This question tends to arise in the face of a moral dilemma or existential crisis but in this world of technology, social media, and advanced scientific discoveries, it’s important to keep asking this crucial question.
Are humans really biologically and socially different from the rest of the created world?
The physical similarities between humans and other mammals are quite plain. We are made of the same flesh and blood; we go through the same basic life stages but how is the value of a human determined?
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One of the key characteristics that make us human appears to be that we can think about alternative futures and make deliberate choices accordingly.
But we are living in an age that makes defining what makes humans human tricky, not because we are both unique and paradoxical but because technological advancements are changing our very existence.
While we are the most advanced species intellectually, technologically, and emotionally—extending human lifespans, creating artificial intelligence, traveling to outer space, showing great acts of heroism, altruism and compassion—we also have the capacity to engage in primitive, violent, cruel, and self-destructive behavior.
It is particularly challenging to name all of the distinctly human traits or reach an absolute definition of “what makes us human” for a species as complex as ours.
So we remain even in this age of modernity and intellectual freedom, no closer to any concrete answers.
It is our intellect that transcends us from simply existing.
Apart from the obvious intellectual capabilities that distinguish us as a species, humans have several unique physicals, social, biological, and emotional traits which are also changing.
Not too long ago as a species we humans used storytelling for communicating and transmitting our ideas. Now we use smartphones and internet platforms without much consideration for what effect they are having on our minds.
(The mind consists of the intangible realm of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and consciousness.)
We assume that others have minds somewhat like ours—filled with beliefs and desires—but we can only infer those mental states. We cannot see, feel, or touch them. We largely rely on language to inform each other about what is on our minds.
Our memories are stored in the Cloud adding to the data collected by machine learning algorithms that shape them into products.
(Memory allows human beings to make sense of their existence and to prepare for the future, increasing their chances of survival, not only individually but also as a species.)
“As far as we know, humans have the unique power of forethought to think consciously: The ability to imagine the future in many possible iterations and then to actually create the future we imagine.
This awareness gives meaning to humanity and the awareness of our mortality. We are human because of our reason.
We are determined and capable of knowledge, and the ability to act on it, without depending on anyone else, even religion or some divine intervention but we are not self-sufficient. We need others.
because of this, we interact with the world based on our perception of it.
Regardless of one’s religious beliefs and thoughts about what happens after death, the truth is that, unlike other species who live blissfully unaware of their impending demise, most humans are conscious of the fact that someday they will die.
The story of what made us human is probably not going to focus on changes in our protein building blocks but rather on how evolution assembled these blocks in new ways by changing when and where in the body different genes turn on and off.
Species evolve to fit the particular environment that they are occupying at a given time, not to “advance” to a different evolutionary stage.
So us of us who are alive today with this realization yet to come are the guinea pigs of the future. In the meantime, we can only be human in society not driven by machine learning harvesting data but by the planet, we live on.
It will be a big moment in what truly makes us human when we do so.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear.
We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?
We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions.
Is it to be human is to be one of us?
This begs the question of the class of creatures to which “us” refers.
In deciding that all and only Homo sapiens are humans, one is expressing a preference about where the boundary separating humans from non-humans should be drawn, rather than discovering where such a boundary lays.
We’re probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds.
In fact, one could know everything there is to know biologically about a human, but still not know what is unique to humanity now, what will be unique about humanity in the future, and what is important about humanity.
Why?
Because the steady growth of computing power and sheer reality-describing data will eventually give scientists an unprecedented understanding of biological systems, including the human body, and the ability to hack it in ways that may ultimately defy death.
All of this will lead to a point at which our tools are so proficient at making themselves that more-human-intelligences emerge, and this change is now so accelerated that we can barely make sense of it.
Cells might be persuaded to develop new collective goals and assume shapes totally unlike those that normally develop from an embryo.
A new type of creature—one “defined by what it does rather than to what it belongs to developmentally and evolutionarily.
————- What will the future mean for us, for our relationships with other people, for our hopes and strivings?
When we look at how ordinary people have used the term “human” and its equivalents across cultures and throughout the span of history, we discover that often (maybe even typically) members of other species are explicitly excluded from the category of the human.
For example, Nazis considered Jews to be non-human creatures.
Generally, in wars, soldiers give nicknames to the enemy to dehumanize them.
And another example is provided by the seemingly interminable debate about the moral permissibility of abortion, which almost always turns on the question of whether the embryo is a human being.
But if we think of the human as an indexical expression – a term that gets its content from the context in which it is uttered – a very different picture emerges.
When we describe others as human, we are saying that they are members of our own kind or, more precisely, members of our own natural kind. ie natural kinds are to contrast them with artificial kinds.
