THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHERE ARE WE WITH GENETIC ENGINEERING?

30 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Uncategorized

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Genetic engineering, The Future of Mankind

( Seven minute read)

Genetic engineering is the act of modifying the genetic makeup of an organism, it can inevitably make us become the first species in history to direct its own evolution.

However there is always a but. Ignoring our ongoing evolution while pursuing gene editing would be incredibly reckless.

Like any evolutionary trait, this new ability may help our species to thrive—and perhaps even produce successor species. Or it may not. It could be one of those evolutionary traits that leads a species down a path that endangers its survival.

Evolution is fickle that way.

In other words, though genetic engineering is a very advanced technology for now, we are going to face a lot of questions not only just the confusion of our evolution. Such as if we tend to edit our gene over and over, the edit gene will be more and more common over generations, but at that time, are we still human beings or a new kind of species?

So where are?

After millions of centuries during which evolution happened “naturally,” humans now can hack the code of life and engineer our own genetic futures. Or, for those who decry gene editing as “playing God,” let’s put it this way:

Nature and nature’s God, in their wisdom, have evolved a species that can modify its own genome.

We will keep evolving one way or the other, but with genetic engineering of humans already under way, we must also consider our evolutionary future. Ignoring our ongoing evolution while pursuing gene editing would be incredibly reckless. On the other hand, genetic engineering can indeed help human to solve a lot of questions.

Before we embark on the most significant alteration to the natural evolution of life, let’s be sure we understand what we’re dealing with.

evolutionjpg

We still know very little about exactly how it works.

We are just starting to understand how the human microbiome — the billions of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in and on our bodies — influence our evolution.

China has already treated at least 86 patients using a new technique called CRISPR gene editing to treat human diseases like certain forms of cancer. So far, these approaches only affect the genes of the patient receiving the treatment, but the next logical step will be to edit genes in human embryos. This would be a permanent cure, since the edited genes would be passed on to subsequent generations.

If we are no longer subject to a natural lottery of endowments, will it weaken our feelings of empathy and acceptance?

If we are wise in how we use it, biotechnology can make us more able to fend off lethal viruses and overcome serious genetic defects.

Should humans actually alter their genetic code to introduce preferential attributes? Should parents be allowed to dictate what their children look like? And, perhaps most pressing of all, should we be altering our own evolutionary path in this extreme way? (Selective breeding is not considered a form of genetic engineering.)

If the marvellous enhancements offered at the genetic supermarket aren’t free (and they won’t be), will that greatly increase inequality—and even encode it permanently in the human race?

What might CRISPR do to the diversity of our species?

Cultural and evolutionary forces can act in opposition to one another. In other words, the population is evolving.

David Attenborough remarked that “we are the only species to have out a halt to our own evolution.

Modifications can be generated by methods such as gene targeting, nuclear transplantation, transfection of synthetic chromosomes or viral insertion.

Genetic modification/engineering of plants still in a test stage.

The technology is still relatively new, and it may take several years before new varieties of pest resistance plants are on sale.

Is this true? No. GM crops have been consumed by billions of consumers in North and South America and Asia for more than 25 years with no ill-effects.

Current genetically engineered crops include those that are resistant to insect attack or are herbicide resistant.

In Japan, you can already buy tomatoes rich in a chemical called GABA, which has a calming effect, and modified sea bream where more of the flesh is suitable for sushi. A US firm is developing seedless blackberries and stone less cherries, gene-edited wheat. Sheep and goats have been genetically engineered to produce chemicals in their milk that can be used to treat disease.

Scientists have recently added a gene to bananas.

We have cultured meat, produced in bioreactors without the slaughter of an animal, has been approved for sale by a regulatory authority for the first time.

What does the future of genetically modified crops hold?

There is no magic fix to climate change and no sure-fire way to make agriculture more sustainable, but climate change will and is transforming how we feed ourselves.

New legislation has also opens the door to the sale of meat, eggs and dairy from gene-edited animals. The new rules do not require GE foods to be labelled as such.

—————

Genetic engineering of stem cells.

Stem cell potential to use in cancer therapy and regenerative medicine are endowed with genetic circuits have the potential to transform basic science and medicine.

Significant efforts are currently underway to program stem cells with genetic circuits to push their differentiation into desired lineages. It is suggest that synthetic biologists can program stem cells with artificial decision-making abilities that can be used to direct stem cell fate into desired lineages. While some principles of genetic engineering remain steadfast, others change as technologies are ever-evolving and continue to revolutionize research in many fields. The next generation of innovators in the field of genomics and data sciences will be using Biobank data leading to patients.

Stem cells play an important role in the development and regeneration of human tissues.

The ultimate goal of the cell engineering strategy is to industrialize and form real cell products that can be marketed.

Transfer of the selected gene into other species. GM crops might breed with wild relatives of the crop plants.
Pollen produced by the plants could be toxic and harm insects that transfer it between plants.
GM crops could cause allergic reactions in people.
Crop growers cannot collect seed from their plants and sow them, because they are different genetically – they must buy new seeds every year – so people in developing countries may not be able to afford them.
The plants produce toxins, which would kill insects eating the crop.

Just like technology the world of GM is more or less non regulated.

In the end perhaps we will be eating ourselves and passing this data to a conscious robot.

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 bobdillon33@gmail.com 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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Algorithms., Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, Distribution of wealth, Inequility, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( 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: WE ARE STILL A LONG WAY FROM ANY WORLD UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONSQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE.

23 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2023 the year of disconnection., A Constitution for the Earth., Carbon Emissions., Climate Change.

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Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

(Twelve minute read)

Understanding the many challenges facing our world isn’t easy, but surely it should be easy to understand that we all survive only because of ecosystems that provide us with life.

The picture is bleak.

The chief reason is that the world has no history of dealing with such a difficult problem, nor the institutions to do so. The harm done by climate change is not visited on the people, or the generations, that have the best chance of acting against it. Those who suffer most harm are and will be predominantly poor and in poor countries.

The rising global temperatures are already fuelling devastating extreme weather events around the world, with escalating impacts on economies and societies and fulling future wars.

What many don’t realise about the warming of the present Earth, is that once we pass a certain threshold, physics takes over, where multiple earth systems march past the point of no return.

We don’t understand the non-linear effects.

There’s are referred to tipping points, best described as domino pieces waiting to topple in only one direction to the end.

Tipping points we thought might happen well into the future are already underway.

It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing.

Although positive things have started to happen, even if all countries commit to achieve net zero emissions by the middle of this century its too late to reverse.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed.

While natural drivers will modulate human-caused changes, especially at regional levels and in the near term, they will have little effect on long-term global warming, reversal is beyond reach.

We really are out of time,

The scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years, and will not be reverse by any technology.

We cannot wait for decades to act, we have to start acting.

————

Already in this decade.

