Tag Archives: Visions of the future.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: THE UKRAINE WAR IS NOW A WAR WHERE THERE CAN BE NO WINNERS. HERE ARE SOME ENTRENCHED TRUTHS.

26 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., The Ukraine., Uncategorized

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( Six minute read) 

The war is now in its ninth month and has a long way to go, it isn’t remotely over.

In other words, the beginning of 2023 in the Ukraine looks a lot like 2022.

It has triggered a global energy crisis and supply chain problems that have halted post-pandemic recovery in many poorer countries.

The war has evolved into one of attrition, grinding on with no end on the immediate horizon.

Putin’s idea that was, the Ukrainian population would either accept their fate as a Russian colony or perhaps even welcome it, is a farcical as Hitlerism vision of a fatherland.

The fighting in Ukraine is effectively now divided into two theatres:

The Donbas region in the east, much of which Russia has captured, where Ukrainian forces are seeking to slow Russia’s advance, and the south, where Ukrainian forces are preparing to launch a counteroffensive to recapture lost territory, with a possible renewed Russian offensive in the east.

At the moment, though, that path seems firmly closed off with the arrival of German manufactured tanks, and American tanks promised if they are supplied in the near future.  

If the Ukrainian counteroffensive succeeds, Putin could come to deem the cost of victory in the east too high. 

If the counteroffensive fails.

A failed offensive that ends in a retreat would be disaster for Ukraine, leaving it militarily weaker and more diplomatically isolated come spring.

Alternatively, Ukraine could become a victim of its own success.

If its forces encroach too far on what Russia may soon officially designate its own territory in the Donbas, Putin could retaliate by using low-yield nuclear weapons, which are designed to be used on the battlefield.

So should a Ukrainian offensive roll over this new self-declared border, the use of nuclear weapons to break up the attack will be on the table. This is not unthinkable — it is only unpalatable.

The Kremlin’s possession of nuclear arsenal means no one can force it to stand down without total annihilation Nuclear explosion

If anything we are closer to the war spreading.

Short of  annihilation this is no longer just a question of who beats whom. 

 

The war asks, how much are we willing to tolerate the unchecked and aggressive use of force, particularly across national boundaries by bigger powers.

However reconsidering the West role in the democratic world after its messy and chaotic exit from Afghanistan.

Inevitably this will mean serious reflection at its (ongoing) history of propping up dictators and turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in the name of diplomacy.

For the war to truly end and for peace to be stable, there has to be some change in Moscow.

The quickest and least bloody path to ending the conflict runs through a settlement negotiated by both sides.

At some point the supply of Western weaponry will dwindle.

Putin’s willingness to escalate and target civilian infrastructure, shows that his all or nothing attitude has not abated.

Remember that he has other, less risky means of terrifying Ukraine and intimidating the West. Chemical weapons.

Putin has made it clear that Russia has no intention of retreating. 

Someone is dreaming or receiving the wrong message that events suggest the war is over. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that any administration has any war termination policies other than the problem is that much of the discussion has relied on a series of unstated and unexamined assumptions about war termination and escalation.

Scrutinizing these assumptions, however, reveals two conclusions.

First, Russia does have a plausible path to victory in the conflict, and will likely prevail absent a significant increase in Western military assistance. Second, the Russians do not have an effective counter to increased Western aid to Ukraine.

If we accept this line of argument, it seems clear that absent a significant increase in outside support for Ukraine—minimally, a dramatic increase in supply of military equipment, but more likely some sort of direct intervention in the form of a peacekeeping mission or imposition of a no-fly zone—Russia will ultimately prevail.

The challenge, however, is to control escalation to avoid the possibility of, in the worst case, a general nuclear exchange. The fear i seems to be that Russia will escalate the conflict, either in intensity or geographic scope in response to an increase in aid or direct intervention.

But why do we think this would be the likely Russian response? 

Russia could escalate to nuclear weapons, of course. But to what end? Can Russia win a nuclear exchange?

It is difficult to construct a plausible argument regarding that.

There is no nuclear option, whether tactical or general, that provides Russia with a war-winning solution, except in the case that a Russian use of nuclear weapons induces the rest of the world to surrender to Russia’s demands.

The issue of escalation has to be placed in the context of strategic logic.

Escalation is a danger particularly when one side or the other possesses some degree of escalation dominance—that is, that escalation changes the conflict in a way that benefits one side or another. There is no evidence, however, that Russia possesses any degree of escalation dominance at present.

On the contrary, in the current situation, Russia benefits to the extent the conflict remains Russia against Ukraine.

Let us make no mistake.

Russia is currently on a path to victory because its strategy is now grounded in a logic of terror and brutalization. Every day that Russia is able to strike Ukrainian civilians with near impunity pushes Ukraine’s leadership closer to the need to surrender in order to prevent a virtual, or literal, genocide. The only way to reverse this is a dramatic increase in outside assistance to Ukraine.

