We have the new prophet Yuval Harari telling us where we came from and where we are going, making millions, while we are becoming less and less involved in decisions making.
Then along came the internet, social media and now algorithms.
The results combine with climate change is more and more disasters, proxies war, with ever widening inequality.
It’s time to ask yourself what do you believe.
Some decades ago the concept of globalisation became related to commercial and industrial development and control throughout the world.
American corporate imperialism is now endangering, with an invisible hand the democracy and freedom of nations.
In this Artificial intelligent world which country poses the greatest risk/ danger to world peace?
North Korea- Iraq – Israel- Ukraine- Russia- China- or USA a colossus astride the world, imposing its will & keeping the peace through military & Economic Power.
Pax Americana no longer exists.
America its self is now a democracy that is bereft of a few of the essential elements to call itself a democratic country.
No one has ever said as far as I am aware that democracy should be a platform where the richest people that earn a thousand times more than the poorest should share presidential platforms.
Now is the time to visit the vanishing wonders of the world before decisions making is the sole prerogative of AI.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that Artificial intelligence is already high jack by capitalism.
No one had a solution to legislate this coming world of AI
There is nothing to deal with something like this even if Yuval Harari tries to explain us Sapiens till the cows come home rest assured there won’t be for some considerable time.
Essentially AI is arming and has armed every person on the planet with their own voice.
Therefore it stands to reason that what ever comes into existence will protect itself from Homo Sapiens.
Million and millions of people are going to have access to technologies that can essentially develop sophisticated methods that are always evolving into something thing better at what it does.
The more data it acquired on people the more powerful it becomes.
Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Contrary to popular belief, fantasy is not about making things up.
It’s about taking what is normal and everyday and usual and unregarded, and turn it around and show it from a different direction, so we see it once more with new eyes.
What we are seeing to day is AI in its infancy, as is the frugality of human life with climate change.
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
In a world where we are supposed to able to communicate, we are so saturated with information and bombarded with advertising we are no longer able to distinguish what is false and what is true.
Truth is usually the opposite to a false statement. Another words in accord with reality or facts.
We have a thing called Social Media which is destroying the very thing it claims to be – Social.
Far from bringing people together it’s is driving them apart with artificial predictive data gathering turning us into products.
Consider the risks.
While world leaders sit around a table passing worthless resolutions.
Exploding pagers /mobile phones with fake news becoming a major propaganda tool to launch cyber attacks.
To contaminate the air or water with drones.
It’s now or never we hold the owners of Algorithms to total transparency and legal responsibility.
It’s now or never we stop all wars and concentrate our collective actions to stop climate change.
It’s now or never we start to legislate for a transfer into living alongside non biological life forms.
It’s now or never that we learn that time it’s self is not just a forwarding of now but encompassed the past and the future all together in space time.
It’s now or never we ensure that all AI recognise our collective human values.
It’s now or never we put genuine value on all life.
It’s now or never Democracy cleanse its self up with long term solutions to world hunger/ poverty/ insecurity/ inequality/ racism/ living wage/ sustainable.
It’s now or never.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
You would think by now we would have figured it out that we have created fantastic amounts of waste and pollution to produce things that we don’t ( and often can’t) use again.
Ecosystem survive and are sustainable because they circulate and re-use energy and materials.
However modern industry which is now using technologies requiring vast amounts of energy continues to rely mostly on the one-way street of resource extraction and depletion.
This combination obviously can’t continue indefinitely. In the face of the staggering amount of power we are allowing massive data storage for algorithms, businesses and governments must learn from ecosystems the concept of up- cycling.
Take the humble honey bee for example.
Time had forgotten the power of the honey Bee.
The honey bee most definitely had what archaeologists call magico – religious significance for many ancient civilisations.
Honey is referred to in most religions books. Indeed it was prescribed as a medicine back in the days of Egyptian, Alexander the Great, Sparta, King Heron, Neto’s wife. Aristotle, the Roman Empire, the Chinese civilisation. India , the Americas , the Aztecs, the Dark Ages, in fact without the honey bee we would not exist.
Honey now seems with the arrival of antibiotics to be relegated to something we put on toast. When it was an antibiotic away back in 1892 it was not taken for granted.
To day New Zealand has a particular variety of honey that kills bacteria the sort bacteria that causes so much woe. But for some reason the country does not promote its production.
The Pohutukawa tree or Christmas Tree quintessential Kiwi produces a honey
The Manuka a bushy tree produces a honey called tea – tree honey .
On the other hand if we allow technology to develop exclusively with in the capitalist world we will have a world more divided with inequalities at its heart and than ever before,
If we are lucky we will have a digital global order.
There is no pause button on these technologies it’s now or never that we harness them to sustainably human values.
There is no simple way back, if there is indeed any way at all .
The Beady eye has for some considerable time been warning if we don’t have totally transparent and accountability we will just become products.
It is beyond comprehension that we have become so docile in giving up information for these self learning algorithms to plunder the the world for short term profit it seems we don’t give a fuck about the future of the planet.
To put this in perspective just take a moment to look at the planet that you’re most likely to live the rest of your life on.
Just under 5 billion years old. Hanging in space, surrounded by satellites spinning at 1600 km, travelling at 107,000km around the sun, it has and is presently supported billions of us, on smartphones, plus all known species that ever existed.
In return we its guard have plundered its finite resources, polluted its atmosphere, seas and rivers and lakes, destroyed its natural forests, covered it in billions of tons of concrete, tarmac, all for short term profit.
