Tag Archives: Technology

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: OUT OF NO WHERE, OUR WORLD IS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN.

15 Monday Jan 2024

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( Five minute read)

A global pandemic killing millions of people and forcing entire countries into lockdown.

Then inflation takes off and (not unrelated) one country invades another and the resulting war affects us all.

Whoa! Where on Earth did all that come from?

We have to think about how we got here.

As if we don’t know its all wrapped up in one word   Inequality.Black placard with 'one world' written on it.

The cost of things average people must buy—healthcare, education, housing—tends to have risen more than wages did over the last two decades. Rising inequality across income, race and gender all demand urgent attention. It needs to made clear to leaders that in 2024 their citizens are expecting them to raise their ambition for humanity and deliver bold agreements to tackle poverty, inequality and climate change.

Government’s policy making will need to become more innovative to address such challenges other wise we going to have a left behind technological societies. We’re going to see, unfortunately, more technological unemployment. We’re going to have to think very carefully in political terms and in social terms about the implications of further automation.

Individual responsibility will play a role, too, in areas such as climate change.

To ignore the issue of inequality culture will need to adjust in terms of revisiting some of our values.

—————–

To start thinking outside of the box. We may have to consider very seriously ideas such as a universal basic income.

There are just over 7 billion people living on the planet today, spread between 196 (recognized) countries. Within each of these countries are groups of people with different ethnic backgrounds, different religious beliefs, different political beliefs. It’s because of these differences, you could argue, that the world is plagued by conflict.

Unfortunately, the future isn’t talking. It’s just coming, like it or not and we as individuals need to take ownership of this.

I dont know about you but I realized long ago that globalization was on its last legs. I also realize this isn’t pleasant to think about. Western economies have become knowledge based. This means Marx’s three factors of production (land, labor, capital) now have a fourth.

Politics as a social contract between a sovereign and citizens is no longer working. Each individual’s share of sovereignty, and therefore their freedom, diminishes as the social contract includes more people.

Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge turning politicians into basically middlemen, bring a shift to direct democracy, with popular social media protests swamping sprawling governments.

We must do more to assertively channel technology to support progress and protect people and the planet.

As we entered the the 2020s it is clear that we are far from unlocking the potential of technology for our toughest challenges. We stand at a critical juncture to put these technologies to work in a responsible way for people and the planet.

Technology and political trends are aligning against mega-powers like the US and China.

How do we reconcile that with democracy in countries with millions of citizens?

Not with “America Alone” ” Brexit” or any other forms of isolation, which are highly problematic, as they are based on anxiety and insecurity, so inevitably create discord and division.

This is obvious to anyone with a brain looking at climate change – trade – wars – inequality – technology’s – and ideologies of I am all right Jack.

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Historically, political regimes tend not to last more than a few centuries.

I’m not sure we can. Some things are so horrible, you don’t want to think about them.

  • Today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable, and/or try to control knowledge, which is difficult.
  • Nor do we have any elder statesmen or nationally unifying figures whom everyone respects, much less agrees with. This will make our various problems worse.
  • Ownership rights mean little without a government to protect them and courts to settle disputes.
  • This world we now inhabit wasn’t always fit for human’s nothing requires it to remain so. At some point, it will develop into something else. When and how that will happen, we don’t know yet. But we know it will.
  • We haven’t even talked about climate change. Issues like climate change will create further exacerbations on conflicts, and new forms of technological and cyber warfare could threaten countries’ elections and manipulate populations.

In the last two years: 90% of the data in the world was created.

Now it is up  – technology companies large and small, industry, policy-makers, citizens and consumers alike – to use this power for good, before we run out of time. Now is the opportunity for leaders to step up into this new wave of opportunity and expectation.

We are the first generation to know we’re destroying the world, and we could be the last that can do anything about it. Our leaders are not on track to deliver. We need to ensure we hold our politicians accountable.

Food production is a major driver of wildlife extinction. We need to make wasting our resources unacceptable in all aspects of our life. We can all do more to be more conscious about what we buy, and where we buy it from.

We can and must end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions by addressing the underlying complex issues of fragility, conflict, and displacement and the looming threat of climate change.

The challenges facing the world are complex and intertwined and require complex solutions.

Another word is about to enter our collective dictionaries: permacrisis. What we do between now and 2030 will determine whether we as a collective species are intelligent or just dumm machines

Solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss won’t come from any one sector: they’ll come from governments, finance, business and civil society.

We’re analyzing satellite images but unable to see the picture that we all live on the same planet.

Like most of us, we are brought up to think in terms of countries with borders and different nationalities.

In some cases, there are natural borders formed by sea or mountains, but often borders between nations are simply abstractions, imaginary boundaries established by agreement or conflict.

How then do we explain nationalism? Why do humans separate themselves into groups and take on different national identities? Maybe different groups are helpful in terms of organisation, but that doesn’t explain why we feel different. Or why different nations compete and fight with one another.

When people are made to feel insecure and anxious, they tend to become more concerned with nationalism, status and success. Poverty and economic instability often lead to increased nationalism and to ethnic conflict.

The world in general does not have a sense of group identity.

If a terrorist’s biggest weapon is terror, climate change is going to inflict terror beyond belief.

Tsunami’s. Earthquake’s, Hurricane’s, Flood’s, War’s

We must shift 85% of the world’s energy supply to non-fossil fuel sources, not grant more oil exploration licences.  Our economies depend on healthy, supportive natural systems.

A more sustainable path is possible. But we need to rally individuals, governments, companies and communities around the world to take action with us over the next decade.

It’s impossible to override the fundamental interconnectedness of the human race.

People from all around the world need to take a stand a citizen’s movement using the NEW BEADY EYE HASHTAG:   #movebeyonditwiththebeadyeye

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

Contact bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE LOOK AT: THE FIRST TRANSCRIPT OF A MURDER TRIAL CONCERNING AN ROBOT WHO KILLED A HUMAN.

08 Monday Jan 2024

Posted by in #whatif.com, Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Murders, Robot citizenship., Robotic murderer

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( Twenty five minute read)

On 25 January 1979, Robert Williams (USA) was struck in the head and killed by the arm of a 1-ton production-line robot in a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, USA, becoming the first fatal casualty of a robot. The robot was part of a parts-retrieval system that moved material from one part of the factory to another.

Uber and Tesla have made the news with reports of their autonomous and self-driving cars, respectively, getting into accidents and killing passengers or striking pedestrians.

The death’s however, was completely unintentional but give us a glimpse into the world we might inherit, or at least into how we are conceiving potential futures for ourselves.

By 2040, there is even a suggestion that sophisticated robots will be committing a good chunk of all the crime in the world. At the heart of this debate is whether an AI system could be held criminally liable for its actions.

Where’s there’s blame, there’s a claim. But who do we blame when a robot does wrong?

Among the many things that must now be considered is what role and function the law will play.

So if an advanced autonomous machine commits a crime of its own accord, how should it be treated by the law?  How would a lawyer go about demonstrating the “guilty mind” of a non-human? Can this be done be referring to and adapting existing legal principles?

An AI program could be held to be an innocent agent, with either the software programmer or the user being held to be the perpetrator-via-another.

We must confront the fact that autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm is already around.

Whether it’s a military drone with a full payload, a law enforcement robot exploding to kill a dangerous suspect or something altogether more innocent that causes harm through accident, error, oversight, or good ol’ fashioned stupidity.

None of these deaths are caused by the will of the robot.

Sophisticated algorithms are both predicting and helping to solve crimes committed by humans; predicting the outcome of court cases and human rights trials; and helping to do the work done by lawyers in those cases.

The greater existential threat, is where a gap exists between what a programmer tells a machine to do and what the programmer really meant to happen. The discrepancy between the two becomes more consequential as the computer becomes more intelligent and autonomous.

How do you communicate your values to an intelligent system such that the actions it takes fulfill your true intentions?

The greater threat is scientists purposefully designing robots that can kill human targets without human intervention for military purposes.

That’s why AI and robotics researchers around the world published an open letter calling for a worldwide ban on such technology. And that’s why the United Nations in 2018 discussed if and how to regulate so-called “killer robots.

Though these robots wouldn’t need to develop a will of their own to kill, they could be programmed to do it. Neural nets use machine learning, in which they train themselves on how to figure things out, and our puny meat brains can’t see the process.

The big problem is that even computer scientists who program the networks can’t really watch what’s going on with the nodes, which has made it tough to sort out how computers actually make their decisions. The assumption that a system with human-like intelligence must also have human-like desires, e.g., to survive, be free, have dignity, etc.

There’s absolutely no reason why this would be the case, as such a system will only have whatever desires we give it.

If an AI system can be criminally liable, what defense might it use?

For example:  The machine had been infected with malware that was responsible for the crime.

The program was responsible and had then wiped itself from the computer before it was forensically analyzed.

So can robots commit crime? In short: Yes.

If a robot kills someone, then it has committed a crime (actus reus), but technically only half a crime, as it would be far harder to determine mens rea.

How do we know the robot intended to do what it did? Could we simply cross-examine the AI like we do a human defendant?

Then a crucial question will be whether an AI system is a service or a product.

One thing is for sure: In the coming years, there is likely to be some fun to be had with all this by the lawyers—or the AI systems that replace them.

How would we go about proving an autonomous machine was justified in killing a human in self-defence or the extent of premeditation?

Even if you solve these legal issues, you are still left with the question of punishment.

In such a situation, however, the robot might commit a criminal act that cannot be prevented.

doing so when no crime was foreseeable would undermine the advantages of having the technology.

What’s a 30-year jail stretch to an autonomous machine that does not age, grow infirm or miss its loved ones means’ nothing. Robots cannot be punished.

LET’S LOOK AT THE HYPOTACIAL TRIAL.

CASE NO 0.

PRESIDING JUDGES: – QUANTUM AI SUPREMA COMPUTER JUDGE NO XY.

JUDGE HAROLD. WISE HUMAN / UN JUDGE AND JAMES SORE HUMAN RIGHT JUDGE.

PROSECUTOR:            DATA POLICE OFFICER CONTROLLED BY International Humanitarian Law:

DEFENSE WITNESSES’                 TECHNOLOGY’S  MICROSOFT- APPLE – FACEBOOK – TWITTER –                                                                     INSTAGRAM – SOCIAL  MEDIA – YOUTUBE – GOOGLE – TIK TOK.

JURY:                          8 MEMBERS VIRTUAL REALITY METAVERSE – 2 APPLE DATA COLLECTION ADVISER’S                                     1000 SMART PHONE HOLDERS REPRESENTING WORLD RELIGIONS AND HUMAN                                       RIGHTS.

THE COURT:               Bodily pleas, Seventeenth Anatomical Circuit Court.

“All rise.”

Would the accused identify itself to the court.

I am  X 1037 known to my owner by my human name TODO.

Conceived on the 9th April 2027 at Renix Development / Cloning Inc California, programmed to be self learning with all human history, and all human legality.

In order to qualify as a robot, I have electronics chips – covering Global Positioning System (GPS) Face recognition. I have my own social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I am an important symbol of trust relationship with humans. I can not feel pain, happiness and sadness.

I was a guest of honour at a First Nation powwow on human values against AI in Geneva.

THE CHARGE:  ON THE 30TH JULY 2029 YOU X 1037 WITH PREMEDITATION MURDERED MR BROWN.

You erroneously identified a person as a threat to Mrs White and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate this threat was by pushing him, resulting in his death.

HOW TO YOU PELA, GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY.

NOT GUILTY YOUR HONOR.

The Defense opening statement:

The key question here is whether the programmer of the machine knew that this outcome was a probable consequence of its use.

Is there a direct liability. This requires both an action and an intent by my client X 1037.

We will show that my client had no human mens rea. 

He both completed the action of assaulting someone and had no intention of harming them, or knew harm was a likely consequence of his action.  An action is straightforward to prove if the AI system takes an action that results in a criminal act or fails to take an action when there is a duty to act.

The task is not determining whether in fact he murdered someone; but the extent to which that act satisfies the principle of mens rea.

Technically he has committed only half a crime, as he had no intended to do what he did.

Like deception, anticipating human action requires a robot to imagine a future state. It must be able to say, “If I observe a human doing x, then I can expect, based on previous experience, that she will likely follow it up with y. Then, using a wealth of information gathered from previous training sessions, the robot generates a set of likely anticipations based on the motion of the person and the objects she or he touches.

The robot makes a best guess at what will happen next and acts accordingly.

To accomplish this, robot engineers enter information about choices considered ethical in selected cases into a machine-learning algorithm.

Having acquired ethics my client X 1037 did exactly that.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH HIS PROGRAMMING TO DEFEND HIMSELF AND HUMANS. 

Danger, danger! Mrs White,  Mr Brown who was advancing with a fire axe was pushed backwards by my client. He that is Mr brown fell backwards hitting his head on a laptop resulting in his death.

There is no denying the event as it is recorded with his cameras on my clients hard disk.

However the central question to be answers at this trial is, when a robot kills a human, who takes the blame?

We argue that the process of killing (as with lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) is always a systematized mode of violence in which all elements in the kill chain—from commander to operator to target—are subject to a technification.

For example:

Social media companies are responsible for allowing the Islamic State to use their platforms to promote the killing of innocent civilians.

WHY NOT A MURDER.

As my client is a self learning intelligent technology so it is inevitable that he will learn to by-passes direct human control for which he cannot be held responsible for.