Concentrations of the major greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2 O) continued to increase. The difference between where emissions are heading and where science indicate they should be in 2030 is as large as ever.

The lifetime of carbon dioxide is so long, one year anomaly in emissions doesn’t change the big picture.

The truth is before our very eyes, in the prism of social media videos of burning wild fires, flooding, immigration, food shortages, you name it and it is happing.

It’s hard to understand that there will be a fresh water crisis when some countries are flooding.

It’s hard to appreciate the Arctic ice is disappearing when the winter is filled with stories of extreme weather events.

We don’t know what’s going to happen to the Antarctic glacier, where we have the biggest mass of ice worldwide and in the worst case, we could see up to two meters of sea level rise by the end of this century if the melting of the Antarctic glacier happens in a speedier manner.

Tree planting isn’t enough.

Its hard to believe that 80% of all insect have died – no bees no pollination – no food.

Its hard to believe that our oceans alone are absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.

Is hard to believe that we are in the process of unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet.

Its hard to believe that there will be ( Severe heatwave historically expected once a decade) heatwaves will happening every other year at 2C.

There is no huge chasm after a 2c rise, we are tumbling down a painful, worsening rocky slope rather than about to suddenly hit a sheer cliff edge – nearly one in 10 vertebrate animals and almost one in five plants will lose half of their habitat.

Its beyond belief that by most standards the world’s governments are currently failing to avert a grim fate with the fingerprint of climate change on recent extreme weather is quite clear to one and all.

The evidence is irrefutable.

We do know that the global average sea level will likely rise, putting the homes of 200 million below sea level in 70 years.

Around 216 million people, mostly from developing countries, will be forced to flee these impacts by 2050 unless radical action is taken. The frequency of heavy precipitation events, will start to climb, nearly doubling the historical norm once it heats up by 2C. Globally, extreme crop drought events that previously occurred once a decade on average will more than double in their frequency at 2C of temperature rise.

A 16-year-old child swims in the flooded area of Aberao village in Kiribati. The Pacific island is one of the countries worst affected by sea-level rise.

Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.

Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels, affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of this century.

It won’t be just about temperature.

The consequences will devastate economies, infrastructure and political stability. A fire rages in Brazil's rainforest, near Maranhao at night.

For example, climate change is intensifying the natural production of water – the water cycle. This brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.

The alarm bells are deafening.

The past 20 years there has been a 53·7% increase in heat-related mortality in people older than 65 years.

A chilling number of Earth’s other denizens, including 40 percent of all amphibians known to science (about 3,200 species) is under threat. Climate change, pollution, deforestation, overfishing, development, and invasive species are putting biodiversity in peril.

At least 155 million people, 2.3 times as many as live in the UK, were pushed into acute food insecurity in 2020 due to extreme weather,

In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at any time in at least 2 million years, and concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide were higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

The loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Amazon rainforest, or extensive thawing of permafrost, as well as other key components of the climate system, are considered “tipping points” because they can cross critical thresholds, and then abruptly and irreversibly change.

Every fractional rise in temperature increases the risk of triggering one of 30 major tipping points. With just 1 degree C of current warming, nine of these are now thought to be beginning to tip. The Earth’s climate and ecological systems are deeply intertwined. A substantial change in one will affect others. Different tipping points are beginning to slowly crash into each other.

Arctic warming, along with melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, is driving fresh water into the North Atlantic, which could have contributed to a recent 15 percent slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in the Atlantic Ocean. Those ocean currents drive heat from the tropics and are responsible for the relative warmth of the Northern Hemisphere.

We shouldn’t be discounting the legacy we’re leaving to future generations, no matter how far they are in the future.”

It is unclear when most of the tipping points will kick in, and the risk of those cascading into an irreversible global tipping point with tremendous impacts on human civilisation warrants a declaration of a planetary climate emergency.

No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us now that we face an existential threat to civilization.

The risks posed by climate tipping points are not part of any economic analysis of climate policies, there there’s also a social tipping points, a broad societal awareness tipping point that will cause a stampede of migration.

Its hard to believe that we are just going to sit back and just watch.

It can be hard not to be despondent, so blinkered.

No wonder public opinion is not sending stronger signals to politicians that more urgent action is required.

How is it that we can have such strong emotional attachments when looking at nature, claim to love and appreciate it, yet be so indifferent to the destructive impact our way of living has on it?

We tend to be motivated by relatively short-term concerns. This may partly explain why we are so slow to accept what is happening. However if scientific knowledge about nature (which is what the natural sciences seek to produce) relies so heavily on producing facts which have been purified of their social, political, cultural and historical baggage, then when this baggage suddenly becomes visible, it causes anxiety and disbelief.

What if permafrost melting or flooding cuts off critical roads used by supply chains? What if storms knock out the world’s leading computer chip factory? What happens once half of the world is exposed to disease-carrying mosquitos?

The changes required are now so vast that many countries, companies, governments struggle to even articulate them.

Reaching a net-zero world will entail “wholesale transformation” in both infrastructure and how things are done. If business leaders truly grasped the seriousness of this crisis, they would immediately pivot their entire business models and resources toward scaling climate solutions full stop.

No matter what we do now, it’s too late to avoid climate change.

Perhaps most concerning of all is the fact that even if emissions of all greenhouse gases ceased entirely tomorrow, any warming would still persist for many centuries.

Countries will still remain umbilically connected to fossil fuels, subsidizing oil, coal and gas to the tune of around $11m every single minute. By the end of this year the world will have burned through 86% of the carbon “budget” that would allow us just a coin flip’s chance of staying below 1.5C.

Realistically what can be done ?

We know that every decision – every oil drilling lease, every acre of the Amazon rainforest torched for livestock pasture, every new gas or electrical -guzzling SUV that rolls onto the road – will decide how far we tumble down the hill.

To achieve anything requires a massive change in the Capitalist systems, away from GDP to Sustainability and Greed energy, benefiting not just the earth but all that live on it surface.

This will require the creation of a perpetual fund of trillions ( see previous posts) allowing every person to invest in a green future, closing the gap in inequality.

Such a fund could be distributed by non-repayable grants by the United nations under new UN blockchain plate form, with all country governments setting their own blockchain plate forms.

Each block is connected to the ones before and after it. Each additional block strengthens the verification of the previous block and hence the entire blockchain. This renders the blockchain tamper-evident, delivering the key strength of immutability. The result is newfound trust and transparency, because members share a single view of the truth, you can see all details of a transaction end to end.

Place a ban on all advertising that does not prompt sustainability.

Close all stock exchanges trading in Co2 as a product.

Cutting emissions tomorrow is better than the day after.

In the end the truth is that we live in a world of I am all right jack.

Not until our hair is burning and our tongues are hanging out, with our smartphone melted to our ears will we eventfully blame ourselves.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT SORT OF LIFE DO YOU WANT AND WHERE ARE WE GOING WITH AI?