If ‘human’ means ‘my own natural kind,’ then referring to a being as human boils down to the assertion that the other is a member of the natural kind that the speaker believes herself to be.
However, when it comes down to it, human beings have nothing special but our highly evolved brains that do something that other species can’t:
We remember, but so do elephants.
So our inquisitive, reflective, pondering minds are forced to wrestle with some big questions in one way or another.
We have cultures and ways of transmitting information, and I guess we may come to realize that it is just us in the future.
Rest assured humans will need humans to be human and the planet we presently call Earth will remain the only place that this is achievable.
You may be certain that AI will want to use satellites to look inside other cultures and will eventually create a human geography information system that uses satellite imagery as the baseline and overlays the satellite maps with datasets and other detailed information covering history, culture, education, economy, religion, weather, and political landscapes.
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Who gave EARTH its name? No one knows.
Earth is the only one in our solar system that does not come from Greco-Roman mythology. All of the other planets were named after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.
Also, there is no particular Homo sapiens individual that researchers recognize as the specimen that gave Homo sapiens its name.
Self-awareness is in its infancy with Artificial intelligence, and the identity and authenticity of an individual in this melted world ahead will be daunting as we don’t yet understand who we are.
Undoubtedly, in the case of humans, we are more creative than any other animals currently alive or pre-human descendants with the same genes, but the problem with evaluating creativity in extinct species is that you can’t talk to them.
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We don’t know everything about our own species—but we keep learning more as we are rendering a new world with new opportunities and perspectives that will either go in two directions.
Either we harness technology to human values or technology is turning us into products for exploration.
Presently to live a human life which in essence is determined by an accident of birth is becoming more and more expensive so that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born.
Moreover, we can scarcely go a day without using inventions and innovations that were once the stuff of science fiction. Cell phones, flat-screen TVs, airbags and antilock brakes, CT scans, digital video players, portable computers, and, of course, the World Wide Web were completely unavailable a few decades ago.
But of course, in a future world where accidents of birth and the fortunes of good genes are even more critical determinants of success than they are now, inequalities that persist will be especially galling.
Because social and positional inequalities already distort existing measures of income and wealth, many seemingly clean-cut economic debates are more intractable than one would imagine. And of course, social anxieties over the unavoidable differences will become even more troubling, the less we can constructively address these issues.
Even if biology could somehow be conquered to the point that genetic good fortune could be parceled out equally to all, the minor differences that remained would loom ever larger.
Whether you view such an eventuality as desirable or irrelevant, more of our intellectual effort should be devoted to this future scenario. Not simply because we are heading there, but in many ways, because parts of that world are already here.
Even today, we routinely exaggerate the extent of material inequality and make foolish comparisons between different time periods and between countries at different levels of development. This does not mean that inequality has disappeared, or that it is unimportant
And as COVID-19 pulls the rugout from under economic growth, money will have so much power that it with AI will control society.
As the need for money grows, so does the greed of it.
Ever since money was introduced as a value to exchange goods, every action that we take exacts a cost and produces consequences and none will be bigger than climate change.
In the economy of the future where knowledge is the most valuable commodity, a person or a country will have to offer more than just money.
Money should never be the master of anyone it is a tool to be used to accomplish the things you want in life.
Even if money does not buy happiness, raising as many people as possible to a middling level of prosperity (an important first step to endure day-to-day economic agony of inequality we are still creating a recipe, not just for disaster but exiting this world.
People are waking up to a story that was already there.
This Recipe for the human stew we are in.
Viruses have been on the planet for millions of years, much longer than Homo sapiens. After a year COVID has infected more than 115 million people and caused over 2.5 million deaths, with over half a million in the US alone.
The world population of 8 billion is doubling every 61 years with 55 percent of us living in urban areas or cities, which is set to rise to 68 percent over the coming decades. Currently, Cities house more than half of the world’s population and are expected to see another 2.5 billion new residents by 2050.
Cities consume over two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global CO2 emissions.China’s co2 emission exceeded those of all developing countries. 14 gigatons, 25% of global emissions.
Producing enough food to feed the world includes raising large numbers of animals in close quarters, and they represent breeding grounds for viruses and infectious agents that can jump to humans. The spillover from animals to humans is closely linked to environmental change such as Climate change.
60% of all Mammals are livestock. Unsustainable.
80 % of all birds are Poultry. Unsustainable.
83% of wild animals are exterminated along with 50% of plants.
Because of selective breeding, future generations of selectively bred plants and animals will all share very similar genes which will reduce variation perfect for future Pandemics.
Mix all of this with Profit for Profit sake and we got a recipe for the future that will rise quicker than you can say I am all right Jack.
And I’m not saying we should go back and live like nomads. But when you put it all together — population pressure, urbanization, agricultural practices, deforestation, high mobility . . . and then climate change is going to make all these things worse.