In response we are just beginning to reap the rewards of Climate Change, that no tech is going to stop.
Resulting in mass migration, inevitable wars, social upheavals etc you would think that we by now understand what is at stake.
For example: This year thousands have braved crossing the Darien gap in Panama to get to the USA, not to mention the Mediterranean , or the English Channel.
Look at Bangladesh under water. The question becomes why do we do nothing? This is a war on every sense of the word and we must win it.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chuck in the bin.
The truth takes into consideration feelings and beliefs, whereas they have no place in fact.
A fact is something that is true everywhere and for everyone.
Facts do not change according to region, caste, culture, religion, etc.
That is not to say that facts from the past have been overturned and proven to be false and that some facts from today will be proven false tomorrow- History is written by the Victor. We no longer know when a fact is going to be true for eternity.
Some of them will.
Take for example you have to be born to experience death. Currently true.
However, with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence – it appears that not just robots but humans will have both life and death capable of independence, separable from one another.
This is not quite yet a scientific fact” but we could be standing on thin ice.
So what makes a fact a fact?
Facts are hardcore and hence they cannot keep constantly changing; a fact remains a fact until proven otherwise. A fact states something that has actually occurred or happened, but we have no idea what’s outside the visible universe.
A matter of seeing is believing I suppose.
The truth is often considered to have a grander scope than facts.
However, something that is true for one person may not be true for everyone.
Is this true?
With the arrival of the Internet, the world has shrunk but unfortunately, we are all now on different platforms of truth.
For example. Facebook discovered that warning users that an article was false caused people to share that article even more.
It seems that the closer you get to the truth, the further you get from the world.
In other words, while you can get people to understand the facts, the facts don’t always matter.
Unfortunately, we don’t care about the truth as much as we typically think our highly social brains make discerning truth more difficult than we might hope because we often protect our previous beliefs rather than face inconvenient truths.
Why?
It’s because we’re all viscerally connected to truth on a fundamental, physical, and spiritual level. It’s part of who we are and like a virus, we instinctively reject dishonesty.
We learn to put on a mask (personality), to present an acceptable display, and hopefully, nobody will see the truth. That process spreads to other aspects of our lives, many times unknowingly.
To think about the future, you have to know about the present
– Prof. Hans Rosling, TEDtalks 2014
My understanding, in a nutshell, is that a hypothesis gets upgraded to a theory (closest you can get to fact) not possibly by chance occurrence. This is evidence that it is true, and will remain true until (if it ever happens) new evidence that disproves it comes to light.
Valid does not equate to true.
Sometimes theories are inducible and then prove by deduction,i.e gravity.
So why do we argue so much when facts about contentious topics are readily available?
If the data are gathered, shouldn’t we all be reaching the same conclusions?
Obviously not.
Presenting people with information about an issue in a nuanced way, rather than presenting them with pro-con arguments laid out in a simplified manner, leads people to have more complex and satisfying conversations about contentious issues.
True.
But our ears are dull of hearing, and our eyes have closed thanks to algorithms that control what we hear or see. They warp our perception of reality and reasoning by creating social media echo chambers.
We can share our worldview like never before, yet we often feel worlds apart when assessing our shared reality. Social media typically does not promote positive interactions.
Complacency lures in the comfort of our smartphones or our living room couch and sadly, we’re always the first victims of our lies because we have to believe them first before we can convince others to do so.
The result is that the difference between fact, truth, and opinion becomes blurred.
What can be changed?
Any sane person, regardless of nationality, color, or political stance, would aim for the first – truth and facts.
So why don’t we just get indisputable facts on the table?
Reaching the correct answer required participants to think carefully about the data.
We often reason with desired conclusions in mind and selectively recruit our mental faculties towards reaching those conclusions.
However if the people most capable of accurately interpreting data are at least as biased as the rest of us, how can we hope to find common ground on our most pressing and divisive issues?
Climate Change – Inequality, Covid-19, you name it. It’s hard to find the truth because there is so much falsehood out there making so much noise that the truth gets drowned out.
Everyone wants to be right, but practically speaking it’s usually more important for us to be socially accepted and internally consistent in our beliefs.
To divert from this human automation, we have to make a deliberate choice.
We have to actively decide to put on the brighter light and accept that doing so will sometimes help us in the longer run. Until we find systematic ways to improve our reasoning, we can all take steps towards improving political discourse by making efforts to challenge our personal beliefs and biases. Our values are more meaningful than their political utility, so if you stumble into a heated debate remember that the search for community, happiness, and truth transcends partisan boundaries.
Without being honest with ourselves we’ll never be honest with others.
Living in our own little world of self-created lies and avoiding the truth of our life experience takes great energy-producing even greater amounts of stress.
The first lie is the one we tell ourselves. It’s usually, “It didn’t happen” or “It didn’t happen like that.”
Sometimes it’s hard to find the truth because for too many people nowadays truth does not matter, only power. Donald Trump.
We have a natural instinct to search for answers and make sense of things.
These phenomena can be described by many different words
Ondinnink, Qualunquismo, Zlatwic,
We are constantly bombarded by messages by well-meaning NGOs who desperately try to help people living in poverty. At the same time media throw in a mix of news full of disasters and war, and then they host huge charity shows on TV ever so many times a year.
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams, 2nd President of the United States of America
Life is making mistakes and that’s the truth.
Here is what Alex Google might tell you.
Something that actually exists; reality; truth: Your fears have no basis in fact.