The Russians may be brutal, but they are not irrational.

As stretched as they already are, the last thing they need or can sustain is a wider conflict. Escalation dominance rests with NATO and the West. We should take advantage of it. We just aren’t being helpful in terms of encouraging an end to hostilities.

And there’s a lot we could be doing to spur negotiations along.

In any case, there is no reason to assume that irrationality or a desire to die a martyr’s death animates Putin.

Wars often continue beyond the point at which, with hindsight, they might in terms of rational strategy have been better stopped. the ending of wars is often associated with some form of regime change.

For Putin, whatever his original goals for the war, the continuation in fighting is now essentially about regime survival. Even if the costs of the war continue to grow, and even if some kind of political settlement could be reached, Putin is likely to continue to fight in the hope of obtaining a settlement that can plausibly be portrayed as a victory, because without this his political position may be fatally weakened.

In ending the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, traditional structural obstacles to conflict termination are likely to create major challenges, irrespective of the mounting costs for both sides.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE: HIGHLIGHTS ANOTHER KILLER OF THE PLANET – MOBILE PHONES.

25 Wednesday Jan 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., A solution to Climate change., Artificial Intelligence., Carbon Emissions., Climate Change.

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( Four minute read)

I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to impose on the up and coming generation but Smartphones are killing the planet faster than anyone expected.

Electronic waste is a huge problem around the globe.

The worst-case scenario is that electronic trash winds up in unregulated or mismanaged heaps, slowly leaking corrosive chemicals into the soil and water table.How much gold is in your phone? (Credit: Getty Images)

All phones require 16 of the 17 rare-earth metals.

This is more than just an amusing detail about the device that never leaves your side.

Suddenly your smartphone is looking a lot more valuable than you might think. Pocket-sized vaults of precious metals and rare earths.

A typical iPhone is estimated to house around 0.034g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and less than one-thousandth of a gram of platinum. It also contains the less valuable but still significant aluminium (25g) and copper (around 15g).

One tonne of iPhones would deliver 300 times more gold than a tonne of gold ore and 6.5 times more silver than a tonne of silver ore.

One million mobile phones could deliver nearly 16 tonnes of copper, 350kg of silver, 34kg of gold and 15kg of palladium.

And that’s just the start.

Smartphones also contain a range of rare earth elements – elements that are actually plentiful in the Earth’s crust but extremely difficult to mine and extract economically – including yttrium, lanthanum, terbium, neodymium, gadolinium and praseodymium.

Despite the recycling programs run by Apple and others, currently less than 1% of smartphones are being recycled.

With an estimated of 3.6 billion using smartphones tech’s carbon footprint is beyond what any one designer, one company, or even one government regulator can contain. Those 3.6 billion smartphone users upgrade to a new phone roughly every 11 months.

That’s because every Google search, every Facebook refresh, and every dumb Tweet we post requires a computer somewhere to calculate it all in the cloud.

Smartphone consumes as much energy as using an existing phone for an entire decade. That means buying one new phone takes as much energy as recharging and operating a smartphone for an entire decade.

But that is not the main problem. It is the building a new smartphone–and specifically, mining the rare materials inside them–represents 85% to 95% of the device’s total CO2 emissions for two years.

Even as the world shifts away from giant tower PCs toward tiny, energy-sipping phones, the overall environmental impact of technology is only getting worse. They’re more or less disposable.

Whereas ICT represented 1% of the carbon footprint in 2007, it’s already about tripled, and is on its way to exceed 14% by 2040.

That’s half as large as the carbon impact of the entire transportation industry.

The list of ICT components is exhaustive, and it continues to grow. ICT’s importance to economic development and business growth has been so monumental, in fact, that it’s credited with ushering in what many have labelled the Fourth Industrial Revolution.Components of ICT

The overall largest culprit with regards to CO2 emissions belongs to servers and data centres themselves, which will represent 45% of ICT emissions by 2020. Although there is no single, universal definition of ICT, the term is generally accepted to mean all devices, networking components, applications and systems that combined allow people and organizations (i.e., businesses, non-profit agencies, governments and criminal enterprises) to interact in the digital world.

Mobile apps actually reinforce our need for these 24/7 servers in a self-perpetuating energy-hogging cycle. More phones require more servers. And with all this wireless information in the cloud, of course we’re going to buy more phones capable of running even better apps.

The future will only get more dire if the internet of things takes off and many more devices are hitting up the cloud for data.

Wearable devices, to home appliances, and even cars, trucks and airplanes. If this trend continues . . . one can only wonder on the additional load these devices will have on the networking and data centre infrastructures, in addition to the incremental energy consumption incurred by their production.

The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices.

What can be done?

Recognising that changing consumer behaviour is probably the least viable option, we need to come up with something better.

