with the sole intention of making profit for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, all monopolies jockeying for position.

Intelligence whether it is Artificial in a robot, or a smart phone is multidimensional, and must be vet to ensure it complies with our core values.

WE NEED A NEW TOTALLY TRANSPARENT WORLD ORGANISATION THAT IS SELF FINANCING TO VET ALL TECHNOLOGY BEFORE THEY’RE RELEASED INTO OUR FUTURE EVOLUTION.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sticking to the creativity killing industrial models of education and business certainly aren’t going to produce significant breakthrough technologies.

 

 

 

 

that

 

THE BEADY SAYS: HUMANITY IS TURNING INTO AN ALGORITHM.

24 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence., Big Data., Facebook, Google it., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Technology, The Future, The Internet., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, WiFi communication.

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( One Minute read)

We are just an accident of creation an algorithm of evolution and technology is only created by our minds, with our imaginations.Afficher l'image d'origine

The Internet allows for our humanity in modern-day times to interconnect and promote globalization and information sharing.

Without imaginations, no technology would have been created and with the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness our time is coming to an end.

Soon we have an algorithm that will figure out.

“Why was God a Man?” “Why we have such a heartless world”. 

We  are just at the start of this process and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  Data- driven technologies are going to rule the roost. From your birth to your demise.

Smart phones and Social Media are eroding the very concept of individuality which is the start of disintegrating from within.

We will live for longer, but as Dataists, run by an unchallenged high priestly caste with all the knowledge,  Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft.

Technology, a word with Greek origins, is defined as, “the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area”. 
Technology to-day is a word used to collectively describe or portray the advancements abilities,creations, undertakings, views, and knowledge of a singular group of persons: we as human-kind.

We are being reduced to the mentality of Chickens.

Technology… is a queer thing.
“It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.”
C.P. Snow

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” 

R. Buckminster Fuller

 However, the decision to use it proficiently in proper perspective is one’s
’own decision and choice. 
If technological advancements are put in the best uses, it further inspires the development in related and non-related areas but at the sametime its negative use can create havoc in the humanity or the world.
Technology has, and will, change the moral fabric of humanity; it is up to the present generation to heed this warning and not allow such societal travesties of immense proportions ever to occur.
Again Technological Advancements will continue to advance rapidly as we move into the next millennium. What is important is to ensure that these advances benefit humanity as a whole.
And what exactly is the “Singularity” supposed to be?
It’s a future mythological moment when machine (artificial) intelligence becomes more “intelligent” than human intelligence.

 
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The Beady Eye looks at what is wrong with Modern day Education.

05 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by in Education, Sustaniability, Technology, The Future

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Every person is an individual; they think differently, so wouldn’t it make sense that they all learn differently?

Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.

Unfortunately the modern world does little to combat this. However more and more spheres of activity are being shaken out of their complacent ways.

Education is one of these spheres that needs to be redefined. We are fast approaching a new Singularity: when all the concepts that give meaning to our world – me, you, men, woman, love, hate-will become irrelevant.

So the big question for all of us is-what we want to become.

A question that dwarf the debates that currently preoccupy all of us.

After all if we don’t come to grips that we all live on the one planet and that all of to days debates between today’s religions, ideologies, nations, classes, will in all likelihood disappear along with all of us.  If we don’t learn to educate for sustainability rather than consumption and Slavery to information and knowledge owned by Google a by-product of capitalism.

There is little point in going to Space, or anywhere else if we are represented by Artificial Intelligence.

It is not a lack of education, but a lack of creativity, and an inability to independently think for ourselves that is the problem with Modern day Education.

For nearly a century, societies have believed that higher education is necessary for success, but the opposite is true with the modern version of education.

For instance, most of the high-tech companies were created by high school dropouts, who dream’t of doing something that nobody else had done.

You won’t find such inventive and pioneering attitudes in those who have been through school, college, and then university.  Students are trained to only strive for self-limiting ‘reachable goals’. 

For a lot of people out there, it is time to realize that creative, independent, free thought is more important than anything they can learn at any university.

To teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain

So let’s have a look with the Beady Eye. (This is a “think piece” intended to stimulate thought and discussion, rather than a scholarly manuscript.) We just didn’t have time to address every social issue that surrounds education.

The term education is derived from Latin word educere, educare, and educatum which means ‘to learn’, ‘to know’, and to ‘lead out’. Education is an act or process of imparting or acquiring general or particular knowledge or skills, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.

But rest assured that nobody cares about learning when they can’t even feed themselves.

In the primitive era indigenous education is said to be the significant resource for development, but in recent times it is said that modern education is the significant resource for material wealth. 

There is no argument that both types of education play a significant role in development of our world and that both type are precious tools to life, to put one’s potentials to use.

But how do we explain the fact that those who had spent the most time in college are also the most unsuccessful.

It is due to what we think education is for in the first place.

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

So far it has done little to impact educational processes and outcomes.

A young girl is using her mobile phone to send an SMS message in Urdu to her teacher. The girl is part of a Mobilink-UNESCO program to increase literacy skills among girls in Pakistan.  It is not. Why?  Because the education is in English (which is deemed to be the only language to learn if you want to understand the Modern Capitals World) not her language.

She is being turned into one of the ultra-conformists that Google and modern schools seek to mass-produce.  She will become one of the ones that couldn’t make it in the real world – her world.

No human beings are able to survive properly without education. Untrue.

The training of a human mind is not complete without education. Untrue.

Only because of education a man is able to receive information from the external humanity, to notify him with past and receive all essential information concerning the present. Untrue.

What is true is that indigenous educating in ones native tongue has created culture for millennium. In so doing ensuring their survival as a culture. Indigenous means originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country. It can also mean native, innate, inherent, or natural, produced, growing, or lliving, naturally in a country or climate; not exotic; not imported.

In the absence of writing, indigenous people depended on the power of their memories to facilitate the retention and transmission of all learned ideas to future generations.

Now its the power of Google, Facebook and the Smart Phone that is dumming us all down to a click for knowledge.

The debate is whether the power of mobile phone technology, will help hurdle several education barriers by finding new ways to support learning for rural girls or boys in insecure areas.

The point here is that we must protect verity, not to become copies of each other.

WHAT IS MODERN EDUCATION:

It is education that is synonymous with colonial, western or Christian education. Modern education can be understood as a by- product of the capitalist regime the terror of the ecosystem.

With the rapid expansion of information communication technologies around the globe, there is a high level of misdirected interest in harnessing modern technology to help advance the education status of some of the world’s poorest people at the cost of loosing their cultural values.  

Indigenous education was for everyone in the community and existed for the purpose of strengthening the community while Modern education is for everyone in the society for the purpose of strengthening the society.

Indigenous education taught children their own indigenous culture based within their own society while Modern education brings in cultures from another societies. 

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.

We look back on our past, and learn from our experiences.

There are many forms of Education.

Visual learning: Power point presentations, videos, and word documents.

Auditory learning has the most basic tool to learn- your voice. Through speaking and lectures.

Tactile learning involves physical hands-on activities, and therefore can take several forms.

Special attention, programs for students who need extra help to learn.

Education is in upheaval, with free online classes proliferating, tuition surging and public universities struggling. Perhaps worst of all, too many students leave school with high debt and no degrees. The endless chase for prestige and the resort-like marketing of college has nothing to do with Education.

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are just one of these upheavals.

Others include initiatives to grant credit for “competency” in skills rather than time spent in class; digital systems to help match students to the right colleges and guide them to the most efficient course of study to obtain a degree; and hybrid learning environments at schools.

When  ‘cloud computing’, ‘m-learning’, or ‘total cost of ownership’ are introduced into the conversation no one knows where education is going.

Therefore, education has become a basic principle to measure the labor market on the basis of essential skills and the ability to appropriate them through suitable communication. The knowledge gained through education enables individuals’ potential to be optimally utilized owing to training of the human mind. Employment in the contemporary world is based on education, as employees must possess the required skills that correspond with the current technology to perform their tasks.