Something is known to exist or to have happened: Space travel is now a fact.
Truth is known by actual experience or observation; something is known to be true: Scientists gather facts about plant growth.
Something said to be true or supposed to have happened: The facts given by the witness are highly questionable.
Law. Often, facts. An actual or alleged event or circumstance, as distinguished from its legal effect or consequence. Compare the question of fact, the question of law.
Truth, on the other hand, is a true state of a certain matter, person, place, thing or event. Truth is considered to be more archaic than fact. It is more subjective than resolute fact. Dictionary.com defines ‘truth’ as:
The true or actual state of a matter: He tried to find out the truth.
Conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
A verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like: mathematical truths.
The state or character of being true.
Actuality or actual existence.
An obvious or accepted fact; truism; platitude.
Honesty; integrity; truthfulness.
(Often initial capital letter) ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience: the basic truths of life.
Agreement with a standard or original.
Accuracy, as of position or adjustment.
Archaic. Fidelity or constancy.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
You don’t have to belive but it helps for something to be true.
Our modern society often seems geared towards quick fixes, superficial relationships, material things.
We are bombarded with advertising and social media images but below this superficial level of experience, there are deeper truths.
The problem of determining the truth in current events (and in other areas) when we’re faced with conflicting views from thousands of media and Internet sources seems insurmountable. Does this make sense? Is it likely?
While accepting that no one is going to get everything right all the time without the truth aiming for equality is a recipe for disappointment.
So we enter into our search for truth by asking these vital questions:
Is truth the property of verbal and written language, or is it now visual and as such by-passes the chaotic problem of human perception and interpretation?
Or is truth assumed to exist in an abstract realm of correctly conceived ideas?
Or is the truth the true knowledge of things as they are now, as they have been in the past, and as they will be in the future?
What does it mean to know the truth?
The most valuable asset you can have is trusting but to have trust it must be true?
Pragmatic proofs are paraded daily on TV and Social media which are both promoted by unregulated platforms with unchallenged Fake News making convincing claims to “knowing.”
Truth used to be conceived as a property of accurately stated words or accurately conceived ideas that correctly characterize world realities like the Corna virus outbreak that might turn out to be the modern-day catalyst to defining the truth.
Let’s start with death as it has a way of concreating the mind.
It is undeniable or is it.
We can’t know anything for certain, so the truth is in need of a God.
Without the Ressurection, Christianity would not exist.
We can’t imagine X being simultaneously true and false in the same manner. Another word if something is true, it’s not simultaneously false in the same way.
How to “prove” it.
All truth is empirically or scientifically testable.
There are no eyewitnesses who watched Big Bang so the assumption that something came from nothing is propositional truth. It has been the big question facing humanity since mankind crawled from the primordial ooze – where did the universe come from?
If we consider the hypothetical proposition of the impact of finding life on another planet or it arriving on this planet it will not prove anyone theological system right or wrong, so our confused view of what is true will remain.
For an example of this is.
If by deduction reasoning, verified against observed facts penguins exist.
But put another way, the claim “penguins exist” is itself a penguin.
That said if someone just refuses to acknowledge logic, it ends all rational discourse. You can’t logically prove anything to someone who denies logic.
So deduction depends upon the nature of assumptions.
These assumptions are not applicable universally because the premises from which they are deduced may not hold good at all time and places.
There is a part of the world that we can’t see.
Quantium Maths is a realm of reality that doesn’t consist of material things but of non-material forms. Quantum physics brings us a new kind of reality, provides us with direct suggestions of how we can live in accordance with the numinous realm of the universe.
But the meaning and purpose of our nature are anchored in the numinous realm of reality, not virtual reality. We usually take our thinking for granted, and the thoughts in our mind tell us a lot of things, but they say nothing about where they are coming from!
The word, “consciousness” derives from the Latin, “con” and “sciencia”, and it means a state of “knowing together” what is true and not true.
There is no plural form because there is only one consciousness.
Our concepts of truth evolve in the same way in which our bodies evolve.
For some reason, in our history, worldviews have always been accompanied by threats.
We believe that the evolution of concepts and their understanding is the true function of biological evolution. It is impossible to know, whether we are evolving with the cosmic mind, or whether it is merely our mind that has to evolve to a better understanding of a non-evolving cosmic order.
We are left with verifiable truth taking many paths based on observations which become intellectual toys that the real world may forget in the intellectual gymnastics and mathematical treatment of the observations.
The principle of noncontradiction cannot be established scientifically only by a witness.
Once you concede that *an* absolute truth exists, a whole slew of truth statements come with it:
It can’t be absolutely true since that would create a contradiction:
So if you remove all religious beliefs it is very easy subconsciously to absorb the truth.
An ascending process” in which facts are collected, arranged and then general conclusions are drawn in which we arrive at a generalisation on the basis of particular observed facts. This process is realistic because it is based on facts and explains to them as they actually are. But it can only show that the hypothesis is not inconsistent with the known facts.
In reality, the collection of data is not illuminating unless it is related to a hypothesis.
Either because it is committed to religion being false (e.g., they want to live a sinful lifestyle, so they need to convince themselves that God isn’t real, or at least, worth obeying), or because they’re too proud to admit defeat, or because they’re not really that interested in investigating the issue deeply, or simply because they don’t see things the same way that you do.
The narrower the problem on the basis of logical reasoning the truer it becomes verified by observation.
The penguin stands verified. It does not need a witness or scientifically proven.
But truth relies on the axiom that things are either true or false: things that are false cannot be true, and things that are true cannot be false.
