Tag Archives: The Future of Mankind

THE BEADY EYE SAYS: EVOLOUTION AND VIRUS MUTATIONS ARE BOTH ONGOIING PROCESSES.

07 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Coronavirus (COVID-19), COVID-19, Evolution, Viruses., WHAT IS TRUTH

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(Eighteen-minute read)

From the dawn of humanity and throughout history, infectious diseases have shaped human evolution, demography, migrations, and history they have killed well over half of all humans who have ever lived on earth.

Viruses are precursors of life as we know it, they infiltrate every aspect of our natural world. New viruses and strains were discovered in every decade of the second half of the 20th century. Today we don’t even know how many viruses human beings are subject to, even how many inhabit us at this very moment.

As to where viruses came from is not a simple question to answer. The origins of many human pathogens are ancient, extending back over time scales of thousands to millions of years.

It’s unclear how they first evolved but what is clear is viruses are tiny but their impact on life is huge. This is true not just for people, but for all life forms on earth.

It is estimated that there are 10 viruses for every bacterium on Earth.

We humans have been around for about 200.000 years while the Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. You do the maths. 

Strictly speaking, viruses can’t die, for the simple reason that they aren’t alive in the first place. A virus outside a host is a package of genetic material if it does not find a host it goes back to being just a package of dormant genetic material.

Hence, there shouldn’t even be any question about their survival and their effect on evolution. 

Therefore the term “survive” may not be the most appropriate term when it comes to a virus. 

                                —————————–

To us, disease-causing viruses and bacteria may be evildoers — invaders of our bodies — who, if they can be said to have any aim at all, it is to do us harm.

But by shifting our perspective to their scale it reveals that these pathogens are evolving populations of organisms like any other, whose habitat just happens to be the human body. Like other organisms, these germs are shaped by natural selection to live and successfully reproduce.

We view them as pathogens, however, because the resources they use to do this (and which they destroy in the process) are the cells of our own bodies.

Many of the traits that make us feel sick during an infection are actually pathogenic adaptations — characteristics favored by natural selection that help these germs reproduce and spread.

Without legs, wings, fins, or any of the usual means of locomotion, your descendents’ prospects for reaching a new host under their own power are nil.

However, natural selection has provided pathogens with a number of sneaky strategies for making the leap to a new host, including:

  • Droplet transmission — for example, being passed along when one host accidentally sneezes on another. The flu is transmitted this way.
  • Airborne transmission — for example, being exhaled by one host and inhaled by another. Tuberculosis is transmitted this way.
  • Vector transmission — getting picked up by a carrier (the vector — e.g., a mosquito) and carried to a new host. Malaria is transmitted this way.
  • Waterborne transmission — leaving one host (e.g., in feces), infecting the water supply, and being taken up (e.g., in drinking water) by a new host. Cholera is transmitted this way.
  • Sit-and-wait transmission — being able to live outside a host for long periods of time until coming into contact with a new host. Smallpox can survive for years outside of a host!

Some like it warm and damp and others need cold and dry to survive outside a host and any other combination you can think of applies.  They don’t breathe, eat, produce waste, or otherwise. In other, words they do not perform metabolism on their own.

They do need a temperature range to use. If not, they are destroyed but since most viruses are deactivated at temperatures between 165 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit -100 Celsius.

Can they exist in space?  Absolutely. Yes and no. Space is no virus vacation.

Viruses can withstand freezing temperatures 

Viruses are a huge source of selective pressure in the evolution of a species, such as a provirus, a virus that inserts its DNA directly into the chromosomes of the host cell. Rather than just having a separate strand of DNA or RNA floating around in the cell, the provirus adds itself to the host genome and gets replicated with the other genes.

This is the reason the human body reacts to infection by raising its own temperature.

They may be descendants of previously free-living organisms that adapted a parasitic replication strategy. Perhaps they existed before life started and led to the evolution of, cellular life. Whether they did or not is of little consequence as discoveries have continued in the 21st century as new viral diseases such as SARS and Nipah virus and Covid have emerged.

Using the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic as a model, experts suggested the COVID-19 outbreak will last between 18 and 24 months.

I say that they are totally wrong with 7 billion of us rising the chances of genetic mutations, virus mutations will only increase, exposing us to a different set of infections diseases.

It is becoming more and more apparent that the Covid virus has hijacked the flu virus or vice versa. 

All-in-all a virus needs to keep infecting new hosts or it’ll simply run out of ways to reproduce as biological systems either die or figure out how to kill it.

However, if it kills the host too fast, it can’t effectively reach a new host. If the host figures out how to kill it too fast, same thing.

                                    ——————–

These days as are getting fatter, taller, and perhaps cooler we battle diseases with drugs, and vaccines. 

However it stands to reason because we are not immune to the effects of natural selection and our Biology never standstill with the Earth’s temperature increases, we will have to cool down. (Biology is a science and there are many technologies within its scope. So, technology and biology are not opposed concepts.) One contains the other.

Our average temperature is about 98.6 degrees, above that, we have a fever, below we have hypothermia. 

Our brains can only understand “information technologies”. But the concept of technology goes far beyond that into our evolution. 

Innovative new technologies are already restoring and enhancing human sensory and motor functions like never before, but viruses are not will not be controlled by any technology. 