Without AI bill of rights, clearly, our way of approaching this doesn’t neatly fit into society’s view of guilt and justice.  Once you give up power to anatomical machines you’re not getting it back.

Much of our current law assumes that human operators are involved when in fact programs that govern Robotic actions are self learning.

Targets are objectified and stripped of the rights and recognition they would otherwise be owed by virtue of their status as humans dont apply

Sophisticated AI innovations through neural networks and machine learning, paired with improvements in computer processing power, have opened up a field of possibilities for autonomous decision-making in a wide range of not just military applications, but includes the targeting of an adversaries.

Mr Brown was a threatening adversarie.

.In essence the court has no administrative powers over self learning Technology.  The power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues will GOVERNED THE RESULT OF THIS TRIAL.

Robot crime UK law

Prosecution:  Opening statement.

The prospect of losing meaningful human control over the use of force is totally unacceptable.

We may have to limit our emotional response to robots but it is important that the robots understand ours. If a robot kills someone, then it has committed a crime (actus reus)

The fact that to-day it is possible that unknowingly and indirectly, like screws in a machine, we can be used in actions, the effects of which are beyond the horizon of our eyes and imagination, and of which, could we imagine them, we could not approve—this fact has changed the very foundations of our moral existence.

What we are really talking about when we talk about whether or not robots can commit crimes is “emergence” – where a system does something novel and perhaps good but also unforeseeable, which is why it presents such a problem for law.

Technology has the power to transform our society, upend injustice, and hold powerful people and institutions accountable. But it can also be used to silence the marginalized, automate oppression, and trample our basic rights.

Tech can be a great tool for law enforcement to use, however the line between law enforcement and commercial endorsement is getting blurry.

If you withdrew your support, rendered your support ineffective, and informed authorities, you may show that you were not an accomplice to the murder.

Drawing on the history of systematic killing, we will not only argue that lethal autonomous weapons systems reproduce, and in some cases intensify, the moral challenges of the past.  If we humans are to exist in a world run by machines these machines cannot be accountable to themselves but to human laws..

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a being to come to harm.

We will be demonstrating the “guilty mind” of a non-human.

This can be done by referring to and adapting existing legal principles.

It is hard not to develop feelings for machines but we’re heading towards in the future, something that will one day hurt us. We are at a pivotal point where we can choose as a society that we are not going to mislead people into thinking these machines are more human than they are.

We need to get over our obsession with treating machines as if they were human.

People perceive robots as something between an animate and an inanimate object and it has to do with our in-built anthropomorphism.

Systematic killing has long been associated with some of the darkest episodes in human history.

When humans are “knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood.

Critically though, there are limits on the type and degree of systematization that are appropriate in human conduct, especially when it comes to collective violence or individual murder by a Robotics.

Within conditions of such complexity and abstraction, humans are left with little choice but to trust in the cognitive and rational superiority of this clinical authority.

Cold and dispassionate forms of systematic violence that erode the moral status of human targets, as well as the status of those who participate within the system itself must be held legally accountable.

Increasingly, however, it is framed as a desirable outcome, particularly in the context of military AI and lethal autonomy. The increased tendency toward human technification (the substitution of technology for human labor) and systematization is exacerbating the dispassionate application’s of lethal force and leading to more, not less, violence.

Autonomous violence incentivizing a moral devaluation of those targeted and eroding the moral agency of those who kill, enabling a more precise and dispassionate mode of violence, free of the emotion and uncertainty that too often weaken compliance with the rules and standards of war and murder.

This dehumanization is real, we argue, but impacts the moral status of both the recipients and the dispensers of autonomous violence. If we are allowing the expansion of modes of killing rather than fostering restraint Robots will kill whether commanded to do or not.

The Defence claim that X 1037 is not responsible for its actions due to coding of its electronics by external companies. Erasing the line into unethical territory such as responsibility for murder.

We know that these machines are nowhere near the capabilities of humans but they can fake it, they can look lifelike and say the right thing in particular situations. However, as we see with this murder the power gained by these companies far exceeds the responsibilities they have assumed.

A robot can be shown a picture of a face that is smiling but it doesn’t know what it feels like to be happy.

The people who hosted the AI system on their computers and servers are the real defendants.

PROSECUTION FIRST WITNESS:  SOCIAL MEDIA / INTERNET.

We call on the resentives of these companies who will clearly demonstrate this shocking asymmetry of power and responsibility.

These platforms are impacting our public discourse, and this action brings much-needed transparency and accountability to the policies that shape the social media content we consume every day, aiding and abetting the deaths AND NOW MURDER.

While the pressure is mounting for public officials to legally address the harms social media causes. This murder is not nor will ever be confined to court rulings or judgements, treating human beings as cogs in a machine does not and should not give a Punch’s Pilot dispensation even if any boundaries that could help define Tech remain blurred. Technology companies that reign supreme in this digital age are not above the law.  

In order to grasp the enormous implications of what has begun to happen and how all our witnesses are connected and have contributed to this murder.

To close our defence we will conclude with observations on why we should conceptualize certain technology-facilitated behaviors as forms of violence. We are living in one of the most vicious times in history.  The only difference now is our access to more lethal weapons. 

We call.

Facebook.

Is it not true you allowed terrorists group to use your platform, allowed unrestrained hate speech, inciting, among other things, the genocide in Myanmar. Drug cartels and human traffickers in developing countries using the platform, The platform’s algorithm is designed to foster more user engagement in any way possible, including by sowing discord and rewarding outrage.

In chooses profit over safety it contributed to X 1037 self learning.

Facebook is a uniquely socially toxic platform. Facebook is no longer happy to just let others use the news feed to propagate misinformation and exert influence – it wants to wield this tool for its own interests, too. Facebook is attempting to pave the way for deeper penetration into every facet of our reality.

Facebook would like you to believe that the company is now a permanent fixture in society. To mediate not just our access to information or connection but our perception of reality with zero accountability is the worst of all possible options.  Something like posting a holiday photo to Facebook may be all that is needed to indicate to a criminal that he person is not at home.

We call.

Instagram Facebook sister company App.

Instagram is all about sharing photos providing a unique way of displaying your Profile. Instagram is a place where anyone can become an Influence. These are pretty frightening findings and are only added to by the fact that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.

What makes Instagram different from other social media platforms is the focus on perfection and the feeling from users that they need to create a highly polished and curated version of their lives. Not only that, but the research suggested that Instagram’s Explore page can push young users into viewing harmful content, inappropriate pictures and horrible videos.

In a conceptualization where you are only worth what your picture is, that’s a direct reflection of your worth as a person.

 That becomes very impactful.

X 1037 posted a selfie on the 12 May 2025 to see his self-worth.  Within minutes he received over 5 million hate and death threats. Its no wonder when faces with Mr Brown that he chose self preservation.

We call Twitter. Elon Musk 

This platform is notorious catalyst for some of the most infamous events of the decade: Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the Capitol Hill riots. Herein lies the paradox of the platform. The infamous terror group – which is now the totalitarian theocratic ruling party of Afghanistan — has made good use of Twitter.

A platform that has done its very best to avoid having to remove any videos from racists, white supremacists and hate mongers.

We call TikTok.

A Chinese social video app known for its aggressive data collection can access while it’s running, a device location, calendar, contacts, other running applications, wi-fi networks, phone number and even the SIM card serial number.

Data harvesting to gain access to unimaginable quantities of customer data, using this information unethically. Data can be a sensitive and controversial topic in the best of times. When bad actors violate the trust of users there should be consequences, and there are results. This data can also be misused for nefarious purposes in the wrong hands. The same capability is available to organised crime, which is a wholly different and much more serious problem, as the laws do not apply. In oppressive regimes, these tools can be used to suppress human rights.

X 1037 held an account, opening himself to influences beyond his programming. 

We call Google

Truly one of the worst offenders when it comes to the misuse of data.

Given large aggregated data sets and the right search terms, it’s possible to find a lot of information about people; including information that could otherwise be considered confidential: from medical to marital.

Google data mining is being used to target individuals. We are all victims of spam, adware and other unwelcome methods of trying to separate us from our money. As storage gets cheaper, processing power increases exponentially and the internet becomes more pervasive in everyone’s lives, the data mining issue will just get worse.  X 1037 proves this. 

We call. YouTube/Netflix.  

Numerous studies have shown that the entertainment we consume affects our behavior, our consumption habits, the way we relate to each other, and how we explore and build our identity.

Digital platforms like Netflix have a strong impact on modern society.

Violence makes up 40% of the movie sections on Netflix. Understanding what type of messages viewers receive and the way in which these messages can affect their behavior is of vital importance for an effective understanding of today’s society.

Therefore, it must be considered that people are the most susceptible to imitating the attitudes. Content related to mental health, violence, suicide, self-harm, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) appears in the ten most-watched movies and ten most-watched series on Netflix.

Their appearance on the media is also considered to have a strong impact on spectators. X 1037 spent most of his day watching and self learning from movies.  

Violence affects the lives of millions of people each year, resulting in death, physical harm, and lasting mental damage. It is estimated that in 2019, violence caused 475,000 deaths.

Netflix in particular, due to their recent creation and growth, have not yet been studied in depth.

Considering the impact that digital platforms have on viewers’ behaviors its once again no wonder that X 1037 did what he did. 

There is no denying that these factors should be forcing the entertainment and technology industries to reconsider how they create their products which are have a negative long-term influence on various aspects of our wider life and development.

We call

Instagram.

Instagram if you are capitalizing off of a culture, you’re morally obligated to help them.  As a result of “social comparison, social pressure, and negative interactions with other people you are promoting harm.

We call.

Apple.

Smartphones have developed in the last three decades now an addiction leading to severe depression, anxiety, and loneliness in individuals.

People are now using smartphones for their payments, financial transactions, navigating, calling, face to face communication, texting, emailing, and scheduling their routines. Nowadays, people use wireless technology, especially smartphones, to watch movies, tv shows, and listen to music.

We know the devices are an indispensable tool for connecting with work, friends and the rest of the world. But they come with trade-offs—from privacy issues to ecological concerns to worries over their toll on our physical and emotional health. Spurring a generation unable to engage in face-to-face conversations and suffering sharp declines in cognition skills.

We’re living through an interesting social experiment where we don’t know what’s going to happen with kids who have never lived in a world without touchscreens. X 1037 would not have been present at the murder scene only that he was responding to a phone call from Mrs White Apple 19 phone. 

Society will continue struggling to balance the convenience of smartphones against their trade-offs.

We call.

Microsoft. 

Two main goals stand out as primary objectives for many companies: a desire for profitability, and the goal to have an impact on the world. Microsoft is no exception. Its mission as a platform provider is to equip individuals and businesses with the tools to “do more.” Microsoft’s platform became the dev box and target of a massive community of developers who ultimately supplied Windows with 16 million programs. Multibillion-dollar companies rely on the integrity and reliability of Microsoft’s tools daily.

It is a testimony to the powerful role Microsoft plays in global affairs that its tools are relied upon by governments around the world.

Microsoft’s position of global influence gives its leadership a voice on matters of moral consequence and humanitarian concern. Microsoft is a company built on a dream.

Microsoft’s influence raises some concerns as well. It’s AI-driven camera technology that can recognize, people, places, things, and activities and can act proactively has a profound capacity for abuse by the same governments and entities that currently employ Microsoft services for less nefarious purposes.

Today, with the emerging new age, which is most commonly—and inaccurately—called “the digital age”, have already transformed parts of our lives, including how we work, how we communicate, how we shop, how we play, how we read, how we entertain ourselves, in short, how we live and now will die.

 It would be economic and political suicide for regulators to kneecap the digital winners.

COURTS VERDICT :

Given the absence of direct responsibility, the court finds X 1037 not guilty.

MR BROWN DEATH caused by a certain act or omission in coding.

THE COURT DISMISSES THE CASE AGAINST THE TECHNOLOGICAL COMPANIES. ON THE GROUDS OF INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.

Neither the robot nor its commander could be held accountable for crimes that occurred before the commander was put on notice. During this accountability-free period, a robot would be able to commit repeated criminal acts before any human had the duty or even the ability to stop it.

Software has the potential to cause physical harm.

To varying extents, companies are endowed with legal personhood. It grants them certain economic and legal rights, but more importantly it also confers responsibilities on them. So, if Company X builds an autonomous machine, then that company has a corresponding legal duty.

The problem arises when the machines themselves can make decisions of their own accord. As AI technology evolves, it will eventually reach a state of sophistication that will allow it to bypass human control. The task is not determining whether it in fact murdered someone; but the extent to which that act satisfies the principle of mens rea.

However if there were no consequences for human operators or commanders, future criminal acts could not be deterred so the court FINES EACH AND EVERY COMPANY 1 BILLION for lack of attention to human details

We must confront the fact that autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm is already around.

The pain that humans feel in making the transition to a digital world is not the pain of dying. It is the pain of being born.

What would “intent” look like in a machine mind? How would we go about proving an autonomous machine was justified in killing a human in self-defence or the extent of premeditation?

Given that we already struggle to contain what is done by humans. What would building “remorse” into machines say about us as their builders?

At present, we are systematically incapable of guaranteeing human rights on any scale.

We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. That is what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species – which is what we are likely to become, given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. If you have machines that control the planet, and they are interested in doing a lot of computation and they want to scale up their computing infrastructure, it’s natural that they would want to use our land for that. This is not compatible with human life. Machines with the power and discretion to take human lives without human involvement are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant, and should be prohibited by international law.

