Surely its time for all of us to stop acting as though we are all independent of Life.
To see the future first you have to be able to imagine it.
People might be beginning to understand but the clock is running out faster and faster which is being signaled by nature year after year while banks are commercializing its very existence.
Including us, none of the worlds in the universe are immune to natural limits.
If we and our politicians are still dragging our feet in another ten, twenty, thirty years we will have degrees of climate change that we will simply not be able to manage. The whole world will be in trouble.
As all the bad things re climate change are coming true assisted by the inertia of AI which is getting build into the system this time we will not be able to rely on coal to generate energy,
The chances of Technology (In the form of Algorithms) tackling inequality or driving sustainability are dismal in the extreme. (See previous postings)
The coming global problems that are going to be created by technology are obvious to see, lack of meaningful employment with the resulting immigration causing civil unrest and a return to Nationalism.
Just look at the results of Paris Climate Agreements being adhered too.
A complete allusion due to the rise of Nationalism.
Why?
Because of nationalism, we are now beginning to address the world problems on all the wrong levels.
We need to be looking forward not backward. Make America great, or Brexit Britain the two current prime examples.
We are now all living with technology and no government can control it.
Now more than ever the global capitalistic economy with national politics does not work.
Basic human needs are changing and even if we manage to establish a Basic Wage for all it will not solve who lives or dies.
Human stupidity or violence should never be underestimated. There is no post-truth fake news it has been with us for thousands of years.
No one has the time to analyze all the information that AI is producing other than another machine to make a judgment.
( I often feel that we should all be changing Facebook, Twitter, Google and the like for the information we are supplying them with.)
We have out of date Organisations that are incapable of making anything stick.
So I hear you saying what can be done.
First and for most, we must apply a World Aid Commission on all Profit-seeking Algorithms, on all high-frequency trading, on all sovereign wealth funds acquisitions, on all foreign exchange transaction over $50,00, on all world Lotto prize money etc. (See previous postings)
Then we must create a technology storm room where all programmes relating to technology in all its forms are held with access to all in sundry.
Of course, this is pie in the sky as it will never happen.
Since the dawn of history, the human has not been able to share for the common good of all, but there is one thing that might focus our minds sooner than extinction and that is the price of oil as it runs out.
New media such as Social Media seems to be driving a return to a more pluralistic communication System and Social movement activists may be seen as consumers of these new media, and for this very reason find attention for their demands.
But this, in fact, is open to différent types of interprétation.
So where are we?
As F.M. Powicke said: ” Political and social history are in my view aspects of the same process. Social Life loses half its interest, and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately”
Social media with its networks and its rules petitions and false news that go beyond democratic representation and is achieving exactly what Powicke rightly identified.
Social left politics is in disarray, Right-wing politics on the rise, Liberal politics in the pockets of Economic growth and the technologic revolution.
It is, therefore, time for in-depth research on the interactions between movement organizations and the society of social media that goes beyond the analysis of media bias.
In course of constructing the political landscape of these movements, if there is going to be any chance. We must not allow the world to be governed by the altar of profit, whether its Apple, Microsoft or some other monopoly platform.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Of course, some argue that we have better things to worry about. Climate Change, Wars, Sustainability etc, but Superhuman, might finally create a joke so funny that everyone on Earth dies laughing.
The fact is that there are a lot of unquestioned assumptions when it comes to AI, learning in ways far beyond that of humans.
We can’t really predict what might happen next because superintelligent A.I. may not just think faster than humans, but in ways that are completely different. It may have motivations — feelings, even — that we cannot fathom. It could rapidly solve the problems of aging, of human conflict, of space travel. We might see a dawning utopia.
There is one thing for sure it has been set in motion and now we are waiting for the results.
In the meantime, there is something unpleasant about A.I. and that is Humanity is already losing control of artificial intelligence which could have catastrophic consequences for civilization.
For example “Deep learning”, is a powerful tool for solving problems. It helps us tag our friends on Facebook, provides assistance on our smartphones using Siri, Cortana or Google.
Deep learning has helped computers get better at recognizing objects than a person.
