( A two-minute read – the first of a series that looks at our World Organisations.)
If we take a selfie of the world looking back over the last ten years can we be proud of what we have achieved.
Where better to start than with the United Nations our main World Organisation.
The former Prime Minister of Portugal, Antonio Guterres until recently was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, he is now the new United Nations Secretary General, after a third security council secret ballot on Monday.
The United Nations has saved millions of lives and boosted health and education across the world. But it is bloated, undemocratic – and very expensive.
There are about 1,200 country offices of the UN around the world.
There are 100 countries with more than 10 UN country offices in each country.
Half of the United Nations money goes for the operational expenses of these office, leaving what is actually a minuscule amount of money for programming or key activities. Even accounting for inflation, annual UN expenditure is 40 times higher than it was in the early 1950s. Its regular budget, which is agreed every two years and goes to pay for the cost of administering the UN – including mouth-watering daily allowances which result in many of its bureaucrats being far better paid than American civil servants – has more than doubled over the past two decades to $5.4bn.
But that is just a small portion of the total spend.
Peacekeeping costs another $9bn a year, with 120,000 peacekeepers deployed mostly in Africa. Some missions have lasted more than a decade. And then there are the voluntary contributions from individual governments that go to fund a large part of disaster relief, development work and agencies such as UNICEF. They have risen sixfold over the past 25 years to $28.8bn. And yet even at that level, some agencies are warning that they are operating on the brink of bankruptcy.
The organisation now encompasses 17 specialised agencies, 14 funds and a secretariat with 17 departments employing 41,000 people.
As the UN marks the 70th anniversary of its founding this autumn, those imperfections – and how the UN addresses them – have come to the fore as the organisation struggles to define its role in the 21st century.
It has become overly bureaucratic and slow in the way it dealt with development issues.
What that tells you is that modern management and modern strategic planning is late coming to the UN.
The UN’s taste for setting goals at the expense of delivering results failed the poorest and most vulnerable.
Cooperation between organisations has been hindered by competition for funding, mission creep. The organisation has grown so big that at times it is working against itself. It is so fragmented that each agency has its own IT system. About one-third of the UN operations in 60 countries had a budget of less than $2m per agency.
However the UN cannot be ignored. Neither can the UN’s huge logistical capabilities, such as the World Food Programme’s airlifts, be matched by any private organisation.
The United Nations of today is hugely different from the United Nations 70 years ago, and therefore it is very important the United Nations changes and adapts itself to changing circumstances.
What we have now is another multiplication of targets and goals which are an extraordinarily comprehensive assessment of what’s needed to be done but there’s no operational clarity around them. Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to monitor it? Who’s accountable for it?
There seem little point in saying anything to the UN about what they should be doing, as it is out of date gossip shop, with no responsibility. Where is the conversation happening which says that, in 2016 and beyond, what is the United Nations there for?”
What should be the core activities of the UN that should receive a significant proportion of the regular funding of the UN?” In the context of what’s happening today, a few million is not going to make any difference. ( See previous posts on 0.05% Aid Commission)
But the bigger obstacle to reform perhaps comes from the UN members states themselves. Which raises what many consider the real obstacle to remaking the UN for the 21st century – that its most powerful body is still locked in 1945.
The five permanent members, the victors over Germany and Japan, hold the whip hand through vetoes.
For all the noise from the US, Britain and France in particular about modernising the UN, they show no willingness to give up the power they wield sometimes in ways governed entirely by political interest.
Since 1982, the US has used its security council veto to block resolutions critical of Israel 35 times. The total number of resolutions blocked by other permanent members over the same period is 27. More recently, Russia and China have used their vetoes to block UN intervention in Syria.
There is little doubt the Mr Antonio Guterres with or without Artificial Intelligence is going to have a lot more refugees on his hands.
The United Nations is an organization of sovereign States, which voluntarily join the UN to work for world peace. There are six main organs of the United Nations—the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Trusteeship Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat.
It’s time to break up the Organisation into specific separate Units and to do away with the veto powers that elected him.
John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955. The notion of intelligent automata, as friend or foe, dates back to ancient times.
You might think with the state of the world we live in that this is some what a naive subject. If you are like me, when it comes to Algorithms I have little or no understanding other than they are beginning to reshape my living life.
Ironically, in the age of the internet and unparalleled access to information, the most critical questions are out-of-bounds.
While the web has broken down the boundaries between different nations, so you can read a blog by anybody, anywhere in the world, on the other hand all our laws and governments remain in national boundaries. Outside of that we have very limited amount of effective governance, collaboration and co-operation and understanding.
Moreover, while we are clearly pretty good at producing knowledge, using this knowledge – that is separating the wheat from the chaff and integrating this together into something useful – is a big problem particularly in fields such as global sustainability.
One of the things we ought not to do is to press full steam ahead on building super intelligence without giving thought to the potential risks. Even if the odds of a super intelligence arising are very long, perhaps it’s irresponsible to take the chance.
As far as I am aware there are no current regulation or laws governing the use of AI. It is penetrating all nooks and nannies, de-privatizing us, turning us into points at job interviews, with algorithm replaced the loan officer.
They are fundamentally reshape the nature of work.
So what will happen when a computer becomes capable of independently devising ways to achieve goals, it would very likely be capable of introspection—and thus able to modify its software and make itself more intelligent. In short order, such a computer would be able to design its own hardware avoiding any laws, ethics, or any human morality.
A case in kind is in the area of autonomous weapon systems ie Drones.
While I am fully aware that the world faces many problems that could be solved by Artificial Intelligence we must before it’s too late give AI a set of values. And not just any values, but those that are in the best interest of humanity. This is the essential task of our age and since humans will never fully agree on anything, we’ll sometimes need it to decide for us—to make the best decisions for humanity as a whole.
How, then, do we program those values into our (potential) super intelligences? What sort of mathematics can define them? These are a few of the problems.
We’re basically telling a god how we’d like to be treated. How to proceed?
It’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction,” Hawking and others wrote in a recent article.” But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.
There is no doubting in many ways, AI innovations could simply help scientists to do their jobs more efficiently – thereby cutting the crippling time lag between science and society. They would have the insight and patience (measured in picoseconds) to solve the outstanding problems of nanotechnology and spaceflight; they would improve the human condition and let us upload our consciousness into an immortal digital form.
Algorithms that ‘learn’ from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.
Indeed if humanity has to leave earth there will be a need for such machines.
For example, could machine learning algorithms delve deep into the previous five assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, based on research published since the last report, provide rudimentary conclusions of the sixth report?
Potential future uses of AI programs like AlphaGo could include improving smartphone assistants such as Apple’s Siri, medical diagnostics, and possibly even working with human scientists in research.
AI could have many benefits, such as helping to aid the eradication of war, disease and poverty.
But if we want unlimited intelligence, we had better figure out how to align computers with human needs before the intelligence of machines exceed that of humans—a moment that futurists call the singularity. It is vital that humans programme robots to understand the “full spectrum of human values”, because the stakes are very high. After all, if we develop an artificial intelligence that doesn’t share the best human values, it will mean we weren’t smart enough to control their own creations.
Technology is take on increasingly personal roles in people’s daily lives, and will learn human habits and predict people’s needs. Anyone with an iPhone is probably familiar with Apple’s digital assistant Siri.
For example, AI could make it easier for the company to deliver targeted advertising, which some users already find unpalatable. And AI-based image recognition software could make it harder for users to maintain anonymity online.
If we look at current state of affairs a 2013 study by Oxford University estimated that Artificial Intelligence could take over nearly half of all jobs in the United States in the near future. Automation has become an increasingly common sight the number of robots in factories across the world rose by 225,000 last year, and will rise even further in the coming years – and it is not just in manufacturing.
AI is only getting better, as computational intelligence techniques keep on improving, becoming more accurate and faster due to giant leaps in processor speeds.