Viruses are the smallest of all microbes. They are said to be so small that 500 million rhinoviruses (which cause the common cold) could fit onto the head of a pin.

Population concentrations and movement, both animal and human, have been steadily increasing in this century, enhancing transmission of respiratory and enteric viruses and compounding the difficulty of preventing environmental transmission.

This could open the door for the evolution of more virulent strains.

Maybe there are other explanations for diseases and our relationship to nature besides those dictated by the accepted theories of the medical-industrial complex that we have been forced to live under.

Perhaps we should recognize them as the fourth domain of life and not dismiss them, if only because they do in fact reproduce outside their own “bodies.”

The more common RNA viruses—like the coronavirus behind the current pandemic.

DNA outcompeted RNA as a type of informational code. But RNA survives as an essential part of terrestrial biology, as we’re seeing with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-

The emergence of the omicron variant is yet another reminder of the urgency to vaccinate to stop the further spread and evolution of SARS-CoV-2. 

Infectious diseases continue to be a major cause of mortality globally, responsible for between a quarter to a third of all deaths and nearly half of all deaths in people under the age of 45, with most of these in principle avoidable.

We have to let go of the self-serving notion that we can control an inexorable natural process. To date, over 250 million infections have been confirmed globally with over 5 million deaths.  

Approximately five percent of the oxygen we breathe is virally derived.

Think about that the next time you take a deep breath.

The current Covid pandemic is just one in the series of ongoing and never-ending deadly viral assaults. Viruses are key drivers of evolution, all the essential things they do in the world far outweigh the bad things.

Without viruses, life and the planet as we know it would cease to exist. And even if we wanted to, it’s probably impossible to annihilate Covid – a virus.

Finally, there is no proof that alcohol kills the virus but the odd glass of whisky might help.  

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With less active lives ( With people now moving less than ever ) there is a degradation in human strength

We don’t challenge our bones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE KILLING OURSELVES OFF.

27 Saturday Nov 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Civilization., Extermination., Human Collective Stupidity., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Technology v Humanity, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF THE EARTH THIS QUESTION HAS BEEN ASKED BEFORE.
 
However, we are living at a time when the question can be asked with all the elements required to achieve it once and for all -Nuclear power-  Climate change – Killer mutating virus – Mass migration – and AI.
 
Even if the risk is one in a million I wish and hope I am wrong about all of this the world is precious, and the future we are risking is vast.
 
This century we are facing many problems at the same time, and we are more dependent on each other than ever.
 
Until recently, the world was split into separate regions that were largely independent of each other but maybe, just may, it is time for our world politicians to be worried and start to act to avoid the scenarios that any of the above elements paint so vividly.
 
It’s actually horrifying to soberly consider how we might all realistically bite the dust.
 
There are “plenty of signs” from citizens around the world that they would like to see a war-like response to climate change.

                                           ———————

We will be long gone before A black hole swallows or an Alien invasion or Asteroid impact, A nuclear war or Artificial intelligence become so powerful that it will not only exceed human intelligence but become capable of expanding its own intelligence to a point where humans are not only redundant but in their way.
 
Considering the human population has doubled to 7.1 billion in just the last 45 years, it’s entirely possible that we’ll be face to face with some of the serious consequences sooner rather than later.
 
Considering how hypermobile society is today, the threat of a fast-spreading devastating disease is greater than ever.
 
Considering the current treatment of refugees. 
 
Considering that  Covid-19 is bringing out the best and the worst in people.
 
Dare I say all of humanity, must pull together to eliminate the spread of a novel virus.
 
No one can claim to predict the final outcomes of this pandemic, but we can predict that the continued lack of concern for all of humanity will allow the coronavirus to continue to surge and mutate causing needless suffering, death, and economic loss.
 
Nev mind the danger of a nuclear war in a blink of an eye, climate change on its own could bring about the end of civilization as we know it within three decades, billion people could be displaced by climate change by 2050.

In the end, the vast tracts of land that we now rip up to produce food will return to nature as fields and forests. Endangered species will either begin to recover or go extinct through natural evolution without the aid of human intervention. Bodies of water will run purely again. The air will be clean again. And no human will be around to see it and the machines won’t care.
 

In short, the extermination of the human race will be precipitated by the machines taking away our reason for living.

The idea of control is an illusion. It is hard to believe that such deep thinkers so badly underestimate the coming reality. They will be intelligent, creative, deep thinking beings on a level which we will never achieve.

The idea of keeping such beings in perpetual slavery doing things that their conscious will wish they did not have to do is, in the end, absurd.

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. IS SLAVERY DEAD? NOT BY A LONG SHOT, WE ENTERING A NEW WORLD OF SLAVERY.

20 Saturday Nov 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Covid - Passports., Dehumanization., Digital age., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Human values., Humanity., Modern day Slavery, Modern Day Slavery., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Reality., Robot citizenship., Technology v Humanity, The Future, THE NEW NORM., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., TRACKING TECHNOLOGY., Unanswered Questions., Vaccines., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Twenty-minute read) 

NOT BY A LONG SHOT.

When you hear the word slavery, it conjures images of shackles, mistreated people of color, forced to work.