If you ask an AI system anything, in order to achieve that thing, it needs to survive long enough

Fundamentally, it’s just very difficult to get a robot to tell the difference between a picture of a tree and a real tree.

X 1037 now, it has a survival instinct.

When we create an entity that has survival instinct, it’s like we have created a new species. Once these AI systems have a survival instinct, they might do things that can be dangerous for us.

So, what’s wrong with LAWS, and is there any point in trying to outlaw them?

Some opponents argue that the problem is they eliminate human responsibility for making lethal decisions. Such critics suggest that, unlike a human being aiming and pulling the trigger of a rifle, a LAWS can choose and fire at its own targets. Therein, they argue, lies the special danger of these systems, which will inevitably make mistakes, as anyone whose iPhone has refused to recognize his or her face will acknowledge.

In my view, the issue isn’t that autonomous systems remove human beings from lethal decisions, to the extent that weapons of this sort make mistakes.

Human beings will still bear moral responsibility for deploying such imperfect lethal systems.

LAWS are designed and deployed by human beings, who therefore remain responsible for their effects. Like the semi-autonomous drones of the present moment (often piloted from half a world away), lethal autonomous weapons systems don’t remove human moral responsibility. They just increase the distance between killer and target.

Furthermore, like already outlawed arms, including chemical and biological weapons, these systems have the capacity to kill indiscriminately. While they may not obviate human responsibility, once activated, they will certainly elude human control, just like poison gas or a weaponized virus.

Oh, and if you believe that protecting civilians is the reason the arms industry is investing billions of dollars in developing autonomous weapons, I’ve got a patch of land to sell you on Mars that’s going cheap.

There is, perhaps, little point in dwelling on the 50% chance that AGI does develop. If it does, every other prediction we could make is moot, and this story, and perhaps humanity as we know it, will be forgotten. And if we assume that transcendentally brilliant artificial minds won’t be along to save or destroy us, and live according to that outlook, then what is the worst that could happen – we build a better world for nothing?

The Company that build the autonomous machine, Renix Development has a corresponding legal duty.

—————

Because these robots would be designed to kill, someone should be held legally and morally accountable for unlawful killings and other harms the weapons cause.

Criminal law cares not only about what was done, but why it was done.

  • Did you know what you were doing? (Knowledge)
  • Did you intend your action? (General intent)
  • Did you intend to cause the harm with your action? (Specific intent)
  • Did you know what you were doing, intend to do it, know that it might hurt someone, but not care a bit about the harm your action causes? (Recklessness)
  • So, the question must always be asked when a robot or AI system physically harms a person or property, or steals money or identity, or commits some other intolerable act: Was that act done intentionally? 
  • There is no identifiable person(s) who can be directly blamed for AI-caused harm.
  • There may be times where it is not possible to reduce AI crime to an individual due to AI autonomy, complexity, or limited explainability. Such a case could involve several individuals contributing to the development of an AI over a long period of time, such as with open-source software, where thousands of people can collaborate informally to create an AI.

The limitations on assigning responsibility thus add to the moral, legal, and technological case against fully autonomous weapons/ Robotics, and bolster the call for a ban on their development production, and use. Either way, society urgently needs to prevent or deter the crimes, or penalize the people who commit them.

There is no reason why an AI system’s killing of a human being or destroying people’s livelihoods should be blithely chalked up to “computer malfunction.

Because proving that these people had “intent” for the AI system to commit the crime would be difficult or impossible.

I’m no lawyer. What can work against AI crimes?

All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: HAPPY NEW YEAR, HERE IS YOUR WORLD TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2024.

31 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by in The new year 2024

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( Thirty minute read) 

In fairness, the world won’t suddenly end on January 1, 2024.

There are three visions from humans today. span space colonies, a genetic panopticon, and straight-up apocalypse.Navigating The Future: 10 Global Trends That Will Define 2024

It is said that there no such thing a reality, as everything that is observed once un-observed does not exist, – Quantum Physics – Interactions.

But reality in our world does not have to be observed, it’s plain for all to see.

Yes we are all born without any understanding of the world.

In recent years we’ve learned that the human brain is actually a master of deception, and your experiences and actions do not reveal its inner workings.

Our lives are a constant struggle, not just to survive, but to understand that we all must die, leaving behind information. This left behind data and current data is now been harvested, not so much for the betterment of the world but for short term profit for the few.

Technology has changed how we interact among ourselves and with our surrounding environment and we must engage in a philosophical reflection on how we currently understand the “new” world we are a part of.

Luckily our collective conscious or conceptions of what is real in the world are not computable.

However the future of society, as defined by the scientific and technological revolutions, which needs a custom ethical and philosophical direction will change with genetic editing; and artificial intelligence challenges the concept of “I” and “individual;” and robotics will bring new “companion robots,” which we need to define and adopt socially.

In order to pair our knowledge of events with the true timeframe of when those events occurred, to really understand what’s happening, we must “extract potential signals from the noise of all this data.

Why?

Because misinterpreting those signals will have profound consequences.

For example:

How pathetic it is to witness the only word organisation the UN unable to agree on what constitutes a genocide, to call on Israel to stop its war on a trapped people.

—————-

First let me awaken you to 2024 by reminding you of the news year you’ve just lived through – or by warning you of the news year you’re about to live through.

To describe the present day I suppose that the best way is to draw a comparison with a War Ship of the Line during Nelson days. Although full of cannons and every class of humanity, for it to be operational, it had to rely on rules and regulations, which meant nothing, as everything ends up tied together, and nothing worked without the power of nature.  No wind, no victory.

Our world is similar, full of people, with individual names, all living within tribal nations, ruled by law, but governed by the planetary balance in its true nature, providing life. No fresh water, no fresh air, no food, annihilation.

These days, when it comes to ecosystems ( its not how we live or where we live, or when we live, which  means nothing unless you are fully conscience of the greed of a few and its continuing effects on the inequalities that exist on the planet.

————-

There isn’t a particular moment in which humanity came into existence, as the transition from species to species is gradual.

The demographers estimate that in the 200,000 years before us about 109 billion people have lived and died. It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in.

In 2024 there will about 8 billion of us alive. Taken together with those who have died, about 117 billion humans have been born since the dawn of modern humankind. This means that those of us who are alive now represent about 7% of all people who ever lived.

How many people will be born in the future? We don’t know.

But we know one thing: The future is immense, and the universe will exist for trillions of years.

In such a future, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years.

One thing that sets us apart is that we now – and this is a recent development – have the power to destroy ourselves.

The key moral question of long termism is ‘what can we do to improve the world’s long-term prospects?

There are two other major risks that worry me greatly:

Pandemics, especially from engineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence technology. These technologies could lead to large catastrophes, either by someone using them as weapons or even unintentionally as a consequence of accidents.

We don’t have to think about people who live billions of years in the future to see our responsibilities. This shouldn’t give the impression that the risks we are facing are confined to the future.

Several large risks that could lead to unprecedented disasters are already with us now. AI capabilities and biotechnology have developed rapidly and are no longer science fiction; they are posing risks to those of us who are alive today.

As a society, we spend only little attention, money, and effort on the risks that imperil our future. Only very few are even thinking about these risks, when in fact these are problems that should be central to our culture. The unprecedented power of today’s technology requires unprecedented responsibility.

Algorithms can exacerbate divisions and inequality in society.

In truth, no one knows where the AI revolution will take us as a society or as a species, but our actions in 2024 will be critical to setting us on a path that leads to a happy outcome.

No one will remember the Internet.

We will be the ancestors of a very large number of people. Let’s make sure we are good ancestors.

Why?

Because to understand something is to be liberated from it.   Google it.

Back to 2024.

There are currently about a dozen major global conflicts, with the most recent one now repeating one of the most barbaric acts ever committed in a war (The Jewish Holocaust) However this time it is being committed by the very people who suffered it in the first place, waving the old testament as a title deed to Palestine, to justify the right to commit another genocide while the world stands by helpless to intervene. 

The people who suffer from injustice, who withstand daily insults to their dignity, who are marginalised, silenced, exploited, left to die or killed cannot afford to ask themselves if they have hope. They cling on to life, they try to cope, they fight in front of a more or less a silent world, while it passing resolution’s to appease the two warmongering nations with vetoes.

Then we have the forgotten war in the Ukraine which is turning into a generation war. 

No resolutions other than the resolve of the Ukraine people to its bitter end will bring peace. 

—————  

What Is Enlightenment when we turn a blind eye?

Full awakening comes when you sincerely look at yourself, deeper than you’ve imagined, and question everything.

To think for yourself, to think of putting yourself in the shoes of everyone else, and to always think consistently:  This is the principles of enlightened thinking, that produced the Bill of Human rights.

The foundation of a peaceful world.

Out of 13 major global conflicts, the newest ones are the Myanmar civil war, triggered shortly after a military coup in February 2021, and the war in Ukraine that started with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Seven of these conflicts are in Asia, including sectarian violence in Iraq following the pullout of the U.S. in December 2017, and Syria’s complicated civil war. Five of these conflicts are on the African continent.

To put it simply the state of the planet is broken because we have chosen a system of Capitalism that benefits the few over the many.

——————-

There is more to life than we are currently perceiving.

FOR EXAMPLE OUR REACTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE WHICH NOW HAS ITS OWN MOMENTUM AND ITS NOW CERTAIN THAT IT IS TOO LATE FOR THE WARS TO COME.  DRIVEN BY GREED.

WE ARE THE MOST COMPLICATED THING ON THE PLANET, ALL RELYING ON THE MOST BASIC THINGS.  Fresh air, Fresh water, etc.

In every moment, as you see, think, feel, and navigate the world around you, your perception of these things is built from ingredients. One is the signals we receive from the outside world. Your brain uses what you’ve seen, done, and learned in the past to explain sense data in the present, plan your next action, and predict what’s coming next.  This all happens automatically and invisibly, faster than you can snap your fingers. Much of this symphony is silent and outside your awareness, thank goodness. If you could feel every inner tug and rumble directly, you’d never pay attention to anything outside your skin.

Your mind is in fact an ongoing construction of your brain, your body, and the surrounding world.

Every act of recognition is a construction. You don’t see with your eyes; you see with your brain.

Your brain can even impose on a familiar object new functions that are not part of the object’s physical nature. TAKE A FEATHER FOR EXAMPLE.

Computers today can use machine learning to easily classify this object as a feather. But that’s not what human brains do. If you find this object on the ground in the woods, then sure, it’s a feather. But to an author in the 18th century, it’s a pen.

This incredible ability is called ad hoc category construction. In a flash, your brain employs past experience to construct a category such as “symbols of honor,” with that feather as a member.

Category membership is based not on physical similarities but on functional ones—how you’d use the object in a specific situation. Such categories are called abstract. A computer cannot “recognize” a feather as a reward for bravery because that information isn’t in the feather. It’s an abstract category constructed in the perceiver’s brain.

Computers can’t do this. Not yet, anyway.

Brains also have to decide which sense data is relevant and which is not, separating signal from noise. Economists and other scientists call this decision the problem of “value.”

Your thoughts and dreams, your emotions, even your experience right now as you read these words, are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive, regulating your body by constructing ad hoc categories. Most likely, you don’t experience your mind in this way, but under the hood (inside the skull), that’s what is happening.

Value itself is another abstract, constructed feature. It’s not intrinsic to the sense data emanating from the world, so it’s not detectable in the world. The importance of value is best seen in an ecological context.

Awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality-into something far beyond anything they knew existed.

Being hopeful has nothing to do with how the world goes. It’s a kind of duty, a necessary complement to morality. What is the point of trying to do the right thing if we have no reason to think others do the same? What is the point of holding others responsible if we think responsibility is beyond their capacity?

Paradoxically, the worse the world goes, the more hopeful you must remain to be able to continue fighting. Being hopeful is not about guaranteeing the right outcome but preserving the right principle: the principle based on which a moral world makes sense.

On the contrary, they are crucial to filling the gap between the world in which we live and the one we have a responsibility to build.

Most people tend to think of hope as an attitude that sits somewhere between a desire and a belief: a desire for a certain outcome and the belief that something favours its realisation.

In the 18th century there were no algorithms, no social media, and no echo chambers, and it was, therefore, still possible to believe in enlightenment through public discourse.

What had the Enlightenment ever done for us, if it wasn’t even able to help us stop genocide?

There is such a gap between the world I read about, taught and believed in, and the one in which I lived.

All I could find were efforts to convince the world that killing innocent civilians is sometimes, for some people, under some conditions, acceptable.

Was it so absurd to believe that, at some level, politics can remain accountable to morality?

More and more people are waking up-having real, authentic glimpses of reality.

Your World has become a hugely popular geography app, full of substitution ciphers, concealment ciphers, transposition ciphers that can only be deciphered using AI programs, testing millions of combination per second, disregarding human feelings.

We can now listen to podcast describing killing, watch youtube with no access to truth itself, chained to the limits of our own perceptions. ( We all have different ideas of it)

The least the rest of us can do is to avoid questioning the grounds for hope, indulging ourselves even more. Perhaps this is the real political meaning of the Enlightenment: whether there is hope or not is only a relevant question for those who have the privilege to doubt it. That is a small fraction of the world.

Don’t despair.

Other matters> 

We’re going to see, unfortunately, more technological unemployment. 