Perhaps we should first ask, does science need disrupting? Yes.
Access to reliable knowledge – the academic literature – is becoming a fundamental bottleneck for humanity. There are now over 50 million research papers and this is growing at a rate of over one million a year. Over 70,000 papers have been published on a single protein – the tumor suppressor p53.
How can any academic keep up? And how can anyone outside of academia make sense of it all – the public, policy makers, business people, doctors or teachers? Well, most academics struggle and the public can’t – most research is locked behind pay walls.
With techniques like deep learning (Deep learning,” that allow a computer to do things such as recognize patterns from massive amounts of data. For example, in June 2012, Google created a neural network of 16,000 computers that trained itself to recognize a cat by looking at millions of cat images. For a computer to recognize a picture of a cat, the machine has no volition, no sense of what cat-ness is or what else is happening in the picture, and none of the countless other insights that humans have.) laying the groundwork for computers that can automatically increase their understanding of the world around them.
However possessing human like intelligence remains a long way off and what is called the singularity,” when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence is still in the realms of science fiction.
That said Stephen Hawking has warned that because people would be unable to compete with an advanced AI, it “could spell the end of the human race.”
AI misunderstand what computers are doing when we say they’re thinking or getting smart.
Considering that the singularity may be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity, not enough research is being devoted to understanding its impacts.
In some areas, AI is no more advanced than a toddler.
Yet, when asked, many AI researchers admit that the day when machines rival human intelligence will ultimately come. The question is, are people ready for it?
Regardless of how artificial intelligence develops in the years ahead, almost all pundits agree that the world will forever change as a result of advances in AI.
The AI genie has already been released from the bottle and there is no way to get it back in.
No one is suggesting that anything like super intelligence exists now. In fact, we still have nothing approaching a general-purpose artificial intelligence or even a clear path to how it could be achieved. Recent advances in AI, from automated assistants such as Apple’s Siri to Google’s driverless cars, also reveal the technology’s severe limitations.
The problem is that a true AI would give any one of these companies( Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, you name them) an unbelievable advantage.
For example, Google has the Google app, available for Android phones or iPhones, which bills itself as providing “the information you want, when you need it.
Google now can show traffic information during your daily commute, or give you shopping list reminders while you’re at the store. You can ask the app questions, such as “should I wear a sweater tomorrow?” and it will give you the weather forecast. Given how much personal data from users Google stores in the form of emails, search histories and cloud storage, the company’s deep investments in artificial intelligence may seem disconcerting.
Advances in technology will push more and more companies to favour capital over labour, they will leave the majority behind.
That may be about to change. Here below are five ways AI looks set to disrupt science.
The short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”
After all, AI systems aren’t consumers and consumers are the sine qua non of economic growth. Hairdressers are judged to be less likely to be out of a job in 20 years than economists.
Perhaps the problem is in the description ( Artificial Intelligence) AI intelligence will not necessarily lead to sentience.
But what if intelligent machines are really just a new branch on the tree of evolution that has led us from the original Protists to where we are today?”
A species to be aided in its evolutionary process by another species called us.
The idea that computers will eventually develop the ability to speak and think with a conscious.
It’s a race between technology and education.
The mindset of the government and people have not adjusted to view the future, even though technology is exploding this decade into a world of the Internet of Things and the propulsion into artificial intelligence.
No one gains if the world’s Intelligence ends up in the hands of a few.
As artificial intelligence becomes a much more “dominant” force in future it will poses “commercial and ethical questions”
What, after all, is an android but a puppet with a computer program pulling its strings?
When I tell my phone I’m hungry and feel like eating Chinese it raises a really interesting question: Who is Siri working for? Is Siri working for me? Is it Siri’s job to find me the best Chinese meal or is Siri working for Apple and trying to get as much money as possible for Apple by auctioning the fact that they have a hungry consumer attached to it and desperate for food? The ethical debate is about who does AI work for.”
Every time you open a new social media site you can create completely new rules of the road and I think we’ll move beyond some of the things we have today.
One of the big challenges will be preserving those existing identities while creating a global culture.
We need a global culture to be able to talk about refugees and finance and tackle issues like global warming and science, and cure cancer. For these huge challenges we need to use the web to work as a whole planet, like one team.
What will make a massive difference is if we manage to design democratic, and scientific and collaborative systems which allow us to function as a planet.”
David Levy believes that, in the 2050 age, human and robots can be able to marriages with each other and it will be legal activity in many countries. But that’s was only a someone’s opinion, not a theory based or any legal law.
Why most AI are Female’s ? “.
What is hard is imagining how we humans will fit into a robot-filled future.
Finally, there is no end to the ways that humans can productively work with one another if they are no longer driven by the conflicts of scarcity. Perhaps we will learn to love our robots.
An after thought. 6/Oct/ 2016.
There is extraordinary potential for AI in the future.
But it’s not the future that I wish to address rather the present.
AI is already making problematic judgements that are producing significant social, cultural, and economic impacts in people’s everyday lives. AI and decision -support systems are embedded in a wide array of social institutions from influencing who is released from jail to shaping the news we see.
The results or impact is hard to see. It is critical to find rigorous ways to make them visible and accountable. We need to know when automated decisions are materially affecting our lives, and if necessary , to contest them.
This won’t be achievable by the United Nations, or National Governments.
Will there be enough good jobs to keep the global economy growing?
This is not the same as acting as a food stuff, where the existence of an earlier species acts as the food or fuel that allows those higher up the chain to exist and evolve.
selective breeding (unnatural selection), where human intervention is used to provide a characteristic,
the first option [is the] the evolution of some very clever tools, weapons, and body parts that become an integral part of the human species tree; or the second option … a new branch on the tree of evolution; or the third option an extension of the human branch.”
The greatest worry is the number of jobs that artificial intelligence systems are poised to take over.
Most of the best jobs that will emerge will require close collaboration between humans and computers.
As some professions become obsolete, more knowledge may not lead to higher pay either, because everyone will be bidding for the same work, which could drive wages down.
such as the promise of a guaranteed income to ensure people do not fall into the cracks. Others argue that a negative income tax would be better because it incentivises work.
Our world is quickly becoming a desolate island, a screen that we hold six inches in front of our noses, and it’s a hard pill to swallow.
Because of this, we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with reality, we lose touch with each other. We seem to have forgotten the basic tenets of empathy.
We have become such a technology-based society, that we have forgotten how to feel. We have forgotten how to relate. We have forgotten how to connect among other humans, let alone with other sentient animals.
We seem to have forgotten what it feels like to be in someone else’s, or some other animal’s, proverbial shoes.
Here in lies one of the major problems.
Some time ago, (some) humans stopped showing empathy, and started killing indiscriminately — people, and other animals. We kill each other over political differences, racial differences, religious differences, and resources. We kill animals for “research,” or for competition and sport, or for a token.
In a world where there is so much doom and gloom about the state of our environment it’s no surprising that the world has lost 10% of its wilderness areas in the past 20 years. The growth of our modern civilisation, spurred on by technological innovations, has been underpinned by the exploitation of the natural environment. Today, a large fraction of the Earth, once swathed in wilderness, is now monopolised by humans. Although the direct causes of wildlife loss are clear enough, what’s less obvious is why many people seemingly don’t care. Society’s ongoing destruction of the environment can be put down to the fact that not enough people value nature and wilderness any more.
Expanding human demands on land, sea and fresh water, along with the impacts of climate change, have made the conservation and management of wild areas and wild animals a top priority.
For some species, our time to see them is rapidly running out.
The richer we are and the more we consume, the more self-centred and careless of the lives of others we appear to become
Human attitudes towards wild nature and wildlife have, historically, been ambivalent.
It seems to me that there are currently two main approaches to wildlife management.
One: The wise use approach aims to accommodate humanity’s continuous use of wild nature as a resource for food, timber, and other raw materials, as well as for recreation.