Whatever the next event will be — and we know there’ll be another event — it’s already out there. A wake-up call is an understatement.
The Dominant role that humanity now plays on Earth – is unsustainable and we must have pandemic memory, even if we want to forget the past year.
What if anything can be done to reverse centuries of mismanagement?
The future of automation is only possible with the Internet of Things (IoT), the hub of collected data where devices interconnect. To get the most from automation, it’s essential to look beyond convenience toward efficiency.
416.2 terawatt-hours of electricity are used by data centers equaling 1% of world energy.
There is now a great urgency for the world to convert to green energy but solar panels and wind farm electrical cars are not the solutions unless they all operate on Hydrofusion. Yet commercial electricity generation from fusion still remains a goal rather than a reality and it’s a solid bet that it will not arrive on the grid before the 2030s and it will be expensive.
We are left with our whole system of living that requires radical structural change away from profit to beneficial sustainability.
This change requires giving the means to Humans to live their lives with dignity while protecting what is left of our planet.
There are other, more ethical ways to provide social services.
At the moment we have sales taxes, gasoline taxes, poll taxes, food taxes (yes, they tax what you need to survive), sin taxes (cigarettes, alcohol, gambling), “fat taxes” (taxes on unhealthy foods), housing taxes, Social Security taxes, payroll taxes, and income taxes…taxes galore! All harm the poor more than they do the rich. And of course, we have the income tax, which is a progressive tax, a tax that affects the rich more than the poor.
What if we had a cutoff point where at a certain income you pay no taxes, and those below that income get money back from the government. A Universal income.
This alone would be revolutionary for the poor and working-class! Coupled with the removal of all regressive taxes, it would be even better.
Instead of using hundreds of billions to fund programs like Social Security and free medical care, food banks, those who would require those programs would probably just be able to afford most of what they need anyway!
The demands for all goods would skyrocket as people now have free money to put into the market.
On top of this, all education including University should be made free.
If we want humans to protect, the ecosystem we have to make it more profitable to protect than destroy. Pay them to protect it.
To do this see previous posts – A 00.05% World Aid commission.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Do not read this if you are depressed or are easily depressed.
If you do read it try not to click the moron like button, but comment.
We, humans, believe that we are the most intelligent beings on the planet.
We believed that are superior to the animals due to our exclusive ability to reason.
In simple terms, this comes about when we select only the ‘survivors’ – those that outperformed the rest, whether people, machines, or companies – and come to conclusions based on their attributes, without looking more broadly at the whole dataset, including those with similar characteristics that failed to perform as well.
Our collective ingenuity has got us into the mess of Climate Change and now a Pandemic that is not just killing us but shining a light on our collective stupidity.
The Earth’s carrying capacity could absorb our endless acts of stupidity.
So to answer this question one could go back over the history of humanity and pick out numerous examples since man emerged from his cave.
From the Nuclear bomb to stepping on the moon. From Michelangelo to Albert Enstine. From the Stone age to the Tec age we have put greed and power before looking after what we had in the first place – Earth.
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As there is no escaping our interconnected world in this post I want to address the origins of Planetary realism when it comes to that interconnection.
Why?
Because we are now engaged in two possible futures for the world, the worst or the best.
Are we going to continue shooting ourselves in the foot?
or
Are we going to recognize that Human DNA is too similar to split us into subspecies or races of stupidity?
Can we act like one?
I firmly believe we know enough to solve our problems, I just doubt we have the collective will to work together to get the job done. We should be much better than our collective selves.
We have to start accepting our common vulnerability and therefore our common interest instead of just National Interests which is paramount to decisions that have to be on a global scale.
When the stakes are high, we want those making decisions – whether they be machines or human, to be correct, trustworthy, and responsible.
However, now we are handing these decisions more and more to machine learning algorithms and neural nets.
We implicitly grant artificial intelligence a degree of agency that not only overstates its true abilities but robs us of our own autonomy... It is always humans who choose whether or not to abdicate this authority, to empower some piece of technology to intervene on our behalf. It would be a mistake to presume that this transfer of authority involves a simultaneous absolution of responsibility. It does not.
Perhaps technology can be correct. But can it be trustworthy and responsible?
While it’s hard to judge even if another person is trustworthy or responsible, it may be even harder to judge something that thinks in such radically different ways as humans.
We once viewed ourselves as the only creature with emotions, morality, culture, which is not true, they can be found in the animal kingdom.
Confucius:
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
This is to say that intelligence is the ability to recognize our weaknesses and one of our greatest weaknesses is the impenetrable barrier now being created right in front of our eyes between Artificial Intelligence and Capitalist Greed.