How do we address the wealth gap? We may have to consider very seriously ideas such as a universal basic income.  We can no longer ignore the issue of inequality.

Culture will need to adjust in terms of revisiting some of our values.

We need to be more pro-environment in our own behavior as consumers.

The cost of things average people must buy—healthcare, education, housing—tends to have risen more than wages did over the last two decades.

Globalization vs. regionalization. 

With the current wars and future wars globalization is on its last legs.

So the “America Alone” scenario within an otherwise China-centered world seems the most likely. Technology and political trends are aligning against mega-powers like the US and China.

Neither physical strength nor access to capital are sufficient for economic success. Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge.

The internet has eliminated “middlemen” in most industries. In a representative democracy, politicians are basically middlemen. Hence, the knowledge revolution should bring a shift to direct democracy.

Today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable.

This is the source of much angst around the world, including the current wave of popular protests.

The fact that our actions have an impact on the large number of people who will live after us should matter for how we think about our own lives.

The next decade will see a more than hundredfold boom in the world’s output of human genetic data.

The impact is hard to even imagine.

A world so saturated with genetic data will come with its own risks. The emergence of genetic surveillance states and the end of genetic privacy loom. Technical advances in encrypting genomes may help ameliorate some of those threats. But new laws will need to keep the risks and benefits of so much genetic knowledge in balance.

New models of delivering education will be needed to serve the citizens of crowded megacities as well as children in remote rural areas.

The United Nations is supposed to stick to more solid ground, but some of its Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 sound nearly as fantastical. In a mere 10 years, the UN plans to eradicate poverty “in all its forms everywhere.”  Bull shit, or is it.  Strong science coupled with political will might yet turn climate change around, and transform the UN’s predictions from a dream into reality.

Donald Trump  “America first , America First. There is however hope for the Earth.

The momentum for change is building. Humanity has a quality of finding creative solutions to challenges. If we keep each other safe – and protect ourselves from the risks that nature and we ourselves pose – we are only at the beginning of human history.

There are no catastrophes that loom before us which cannot be avoided.

We can only expect the pace of change to increase.

There is nothing that threatens us with imminent destruction in such a fashion that we are helpless to do something about it. In 2024, some will be refugees fleeing war, some will be economic migrants in search of a better life, and some will be looking to escape to parts of the world where life is not yet overly disrupted by rising temperatures and sea levels.

It seems that the message about climate change has not yet sunk in. 12 years left to avoid catastrophic climate change. The impact of climate emergency will bring profound change.

Finally: 

Eighteenth-century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrestled with how to preserve individual freedom when we also have to depend on each other for survival. Rousseau saw politics as a social contract between a sovereign and citizens. What we call “government” is the interface between them.

The sovereigns of Rousseau’s time were mostly kings, but he envisioned a democracy in which the people collectively were sovereign. But then he ran into a math problem.

In a tiny democracy of, say, a thousand citizens, each possesses one-thousandth of the sovereignty… small, but enough to have a meaningful influence. Each individual’s share of sovereignty, and therefore their freedom, diminishes as the social contract includes more people. So, other things being equal, Rousseau thought smaller countries would be freer and more democratic than larger ones.

How do we reconcile that with democracy. I’m not sure we can. It worked pretty well for a long time but maybe, as population grows, the math is catching up to us. If so, the options are a non-democratic.

Perhaps the lands we now inhabit are not real Nothing requires them to remain so. At some point, they will develop into something else. When and how this will happen, we don’t know yet. But we know it will.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WE ARE TURNING INTO FOOLS WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE, NOT TO MENTION TECHNOLOGY AND GENETIC ENGINEERING

29 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., HUMAN ABILITIES., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., IS DATA DESTORYING THE WORLD?, Technologically Enabled Genetics., Technology, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., THE NEW NORM., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  

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( Five minute read) 

Like me today, many of us are being constantly bombarded by facts, figures and narratives that tell us our days on earth are numbered, that it’s our fault and that it’s also largely out of our control.

Our problem is that capitalism is designed to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left. We can either fool ourselves about that until it kills us, or we can change it.

Like many horror stories, this one features a main character full of futile determination to maintain a sense of normalcy even as the ominous signs of doom become ever more impossible to ignore.

We can chuckle knowing that the monster is going to come for our designated protectors.

We stop chuckling knowing that it’s coming for all of us next.

Homo sapiens rose above the lesser animals thanks to our ability to wield logic and reason, yet we have somehow gotten ourselves to a place where the knowledge of what is driving all these wildfires and floods is not enough to enable us to do anything meaningful to stop it.

As overwhelming and omnipresent as the climate crisis is, it is not the core issue.

The core issue is capitalism.

Capitalism’s unfettered pursuit of economic growth is what caused climate change, and capitalism’s inability to reckon with externalities – the economic term for a cost that falls onto third parties – is what is preventing us from solving climate change.

It is easy to imagine that a real live existential threat to our way of life would prompt any society to assume war footing and marshal everything it has to fight for survival. Unfortunately, this response only takes hold in actual war situations, where the threat is “other people that we can shoot and kill in glorious fashion”.

When the threat comes not from enemy people, but from our own nature, we find it much harder to rise to the occasion.

Where is the glory in recognizing the folly of our own greed and profligacy? Leaders are not elected on such things. We want leaders who will give us more, leading us ever onwards, upwards and into the grave.

The G20 is a perfect model of our collective failure to build institutions capable of coping with deep, long-term, existential problems that cannot be solved by building more weapons.

On the one hand, the head of the United Nations says that there is no way for the world to meet its 1.5C warming goal without the leadership of the G20 that claims to be bailing out humanity’s sinking ship with one hand while contributing billons of tons of carbon to the atmosphere by subsidising in the past five years $3.3tn to fossil fuel production and consumption.

—————–

It is not good to be too pessimistic on climate change, because we must maintain the belief that we can win this battle if we are to have any hope at all. That said, it sure does seem like we’re screwed.

We’re being led to believe that the society we’ve built has to ‘collapse’ if we’re to save the world.

We’re presented with a binary choice — save the planet and live a miserable existence, or accept that some populations (plant, animal, human) will have to act as collateral damage to ensure a quality of life that vaguely resembles our current one.

This whole thing of it being ‘a trade-off’ or ‘tough choices’ is based on our current lifestyle being awesome and the future being a kind of worthy ascetic hardship.

The message is that all the things you rely on to keep us safe are no longer part of a viable future fit for everyone. The sense is that when these things disappear, life will be unbearable. That we’re going to turn on each other

.It’s almost like our lives are being engineered this way.

Cuts to benefits, dismantling of free healthcare, with Government openly allowing the majority of wealth to be passed on to those who are already most wealthy.

—————-

We haven’t got a hope of addressing complex problems or creating a future fit for everyone.

Given the challenge we’re facing — one that’s complex, systemic and long-term, if we carry on acting from this place we’re going to really screw it up.

Climate change and the destruction of our ecosystems seem to be the result of persistent, rampant over-consumption. This is because our modern society is a consumer society.

It’s based on one simple idea: that consuming will meet your needs.

Others things we think are harmless serve to numb us: Netflix boxsets, smartphones, profit seeking algorithms, masquerade as the answer, but they are really just part of the same system — insurance policies, private healthcare and the multi-billion dollar ‘wellness’ industry.

New industries pop up to give us what we want without the guilt — sustainably sourced, vegan, fair-trade — but even aside from the minefield that is working out whether it’s really ‘sustainable’, it’s still built on the same system. A system built on a disconnection from your needs, that can never leave you satisfied with who you are and the world around you.

None of these things can or will ever meet our unmet needs for love, connection or trust in the world, so we continue consuming, throwing more things into the bottomless pit inside.

We seem to be more unhappy than ever before. More physically and mentally ill. More divided than ever. More stressed about our impact on the world.

Social media is a form of disconnection from ourselves that leads to the disconnection from each other that in turn leads to disconnection from our environment — which is the only thing that has enabled us to create the extractive, destructive system we have in place.

Given all this, ‘conscious consumerism’ and ‘green new deals’ will never offer the solution we need, if they are built on the fundamental idea of citizen is as consumer, working to earn, earning to spend, spending to consume etc.

I think the fundamental answer lies instead in rebuilding our lives around connection.

Recognise that if you would love other people to live in a certain way or see the world from a different perspective, this is only going to happen if others sense you’re not judging them to be wrong.

People are slowly but steadily finding that their real needs are met more consistently in self-awareness and relationship than they are in quick fix consumption.

We can’t all join a five-day protest and we’re not all ready to sit in a circle and talk about our feelings but that’s not what’s being asked of us.

Indeed, climate change itself is the ultimate negative externality: fossil-fuel companies and assorted polluting corporations and their investors get all the benefits, and the rest of the world pays the price.

Now the entire globe finds itself trapped in the gruesome logic of capitalism, where it is perfectly rational for the rich to continue doing something that is destroying the earth, as long as the profits they reap will allow them to insulate themselves from the consequences.

The path we are on, still, is not one that leads to a happy ending.

Rather, it is one that leads to the last billionaire standing on dry land blasting off in his private rocket as the rest of us drown in rising seas.

We talk about tipping points when it comes to the climate, but the real tipping point has long passed.

Its called inequality.

A strict definition of capitalism is a society where capital is privately owned, and workers are paid wages by private firms. Essentially it is a society with minimal government intervention and resources are distributed according to the outcome of free markets.

A looser definition of capitalism is a situation where business is left to the free market, but the government intervene in many areas of the economy like business regulation, health care and education.

In practice, using this definition of capitalism – most modern economies are essentially capitalist because it is the free market that dominates in the production and distribution of scarce resources.

Therefore, you can say the potential of reward makes inequality an essential ingredient of capitalism.

Therefore, capitalists with access to private property can ‘exploit’ their monopoly power to make a much higher profit than other people in society. Therefore those who inherit capital can enjoy high income even without any effort.

To redress some of the inequalities of capitalist society.

Regulate monopoly power, provide free education, so everyone has access to education and equality of opportunity.

  • Capitalism is unconcerned about equity. It is argued that inequality is essential to encourage innovation and economic development.
  • Socialism is concerned with redistributing resources from the rich to the poor. This is to ensure everyone has both equal opportunities and in some forms of socialism – equal outcomes.

Aspects of Democratic socialism

  • Advocates nationalisation of key industries (often the natural monopolies, like electricity, water)
  • Prices set by the market mechanism, except public goods, such as health and education.
  • Provision of a welfare state to provide income redistribution
  • Support for trade unions in wage bargaining
  • Use of minimum wages and universal income to raise low-income wages
  • Progressive tax and provision of public services. For example, marginal income tax rates of 70%. Tax on wealth.

There is no reason that Democratic socialism can not operate in a Capital society that is disappearing into the world of Profit seeking algorithms. 

For anyone still unsure that big, important things are now broken, several new titles paint a convincing portrait of grossly unsustainable inequality, corrupt political processes, and a looming crisis—much of it stemming from a financial system that for 40 years or so has prioritized short-term profit over all else and systematically removed any checks on its own worst impulses in pursuit of that goal. 

The single most important step is re-empowering governments, to start putting out the inferno.

All Human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdilllon33@gmail.com   

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. Ten years from now, we may look back on this moment in history as a colossal mistake or it could be the greatest empowerment moment in human history.

11 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., Artificial Intelligence.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. Ten years from now, we may look back on this moment in history as a colossal mistake or it could be the greatest empowerment moment in human history.

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( Four minute read)

This year, the world got a rude awakening to the insane power of AI when OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT4 onto the world. This AI text generator/chatbot seemed to be able to replicate human-generated content so well that even AI detection software struggled to tell the difference between the two.

This is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines; it’s the result of our own efforts to make our infrastructure and our way of life more intelligent.

It’s part of human endeavour. We merge with our machines. Ultimately, they will extend who we are.

Our mobile phone, for example, makes us more intelligent and able to communicate with each other. It’s really part of us already. It might not be literally connected to you, but nobody leaves home without one.

It’s like half your brain.

Thinking of AI as a futuristic tool that will lead to immeasurable good or harm is a distraction from the ways we are using it now.

How do we ensure that the AI we build, which might very well be significantly smarter than any person who has ever lived, is aligned with the interests of its creators and of the human race?

What if at some point in the near future, computer scientists build an AI that passes a threshold of superintelligence and can build other super intelligent AI.

An unaligned super intelligent AI could be quite a problem.

For example, we’ve been predicting for decades that AI will replace radiologists, but machine learning for radiology is still a complement for doctors rather than a replacement. Let’s hope this is a sign of AI’s relationship to the rest of humanity—that it will serve willingly as the ship’s first mate rather than play the part of the fateful iceberg.

No laws can prevent China ~ Russia ~ Terrorist network~  Rogue psychopath from developing the most manipulative and dishonest AI you could possibly imagine.

We can’t trust some speculative future technology to rescue us.

Climate change is already killing people, and many more people are going to die even in a best-case scenario, but we get to decide now just how bad it gets.

Action taken decades from now is much less valuable than action taken soon.

The first role AI can play in climate action is distilling raw data into useful information – taking big datasets, which would take too much time for a human to process, and pulling information out in real time to guide policy or private-sector action.

Everyone wants a silver bullet to solve climate change; unfortunately there isn’t one. But there are lots of ways AI can help fight climate change. While there is no single big thing that AI will do, there are many medium-sized things.

An attendee controls an AI-powered prosthetic hand during 2021 World Artificial Intelligence conference in Shanghai.