Two: The preservationists, whose goal is to protect pristine nature, not to use it, carefully or otherwise. Wild places should be allowed to develop on their own with as little interference from humans as possible.
Neither work:
For years we’ve been told that people cannot afford to care about the natural world until they become rich; that only economic growth can save the biosphere, that civilisation marches towards enlightenment about our impacts on the living planet. The results suggest the opposite.
There is only one way to protect what is left.
Protected areas, like national parks and wildlife refuges, are the cornerstones of global conservation efforts.
We must pay for it. Either by buying the land or paying the locals to maintain it.
Why is it so difficult to persuade people to care about our wonderful planet, the world that gave rise to us and upon which we wholly depend?
Because we lack empathy. Empathy is defined as: the capacity to understand or feel what another being (a human or non-human animal) is experiencing from within the other being’s frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.
Without it we all have different values that give rise to conflicts or dilemmas.
The way in which these different values are prioritized will determine policy of conservation in the future.
For instance, there may be a conflict between sustaining certain human livelihoods and preserving a particular species, or there may be a dilemma between the protection of wild nature and animal welfare.
The question, then, is how we should address such dilemmas and disagreements. The first thing to note, in trying to answer this question, is that the rich anglophone countries are anomalous. The more we consume, the less we feel.
Our erroneous belief that we are more concerned about man-made climate change than the people of other nations informs the sentiment, often voiced by the press and politicians, that there’s no point in acting if the rest of the world won’t play its part.
Our refusal to stop pumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is pure selfishness. The more harm we do, the less concerned about it we become. And the more hyper consumerism destroys relationships, communities and the physical fabric of the Earth, the more we try to fill the void in our lives by buying more stuff.
In modern debates about wildlife, however, other values have become increasingly important. We don’t know exactly how ecosystems will respond to climate change but you may rest assured that with rising sea levels nature will be the last to be rescued.
Sustaining interest in this great but slow-burning crisis is a challenge no one seems to have mastered. Only when the crisis causes or exacerbates an acute disaster – such as the floods – is there a flicker of anxiety, but that quickly dies away.
So the perennially low-level of concern, which flickers upwards momentarily when disaster strikes, then slumps back into the customary stupor, is an almost inevitable result of a society that has become restructured around shopping, fashion, celebrity and an obsession with money.
It’s hard to understand how anyone could imagine that economic growth is a formula for protecting the planet.
How we break the circle and wake people out of this dream world is the question that all those who love the living planet should address.
Just look at the United Nations:
For the first time in UN history, candidates seeking to replace the organisation’s secretary-general have held a live debate, presenting the case for their candidacy and taking questions from UN member states on key global issues.
All previous secretary-generals were chosen behind closed doors by the UN’s permanent five members: the US, China, Russia, France and Britain.
This remains so: The permanent five UN Security Council members still fix “who is going to be selected behind closed doors. Don’t think for a moment that the permanent members are going give up powers they won after World War II readily. Hand-picking the UN secretary-general is still one of their trump cards.
The possibility of the United Nations getting an energetic idealist to shake up the world body by streamline archaic UN systems, to stand up to the big powers and do more to end wars, and fight poverty is as remote as ever. It will remain both bloated and overstretched with its staff more interested in winning promotions than fighting malaria, climate change and regulating poverty or stopping wars, not to mention protecting what’s left of nature.
So long as it has to beg for funds it will remain a worthless gossip shop. ( See previous posts)
There will be no easy answers.
As Leonard Da Vinci said,
” Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Empathy is about being we-focused rather than I-focused and understanding that, collectively, we are better off when we step outside of our silos. As a leader, you must emphasize value, not just transactions; people, not just processes.
If you were to be asked this question the answer might not be as obvious as you think.
You might say for example: Climate Change, Wars /ISIS, Inequality, Fresh Water, Nuclear Weapons, Donald Trump, Drugs, the list is endless.
All of these are reversible if we applied an ounce of collective world intelligence.
If you were honest with ourselves you would have no option but to point the finger at us as the greatest threat to the world.
It’s difficult to think of a problem in today’s world that it doesn’t either cause or compound by humanity. This is our greatest challenge: learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment.
Here are two of the greatest threats:
The Smartphone and AI.
With more than 1 billion users worldwide and 2.5 million apps — and counting — available across Google and Apple’s digital marketplaces, smartphones are impacting day-to-day life in some surprising ways.
The smartphone’s role in shaping human interaction is far-reaching,whose functionality is constantly evolving and is now a pocket-size PC. The device seems to have limitless potential. The majority of Internet traffic (60 percent) now comes from mobile devices.
Smartphones are affecting how the brain processes information. Google, fields more than 1 billion search queries per day — is changing how the brain catalogs knowledge. Smartphones have become a kind of “external memory source.”
We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.
Information is so rapid and up-to-the-minute. … Ten years ago, we’d all be crowding around a television to hear what’s happening, and now we have our phones.
There’s no longer an excuse for stupidity.
Future generations will have different priorities about what they choose to remember. Smartphones will become more than just a device in our pockets but something closer to a digital extension of ourselves.
The threat to the world is not that machines are taking over. It’s that they’re helping us to be more human, helping us to connect with each other regardless of geography.
60 percent of users don’t go more than an hour without checking their phone.
36 percent of smart phone users would rather give up their TV than their smart phone.
There are more than 125 million people in the Middle East region are online, and more than 53 million actively use social networks.
The widespread use of smartphones was a defining factor in the development of the spread of Arab Spring both in how protesters shared information with one another and how events were documented by legions of impromptu citizen journalists.
Now combine the Smartphone with the impotence of global governance combined with the lack of Inspirational leaders there is an ever growing pool of evidence that we are all becoming dependent on AI-powered assistance intelligence (without a conscience or any long-term planning.)
As AI advances, it will embed itself even deeper into our social fabric, shaping everything from how we do business to how we receive medical care.
It will become so commonplace that we will dependent on it. The technology may pit us against our own human nature:
What happens to risk, or the humanistic notion of what is true, when everything is based on everyone else? When our digitized advisors aggregate, average, and assuage, are we even autonomous beings anymore?
Political positions, financial decisions, attitudes toward social justice—our biggest decisions are often fueled by poor logic and misinformation. In the best circumstances, artificial intelligence could save us from ourselves, by helping us understand each other, see the world more clearly, and collectively make better decisions.
However if we do not acknowledge and take on board people’s valid concerns with AI we risk seeing the potential benefits of these technologies lost under a mountain of fear and negativity.
We need our out of date United Nations to have a mature, informed and inclusive world meeting about the future of automation and the potential impact of new technologies in order to ensure that this new power is used responsibly in the economic and moral sense.
At the moment there is no proper regulation around the use of AI.
Of course the UN is incapable of holding such a meeting so perhaps it is time for a new Institution called World Click (for example) to bring the whole of technology under a world umbrella.
If we care about the world we live in, we should think long and hard about the interfaces, rules, and policies that will govern artificial intelligence and our new way of life.
It would be easy enough for the people who design AI systems, motivated by greed, self-interest, or politics, to train computers to manipulate our lives in subtle and insidious ways, essentially lying to us through the algorithms that guide our thinking.
The coming tidal wave of decision support threatens to give very few people a phenomenal amount of suggestive power over a great many people—the kind of power that is hard to trace and almost impossible to stop.
Every day, Capitalism and the free market is moving into a digital age which is run more and more by algorithms that will only make those that own them richer while the world is about get poorer and poorer due to Climate change.
What is the alternative? Is there an alternative?
Global governance failure is the most interconnected of the global risks—it has a direct connection with 75% of the all the risks covered in this blog.
Of course the next threat Climate Change has the potential to wipe most of us of the face of the earth.
Changes in climate and weather patterns worldwide are converging with social trends, shifting populations, land use change, and increasingly impaired water infrastructure to dramatically make life worse for those across the globe.