The military is pouring millions into the technology so it can be used to steer ships, control drones and destroy targets.
And there’s hope it will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make traders billionaires by reading the stock market and totally transform the world we live in.
Indeed whether you call it Deep learning, it could be the last invention that humanity will ever need to make.
If they can’t figure out how the algorithms (the formulas which keep computers performing the tasks we ask them to do) work, they won’t be able to predict when they fail.
The Question is are we going to rely on a Google AI ethics board or we agree on a World Technological Strong Room where all AI programs are stored and available to everyone.
It’s now or never.
All human comments appriciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
There is little doubt that future A.I. will be capable of doing significant damage.
In the near future, we may indeed need a very new perspective on the nature of consciousness, as quantum mechanics is proving with a narrative of the self-interacting with the world.
Even if we manage through technology to artificially create some kind of limited consciousness it does not mean we understand it as it is an emergent property of very complex neuronal patterns.
It is easy to imagine an unconstrained software application that spreads throughout the Internet, severely mucking up our most efficient and relied upon medium for global exchange.
However, the question is will we see a machine that is aware of itself and its surroundings. That could take in and process massive amounts of data in real time?
This will require intentional behavior from an A.I. Therefore it would have a mind, as intentionality can only arise when something possesses its own beliefs, desires, and motivations.
Though computers and robots are more advanced than ever, they’re still just tools. They are unaware of their own existence and can only perform tasks for which they were programmed.
But what if they could think for themselves?
Brains and computers work very differently. Both compute, but only one understands.
A strict symbol-processing machine can never be a symbol-understanding machine
Conscious machines would raise troubling legal and ethical problems.
Would a conscious machine be a “person” under the law?
Should “conscious” be thought of in the way we think of humans, and even some animals?
IE: Information received through any of the six senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, or feeling.
Your conscious mind is continually observing and categorizing what is going on around you. It has no memory, and it can only hold one thought at a time and deal with it either positively or negatively, “yes” or “no.”
Is consciousness the accepting new information, storing and retrieving old information and cognitive processing of it all into perceptions and actions.
If that’s right, then one day machines will indeed be the ultimate consciousness.
They’ll be able to gather more information than a human, store more than many libraries, access vast databases in milliseconds and compute all of it into decisions more complex, and yet more logical, than any person ever could.
So where are we?
Is consciousness more about human behavior that cannot be computed by a machine. Creativity, for example, and the sense of freedom people possess don’t appear to come from logic or calculations.
Then again consciousness and the physical world are complementary aspects of the same reality.
When a person observes, or experiments on, some aspect of the physical world, that person’s conscious interaction causes discernible change.
Although it requires brains to become real is consciousness a thing that exists by itself – there had to be something before the Big bang perhaps space had or has a conscious.
Consciousness alone, however, cannot make physical changes to the world, but dreams or visions can. After all, we experience the world subjectively.
If a computer can’t be conscious, then how can a brain?” A simulation of a brain is still not a physical brain. After all, it is a purely physical object that works according to physical law. It even uses electrical activity to process information, just like a computer.
Some of these questions have to do with technology; others have to do with what consciousness actually is.
We left with the possibility that new biological structures that are, or could become, conscious are yet to be discovered.
The most accurate of brain simulations will not yield minds, nor will software programs produce consciousness. Therefore we will not have machines with what we call consciousness.
Human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot–is a quite a leap.
However, we could be confronted with this kind of technology so don’t lose your mind too soon.
All conscious human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
The vast majority of us now live in cities far removed from nature, walking around with our faces in smartphones connected to the cloud by algorithms sporting fancy names like Twitter, Facebook etc.
I am sure you have read or hear that we are now connected more than ever in our history, but most of this connectivity is false. As amazing as this seems, this is just the beginning of what we can expect.
Mobile technology has seen a meteoric rise in adoption since the debut of the first iPhone in 2007. Seven years have given us significant advancements in mobile technology, but relative to the span of recorded human history, seven years is still a short time.
We’re barely skimming the surface of what we can expect from technology.
This very moment we live in a world in which news is broken in under 140 characters and people are more driven by bouncing icons on their mobile phones than what can be experienced outside of their 3.5” screen.