Governments should pass a law that requires all companies manufacturing these deceives to make a cash refund payment to encourage the return of the devices for recycling.  which could make it the ultimate cottage industry,

The internet is omniscient, our phones omnipotent, and together they demand and are destroying our values however there is life beyond the phone, but experiencing its richness requires mindfulness and discipline.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: SOONER RATHER THAN LATER THERE WLL BE NO REAL INDEPENDENT SELF LEFT. JUST A DOWN LOAD OF ONESELF.

24 Tuesday Jan 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Algorithms.

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 ( Seventeen minute read) 

We know that we are living through a climate crisis, a mass extinction and an era of normalised pollution that harms our health, but we are also confronting with an age of technology with algorithms (APPS) that are changing society to benefit of a few while exploiting the many.

There are many examples of algorithms making big decisions about our lives, without us necessarily knowing how or when they do it.

Every “like”, watch, click is stored. Extreme content simply does better than nuance on social media. And algorithms know that.

Algorithms are a black box of living. 

We can see them at work in the world. We know they’re shaping outcomes all around us. But most of us have no idea what they are — or how we’re being influenced by them.

Algorithms are making hugely consequential decisions in our society on everything from medicine to transportation to welfare, benefits to criminal justice and beyond. Yet the general public knows almost nothing about them, and even less about the engineers and coders who are creating them behind the scenes.

Algorithms are quietly changing the rules of human life and whether the benefits of algorithms ultimately outweigh the costs remains a question.

Are we making a mistake by handing over so much decision-making authority to these programs?

Will we blindly follow them wherever they lead us?

Algorithms can produce unexpected outcomes, especially machine-learning algorithms that can program themselves.

Since it’s impossible for us to anticipate all of these scenarios, can’t we say that some algorithms are bad, even if they weren’t designed to be?

Every social media platform, every algorithm that becomes part of our lives, is part of this massive unfolding social experiment.

Billions of people around the world are interacting with these technologies, which is why the tiniest changes can have such a gigantic impact on all of humanity.

I think the right attitude is somewhere in the middle:

We shouldn’t blindly trust algorithms, but we also shouldn’t dismiss them altogether. The problem is that algorithms don’t understand context or nuance. They don’t understand emotion and empathy in the way that humans do they are eroding our ability to think and decide for ourselves.

This is clearly happening, where the role of humans has been side-lined and that’s a really dangerous thing to allow to happen.

Artificial algorithms will eventually combine in ways that blur the distinction between the place of where life is imitating tech. 

Who knows where the symbiotic relationship will end?

Fortunately we’re galaxies away from simulating more complex animals, and even further away from replicating humans.

Unfortunately we’re living in the technological Wild West, where you can collect private data on people without their permission and sell it to advertisers. We’re turning people into products, and they don’t even realize it. And people can make any claims they want about what their algorithm can or can’t do, even if it’s absolute nonsense, and no one can really stop them from doing it.

There is no one assessing whether or not they are providing a net benefit or cost to society.

There’s nobody doing any of those checks except your Supermarket loyalty card.

These reveals consumer patterns previously unseen and answers important questions. How will the average age of customers vary? How many will come with families? What are the mobility patterns influencing store visit patterns? How many will take public transportation? Should a store open for extended hours on certain days?  

Algorithms are being used to help prevent crimes and help doctors get more accurate cancer diagnoses, and in countless other ways.  All of these things are really, really positive steps forward for humanity we just have to be careful in the way that we employ them.

We can’t do it recklessly. We can’t just move fast, and we can’t break things.

                                                             _________________________________

Sites such as YouTube and Facebook have their own rules about what is unacceptable and the way that users are expected to behave towards one another.

The EU introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which set rules on how companies, including social media platforms, store and use people’s data.

How data was collected from a third party app on Facebook called “thisisyourdigitallife”  Facebook recently confirmed that information relating to up to 87 million people was captured by the app, with approximately 1 million of these people being UK citizens.

It is very important to note that deleting/removing one of these apps, or deleting your Facebook account, does
not automatically delete any data held on the app. Specific steps need to be taken within each app to request the deletion of any personal information it may hold.

If illegal content, such as “revenge pornography” or extremist material, is posted on a social media site, it has previously been the person who posted it, rather than the social media companies, who was most at risk of prosecution.

The urgent question is now: 

What do we do about all these unregulated apps?

There’s an app for that”, has become both an offer of help and a joke.

Schoolchildren are writing the apps:

A successful app can now be the difference between complete anonymity and global digital fame.

A malicious app could bring down whole networks. 

Google’s Android operating system is coming up on the rails: despite launching nearly two years later, it has more than 400,000 apps, and in December 2011 passed the 10bn downloads mark. 

With the iPod and iPhone.  31bn apps were downloaded to mobile devices in 2011, and predicts that by 2016 mobile apps will generate $52bn of revenues – 75% from smartphones and 25% from tablets.