19 Saturday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Uncategorized

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Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism and Greed, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Ten minute read)

No matter what sort of life you might wish for it will be governed by technology, that you have little or no control over or of.

Is this true?

I want my life back. I want my soul back.

I don’t want my life to be fodder for Data harvesting.

I want digital blockchain ownership rights, so I can trade my investment into technology against profit seeking algorithms.

I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we need to stop abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad.

I don’t think any technology has some deterministic endpoint.

But there’s a catch.

Data is only as valuable as the insight you derive from it now or in the future. If we’re to avoid technological extremism we’re going to have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

We know that, at the very least, some technologies are harming our natural world, our societies and, ultimately, ourselves, turning everything into Data.

According to a prediction from Gartner, “By 2024, 30% of digital businesses will mandate DNA storage trials. This is a future that can only arrive when we learn to unlock the storage and computing capabilities of nature that have allowed life to thrive for billions of years.

Throughout human history, it has always taken significant resources to store data. Therefore, data has been stored only to the extent that it makes economic sense, if data cannot yield value, it is no longer an asset but rather a liability.

If all is turned it data stored in the cloud, the exponential growth of data will overwhelm existing storage technology. The average person makes 35,000 decisions per day.

————

So where are we?

By way of this vicious technological cycle, we are consciously causing the sixth mass extinction of species.

Technology destroys places.

Aside from the oceans, rivers, topsoil, forests, mountains and meadows, it helps us massacre and pollute with ever-improving precision and speed, its complex set of cogs quickly spreads us out all over the world, safe in the knowledge that we can stay in touch with loved ones via technologies that offer what is really only a toxic substitute for real connection and time together.

It is badly injuring, perhaps fatally, rural communities, luring their youth into industrial and financial centres – cities – whose existence is premised, as the American writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry said, on the devastation of some other far-flung place, which consumers don’t have to look at thanks to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind distance afforded by technology.

And now look at the state of us.

Capitalism’s survival now depends not just on recapturing all of this data but the CO2 it is a releasing.

Workers must work and produce value. Capital must exploit them, connected, by a peculiar sort of invisible cable, to the global network of quarries, factories, courtrooms, mines, financial institutions, bureaucracies, armies, transport networks and workers needed to produce such things. Reflective of a generic, transient and whimsical culture, spending more time watching porn than we do making love. Because we stare into screens instead of eyes, while social media are making us antisocial.

Technology destroys people.

We’re already cyborgs (pacemakers, hearing aids) of a sort, and are well on our way to the type of Big Brother dystopia of the techno-utopians. Our toxic, sedentary lifestyles are causing industrial-scale afflictions of cancer, mental illness, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune disorders and food intolerances, along with those slow killers, loneliness, clock-watching and meaninglessness.

If one rejects technology that means no laptop, no internet, no phone, no washing machine, no tapped water, no gas, no fridge, no television or electronic music; no anything requiring the copper-mining, oil-rigging, plastics-manufacturing essential to the production of a single toaster or solar photovoltaic system.

It destroys our relationship with the natural world. It first separates us from nature, while simultaneously converting life into the cash that oils consumerist society.

Without biodiversity, life on earth as we know it would cease to exist.

And it’s not just about rare or endangered species, it’s everything from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, not technology. So think about it this way. Biodiversity is us — it’s like a big, interconnected web where each species has a role to play, and the only way to achieve this is that we all invest and benefits from investing in world of green energy.

Awareness of the importance of biodiversity remains low, inclusion of biodiversity in development projects is rare. Time is running out for our planet, for its people, and the delicate ecosystems that hang in the balance. This is not the life that anyone would chose.

——————–

Rejecting technologies that my generation considers to be the basic necessities of life, one might instead of making a living to pay bills, make a living of ones life, denouncing complex technology simply by renouncing it.

Our cultures need to make a Faustian pact, (a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, or data for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches ), on my behalf, with Speed, Numbers, Homogeneity, Efficiency and Schedules, are not listing when I say I want my soul back. person on a smartphone

Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency. “

When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.

About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

Social media has become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

What can we do about it?

We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.

People obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

Researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

Social media is an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favours] anger and salacious content.

Simply counting clicks is not enough.

To understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.

We need to.

Interduces automated and user-generated labelling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. However tagging some stories as false makes readers more willing to believe other stories and share them with friends, even if those additional, untagged stories also turn out to be false.

To allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them for data portability and interoperability, so consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another. We need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.

This can be achieved with Blockchain plate forms.

Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network, reducing risk and cutting costs for all involved.

A blockchain network can track orders, payments, accounts, production and much more. And because members share a single view of the truth, you can see all details of a transaction end to end, giving you greater confidence, as well as new efficiencies and opportunities

Each block is connected to the ones before and after it.

These blocks form a chain of data as an asset moves from place to place or ownership changes hands.

The blocks confirm the exact time and sequence of transactions, and the blocks link securely together to

prevent any block from being altered or a block being inserted between two existing blocks.

Each additional block strengthens the verification of the previous block and hence the entire blockchain.

This renders the blockchain tamper-evident, delivering the key strength of immutability. This removes the

possibility of tampering by a malicious actor — and builds a ledger of transactions you and other network

members can trust.

With blockchain, as a member of a members-only network, you can rest assured that you are receiving

accurate and timely data, and that your confidential blockchain records will be shared only with network

members to whom you have specifically granted access.

If things continue without change, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic

backlash and user burnout. Ask me to stay on social media to speak out about the technology issue,

make a comment. All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin. Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: FROM HERE INTO THE FUTURE WILL TECHNOLOGY’S BE THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GENERATIONS?

17 Thursday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GENERATIONS, Uncategorized

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Artificial Intelligence., The Future of Mankind

( Fifteen minute read)

We could be the first in human history to leave our children nothing.

No greenhouse-gas emissions, no poverty, and no biodiversity loss but they say that the attention spam of the generation of social media is only eighth minute.

So here are a few facts.

We have 8 billon of us on the earth, with around 35 mega cities, built on the back of fossil fuels, feed by monocultural farming. 4% of all animals are wild, all the rest are domestic. There is no technology that will save humanity against Climate change.

Only if we put the Earth first will there be a future generation.

There will be no encore.

————

When we talk about generational differences, we no longer can just identify differences between generations, but we can identify differences within generations as well.

Technology is the catalyst for the rapidity with which generations now evolve. Change, hitherto that was a gradual process, has become, for us, cataclysmic.

It has become a tidal wave that threatens to overwhelm us.

A decade to-day is the equivalent of a generation, and standards and values topple over like ninepins.

Take smartphones for example. They have only been in widespread use for a decade, but they’re now so fundamental to our daily lives that it’s hard to remember life without them.