Google attempts to understand our behaviors to deliver more relevant information and content to better connect with users through their various services.
As connected as we are now, there is still a fundamental disconnect between people and the companies that attempt to reach them through these technologies.
We may one day reach a point where true conversations can happen between man and machine, but for now, it is still up to the people, the marketers and brand ambassadors of the world, to drive this human connection.
So what does all of this mean?
The world used to be really small. People were limited to what happened in their city or village and every now and then, if the event was truly important, the news spread far enough. They wrote letters that would take months to reach their final destination if ever at all. The information was kept by few. You would hear from countries directly involved in the recent history of yours and you would barely ever make it very far from home. And even if you did, it was not an everyday thing or an everyday decision for anyone.
This was the life less than 100 years ago.
And to put things in perspective, humans have been on earth for around 200.000 years and the Earth herself is 4.543 billion years old.
So we can agree that the way we live now is fairly recent.
“We are now so disconnected” with the madness being amplified year after year with so much information it leaves us with 3 choices:
You will listen to it as if this had nothing to do with you what so ever.
Or
You hide under your blankets. Forever. And deny it. Live in the bubble. Proclaim that all is well. Refuse to see the disconnection to the point that you are unable to move or function.
Or
We can take a stand, and make a choice.
We can listen enough to know and make an informed choice and then we can choose to do something about it.
This is where the greatness is found.
There are no absolutes in science but we have to begin to trust the science of climate change.
Why?
Because it is untestable that this is the best planet we know, and it is clear beyond any doubt that the risk to us all is climate change.
The move beyond the land and our disconnection from nature are impressive… but it is also one of the main threats facing us all.
With or without the Paris climate agreements: We are still pumping 70 million tons of CO2 into our atmosphere a day.
Rest assure that climate change will not all happen at once.
It must now be treated as a continual threat with no debate.
We exist by nature consent not the other way around and the sooner we learn it the better.
It is the time that we put sustainability on all Education syllabus.
It is the time for all of us to demand that all-weather forecasting slots on our televisions screens at least once every three months addressed climate change.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Do you ever stop to ask yourself why you should trust the information or decisions that algorithms produce?
AI smartphones will soon be standard, using machine learning from the cloud and sooner than later smartphones will have personalized algorithms that will run even when offline.
These algorithms will be own by the companies that both sell and manufacture the phone and will, therefore, carry inbuilt biases depending on which platforms they are attached to.
Imagine a cheap little device that can compute as much data as all the brains in the world. It will have a deep and irreversible affect on everyone and there is no way of predicting what exactly will happen as the developers of such a device will have no idea what it is doing.
How far do we want to go- Robots that obey no matter what with us blind human as their allies.
Today the world faces a number of hugely complex challenges, from global warming to conflicts to nuclear weapons to rampant inequality. But one the real seismic change is how we are going to respond to each other when we all trusting algorithms to make decisions on our behalf.
Now is it the time to put in place world standards and regulations that govern the use of all biological data.
THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE WORLD IS GOING TO NEEDS AS MUCH COMPUTER POWER POSSIBLE TO TACKLE ITS PENDING PROBLEMS.
HOWEVER, IT SHOULD BE A HUMAN RIGHT TO INSPECT THE SOURCE CODES OF ANY TECHNOLOGY THAT HAS BIOLOGICAL DATA IN ITS TARGETED SOFTWARE ALGORITHMS.
IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE COST OF POWER/ENERGY WILL DRIVE THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY AND ITS SYSTEMS IN THE WORKPLACE AND COMMERCIAL WORLD MARKETS NOT TO MENTION SURVEILLANCE EITHER BY GOVERNMENTS OR OTHER ORGANISATIONS.
NOW IS THE TIME TO START DEMANDING STANDARDS.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
If you look at the direction the world is going in life itself is about to break out of organic life into to nonorganic life.
If you were expecting some kind of warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.
In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.
Another word we will have different biological classes of people with new types of gods with new tec religions that produce new bodies, brains, and minds.
There will be no more going to heaven.
It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world. There will be new stories, new thinking to match the new technologies.