There exists absolute and knowable truth, outside of the realm of the natural sciences, and not subject to empirical and scientific testing.
All scientific knowledge is built upon a bed of metaphysical propositions that cannot be established scientifically. Where experiment is practically impossible, abstraction and analysis afford the only means of escape from those which complicate the problem so much.
So many people hold wrong opinions simply because they’ve never thought deeply on the subject. And our culture is absolutely toxic with wrongheaded philosophical and religious views and now false news.
I won’t say you are wrong if you won’t say I am. The argument depends totally on the rules of the logic game. Unfortunately because of Social media, our intellects are falling.
We established the truth of the claim by the witness and not those who hide behind logically incoherent arguments removing themselves from the field of logical discussion.
The only thing to do (I presume) is to attempt to lure them back by showing that they’ve transgressed logic and are simply appealing to emotion?
Assuming that the public square should be devoid of religion; assuming that faith is irrational; etc. “Absolute truth exists” is absolutely true.
On the other hand, no one can know anything for certain, is sceptic’s absurdity.
This statement is a broad (self-refuting) metaphysical and epistemological claim.
To achieve a trusted world it requires a compromise of the cultures.
At this point in our analysis, we might ask:
Does it all matter? Why should we care?
Our answer is the belief that happiness in this life can be found only by understanding the spiritual background of the universe, and by living in accordance with it.
This means that we have to recognize the invisible background of reality and accept the importance of spirit in our life. Denying the transcendent aspects of our nature can lead to serious problems for our physical health and spiritual well being.
The truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth or someone may claim the right to tell it for you.
Our task isn’t the task of slaves to technology, who have to serve their creator.
“If Materialism is false”, writes Imants Baruss “then what is true?”
What is true these days is that we economizing it.
Let people believe what they want, as long as those beliefs aren’t leading to hurtful or unlawful actions.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
It is widely assumed by the general public that humanity is “progressing” and that we are better both physically and mentally than our predecessors were. Of course, this is true for some of us but for 6 billion of us on 2$ a day I doubt they would agree.
A person’s conception of truth is deeply intertwined with their conception of reality and truth isn’t actually divorced from reality. Science is dependent on truthfulness.
Few of us these day’s has the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth, but can we or should we trust the source?
As the saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
In a world where facts are under siege, credentialed sources are proving more important than ever.
We are getting our news from platforms, run by Facebook, Google, Twitter, Messanger, etc including other social media sites and search engines, but can we place our trust in those platforms.
The profession of undermining truth has been in existence for decades. For much of recorded history, the truth was rooted in scholasticism now it’s rooted in a capitalist haze where political correctness and social justice including warfare have descended from the ivory tower of the rich infiltrating tech, business, healthcare, and governments.
The quest for facts these days is now governed by disinterested Google algorithms that trade us, accuracy for efficiency, creating a “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.
It seems that we accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.
As a result, humankind is losing mental capacity to know the truth and we are living in an era of rationality inequality.
For example, voters act on issues that don’t affect them personally and are under no pressure to inform themselves or defend their positions.
People vote as if rooting for sports teams, encouraged by the media, which treat politics as a horse race, encouraging zero-sum competition rather than a clarification of character and policy.
So what is happening?
History is littered with the bending or inverting of truth by people in power has long been consequential, so the recent prominence of “fake news.” is not a new development. The belief that fake news is displacing the truth itself needs to be examined for its truth.
The implication is that we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own.
“Social media.”
Not long ago many intellectuals deplored the lack of democratic access to mass media.
Now a few media corporations, in cahoots with the government, “manufactured consent” with their oligopoly over the means of production and dissemination of ideas.
We used to say, freedom of the press belongs to those who own, one no longer true.
Social Media with it’s like algorithms are now fueling, accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that can be weaponized: since everyone reviles these bigotries, they can be used to demonize adversaries, which in turn spreads a terror of being demonized. It has become the place where one can express heterodox opinions without fear of being silenced or fired.
A network of pluralistic ignorance enforced by denunciation mobs.
So when it comes to intolerant repression of non-leftist ideas, don’t blame the Millennials or the iGens because unregulated Social Media is now blazing out of control abetted in part by government subsidies and lack of will to regulate.
People gravitating to people who are like them.
Social media held out the promise of giving a voice to the people, unfortunately, is making us dumber.
It is true to say that the network dynamics of social media are still poorly understood, but they do not yet host the mechanisms of vetting and reviewing that are necessary for true beliefs to bubble up to prominence from the turbid pools of self-presentation, group solidarity, and pluralistic ignorance.
We project the best sides of our lives through social media but revile real vulnerability.
So we are living in a post-truth world” true?
If your answer is “yes” then the answer is “no” because you’ve just evaluated the statement in an evidentiary manner, so evidence still matters and facts still matter.
But humans are fundamentally irrational – No.
If humans were truly irrational, who specified the benchmark of rationality against which humans don’t measure up? How did they conduct the comparison? Why should we believe them? Indeed, how could we understand them?
We did not evolve with the truth-augmenting technologies that have been invented in recent millennia and centuries, such as writing, quantitative datasets, scientific methodology, and specialized expertise. We evolved with the reality of the thought of what is true.
We don’t believe in reason; we use reason but as soon as you try to argue that we should believe things by any route other than reason, you’ve lost the argument, because you’ve appealed to reason.
That is why a defence of reason is unnecessary, perhaps even impossible. The very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason.