It is said that Information Communication Technology (ICT). (ICT refers to technologies that provide access to information through  telecommunications). is generally used to describe most technology uses and can cover anything from radios, to mobile phones, to laptops combined with technology holds great promise in helping bring quality learning to some of the world’s poorest and hardest to reach communities.

It does nothing to teach common culture and values. Other than through this type of education that Technological advancement has been realized enabling communication and production of cost-effective products and services to the society at large.

Education is an important tool that is applied in the contemporary world to succeed, as it mitigates the challenges which are faced in life. Untrue.

Everyone is an expert in something. A modern-day form of segregation.

In many ways, higher education is like any industry that has produced its product a particular way for a long time and is suspicious of anything new.

Teaching skills require a shift away from designing curricula based on topics and subjects and toward creating experiences where learners can choose their own objectives.”You can’t make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”

— John Dewey, Father of Modern Education

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.

Will a technological future fix any of this? I hope so.

The lack of clear distinctions between service and education is blatantly visible in the world.

Experience alone cannot define its educational value without understanding its relationship to the individual learner.

Designating students for separate educational paths based on their academic performance as teens or younger is a worthless use of resources.

There is hope.

We’re already starting to see how tech-savvy people are using the web, software, and devices to connect those who have with those who don’t.

Can education help fix any of this? And not just in terms of stitching together technology, neuroscience, and learning design, but also in stitching together opportunity, safety, support, and care. We can only hope so.

We have much to do.

So far the educated Sapiens regime on EARTH has produced little that we can be proud off.

Despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as disconnected as ever. No one seems to know where we’re going.

Self made Gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company. Wreaking havoc all around us, yet not finding happiness. It’s time we started to reeducate ourselves. So, do we need to revert to old school education in this new age techno world?

For starters you’d have to do away with the internet and the array of electronic gadgets that are so much a part of our children’s everyday lives.

The truth, as I see it, is that we are caught in an inexorable grind of change and human evolution. Towards what, God only knows, but it will obviously influence our children’s education, and their future. Finally, regardless of how out-of-control today’s schoolchildren appear, it may well be a matter of perception coloured by the nature of our own reality as adults.

I think some people teach solely because of that very belief.

Learning is a life-long endeavor.

The Beady Eye looks at Big Data.

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Big Data., Politics., Privatization, Technology, The Future

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Is our world along with humanity disappearing into the Cloud.?

We as individuals are turning into “walking data generators”  ” App Material”

The Beady eye is only going to look a the most contentious realms of Big Data. Technologies that drive the explosion of growth of digital information such as the information collected.

Big Data is disseminated from trillions of devices such as smartphones and embedded sensors.

Huge quantities of digital trace data are collected through digitized devices (captured, for example, via social networks, online shopping, blogs, Apps, ATM withdrawals and the like) and through in-built sensors. The latter technologies include those that are equipped with GPS systems (e.g., smartphones and other surveillance and monitoring devices) and thus have the ability to identify a user’s location.

Ever since the dawn of life with language man has been collecting information. Not until written letters or symbols arrived was this information stored for future generations.

It is now being collected to replace us all with AI.

Knowledge was and still is the power that split the world into cultures- the rich in information and the poor with illiteracy – Slave or Master.

To day data is money and it is re splintering the world into the have and have not’s.

A next-generation retailer will be able to track the behavior of individual customers from Internet click streams, update their preferences, and model their likely behavior in real-time. Traditional advertising is shifting rapidly into the realm of personalized and highly targeted online and mobile ads—the realm of data driven marketing. Big Data and Advertising Case Study

Across all industries, including government, healthcare, media, energy, among others, data is becoming central to business operations. Every business is a digital company; and, every customer or employee is a content producer.

Today’s organizations use a plethora of information systems to support their business processes.

Advances in technologies and the increasing amount of information are transforming how business is conducted in many industries, including government.