Apps have also been important for streaming TV and film services such as Netflix and Hulu, as well as for the BBC’s iPlayer and BSkyB’s Sky Go – the latter now attracts 1.5 million unique users a month.

Apps will steal data or send pricey text messages.

Entire businesses are evolving around them. 

They are the new frontier in war’s instructing drones.

No one can fearlessly chase the truth and report it with integrity.

They are shaping our lives in ways never imagined before.

Today there is an app for everything you can think of.

In a short run, Apple and Google have done what nobody ever dreamed about fucked us.

Thanks to the gigantic rise of mobile app development technology, you can now choose digitally feasible ways of not knowing yourself.

The era of digitally smart and interactive virtual assistants has begun and will not cease.

Machines can control your home, your car, your health, your privacy, your lifestyle, your life, maybe not quite yet your mother.  You leaving behind gargantuan amount of infinite data for company owners.

It goes without saying that mobile apps have almost taken over the entire world.

Mobile apps have undoubtedly come a long way, giving us a whole new perspective in life: 

Living digital. 

Yes there are countries trying to pass laws to place controls on platforms that are, supposed to make the companies protect users from content involving things like violence, terrorism, cyber-bullying and child abuse, but not on profit seeking apps, trading apps ( Wall street is 70% governed by trading apps), spying apps, truth distorting apps destroying what left of Democracy. 

A democracy is a form of government that empowers the people to exercise political control, limits the power of the head of state, provides for the separation of powers between governmental entities, and ensures the protection of natural rights and civil liberties.

Meaning “rule by the people,” but people no longer apply when solutions to problems are decided by Algorithms.  

Are algorithms a threat to democracy?

It’s not a simple question to answer – because digitisation has brought benefits, as well as harm, to democracy. 

History has shown that democracy is a particularly fragile institution. In fact, of the 120 new democracies that have emerged around the world since 1960, nearly half have resulted in failed states or have been replaced by other, typically more authoritarian forms of government. It is therefore essential that democracies be designed to respond quickly and appropriately to the internal and external factors that will inevitably threaten them.

How likely is it that a majority of the people will continue to believe that democracy is the best form of government for them?

Digitisation brings all of us together – citizens and politicians – in a continuous conversation.

Our digital public spaces give citizens the chance to get their views across to their leaders, not just at election time, but every day of the year.

Is this true?

With so many voices, all speaking at once, creating a cacophony that’s not humanly possible for us to make sense of, such a vast amount of information.  And that, of course, is where the platforms come in.

Algorithms aren’t neutral.

Such allure of Dataism and Algorithmic decisions forms the foundation of the now-cliched Silicon Valley motto of “making the world a better place.”

Dataism is especially appealing because it is so all-encompassing.

With Datasim and algorithmic thinking, knowledge across subjects becomes truly interdisciplinary under the conceptual metaphor of “everything as algorithms,” which means learnings from one domain could theoretically be applied to another, thus accelerating scientific and technological advances for the betterment of our world.

These algorithms are the secret of success for these huge platforms. But they can also have serious effects on the health of our democracy, by influencing how we see the world around us.

When choices are made by algorithms, it can be hard to understand how they’ve made their decisions – and to judge whether they’re giving us an accurate picture of the world. It’s easy to assume that they’re doing what they claim to do – finding the most relevant information for us. But in fact, those results might be manipulated by so-called “bot farms”, to make content look more popular than it really is. Or the things that we see might not really be the most useful news stories, but the ones that are likely to get a response – and earn more advertising. 

The lack of shared reality is now a serious challenge for our democracy and algorithmically determined communications are playing a major role in it. In the current moment of democratic upheaval, the role of technology has been gaining increasing space in the democratic debate due to its role both in facilitating political debates, as well as how users’ data is gathered and used.

Democracy is at a turning point.

With the invisible hand of technology increasingly revealing itself, citizenship itself is at a crossroads. Manipulated masterfully by data-driven tactics, citizens find themselves increasingly slotted into the respective sides of an ever growing and unforgiving ideology divide.

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

Algorithm see, algorithm do.

Policymaking must move from being reactive to actively future-proofing democracy against the autocratic tendencies and function creep of datafication and algorithmic governance.

Why?

Because today, a few big platforms are increasingly important as the place where we go for news and information, the place where we carry on our political debates. They define our public space – and the choices they make affect the way our democracy works. They affect the ideas and arguments we hear – and the political choices we believe we can make. They can undermine our shared understanding of what’s true and what isn’t – which makes it hard to engage in those public debates that are every bit as important, for a healthy democracy, as voting itself.

Digital intelligence and algorithmic assemblages can surveil, disenfranchise or discriminate, not because of objective metrics, but because they have not been subject to the necessary institutional oversight that underpins the realisation of socio-cultural ideals in contemporary democracies. The innovations of the future can foster equity and social justice only if the policies of today shape a mandate for digital systems that centres citizen agency and democratic accountability.