How could we possibly see those who can remember life before the smartphone as part of the same generation as those who’ve known nothing else?

If we name each generation based on the technological conditions it experienced, generations may soon encompass only a few years apiece. Slicing the population into ever-narrower generations, each defined by its very specific relationship to technology, is fundamental to how we think about the relationship between age, culture, and technology.

They include the digital natives, the net generation, the Google generation or the millennials.

But generation gaps did not begin with the invention of the microchip. What’s new is the fine-slicing of generational divides, the centrality of technology to defining each successive generation.

It’s not politics or sociology, because they don’t move fast enough, it has to be video based.

We’ve moved from a view of generations as biological “in the sense of the generation of a butterfly from a caterpillar,” as Hentea puts it, to a view of generations as sociological. By no longer limiting political power to a defined group but rather encouraging political participation across social strata.

At the same time, democratization paradoxically created generational categories.

With aristocratic privileges abolished and duties diminished, the Internet generation provided a fall-back for social belonging:

Not everyone can belong to my generation, so the vestigial desire for distinction is satisfied, but at the same time, no one remains without a generation, so the democratic impulse toward equality is met.

Since the dotcom bubble burst back in 2000, technology has radically transformed our societies and our daily lives. Today over half the global population has access to the internet. At the same time, technology was also becoming more personal and portable greatly shaped how and where we consume media.

While these new online communities and communication channels have offered great spaces for alternative voices, their increased use has also brought issues of increased disinformation and polarization.

It is indisputable that thanks to technology, we are getting a chance to live a life our predecessors could not even dream about.

The next generation is not going to sit and read policy and procedure manuals. Nor are they going to spend their time dealing with complex reports.

If the role of technology in shaping an emergent generational consciousness seems obvious, but no one attributes the evils of the age to its machines. By growing up with mobile devices and social networks, the skills they bring into the workplace for collaborative capabilities is profound compared to what we saw with Millennials just 10 years prior.

————-

However as we know each generations live in the shadow of the generation before it.

The technology there are using are filtrated with all the positives and negative of the generation before them.

But do all tech advancements bring sole good to our lives?

Or, maybe, the impact of tech innovations is quite ambiguous.

It’s easy to become desensitized to the importance of innovations and advancements for the overall progress of society.

All countries share responsibility for the long-term stability of Earth’s natural cycles, on which the planet’s ability to support us depends. We are the first generation that can make an informed choice about the direction our planet will take. Either we leave our descendants an endowment of zero poverty, zero fossil-fuel use, and zero biodiversity loss, or we leave them facing a tax bill from Earth that could wipe them out.

There’s no sugar-coating the truth that different generations interact with technology differently.

Advancements in technology have already tapped into every area of life. There is a dedicated mobile app for everything.

Every living person today can be considered part of a digital generation, because — no matter how much we engage with technology — we are living in a digital-first world. Of course, the degree to which each person is comfortable and willing to embrace technology is also dependent on when and where they entered the world.

To some degree, it’s actually something we’re born into, depending on how tech-forward the world was when we entered it.

Technology is ever-evolving and each digital generation adapts to these advancements at their own pace.

However the digital generation can be considered as encompassing only people who were born into or raised in the digital era, meaning with wide-spread access to modern-age technology such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and digital information like the internet.

There are differences in the motivations underlying technology behaviour in each generational group, and there may be variances in the way each generational group uses and gets engaged with technology.

Research findings indicate that millennials mostly use and get engaged with technologies for entertainment and hedonic purposes. They use technology as a means to go after their aspirations and dreams, looking to gather and share information that quickly moves them and their ideas forward.

They are prone to act faster once they make a decision and technology has made a true quantum leap, with augmented reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing being just a few examples of the most recent inventions.

The days of simple demographic segmentation are gone.

With every new generation, the access to limitless amounts of data has created a much more complex level of fragmentation and micro-segmentation.

To day the average person has an attention span of just 8 seconds.

Digital citizenship now applies to everyone but not everyone is the same in any generation, and everyone is subject to different economic circumstances regardless of their generation.

Though it may be tough to predict which advancements technology would bring next, some innovations are already changing our beliefs about the world around us.

Clearly, technology by itself is neither good nor bad.

It is only the way and extent to which we use it that matters.

While some people want just, to sit back and watch the world burn.

We are now the generation under constant surveillance, sharing our data with companies all the time online. Tracing our shadows that allows them to get a glimpse into the digital traces you’re leaving – how many, what kinds, and from what devices.

The use of surveillance cameras in modern society has always been divisive, requiring governing bodies to perform a fine balancing act between respecting the nation’s civil liberties and keeping its citizens safe and secure. It’s a multi-layered issue incorporating many dimensions, including technology, legislation, code of ethics and conduct, and one that triggers conversation year-round.

When the Covid pandemic hit, a number of governments rolled out or extended surveillance programs of unprecedented scale and intrusiveness, in the belief, however misguided, that perpetual monitoring would help restrict people’s movements and therefore the spread of the virus.

It’s important to ask when technology adds value, and for whom.

If technology can indeed aid in pandemic response and recovery, it is essential to have open, inclusive, transparent, and honest public discussions on the appropriate type of public digital infrastructure people need to thrive.

The rush to embrace digital contact tracing has opened a Pandora’s box of privacy.

As the technology develops, we are seeing more sophisticated AI being integrated into surveillance systems and facial recognition technology, in particular, is creating a stir in terms of practice and legislation. Surveillance is a vast and varied topic and one that can present some very emotive and social issues, as well as legislative and technological ones. Without real reflection on the rights implications, there’s a real risk of deepening inequality and vesting considerable power to coerce and control people in governments and the private sector.

Any deployment of technology should be rooted in human rights standards, centred on enabling people to live a dignified life.

It’s up to every digital citizen — whether they’re a digital native or digital immigrant — to practice cyber safety and, in turn, instil it in digital generations to come.

New technologies such as virtual visits, chatbots are being used to delivery healthcare to individuals, especially during Covid-19.

The ability to understand and respect someone else’s feelings is always important but even more so online. That’s because written communications and online interactions, such as text messages and social media comments, are often missing the nonverbal cues we have in the physical world that give us a well-rounded understanding of someone else’s stance.

Every user of the internet has a right to privacy. Still, we share The law still applies when we’re online

On the downside, some technological developments prove to be a curse rather than a blessing. Overindulgence in the use of digital apps and smart devices, overreliance on online tools may sometimes lead to tragic effects.

If you believe that technological conditions profoundly shape the life experience and perspectives of each successive generation, then those generations will only get narrower.

Doesn’t the leap from Facebook to Snap Chat constitute its own profound generational divide?

If we name each generation based on the specific technological conditions it experienced during childhood or adolescence, we may soon be dealing with generations that encompass only a few years apiece. At that point, the very idea of “generations” will cease to have much utility for social scientists, since it will be very hard to analyse attitudinal or behavioural differences between generations that are just a few years part.