This is the point where it gets somewhat complicated.
We build mental models of the world around us that allow us to explain, predict, and control things to our advantage.
Algorithms know this by monitoring our lives and consultancy firms that specialize in defending products from tobacco to industrial chemicals that harm the public (that have and are with us since the dawn of Capitalism) are manipulating the market place for profit while ensuring that the truth stays buried.
So our reasoning is contaminated by false news.
Social media is a major source of these falsehoods coupled with peculiarities in human behaviour on social media, make it easy for fake news to spread. Twitter, Facebook you name them.
“Political” fake news spread three times faster than other kinds, and the top 1 per cent of retweeted fake news regularly diffused to at least 1,000 people and sometimes as many as 100,000.
Out of all of the news you see reported, how much of it do you believe is made up or fake news?
Around 40% with 70% per cent more likely than true news to receive a retweet.
While the political repercussions of fake news are quite obvious, the phenomenon it depends on how the information is presented and how rationality is defined.
The powers of inference for example.
Rational inference, scepticism, and debate are in our nature but set against false news that is normalizing the production of alternative facts are a project long in the making.
Politicians—two in particular—lies a lot. But politicians have always lied. They say that in war, truth is the first casualty, and that can be true of political war as well.
THERE’S A TON OF MISINFORMATION OUT THERE, AND WE’RE NOT OKAY LETTING IT GO UNCHECKED.
Why is the truth important?
We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally.
Spreading disinformation here, hiding evidence of harm there, undermining authorities evidence can change people’s minds. Internet discussion groups, in which these ideas harden and grow more extreme in the absence of critical engagement.
Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change.
Forecasting is no longer the dark art of pundits, gurus, it is big data and everyday fact-checking with Google has and is been revolutionized.
When people are confronted with their own ignorance of the facts, they become more epistemically humble about their opinions.
Unwelcome news is automatically rebranded fake news.
In the end, we are mere mortals but has the day of rationality-promoting norms and institutions passed?
The causes are complex, but it’s exhausting to live in a society where asking for help equals failure.
“Life before Google.”
Nothing can reverse the damage that has been done during our own generation, and some of this regression in truthfulness in the last 50 years is a paradoxical byproduct of the fantastic progress, we have made inequality.
From climate breakdown to air and water pollution, Co2 emissions, natural disasters, the spread of the coronavirus virus, ongoing wars, our media watchdogs that don’t know what they are watching only using them to boost their viewing ratings.
Something important about the way we conceive of truth in our daily lives is needed if we are to tackle the difficulty assessing the reliability of the information that we find on the internet.
To achieve this these platforms with profit-seeking algorithms need to put their money where their mouths are.
Considering the technological boom are humans becoming smarter or more stupid?
The art of creating scientific disinformation is now at a new level of the tricks reanalysing results to reach different conclusions and hiring people prepared to rig methodologies to produce funders’ desired result.
The truth of history constitutes its whole value.
Enriching a favoured few at the expense of the great majority of mankind will be the last lie. The inconvenient truths will inevitably come to light.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The films served to both promote products and a vision of America undergirded by chemicals and synthetic materials. We learn the industry was proud to produce insecticides, PCBs, vinyl and other materials and toxins later identified as environmental toxins.
This truth has been with us from the dawn of humanity.
The inability to share leads to most world problems.
Inequality.
With the ability to share truth and untruths through social media right now, it’s difficult to know what to trust or who to trust.
Are we seeing a return to protectionism or the redefining of capitalism, to sustainability before profit?
There is one certainty Social media is having an effect on where power and how power is used giving rise to Popolusim contra Eliatilism.
So I think it is time to be a bit more honest and plain-speaking about the circumstances that have led to Brexit.
Politics and the media are being pushed to the limit by advancements in technology and uncertainty about the future.
Misinformation is spreading.
When it comes to Brexit, we have reached the point where, to an extraordinary extent, the implementation of the 2016 referendum result trumps all else. But as we approach the departure date all statements about British politics should be assumed to include to the word “probably”
If it will happen when it will happen.
For the most part, the debate about Brexit since the 2016 referendum has been framed primarily in economic terms but it is my contention that Brexit, whether it happens or not, is now showing that the EU never was the problem.
The problem is fixing Britain’s relationship with itself.
The irony is that the country that was least affected by the migration crisis is the one where we are now seeing the most consequential political backlash.
Those who promise that leaving the EU will deliver “control” are really promising something quite specific: a social and cultural reboot.
Of course, this is a complete impossibility. We live in a world defined by the economic, social and cultural interdependence of nation states.
Take back control” was indeed the slogan of the Leave campaign, but it was “control” with one purpose, above all others, the relationship between taxation and public spending and immigration.
A wealthy nation is essential both to the aspirations of individual households and the funding of public services. Unfortunately, England is now reaping the rewards of putting the economy before its people.
Of selling most of its assets, of investing in a world image of power when in fact its people were on the streets due to lack of social housing, were lying in hospital corridors due to lack of funding, were relying on food banks due to lack of decent wages, were running up personal debts, were educated for the market place.
These are now the gravitational centre of the whole debate:
Britain’s act of masochism in leaving the EU will create a country that is unpopular, self-hating and insecure about its identity.
There will be no game-changing trade deals.
It is better that they draw this conclusion today rather than in 2040 after a period of harsh isolation in the middle of the North Sea.
The British people (and particularly the English), who have been in search of their identity since 1945, might finally recognize that it lies not in the distant past (Empire/Commonwealth), nor in the recent past (“special relationship” with the US) but in the future.