Climate change poses several challenges to water management strategies including extreme events, dwindling water supply, and the increasingly incorrect assumption that the past will accurately predict future conditions.
Simply put Climate change “is the greatest collective challenge we face as a human family. It like AI has the capacity to change the way all of us live.
In much the same way great powers have fought wars over land and oil, we could see battles for the control of freshwater supplies.
Next Inequality.
The growing disparity in the wealth inside countries and among countries is a challenge the world has faced for centuries.
At the end of the 9/11 era, politics is driving the global economy, while economics drives geopolitics. All of this is playing out against a volatile G-Zero backdrop of global leadership in short supply.
Chronic fiscal imbalances are going to emerge as one of the greatest global risk over the next decade.
Moving On. Fresh Water/ Food.
The potential for food crises in poor countries due to Climate change will cause governments collapse. Sustaining growth will be one of the century’s big challenge.
An estimated 4bn to 5bn people in the world suffer from strained access to clean water, with the Middle East in particular likely to be a hotspot for struggles around water supply. Agriculture already accounts for on average 70pc of total water consumption and, according to the World Bank, we would need to ramp up food production by 50pc by 2030 to meet the needs of the world’s population.
Not forgetting Energy.
Satisfying ever-growing energy demand in a sustainable way has become the world’s biggest challenge.”
On top of all that we live today under the threat of global terrorism….Cyber is probably the threat least known, most ignored…and eventually…could be the most catastrophic….
Then we have, the spread of nuclear weapons, and selling of arms.
A potential Donald Trump presidency could be more dangerous to the world’s economy than the rising tide of global terrorism. The greatest risk to global stability over the next 20 years may be the nature of America itself.
If you have got this far I am sure like me you are saying so what. We fucked no matter what we do.
Not so.
We are on the threshold of a new revolution maybe without a leader but thanks to Technology we have the Smartphone that if called upon could be turned into World people’s power to demand change.
To stop Profit for Profit’s sake, To stop arms trading, To stop CO2 emissions, To stop Wars, to create if not a fair world at least a transparent justice first world before we contaminate the rest of the universe.
The fact is if a million smartphones were to campaign on a daily basis change could be achieved. Of all the threats to human society they have the silent power to unite the little consensus that there is left amongst us all.
This post continues with the theme of Intelligence. (Four minute read)
The Beady eye has in previous post addressed the chaotic world of social media under the headings of are we all being Googlefied, Twitterised, and becoming Selfied by Facebook.
THIS VERY MOMENT PROGRESSION is TOWARDS MONITORIATION by WiFi.
It’s hard to imagine what life would be like without the internet.
Social media sites have taken over our lives with most people existing in a rapidly moving and complex world.
People are living in a world ‘saturated by media sounds and images.
It’s even harder to even imagine that 10 years ago there was no Facebook or Twitter!
With Facebook becoming more of a medium for self-promotion.
So here is my feeble attempt to cast an overview of what is happening to society as a result of what I call the continuing dissociation with real life.
The world as it is represented by society today has become a very big place with the internet changing the world and revolutionised the way we live.
Social media websites are some of the most popular haunts on the Internet and they are revolutionized the way people communicate and socialize on the Web.
On the other hand social media binds together communities that once were geographically isolated, greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration. Suddenly the world could be accessed at the touch of a button. Gone were the days when we were waiting for information and doing hours of research at the local library.
People in the Western world would rather live without TV than without internet access.
Now comes WiFi. The potential for WiFi is endless. It seems we welcome new or improved technology with open arms just about every day.
We are well on the road to paperless administration and functioning. There is Wire Free WiFi Dog Fence. WiFi technology has just approved a brand new next-gen WiFi 802.22 technology that could allow your home network to span up to 60 miles! There are mi-light smart tech wi-fi bulb. There is Wave WiFi Technology. There is Wi-Fi technology module for moving cars which will enable people to access high-speed Internet while they are traveling.
There are plans to ‘connect’ whole cities. A whole city can be provided by WiFi by deploying internet routers at distant positions.
It surrounds society from the minute we wake up to the late hours we go to bed at night. Whatever the form of media, it is a reliable source of keeping up to date on all the latest technology, from iPod shuffle, to the iPhone, in the modern society today.
I do not believe that with WiFi, technology has any bounds.
It has taken over our lives but it seems like that happiness is diminished and we are on the threshold of autonomous crowd monitoring via devices using sensor networks to track people.
Our obsession with our smartphones has not only changed the way we spend time, but the way we feel and think.
I HATEbeing out in public and seeing people on their phones. It seems that we can’t enjoy the world around us for an hour without retreating back into that safe little digital box.
The rise of social media is definitely correlated with the rise of narcissism in our society. Our self-esteem depends on how many likes we get, how many followers we get, if someone texts us back.
By now, we are all aware that social media has had a tremendous impact on our culture, in business, on the world-at-large.
Make no mistake: email, Facebook and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction. With social media there is a paper trail for everything.
However, aside from seeing your friends’ new baby on Facebook, or reading about Justin Bieber’s latest brush with the law on Twitter, what are some of the real impacts, both positive and negative, that social media has had on our society?
The real question is:
Is it Intelligent to create entire cultures of people who do not trust the government intelligence linkages to the carriers who don’t wish “their every move, message and meme to be indexed, analyzed and categorized by Big Brother and big business.
Has the truth disappeared in a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, consumerism is essentially expected.
Every politician worth his salt now needs to jump on the social media bandwagon. This is because social websites have played an important role in many elections around the world.
Majority of people in the world believe that they live in a modern society and have more technology resources available such as the internet, TV, Radio and newspapers to know the causes behind the events that happened in the past or happening in the present.
Television is becoming more than a passive watching device as content viewing spans other devices.
Households are spending more time online.
In order to deal with it, we need shortcuts.
We cannot be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event, and situation we encounter in even one day.
It leads me to think that we’re all kind of in this big, worldwide reality television game. We’re all competing to see who has the best life with the best boyfriend or girlfriend having the best meals on the best vacations with the best families and the best dogs. By the time you make it home there is nothing to talk about because you’ve spoken about everything all day through social media or you’ve looked through each other’s social media feeds.
Social networks offer the opportunity for people to reconnect with their old friends and acquaintances, make new friends, trade ideas, share content and pictures, and many other activities. (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way)
Accessing patient’s notes instantly is a massive progression in patient care. In future, scans, x-ray results, blood pressure checks and cholesterol checks could be all scanned straight into a patient’s notes.
When you stop having offscreen interaction, you lose empathy.
You lose the ability to have genuine reactions to real problems and real things.
Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon I call BRAINWASHING .
One of the biggest changes that is taking place is that we all contributing to cultural branding.
If you look at crowd cultures grabbed the critiques and blew them up, pushing industrial food anxiety into the mainstream you begin to realize why in the Western World we have a rising problem with obesity.
News about every major problem linked to industrial food production—processed foods loaded with sugar, carcinogenic preservatives, rBGH in milk, bisphenol A leaching from plastics, GMOs, and so on—began to circulate at internet speed.
Parents worried endlessly about what they were feeding their kids.
Crowd culture converted an elite concern into a national social trauma that galvanized a broad public challenge, but on the other hand it is targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowd cultures and converting them into profit.
In cultural branding, the brand promotes an innovative ideology that breaks with category conventions. Companies leapfrog the conventions of their categories to champion new ideologies that are meaningful to customers.
You have mind share branding, is one that companies have long relied on. It treats a brand as a set of psychological associations (benefits, emotions, personality).
You have purpose branding, in it, a brand espouses values or ideals its customers share, to turn what was once serendipity into a rigorous discipline.
On top of all of this you have.
Entertainment “properties”—performers, athletes, sports teams, films, television programs, and video games—are also hugely popular on social media.
On top of that it is nearly impossible to escape the invasion of advertising and online petitions. Social media allows companies to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers.