I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so. Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge. Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard. And how to pay for it all? If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it. But at the end of the decade, humans will still be humans, and both greed and generosity, love and hate, truth and lies, will likely still exist in the same proportions as they do today.

We are looking to technology to lead us towards a carbon-neutral world but there are other factors at work, [to] the growth of authoritarian governments and social inequalities.

Climate change will change the temperatures up or down till a tipping point plunges us into a non reversible disaster, with consequence of unimaginable survival.

We are headed toward an increasingly panoptic society, as represented by the Chinese government’s emerging social credit scale. In other words, just as digital world is shaping the physical world, physical world shapes our digital world as well.

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

Contact : bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. THE FIRST OF OUR CURRENT CHALLENGES WITH CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO ADMIT THAT WE WILL NOT STOP IT.

10 Thursday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change.

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Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Fourteen minute read)

Why is this so ?

We lack the collective will to address climate change because of the way our brains have evolved over the last two million years..

As individuals, we know what we can do about climate change. But addressing the issue also requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities. The larger the group, the more challenging it gets.

We know that climate change is happening, but cognitive biases that ensure our initial survival make it difficult to address, complex, long-term challenges that now threaten our existence, like climate change.

They impede our ability to take action, now hamstringing our ability to respond to what could be the largest crisis humanity has ever created or had to face. An older lady clasps her chest and shouts while fires rage in the background behind a large house in Greece

Prevention is no longer an option.

The natural systems that regulate climate on the planet are already changing, and ecosystems that support us are shifting under our feet, undermining many of the ecological foundations of our ability to provide for basic needs.

Clearly, one of the key challenges is going to be how the burden is distributed, and how we respond to the vulnerability of people to climatic shifts and adjustments – from drought and floods, to health issues ranging from disease to heatstroke, to food security, to environmental migrations.

And, of course, our actions now – given the delay between emissions and impact – will harm people in the future. So our responsibilities of justice now extend over vast stretches of geography and time.

We will be a climate-challenged society for the foreseeable future, immersed in a long age of adaptation.

But that information hasn’t been enough to change our behaviours on a scale great enough to stop climate change. And a big part of the reason is our own evolution.

The same behaviours that once helped us survive are, today, working against us. We imagine we live in a rational, enlightened society. In such a place, experts would identify issues to be addressed, and goals to be reached, in response to our creation of climate change. Scientific knowledge would be respected and accepted (after peer review, of course), and policy would be fashioned in response.

Ignoring climate change in the short term has benefits both to individuals and to organizations.

Climate change is a nonlinear problem.

When a function increases slowly at first and then accelerates, though, that causes problems, because people extrapolate that function linearly, without obvious consequences until suddenly there is a significant problem.

Many effects of climate change are distant from most people.

People conceptualize things that are psychologically distant from them (in time, space, or social distance) more abstractly than things that are psychologically close. When there are weather disasters that are probably a reflection of climate change (like wildfires or extreme storms), they tend to happen far away from where most people live.

As a result, most people are not forced to grapple with the specifics of climate change, but rather can treat it as an abstract concept.

Abstract concepts simply don’t motivate people to act as forcefully as specific ones do.

Only when you and me and others experience this future threat in the present (rather than something that is still a generation away) will it have enough motivational force to get us to engage in actions that take more effort today.

Consider what you’d be willing to forgo today knowing that in one generation there will be serious, catastrophic consequences because of inaction.

Ultimately, we have to be willing to be explicit about the values we are acting on.

If we choose to enrich our lives in the present at the cost of the quality of life of future generations, that is a choice of values that we rarely like to make explicitly. We have to be willing to look in the mirror and say that we are willing to live our lives selfishly, without regard to the lives of our children and grandchildren.

And if we are not willing to own that selfish value, then we have to make a change in our behaviour today.

WHEN THE LAST INSECT DISSAPEARS SO DOES OUR FOOD CHAIN.

Why People Aren’t Motivated to Address Climate Change.

Even more challenging, however, is the reality that our emissions undermine the environments of vulnerable people elsewhere:

Unfortunately, climate change involves a combination of factors that make it hard for people to get motivated.

In the case of climate change, there are sceptics who argue that it is not certain that the influence of human activity on climate will have the dire consequences that some experts have projected.

People are much better with obvious threats like that nasty dog at the door than they are with threats that escalate quickly and nonlinearly.

Now we have entered a new era in the human relationship with climate change, with a variety of broad and different challenges.

So how might we begin to address the challenges of climate justice?

We may be dealing with an issue with a level of complexity that human beings are simply not capable of addressing. Climate change will certainly challenge our adaptive abilities more than anything else the species has faced.

It will demand multi-scale, widely-distributed, networked, flexible, anticipatory, and adaptive responses on the part of governments from the global down to the local.

Climate change will require a radical re-thinking of the very nature of governance, and the adoption of new forms

We are capable of changing our currently destructive relationship with the rest of nature.

Key here is the reality that, in bringing climate change upon ourselves, we have demonstrated that the very construction of how we immerse ourselves in the natural world, and how we provide for our basic needs, is simply not working.

In fact, our relationship with nature is undermining the lives we’ve constructed.

Our continued refusal to recognise ourselves as animals embedded in ecosystems has resulted in the undermining of those systems that sustain us.

That’s our key problem, our central challenge.

Many groups and movements are rethinking and restructuring the ways we interact with the natural world as we provide for our basic needs – around sustainable energy, local food security, and even crafting and making. These new materialist movements offer alternative ways of relating to the nonhuman systems that sustain us, and illustrate the possibility of redesigning and restructuring our everyday lives based in our immersion in natural systems. After 30 years of failing in our response to climate change, we may yet demonstrate that human beings still have the capacity to adapt.

The good news is that our biological evolution hasn’t just hindered us from addressing the challenge of climate change. It’s also equipped us with capacities to overcome them. How we communicate about climate change influences how we respond.

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

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THE BEADY ASK’S. BACTERIA IS NECESSARY FOR LIFE BUT COULD NEW ANCIENT MICROBES RELEASED BY CLIMATE CHANGE END IT.

09 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Uncategorized

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The Future of Mankind

( Four minute read)

Humans coevolved with their microbial partners and parasites for hundreds of thousands of years.

No matter how hard you try getting rid of bacteria is a futile task. Bacteria is in the air we breath.

Here are few that live in you, on you, with exotic names, to terrify you.

Salmonella is a very common bacteria so common that you may not realize that it actually lives in your intestines.

E.coli like Salmonella, that is perfectly healthy and safe when it lives in your intestines, but can be harmful.

Campylobacter bacteria, are very common and are found in the organs and muscles of many livestock animals, birds and are also present in soils.

Pseudomonas is a very common family of bacteria and is found all over the world. Found in soil, water, on plants and healthy people often have Pseudomonas bacteria living on their skin, in their hair and in places like their armpits.