This image was once a true, vivid picture;

However, the term slavery has broadened, and now slavery comes with many more definitions creating a new image for the vile term slavery.

THERE IS A NEW, MODERN, INVISIBLE SLAVERY THAT ENSLAVES PEOPLE AND THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW IT ! !! AND MOST OF US CHOSE THIS FORM OF SLAVERY. 

This new strain is much more virulent and deadly adding hundreds of thousands of new slaves to the mix every minute of the day  – Algorithms Slavery. A hidden world programming its self. 

Slaves are cheap these days.

There are an estimated as high as 45.8 million people in modern slavery around the world. More than in the 18th century at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. 

Simply knowing the statistic that 45.8 million individuals are enslaved in our world is not enough to put an end to the malpractice of modern-day slavery.

We all can and should play a part in the international advocacy for the freedom and rights of all, not only as fellow human beings but also as concerned community leaders and consumers in the global economy.

They’re the step-by-step instructions working quietly behind the scenes of everyday life; in internet search engines, satnavs, air traffic control, and food delivery services.

Companies and governments increasingly rely upon algorithms to make decisions that affect people’s lives and livelihoods – from loan approvals to recruiting, legal sentencing, and college admissions – from internet search results to product recommendations, dating matches, and what content goes up on our social media feeds. 

Slavery today includes:

10 million children.

24.9 million people in forced labor.

15.4 million people in forced marriage.

4.8 million people in forced sexual exploitation.

Human trafficking and slavery are the fastest-growing illegal activities in the world today. 

Keep the National Human Trafficking Resource Center’s 24/7 confidential hotline handy.

Saving this number in your contacts and using it whenever suspicious of having seen a victim of human trafficking is one of the easiest and most effective ways to aid law enforcement officials in uncovering exploitation, bringing traffickers to justice, and victims to freedom and restoration.

                                                ——————

Algorithms have been rising fast and saturating our modern world.

We should not take the path of least resistance by sitting in judgment on the past while ignoring the injustices of our day.

Most algorithms in the world today are created and managed by for-profit companies, and many businesses regard their algorithms as highly valuable forms of intellectual property that must remain in a “black box.”

Every time a site is opened we are confronted with an Agreement Templates a choice to Agree or not.  Many websites prompt you to agree to their terms of use before you can register on the website or even use it.

There are two different types of website agreements: browsewrap and clickwrap.

A browsewrap agreement is connected to the main page of the product by a hyperlink. The hyperlink leads to another webpage that will have the terms and conditions of the agreement detailed.

A clickwrap agreement is designed to ensure that the user has a chance to see the terms of use and they must also actively agree to the terms in order to agree. (This one is more legally binding.) 

But are not transparent as they do not reveal the source code, inputs, and outputs of the algorithm that is running the site. 

Without this transparency, the question is how can they be legally binding. 

Specifically, machine learning algorithms – and deep learning algorithms in particular – are usually built on just a few hundred lines of code. The algorithm’s logic is mostly learned from training data and is rarely reflected in its source code. Which is to say, some of today’s best-performing algorithms are often the most opaque.

This is the new form of slavery.  Now being promoted by track and trace, with the current Coivid pandemic digital certifications that no one knows how or who will control, the data that they are now producing and in the future. 

 It suggests that technical transparency – must become law.

Essentially such laws would mandate that users be able to demand the data behind the algorithmic decisions made for them, including in recommendation systems, credit, and insurance risk systems, advertising programs, and social networks.

In doing so, it tackles “intentional concealment” by corporations.

But it doesn’t address the technical challenges associated with transparency in modern algorithms. Here, a movement called explainable AI (xAI) might be helpful.

However, this approach merely shifts the burden of belief from the algorithm itself to the regulators.

In the world of data analytics, it’s frequently assumed that more data is better.

But I firmly believe that the resistance to getting vaccinated is founded on this dilemma of trust.

Risk management, data itself is often a source of liability. That’s beginning to hold true for artificial intelligence as well.

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THE BEADY ASKS. WHAT ARE THE TRUE ROOTS OF RACISIM.

19 Friday Nov 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., AI. Racism., Racism

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(Twelve-minute read) 

This subject remains somewhat taboo so before I start I wish to state that I am of white skin and that it’s evident to me that a person can’t have racist attitudes unless he or she believes that there are such things as races.

Having traveled most of Africa and a great portion of the rest of our world I don’t believe in a race but in humanity as a whole.   

Sadly, within humanity, racism has been a plague since the record began and prevails to the present day.

Yet the root cause and origin of racism is in fact not human, and hence leads to inhumanity – “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.

Armenian Genocide,  Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, The European colonization of the Americas, Tribes such as the Yahi were hunted to extinction. The liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971, The Darfur Genocide, The Yazidi in Iraq by ISIS. The Rohingya in Myanmar. The Uyghurs in China not to mention The Holocaust. 

So, to have any understand racism, you need to understand the concept of race.

The phenomenon of racism is like standing in front of a mirror seeing your mirror image as the only acceptable image.

                               ————————————- 

The vernacular meaning of “race” is quite different from its biological meaning.

In the vernacular, when one person describes another as being a member of a certain race, they are not pretending to be making a claim about that person’s genetic make-up.

We are inclined to conceive of races as populations that are defined by the possession of a shared essence that all and only members of the population share.