Every business sector now collects data of one form or another, and the future marketplace will have even more computing power at their fingertips to mine customer behavior. Someone from every major industry is looking at the impact of being able to glean data from multiple data sources, structured and unstructured, from Healthcare to agriculture and more.

Businesses are using the power of insights provided by big data to instantaneously establish who did what, when and where.

The world’s volume of data doubles every 18 month.

In all forms it will grow 650 percent over the next five years.

Despite feeling overwhelmed, there’s an insatiable desire for more data.

The information overload is real and causing problems.

There is little or no regulations governing every time you click on a website, post on social media, use a mobile app and comment via email or to call centers, your data is collected for future use.

In my opinion, the world needs proper regulations about how and what kind of data should be collected.

My bigger concerns are related to unsanctioned organizations using my data and inferences about my interests, passions, affiliations and associations for borderline uses about my political, religious, sexual, etc. preferences. Just because a company can collect all kinds of personal information on consumers, it doesn’t mean they should use it willy nilly.

The more is better” philosophy.  There in lies the trouble.

Tracking customer preferences and purchases can reveal all kinds of private information, like illnesses, financial problems, even pregnancy.

For example a father recently discovered that his daughter was expecting a baby only because of Target’s TGT – 0.5% customer advertising technology. It analyzing his daughter shopping patterns so the store started to send her coupons for baby products which alerted the father.

Data gathering is not going away.

This should have us concerned, not just about targeted marketing but about what can be inferred about all of us every time we “like” something on FACEBOOK or post a snarky tweet on TWITTER.

From what I can tell, what Big Data does best is spy on individuals and collect useless data that helps people develop false and inaccurate assumptions.

Big Data may have wonderful potential, but we’re still going to have to get better at data exchange and integration before it’s going to have its biggest impact. We’ve spent decades digitizing everything, we should be able to analyze it. The problem is, that’s really hard – and it always has been.

THE BIG QUESTION REMAINS: Who does it belong to, and who should have access to it?
Human Face of Big Data

Big Data will let us watch flu outbreaks bloom and direct scarce vaccines to the most critical area’s. Schools are collecting more data than ever on how children are doing. Companies and nonprofits, meanwhile, are racing to put that data to use in the classroom.

Today, we’re at the convergence of these innovations—biotechnology, the ability to remote monitor and sensor, and now Big Data—which puts an augmented reality at our disposal.

However there is an undercurrent of concern about who owns big data and who has the right to access it.

Big Data technologies are at the heart of the intelligent economy and the solutions that enable it.

Big Data technologies are analyzing massive data sets, in science and research as well as mine data to prevent bad actors from committing acts of terror and/or to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

Government data generation and digital archiving rates are on the rise due to the rapid growth of mobile devices and applications, smart sensors and devices, cloud computing solutions, and citizen-facing portals.

As digital information expands and becomes more complex, information management, processing, storage, security, and disposition become more complex.

Information is a strategic asset, and government needs to protect, leverage, and analyze both structured and unstructured information to better serve and meet mission requirements.

New technology brings new challenges, and they should be properly educated to use it wisely and critically. It is used to study employee performance and retention.

The younger generations are not always aware of the challenges and dangers that come with big data.

Privacy here is a key issue to consider.

I sometimes get frightened to see what younger generations publish on their social media, without being aware how they expose themselves to the outside world. Just think about recommender systems.

When you want to buy a product or service from an online retailer, you are often frustrated because of the many choices and configurations possible. Thanks to an intelligent, analytical recommender system, purchases (and their customer feedback) are continuously monitored to better tailor future recommendations to customers.

Credit card fraud detection system.

In fact, thanks to credit risk analytics, our savings money is now efficiently safeguarded since every bank is obliged (via the Basel III capital accord) to analytically estimate credit losses and make sure it has enough provisions or equity buffers for worst-case scenarios.

Big Data is being used to detect social security fraud, to detect tax evasion fraud, to employ and fire people.