Algorithms Will Rule The World

A troubling trend in our increasingly digital, algorithm-driven world — the tendency to treat consumers as mere data entry points to be collected, analysed, and fed back into the marketing machine.

It is a symptom of an algorithm-oriented way of thinking that is quickly spreading throughout all fields of natural and social sciences and percolating into every aspect of our everyday life. And it will have an enormous impact on culture and society’s behaviour, for which we are not prepared.

In a way, the takeover of algorithms can be seen as a natural progression from the quantified self movement that has been infiltrating our culture for over a decade, as more and more wearable devices and digital services become available to log every little thing we do and turn them into data points to be fed to algorithms in exchange for better self-knowledge and, perhaps, an easier path towards self-actualization.

Algorithms are great for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning, which makes them a super valuable tool in today’s data-driven world. Everything that we do, from eating to sleeping, can now be tracked digitally and generate data, and algorithms are the tools to organize this unstructured data and whip it into shape, preferably that of discernible patterns from which actionable insights can be drawn.

Without the algorithms, data is just data, and human brains are comparatively ill-equipped to deal with large amounts of it. All of which will have profound impact on our overall quality of life, for better and worse. There is even a religion that treats A.I. as its God and advocates for algorithms to literally rule the world.

This future is inevitable, as AI is beginning to disrupt every conceivable industry whether we like it or not—so we’re better off getting on board now.

As autonomous weapons play a crucial role on the battlefield, so-called ‘killer robots’ loom on the horizon. 

Fully autonomous weapons exists.

We’re living in a world designed for – and increasingly controlled by – algorithms that are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control.

It takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse.

A lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.

Algorithm-driven systems typically carry an alluringly utopian promise of delivering objective and optimized results free of human folly and bias. When everything is based on data — and numbers don’t lie, as the proverb goes — everything should come out fair and square. As a result of this takeover of algorithms in all domains of our everyday life, non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves, therefore luring us in an algorithmic trap that presents the most common-denominator, homogenized experience as the best option to everyone.

In the internet age, feedback loops move quickly between the real world.

The rapid spread of algorithmic decision-making across domains has profound real-world consequences on our culture and consumer behaviour, which are exacerbated by the fact that algorithms often work in ways that no one fully understands.

For example, the use of algorithms in financial trading is also called black-box trading for a reason.

Those characteristics of unknowability and, sometimes, intentional opacity also point to a simple yet crucial fact in our increasingly algorithmic world — the one that designs and owns the algorithms controls how data is interpreted and presented, often in self-serving ways

.In reaction to that unknowability, humans often start to behave in rather unpredictable ways, which lead to some unintended consequences. Ultimately, the most profound impact of the spread of Dadaism and algorithmic decision-making is also the most obvious one: It is starting to deprive us of our own agency, of the chance to make our own choices and forge our own narratives.

The more trusting we grow of algorithms and their interpretation of the data collected on us, the less likely we will question the decisions it automated on our behalf.

Lastly, it is crucial to bring a human element back into your decision making.

Making sure that platforms are transparent about the way these algorithms work – and make those platforms more accountable for the decisions they make.

This however I believe this is no longer feasible, because it can be especially difficult when those algorithms rely on artificial intelligence that making up the rules on there own accord. 

The ability to forge a cohesive, meaningful narrative out of chaos is still a distinct part of human creativity that no algorithm today can successfully imitate.

In order to create an AI ecosystem of trust, not to undermine the great benefits we get from platforms.

WE DON’T HAVE TO CREATE A WORLD IN WHICH MACHINES ARE TELLING US WHAT TO DO OR HOW TO THINK, ALTHOUGH WE MAY VERY WELL END UP IN A WORLD LIKE THAT.

To make sure that we, as a society, are in control

If people from different communities do not, or cannot, integrate with one another they may feel excluded and isolated.

In every society, with no exception, it exists a what we could call a ”behaviour diagram of the collective life with social control been the form society preserves itself from various internal threats.  China a prime example. 

Algorithms for profit, surveillance, rewards, power, etc, are undermining what’s felt of our values, chancing the relationship of authority and the negation of hierarchies and the authority of the law.

Hypothetical reasoning forward allows us to reason backwards to solve problems.  Process is all we have control over, not results.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120528-how-algorithms-shape-our-world

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT FOR HUMANS TO ACCEPT THE TRUTH. IF WE DON’T THE TRUTH WILL BE CONSTRUCT BY ALGORITHMS AND DATA.

21 Saturday Jan 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Civilization., Communication., Dehumanization.

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( FIFTEEN MINUTE READ)

Human brains are the product of blind and unguided evolution, therefore one day hit a hard limit – and may already have done so.