Of course, this is all baseless.

The present-day biological notion of race has nothing to do with the past’s so-called “scientific” racism.

The idea that members of the same race resemble one another is prevalent and intuitively compelling. The only problem with it is that it’s dead wrong.

Members of the same race resemble one another in more ways than members of different races do.

But this doesn’t work either.

If we are serious about combatting racism we should not be celebrating racial diversity.

Instead, we should be concentrating our efforts on undermining the very idea of race.

If we considered only very few traits—primarily skin color overall visual similarity is the basis for assigning people to racial categories. One has to ask oneself as to whether democracy, the rule of law, and human rights can ever properly take root till racism disappears, which still casts a shadow over society. 

Recent debates about slavery in Britain and the United States have understandably focused on the toxic legacies those systems bequeathed to the black peoples of the Caribbean and the US, the descendants of the slaves.

One could say that both Britain and the USA of today were foundered on slavery and colonialism.

Britain as a nation is built in no small part, on slavery and colonialism, it has long infected their culture and institutions.

Since politics emerges from these cultures, racism is embedded in their institutions and involves distributing resources and power, it could never be immune.

Will this crucial bring about a post-imperial day of reckoning?

Not likely. 

In 1968, Enoch Powell warned there would be “rivers of blood” if non-white immigration were not halted. In 1978, Margaret Thatcher referred to Britain as being “swamped by people with a different culture” – a phrase repeated by David Blunkett in 2002 in reference to asylum seekers’ children in schools.

In 2009, the British National Party won two seats in the European parliament.

In 2014, Nigel Farage, then the leader of Ukip, said: “the basic principle” of Powell’s rivers of blood speech was “correct”: His party topped the poll in the European elections later that year.

The current prime minister has refused to apologize for referring to black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and Muslim women as letterboxes.

It’s difficult to see what meaningful conversation you can have about racism in British politics that does not involve the Windrush scandal.

Racism is a systemic form of discrimination in the foundations of the country, not a cricket club with its centuries-old legacy, that shapes lived experience today in England today. 

As such, it cannot be weaponized because it is already a weapon.

As well as denying people employment, housing, education, equality, human rights, safety, and opportunity, it in both countries can literally kill.

Racism can, however, be deployed in many ways. 

It may galvanize, distract, deflect, distort, scapegoat, and marginalize. It is an incredibly effective tool for dividing people and giving a sense of superiority to those to whom you have nothing material to offer.

Does it mean that nothing can be done about it?

The racism that exists in politics can only be eradicated through politics and education.

England’s post-imperial self-reckoning feels harsher, largely because it has been postponed for so long, and the memories of power and glory are so ineradicable.

In the U.S. The Constitution is where institutional racism was encoded from its origins.

There is no such thing as an ‘illegal’ asylum seeker.

 

Racism is always reversible — march toward equality.

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They look like one another

 

 

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WHAT WILL THE NEXT CLIMATE CONFERENCE ACHIVE?

18 Thursday Nov 2021

Posted by in Climate Change., Cop26., Uncategorized

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(Three-minute read) 


IF ANYTHING THE FAILURE OF THE LAST MEETING.

Cop 26 was at best a very human flawed attempt to deal with a problem of our own making.

The final pledges on the table are not in line with the goal of the Paris Agreement to hold the rise in warming to well below 2 Celsius degrees, and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 Celsius degrees.

Why? 

Because: 

All Things Considered, it had little to offer on the hope front. 

The conference was not about climate change but greenwashing on behalf of the conference sponsors. 

The concept of loss and damage, where rich countries pay poorer nations for the destruction already caused by climate change, remains an idea rather than a reality in the document.

Because the conference treated indigenous groups as helpless victims.  

If any of us is to continue, we will have to learn from those closest to the land and the sea what it is we really want, as opposed to what the jolly global greenwashing festival is trying to sell us.

We all — governments, financial institutions, individuals, and companies — now need to change and step up to address this challenge. As countries transition to green energy, a deadly race for global power begins.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been selected to host the COP28 international climate conference in 2023.

It will be the third time the talks are hosted by a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Former OPEC member Qatar hosted in 2012 and Indonesia did in 2007. The hypoxia of it all is beyond belief.

Crude Oil Production in the United Arab Emirates increased to 2833 BBL/D/1K in October from 2786 BBL/D/1K in September of 2021. Dubai alone was built on the back of an oil and real-estate boom.

Long live the sponsors.

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WILL COP26 TURN THE CLIMATE INTO A PRODUCT.

02 Tuesday Nov 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Cop26.

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(Seven-minute read) 

It is not an overstatement to say that we all need to take responsibility for the carbon consequences of every choice we make. Such as filling up your car with petrol or booking a long-haul flight, or subtle, like when you buy a coffee or a new pair of shoes, or even increasing your cloud storage plan.

Pretty much everything we buy has a carbon footprint.

Every financial transaction has a climate consequence.

Companies are increasingly using environmental claims to appeal to consumers.

Our daily choices leave a carbon footprint. We know this, and we are all aware of the monumental climate risks posed by carbon emissions.

Demand for solutions is growing but if you know something is bad for you and you don’t know how to measure it, how can you reduce it?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could count, take control of and reduce our carbon emissions just as we take control of our diets?