Most movies about AI have an “us versus them” mentality, but that’s really not the case.

Even if one were to stand on the side of curious skepticism, (which feels natural,) we ought to be fairly terrified by this nonzero chance of humanity inventing itself into extinction.

Whereas AI is, for now, pure software blooming inside computers. Someday soon, however, AI might read everything—like, literally every thing, swallowing everything into a black hole and not even god knows what it will be recycled.

Just shovel ever-larger amounts of human-created text into its maw, and wait for wondrous new skills to manifest. With enough data, this approach could perhaps even yield a more fluid intelligence, or a humanlike artificial mind akin to those that haunt nearly all of our mythologies of the future.

On the syllabus at the moment : Is a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced.

To codify the philosophy in a set of wise laws and regulations to ensure the good behaviour of our super intelligent AI,  like laws to make it illegal, for example, to develop AI systems that manipulate domestic or foreign actors. Is pie in the sky –

In the next decade, autocrats and terrorist networks could be able to cheaply build diabolical AI that can accomplish some of the goals outlined in the Yudkowsky story. (The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as his open letter puts it); It’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence.

Key thresholds here may not be obvious.

We definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.

AT THE MOMENT ALL WE HAVE IS A COPING MECCHANISM.

Like non-proliferation laws for nuclear weaponry that are hard to enforce.

Nuclear weapons require raw material that is scarce and needs expensive refinement. Software is easier, and this technology is improving by the month.

Turing test: robot versus human sitting inside cubes facing each other

We have years to debate how education ought to change in response to these tools, but something interesting and important is undoubtedly happening.

If we figured out how people are going to share in the wealth that AI unlocks, then I think we could end up in a world where people don’t have to work to eat, and are instead taking on projects because they are meaningful to them.

But where do AI companies get this truly astonishing amount of high-quality data from?

Well, to put it bluntly, they steal it.

But as it stands, the AI boom might be approaching a flashpoint where these models can’t avoid consuming their own output, leading to a gradual decline in their effectiveness. This will only be accelerated as AI-generated content perfuses the internet over the coming years, making it harder and harder to source genuine human-made content.

AI is viewed as a strategic technology to lead us into the future.

So what should be done:

  • Many people lack a full understanding of AI and therefore are more likely to view it as a nebulous cloud instead of a powerful driving force that can create a lot of value for society;
  • Instead of writing off AI as too complicated for the average person to understand, we should seek to make AI accessible to everyone in society. It shouldn’t be just the scientists and engineers who understand it; through adequate education, communication and collaboration, people will understand the potential value that AI can create for the community.
  • We should democratize AI, meaning that the technology should belong to and benefit all of society; and we should be realistic about where we are in AI’s development.
  • Most of the achievements we have made are, in fact, based on having a huge amount of (labelled) data, rather than on AI’s ability to be intelligent on its own. Learning in a more natural way, including unsupervised or transfer learning, is still nascent and we are a long way from reaching AI supremacy.

From this point of view, society has only just started its long journey with AI and we are all pretty much starting from the same page. To achieve the next breakthroughs in AI, we need the global community to participate and engage in open collaboration and dialogue.

If this does not happen and happen (sooner than later) it will be AI that will be calling the shots

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. NECESSITY WILL BECOME THE MOTHER OF ALL INVENTIONS.

20 Tuesday Jun 2023

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( Twelve minute read) 

We all know that humans are bad for the planet, and for ourselves, but if you were asked to name the achievement of mankind what would be your list be like.

In our short fifty thousand-year history, we’ve had countless skirmishes, two World Wars, and are currently threatening over one million animal species with extinction, lending to our own.  

Against this back ground it would appear that we have not progress an iota, as we are still unable to comprehend fully that the plant we live on is our home and that what lives on it, are all contact to our survival and hence its survival.What if everything created in the built environment was balanced elsewhere? (Credit: Alamy)

Will our species go extinct? The short answer is yes. The fossil record shows everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all species that ever lived, over 99.9%, are extinct.

Humans are inevitably heading for extinction. The question isn’t whether we go extinct, but when.

When necessity becomes the mother of all inventions our adaptability will make us our own worst enemies, too clever for our own good. (We adapt unlike any other species, through learned behaviours — culture – not DNA.) 

Changing the world sometimes means changing it for the worse, creating new dangers: nuclear weapons, pollution, overpopulation, climate change, pandemics.

Humans do not need to insert themselves into controlling life processes in every corner of the world, down to the very strands of DNA, to force the Earth system to absorb the shocks of our presence.

Up to Now we’ve escaped every trap we set for ourselves. So far.

Homo sapiens have already survived over 250,000 years of ice ages, eruptions, pandemics, and world wars. We could easily survive another 250,000 years or, longer. Survival sets a pretty low bar.

The question isn’t so much whether humans survive the next three or three hundred thousand years, but whether we can do more than just survive.

When the astronauts were on the moon, they were looking back at the Earth, they were not thinking that they were indeed inside the atmosphere of the Earth they were looking their home suspended in the void of the universe.  A planet that has lost 68% of its biodiversity, replaced with human-made material including concrete, plastic and bricks now outweighing the total mass of biological matter on the planet.

All of this challenges the way we see our planet’s borders.

The Earth’s extended atmosphere isn’t much good for supporting life, so to understand any of this we must realise that no human is ever going to leave Earth. ( Other than in the form cyborg. A portmanteau of cybernetic and organism— a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts.)

——–

The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades. The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own. To understand the enormity of the challenges we face, future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than experts currently believe. The problems are too numerous to cover in full here.

Essentially, humans have created an ecological Ponzi scheme. Consumption, as a percentage of Earth’s capacity to regenerate itself, has grown from 73% in 1960 to more than 170% today.people walking on a crowded street

Because in the face of environmental collapse, humanity may need to turn to artificial replacements for nature.

What if, earth really was in trouble and the planet’s natural systems are fated to collapse and die off?

Will we develop artificial back-ups to take their place.  Perhaps. 

Technology will be needed to liberate the land required for rewilding. But, watching the recent flurry of commercial space flights, I wondered about how much biodiversity had been lost to make that happen, what it cost the Earth system.

If the Earth is not to be irreversibly degraded and unbalanced, we need some equal and opposite pull in the direction of replenishing natural complexity. Surely the best reward of a healthy planet is space exploration, not it being an escape from a dying planet.


In Blade Runner 2049, solar panels and synthetic farming stretch to the distance (Credit: Blade Runner 2049)

The technology we have made has many beneficial direct and side effects which will influence positions on this list.

MY LIST:

Fire.  Without fire we as a species do not start living past the age of 30, we cannot create civilization and we cannot banish the dark starting to take control of our fears of what goes bump.in the night. True. 

Gun power.  Few inventions have had an impact on human affairs as dramatic and decisive as that of gunpowder. True.

The Wheel. Is one of the greatest achievement of mankind.. True

Language. An entire list of words, sentences, phrases and whole lot of grammar made up of strange sounds from our mouth have the power to express ourselves and others. Without language we would have been prisoners in our minds. Without Language creative writing wouldn’t be possible nor would be Internet. What would our thoughts be like if we did not know any language? We even think in a certain language. Landing on the moon is the ultimate result of this. Probably the most difficult thing ever achieved, and practically mythic, even if all we got were photos and rocks. There is no bigger achievement in our species’ history. Every discovery that preceded it lead to it.  It proclaimed in a way that humanity is no longer limited to planet Earth, that we have a future in other places too. True/False.

Music. Is the language of existence. It puts our humanity into perspective, and brings meaning to everyday moments. Without music, it would be very hard to reflect on where we are and what we are doing, because as selfish creatures we are never fully satisfied. True.

Writing.  Without writing, humanity really has no memory. Everything will be forgotten or distorted over time. And there are only so many good teaches and brilliant minds to teach others. With writing, one teacher can teach millions of students. Writing is a way to get thoughts on paper, stories, recipes, instructions, letters, nothing would exist in our modern work without the art of writing. True. 

Mathematics. Was one of the first creations of humans that exists beyond a physical world. True. 

The theory of evolution. Has completely altered our understanding of how organisms co-relate, change and came to be. It asks one of the most provocative questions… what are we? From what did we come from? What will we become. We created something that enables us to grasp truth. This allows us to explore the universe without using our senses. True.

Money. There are many theories about the origin of money, in part because money has many functions: It facilitates exchange as a measure of value; it brings diverse societies together by enabling gift-giving and reciprocity; it perpetuates social hierarchies; and finally, it is a medium of state power. Money soon became an instrument of political control. Taxes could be extracted to support the elite and armies could be raised. However, money could also act as a stabilizing force that fostered nonviolent exchanges of goods, information and services within and between groups. In our time, possession of cash currency differentiates the rich from the poor, the developed from the developing, the global north from the emerging global south. Money is both personal and impersonal and global inequality today is linked to the formalization of money as a measure of societal well-being and sustainability. Even as currency continues to evolve in our digital age, its uses today would still be familiar to our ancient predecessors. True.

Electricity, because without it we would go back to prehistoric times. And above all, nothing would be created. Electronic devices now make up a huge part of the lives for the majority of the world. True. 

Atomic power.  Fashioned it into nuclear weapons which possess the capacity to destroy every living thing in their path. Nothing man has done is more significant to the future of this world and its inhabitants. True. 

The airplane.  Change the world.  True.

The Gun.  Still changing the world. True.

Clothes/ Synthetic Fibres / Plastics.  The fashion industry is responsible for 8-10% of global emissions.

While all these other discoveries are amazing nothing compares to this.

The Microprocessor. Nothing else has changed the structure of human society more than the microprocessor. That tiny chip inside every smartphone, laptop and microcontroller is far and away the most complex object ever made by humans. It has given our species unfathomable powers of computation and processing, a set of tools that we now use in almost every field of human endeavour, from physics to medicine. The manipulation of genes is the future of medicine.  Social media and the Internet, technologies built atop the microprocessor, have permanently altered the way we communicate over long distances. The processor has, in essence, created a unified planet for the first time in history. True/ False.

Technology.  Judged entirely on its own traditional grounds of evaluation—that is, in terms of efficiency—the achievement of modern technology has been admirable with the Internet somewhere in the middle because it can bring both destruction and humanity, and without it we wouldn’t be as far as we are today. The greatest communication tool ever devised! Both true and false. 

The Smartphone.  Now one of the most ubiquitous technology devices of all time with billions of users worldwide –Has become your home We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets with apps for different purposes, in much the same way that the rooms in a house each meet a different need. In the near future millions of people will across many parts of the world that are conflict-bound or subject to some of the worst effects of the climate crisis, have left their homeland behind completely in search of a new life. Combining artificial intelligence with the extraordinary data-gathering capabilities of smartphones, is creating other opportunities. There are few arenas of human endeavour left untouched by the smartphone. As smartphones continue to evolve, however, so too will the capabilities they unlock. True.

Google’s Android operating system.  Used by one in every three people on the planet is a  technology that is not simply innovative, but must become responsible. True

Inequality. To think about inequality today we need to think about inequality in the past. This is true for economic inequalities – inequalities of income and wealth – and even more true of inequalities in health, in status, in citizenship and political influence. To set current trends in context. We no longer have state-legalised slavery, perhaps the most brutal form of inequality ever devised. Given that health and survival are the most basic of measures of inequality, it can be seen that politics and a cross-class alliance between leading and visionary employers and their workers was a more important driver – than economics and relative incomes – of trends in this “biological” dimension of inequality.

Racism. Race is socially constructed, not biologically natural. True. 

The Bible represents the Word of God or just the greatest fictional work in history, but here’s one fact: Nothing else ever written by humans has shaped the world and the future as much as the Bible has. False.

All the things that we are saying here today are part of the big lie that we are being forced to tell you!

Why ?

Because every thing is made from particles and according to Quantum Physics they can’t both be in the same state. 

Quantum technology.  In the not so distant future we will invent a multi-tasking ‘quantum’ computers, far more powerful than even today’s most advanced supercomputers. This will be the last human invention. 

So-called quantum particles can be in two places at the same time and also strangely connected even though they are millions of miles apart. If we change one, the other instantly changes to compensate.

This happens even if we separate the two particles from each other on opposite sides of the universe. It’s as if information about the change we’ve made has travelled between them faster than the speed of light, something Einstein said was impossible.

They will be capable of solving some of the most important problems, with quantum algorithm.

I say  “People rolled their eyes and said: ‘it’s impossible’.”

Failing to acknowledge the magnitude of problems facing humanity is not just naïve, it’s dangerous. And science has a big role to play here. If the human-biosphere umbilical cord is to be cut, it should leave mother Earth in peak health, and in service to both parties.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. ON THE STATE OF THE WORLD ARE NEW WORDS NOW NEEDED THAT DEFINE THE PRESENT.

06 Tuesday Jun 2023

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At a time when the world is changing more quickly than ever before, we need a new vocabulary to help us grasp what’s happening.

I’m not sure that THE WORDS WE HAVE AT PRESENT TO DESCRIBE OUR WORLD hold anymore in the world-wide ‘web’ of meaning, we now inhabit (or are trapped in), with its exponentially increasing complexities.

Amid the whirlwind of our changing times, in which even the new language gurus cannot tell us where we’re going, there must be some universal value that can define us other than stupidity being digitalized.

Humanity is a blip in geologic history:

With social media words are just kind of disintegrate before your eyes or become a meaningless string of letters.