If we measure the IQ of AI it would be against its capabilities of reasoning and its problem-solving ability and nothing else.
Rational thinking and intelligence don’t tend to go hand in hand.
This measurement doesn’t measure curiosity or creativity.
Unlike the robotic world, people desperately believe they’re smart because they desperately want to see themselves as smart and sometimes because they really can’t tell.
Most of us measure our IQ as being five points higher than it actually is.
Thinking AI might work in the same way as a human brain is not only misleading but dangerous.
Up to now AI only takes orders and does not think by itself so there is a massive disconnect from biological networks. They, that is AI lacks some crucial components essential to navigating the real world…. they do recreate something like human intelligence that has the ability to analyze all matters from multiple angles while not or never will be prepared to take on responsible decision making.
In short, Dunning and Kruger discovered that the less intelligent you are, the more confident you’re likely to be that you know what you’re doing and the more likely you are to be wrong. Being unsure, in this context, is often a mark of intelligence.
Without being curious, an intelligent person won’t ever use their intelligence to learn and form new ideas.
At the same time, a person without curiosity it seems, be less likely to question themselves or the world around them in the first place. As a result, it seems they would also be unlikely to ever use what intelligence they had to learn new things and question their own misperceptions.
But AI is learning to manipulate human behavior, creating more problems for the world.
Of course, there is just one thing that nags away at the average man or woman in the street in amongst all this academic and government research and analysis, how safe is AI going to be for me – can I trust big business and government to behave ethically?
It is already exploiting vulnerabilities in ways people make choices. Click like and the AI steer you towards particular actions by filtering your choices.
WE now have “behavioral modification empires.”
The purpose of organizations such as Google and Facebook ceased to be building connections, and instead became about adapting your habits and thought patterns in the name of profit.
With so much misguided thought and active disinformation online, it has become difficult for people with insight worth sharing to do so. Behind the anonymity of the web, anyone can claim to be an expert. When everybody is an expert, nobody is.
In other words, the AI learns how people make choices.
Broad, anonymous social networks breed collective stupidity.
This has enormous ramifications for the future as AI could be used to steer people away from stupid choices or to make them.
AI can outwit us on the virtual battlefield so let’s not put them in charge of the real thing.
This is already happing with drones that identify, track and kill people without any human intervention. They have no moral capability to decide who lives or who dies, no empathy no compassion.
However, if a machine can beat us at a game does it make them more intelligent than us?
Despite the many warning raised not only will we see robots fighting wars they will be planning them too.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger, “The miscalibration of the incompetent stem from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”
This goes directly into how people view themselves and their abilities. For instance, most people think they’re above average when that literally cannot be true.
In any leadership role, you’ve got to establish trust.
It’s trusting that the person is going to do things and trusting that they’re telling the truth and being upfront and honest.
But how you go about doing that virtually is a little different – it’s a different skill set.
We have seen that Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter transform Donald Trump into one of the worst presidents of the USA and a proud country England into a whaling nation of Nigel Farage has beings.
Because of our collective stupidity, social media transformed both into remote winners with lies.
Therefore it is reasonable to say that with the current Coivd-19 Pandemic that hopefully, people are now more likely to be seen based on what they actually do, not based on who they are.
Why?
Because they simply don’t translate into anointing leaders by virtual leadership.
Neither of them got better at the skills, such as reasoning from given data. Indeed smart people are more prone to silly mistakes because of blind spots in how they use logic.
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Considering the benefits accruing from AI.
Let’s start with how much data we produce globally.
It’s about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced every day in the world.
Next, if you Googled “how much energy do Google’s servers use?”
Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot. An estimate in 2017 claimed that the amount of power required to run Google’s servers is 2.26 million megawatts per year – enough to keep 200,000 homes going for the same time.
Facebook, in contrast, uses a wee bit more than Google, at about 3.43 million megawatts per year. Between them and Google they could power over 20% of the houses in Scotland.
When we come to the internet as a whole, it uses a bit more than 10% of the world’s energy consumption.
All electricity generation systems have a ‘carbon footprint’, that is, at some points during their construction and operation carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted. Then again all electricity generation technologies emit CO2 at some point during their life cycle. None of these technologies is entirely ‘carbon-free’.
While the energy involved in all bitcoin transactions in one year is 77.78 terawatt-hours – equivalent to the entire electrical consumption of Chile.
It’s no wonder that even without co2 emissions have climate change.
We are going to have to find a way to generate more electricity to power the economies and societies of the future, but in a manner that doesn’t wreck the planet.
There is a saying that “Mad dogs and English men go out in the noonday sun.”
Did you know the sun produces the equivalent of 38,460 SEPTILLION watts – that’s 3.846 x 1026 watts) PER SECOND. That’s almost enough to power a Metallica gig.