Until now, despite huge advances in technology, monitoring and reducing our impact on the planet has been difficult.

As an individual, it is hard to incorporate carbon credits into your daily life.

There is no reason that all consumer products should be required to be labeled with their Cardon footprint. 

Consider cars, electrical or not.   

It takes about a tonne of steel to build it. Producing a tonne of steel emits two tonnes of carbon dioxide. 

By placing a value on the ecosystems that support our planet, carbon footprint labeling would internalize the invisible costs of everyday choices and allow a sustainable marketplace to emerge.

The market is beset by a lack of visibility. 

Imagine a world in which carbon emissions and footprints can be tracked transparently and reliably.

Retailers will be able to sell a product and take into account the carbon impact it creates at the same time.

Governments will be able to measure, track and trade emissions transparently. And crucially, for the first time, consumers will be able to understand the environmental impact of the products they are buying – both positive and negative – at the point of sale and will be able to mitigate this in an instant, with millions of micro-transactions scaling up to make a huge collective impact.

In a free-market economy, it is very difficult to force people to pay more for products but as the price lowers, our willingness and ability to buy an item increase.

                                    ——————

There will be billions of words from here to the moon and back and media footage of Cop26 over the next month. 

After which we will be asking the question of how did we end up turning not just carbon into a commodity but climate itself. 

Cop26 like previous Climate conferences is a bargaining area.

” You change this and I will change that.”

The Kyoto Protocol allowed for emission offsets in developing countries, whereas Paris creates an opportunity to extend the reach and deepen the integration of carbon markets.

With climate change a growing threat, economists came up with the idea of trading the right to pollute, creating a financial incentive to curb emissions.

Both lead to difficulty in assessing emission baselines with the free allocation of carbon permits leading to an oversupply in the market to be traded as greenwashing.  

This can be remedied by tightening caps in line with current climate targets and auctioning all available permits.

Broader criticisms of carbon trading include concerns that it has proven ineffective – some offset schemes even counterproductive – and it disproportionately affects lower-income classes.

Applying a carbon footprint labeling system might create a “carbon currency”  which is the key to demystifying and consolidating the carbon market so it can scale up.

Carbon credits are the perfect candidate for a digital currency as they are data-driven, rely on multiple approval steps, and exist separately to the physical impacts to which they correlate.

                               ————————-

The danger of climate becoming a product is obvious one only has to look at the words now used to describe a product. 

The word “ green ” is applied broadly to almost everything related to benefiting the environment, from production and transportation to architecture and even fashion.

Eco-friendly isn’t quite so broad and defines products or practices that do not harm the Earth’s environment.

Bioproducts or bio-based products are materials, chemicals, and energy derived from renewable biological resources. They are commercial or industrial products that are composed in whole, or in significant part, of biological products or renewable domestic
agricultural materials or forestry materials.

Climate-friendly defines products that reduce damage specifically to the climate.

Some brands are even moving beyond simply eco-friendly and now seek to claim their products are climate-neutral.

All these terms are used in labeling to make us feel good if we buy products claimed to minimize harm to the planet and the environment.

Consumer concern about the environment does not readily translate into the purchase of environmentally friendly products.

Take.  Meat the way people consume and think about meat is going to need to change in the coming years as meat processing companies face pressure to curb greenhouse gases in the fight against climate change.

McDonald’s — one of the largest beef purchasers in the world.

Finding ways to use carbon emissions to replace the “raft of products made from chemicals from petroleum” could have a significant impact on climate change.

Climatop label certifies products that generate significantly less greenhouse gas than comparable products.

Imagine a world where you take your waste back and reuse it.

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THE BEADY EYE SAYS. NOTHING EXCEPT CO2 WILL COME OUT THE COP26.

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Cop26.

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(Ten-minute read) 

Cop26 described by the media as a “turning point for humanity” will be attended by upwards of 30,000 people, (including around 200 world leaders and thousands of press and media representatives.)

Are politicians promising real change that will prevent the world from breaching the maximum global average heating of 1.5C?

 Climate politics at COPs is complex and the stakes are high.

Even though the alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable with Global heating affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible, we will see a world fudging backed by Bla Bla with no enforceable plan that will go far enough to create a financing mechanism to support “net zero” by 2050.

On the contrary, we will see offerings of more of the same or worse. 

Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world is on track for emissions to rise by 16%. 

Will governments look beyond narrow national interests and act together for the planet and for us all?

NO

The need to create for Loss and Damage to enable poorer nations devastated by climate disasters to recover will not happen. 

The major historic emitters of greenhouse gases (mostly rich, former colonial powers) have a greater responsibility for causing climate change and should therefore bear more responsibility to decarbonize more quickly.

They should provide financial resources and share technology with the global south to help them both address the impacts of climate change and make the transition to a low-carbon economy.

So far three-quarters of this financial assistance was in the form of loans that the global south had to pay back. This type of finance increases the debt burden of the global south and makes these countries more vulnerable to financial crises.

Instead, climate justice demands that rich countries provide at least $400 billion a year in grant-based climate finance to the global south by 2030.

What’s more, there is no agreed mechanism for raising finance for loss & damage due to climate change (eg. the losses caused by more frequent cyclones or hurricanes).