So a population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation.

But does this argument really hold up?

Can our puny brains really answer all conceivable questions and understand all problems?

What made our species unique, is that we were capable of culture, in particular cumulative cultural knowledge. With the arrival of Artificial Intelligence this applies as we now have Apps that select what we hear, see and believe to be true.

Considering that human brains did not evolve to discover their own origins either, and yet somehow we managed to do just that. Perhaps the pessimists are missing something.

It is right that our brains are simply not equipped to solve certain problems, there is no point in even trying, as they will continue to baffle and bewilder us. Assuming we could even agree on a definition of “truth,” the list of reasons we can’t or don’t wish to know the truth would be quite long and well beyond the scope of this blog post.

We all know that we are destroying the planet we all live on. One of the reasons that we have difficulties with perceiving this truth, is with seeing reality, has to do with the purpose of truth.

The purpose of truth is rooted in the purpose of life itself. Truth isn’t desirous for its own sake, it serves a higher master than AI.

Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.

Our ancestors needed to be able to discriminate friend from foe, healthy from unhealthy, and safe from dangerous (e.g., “It is good to eat this and bad to eat that.”).

Within an evolutionary framework, ignorance of what is true or real could be dangerous or deadly.

In order to survive, it was critical for our ancestors to learn to make predictions based on available information. It motivates them to move from a state of not knowing to knowing.

Thus, our ancestors didn’t need to see the world for what it really was. They just needed to know enough to help them survive. For example, the world looks flat. It looks like the sun rises in the sky and is a relatively small object. Our eyes (or our brains) deceive us though. The Earth, as well as other planets, are roughly spherical in shape. A million Earths could fit inside the Sun, and it is 93,000,000 miles away from us.

If our ancestors had no need to understand the wider cosmos in order to spread their genes, why would natural selection have given us the brainpower to do so?

At some point, human inquiry will suddenly slam into a metaphorical brick wall, after which we will be forever condemned to stare in blank incomprehension.

We will never find the true scientific theory of some aspect of reality, or alternatively, that we may well find this theory but will never truly comprehend it?

No one has a clue what this means.

To day, why is it that some cannot accept the Truth?

Truth is something we have to face now or after some time..

I think its mostly because of the fear of having to accept it, face it and deal with it, even though it may contradict what one might already believe.

A person’s belief system is built on a foundation. If the facts are outside of the foundation and cannot be supported by it, the person may not believe it, or remain very sceptical about it.

Lets take a few examples.

The past:

The Holocaust:87b84f9d 6d7f 48fe 8c90 530d980936bc

While no master list of those who perished in the Holocaust exists anywhere in the world. The shelves of the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem contain four million pages of testimony in which survivors and families have contributed information, but for those who were never known, there can be no record.

Towards the end of the war thousands of Hungarians Jews could have being saved if the the railways were bomb.

They were not because the reports of what was happing were not believed.

The Future.

An Asteroid or Meteorite heading towards earth.  Most of us would have no comprehension of such an event and would probably not believe it to be true.

The present:

This talk about man-made climate change.

People have been predicting catastrophic events for the last hundred years or so. None of them have happened, so people have a hard time believing new predictions.

—————————————–

Today, fewer and fewer people understand what is going on at the cutting edge of theoretical physics – even physicists.

The unification of quantum mechanics and relativity theory will undoubtedly be exceptionally daunting, or else scientists would have nailed it long ago already.

The same is true for our understanding of how the human brain gives rise to consciousness, meaning and intentionality.

But is there any good reason to suppose that these problems will forever remain out of reach? Or that our sense of bafflement when thinking of them will never diminish?

Who knows what other mind-extending devices we will hit upon to overcome our biological limitations?  Biology is not destiny.

As soon as you frame a question that you claim we will never be able to answer, you set in motion the very process that might well prove you wrong: you raise a topic of investigation.

With all the data that is at our disposal theses days, Truth is analysed by Algorithms and self learning software programs.

The data-driven revolution is prefaced upon the idea that data and algorithms can lead us away from biased human judgement towards pristine mathematical perfection that captures the world as it is rather than the world biased humans would like.

Truths that do not always align with our values. “Truth” told by data with the preordained outcome they desire.

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Algorithms And Data Construct ‘Truth,’ Not Discover It.

There is no such thing as perfect data or perfect algorithms.

All datasets and the tools used to examine them represent trade-offs. Each dataset represents a constructed reality of the phenomena it is intended to measure. In turn, the algorithms used to analyse it construct yet more realities.

In short, a data scientist can arrive at any desired conclusion simply by selecting the dataset, algorithm, filters and settings to match.(filistimlyanin/iStock.com)

It is more imperative than ever, that society recognizes that data does not equate to truth.

The same dataset fed into the same algorithm can yield polar opposite results depending on the data filters and algorithmic settings chosen.