Algorithms will be the new form of Communism.
These days we die not because it is in our DNA or Genes but because of Techo problems.
Calico a Google subsidiary is a research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan.
Its ambition is to solve the problem of human health/death.
It’s all being done right before our eyes.
Algorithms can now detect personalities via human language conversation.
What’s next? Will WW3 be launched via algorithm?
Perhaps not but inequality will be the norm with Fundamentalism gone.
The power of algorithms has spread far beyond Wall Street and now touches all of us–starting with today’s young innovators.
Algorithms are doing a lot more than automating stock trades.
Most people don’t know that there are algorithms that decide how customer service calls get routed or how customer service requests will be treated. When people call these big companies like their health insurer or telecom company, they’re actually being categorized, sliced, diced and parsed by a bot.
It’s incredible to think that the words someone chooses on a given morning will forever change how that company treats him or her.
These algorithms don’t just affect people involved in computer science.
No-one would doubt that Google system has made searching a whole lot easier, but at what price? As algorithms spread their influence beyond machines to shape the raw landscape around them, it might be time to work out exactly how much they know and whether we still have time to tame them.
Algorithm change because they know they’re getting gamed.
Algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything.
They can save lives, make things easier and conquer chaos but are they putting too much control in the hands of corporations and governments, perpetuate bias, create filter bubbles, cut choices, creativity, and serendipity, and could result in greater unemployment.
How far Google’s data-crunching algorithm go in harvesting our personal data and shaping the web will be the Story of the Future and because our brains are becoming more and more reliant on the internet for memory
The Google story could well be the god of the future.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
We now have a car in space at a cost of $90 million. That’s $639.80 per pound thanks to Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy SpaceX rocket. The next most powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, runs about $350 million per launch.
It boasts 27 engines, more than any other working rocket has ever used, which together create a combined 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Falcon Heavy is capable of taking 68 tonnes of equipment into an orbit close to the Earth.
With a world in turmoil, the new age space race is upon us.
Next, we need traffic lights.
Space debris is rapidly becoming one of the biggest problems we face – there are more than 150m objects that need tracking to ensure as few collisions with working spacecraft as possible.
The amount of kerosene in three Falcon 9 rockets is roughly 440 tonnes and RP-1 has a 34% carbon content, which is a lot of carbon dioxide when burnt.
However this amount of carbon is a drop in the ocean compared to global industrial emissions as a whole, but if the SpaceX’s plan for a rocket launch every two weeks comes to fruition, this amount of carbon (approximately 4,000 tonnes per year) will rapidly become a bigger problem.
Now for a bit of history:
For the 1967 Apollo mission to the moon, Saturn V rocket’s first stage carried 203,400 gallons of kerosene fuel and 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen, totaling over 500,000 gallons of fuel for getting out of the atmosphere alone. The second stage carried another 260,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and 80,000 gallons of liquid oxygen. The third stage carries 66,700 gallons of liquid hydrogen and 19,359 gallons of liquid oxygen.
All told the rocket that achieved one small step for a man and one giant leap for mankind held just under 950,000 gallons of fuel.
Falcon 9’s first stage uses 39,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and almost 25,000 gallons of kerosene, while the second stage uses 7,300 gallons of liquid oxygen and 4,600 gallons of kerosene. Combined, it makes lean mean 75,900 gallons of fuel.
On the other hand.
The Saturn V’s first stage lasted 180 seconds So. The first stage consumed 1,400,000 pounds of RP-1 and 3,178,000 pounds of LOX.
That’s 4,578,000 pounds of the expanded chemical in total.
The mass of most rockets is more than 95% fuel.
Let me congratulate Mr. Musk and remind him of his own words ” Only a carbon tax—not innovation, conservation, or renewable energy—will accelerate the transition from carbon-producing fossil fuels to sustainable energy.”
My point is:
Perhaps it might have been better putting his energy and all that energy into something with a bit more imagination.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
( A twelve-minute read that could be the answer to Poverty)
You don’t have to be Einstein to recognize that inequality in all its forms is what wrong with our world. It haunts every minute of our lives no matter who you are, however ‘Ending world poverty is an unrealistic goal’
It is policy not aid which matters most in today’s world.