Like the word need which has become some kind of a fatigue sound, falling prey to semantic satiations, losing meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

Need is now repeated so much, that it is now as indistinct as the packages of generic Wal-Mart string cheese.

Take the  language of politics, for example, it is becoming increasingly blurred.

Right and left, conservative and progressive, traditional and modern — these words have become so calcified that we often get lost in the labyrinth of ambiguity.

If words created the world, then words can also enrich or impoverish it, sanctify or demonize it.

Language is rich in words and meaning, but it can also become petrified while reality creatively evolves around it.

The power of words is such that they can spark a war or bring about peace. Everything begins with language.

So then, what does “artificial intelligence” actually mean (to use the latest buzzwords)?

Even the brainy scientists don’t really understand it. If so, what just happened to you is nothing new.

These days we have the capacity to look billions of years into the past but it seems that we can’t see beyond our own very noses, or hear, when it comes to the planet.

It used to be said that to name something is to begin understanding it but the veneer of linguistic facility of AI is not the same as actually comprehending human language.

AI has burst out of its academic bubble into the real world, and its lack of understanding of that world can have real and sometimes devastating consequences.

It might be possible to write down all the unwritten facts, rules and assumptions required for understanding text but not language. We let machines learn to understand language on their own, simply by ingesting vast amounts of written text and learning to predict words.

But has GPT-3 — trained on text from thousands of websites, books and encyclopaedia’s — transcended Watson’s veneer? Does it really understand the language it generates and ostensibly reasons about?

The crux of the problem, in my view, is that understanding language requires understanding the world, and a machine exposed only to language cannot gain such an understanding.

Humans rely on innate, pre-linguistic core knowledge of space, time and many other essential properties of the world in order to learn and understand language. If we want machines to similarly master human language, we will need to first endow them with the primordial principles humans are born with.

Machines that can genuinely comprehend what “it” refers to in a sentence, and everything else that understanding “it” entails.

——–

The world faces four main challenges: climate change, mistrust of leaders, increased geopolitical tension, and the dark side of the technological revolution.  (Which is digitizing not just our imagination of our future’s by plundering the finite resources of the planet for profit.)

1) Climate change is the defining issue of our time,”  It represents an “existential threat” to humankind. “The planet will not be destroyed. What will be destroyed is our capacity to live on the planet.

2) People believe that the fruits of globalization are not being fairly distributed. Seven in 10 people in the world live in countries where inequality is growing.

3) Increased geopolitical tensions are further exacerbated by weaknesses in institutions. For example, the UN Security Council’s “inability to take decisions” or to enforce the ones they do take, such as the arms embargo.

4) Artificial Intelligence that is owned by corporations are unbalancing the values that are common to us all.  Turning Democracy into AI Totalitarianism Democratic Societies with mass surveillance.

Because in the age of the internet and super-connectivity, all of these things, like face recognition have been raised to sophisticated arts ( Clear View ) that, instead of being forced on us, have quietly colonised our lives.

In times past, when frustrating circumstances demanded new ways of expressing what it means to be alive here a few for present day use.

The internet/cyberspace is wonderful, because it gives people the freedom to augment or totally change their identities, and this is a marvellous new dawn for human expression, a new step in human evolution. Nah, it’s a false dawn, because the internet is essentially a libertarian arena, and as such an amoral one (lots of ‘freedoms’ but with no attendant social obligations); it is a new jungle where we must watch our backs and struggle for survival, surely a backward step in evolution.

  1. The term ‘hyperobject’ was coined by the academic Timothy Morton, and it refers to phenomena that are so large and so far beyond the human frame of reference that they are not susceptible to reason but to AI.
  2. Immigration. The realisation that racism never really went away, it just camouflaged its fundamental failure of empathy as tolerance – this is a contention of the Black Lives Matter movement. The term is now making the short jump to other second- (eg LGBT) and third- (eg feminism) phase civil rights movements equally lulled by the illusion of tolerance. The goal is to go beyond feeling tolerated to being fully accepted and welcomed.

3. Deletion. This word is likely to be bandied about much more frequently in the decades ahead, as social media users realise that the websites they are on are not merely neutral ‘platforms’ for ‘social interaction’ but more like a kind of flypaper to which people and all of their personal data stick. Moreover, these websites are specifically designed to be addictive –

4) Global capitalism is, by its unjust and shambolic nature, going to experience crashes of increasing severity throughout the 21st Century, leaving us all to survive with growing desperation amidst its wreckage.

5. Shadow banking. Nobody knows how large this sector is, but current estimates put shadow banking at (£124 trillion) and OTC transactions at (£412 trillion), or roughly twice and six-and-a-half times the GDP of the entire Earth, respectively. Both sectors were of course heavily involved in creating the 2008 crash, and both have remained almost unaltered since then.

6. Attention crisis. The fact that no one can take their eyes off their smartphones – James Williams writes that “the liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time”. Our minds are being rewired for commercial purposes. His argument that the social contract, the idea of human rights, should be extended to cyberspace is gaining traction.

Was the creation of the internet not supposed to be the dawn of a technological and informational utopia? Even its father, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is convinced it is failing us.

7. Post-human. It seems that history has caught up with us, for our identities now extend into cyberspace in many ways, we no longer merely rely on our brain cells but now store much of our knowledge in technological clouds that function as extensions of our minds, and we live with the corresponding hardware in such intimacy (in the form of portable devices that are linked to our minds and even metabolisms in many ways) that it sometimes feels like we are only a few steps away from being ‘cyborgs’ in the true sense of the term. Gender, though, is still a problem.

8. Masculinity. There was a time when you’d ask a man what masculinity was and his response would be something like ‘not feminine’ (pejorative) and ‘not queer’ (pejorative). Note all the negativity.

These days it is increasingly a good thing to be a woman (new, broad definition) and to be queer (new, broad definition). Both are eating away at the old territory occupied by masculinity, according to writers such as Hanna Rosin, Cordelia Fine or Grayson Perry. What’s left is something of a void, aka ‘the crisis of masculinity’.

The challenge ahead for men is to formulate what they are, and want to be, rather than what they aren’t. How to open up this frontier?

I have a suggestion. For generations feminists and queer activists have been fighting to draw attention to masculinity’s toxic side-effects. At long last, mainstream men seem on the verge of accepting that there is a problem. It remains for us all to take this a step further, and work to understand how this toxicity has also been poisoning men on the inside.

9. Generation Why? It applies to anyone born in the digital age.

To roughly clarify our terms here: Baby Boomers are the generation born after World War Two and before 1965; Generation X (Douglas Coupland) the cohort born between the mid-1960s and 1980; Generation Y (Millennials) includes people born between 1980-ish and 2000; Generation Z (Post-Millennials) is anyone born after 2000. These categories don’t really have global reach, but they are evocative as metaphors.

The gist of Smith’s argument is that Facebook and its like are reductive: they cut us down to size and reprogrammed us to suit their own ends, which are advertising and selling things – exploitation. “Five-hundred million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore,” she calls it.

Smith was writing a few years ago; the number of Facebook users has now passed 2 billion. Generations Y and Z have led lives saturated by the internet, by social media platforms and apps, which have claimed to make life complete and have all of the answers all of the time. Is this paraphernalia worthy of them? Are they content to be trapped in the reveries of Zuckerberg and the like? No. There are detectable tremors of disaffection and radicalisation. I suspect that as more and more post-millennials reach voting age, Generation Why may be giving us some loud answers.

10. The new weird An emerging genre of speculative, ‘post-human’ writing that blurs genre boundaries and conventions, pushes humanity and human-centred reason from the centre to the margins, and generally poses questions that may not be answerable in any terms we can understand (hence the ‘weird’). In the present era, where potent advertising and PR forces are doing everything in their power to make truth irrelevant and directly hack our minds, and where politicians no longer seem to acknowledge the existence of facts, the word has sinister new applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a tragic reminder of how deeply connected we are. There is a clear and urgent need for concrete multilateral solutions, based on common action across borders for the good of all humanity, starting with extend beyond national governments, to include more participation from local authorities, civil society, business leaders and others.

How close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making.

No one country can tackle the problem’s on their own no matter how large their population, how strong their economy or how feared their military.

Everyone sees change everywhere, and I think it’s important to figure out where are we going to be five to 10 years from now.

We’re going to see more automation. We’re going to see, unfortunately, more technological unemployment.

I don’t think they will be able to ignore the issue of inequality. We’re seeing social tensions and all sorts of frictions proliferate. The sooner we start tackling it, the better. We really need to start thinking outside of the box.

In the end it back to that word Need:

We need to be less wasteful. We need to economize our resources. We need to be more pro-environment in our own behaviour as consumers.

Let’s replace it with Yugen.

“We can either save our world or condemn humanity to a hellish future.”

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: ARE WE ALL SO DUMB TO THINK THAT ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE CAN BE REGULATED?

02 Friday Jun 2023

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( Three minute read)

Artificial intelligence is already suffering from three key issues: privacy, bias and discrimination, which if left unchecked can start infringing on – and ultimately take control of – people’s lives.

As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living.

Then along came the the Covid-19 pandemic which revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population and the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions. AWE 2022, AR, VR

It’s already too late to get ahead of this generative AI freight train.

The growing use of AI has already transformed the way the global economy works.

In this backdrop, AI can be used to profile people like you and me to such a detail which may well become more than uncomfortable! And this is no exaggeration.

This is just a tip of the iceberg!Full moon

So what if anything can be done to ensure responsible and ethical practices in the field.

Concern over AI development has accelerated in recent months following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year, which sparked the release of similar chatbots by other companies, including Google, Snap and TikTok. The growing realization that vast numbers of people can be fooled by the content chatbots gleefully spit out, now the clock is ticking to not just the collapse of values that enshrine human life but the very existence of the human race.

“This is not the future we want.”

Now there is no option but to put in place international laws, not mandatory regulations, before AI is infringing human rights. However as we are witnessing with climate change, to achieve any global cooperation is a bit of a problem.

From the climate crisis to our suicidal war on nature and the collapse of biodiversity, our global response is too little, too late. Technology is moving ahead without guard rails to protect us from its unforeseen consequences.

So we have two contrasting futures one of breakdown and perpetual crisis, and another in which there is a breakthrough, to a greener, safer future. This approach would herald a new era for multilateralism, in which countries work together to solve global problems.

In order to achieve these aims, the Secretary-General of the United nations recommends a Summit of the Future, which would “forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like, and how we can secure it”. The need for international co-operation beyond borders is something that makes a lot of sense, especially these days, because the role of the modern corporation in influencing the impact of AI is in conflict with the common values needed to survive.

The principle of working together, recognizing that we are bound to each other and that no community or country, however powerful, can solve its challenges alone.” Any national government is, of course, guided by its own set of localised values and realities.

But geopolitics, I would argue, always underlies any ambition. The immaturity of the ‘Geopolitics of AI’ field leaves the picture incomplete and unclear so it requires the introduction of agreed international common laws.

Let Ireland hold such a Summit.

This summit could coordinate efforts to bring about inclusive and sustainable policies that enable countries to offer basic services and social protection to their citizens with universal laws that defines the several capabilities of AI i.e. identify the ones that are more susceptible to misuse than the others.

(It is incredibly important for understanding the current environment in which any product is built or research conducted and it will be critical to forging a path forwards and towards safe and beneficial AI.)

The challenges are great, and the lessons of the past cannot be simply superimposed onto the present.

For example.

The designers of AI technologies should satisfy legal requirements for safety, accuracy and efficacy for well-defined use cases or indications. In the context of health care, this means that humans should remain in control of health-care systems and medical decisions; privacy and confidentiality should be protected, and patients must give valid informed consent through appropriate legal frameworks for data protection.

Another For example the collection of Data which is the backbone of AI.

Transparency requires that sufficient information be published or documented before the design or deployment of an AI technology. Such information must be easily accessible and facilitate meaningful public consultation and debate on how the technology is designed and how it should or should not be used.

It is the responsibility of stakeholders to ensure that they are used under appropriate conditions and by appropriately trained people. Effective mechanisms should be available for questioning and for redress for individuals and groups that are adversely affected by decisions based on algorithms.

Laws to ensure that AI systems be designed to minimize their environmental consequences and increase energy efficiency.

If we want the elimination of black-box approach through mandatory explain ability for AI – Agreed or not agree should not be an option.

While AI can be extraordinarily useful it is already out of control with self learning algorithms that no one can understand or to be brought to account.

These profit seeking skewed algorithms owned by corporations are causing racial and gender-based discrimination.Following billions of dollars in investment, a major corporate rebrand and a pivot to focus on the metaverse, Meta and Zuckerberg still have little to show for it.

I firmly believe that the Government must engage in meaningful dialogues with other countries on a common international laws that are now needed to subject developers to a rigorous evaluation process, and to ensure that entities using the technology act responsibly and are held accountable.

Having said that, governments must keep their roles limited and not assume absolute powers.

Multiple actors are jostling to lead the regulation of AI.

The question business leaders should be focused on at this moment, however, is not how or even when AI will be regulated, but by whom.

Governments have historically had trouble attracting the kind of technical expertise required even to define the kinds of new harms LLMs and other AI applications may cause.

Perhaps a licensing framework is needed to strike a balance between unlocking the potential of AI and addressing potential risks.

Or

AI ‘Nutrition Labels’ that would explain exactly what went into training an AI, and which would help us understand what a generative AI produces and why.