Micrococcus is a very common genus of bacteria that has many different species. These bacteria are found all around us, including in the dust we find in our carpets and on our furniture in our homes.

Staphylococcus aureus or S.aureus an opportunistic bacteria, is found on our skin, in our nose, armpit, groin and other warm parts of your body is a bacteria that lives, with little to no impact on our health, in our noses and throats. It lives within our lungs and on our mucous membranes.

Bacillus bacteria are a group of bacteria that are found commonly in the environment but can cause illness in humans.

Clostridium perfringens another common bacteria that is found in the environment and in the intestines of many animals is This bacteria is found all around us and in most cases is harmless.

There you have it, a few bacteria’s that usually live peacefully with us, day today. However, when the conditions are right, they can make our lives miserable and uncomfortable.

If we ignore them, we are looking at our lives through a keyhole.

They guide the construction of our bodies, releasing molecules and signals that steer the growth of our organs. They educate our immune system, teaching it to tell friend from foe. They affect the development of the nervous system, and perhaps even inﬂuence our behaviour. They contribute to our lives in profound and wide-ranging ways; no corner of our biology is untouched.

In 2019, 7.7 million deaths around the world were found to be linked to bacterial infections. That equals 1 in 8 of all global deaths. It makes bacterial infections the second largest cause of death globally.

Three unknown species have been discovered growing on the ISS, but don’t break out the anti-bac wipes just yet, because there are bacteria that live in solid rock, metabolising radioactive waste, and even some that survive in boiling water.

Imagine if all microbes on the planet suddenly disappeared.

On the upside, infectious diseases would be a thing of the past, and many pest insects would be unable to eke out a living. But that’s where the good news ends because there would be complete societal collapse only within a year or so, linked to catastrophic failure of the food supply chain.

Over the past decade or so, the list of medicines we can use against harmful bacteria has been dwindling. At the same time, other disease-causing organisms – fungi, viruses and parasites – are also developing resistance to the drugs.

Bacteria are when it comes to straight numbers, the biggest population of organisms that exist on Earth. Bacteria can be found almost anywhere on the planet. The total estimate of bacteria that live around us is five million trillion trillion.

Sounds like a bunch of trillions, but the number would look like this: 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. An easier way of putting this would be ‘’five with 30 zeros after it’’ or, if you are a strict mathematician: 5 x 10 to the 30th power.

Somebody calculated, taking the average size of bacteria into account how much distance would all the bacteria stacked on top of each other. As it turns out, that long chain of bacteria would extend for a trillion light-years.

Out of all the bacteria that exist around us, less than one percent would, technically speaking, be considered dangerous.

Without a doubt, the stability of the Earth’s system largely depends on the world of bacteria.

There are more than 400 species of bacteria that make up the gut microbiome, helping digest food, ward off harmful pathogens, and synthesize vitamins.

The global antibacterial products market size was valued at USD 27.04 billion in 2020 and is expected to pass 30 billion this year.

We are surrounded by infections.

The release of just 1 per cent of pathogens trapped in the planet’s melting ice could pose a real risk of damage to the Earth’s ecosystems and potentially threaten human health, according to a new study.

As a society, we need to understand the potential risk posed by these ancient microbes so we can prepare for any unintended consequences of their release into the modern world.

COVID-19 is or was a virus not a bacteria.

Extreme weather events have come to dominate the disaster landscape in the 21st century.

To give some context, 689 million people – more than 9% of the world’s population – live on less than $1.90 a day.

The world’s 10 most affected countries are spending up to 59% of their GDP on the effects of violence. 2% reduction in the global impact of violence is roughly equivalent to all overseas development aid in 2019.”

With climate change releasing new ancient microbes the risk is no longer simply a fantasy.

With the state of the planet deteriorating, instead of working together to solve our problems, we spend time blaming, shaming, and attacking others—and the problems only escalate.

The question is how far do we have to go before we ask people in conflict to look beneath their differences to discover their shared needs.

Ajax kill all known clingon’s but remember we are tethered to the Earth.

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WILL CLIMATE CHANGE LEAD TO MORE WARS?

08 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2023 the year of disconnection., Arms Trade., Carbon Emissions., Climate Change., Climate refugees., CO2 emissions, Collective stupidity., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Life., Migrants/Refugees., Militarism., MISINFORMATION., Mr Putin., Natural World Disasters, Northern Ireland., PAIN AND SUFFERING IN LIFE, Palestinian- Israel., Reality., RUSSIA/ UKRAINE/ US/ NATO/ EU, State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The cost of war., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD. , Ukraine/ Russia., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, War., Wars, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations.

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Capitalism vs. the Climate., The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Six minute read)

It’s one of the most important questions of the 21st century:

You always have a higher potential for violent conflict when the survival conditions of groups of people are threatened. This is a very basic principle.

Will climate change provide the extra spark that pushes two otherwise peaceful nations into war?

The obvious answer is yes.

You can see this when you look at events that are already happening, like land conflicts due to desertification, or various resource conflicts around the world.

There are currently 27 ongoing conflicts worldwide. A quarter of the entire global population lives in conflict-affected areas. This year, it is estimated that at least 274 million people will need humanitarian assistance. But it’s important to remember that the causal links between climate and conflict are rarely direct.

However there has always been an empirical connection between violence and climate change which has persists across 12,000 years of human history.

We now live on a planet expecting changes to temperature or rainfall in the coming decades—which will come faster and stronger than the many natural climate changes of the past.

This is the situation the world finds itself in today.

Conflict is on the rise. Millions are displaced. International law is disregarded with impunity, as criminal and terrorist networks profit from the division and violence.

The reasons for the outbreak of conflict range from territorial disputes and regional tensions, to corruption and dwindling resources due to climate change.

Take the Syrian war for example.

Nearly 11 years after it started, the Syrian refugee crisis remains the largest displacement crisis worldwide (13.2 million, including 6.6 million refugees and more than 6 million internally displaced people). At least 2 million people are living in tented camps with limited access to basic services.

Lasting more than 60 years, the conflict in Myanmar (previously called Burma) remains the longest ongoing civil war in the world.

The cost of war is almost unfathomable with conflicts driving 80% of humanitarian needs.

In 2016, the cost of conflict globally stood at an astonishing $14 trillion. That’s enough to end world hunger 42 times over.

For the seventh year in a row, global military spending is increasing, exceeding trillions’ for the first time.

Just imagine what the world could do with that money if conflicts were to end worldwide.

——-

If you’re looking for the causes of climate change, it’s us—the overconsuming, fossil-fuel-burning North and West.

If you want to get serious about climate change, worrying about the small-scale details of conflicts in Africa is missing the point. It’s us.