But the important thing to note about these unknown unknowns is that nothing can be said about them.

The basic premise of the data-driven revolution in bringing quantitative certainty to decision-making is a false narrative.

To presume from the outset that some unknown unknowns will always remain unknown, is not modesty – it’s arrogance.

There’s always a human strategy behind using algorithms.

The exact details of how they works are often incomprehensible. Is this what we really want?

I think we need more transparency about how algorithms work, and how owns and operated them.

The problem with this is that demanding full transparency will have an adverse effect on the self-learning capacity of the algorithm. This is something that needs to be weighed up very carefully indeed.

There are certainly causes for concern but the need for regulations as profit seeking algorithms are plundering what is left of our values.  

If not regulated, I think that we’ll also see lots more legal constructions determining what we can and cannot do with algorithms.

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Algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything.

They can save lives, make things easier and conquer chaos.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is naught but algorithms.

The material people see on social media is brought to them by algorithms.

In fact, everything people see and do on the web is a product of algorithms. Every time someone sorts a column in a spreadsheet, algorithms are at play, and most financial transactions today are accomplished by algorithms. Algorithms help gadgets respond to voice commands, recognize faces, sort photos and build and drive cars. Hacking, cyberattacks and cryptographic code-breaking exploit algorithms.

They are mostly invisible aids, augmenting human lives in increasingly incredible ways. However, sometimes the application of algorithms created with good intentions leads to unintended consequences.

We have already turned our world over to machine learning and algorithms.

Algorithms will continue to spread everywhere becoming  the new arbiters of human decision-making.

The question now is, how to better understand and manage what we have done?

The main negative changes come down to a simple but now quite difficult question:

How are we thinking and what does it mean to think through algorithms to mediate our world?

How can we see, and fully understand the implications of, the algorithms programmed into everyday actions and decisions?

The rub is this: Whose intelligence is it, anyway?

By expanding collection and analysis of data and the resulting application of this information, a layer of intelligence or thinking manipulation is added to processes and objects that previously did not have that layer.

So prediction possibilities follow us around like a pet.

The result: As information tools and predictive dynamics are more widely adopted, our lives will be increasingly affected by their inherent conclusions and the narratives they spawn.

Our algorithms are now redefining what we think, how we think and what we know. We need to ask them to think about their thinking – to look out for pitfalls and inherent biases before those are baked in and harder to remove.

Advances in algorithms are allowing technology corporations and governments to gather, store, sort and analyse massive data sets.

This is creating a flawed, logic-driven society and that as the process evolves – that is, as algorithms begin to write the algorithms – humans may get left out of the loop, letting “the robots decide.”

Dehumanization has now spread to our, our economic systems, our  health care and social services.

We simply can’t capture every data element that represents the vastness of a person and that person’s needs, wants, hopes, desires.

Who is collecting what data points?

Do the human beings the data points reflect even know or did they just agree to the terms of service because they had no real choice?

Who is making money from the data?

How is anyone to know how his/her data is being massaged and for what purposes to justify what ends?

There is no transparency, and oversight is a farce. It’s all hidden from view.

I will always remain convinced the data will be used to enrich and/or protect others and not the individual. It’s the basic nature of the economic system in which we live.

It will take us some time to develop the wisdom and the ethics to understand and direct this power. In the meantime, we honestly don’t know how well or safely it is being applied.

The first and most important step is to develop better social awareness of who, how, and where it is being applied.”

If we use machine learning models rigorously, they will make things better; if we use them to paper over injustice with the veneer of machine empiricism, it will be worse.

The danger in increased reliance on algorithms is that is that the decision-making process becomes oracular: opaque yet unarguable.

If we are to protect the TRUTH. Giving more control to the user seems highly advisable.

When you remove the humanity from a system where people are included, they become victims.

Advances in quantum computing and the rapid evolution of AI and AI agents embedded in systems and devices in the Internet of Things will lead to hyper-stalking, influencing and shaping of voters, and hyper-personalized ads, and will create new ways to misrepresent reality and perpetuate falsehoods to the point of no return.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASKS: SHOULD WE BE ABLE TO SELF IDENTIFY WHEN IT COMES TO GENDER.

17 Tuesday Jan 2023

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( Six minute read) 

Pause and think about the above statement. Even to discuss its implications is fraught with dangers.

So at the outset to this post let me state that I have little appreciation of  what it is like to live in a body that does not recognise its gender. 

Are you a man or a woman?

To answer this question you would have been able to give a definite answer one way or the other, and would probably have appealed to your body type and biology to explain it.

Until recently, most people would have found that a simple question. 

However it is turning into a highly fraught and emotive debate, due to certain chromosomal or hormonal conditions, not all individuals can be easily categorised as biologically male or female.

Why does a man feeling like a woman or visa versa mean that transitioning is a medical necessity, but feeling and defining yourself as black is shrouded in layers of deception?