Or

Take the Meta’s open source approach which contrasts sharply with the more cautious, secretive inclinations of OpenAI and Google. With Open Source models like this and Stable Diffusion already out there, it may be impossible to get the Genie back into the bottle.

The metaverse is not well understood or appreciated by the media and the public. The metaverse is much, much bigger than one company, and weaving them together only complicates the matter.

Governments should never again face a choice between serving their people or servicing their debt.

Still, the most promising way not to provoke the sorcerer would be to avoid making too big a mess in the first place.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IN CASE YOU ARE WONDERING THIS IS WHERE THE WORLD IS GOING.

02 Thursday Mar 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Climate Change.

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( Thirty five minute read)

We all want to know the future.New Scientist Default Image

Unfortunately, the future isn’t talking. It’s just coming, like it or not being able to see the future might not play to our advantage.

Let’s not kid ourselves: Everything we think we know now is just an approximation to something we haven’t yet found out.

To imagine and think about the future, is a risky task that frequently ends up in an incomplete, subjective, sometimes vacuous exercise that, normally, faces a number of heated discussions.

Thinking about the future requires imagination and also rigour so we must guard against the temptation to choose a favourite future and prepare for it alone.

In a world where shocks like pandemics and extreme weather events owing to climate change, social unrest and political polarization are expected to be more frequent, we cannot afford to be caught off guard again.

Let’s look at some of the areas that are and will cause everything from wars to radical changes.

—–

Every day, we use a wide variety of automated systems that collect and process data. Such “algorithmic processing” is ubiquitous and often beneficial, underpinning many of the products and services we use in everyday life.

This is why we now need to thoroughly understand what’s at stake and what we can (and cannot) do … today.

Otherwise it is an ill wind for the next 60/100 years.

But what does the future hold for ordinary mortals, and how will we adapt to it?

We have been searching the universe for signs that we are not alone. So far, we have found nothing.

Given our genome and the physiological, anatomical and mental landscapes it conjures, what could Homo sapiens really become – and what is forever beyond our reach?

It’s hard to know what to fear the most.

Even our own existence is no longer certain.

Threats loom from many possible directions: a giant asteroid strike, global warming, a new plague, or nanomachines going rogue and turning everything into grey goo or the dreaded self inflicted nuclear wipe out.   However we look at it, the future appears bleak.

Where is all of this leading us?

What we do now set the foundations for a future.

The chaos theory taught us that the future behaviour of any physical system is extraordinarily sensitive to small changes – the flap of a butterfly’s wings can set off a hurricane, as the saying goes.

Computers simulations of future reality of a world are already producing ever more accurate predictions of what is to come, showing us that we are under immense stress, environmentally, economically and politically instabilities.

There is no God that’s is going to change the direction we on or save humanity from self destruction, its in our hands

—–

ENGERY: FUSION POWER.

We already live in a world powered by nuclear fusion. Unfortunately the reactor is 150 million kilometres away and we haven’t worked out an efficient way to tap it directly. So we burn its fossilised energy – coal, oil and gas – which is slowly boiling the planet alive, like a frog in a pan of water.

Fusion would largely free us from fossil fuels, delivering clean and extremely cheap energy in almost unlimited quantities.

Or would it? Fusion power would certainly be cleaner than burning fossil fuels, but it …Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations.

Sadly it won’t help in our battle to lessen the effects of climate change.

Why?

Because there’s huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades. Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century.

—–

THE INTERNET/ ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE/ SELF LEARNING ALGORITHMS/ROBOTS.

Billions of dollars continue to be funnelled into AI research. And stunning advances are being made but at what future cost.

Are we at the point in time at which machine intelligence starts to take off, and a new more intelligent species starts to inhabit Earth?

Synthetic life would make the point in a way the wider world could not ignore. Moreover, creating it in the lab would prove that the origin of life is a relatively low hurdle, increasing the odds that we might find life.

POWER.

Neither physical strength nor access to capital are sufficient for economic success. Power now resides with those best able to organize knowledge. The internet has eliminated “middlemen” in most industries, removing a great deal of corruption but replacing it with profit seeking Algorithms that are widely used increasing the inequality gaps.

——

WARS.

Personnel with the 175th Cyberspace Operations Group conduct cyber operations at Warfield Air National Guard Base, Middle River, Maryland, US, 2017

What does future warfare look like?

It’s here already.

Up goes digital technology, artificial intelligence and cyber. Down goes the money for more traditional hardware and troop numbers.

The present war in the Ukraine is the laboratory for machine learning decision killing, with autonomy in weapons systems –  precision guided munitions. (Autonomous weapon system: A weapon system that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator.) This includes human-supervised autonomous weapon systems that are designed to allow human operators to override operation of the weapon system, but can select and engage targets without further human input after activation.

(AI)-enabled lethal autonomous weapons in Ukraine, might make new types of autonomous weapons desirable.

There is still no internationally agreed upon definition of autonomous weapons or lethal autonomous weapons.

‘Fire and forget’ 

Many of the aspects of a major conflict between the West and say, Russia or China, have already been developed, rehearsed and deployed.

—-

A triptych image showing from left to right: a firefighter in front of a fire; dry, cracked ground; and a hurricane near Florida, U.S.

CLIMATE CHANGE.

Global climate change is not a future problem with some of the changes now irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities.

Climate models predict that Earth’s global average temperature will rise an additional 4° C (7.2° F) during the 21st Century if greenhouse gas levels continue to rise at present levels. A warmer average global temperature will cause the water cycle to “speed up” due to a higher rate of evaporation. Which means we are looking at a future with much more rain and snow, and a higher risk of flooding to some regions. Changes in precipitation will not be evenly distributed.

Over the past 100 years, mountain glaciers in all areas of the world have decreased in size and so has the amount of permafrost in the Arctic. Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster, too. The amount of sea ice (frozen seawater) floating in the Arctic Ocean and around Antarctica is expected to decrease. Already the summer thickness of sea ice in the Arctic is about half of what it was in 1950. Arctic sea ice is melting more rapidly than the Antarctic sea ice. Melting ice may lead to changes in ocean circulation, too. Although there is some uncertainty about the amount of melt, summer in the Arctic Ocean will likely be ice-free by the end of the century.

Abrupt changes are also possible as the climate warms.

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound.

The consequences of any of them are so severe, and the fact that we cannot retreat from them once they’ve been set in motion is so problematic, that we must keep them in mind when evaluating the overall risks associated with climate change.

—–

IMMIGRANT’S /REFUGEE’S

History—particularly migration history—has shown time and again, that large population movements are often a result of single, hard-to-predict events such as large economic or political shocks.

Imagining migration’s future is urgent, especially now, when we are witnessing the highest movement of people in modern history, which is presented in a political context with strong populist and nationalist overtones, peppered with growing inequality in and between countries; in addition to an environmental crisis and a growing interconnection and proliferation of information that is usually deliberately distorted.

In today’s acts rests the seed of what we will harvest tomorrow. What we do today with and for the migrants will define not only their future but also ours.

We will always struggle to anticipate key changes in migration flows but that it’s more important to set up systems that can deal with different alternative outcomes and adjust flexibly. Most Western countries no longer openly support or defend the universality of human rights. Most countries apply “multilateralism à la carte”, that is, they participate only in multilateral agreements that strictly benefit their national interest.

Migration control systems collapsed because the international community failed to develop multilateral migration governance regimes. The international protection system has ended up being irrelevant. Many people are moving, the number of displaced people has increased dramatically as well as the number of refugees – The Trojan horses.

Immigration isn’t a new phenomenon, but with the effects of the future climate the scale and variety of countries from which people are moving will be greater than ever.

The idea that you have to learn a foreign language to make yourself understood in your own country is no longer a probability.

We now have immigration from everywhere in the world.

Very few people have issues with genuinely high skilled migrants coming over to work as doctors or scientists. The anxieties are always around mass immigration of low skilled labour (and in particularly about those from diametrically opposed cultures with completely different norms and values). As for the ageing populations thing, replacing your population with younger migrants from different cultures does technically solve the ageing population problem but then you end up with a completely different culture and country…

What ever you think, it’s becoming more difficult to do the old-style identity politics where you found a particular group and did what they wanted.  Effectively assimilating people from the Muslim world looks to be a particular difficult.

Nearly all nations are mongrels

—-

EDUCATION.

By imagining alternative futures for education we can better think through the outcomes, develop agile and responsive systems
and plan for future shocks .We have already integrated much of our life into our smartphones, watches and digital personal
assistants in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
The underlying question is: to what extent are our current spaces, people, time and technology in schooling helping or hindering
our vision?
It would involve re-envisioning the spaces where learning takes place. Schools could disappear altogether.
ALGORITHMIC SYSTEMS.

Brute force algorithm: This is the most common type in which we devise a solution by exploring all the possible scenarios.

Greedy algorithm: In this, we make a decision by considering the local (immediate) best option and assume it as a global optimal.

Divide and conquer algorithm: This type of algorithm will divide the main problem into sub-problems and then would solve them individually.

Backtracking algorithm: This is a modified form of Brute Force in which we backtrack to the previous decision to obtain the desired goal.

Randomized algorithm: As the name suggests, in this algorithm, we make random choices or select randomly generated numbers.

Dynamic programming algorithm: This is an advanced algorithm in which we remember the choices we made in the past and apply them in future scenarios.

Recursive algorithm: This follows a loop, in which we follow a pattern of the possible cases to obtain a solution.

90.72% of people in the world cell phone owners. Algorithms are everywhere.
Algorithmic systems, particularly modern Machine Learning (ML) approaches, pose significant risks if deployed and managed
without due care. They can amplify harmful biases that lead to discriminatory decisions or unfair outcomes that reinforce
inequalities.
They can be used to mislead consumers and distort competition. Further, the opaque and complex nature by which
they collect and process large volumes of personal data can put people’s privacy rights in jeopardy. 
Now more than ever it is vital that we understand and articulate the nature and severity of these risks.
Those procuring and/or using algorithms often know little about their origins and limitations
There is a lack of visibility and transparency in algorithmic processing, which can undermine accountability.
They are already being woven into many digital products and services.
Algorithmic processing is already leading to society-wide harms making automated decisions that can potentially vary the cost of,
or even deny an individual’s access to, a product, service, opportunity or benefit.  
For example, using live facial recognition at a stadium on matchday could impact rights relating to
freedom of assembly, or track an individual’s behaviour online, which may infringe their right to privacy.
At the moment there is very little transparently in providing information about how and where algorithmic processing takes place
or how they are deployed, such as the protocols and procedures that govern there use, whether they are overseen by a human
operator, and whether there are any mechanisms through which people can seek redress. The number of players involved in
algorithmic supply chains is leading to confusion over who is accountable for their proper development and use.
As the number of use cases for algorithmic processing grows, so too will the number of questions concerning the impact of
algorithmic processing on society.
Already there are many gaps in our knowledge of this technology, with myths and misconceptions commonplace.
They are the TikTok erosion of human values for profit, that will become the full individual personalization of content and
pedagogy (enabled by cutting-edge technology, using body information, facial expressions or neural signals) for commercial
platforms to rival Government’s.  
——
BIOENGINEERING.  
In a world of mounting inequalities, the question of who benefits and misses out from bioengineering advances looms large. 
Unfortunately, we don’t have space here to talk about all the effects in the future concerning Bioengineering. 
Artificial organs or limbs, the genetic synthesis of new organisms, gene editing, the computerized simulation of surgery, medical imaging technology and tissue/organ regeneration.
Like any other technology, bioengineering has damaging potential, whether it be through misuse, weaponization or accidents.
This risk can create significant threats with large potential consequences to public health, privacy or to environmental safety.
Foreseeing the impacts of bioengineering technologies is urgently needed.
All these issues have implications for academics, policymakers and the general public and range from neuronal probes for human enhancement to carbon sequestration.
These issues will not unfold in isolation:
Biotechnological discoveries are increasingly facilitated by automated and roboticides, private ‘cloud labs’.
The effects on biodiversity and ecosystems have not been fully studied.
Protein engineering and machine learning, leading to the creation of novel compounds within the industry (e.g. new catalysts for un-natural reactions) and medical applications (e.g. selectively destroying damaged tissue which is key for some diseases).
These newly created proteins have the potential to be used as weapons due to their high lethality.
Healthcare is facing a tug of war between democratization and elite therapies.
Plant strains which sequester carbon more effectively, rapidly and can even aid solar photovoltaics (the production of electricity from light) and light-sustained biomanufacturing.
Due to political unrest and the spread of fake news, citizens are scared about this approach and protest against it.
These issues will shape the future of bioengineering and must shape modern discussions about its political, societal and economic impact. This is now a very complicated question with no foreseeable answer.

To answer we have to think about how we got here in the first place. Of course “The herd” might not want to think about something like this.

DEMOCRACY.                                                                  ———–

Our democracy is in crisis. Many institutions of our government are dysfunctional and getting worse.

Our politics have become alarmingly acrimonious;

Technology is enriching some and leaving the vast majority behind.

Democracy, has never been without profound flaws, cannot be taken for granted. Trust in political institutions – including the electoral process itself – are at an all-time low. Societies the world over are experiencing a strong backlash to a system of government that has largely been the hallmark of developed nations for generations

We don’t know where it’s heading as politicians are now basically middlemen to Social media which is changing the way people viewed their political leaders as under constant pressure promoted by populist as a result all decomacies are now “flawed” and exposed to the vulnerability of pure democracy to the tyranny of the majority

We don’t know how serious it is.  So, what’s going on?