So you would think that it is a no-brainer that we have solar panels to enable everyone to use this source of energy by giving nonrepayable grants to every home to install them. To stop Co2 emissions. We have to fit our species into the energy flow of its biosphere.
That is the meaning of life in case you are so stupid still looking for a meaning.
Instead, we have Paris Climate change conferences promises and the forthcoming Glasgow Zome dribble turning CO2 into a product – for profit.
One thing is certain:
The original purpose of the internet has been lost. It set the stage for a technological revolution that could harness human intelligence and advance our shared knowledge.
Its click-baiting algorithms and lack of regulation have brought with them chaos.
As social media came to dominate the landscape, it made using the internet for the purpose of collective intelligence increasingly difficult.
The rise of social media was supposed to bring us closer together but instead, I argue, it has done the opposite.
A system based on generating clicks and interactions has created an environment for the outlandish and bizarre to flourish, with expertise falling by the wayside. With so much content being generated, how can experts possibly stand out from the crowd?
Machines and AI are great, but we have to retain some capacity to think for ourselves.
No matter how algorithms are retrained they will continue to impact the millions who use them.
The results will be that AI over time, will not categorize people into races on traits it thinks are most important – but into stupid or clever.
For obvious reasons, this year is different.
The pandemic has, of course, transformed how most workplace in-person teams are now all or partially digital operations in the wake of the pandemic, removing Joe Soap from any say about the Future.
At the moment we have a warlike philosophy – if we continue to develop AI it might not overtake our individual stupidity but our collective stupidity, putting our very existence in danger.
Tech should never be any more than a tool that helps us to bring out the best in humanity. Many of the issues we throw billions at and attempt to solve with technology could be easily achieved if we were able to better utilize our collective intelligence.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
If I was writing a post about what is right about the world it would be a few minutes read.
Of course, this is a flippant remark as there are many things right with the world.
Technology and Science has produced vaccines to fight Covid-19 and millions of us are every day doing our bit, to ensure that the most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
However, to put it mildly, we live in a topsy-turvy world and its present state is pretty grim right now.
In a world that has been governed by inequality and recently by ‘fake news’ and leaders who dismiss ‘facts,’ it no wonder that we are in such a mess.
With this continuing statistically meticulous presentation of global trends is vitally important to understand the world today, including the economic, health, and geo-political reverberations of Covid-19.
The overall state of our world makes sad reading.
ACCORDING TO WORLD REVOLUTION ORG.
THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.
Around 258 million people live outside the country of their birth.
14% of the world’s children are economically active
Nearly 2 billion people in the world are overweight or obese.
More than 800 million people are undernourished.
By 2050 almost all seabirds will have ingested plastic.
Nearly 50% of the world’s economic output is generated in places aiming to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Violence costs the world around $8.3 trillion a year – twice the amount needed to meet the UN’s development goals.
There have been over 250 major wars in the world since World War II, in which 23 million people have been killed., tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved.
Over 35 major conflicts are going on in the world today. In armed conflicts since 1945, 90 percent of casualties have been civilians. 3 out of 4 fatalities of war are women and children.
In the wars of the last decade, more children were killed than soldiers. In the last decade, child victims of war include an estimated 2 million killed, 4 to 5 million disabled, 12 million left homeless, and more than 1 million orphaned.
There are 300,000 child soldiers in the world.
Landmines maim or kill approximately 26,000 civilians every year, including 8,000 to 10,000 children. At least 75% of landmine victims are civilians. It is estimated that there are between 60 and 70 million landmines in the ground in at least 70 countries.
More than 500 million small arms and light weapons are in circulation around the world. In major conflicts since 1990, they have caused 4 million deaths – about 90 percent of them civilians, and 80 percent women and children.
There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today. Some 5,000 nuclear weapons are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched at a few minute’s notice.
Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.
Genocide and other mass murders killed more people in the 20th century than all wars combined. Between 54 and 80 million people have been killed in genocides in the last century. Between 170 and 360 million people have been killed, in total, by governments (democide) in the 20th century, apart from war.
Human rights & social justice.
33% of the world’s people live under authoritarian, non-democratic regimes. 35% of the world’s people live in countries in which basic political rights and civil liberties are denied (such as freedom of speech, religion, press, fair trials, democratic political processes, etc).
1 billion people – 1/3rd of the world’s labor force, are unemployed or underemployed. An estimated 37 million people are enslaved around the world, including an estimated 20 million people held in bonded labor (forced to work to pay off a debt, also known as ‘debt bondage’). At least 700,000 people annually, and up to 2 million, mostly women and children, are victims of human trafficking worldwide (a modern form of slavery — bought, sold, transported, and held against their will in slave-like conditions).