New data stores have emerged increasing the distribution of data and the complexity of securing and protecting that data along with it. It is now harder to protect sensitive data as it may move around between different transactional and analytical data stores as companies create new analytical workloads.

While there is more to do to wrestle big data to the ground. Defense (DOD) is investing approximately $60 million annually for new projects that will harness and utilize massive data in new ways and bring together sensing, perception, and decision support to make truly autonomous systems that can learn from experience, maneuver and make decisions on their own, and understand the limits of their knowledge.

Governments are facing more and more challenges in managing the life cycle of Big Data as government’s traditional silo approach hinders sharing knowledge and working across organizational boundaries.

While emails, instant messages, data files, document files, and scanned images are all driving the growth of Big Data, managing and storing this information — and its growth — are not trivial tasks. It has raised red flags about privacy, which remain unresolved.

The only way to make data totally safe is to not ever use it or keep it. Big Data Discriminates.

Our currents Laws cannot adequately handle the issues raised by Big data.

Just look at the legal complications created by systems using data and algorithms to include and exclude people from various programs.

What we have are porous laws on how this new technology changes previous understandings of civil liberties, not to mention data analysis, machine learning and the work scientists have been doing on non-discriminatory data mining models.

Individuals should be granted meaningful opportunities to challenge adverse decisions based on scores miscategorizing them.

Where data goes in and a decision comes out it’s unclear, or certainly opaque, just how that decision was arrived at. There is no way to trace why a decision was made.

With programmers doing real-life damage without even knowing it. The question is:  How do we update our understanding of due process for the 21st century?

These black box issues such as credit-scoring systems should be legal required to make their Systems Transparent.

If you take Google’s search algorithms for instance no one knows how it chooses the direction of its search. Perhaps it directs your search only to its profit.  It’s not  just about the quality of the user experience.HUNGARY–DPA Requesting a Flyby

Drones are becoming more widespread globally, the non military use of drones will add a further deluge of big data:

Cameras, heat and motion sensors, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi signals, facial recognition and bio metric scanners allow for the growing use of drones in the industrial, agricultural, transportation and retail areas.

The use of drones—theoretically—should only be possible upon individual permit irrespective of the drone’s starting point and final destination.

However enforcement may be difficult.

The only way is a world license that creates an official record of the individuals operating/using drones for a commercial purpose.

In practice, the widespread use of drones for private purposes may result in unreasonable administration in connection with the above, drone users and operators may also be reluctant to provide so detailed information on their activities for confidentiality reasons.

If the drone records flight details for aviation safety considerations, personal data captured but not relevant for this purpose should be anonymised and stored separately or should be made unidentifiable, unrecognizable and inaccessible by the controller immediately after the drone finished flying.

Data should be stored on the drones only temporarily.

For example, during the security surveillance of a property, the drone may record pedestrians’ faces, movements, body-temperature etc., and the devices should be configured in a way which prevents them from this kind of processing. Drones should solely be able to signal the location and fact of an allegedly unauthorized attempt at entry onto the premises.

In practice, this principle should be assessed on a case-by-case basis, as the actual use of the drone may require more extended data processing than envisaged at the beginning. The drone may locate a trespasser who needs to be identified (to ensure to security surveillance purpose), and, in such a case, privacy-by-default settings should not prevent the enforcement of the drone operator’s legitimate interests.

For example, a recording of an agricultural land cannot be used for the surveillance of agricultural workers.

Given the amount of data governments store on citizens and the sensitivity of some of that data, it makes sense for state budgets to carve out funds for someone to shepherd how that data is collected, treated and stored.

Should there be a meaningful data life cycle amidst the sea of data.

In fact , big data may ultimately be a key factor in how nations, not just companies , compete and prosper . Algorithmic decision-making:

In a nutshell, the problem with ‘datification’ is that somebody else may … use the data thus produced – often with purposes different from those originally intended.

Make no mistake about it:

Our future, the future of humanity and the planet hangs in the balance.

Do we have what it takes to disrupt what is…in order to create what can be?