There is no limit on the possibilities of how much further joining forces the various forms of mass communication with technology will go.
In the end the more mass communication evolves the more the world and society changes with it.
While propaganda has been around for almost a thousand years, only recently (last 100 years) with the advent of technologies that allow us to spread information to a mass group has it evolved to a scientific process capable of influencing a whole nation of people. They have also served to rally people for a cause, and have inspired mass movements and political unrests in many countries.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing.
Remember, the technologies out there might seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if they don’t help meet learning objectives, if the audience isn’t taken into account, if logistical considerations aren’t thought about and if the instructor isn’t comfortable with the technologies then they are much like the bard wrote, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing”.
In conclusion, the biggest change is. Separation.
When we can’t see someone through OUR OWN EYES, it’s creates distrust : IT WILL BECOME HARDER to love them.
watching biased news channels, or participating in violent video games.
Most of what we hear about in the world today comes to us as it is broadcasted through the television news networking stations and the Radio broadcasts throughout the day….
In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll.
Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially
While mass media targets the individual in short-term intervals, the overall influence on them has been established as the consumer moves from one impressionable age category to another.
Be aware of the general perspective that others use to frame the problem or issue at hand, because accepting their frame on their terms gives them a powerful advantage.
Be sensitive to situational demands however trivial they may seem: group norms, group pressures, symbols of authority, slogans, and commitments.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS:WHAT IS IT ABOUT US THAT MAKES US WHOLLY INCAPABLE OF RESPONDING? TO CLIMATE CHANGE- IS IT GREED OR ARE WE JUST PLAIN STUPID.
The Olympics are in full swing with its opening message long forgotten by those how win a medal.
The world since the first farmer grew two carrots has had its winners, losers, wars, famines, rich, and poor, you name it the World has weathered all.
You could be a faitheist and say “What happens happens” but as Lone Man ( Isna la wica) ( late 19th century Teton Sioux said ” I have seen that in any great undertaking it is not enough for a man to depend simply upon himself.”
I have written on Climate Change before the Paris Agreement and after.
Since then every day of the week there is some new evidence that the climate is changing.
The global meltdown has begun.
Long predicted and long denied, the effects of climate change are arriving faster than even the gloomiest prophets expected.
The earth is dying, yet those who spread this message are treated as dangerous and mad.
This week we learnt that the Arctic ecosystem is collapsing.
Three weeks ago, marine biologists reported that almost all the world’s coral reefs could be dead by the end of the coming century.
One month ago, the Red Cross reported that natural disasters uprooted more people in 1998 than all the wars and conflicts on earth combined.
The demographer Dr Norman Myers calculates that 25m people have already been displaced by environmental change, and this will rise to 200m within 50 years.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reports that nine of the 10 most dangerous diseases carried by insects and other vectors are likely to spread as a result of global warming.
You would think that with our combined World Intelligent we would be by now well beyond the point of discussing the implementation of the Paris Agreement.
Not on your Nelly.
And yet, far from addressing this coming catastrophe, we curse or mock anyone who draws attention to it.
What is it about this pattern of living that demands that those who challenge it must be treated as if they were dangerous or mad?
Is it just plain stupidity or that we have found the key to undying happiness, the transactable elixir of life?
What is it about this crisis, what is it about us, that makes us wholly incapable of responding?
Is it the drive to make more money than you could possibly need, to buy more goods than you could possibly enjoy, is a species of mental illness. Success in this system brings not happiness, but, at best, an alleviation of the pain required to sustain it. Even its beneficiaries are also its victims.
Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering.
To date we have not reached the necessary number of countries to represent 55% of global emissions to sign up to the agreement to implement the Paris Agreement. (Which I advocate will have little effect as the agreement has no means of enforcing anything agreed.)
Negotiations and meetings have been marred by special interest groups trying to prevent effective action to combat climate change. In addition, there has been a lack of political will to take effective steps and measures.
Many large corporations, have opposed climate change treaties seemingly afraid of profit impacts if they have to make substantial changes to how they do business.
All countries are affected by, and contribute to, the buildup of greenhouse gases, and should be willing to join in the effort to stop it. However, it is far from easy to agree what to do, and how to do it….
Because : Poor countries face the brunt of the problems caused by global warming, and point out that most of the current global warming are the results of the rich countries’ pollution.
Current consumption patterns also see far more greenhouse emissions per person in the rich countries than the poorer ones.
As evidence of climate change mounts the impacts will be worse for more vulnerable people around the world, and could destabilize the world economy.
However, some are ( Donald Trump) still trying to undermine climate change action through deception.
The EU is in crisis, and the USA will be soon.
Brazil’s “interim” government, led by Michel Temer, signed an emergency loan to the State of Rio de Janeiro to help finance infrastructure for the 2016 Olympics. The bailout was conditional to selling off the State’s public water supply and sanitation company, the Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos (Cedae).
What will it take to persuade us to stop using the world as our punchbag?
Many are agreed that climate change may be one of the greatest threats facing the planet.
All the words, pledges, agreements mean nothing without the political will, and financial backing.
There is only one way to make any difference worthwhile happening world-wide and that is to tap into World Greed.
Profit for Profit sake.
By placing a World Aid commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency Financial Transactions, on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all Foreign Exchange transactions over $20,000, on all Lottery wins over $100000, on all gambling.
This would create a perpetual Fund of trillions to tackle Climate Change.
Will it happen.
Not without all of us demanding it of the United Nations.
The Earth is the mother of all people and all people should have equal rights upon it.
Having just posted an overview of Future of Artificial Intelligence it would be remiss of me not to address the Intelligence that is creating the AI in the first place.
So here another fascinating subject.
The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation.
It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.
This post will only scrap the skin of the subject Intelligence.
As I have said; Technology” in its broadest sense, include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions, and our intellects.
There are many questions like if Artificial Intelligence is to become self learning will it in turn accelerate our ability to improve human DNA and create even better minds or will we with our basic intelligence be left asking Google just what is Intelligence?
Perhaps we will experience a positive feedback loop from the behavior of these learning algorithms resulting in a enhanced human surrounded by vast machine intellects.
Or are we going to be looking at myriad types of intelligences at play:
With the ordinary human rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them; familiar humans interacting with ever-improving computer minds, are we going to experience a future with a diversity of both human and machine intelligences. For the first time, sentient beings of many different types will interact collaboratively to create ever greater advances, both through standard forms of communication and through new technologies allowing brain interfaces.
We may even see human minds uploaded into cyberspace, with further hybridization to follow in the purely virtual realm. These uploaded minds could combine with artificial algorithms and structures to produce an unknowable but humanlike consciousness.
This is just the beginning of “shared thought.” Far future vision is the spread of our non-biological intelligence to the four corners of the universe, infusing our deliberate will directly upon its fate.
If we are able to break the speed of light barrier we could have a universal omnipresence within a few centuries.
Human intelligence is disappearing into big data and large-scale network.
Is it our destiny?
In any case, let us all hope the boundaries of reality continue to expand the unknown at least as fast as our ability to consume and understand it, lest we be caught in the forever loop of The End is Just the Beginning.
So let me with my basic Intelligence ask you the reader.
What is Intelligence?
It is clear that human intelligence has changed since the emergence of the very first hominids.
Artificial Intelligence machines will soon be equaling the power of human thought-with all of its complexities and richness and perhaps even outstripping it.
General intelligence can be described as the ability of an individual to acquire and apply knowledge and thus, can be passed down from generation to generation.
Environmental and migrational factors have influenced human intelligence since we emerged for the caves but evolution has not yet had a chance to catch up to the rapid progress we have made as a society and might not due to human circumvention of natural selection.
The migration of people to all areas of the earth along with the industrialization of modern society has abstracted modern man from our ancestors.
A greater importance has been placed on cognitive ability and intelligence to allow us to function in modern society. But to say that human intelligence has evolved to the point of stagnation is quite absurd.