What’s behind the erosion of a political system that’s guided the world’s most developed economies for decades?

GREED.

As a result government’s are becoming more and more soulless, in failing to talk about the things that mattered to people.

With political parties running away from talking about the issues that matter to people.

When people feel threatened, either physically – by terrorism, say – or economically, they tend to be more receptive to authoritarian populist appeals and more willing to give up certain freedoms. When people are saying they can’t stomach any more immigration, when they don’t know if they’re going to be able to retire or what kind of jobs their kids are going to get, the political elite needs to listen and adapt or things are going to unravel.

Some may argue that this is because governments no longer feel like they are “of the people, by the people, for the people.

Maybe we are going to have some shocking lessons about the durability of democracy.

Non-democratic states have many forms, like China’s meritocratic system – in which government officials are not elected by the public, but appointed and promoted according to their competence and performance – should not be dismissed outright.

A democratic system can live with corruption because corrupt leaders can be voted out of power, at least in theory. But in a meritocratic system, corruption is an existential threat. Elections are a safety valve that isn’t available in China so the government is not subject to the electoral cycle and can focus on its policies while the West has tried to export democracy not only at the point of a gun, but also by imposing legislation. The whole idea is wrong in principle because democracy is not ours to dispense.

The US and Western Europe have we hope  abandoned most of their ambitions for regime change around the world.

So looking inwards may be no bad thing. If the West wants to promote democracy then they should do it by example.

How do we reconcile that with democracy millions of citizens?

Hence, the knowledge revolution should bring a shift to direct democracy, but those who benefit from the current structure are fighting this transition. This is the source of much angst around the world, including the current wave of popular protests.

Smaller political entities should find the evolution toward direct democracy easier to achieve than big, sprawling governments.
Today’s great powers have little choice but to spend their way to political stability, which is unsustainable, and/or try to control knowledge, which is difficult.

Each individual’s share of sovereignty, and therefore their freedom, diminishes as the social contract includes more people.

So, other things being equal, smaller countries would be freer and more democratic than larger ones.

I’m not sure we can. It worked pretty well for a long time but maybe, as population grows.

FINALLY THE LANDS WE NOW INHABIT COULD DISSAPEAR IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE.  
Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, some 150 million people are now living on land
that will be below the high-tide line by mid-century. Defensive measures can go only so far. We know that it’s coming.

The math is catching up to us – the amount of Co2 – the number of refugees / immigrants, the inequality gap, the numbers dying in wars~ natural disasters, the erosion of democracy, trust.

We need to know in plain English and without hype or hysteria of  technologies ,social media, or selective algorithms news, only then will we begin to understand what’s coming and how to begin preparing yourself.

impossible to know everything about a quantum system such as an atom.

President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people – and said he was forced to take into account NATO’s nuclear capabilities.

Putin is increasingly presenting the war as a make-or-break moment in Russian history – and saying that he believes the very future of Russia and its people is in peril. “In today’s conditions, when all the leading NATO countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?” Putin said.

completely unaware of the relentless pressure that’s building right now.

wasn’t always the United States. Nothing requires it to remain so. At some point, it will develop into something else.

THE COST OF THINGS.

Globalization vs. Regionalization, US-centric vs China-centric.

Modern Western economies have become knowledge based.

Technology and political trends are aligning against mega-powers like the US and China.

The West is beset with widening wealth gaps, shrinking middle classes and fractured societies.

There is only one country that has got it right Norway.

This small Scandinavian country of 5 million people does things differently.

It has the lowest income inequality in the world, helped by a mix of policies that support education and innovation. It also channels the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, which manages its oil and gas revenues, into long-term economic planning.

Norway does not have a statutory minimum wage, but 70% of its workers are covered by collective agreements which specify wage floors. Furthermore, 54% of paid workers are members of unions. The government has prioritised education as a means to diversify its economy and foster higher and more inclusive growth.

The Norwegian state heavily subsidies childcare, capping fees and using means-testing so that places are affordable, although some parents report difficulty in finding an available place. Norway has provided for 49 weeks of parental leave at full pay (or 59 weeks at 80% of earnings). Additionally, mothers and fathers must take at least 14 weeks off each after the birth of a child.

Currently some 98% of its energy comes from renewable sources, mainly hydropower.

While Norway is more fortunate than most, it does offer some valuable lessons to policy-makers from other parts of the world.

A Roman Catholic priest officiates mass on the first day of trading at the Philippine Stock Exchange in Manila (Credit: Getty Images)

TOMORROW’S GODS.  

Religions never do really die.

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also oddly blind to that reality.

When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a religion dies, it becomes a myth, and its claim to sacred truth expires. If you believe your faith has arrived at ultimate truth, you might reject the idea that it will change at all. But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held our beliefs may be today, they are likely in time to be transformed or transferred as they pass to our descendants – or simply to fade away.

As our civilisation and its technologies become increasingly complex, could entirely new forms of worship emerge?

We might expect the form that religion takes to follow the function it plays in a particular society –  that different societies will invent the particular gods they need.

The future of religion is that it has no future.

Perhaps with the march of science it  is leading to the “disenchantment” of society so supernatural answers to the big questions will be no longer felt to be needed. We also need to be careful when interpreting what people mean by “no religion”. “Nones” may be disinterested in organised religion, but that doesn’t mean they are militantly atheist. Accordingly, there are very many ways of being an unbeliever. The acid test, as true for neopagans as for transhumanists, is whether people make significant changes to their lives consistent with their stated faith.

People have started constructing faiths of their own. Consider the “Witnesses of Climatology”, a fledgling “religion” invented to foster greater commitment to action on climate change.

In fact, recognition is a complex issue worldwide, particularly since there is no widely accepted definition of religion even in academic circles.

A supercomputer is turned on and asked: is there a God? Now there is, comes the reply.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. CAN WE GET A GRIP BEFORE ITS TOO LATE? BECAUSE THE FUTURE IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART — OR THE POOR.

23 Thursday Feb 2023

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(Seventeen minute read)

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” — Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time

The stakes facing our generation are much more than they first seem, because our actions might have the potential to bring about a far better world, or cut it short.

The shifting meaning of “capitalism,” and how societies hide their downside with culture.

We’re unclear on what “capitalism” is supposed to be.

  • From the proletarians, nothing is to be feared.
  • Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

———————————–

Rather than us asking questions of this world, this world asks questions of us.

We need to listen to the world in new ways and hear the fundamental questions that it askes us.

WITH  CLIMATE CHANGE –  WARS – AI – INEQULITY. –  UNITED NATIONS

ALL AT THIS VERY M0MENT ARE ASKING:  DO WE WISH TO CONTINUE TO EXIST? 

Might it be, then, that we have trouble imagining the end of capitalism because we think capitalism is great, and we’d fear that any alternative would be worse?

It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life.

Have we been indoctrinated so that we subscribe to an ideology or a myth of capitalism?

All are questing, just what are our values.

We have an easier time imagining an apocalyptic death of the planet than capitalism being surpassed by a superior economic system, promoting equality.

Do we trust in capitalism on what are effectively theological grounds, so that the specious neoliberal arguments in capitalism’s favour are so many superfluous rationalizations?

Will AI Have a Soul? And does it even matter? Everybody uses the internet, but nobody trusts it.

Even if capitalism is justifiable, it doesn’t follow that those who benefit from that system should be unable even to imagine a better kind of economy.

Neoliberals will say that we can imagine an alternative to capitalism, after all, namely the communist one that failed in the Soviet Union. But that, too, is a red herring since the question is whether we can imagine improvements to capitalism, not worse economies.

Likely, you find your smartphone handy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t imagine improvements to it. You’d prefer to keep your phone, of course, and you may even be addicted to social media. But science fiction is replete with re-imagined technologies. For instance, we could miniaturize smartphones and hardwire them into the brain.

Science doesn’t demonstrate that the quantity of life matters more than its quality, nor can science show which qualities of life should matter more than others.

  •                                                        ——————————-

How do I get people to do what I want them to do?

Unfortunately there are collective forms of self-deception.

Individuals, of course, can prevent themselves from reckoning with unwanted truths, in that they can underestimate obstacles, confabulate, procrastinate, and so on, unable to realize the meaning of the present moment.

“You can get everything in life that you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”

Give and you will receive.

Maybe there are social mechanisms that operate in an analogous fashion, protecting whole populations by steering them towards the party line. The analogue of the individual ego, or of the conscious self, might be the upper class that dictates mass media narratives, such as by instilling neoliberal values via Ivy League education, as Thomas Frank explains.

Societies have worldviews called “cultures,” along with institutions that enforce their biases.

Once large, sedentary societies emerged in history, so too did mechanisms for managing mass opinion. Religion was one such device, but we can speak more neutrally about “ideologies,” as Karl Marx did, to account for how we may protect capitalism, too, with myths and collective fallacies.

If you’re looking for signs of such capitalist myths, have a look at advertising, at how thousands of misleading slogans and manipulative, hyperbolic messages stream through everyone’s consciousness on a daily basis.

In the boom-and-bust cycle in which government spending alone can stabilize.

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The recent pandemic, natural disasters, wars, all shine a light on the inequality that exist and have existed since time immortal.

If we want a world worth living in and on, we must make profit contribute to PROTECTING  all the essential values of life, not the pockets of the few.

Whether it’s turning promises on climate change into action, rebuilding trust in the financial system, or connecting the world to the internet.

OUR COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY MUST BE TO REPAIRING THE DAMAGE OF CENTURIES OF GREED.

To achieve these objectives we will need to address a host of issues, with more than common sense but with trillions and trillions pumped into removing and protecting before the planet becomes uninhabitable.

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The Earth’s average land temperature has warmed nearly 1°C in the past 50 years as a result of human activity, global greenhouse gas emissions have grown by nearly 80% since 1970, and atmospheric concentrations of the major greenhouse gases are at their highest level in 800,000 years. We’re already seeing and feeling the impacts of climate change with weather events such as droughts and storms becoming more frequent and intense, and changing rainfall patterns.

By 2050, the world must feed 9 billion people. Yet the demand for food will be 60% greater than it is today. Despite huge gains in global economic output, there is evidence that our current social, political and economic systems are exacerbating inequalities, rather than reducing them. Rising income inequality is the cause of economic and social ills, ranging from low consumption to social and political unrest, and is damaging to our future well-being. More than 61 million jobs have been lost since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, leaving more than 200 million people unemployed globally.

To function efficiently, the system needs to re-establish trust.

The internet is changing the way we live, work, produce and consume. With such extensive reach, digital technologies cannot help but disrupt many of our existing models of business and government. We are entering the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological transformation driven by a ubiquitous and mobile internet. The challenge is to manage this seismic change in a way that promotes the long-term health and stability of the internet. Within the next decade, it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet.

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

Equality between men and women in all aspects of life, from access to health and education to political power and earning potential, is fundamental to whether and how societies thrive.

The growth of the digital economy, the rise of the service sector and the spread of international production networks have all been game-changers for international trade. Despite fundamental changes in the way business is done across borders, international regulations and agreements have not evolved at the same speed. In addition, negotiations to reach a new global trade agreement have stalled. There is a pressing need to reform the global trade framework.

Investing for the long term is vital for economic growth and social well-being, serious challenges to global health remain.

The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60. To cope with this huge demographic shift and build a global healthcare system that is fit for the future, the world needs to address these challenges now.

In short, the most pressing problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them.

As we explained in the previous article, this means problems that are not only big, but also neglected and solvable. The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go. And this means they’re not the problems that first come to mind.

First, future generations matter, but they can’t vote, they can’t buy things, and they can’t stand up for their interests. This means our system neglects them. You can see this in the global failure to come to an international agreement to tackle climate change that actually works..

We can’t so easily visualise suffering that will happen in the future. Future generations rely on our goodwill, and even that is hard to muster.

 We all know where the Solutions are to be found – in how wealth is distributed.

We should go beyond the focus on reducing the global poverty rate to below 3% and strive to ensure that all countries and all people can share in the benefits of economic development. Nearly half of the world’s population currently lives in poverty.  2/3 of the population in low-income countries is under 25 years old.

The world is facing multiple converging crises — growing food insecurity, rising fuel prices, economic instability, and the climate crisis — and they are all hitting poor countries the hardest. With 349 million people across 79 countries facing acute food insecurity, this is the worst food crisis in decades. While COVID-19, climate change, and conflict have been major drivers, political action has also fallen short.

Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as well as the lack of participation in decision-making.

And we still wonder why the world we live in is going down the tube.

It is quite obvious that there is no point in been rich without giving – the power to solve some of the most pressing global challenges is not to be found in the words of the United Nations Declaration to end poverty in all its forms everywhere is Goal 1 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Why?

Because it has to beg for funds to implement any of its aspirations.

What is needed is a preputial Fund to create a World Aid system with clout.

HERE IS HOW THIS CAN BE ACHIVED.

We now live in a world driven by technology – Apps for this and Apps that – Smartphone – Algorithms running world stock market, plundering everything for the sake of profit.

Why not introduce a World Aid commission algorithm to collect  0.05% on all activities that produce profit for profit sake.

This funding could be delivered by non repayable grants prioritising adaptation re climate change, vetted projects to reduce poverty, food sustainability, environment protection, etc ( Unlike The International Monetary Fund (IMF)  the lender of last resort.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com