Twentieth-century wars were fought over land, religion, and economics. But the wars of the 21st century will be fought over something quite different: climate change, and the shortages of water and food that will come from it with mass migration leading to social disruption and potentially violent conflict.

I think this will become more apparent over the next decade or so. You can see it already in Europe.

I suspect we’re going to see more nativism, more xenophobia, and more talk of building walls on our borders.

If you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

The thin veneer of civilization.

‘ Overwhelmed by the disaster, people could not see what was to become of them and started losing respect for laws of god and man alike,” Thucydides wrote.

Do we have the institutions, the structures, the systems of cooperation we need to deal with this problem?

I don’t think we have an existing structure of peacekeeping that can hold up under these conditions — or at least I’m not encouraged by what we’ve seen so far.

Can Western democratic society, which is built on a system of limitless growth and productivity, change its destructive relationship with nature?

No, modern liberal democratic societies are successful at improving the lives and freedoms of people who live in them but the problem is that their systems are based on the exploitation of nature and our environment, and we’re sort of trapped in this paradigm.

Climate change is a threat multiplier, which means it amplifies problems already facing the world.

Stressors such as poverty, political instability, and crime are magnified by increased droughts, floods, or heat waves. Of the 25 countries deemed most vulnerable to climate change, 14 are mired in conflict.

The climate crisis is altering the nature and severity of humanitarian crises.

As the world gets hotter, mayhem could spread.

Humanitarian organizations are already struggling to respond and will not be able to meet exponentially growing needs resulting from unmitigated climate change.

I think one of the things that clearly exacerbates matters is when the issues become politicized.

It’s going to take a combination of both personal action and systemic change to combat climate change. One is not a substitute for the other, and doing one without the other won’t solve the issues we face.

How civilized will we remain?

Climate change will be a small hole through which we glimpsed what always lies below the thin crust we lay across the seething magma of nature, including human nature.

Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat.

These are some of the ways that we’ve been told can slow climate change.

But the inordinate emphasis on individual behaviour is the result of a marketing campaign that has succeeded in placing the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.

With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defence of the fossil fuel status quo, the societal tipping point won’t happen without the active participation of citizens everywhere aiding in the collective push forward.

While humongous industries continue to shirk responsibility, lobbying against change and top-down regulation. Nothing decivilizes more quickly and surely than war.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

So watch the video, learn the facts, and form your own conclusions.

. https://youtu.be/RnWoFJmqCF8

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL A QUANTUM COMPUTER SOLVE THE WORLD PROBLEMS?

31 Monday Jul 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, Quantum computers., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The Future, THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD. , WHAT IS TRUTH

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL A QUANTUM COMPUTER SOLVE THE WORLD PROBLEMS?

Tags

Artificial Intelligence., Quantum computers., The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Five minute read)

We have very limited ability at this stage to imagine the applications of quantum computing, but down the road in the near term they could solve countless problems – and create a lot of new ones.

In order to prepare for what is coming.

Educate ourselves on the reality of Quantum Computers, and the impacts they could have around the world is now paramount if we wish to keep the values we place on life.

Soon will come a time when trusting a quantum computer will require a leap of faith.

Every year, new computers are being developed that are faster and smarter than ever before. But if you really want to take things to the next level, you’ve got to go quantum.

This new frontier of humanity could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science.

Quantum’s industrial uses are boundless.

In the future, we will rely on everywhere in the world having access to quantum technology, but with risks, to national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defences.

Modern warfare and national–security mechanisms are grounded in the speed and precision of decision making. If your computer is faster than theirs, you win.

The digital devices in our everyday lives – from laptop computers to smartphones – are all based on 0s and 1s: so-called ‘bits’. But quantum computers are based on ‘qubits’ – the quantum 0s and 1s that are altogether stranger, but also more powerful. (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.)

They will pave the way for systems that can solve complex real world problems that the best computers we have today are incapable of. Entanglement

Currently, computers solve problems in a simple linear way, one calculation at a time.

A quantum computers could do multiple calculations all at the same time, millions of miles apart, mirroring each other’s actions instantaneously, transporting information from one chip to another with a reliability of 99.999993% at record speeds.

——-

Now that we understand what AI is capable of we also need to know its limits.

Before long, much of the material on the internet will have been written, or at least co-written, by AIs.

What will happen when AIs are being trained on texts they have written themselves?

The amount of data consumed in this way keeps going up and up.

What happens when data runs out?

——-

Generative AI is in a Cambrian explosion of capability.

Generative Ai, is now creating art, make music, generate synthetic humans, birth artificial influencers and celebrities, literally generate video from text, and threaten to upend our notions of creativity, art, public domain, copyright, and the nature of reality itself.

This is just the beginning, the ultimate thing for AI to create is more of itself.

When maybe AI is also at the point where it can start writing the code that will make its own AI even better. And that’s like where the true singularity is … when it can kind of set itself to improve itself, when it can start to improve itself better than what a human can.

It’s impossible to speculate what society could truly look like in such a situation.

But I think in most of our lifetimes we’re going to experience that. Exciting is one word for that.

Another is terrifying. Machines that can outthink humans. Your brain is the most intelligent learning algorithm in the universe that we know so far. The truth is that for now, AGI remains a fantasy.

Even if AGI is never achieved, the self-teaching approach may still change what sorts of AI are created.

The rapid development of AI that can train itself also raises questions about how well we can control its growth. If AI starts to generate intelligence by itself, there’s no guarantee that it will be human-like.

Whether this will happen, and how it will progress if it does is impossible to know, but there’s no guarantee that humanity as we know it would survive such a time, or that the vast AI entities potentially created by such an explosion would be benevolent to life as we know it.

I think that really where AI can be empowering is in that long tail when there’s like non-consumption with the alternative, where you could not afford to create that content in the first place.

And you can imagine that with like these very obscure topics.

You could even imagine that for news where maybe there’s something that happened in your local neighbourhood where only 20 people want to read that article and then it doesn’t make sense for a human to write it.

Generating artificial intelligence is all ready producing images like a photographer, creating music like an artist, selling like a sales rep, diagnosing disease like a doctor, and (gulp!) writing text like a human.

The technology could potentially also be used to design drugs more quickly by accurately simulating their chemical reactions, a calculation too difficult for current supercomputers. They could also provide even more accurate systems to forecast weather and project the impact of climate change.

Rather than humans teaching machines to think like humans, machines might teach humans new ways of thinking.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE THE ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY NOW ACCEPT THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE BASIS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.

29 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Climate Change.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE THE ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY NOW ACCEPT THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE BASIS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.

Tags

Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Seven minute read)

Scientists have made climate change appear difficult but it’s not difficult to understand.

All living things respond to climate and changes in the climate, even if these changes are subtle and temporary. Our own experience of climate throughout our lifetimes, along with scientific records, also proves that climate change is happening. Weather is simply the set of atmospheric conditions at one location at one limited period of time. Climate, however, involves the average condition of the atmosphere over a long period of time (such as across a few decades or more) at a given location.