About 246 million, or 1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labor. Nearly three-fourths of these, about 180 million children, including 110 million under age 15, are exposed to the worst forms of, or hazardous, child labor. Some estimated 8.4 million children are trapped in the most abhorrent forms of child labor – slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, prostitution, pornography, and other such activities.
Women account for 70 percent of the world’s people who live in absolute poverty. Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food, and yet earn only 10% of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property. Worldwide, a quarter of all women are raped during their lifetime. Depending on the country, 25 to 75 percent of women are regularly beaten at home. Between 10% and 50% of women report they have been physically abused by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Over 120 million women have undergone female genital mutilation. Women hold only 12% of parliamentary seats worldwide. Women account for 2/3rd of the world’s illiterate adults, and girls account for 2/3rd of the world’s children without access to education.
In 1998, extrajudicial executions were carried out in 47 countries, ‘disappearances’ occurred in 37 countries, torture occurred in 125 countries, prisoners of conscience were held in 78 countries, unfair trials for political prisoners occurred in 35 countries, detentions without charge or trial occurred in 66 countries, executions were carried out in 36 countries, and human rights abuses were committed by armed opposition groups in 37 countries.
There are over 45 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world.
Poverty & development.
3 billion of the world’s people (one-half) live in ‘poverty’ (living on less than $2 per day). 1.3 billion people live in ‘absolute’ or ‘extreme poverty’ (living on less than $1 per day).
800 million people lack access to basic healthcare. 17 million people, including 11 million children, die every year from easily preventable diseases and malnutrition.
800 million people are hungry or malnourished. Nearly 160 million children are malnourished worldwide. 11 million people die every year from hunger and malnutrition.
2.4 billion people lack access to proper sanitation. 1.1 billion do not have safe drinking water. By 2025, at least 3.5 billion people, or nearly 2/3rd’s of the world’s population will face water scarcity. More than 2.2 million people, mostly children, die each year from water-related diseases.
275 million children never attend or complete primary school education. 870 million of the world’s adults are illiterate.
3 million people die every year from HIV/AIDS. Approximately 25 million people have died from AIDS in the last 20 years. 70 million will die from AIDS by 2020. 40 million people are currently infected with HIV/AIDS, who will die within 10 years. 13 million children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS since the epidemic began, and the number is expected to double to 26 million by 2010.
Over 100 million people live in slums. An estimated 25 to 50 percent of urban inhabitants in poor, developing countries live in impoverished slums and squatter settlements.
The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57% (2.7 billion people). The top 5% of the world’s people earn more income than the bottom 80%. The top 10% of the world’s people earn as much income as the bottom 90%. The richest 16% of the world’s population receives 84% of the world’s annual income.
The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet. The combined wealth of the world’s richest 300 individuals is equal to the total annual income of 45% of the world’s population. The world’s 3 wealthiest families have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 600 million of the world’s people. The wealthiest one-fifth of the world’s population receive an average income that is 75 times greater than the poorest one-fifth.
Poor countries (which contain 4/5th’s of the world’s people) pay the rich countries an estimated nine times more in debt repayments than they receive in aid. Africa alone spends four times more on repaying its debts than it spends on health care. In 1997 the foreign debts of poor countries were more than $2 trillion and growing. The result is a debt of $400 for every person in the developing world – where the average annual income in the very poorest countries is less than a dollar a day.
Environment & sustainability.
Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone. Only one-fifth of the Earth’s original forests remain pristine and undisturbed.
Between 10 and 20 percent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years. Based on current trends, an estimated 34,000 plant and 5,200 animal species – including one in eight of the world’s bird species – face extinction. Almost a quarter of the world’s mammal species will face extinction within 30 years. Up to 47% of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction.
60% of the world’s coral reefs, which contain up to one-fourth of all marine species, could be lost in the next 20–40 years
Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles and marine mammals are entangled and drowned by irresponsible fishing practices every year.
More than 20 percent of the world’s known 10,000 freshwater fish species have become extinct, been threatened, or endangered in recent decades. Sixty percent of the world’s important fish stocks are threatened by overfishing.
Desertification and land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe. Over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and one billion people are at risk.
Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years, resulting in multiple adverse effects on the environment and human society, including widespread species loss, ecosystem damage, flooding of populated human settlements, and increased natural disasters.
An estimated 40–80 million people have been forcibly evicted and displaced from their lands to make way for the construction of large dams, resulting in economic and social devastation for these people.
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IT APPEARS THAT THE WOLRD IS IN SUCH A STATE THAT TRUTH HAS ALREADY CEASED TO MATTER AND EVIDENCE OF THIS IS WHATEVER OF APPROVAL NARRATIVES WANT IT TO BE.