Why?
Because the politics of inequality in the future will be as important as the economics of the Future.
Relative poverty is unpreventable without tackling inequalities.
The aspirations of delivering a world where the quality of education, healthcare and national infrastructure available to every person is sufficient to bestow on them meaningful hope and ambition is hopefully the aim of “development”. I emphasize the word hopeful.
In a world in which a billion people live on $1.26 a day, with climate immigration increasing and technology Algorithms blundering the world’s wealth.
We’re going to have to realize sooner than later that if we are to avoid or end violent conflicts ( That these days has inequality as their triggers) there is only one course to follow and that is to spread the wealth of the world fairly.
Poverty is a perception – it is a status which is bestowed on people who have relatively little – even in societies of plenty. Just look at the prevailing political view on aid to middle-income countries that contain hundreds of millions of desperately poor people.
We all know that the chances of ending poverty altogether are zero.
It would potentially cost some of the world’s biggest businesses billions and would need to be agreed by a group of world leaders who, if they all went out to dinner, would be sat around the table with their calculators out arguing about how to split the bill.
In a world driven by Greed, Advertising, and now more and more by filtered Social Media, we are becoming increasingly desensitized to the blight of others.
For those working in organisations that are dependent on official development assistance, it is hard to talk about ending their dependency, but the 21st century demands the challenge is not ducked.
Too much negativity and accusation of not making any progress with aid money. Comments like Shit Holes, which imply that aid is no longer necessary are undermining our Aid agencies, which are becoming an increasingly endangered species.
So if we accept that we won’t be satisfied if we overcome absolute poverty, where do we go next?
The closer we get to ending extreme poverty, the harder it is going to be to do it.
Imagine how different the world would be if the focus of aid spending was not “ending $1.25 dollar a day poverty” but “creating a fairer and more equitable world”.
Relative poverty will always exist and it should always be at the forefront of efforts to improve our world because it demands more than the bare minimum solution, or Asshole Trumps.
Decisions taken on tax regimes, remittance flows and trade concessions are now not the fastest route to assist poor countries in their development. Inequality is at the root of the reasons why.
So in this world of inequalities is there any way of assisting development in a meaningful way.
Gadgets like tablets, smartphones and not-so-smart phones are multiplying five times faster than we are, with our population growing at a rate of about two people per second, or 1.2% annually.
The world is home to 7.2 billion gadgets, and they’re multiplying five times faster than we are.
The Mobile phone has done more for Africa than all Aid. No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone.
The number of mobile phone users in the world is expected to pass the five billion mark by 2019. In 2016, an estimated 62.9 percent of the population worldwide already owned a mobile phone.
The mobile phone penetration is forecasted to continue to grow, rounding up to 67 percent by 2019.
By 2019, China is expected to reach almost 1.5 billion mobile connections and India almost 1.1 billion.
The number of smart phone users worldwide is expected to grow by one billion in a time span of five years.
It’s not that every person in the world has a mobile device, far from it; more than half of the population don’t have a mobile phone.
There are around 250 million machine-to-machine connections.
That may only be a fraction of the total number of mobile connections, but it was enough to knock us people off our perch in the man vs machine superiority stakes.
Just imaging what would happen if we were to equip everyone in the world (of voting age) with a mobile phone that could receive a basic income on a monthly basis.
Each phone with its unique pin.
With a phone that supplies a basic income we would witnessing a transformation in the way people relate to their governments.
A game-changer.
Not just a safer way to store money, but to reduce the need for Aid, to cut out corruption, to empower the poor, to eradicate inequality, to encourage closing the digital divide with the rest of the world. To give a sense of a future, information, opportunity and choice. To lift young people are currently trapped in poverty, often exacerbated by the need to contribute to their family incomes.
Explosive growth in mobile broadband use across continents would improve transparency and give a voice to citizens.
They would have a major economic, social and political impact.
So instead of the World Bank, the IMF, the Warren Buffets, the Bill Gates, the Mark Zckerbergs, the UN, Oxfam, the WTO, technology has the potential to lift people out of poverty.