The only sensible course, therefore, is to suspend Article 50 and request a return to the status quo ante.
This could be done following a proper constitutional process, meaning a parliamentary vote. Britain can unilaterally revoke Article 50 and therefore freeze the process of leaving the EU.
Britain can write a letter to the EU and state that it wants to freeze its withdrawal process, and that’s what it takes to get yourself off the default path towards crashing out.
However, this process cannot be used just to pause the process and regroup.
In order to pause the process and regroup, the U.K. would need to have the consent of all the other EU members.
If it were just a request to say, oh, we’ve really lost our mind, we don’t quite know what to do, it’s very unlikely that the other 27 members would say, oh, yeah, sure, fine, let’s do that.
Then we come to the Backstop re Northern Ireland;
Northern Ireland wants some legally binding assurances that the U.K. will be able to get out of it unilaterally.
The probability of EU leaders conceding this is zero. And it’s zero today. And it’s zero down the road.
The EU’s position has been very much: This is—this is not negotiable. And, frankly, they all know that you know, a number of EU members are unhappy with the terms of the withdrawal agreement. And if it were to be reopened, it would be a whole can of worms with a lot of, you know, different asks being put on the table.
So this is just not going to happen without the backstop becoming the front stop.
The priority list in continental Europe, with coming elections you know, Brexit isn’t the first thing, or the second thing, or the third thing; it’s somewhere after that.
The disasters to befall the EU27 won’t have befallen them. They will, instead, have continued to evolve their community, grow their economy, taken heed of lessons played out across the Channel, made things better.
Does any of this matter?
Because London is fine, Westminster and the BBC will say Britain is fine. This is no longer so, there is a much uglier reality and one that has little to do with GDP.
If London loses its financial clout there will be a fundamental change to the British economy that Britain now needs to cycle through before it can clarify where it wants to end up with in this Brexit process.
Brexit is both symptom and cause of a breakdown in this consensus.
This needs to be understood outside the day-to-day disasters of the Brexit process itself.
The NHS won’t have fixed itself. Nor will social care. Nor pension problem. Nor it’s out of date infrastructure.
So low and behold we now see department ministers promising funds to fix the NHS etc. However, Brexit will be a suffocating error when it comes to finding these funds. A poorer U.K. outside the EU will be less useful both as a military ally and as a diplomatic partner or as a trading partner.
There could be one unanticipated positive outcome.
The conventional politics of “left versus right” no longer apply:
The political party that can transcend party lines and speak to people across the ideological spectrum will be the rising voice in the next 10 years.
It is unlikely that either of the main political parties in England will survive in their current forms, given the pressures their internal coalitions are already under.
It does not take a nitwit that global we are witnessed the highest number of global battle deaths for 25 years, persistently high levels of terrorism, and the highest number of refugees and displaced people since World War II.
If this is not observable we are left with “the essence of bullshit: a complete lack of concern with truth” and “an indifference to how things really are.”
All one has to do is turn on your TV. Who can tell what infringements to our civil liberties will have been introduced in the name of keeping us safe? What new walls will be built?
The important thing is not that what he says is true, but that it persuades. and by then none of us will have recourse to Europe to stave them off, either?
Luckily there is no such thing as an average human being.
Nonetheless, that fictional construct is precisely what businesses use to explain human behaviour, reducing us to mere consumers.
There are however those who navigate the currents of uncertainty and change without the need for any particular dogma or orthodoxy to guide them. These are the innovators, thinkers, misfits, activists, artists, and creators who can be found on the fringes of any walk of life, nipping at the hem of hegemonic power, disrupting the status quo, and bravely embracing the unknown.
The future belongs to these voices, not to a world where the truth has become so malleable and subjective as to be almost meaningless as a concept.
It also belongs to those brave enough to stand up to bullshit in some of its most vaunted forms. There is some hope for this.
The fine line between the present and the future never looked so blurry.
However, the truth has to persist unaffected, in the past, in the present and in the future.
The next victims of social media will be based on media trends.
What is left when you take away all the ads and the packaging of Brexit is the truth of the product –
Wake up England and stop being the sulking wanting to leave the room when you still have the chance to influence the creation of a Europe, whole, free and at peace.
All human comments appreciated/All abuse and like clicks chucked in the bin.
The UK National Debt is estimated to be £1.84 trillion.
Uk Defence spending is budgeted to be £48.3 billion.
A quick examination of the numbers reveals that the world continues to spend vastly disproportionate resources on creating and containing violence compared to what it spends on peace.
how you design the ballot would have a material impact on how it turned out.
The UK has consistently armed many of the most brutal and authoritarian regimes in the world.
WITH IT’S RECENT BREXIT RHETORIC IT WOULD NOW APPEAR THAT IT CAN’T WAIT TO OPT OUT OF THE EU NATIONAL ARMS EXPORT LICENSING CRITERIA.
UK arms manufacturers have exported almost £5bn worth of weapons to countries that are judged to have repressive regimes in the 22 months since the Conservative party won the last election. Out of 49 countries that are classed as “not free” by Freedom House, the independent organization that promotes democracy, 36 have bought British-made weapons under the current government.
Even when Saudi’s massive order book is stripped out, arms exports to repressive regimes have almost doubled since the Tory government was elected: orders to such countries, excluding Saudi, amount to almost £1.2bn, compared with £680m in the 22 months before the election.