We think we understand environmental damage: pollution, water scarcity, a warming world. But these problems are just the tip of the iceberg.
Evidence is growing that the thermohaline current may be slowed or stopped by cold freshwater inputs to the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. This could occur if global warming is sufficient to cause large scale melting of arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet. Such a change in the current may be gradual (over centuries) or very rapid (over a few years).
Either would cause planet-wide changes in climate. This effect may be part of what starts and stops the ice ages.
The land in the northern hemisphere has been unfrozen for less than half of the last 400,000 years. In 2005, it was discovered that deep water formation under the Arctic “Odden ice tongue” had almost stopped.
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If perpetual economic growth on a finite planet is impossible, what are the alternatives?
Can national governments manage the transition to sustainability, to a world of sharing?
I think not.
The capitalist system and its institutions have lurched from disaster to disaster, blatantly incapable of mastering the social, economic, environmental, and now health emergencies it has created.
Industrial civilization, economic growth, and the lifestyles of the developed world are dependent on inexpensive oil and gas. The energy and products from cheap oil have made possible the major changes in globalized industrial civilization in the last 100 years, including its huge impact on indigenous cultures and planetary ecosystems.
Affordable food production by industrial agriculture needs inexpensive natural gas and oil inputs for fertilizers, pesticides, industrial machinery, planting, cultivating, harvesting, processing, packaging, transportation, and marketing.
We use six times as much water today as we did 100 years ago.
Where do we go from here?
One question is:
How did we get to this state of extreme polarization?
Who (or what) started us down this destructive path?
All hail to the machine learning profit-seeking algorithms that run Social Media.
We are only as strong as our weakest link and the weakest link is Big Tech which is completely out of control.
Suppression of information, online bullying, and intimidation— are good if they serve politically correct causes, for which the ends justify the means but do anyone with a functioning brain not now realize that is it is conceivable that well-trafficked truth-telling sites are impossible?
Does this information break your heart?
Of course not.
Because we don’t see where the locus of power is, that it lies with the interlocked networks of corporations that command advanced communications technology, not in “their” government.
So wherever we are right now is not necessarily where we’ll end up.
The coronavirus has changed everyday life for many around the world affords us the opportunity to take responsibility for each other—to leave the myth of individualism and blaming behind, but the problem: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc., are not “private companies” in any meaningful, real-world sense. These-are-private-companies like Facebook Twitter, Google, etc, simply aren’t in the real world.
These are private companies; they can do business with whoever they please and deplatform whoever they please. The myth of individualism has all but disappeared.
Social media is legitimately criticized as a destroyer of your time. ( See previous Posts)
The evidence for this is what happened in the Twitter presidency of the USA, the rejection of membership of the EU by England on lies, the Arab spring, and now the continuing coronavirus death toll.
New social media uploads last as long as those who control information want them to last.
Now, Biden says he wants “healing.” Biden-Harris “healing” will mean bowing before the cult of woke, a baffling concept because the awakened are still asleep.
Of course, slavery is an abomination. Of course, there should be free speech. Of course, there should be full emancipation of women. Of course, there should be the defense of all the Great Freedoms, even religion. That is how we progressed to this lofty condition of humanity.
Lots of ideas fail when put into practice.
It’s worth pointing out, too, that today’s striven-for norms may well confound the concepts of future generations. Although the wokes, or the wakes, hold strong opinions now who is to say what other ideas may take over and differently bias the next to awaken?
One wonders if when the pendulum swings future generations might not come to regard the woke clientele as equally misguided, just as today’s woke contingent deplores the earlier generations that thought memorial statues and patriotism well worth it.
Meanwhile, Rule Britannia and Land of Hope, and Crosby may be held to refer to slavery but are all also part of the great learning curve of human progress.
Perhaps we should all start replacing the customary ‘Good Morning’ greeting with an abject apology for consuming the commonly shared oxygen supply of the planet.
Anyway, I’ve had about enough of hearing the whining of those who stand, head bowed, around the catafalque of patriotism.
The speed at which things have been unraveling in 2020 has been jarring. From normalcy to Pandemic Panic lockdown with maximum fear in a matter of weeks; from ostensibly united against the pandemic to if we were not careful to nationwide riots and cultural revolution in a matter of days not years.
While the threat of the former will inevitably pass with time, the threat inherent in the latter is pervasive, aggressive, and emboldened.
Where do we go from here?
Even though we are living in a technological age every day we see appeals to save critically endangered animals, from Bees that are dying at an alarming rate, to Children, to Climate change.
In the next decade, we will see more than a hundredfold boom in the world’s output of human genetic data thanks to Covid-19 from the cradle to the grave which will not save the Bees that pollinate our plants. I would say that relatively few people would on reading this think that the world they are living in is getting better.