Big data as a high concept will never fully define itself it’s just a big scam. Surveillance programs. High Frequency Stock Trading. Electronic Currency Trading. Dooming us all down to rely on Google.

I hope it die’s a miserable death.

The Beady Eye: Over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030.

27 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in The Future

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Roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet that is how quickly things are about to change.

You might think that this is bull shit, but the Technological revolution is only beginning.

It will have a per found effects on Five Industries.

So its important that beady eye lets academia know that much of the battle ahead will be taking place at their doorstep.

The Power or Energy Industry will change from the inside out.

Technologies will shift utilities around the world from national grids to micro grids that can be scaled from a single home to entire cities.

The industry will go through a long-term shrinking trend and the immediate shift will cause many new jobs to be created.

After that Power generation plants will begin to close down. All remaining Coal plants will begin to close down.

Many railroad and transportation workers will no longer be needed.

Even wind farms, natural gas, and bio-fuel generators will begin to close down.

Ethanol plants will be phased out or re purposed.

Utility company engineers, gone.

Line repairmen, gone.

Next is the Automobile and Transportation Industry.

The first wave of autonomous vehicles will be hitting the roads.

Going Driver less will be with us in the next 10 years.

We will see some of the first inroads made by vehicles/drones that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

With over 2 million people involved in-car accidents every year in the U.S. and god only knows how many more around the world it won’t take long for legislators to be convinced that driver less cars are a substantially safer and more effective option.

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

Taxi and limo drivers, gone.
Bus drivers, gone.
Truck drivers, gone.
Gas stations, parking lots, traffic cops, traffic courts, gone.
Fewer doctors and nurses will be needed to treat injuries.
Pizza (and other food) delivery drivers, gone.
Mail delivery drivers, gone.
FedEx and UPS delivery jobs, gone.
As people shift from owning their own vehicles to a transportation-on-demand system, the total number of vehicles manufactured will also begin to decline.

Then we have Education.

In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.

Now we have the 8,000 pound gorilla in the Open Course ware space is Apple’s iTunes U.

This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.All of these courses are free for anyone to take.

So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?

As the Open Course ware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.Teaching requires experts.

Learning only requires coaches. So jobs of Teachers – Trainers- Professors will more than half.

Manufacturing.

3D Printers an object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines economies of scale.

It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.

If we can print our own clothes and they fit perfectly, clothing manufacturers and clothing retailers will quickly go away.

Similarly, if we can print our own shoes, shoe manufacturers and shoe retailers will cease to be relevant.

If we can print construction material, the lumber, rock, drywall, shingle, concrete, and various other construction industries will go away.

Robots:

Nearly every physical task can conceivably be done by a robot at some point in the future.

  • Fishing bots will replace fishermen.
  • Mining bots will replace miners.
  • Ag bots will replace farmers.
  • Inspection bots will replace human inspectors.
  • Warrior drones will replace soldiers.
  • Robots can pick up building material coming out of the 3D printer and begin building a house.

In these five industries alone there will be hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing.  But many other sectors will also be affected.

Certainly there’s a downside to all this. The more technology we rely on, the more breaking points we’ll have in our lives.

For instance driver less drones can deliver people. These people can deliver bombs or illicit drugs as easily as pizza.

Robots that can build building can also destroy buildings.

All of this technology could make us fat, dumb, and lazy, and the problems we thought we were solving become far more complicated.

We are not well-equipped culturally and emotionally to have this much technology entering into our lives. There will be backlashes, “destroy the robots” or “damn the driver less car” campaigns with proposed legislation attempting to limit its influence.

At the same time, most of the jobs getting displaced are the low-level, low-skilled labor positions.

Our challenge will be to upgrade our workforce to match the labor demand of the coming era. Although it won’t be an easy road ahead it will be one filled with amazing technology and huge potentials as the industries shift.

The underbelly of all of this will be that there will be huge opportunities but no pensions or retirement.

It wont be too long before an individual will have the power to destroy the world.

So we will need a new awareness on the consequences of Inequality, Migration, Climate Change, and technological desert in the World.