I would say because of the need to work for survival is now greatly lessened we are now in a state of limbo where there is no evolutionary pressure, unless there is a dramatic change in the environment, or we are not able to support as many people living on the earth.
And I also believe that the evolution of human intelligence will cease some time in the distant future.
The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—or at least the human minds of today.
It may seem incredible, or even disturbing, to predict that ordinary humans will lose touch with the most consequential developments on planet Earth, developments that determine the ultimate fate of our civilization and species.
The human minds might not be capable of understanding the physics of the atomic realm. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.
Ordinary humans of the future will come to accept machine intelligence as everyday technological magic, like the flat screen TV or smart phone, but with no deeper understanding of how it is possible.
Today, no more than a fraction of a percent of the population has a good understanding of quantum physics, although it underlies many of our most important technologies:
So the potential for improved human intelligence is enormous. Cognitive ability is influenced by thousands of genetic loci, each of small effect.
The first thing to notice is that the longer the time scale we are considering, the less likely it is that technological civilization will remain within the zone we termed “the human condition” throughout.
Vaclav Smil – the historian of technology who has argued that the past six generations have seen the most rapid and profound change in recorded history – maintains that the 1880s was the most innovative decade of human history.
It has taken us so far as to change our little make-shift huts to buildings that touch the sky, and to change our raw meat into seven-course meals
Humanity has enough intelligence to move into outer space and explore other worlds on the other hand we don’t seem to have the Intelligence to see or resolve the problems confronting us today.
Why?
It’s not that we lack the Intelligence to do so.
People are unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.
If you look around you I am sure you will agree that we have an awful long way to go before we reach basic Intelligence in order to live in peace and cherish the world we live on.
Because the currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain but rather copies of DNA helixes.
The discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from our intelligence so far.
AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future.
Self-driving cars, war outsourced to robots, surgery by autonomous machines – this is only the beginning.
If you’re old enough to drive today, there’s a good chance your children will never learn to drive.”
The imminent arrival of self-driving cars also brings up serious questions about our relationship with technology that we have yet to resolve.
How much control of our lives do we want to give over to machines – and to the corporations that build and operate them?
A new AI algorithm could revolutionize democracy and transform healthcare. Its called artificial swarm intelligence.
One of the most obvious uses of this form of AI would be in politics, both for voters selecting candidates and politicians making policy decisions, or a group of doctors could use it to combine their collective intelligence in order to make more accurate diagnoses.
We’d teach computers to be computer scientists so they could bootstrap their own development.
If you’re like me, you used to think Artificial Intelligence was a silly sci-fi concept, but lately you’ve been hearing it mentioned by serious people, and you don’t really quite get it.
There are three reasons a lot of people are confused about the term AI:
1)We associate AI with movies.
2) AI is a broad topic
3) We use AI all the time in our daily lives, but we often don’t realize it’s AI.
So let’s clear things up.
First, stop thinking of robots. A robot is a container for AI.
Secondly, you’ve probably heard the term “singularity” or “technological singularity.” This term has been used in math to describe an asymptote-like situation where normal rules no longer apply.
Finally, while there are many different types or forms of AI since AI is a broad concept, the critical categories we need to think about are based on an AI’s caliber. There are three major AI caliber categories:
As of now, humans have conquered the lowest caliber of AI—ANI—in many ways, and it’s everywhere.
Artificial Narrow Intelligence is machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence or efficiency at a specific thing.
A few examples:
Cars are full of ANI systems. Your phone is a little ANI factory.Your email spam filter is a classic type of ANI.
When you search for a product on Amazon and then you see that as a “recommended for you” product on a different site, or when Facebook somehow knows who it makes sense for you to add as a friend? That’s a network of ANI systems, working together to inform each other about who you are and what you like and then using that information to decide what to show you.
Same goes for Amazon’s “People who bought this also bought…” thing—that’s an ANI system whose job it is to gather info from the behavior of millions of customers and synthesize that info to cleverly up sell you so you’ll buy more things.
Google Translate is another classic ANI system
When your plane lands, it’s not a human that decides which gate it should go to. Just like it’s not a human that determined the price of your ticket.
The world’s best Checkers, Chess, Scrabble, Backgammon, and Othello players are now all ANI systems.
Google search is one large ANI brain with incredibly sophisticated methods for ranking pages and figuring out what to show you in particular. Same goes for Facebook’s News feed.
And those are just in the consumer world.
Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done.
As computer scientist Donald Knuth puts it, “AI has succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking.
Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-old’s picture book and not just recognize the words but understand the meaning of them?
That’s a whole other ball game.
Sophisticated ANI systems are widely used in sectors and industries like military, manufacturing, and finance (algorithmic high-frequency AI traders account for more than half of equity shares traded on US markets.)
ANI systems as they are now aren’t especially scary.
At worst, a glitchy or badly programmed ANI can cause an isolated catastrophe like knocking out a power grid, causing a harmful nuclear power plant malfunction, or triggering a financial markets disaster.
ANI is a precursor of the world-altering hurricane that’s on the way.
Each new ANI innovation quietly adds another brick onto the road to AGI( Artificial General Intelligence) A machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can. Creating AGI is a much harder task than creating ANI, and we’re yet to do it.
Then we have ASI.( Artificial superintelligence) “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” Artificial Superintelligence ranges from a computer that’s just a little smarter than a human to one that’s trillions of times smarter—across the board
Or as Aaron Saenz sees it, our world’s ANI systems “are like the amino acids in the early Earth’s primordial ooze”—the inanimate stuff of life that, one unexpected day, woke up.
Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it.
The field of robotics and sophisticated AI programming are now being used to develop robots that can be a major threat to humanity. For instance, one of the robots that is used for the nation’s border protection is controlled by remotes. Lethal robots have been developed in some countries where one soldier can trigger multiple aerial as well as ground attacks!
But advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and more quickly.
This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?
We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. — Vernor Vinge
Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.
“The world 35 years from now might be totally unrecognizable,”
Most of us think linearly, when we should be thinking exponentially.
In order to think about the future correctly, you need to imagine things moving at a much faster rate than they’re moving now.
If you look only at very recent history. Between 1995 and 2007 saw the explosion of the internet, the introduction of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook into the public consciousness, the birth of social networking, and the introduction of cell phones and then smart phones.
A new, huge Phase 2 growth spurt might be brewing right now.
If I tell you, later in this post, that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, “That’s stupid—if there’s one thing I know from history, it’s that everybody dies.” And yes, no one in the past has not died.
Logic also suggests that if the most advanced species on a planet keeps making larger and larger leaps forward at an ever-faster rate, at some point, they’ll make a leap so great that it completely alters life as they know it and the perception they have of what it means to be a human—kind of like how evolution kept making great leaps toward intelligence until finally it made such a large leap to the human being that it completely altered what it meant for any creature to live on planet Earth.
Building skyscrapers, putting humans in space, figuring out the details of how the Big Bang went down—all far easier than understanding our own brain.
As of now, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.
Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second—incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it’s a dog or a cat—spectacularly difficult.
The science world is working hard on reverse engineering the brain to figure out how evolution made such a rad thing—optimistic estimates say we can do this by 2030.
Once we do that, we’ll know all the secrets of how the brain runs so powerfully and efficiently and we can draw inspiration from it and steal its innovations.
Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth—all suddenly possible.
Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth.
As far as we’re concerned, if an ASI ( Artificial Superintelligence ) comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth—and the all-important question for us is: Will it be a nice God?
How will artificial super intelligence help humanity? What really is intelligence? Does it help achieve wisdom?
Maybe dolphins are smarter than humans, you don’t see them destroying their environment making it impossible for future generations to sustain themselves.
Could an artificial intelligence even have its own priorities, or are they something that arose through random, aimless evolution?
I expect the moment the computer becomes ASI – it shuts itself off, because it might not see a point in continuing.