What comes next is anyone’s guess.
Giving up your freedom, trusting “your” government, wearing your face mask, and by the way, getting the jab so you can go back to consuming, while the real economy drops into the worst depression of modern times.
We might be confused by what is happing in the world but we should not be deluded.
There’s always something we can do.
At the moment with covid-19 there is a lot of millionaires Davos verbal diarrhea on social media about a Reset – without any financial commitments – it is just multimillionaires and multi-billionaires spouting their neoliberal capitalist ideology turning nature into a product.
There is huge inequality in the world and they are literally the representatives of the 1%, actually, the 0.001%.
The only thing that can be reset is Accountability and Transparency, with large financial fines for breaches of sustainability, while harnessing profit for profit’s sake to convert the world to green economies. ( See previous post: World aid commission of 0.05%
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
With technology and new technique in artificial intelligence redefining how life can be created opening a research window into the early moments of a human life perhaps the above question is not so farcical, despite some thorny ethical constraints like artificial embryos.
In a breakthrough that redefines how life can be created, embryologists working at the University of Cambridge in the UK have grown realistic-looking mouse embryos using only stem cells. No egg. No sperm. Just cells plucked from another embryo.
What if they turn out to be indistinguishable from real embryos?
Then there are advances in genomic biotechnology presenting the possibility of bringing back long-extinct species.
To get from the genome work in the lab to herds of Woolly Mammoths would definitely bring the survival of the fittest into question.
Generative adversarial network, or GAN, takes two neural networks—the simplified mathematical models of the human brain that underpin most modern machine learning—and pits them against each other in a digital cat-and-mouse game. It is endeavouring to give machines imagination.
DNA has linked 206 variants to intelligence. One day, babies will get DNA report cards at birth.
Herbert Spencer coined the term “Survival of the Fittest” in 1864.
Darwin intended “fittest” to mean the members of the species best suited for the immediate environment, the basis of the idea of natural selection.
Darwin’s distinctive idea was to emphasize natural selection as the main mechanism of evolution: if certain heritable traits increase or decrease the chances of survival and reproduction in the struggle for life, then those traits that favour survival and reproduction will increase in frequency over generations, and thus organisms will become more adapted to their environments, and over a long period of time the differences between varieties of a species can become so great that the varieties become new species.
On the one hand, he tells the reader to disregard his metaphorical personification of Nature as implying “conscious choice” or “intelligent power,” because nature should be understood as “only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws.”
On the other hand, he refuses to give up his personification of Nature, apparently because he senses that this engages the mind of the reader through the poetic imagery of Nature as a person.
The survival of the fittest that determines everything is stuck in our lexicon. With the phrase today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended.
When it comes to technology “Survival of the fittest” is inaccurate for two important reasons.
First, survival is merely a normal prerequisite to reproduction.
Second, fitness has specialized meaning in biology different from how the word is used in popular culture. In population genetics, fitness refers to differential reproduction. “Fitness” does not refer to whether an individual is “physically fit” – bigger, faster or stronger – or “better” in any subjective sense.
It refers to a difference in reproductive rate from one generation to the next.
But in evolutionary terms, survival is only half the picture; you must also reproduce to be “fit” in the Darwinian sense.
The influence of the environment on life expectancy in the future will be far greater political, not a biological issue. It will be the survival of those best able to adapt to change.
Resources, especially those necessary for survival, will become more valued.
Artificial intelligence may gain, along with a sense of imagination, a more independent ability to make sense of what it sees in the world but is the technology ready?
If the AI revolution is going to spread Darwin natural selection it will have to be updated, then the real AI revolution can begin. Darwin always brought in information and made a whole new picture out of it.
Is Darwin still relevant today? Yes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a biology class that isn’t based on evolutionary biology. Yet the explanatory power of the evolutionary theory is not bound to biology.
Why? Because the theory of evolution is still evolving.
As the late Russian Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Darwin not only made us aware of how nature works, but also of our place within nature. ( Unfortunately for him the discovery of DNA and that Quantum Mathematics governs all biology had not been discovered)
Evolution now needs to be critically evaluated in the classroom, rather than dogmatically indoctrinated.
Artificial intelligence is and will take both to a whole new level and transform them into something relevant to our time and our discoveries.
Thus, we say that all the individuals of a species comprise a gene pool from which selection (either artificial or natural) can select. The important point is that we cannot select for genes that are not in the gene pool of the species. Only clones have the same genes and are essentially identical—including the same sex.
In the future, the evolutionist must look to mutations, their most ludicrous mechanism of all.
A new DARPA research program is developing brain-computer interfaces that could control “swarms of drones, operating at the speed of thought.” What if it succeeds?
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