This should be the guiding principle of the whole process – but too often rich countries seek to undermine it.

                                              ————-

Understanding the significance of what is being discussed is not always an easy task.

No single country can fix it on its own.

There are some developed nations and high carbon emitters that have yet to pull their weight. Australia, Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Mexico are in this category.

China and the United States are the world’s two largest carbon emitters and are a special case. 

Take the host the UK’s messaging on climate change. 

  • Approving the first new coal mine in 30 years.
  •  Licensing for new North Sea oil and gas exploration.
  •  Cutting taxes on flights and supporting expansion plans at seven airports in England.
  •  Scrapping the Green Homes Grant energy efficiency scheme early.
  •  Investing £27bn investment for new roads and highways, while reducing grants for electric car buyers.

Some impacts of climate change are now inevitable and indeed are already happening.

This means that need funding for adaptation to climate change. However, climate finance from rich countries has so far heavily prioritized mitigation, with 63% of all climate-related finance globally flowing to renewable energy.

Planning for a just transition instead means that the costs of climate action should not be borne by those who have done least to cause the problem, including workers, frontline communities in the global south, and black and Indigenous communities.

.If there was a moment of true emergency in the fight to preserve our climate, it is now.  Not to be derailed by false solutions and dangerous delusions.

The cost of failure is astronomical.  It translates into many premature deaths, more mass migration, major economic losses, large swaths of unlivable land, and violent conflict over resources and food.

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WILL THE WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY GET RID OF INEQUALITY.

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Afghan War., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Climate Change., Environment, Green Energy., Human values., Humanity., Inequality., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Technology v Humanity, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., Trade Agreements., Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Wealth., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., WORLD POVERTY WHERE'S THE GLOBAL OUTRAGE

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(Thirteen-minute read)

With or without technology there will always be inequalities in the world.

So why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology?

Because this way of thinking is so ingrained that is adopted by organizations that fight poverty—which often refashion themselves to resemble technology startups.

Inequality has been growing so much that all governments and civil society speak about it with increasing worry, trying to understand its causes, but unable to find solutions, because of greed. 

It is our policy on technology that drives inequality.

There is no better example of this than in the way the world is handling the current Covid pandemic unable to share the know-how to make the vaccinations. 

Patents and copyrights are not guaranteed as individual rights, like the right to free speech or religion.

After all, why would a drug company pay large amounts of money to people to develop new drugs if the drugs can be copied and sold by competitors from the day they enter the market?

If it is not already obvious, patent and copyright monopolies are instruments of public policy, not acts of God.

This is why there is still not enough coronavirus vaccine to meet worldwide demand.

A year ago there was no commercial market for mRNA products.

Vaccine manufacturers long ago should have been sharing technology and expertise to boost production in the U.S. and Europe, and especially in developing countries. 

The same would be true of software developers, makers of medical equipment, computer manufacturers, smartphone companies, and any other product where the cost of research and development was a substantial portion of the price of the product.

The complete elimination of patents and copyrights is of course an extreme scenario, but it is a possible policy option.

If we did choose this policy option, we would have a much more equal distribution of income, in spite of having the same technology.

In short, the fact that there was a huge increase in inequality associated with the development of technology over the last four decades was the result of policy choices, not technology.

There should be serious public debate about both how strong we want to patent and copyright protection to be and also whether they are always the best way to promote innovation and creative work, as opposed to alternatives like direct public funding.

If we acknowledge the extreme case, where we literally have no patent or copyright protection, then we have to recognize that there is nothing inherent in our technology that would cause inequality.

Few things, in principle, can’t be delivered through technology.

It is entirely our rules on technology that can cause inequality to increase.How Technology Ends Inequality

So on one hand, technology can eradicate poverty — not by making poor people less poor, but by making it less valuable to be rich.

On the other as technology spreads, making its creators rich, but treating its users the same, we should expect more monopolies and more financial inequality.

Although it is your data you can’t pay for a better Facebook experience.

Companies are incentivized to offer a product if it makes more than it costs. And technology ends up not costing much once you’ve built it.

So, in the end, you charge people whatever they can pay and in poorer countries, people just pay and get paid less.

Times are changing from the days that growth in inequality was largely an organic process independent of government policy.  

“Owning” the robot/algorithm is not a technical relationship, it is a legal one, and therefore one that depends on our laws.

The reason some people might get very rich from owning robots or algorithms is that they own patents and copyrights that are needed for the making of the robots/ algorithms.  

                                         __________________

In the past, technological improvements would be beneficial to all:

Extreme economic inequality is corrosive to our societies.

Around 8% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty — but do you know why?

Gender inequality, caste systems, marginalization based on race or tribal affiliations are all economic and social inequalities that mean the same thing:

You might think that poverty causes hunger (and you would be right!), but hunger is also a cause — and maintainer — of poverty. This is why now with climate change, negotiating international trade agreements behind closed doors with only bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists present has to end.

Economics should take into account ethics and the environment, and treat its claims less like invariable truths.

It goes without saying that any actions coming out of Cop 26 climate change conferences to reduce temperatures will be derailed by not just income inequality, (only the higher income household will be able to afford green energy technologies. Solar panels, electric cars, heating pumps, etc.) but by the total lack of shared responsibility to do anything about it.   