There is no reason that a mobile money basic income could not be achieved with the application of a world aid commission of 0.05%. ( See previous posts)
Applying such a commission: (On all profit seeking Algorithms, on all High Frequency Trading, on all Foreign Exchange Transactions over $50,000, on all Sovereign Wealth Funds acquisitions, to mention just a few of the existing Capitalist instruments that are solely designed for Profit.) would create a perpetual Fund of trillions.
Traditional banking is out of reach for many people in rural areas of developing countries, but mobile is bringing people into the financial system in droves. Financial inclusion, starting with a humble savings account, enables people to start businesses, invest in education and weather bad times.
Mobile still has hurdles to jump before it can reach all the lives of people most in need of the technology: Namely, reliable, affordable energy and comprehensive network coverage. However you can rest assured if aid was directed to placing a communication satellite in orbit to service Africa or Latin America cell, phone use could help developing the countries within these Continents to plan electrical infrastructure.
There are in the world already a enough used mobile phones to supply most of Africa ( Pop. 1,273,903, 985)
Unfortunately there seems to be a major barrier to people turning in their old phones to be recycled.
To give a couple of examples, a recent survey found that 63% of Canadians have an unused phone at home. And in the UK alone, people are holding on to an estimated 76.8 million unused phones.
( A twenty-minute read if you want a world worth living in)
Most of us were taught that poverty started with the Industrial Revolution.
For the most part this is true but it did not happen in the isolation of the British Empire.
This story is powerful in its simplicity but if we rewind to about 1500 people living in South America, India, and Asia were much better off than Europeans. In fact Europe was just emerging from the dark ages.
China and India controlled most if not nearly all the world economy.
The Question is how did this change and why?
I put it down to Christopher Columbus and shoddy geographical calculations.
On his second outing in the Caribbean he was looking for gold and as a result the Spanish invasion killed must of the islands inhabitants. Then came a bloke named Cortes who ripped off the Aztec of Mexico,followed by Pizarro yet another Spanish conquistador with an unquenchable thirst for gold.
A total of over 185,000 kilograms of gold and 100 million kilograms of silver were pilfer from Latin America and pumped into Spain and then used to pay for Spanish war and debts.
(A 100 million kilograms of silver invested back then @ 5% would amount to $165 trillion to-day. More than double the world’s total GDP to-day)
This wealth allowed Europe to grow its economic wealth beyond the China or India.
The result was Europeans outsourced its labour into wars and colonization reducing the population of the rest of the world by slavery, epidemic diseases and massacres while enjoying the rich life.
( Free Slavery labour benefited the USA Colonies by over 222.5 million hours) Britain pay compensation of over £20m to slave owners equivalent to £300 million to-day which tell us nothing of the total value they produced.
The Silver was turned into cotton and sugar and spices. Cotton being the key raw material for the European Industrial Revolution.
The Surviving slaves got nothing.
Indeed without the slave colonies of the New world there would have being no market for the Industrial goods.
You could say that the above is rather a simplistic explanation but development in Africa and Latin America was effectively stolen by Europe.
So where are we to-day.
Almost half the world — over 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day.
The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.
Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.
1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 children in the world). 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health services. 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (or roughly 29,000 children per day).
Poverty is the state for the majority of the world’s people and nations. Why is this?
Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization and technology are global decisions, policies, and practices.
Formulated by the rich and powerful.
These can be leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions, and influential people.
As a result, in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.
The poorest are also typically marginalized from society and have little representation or voice in public and political debates, making it even harder to escape poverty.
The amount the world spends on military, financial bailouts and other areas that benefit the wealthy, compared to the amount spent to address the daily crisis of poverty and related problems are often staggering.
To attract investment, poor countries enter a spiraling race to the bottom to see who can provide lower standards, reduced wages and cheaper resources.
This has increased poverty and inequality for most people. It also forms a backbone to what we today call globalization. As a result, it maintains the historic unequal rules of trade.
Now we are looking at a new form of Poverty currently being created by a few monopolies. I call it Algorithm Poverty.
Around the world, in rich or poor nations, poverty has always been present. In most nations today, inequality—the gap between the rich and the poor—is quite high and often widening.