Following the referendum on leaving the European Union, the Defence & Security Organisation, the government body that promotes arms manufacturers to overseas buyers, was moved from UK Trade & Investment to the Department for International Trade.
SETTING THE ARMS TRADE ASIDE THE UK SINCE JOINING THE EUROPEAN UNION (WHETHER IT HAS BEEN A NET CONTRIBUTOR OR NOT) HAS NEVER ENGAGED WITH THE OVERRIDING ASPIRATION OF THE EU – PEACE.
With just three months to go to the October deadline, we are now witnessing the new UK Brexit chief Dominic Raab threating to renege on paying the Uk legal exit payments.
TO WALK AWAY FROM THE BREXIT DIVORCE WILL BRAKE INTERNATIONAL LAW.
THE AMOUNT OF £39 BILLION IS NOT A GRATUITY PAYMENT IT IS A LEGAL LIABILITY.
It represents liabilities to contribute towards pensions to public servants, agreed contributions to joint research and development programmes. It represents binding liabilities that in total are estimated to be £87bn. The EU has agreed to refund $48 bn, this includes the refund of the UK’s share of the ECB.
Saying that the UK can walk away from its commitments is once more deceiving the people of England.
Do so and there will definitely be NO DEAL ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD other than with the 36 who have bought British-made weapons.
It will then be time to change the national anthem from God save the Queen to God Save The People.
There will be no transition period.
Trade with the EU will be under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. (Immediate customs and regulatory checks, tariffs.)
Sterling will fall- Inflation- unemployment- disruption at ports and airports- prices of consumer good to rise.
Mr Raab claims that the EU,s economy will be worse off.
Get real the EU27 economy is ten to eleven time the size of the UK’s.
With a no deal, the peoples legal status as citizens on both sides will become illegal immigrants as any rights agreed do not apply.
You can rest assured that nobody will ever try to leave the EU in the near future.
Dominic Raab name is derived from an Old-German personal name, which meant “raven.”
PERHAPS HE IS WELL NAMED TO REPRESENT A RAVEN MAD UK that thinks that the EU owes them a deal, on non – negotiated terms to leave.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE CAN’T HELP BUT WEEP WHEN IT LOOKS AT CLIMATE CHANGE. WITH THE STATE THE WORLD IS IN AT THE MOMENT THERE IS ZERO HOPE OF US COMING TOGETHER WITH A REALISTIC SOLUTION.
For the past year, I have been adding to my Flipboard ( # Silent Witness to Climate Change) anything connected to the subject.
In the last few months, the shit really started hitting the fan.
Record heat waves in Pakistan, India, each killing thousands of people, while California burns, Port Rico has little or no water and the Helheim glacier in Greenland lost 10 billion tons of ice.
Countries and communities around the world are already experiencing stepped-up climate change impacts – including droughts, floods, more intense and frequent natural disasters, and sea-level rise – and the most vulnerable are being hit the hardest.
It is not difficult nor does it require Artificial intelligence to realize that if the world does not address Co2 emissions we are looking at mass migration, economic collapse, not to mention wars that will threaten the very fabric of civilization.
GLOBAL WARMING IS ALREADY HAPPING FAR FASTER THAN THE 2 DEGREES CELSIUS LIMITED SET BY THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT. THE CURRENT RATE OF EMISSIONS WITHIN THE PRESENT CENTURY WILL EFFECT OUR OCEANS – IRREVERSIBLE.
The appearance of low-oxygen regions is doubling every ten years, spreading from coastal areas into deep and deeper water, forcing fish whales and pretty much every living ocean creatures upwards. Cold patches in the ocean are slowing warm ocean circulation currents while acidifying continuous unabated with over six percent of the world reefs disappearing before the end of the decade.
SURELY WE DON’T NEED TO BE TOLD THAT HURRICANES ARE GETTING STRONGER AND MORE AND MORE DEVASTATING NATURAL DISASTER ARE OCCURRING WORLDWIDE. Considering all of the other climate forces surely its time that our world leaders whether in or out of government stand up and take notice.
We are all however through our self-image underestimate climate change.
If you ask me no one can comment on how far in the future these changes will occur but what is happing to the Bearing sea is already providing us with a snapshot of what is to come and it won’t be gradual. (The Bearing sea was once a barrier between the Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean it is now an arm of the Atlantic.)
Rather than seeing lots of regional tipping points, the future will be the sum of all the climatic events and their interaction. It won’t be Florida that is wiped off the map but the whole of the earth ecosystems.
With the Donald Trump promoting America First, fueling trade wars and opting out of the Paris Climate agreement it would be a brave political leader to be advocating that we should cut consumption for obvious economic reasons.
Social media continues to dilute any long-term coordinated political engagement, aiding populous ends, and fragmented partitions.
To reduce Co2 emissions we are left with one option and that NEEDS to engage all of us.
So what if anything can be done?
All TV stations should be legally obliged to provide their viewers with a weather forecast once a month that is dedicated to the effects of climate change in order to bring the subject to the attention of the viewing public.
We are beginning to see small communities developing their own sustainable energy supply. GOVERNMENTS NEED TO SUPPORT THIS TRANSFORMATION WITH REWARDS AND SUBSIDIES WHETHER ITS TAX BRAKES OR PAYING FOR THE ENERGY GENERATED.
WHAT IF YOU WERE REWARDED FOR CONVERTING TO SOLAR PANELS.
To make a difference worldwide we must make GREED IN THE FORM OF PROFIT CONTRIBUTE. ( see previous posts on a WORLD AID FUND)
Will any of this happen?