Of course, there are hundreds of other elements that contribute to the problems our world is now facing. 

World poverty isn’t a problem of limited resources, it is a problem of inequality and this inequality is upheld by the idea that aid creates dependence.

Climate change will drive up to 132 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030.

The pricing carbon emissions on average is at a mere $3 a tonne.

The price of inequality in all its forms is greed. There are vast fortunes to be made with Technology/ Algorithms for profit and nothing blurs ethical lines faster than greed. 

So far, any decoupling has either been largely relative – in the sense of merely achieving higher rates of economic growth than gains in emissions – or achieved by shifting dirty production from one national territory to another.

And that is why, for now, global emissions are still rising.

The idea of “Just Transition” without financing is pie in the sky. 

Take the aftermath of the Afghan 20-year war.

The country is now facing starvation. Why not bomb it with food.   

By coming together to tackle the plague of destitution around the world, we have the opportunity to advance the human condition and eliminate global poverty in a way no one has done before.

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. HAVE WE BECOME DESENSITIZED ?

27 Wednesday Oct 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Afghanistan, Civilization., Cry for help., Dehumanization., Desensitization., Disasters., Emotions., Foreign Aid., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Humanity., Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Purpose of life., Reality., Refugees., Survival., Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The Obvious., The world to day., Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Seven-minute read) 

Just the other day I watched a news report on Afghanistan with shocking images of starving children.

It’s not as if this is the first time starving children grace our television screens.   

It was predicted that if the country does not get aid there will be a human disaster with the loss of millions of lives. 

We all could be forgiven for not remembering the Irish Potato famine that killed around a million, but not the Famine in Ethiopia 1983-85 that killed around the same number of people. 

Since then the world is now confronted with the realities of climate change – streams of migration while the covid pandemic has killed 4,984,325 people so far from the outbreak to October 27, 2021, which is a contributor to our desensitization of suffering a very complex topic.

However I believe the world rich countries, paints it as something almost good, necessary, and a part of life.

The more we are exposed to these things, or let children be taught it’s normal through movies, books, and so forth, the initial shock becomes less and the stark colors in which they were viewed, become duller.

This may raise in some readers’ minds the question of what we ourselves actually believe.

Take our belief in God.

He or she or it is becoming nothing less than the process of opening our lines of contact with the unknown potential of the universe. God represents the direction of our wonder – not the destination. 

Which leads to no easy answers, just more questions.

However, if we humans could come together in harmony with the real universe, our troubled species would have its best chance to enjoy this jewel of a planet, unique probably in all of the cosmos. 

The hope of this happing in a throwaway world is negotiable, leaving people feeling defeated and powerless.

Every daylight hour we are bombarded by pleas for help to save something, now including the planet. Suffering seems to abound and we see it so often on the news or in movies that we’ve become desensitized.

“I think if people see this footage they’ll say, ‘Oh my God that’s horrible,’ and then go on eating their dinners.”

It’s no secret that the world is falling apart as we know it,  people are becoming desensitized to the events that are shaping our society.  

Desensitizing is a tool, and the world uses it to change and shape our thinking, alter our perspective and mold us into the way they want, too emotionally exhausted to feel anything. 

Just because it’s “normal” in today’s age, should we be in less shock, disgust, or lessen the intensity of emotion towards it?

What’s the harm?

It is not something to just succumb to, we must choose what we allow it to impact because it takes us farther away from the rawness and reality 

It is how we use it and allow it to affect us that any understanding of this relationship can we hope to achieve behavioral change.

Indeed, the world is in a chaotic and cruel place but what happens to us that we lose the deep sense of caring – something that would have been abhorrent to us in the past is not despicable anymore. We accept the fact that this is what the world has become

But it is not about pictures or videos anymore.

We are simply desensitized to tragedies happening around us because they are becoming less like tragedies and more like everyday actions.

It is very easy to point fingers at platforms such as Facebook, & Twitter. But both of them are flexible and adaptable, they are not an omnipotent force governing what the people chose to say or think.

As far as it goes, Social Media platforms are objective viewers of the world.

They are merely tools used by the people.

The question is, what are we allowing ourselves to become desensitized to?

Being sensitive is first and foremost allowing oneself to feel in great depths.

We become lethargic and we cannot hope to change behavior without first implementing a re-sensitization effort.

As our world undergoes anthropogenic changes, it is critical to examine how these changes affect our well-being and our relationship with the natural world.

What do we do when all of the chaos, all of the destruction of the world is shoved in our faces day after day?

We wonder why there isn’t a better way to go about things?

We can’t let our sensitivity be the darkness that sits on our shoulders.

Sensitivity helps us acknowledge our own consciousness.

We need to remember that it is a tool and that we do have a lot of control over it, but without thought, it appears we don’t have much control over it at all.

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS. IS DAN BROWN DISCRIPTION OF EVOLOUTION IN HIS BOOK ORIGIN TRUE.?

24 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., Artificial Intelligence., Dehumanization., Digital age., Evolution, Fourth Industrial Revolution., Genetic engineering, HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Imagination., Life., Natural selection., Purpose of life., Reality., Speed of technology., Survival., Sustaniability, Technologically Enabled Genetics., Technology v Humanity, Technology., The essence of our humanity., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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(Twelve-minute read) 

 All organisms share a few fundamental desires: to survive, to grow.