The causes are numerous, including a lack of individual responsibility, bad government policy, exploitation by people and businesses with power and influence, or some combination of these and other factors.
Inequality will affect social cohesion and lead to problems such as increasing crime and violence. Almost half the world—over three billion people—live on less than $2.50 a day and at least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day:
And we wonder why the world is in a state of chaos.
Around 21,000 children die every day around the world. World hunger is a terrible symptom of world poverty.
Food aid (when not for emergency relief) can actually be very destructive on the economy of the recipient nation.
Free, subsidized, or cheap food, below market prices undercuts local farmers, who cannot compete and are driven out of jobs and into poverty, further slanting the market share of the larger producers such as those from the US and Europe.
Poverty leads to hunger. There are many inter-related issues causing hunger. They include land rights and ownership, diversion of land use to non-productive use, increasing emphasis on export-oriented agriculture, inefficient agricultural practices, war, famine, drought, over-fishing, poor crop yields, etc.
Solving world hunger in the conventional sense (of providing/growing more food etc) will not tackle poverty that leads to hunger in the first place.
Further, there is a risk of continuing the poverty and dependency without realizing it, because the act of attempting to provide more food etc can appear so altruistic in motive.
To solve world hunger in the long run, poverty alleviation is required.
For the first time in our history Technology offers us a chance to distribute the world’s wealth fairly.
Without Trade agreements, Aid, Repayment, Corruption, Power Brokering by NGOs, United Nations Begging, Bureaucratic interference, or any other hidden agendas.
It could be both implemented and funded by the very Algorithms that are going to spread poverty. ( See previous Posts)
It requires the large capitalist monopoly platforms to supply a free basic mobile phone to every person register as citizen of a country world-wide.
On registration the people would be allocated a pin number.
This pin would allow them to access a monthly Basic non repayable no strings attached Income payment.
There is no other way of ensuring that our world can fight poverty and climate change.
Most of the causes of hunger are found in global politics.
People are hungry not because the population is growing so fast that food is becoming scarce, but because people cannot afford it.
The number of people overweight or obese is now rivaling the number of people suffering from hunger around the world.
Its time to get off our fat asses and share our wealth not push it around to create more wealth.
If you want a world worth something in the future now is the time to start creating it. Solve World Poverty once and
For all.
It can be done with the press of a button.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.
There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.
The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.
In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.
Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.
New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.
All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.
Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.
All need software in the form of algorithms to run.
AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.
Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?
One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
Not surprising.
So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.
That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.
Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this.
Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.
So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.
( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)
Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)
It operates through the following segments:
Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.
Market Cap As of May 2017
$507.5 Billion
Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.
Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:
An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.
Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.
It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.
Amazon:
The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.
Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.
eBay Inc: (PayPal)
There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:
The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:
Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)
Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.
Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.)
A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.
More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.
Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.
These are the main contenders as we know them to-day
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So the Question is:
Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.
Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)
At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.
While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.
Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.
One could say that:
Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff, Google represents doming down.
All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.
So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.
I think Not.
In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.
Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us. Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.
The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.
“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”
The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches – is Google.
Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.
Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.
Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.
Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.
Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.
Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.
Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.
By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud. With one winner.
The Google Monopoly.
Once a Google client always a Google client.
How do you stop using Google?
Already impossible.
Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.
Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.
It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.
Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact. It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)
Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?
The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.
Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.
In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.
On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.
Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.
I feel that this will change in the coming years.
All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.
Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.
After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.
It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?
Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.
So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.
= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?
= Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?
= Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?
Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.
Why might this be the case – and does it matter?
Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.
It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.
It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;
Soon, however, things move on to new realms.
Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.
An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.
Social media however has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.
However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.
It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.
It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.
Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.
As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.
The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:
The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.
This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.
Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.
Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.
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What happens to our online materials at death.
Finally: Capitalism can never be ethical.
There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.
If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service) is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.
Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.
Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.
My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.
Google it.
All human comments much appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
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Let me congratulate Mr. Musk and remind him of his own words ” Only a carbon tax—not innovation, conservation, or renewable energy—will accelerate the transition from carbon-producing fossil fuels to sustainable energy.”
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