Nuclear power – Infusion – Technology- Paris Climate Agreement, you name it, will not stop natures environmental response to our abuses of sustainability.
THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT IF WE ARE TO TURN THE TIDE ON CLIMATE CHANGE GOVERNMENTS AND ALL OF US MUST RESHAPE THE FUTURE OF ENERGY.
TO BENEFIT SOCIALLY AND FINANCIALLY FROM THE ENEGERY WE MUST TRANSITION TO COMMUNITIES MODELS.
While we are all becoming aware that we are at the edge of a new phase of human history. To get there we must act not as machines driven by data and algorithms ungoverned by ethical philosophical norms.
INDIVIDUALS TURNED INTO DATA TO FUEL PARTIES FOR POLITICAL OR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES IS NOT GOING TO TACKLE THE PROBLEMS THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS BRING TO THE WORLD.
ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE ALGORITHMS ARE WEAKENING THE FORTITUDE REQUIRED TO ACT.
POLITICAL LEADERS OVERWHELMED BY NICHE PRESSURES ARE DEPRIVED OF TIME TO THINK OR REFLECT ON CONTEXT, CONTRACTING THE SPACE AVAILABLE FOR THEM TO DEVELOP VISION.
THE DIGITAL WORLD WITH ITS INCENTIVES IS EMPOWERING THE RADICAL OVER THE THOUGHTFUL TO SUCH AN EXTENT THAT WE MUST EXPECT AI TO MAKE MISTAKES FASTER- AND OF GREATER MAGNITUDE THAT HUMANS DO.
AI may well in the future reach its intended goals, but it will be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions.
THE TERM ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE IS A MISNOMER.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD IS PREOCCUPIED WITH COMMERCIAL VISTAS RATHER THAN EXPLORING THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE HUMAN CONDITION THAT IT HAS BEGUN TO PRODUCE.
THERE IS ONE THING FOR CERTAIN IF WE DO NOT START TO ADDRESS CLIMATE CHANGES SOON WITH A GLOBAL EFFORT TO CLEAN UP OUR ACT WE SHALL DISCOVER THAT WE STARTED TOO LATE.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
The problem is that the concept of “artificial intelligence” is way too potent for its own good.
Ai, Machine learning, Deep learning neural networks have no obvious ways of performing logical inferences all are still a long way from integrating abstract knowledge, such as information about what objects are, what they are for, and how they are typically used.
These are the three terms you’re most likely to have heard lately, and, to be as simple as possible, we can think of them in layers. Neural networks are at the bottom — they’re a type of computer architecture on to which artificial intelligence is built.
Machine learning is next — it’s a program you might run on a neural network, training computers to look for certain answers in pots of data; and
Deep learning is on top — it’s a particular type of machine learning that’s only become popular over the past decade, largely thanks to two new resources: cheap processing power and abundant data (otherwise known as the internet).
The concept of neural networks goes all the way back to the ‘50s and the beginning of AI as a field of research.
In a nutshell, these networks are a way of structuring a computer so that it looks like a cartoon of the brain, comprised of neuron-like nodes connected together in a web. Individually these nodes are dumb, answering extremely basic questions, but collectively they can tackle difficult problems. More importantly, with the right algorithms, they can be taught.
In other words, they don’t have any common sense.
BUT WILL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE EVER DEVELOP IMAGINATION.
In most cases, the systems making claims to artificial intelligence aren’t sentient, self-aware, volitional, or even surprising. They’re just software.
AI platforms should do more than answer simple questions. They should be able to learn at scale, reason with purpose, and naturally, interact with humans TO BE CALLED INTELLIGENT.
THERE IS PRESENTLY A GREAT MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE TERM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AMONG THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS WHEN IT COMES TO NOT ONLY IDENTIFYING AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
With Artificial intelligence poised to disrupt everything, it’s time we get on the same page as to what AI is, and perhaps more importantly, what we want it to be so that we can regulate and control the technology.
IF WE DON’T ANYONE LOOKING TO DRAW BUZZ TO THEIR PRODUCTS WILL CONTINUE TO CO-OPT THE PHRASE.
If we don’t we won’t NOTICE WHEN A TRUE REVOLUTIONARY AI SYSTEM DOES ARRIVE.
AND HOW PROBLEMATIC THAT WILL BE.
NOW IS THE TIME THAT WE MUST FULLY ALIGN THE GOAL’S OF AI WITH OURS WHICH IS ALREADY STRICKLING DIFFICULT WITHOUT AN OVERALL GOVERNING WORLD BODY.
IT IS PARAMOUNT FOR WORLD PEACE NOT TO MENTION IN THE COMING YEARS TO REDUCE THE INCREASING GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR THAT EVERY AI PROGRAM SHOULD BE VETTED NOT JUST FOR A SUREFIRE WAY OF PREDICTING HOW IT WILL BEHAVE BUT TO ENSURE IT COMPLIES WITH OUR COMMON HUMAN VALUES.
FOR TRANSPARENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY EVERY AI PROGRAM SHOULD BE REGISTERED WITH THIS WORLD BODY WITH A SHUTDOWN PROGRAM.
ALL HUMAN COMMENTS APPRECIATED. ALL LIKE CLICKS CHUCKED IN THE BIN.
We are constantly bombarded by messages by well-meaning NGOs who desperately try to help people living in poverty. At the same time media throw in a mix of news full of disasters and war, and then they host huge charity shows on TV ever so many times a year.
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