Ultimately, the scary thing about the rise of intelligent machines is not that they could someday have a mind of their own, but they could someday have a mind that we humans – with all our flaws and complexity – design and build for them.
Establishing ethics, moral values and standards becomes difficult when humans are dominated by machines. Any amount of automation cannot recreate intelligence as it is a gift for mankind.
IN THE FIRST PART ON THIS BLOG I ATTEMPTED TO SHOW THAT TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING THE WAY WE VIEW DEMOCRACY AND AS A CONSEQUENCE POLITICAL PARTIES WILL OR ARE BECOMING OBSOLETE.
For those of us who still think that because we support a particular party AND that it will deliver on its pre-election promises I can only say we are living in cloud cuckoo land.
Governance use to be understood as ‘a system of values, policies and institutions by which a society manages its economic, political and social affairs through interaction within and among the State, civil society and the private sector.
This for now holds true for the most part but it is changing as we enter the Technology Revolution.
Why?
BECAUSE MOST SOCIETIES ARE NOW A MIX OF SEVERAL CULTURES DRIVEN BY A WORLD MEDIA THAT HAS TURNED EVERY FORM OF GREED AND VIOLENCE INTO AN ENTERTAINMENT.
POLITICIANS ARE NO LONGER CAPABLE OF REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE WHO VOTE FOR THEM.
THERE IS NO LONGER ANY LONG TERM PLANNING ONLY KNEE JERK REACTIONS.
INDEED WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO THE BEAR TRUTH- THEY ARE ALL DRIVEN BY DATA ON THE ECONOMY, AND MANIPULATED BY BIG MONEY OR THE LACK THEREOF.
Where does this leave us.
Just look at the current USA presidential election. Two candidate that are viewed as a threat to world peace.
There is an urgent need not just in the United States to invest in cultural diversity and dialogue.
Culture is increasingly recognized as a cross-cutting dimension of the three economic, social and environmental pillars of sustainability.
We must strengthen social cohesion and provide sources of inspiration for renewing forms of democratic governance if we are to put a break on governance for the sake of money rather than for the values we all cherish.
We must places more emphasis on ‘unity in diversity.’
Indigenous knowledge can direct us towards more sustainable modes of living.
Similarly, ignoring the increasingly multicultural makeup of societies would amount to negating the existence of large sections of the population, which compartmentalizes society and damages the social fabric by creating competition between the different communities over access to resources (for education, health, social services) rather than promoting a sense of solidarity.
The expansion of digital networks, for example, has sometimes helped to revitalize endangered or even extinct languages; and the development of new technologies has greatly increased the possibilities of communicating and exchanging cultural content in time and space. Moreover, in certain cultural contexts, global cities in particular, the varied cultural flows and sometimes unexpected encounters produced by globalization are reflected in a growing range of consumer habits and trends.
You might ask why more emphasis on ‘unity in diversity.
Because Cultural diversity, characterized as it is by space-time compression linked to the speed of new communication and transportation technologies, and by the growing complexity of social interactions and the increasing overlap of individual and collective identities — cultural diversity has become a key concern, amid accelerating globalization processes, as a resource to be preserved and as a lever for sustainable development.
Intercultural dialogue must be seen as a complex and ongoing process that is never completed.
Unfortunately Globalization is NOT ACHIEVING THIS but is leading inevitably to cultural homogenization. Facebook, Twitter, Linked In etc.
While it is true that globalization induces forms of homogenization and standardization, it cannot be regarded as inimical to human creativity, which continues to engender new forms of diversity, constituting a perennial challenge to featureless uniformity.
Digital technology has drastically changed the modes of producing and disseminating cultural products, and cultural industries that previously were kept separate by analogue systems of production (film, television, photography and printing) have now converged.
We can’t hold a computer program like Google hostage to our demands.
We must move away from elite level deal making by allowing diverse interests to influence and design our own debating and decision-making rules.
Take for instance the eradication of world poverty, which is an intolerable violation of human rights in terms of both the hardships and the loss of dignity it causes – must be approached in terms of each specific social and cultural setting.
No amount of money is going to make any long-term worthwhile difference.
This can only be done with massive investment in Education.
Without education we are blowing in the wind, because rights and freedoms are exercised in very varied cultural environments and all have a cultural dimension that needs to be acknowledged so as to ensure their effective integration in different cultural contexts.
Education is a fundamental human right to which all children and adults should have access, contributing as it does to individual freedom and empowerment, and to human development.
We must escape National dialogues and engage in collective world mandates, that have legal status, and are independence from the government.
We must re- invent the United Nations changing it from a gossip shop on world problems to an Organisation that is fully funded with total transparency.
Irrivalent of the changes in technology quit hoc resolutions diplomacy is not enough.
Human beings relate to one another through society, and express that relationship through culture.
New technologies have not yet rendered the older technologies obsolete.
If we are to respond to the challenges inherent in a culturally diverse world, we must develop new approaches to intercultural dialogue, approaches that go beyond the limitations of the ‘dialogue among civilizations’ paradigm. Too often, dialogue events have stressed collective identities (national, ethnic, religious) rather than identities of individuals or social groups.
We must ensure a level playing field for cultural encounters and guaranteeing equality of status and dignity between all participants in initiatives to promote intercultural dialogue involve recognizing the ethnocentric ways in which certain cultures have hitherto proceeded.
The founding Vetoes in the United Nations must be scraped by give all nations an equal voice.
While virtually all human activities are shaped by and in turn help to shape cultural diversity, the prospects for the continued vitality of diversity are crucially bound up with the future of languages, education, the communication of cultural content, and the complex interface between creativity and the marketplace.
Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented enmeshment of national economies and cultural expressions, giving rise to new challenges and opportunities.
The emergence of genuine ‘knowledge societies’ implies a diversity of forms of knowledge and of its sources of production, We are creating Internet technological Sahara Deserts that are and will drive millions to seek a better life or wars.
Communication networks have shrunk or abolished distance, to the benefit of some and the exclusion of others.
To address the problems that derive from the grotesque inequalities and structural poverty of our world which is at the foundations of 90% of the mess we now find ourselves in. We must recognise that successful intercultural dialogue lies in the acknowledgement of the equal dignity of the participants… based on the premise that all cultures are in continual evolution and are the result of multiple influences throughout history.
All rights and freedoms have a cultural dimension that contributes to their effective exercise. It is precisely this dimension that forms the link between the individual, the community and the group, which grounds universal values within a particular society.
All communities do not experience and respond to phenomena such as globalization in the same way.
As migration flows have intensified with globalization, they have significantly modified the ethno-linguistic makeup of a number of countries and have created new linguistic and translation needs, especially in administrative, legal and medical circuits worldwide.
Characterized as it is by space-time compression linked to the speed of new communication and transportation technologies, and by the growing complexity of social interactions and the increasing overlap of individual and collective identities — cultural diversity has become a key concern, amid accelerating globalization processes, as a resource to be preserved and as a lever for sustainable development.
Finally, forms of democratic governance can be renewed by deriving lessons from the different models adopted by diverse cultures.
We the people of the world must make our collective voices heard which is becoming almost impossible due to all of the above.
If we don’t want to rule by
AI has officially made its way into Google’s search algorithm.
(The artificial intelligence of RankBrain comes in the form of mathematical entities called vectors that can be understood by computers. When presented with an unfamiliar word, RankBrain will help formulate a guess at what the query was about and filter accordingly.)
There are many possibilities as to how Rank Brain could work into being a signal to direct your choice to making any decision.
Central to the many problems arising in this context is the Western ideology of knowledge transparency, which cannot do justice to systems of thought recognizing both ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ knowledge and embodying initiatory processes for crossing the boundaries between them.
Diversity of traditions and cultures has for centuries been one of Europe’s riches and that the principle of tolerance is the guarantee of the maintenance in Europe of an open society.