At timescales of thousands of years beyond human lifetimes, climate responds to the precession (slow rotation or “wobble”) of Earth’s axis, the planet’s tilt (obliquity), and the changes to the elliptical shape (eccentricity) of Earth’s orbit.

These phenomena interact with one another to determine the amount of sunlight (and thus solar heating) different parts of Earth’s surface receive during different seasons of the year.

Global and regional climates are changing too quickly for many forms of life to adapt and survive.

But this is not the whole story.

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

Earth’s climate is on a path to warm beyond the range of what has been experienced over the past millions of years.

The range of uncertainty for the warming along the current emissions path is wide enough to encompass massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems: as global temperatures rise, there is a real risk, however small, that one or more critical parts of the Earth’s climate system will experience abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes. Disturbingly, scientists do not know how much warming is required to trigger such changes to the climate system.

When people are confronted with a difficult problem, they tend to disengage. In addition to that, beginning in the mid-eighties, Big Oil began a concerted campaign to sow doubt in the public’s mind; is the climate really changing, or is this just more variations in the weather?

The current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Most of the warming occurred in the past 40 years, with the seven most recent years being the warmest. The years 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year on record.

This is why our planet is in trouble.

Why are our leaders, in government and industry, not telling us the truth about climate change?

The answer is simple:

Because they can’t. What is happening to the climate is bad news, and bad news does not get votes, or increase profits.

There is no need to inflate the magnitude of what is happening. It is time for us all to face the “cruel truth” that has been overlooked for too long.

The reality is confronting enough. If humans put too much carbon back in the atmosphere, there’s only one thing that can happen. The Earth will get hotter, maybe too hot.

It is not possible for modern man to combust fossil fuels, put the carbon back in the atmosphere, and still expect the current lifestyle to continue.

In order to counteract climate misinformation.

1200 'Scientists' Claim That Climate Change Is Not Real. Here's The Truth

The list of records broken is itself unprecedented.

200 million people in the world, more than three times the UK population, will live below the tideline by the end of this century if levels continue to rise.

In the Hollywood blockbuster ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ocean currents around the world stop as a result of global warming, triggering a new Ice Age on Earth. That may have been science fiction but scientists say the terrifying prophecy could soon become a reality.

The heat in the northern Atlantic Ocean has now pushed beyond what climate models predicted. The Atlantic Ocean current which drives the Gulf Stream could collapse at ‘any time’ from 2025 thanks to climate change.

A study published this week gives a further insight into what this might mean.

It suggests the climate system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could shut down faster than previously thought – by about 2050, or possibly as soon as this decade – if emissions are not cut soon. The risk of an earlier ocean circulation breakdown has increased, with potentially disastrous and rapid ramifications for temperatures, rainfall and sea level rise. Similarly, the amount of sea ice around Antarctica continues to be far below previous record lows.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation last collapsed 12,000 years ago.

The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, the impact would be devastating. Such a scenario is ’95 per cent certain.

This is not actually worse than we expected. It is the brutal reality of what scientists told us would happen.

Heat waves kill more people than fires, floods and cyclones. A study found extreme heat killed more than 61,000 in Europe alone last year.

Imagine the headlines if we knew about that in real time.

Human emissions are permanently adding the equivalent of an El Niño to the global system every five to 10 years.

The good news from scientists is that rapid action can still make a significant difference and limit future damage.

It would mean ruling a line under new fossil fuel developments where there are alternatives – that is, virtually all of them – and taking a war-footing approach that genuinely prioritised accelerating the transition that every major scientific body and government agrees is necessary.

It wouldn’t mean pretending the gas industry is a climate solution, or that nuclear energy is a serious climate solution. Nor is carbon capture and storage on track to be more than a niche technology, and paying for carbon offsets can’t justify fossil fuel use.

It would mean leaders acting as though they could persuade the public of what’s required, rather than living in fear of how they might respond.

Polls suggest a majority in many countries are open to action. Now’s our chance.

Alternatively, politicians could continue not delivering on the commitments made in Paris eight years ago and wait for another month as devastating as July 2023 before doing more. One thing we can say with confidence: It is likely to come around soon enough.

America’s Independence Day was celebrated on July 4th. That is the same day the Earth’s temperature was hotter than it has been at any time in history. Sea ice melts from white into turquoise pools off Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. Between 1979 and ...

I don’t think it’s going to be anything that we can do as man to influence that to any great degree.

But I will tell you, again, looking at the past 4,000 or 5,000 years of human history, there’s a strong correlation between the rise and fall of temperature and the rise and fall of civilizations. And it’s just opposite of what we’re being told.

Going forward, who are you going to believe?

One only has to look at both major parties in the UK, currently diluting their plans to combat the climate crisis.

It’s hard to believe (due to politicians chopping and changing of their views and actions) that a new oil field ( Rosebank) where operation emission alone (not counting any emissions from burning the oil and gas it is likely to produce) – are likely to reach 5.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide, driving a coach and horses through any climate commitments.

Are there really people at the top of either of the main parties calling for abandonment of green policies.

You can bet your nannie that there are.

It is not my role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change but the consequences will devastate economies, infrastructure and political stability. We face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

The verbal is over.

Its time to pour trillions/ trillions into providing non repayable grants before the lights go out.

( See previous posts. Placing 0.05% World Aid commission on all activities that are not sustainable )

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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Tag Archives: The Future of Mankind

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHERE ARE WE WITH GENETIC ENGINEERING?

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

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WE ARE STILL A LONG WAY FROM ANY WORLD UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONSQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE.

Understanding the many challenges facing our world isn’t easy, but surely it should be easy to understand that we all survive only because of ecosystems that provide us with life.

The picture is bleak.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT SORT OF LIFE DO YOU WANT AND WHERE ARE WE GOING WITH AI?

Without biodiversity, life on earth as we know it would cease to exist.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: FROM HERE INTO THE FUTURE WILL TECHNOLOGY’S BE THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GENERATIONS?

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. THE FIRST OF OUR CURRENT CHALLENGES WITH CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO ADMIT THAT WE WILL NOT STOP IT.

THE BEADY ASK’S. BACTERIA IS NECESSARY FOR LIFE BUT COULD NEW ANCIENT MICROBES RELEASED BY CLIMATE CHANGE END IT.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WILL CLIMATE CHANGE LEAD TO MORE WARS?

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL A QUANTUM COMPUTER SOLVE THE WORLD PROBLEMS?

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE THE ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY NOW ACCEPT THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE BASIS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.

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Understanding the many challenges facing our world isn’t easy, but surely it should be easy to understand that we all survive only because of ecosystems that provide us with life.

The picture is bleak.

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Without biodiversity, life on earth as we know it would cease to exist.

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