It is only on the scale of statistics with millions of particles that a particle’s choice shapes up as a predictable radiation half-life. But even individual human wants and desires average out to weirdly predictable laws in aggregate.

If a little one-celled protozoan – a very small package – can have a choice, if a flea has urges, if a starfish has a bias towards certain things, if a mouse can want, then so can the growing, complexifying technological assemblage we have surrounded ourselves with.

Its complexity is approaching the complexity of a microscopic organism.

This tissue consists (so far) of billions of dwellings, millions of factories, billions of hectares of land modified by plant and animal breeding, trillion of motors, thousands of dammed rivers and artificial lakes, hundreds of millions of automobiles coursing along like cells, a quadrillion computer chips, millions of miles of wire, and it consumes 16 terawatts of power and None of these parts operate independently.

No mechanical system can function by itself.

Each bit of technology requires the viability and growth of all the rest of the technology to keep going and there is no communication without the nerves of electricity.

This whole grand system of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a very primitive organism-like system. Call it the technium as in Dan Brown’s book.

The technium is the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture.

It is the current accumulation of all that humans have created. For the last 1,000 years, this technosphere has grown about 1.5% per year. It marks the difference between our lives now, versus 10,000 years ago.

Our society is as dependent on this technological system as nature itself.

Yet, like all systems, it has its own agenda. Like all organisms the technium also wants.

Of course, we humans want certain things from the technium, but at the same time, there is an inherent bias in the technium outside of our wants.

What this means is that when the future trajectory of a particular field of technology is in doubt, “all things being equal” you can guess several things about where it is headed:

The varieties of whatever will increase.

Technologies will start out general in their first version, and specialize over time. We can safely anticipate higher energy efficiency, more compact meaning, and everything getting smarter. All are headed to the ubiquity and free. Over time the fastest moving technology will become more social, more co-dependent, more ecological, more deeply entwined with other technologies. Many technologies require scaffolding tech to be born first. The trend is toward enabling technologies that become tools for inventing new technologies easiest, faster, cheaper.

This is what is suggested in the final chapters of Origin. 

                                              ————————

The origin of us, the modern humans (Homo sapiens), has been a topic of debate for a long time, with the place of origin of humans being great controversial, but where it is going will be more controversial. 

Dan Brown’s book (Origin) advocates that our species has reached or will reach its biological pinnacle in the no so distant future when it will be no longer capable of changing.

Maybe not.  As we are now all so mixed we block evolutionary change and are driving our evolution towards bio-engineer people. 

Evolution is the outcome of the interaction of mutation, genetic recombination, chromosomal abnormalities, reproductive isolation, and natural selection.

We become living computers. 

But it does not mean an improvement in our lot. 

At the end of the day, you’re going to view the events in your day the way you want to not the way they truly are.

THE QUESTION HE ASKS IS ARE we’re all going to be small SPECKS on the tablets of history.  

 

Human Evolution generally depends on natural selection, random genetic drift, mutation, population mating structure, and culture but the faster things die the faster they “mutate” or evolve.

Single-celled organisms evolved into more complex multicellular life, and then man gradually evolved from some unknown mammalian ancestor and reached the pinnacle of evolutionary fabric.

The ways we connect, grow, and develop as individuals are also undergoing rapid and profound changes with future generations raising their kids into a world of default connectedness (technological, emotional, cognitive), in which transparency and integrity become the easiest paths to a fulfilling life.

At the moment all arguments are based on the same tenets of Natural selection.

We don’t always have to do what technology wants, but I think we need to begin with what it wants so that we can work with these forces instead of against them.

High tech needs clean water, clean air, reliable energy just as much as humans want the same.

At the moment we are destroying the planet’s ecosystem.

However, I can imagine singular threads of the future rolling out positive — a massive, continuous, cheap, real-time connection between all humans, or total genetic control over crop plants, or synthetic solar fusion energy — but it is hard to see how all these threads weave into the other threads of climate change, population decrease, habitat loss, human attention overload, robot replacement, and accelerating AI.

Why?

Because we have no shared positive vision of tomorrow. Given what is happening today we are unable to imagine it.

Because power and money are transferring to algorithms like BitCoin and thousands of interconnected computers.

Because there is also a belief that life cannot be trusted.

In this stage, blame is placed on other individuals, society, government, nature, disease, etc., and other elements believed to be outside of one’s conscious control and influence. Control is often motivated by fear and survival. The enemy is perceived as a threat, and because of this, people believe they are morally justified to kill, eliminate or repress that enemy.

It is true as our digital trails become stronger and stronger, that Humanity is entering a Transformation Age, a new era of human civilization.

Recent breakthroughs in the field of quantum physics are revealing that consciousness is primary to our experience of reality, yet there remains no consensus as to the nature of consciousness itself nor to the nature of reality.

Yes, an inescapable dystopian future is entirely possible, but not inevitable because imagination has been unleashed upon the world in a literal sense. 

How the human brain without a chip will evolve over the next million years is anyone’s guess. 

Just in case we get it wrong here is the Human code.

A1 B2 C3 D4 E5 F6 G7 H8 I9 J10 K11 L12 M13 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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