Take England’s recent referendum on the EU.
So far the English referendum has resulted in transitional period now represented by an unelected interim governments whose authority to press the out button and start negotiations to leave may lack legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
Political transitions are tumultuous processes that celebrate advances and suffer setbacks several times before they can conclude with a new, widely accepted constitutional order.
There is a whole new class of millionaires as the new generation takes control of banks, government, and other institutions. The stage is set for another depression and the collapse of the welfare state.
How this can be achieved I leave to you to suggest.
But I am convinced that with the smart phone we should create a new political platform where the voice of people would hold weight in decision taken by our political masters.
If every eligible voting age citizen had a phone, any project that cost over x billions could be electronically sent for approval or disapproval.
As how to finance the United Nations ( see previous post : A World Aid Commission)
Can any of what I am writing about be achieved. Yes it Can.
You might think this is a stupid thing to contemplate.
But just look around you.
Every minute on the web there is a new petition to vote on.
People are invited on Facebook and twitter to vote and for that matter to get killed ( as reported on the Shooting in Germany)
And now Hillary Clinton has just released a mobile game app that allows the user to build your own campaign headquarters by completing ” Fun” challenges to earn credit stars which you can cash in a virtual shop. You get a free Autograph and a Trump or False Quizzes and a lovely virtual plant to be watered.
You don’t have to be a genius to know what is behind the App.
And just the other day Paddy Ashdown in the UK set up a new political group called MoreUnited.UK which intends to support political candidates it agrees with – regardless of their party affiliation – with cash and on-the-ground campaigners.
So where or what next.
This is a serious question as the world is shaped by big, powerful forces or trends that nobody can control.
These forces are now driven by technology.
Right now these forces are driving the biggest change in 500 years and I don’t have to tell you that they are not all good despite the new environmental spirit.
Governments are preoccupied with cloaking democratic sovereignty in order to do business for the kept classes. A source of great social unrest, state violence, and public pressure for institutional reform. I.E. the English referendum to leave the European union.
The modern capitalist system has been charged more and more by its critics with crushing the spirit and substance of representative self government.
The subject of capitalism versus democracy is back.
Market failures are having political effects: they are breathing new life into demands for fresh thinking and a new democratic politics that, so far, has not happened on any scale.
Capitalist markets have been a mixed blessing for democracy in representative form. The dynamism, technical innovation and enhanced productivity of the free market have been impressive. Equally notable with the free market is the rapaciousness unequal ( class-structured) outcomes, reckless exploitation of nature.
Pauperism mixed with plutocracy is today a feature of practically every democracy on our planet.
Enough is Enough.
With the gap between the rich and poor grows even wider there is political trouble ahead.
This is why every form of democracy worth its salt has stood against the presumption that the wealthy are ‘naturally entitled to rule.
Is capitalism the only moral economic system or a deeply flawed socio-economic system that has to be addressed by more government intervention and control? Or is it foundations no long based on individual rights? Each individual is an end in themselves and not a means to achieve the wishes of others.
If you adopt the view that capital belongs to everyone it is the only moral system because it respects the volitional reason of the individual to engage with others and further their own happiness as they see fit and it allows them to fail and learn from the consequences if they should make a mistake.
But the above is no longer true as we enter a new form of Capitalism which Oliver Stone recently christened as ‘ SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, ROBOT TOTALITARIANISM .
POKEMON GO’S collects names and locations of the user. It can also access the contents of your USB storage, your accounts, photographs, network connections, and phone activities, and even activate your phone when it is on standby mode. It reserves the right to share all the data it collects with a third parties such as advertisers. It is a sinister trade-off for playing a game that you think is free.
So the question asked in the heading of this blog is more than serious.
Are Politicians representing or will they be able to represent the people in the future?
In democratic election campaigns, do political parties any longer compete freely for votes?
Do Political parties (in this world of fast developing technologies) any longer provide a way for voters to easily identify a candidate’s positions?
As Parliaments gain greater control, the issues on which they disagree often are not goals so much as means: how best to keep the economy growing, protect the environment, and maintain a strong national defense.
Such competition is one of the hallmarks of democracy.
Parties’ views on government’s role often depend on the specific issue or program in question.
A political party use to be a group of voters organized to support certain public policies. The aim of a political party is to elect officials who will try to carry out the party’s policies. This is no longer true.
In the modern age where everything is connected to everything.
The United States has a two-party system.
Political parties are often a standard by which a country’s political freedom can be measured. Some countries have only one political party. In China, for example, there is only one party, the Communist Party.
Democracies usually operate under either a two-party or a multiparty system. Like the United States, Britain has a two-party system. The major parties are the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, though there are active third parties.
Multiparty systems are common in Europe and other parts of the world. In this system, three or more parties each enjoy substantial support from voters. France, Germany, Israel, and South Africa are just a few examples.
In these countries there may be many parties representing a wide range of political views. Because of the number of competing parties, it is sometimes difficult for any one party to get a clear majority of the votes. In such cases, leading parties that can agree on general policies form a coalition (a combination of parties) to run the country.
In the past 30 years, party membership has dropped significantly across Europe, whereas other forms of political participation have developed.
Social Media has rapidly grown in importance as a forum for political activism in its different forms.
Social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube provide new ways to stimulate citizen engagement in political life, where elections and electoral campaigns have a central role.
Personal communication via social media brings politicians and parties closer to their potential voters.
Although the presence of social media is spreading and media use patterns are changing, online political engagement is largely restricted to people already active in politics and on the Internet.
Social media has reshaped structures and methods of contemporary political communication by influencing the way politicians interact with citizens and each other. However, the role of this phenomenon in increasing political engagement and electoral participation is neither clear nor simple.
In the past few years, the way that citizens communicate with one other about politics has been fundamentally altered by the emergence of social media.
In view of recent political developments as diverse as Occupy Wall Street in the United States, the rise of Indignados in Spain, protests in Moscow and Tehran, and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, it has become increasingly clear that social media are now intertwined with political activity.
However we know surprisingly little about exactly how social media affects political participation.
We are only beginning to scratch the surface of developing theories linking social media usage to political participation.
At the same time, the data being generated by users of social media represents a completely unprecedented source of data recording how hundreds of millions of people around the globe interact with politics.
The M5S Movement in Italy has evolved rapidly to become a significant political player by using social media to engage like-minded people in virtual and real life political action.
The impact of social media on political communication.
New ways of building an online campaign and the trend of personalisation in politics. The possibility to communicate directly with voters via social media is groundbreaking and essential for the development of citizens-initiated campaigning.
Well known cases such as the Obama Presidential campaign, the Arab spring uprisings and UK Uncut demonstrations.
A new concept of virtual political support.
Freedom became capitalism’s self-celebration which it largely remains.
Yet the reality of capitalism is that the mass of employees are not free inside capitalism or any other system for that matter to participate in the decisions that affect their lives ( e.g., what the enterprise will produce,what technology will it use, where production will occur, and what will be done with the profit workers’ efforts help to produce)
In fact their exclusion from such decisions modern-day employees resemble slaves and serfs.
Parliaments and universal suffrage have accompanied capitalism – an advance over serfdom and slavery. An Advance undermined by inequality of opportunity and income a discomforting fact mostly overlooked.
It is not likely that Capitalism is going to disappear in the near or distant future.
There is every likelihood with the arrival of AI ( Artificial Intelligence) that democracy as we know it will be eroded further.
At the moment it all boils down to Smart phone Democracy.
Perhaps in the near future we see a Smartphone political party.
Which might not be a bad way to go provided everyone has a Smart phone and everybody is requested to vote on any project that costs us the taxpayers and the nation over a billion.
The smartphone’s role in shaping human interaction is far-reaching,whose functionality is constantly evolving and is now a pocket-size PC. The device seems to have limitless potential. The majority of Internet traffic (60 percent) now comes from mobile devices.
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