The real rationale for questioning our traditional understandings of men and women has little to do with the existence of intersex people and more to do with the recent increase in the number of people who are biologically unambiguously of one sex, but identify as the opposite.

How do you decide which feelings are legitimate—and should be acted on—and which are not?

The resulting minefield of human-rights ambiguities, and questions over who is allowed to say what is bewildering.

                                                                 ——————————-

When we reject our birth definition of who we are, life becomes complicated.

In our current cultural moment, one person is affirmed for defining themselves by how they feel, but another is told that how they feel is irrelevant.  So which is it?

Is the proposed movement to self-declaration of gender making a mockery of the structure of society.?

(There’s also the question of what happens when the freedom for some to self-create comes into conflict with the right of protection for others.) 

The proposal is that, rather than continue the current system, where someone requires a medical diagnosis and a two-year period of living in their acquired identity before they can legally change gender, those seeking to transition should simply be allowed to self-declare, meaning that someone born a man could declare himself to be a woman and immediately have the right to enter spaces reserved for women.  

How would you like being sexually assaulted by “women with penises” or a man with a vulva, must give us pause for thought about whether this is wise. 

Not to mention  sport . “You can’t just proclaim yourself female and then compete against women.

There must be some standards.

People insist that self identifying is ok for some protected characteristics but not for others.

Well, that seems arbitrary.

Some of us will know and agree with people who want to redefine their “assigned” gender, or we may feel that way ourselves; yet

we don’t automatically agree that people should be able to redefine their race. Perhaps it’s vice versa.

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The issue of what it means to be a human is confused.

Reality is being obscured so that race, gender, and age are all coming to be described as fluid.

Self-worship rapidly leaves us empty, so it is an error to think that gender identity—or any other identity for that matter—as

something that can be completely determined by one’s self.

In an individualist society, we prize the values of freedom, autonomy, equality and self-determination.

  

We believe that people should be free to pursue their own agendas, to become whomever they wish to become, provided that they

do not hurt others along the way. From this view, it is easy to see how we might want to sanction the idea that gender—one’s

experience of self as man or woman, masculine or feminine, as non-binary, or even non-sexed—as something that a person

defines for oneself.

But this is neither true of transgender identities nor of any other type of psychological or social identity. 

I cannot establish an identity by myself; it must be negotiated with and validated in my relations with others.

This does not mean that I have no role in establishing my identity—it simply means that I cannot and do not do so by myself.

The point here is not that one’s personal experience is irrelevant to one’s identity—it is indeed foundational.

The point is that it is simply not sufficient. We need more than what someone says in order to establish and verify an identity.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t believe transgender people when they claim an identity. It is simply to say that the

everyday idea that our identities are established solely through self-identification is a flawed one.

This is also not to say that transgender people have to prove themselves to others.

It is simply to say that the everyday way we verify any given claim to an identity relies not on a mere verbal statement, but also

what a person naturally and spontaneously does in everyday interaction.

Identity formation is a social and not simply an individual process.

The problem arises when we come to think that social gender replaces the category of biological sex. It doesn’t.

Gender simply refers to something different from (if not fully independent of) biological sex.

If we are going to embrace the concept of gender, we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that gender doesn’t trump

sex. And, of course, the opposite is also true: sex doesn’t trump gender.

Each has their place in the vagaries of social life, and we must work together to find out when they are relevant and when they are

not.

But the identities that we are free to construct are our social identities.

The moment we distinguish gender from sex, we have two parallel concepts where there was once one.

To say that gender is malleable means that people can create social identities along the full range of the gender spectrum.

This use of the term “gender” should be an acceptable one.

The problem comes when people use the category of gender as a replacement for sex. When this happens, the concept of gender is

extended beyond its appropriate limits—that is, to one’s experience of ” who I am” in relation to others.

Transgender people need and deserve compassion.

They deserve the right to define themselves in terms of their experienced genders. A person who experiences discordance between

their assigned sex and their social and relational sense of gender is likely to experience suffering from that fact alone.

Such suffering is amplified by the many indignities and humiliations that such individuals face in a society that finds it difficult to

understand and accept people with transgender identities.

The result of all of this would be a radical redefinition of our words “man” and “woman”, and of the political entities those words

describe.

Rather than referring to members of biological classes, who can generally speaking be distinguished from one another by sight, the

words will now refer to subjective mental states, feelings in a person’s head, indistinguishable from one another except by self-

declaration.

The current discourse which insists that a person becomes a woman the moment they declare themselves to be one.

A legal redefinition of our existing gender categories so that they reflect gender identity, instead of biological sex, would have the

consequence of overriding existing legal protections against discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex.

We don’t know to what extent anyone would seek to exploit legislation designed to allow people to self-identify as women. 

The categories of “man” and “woman” effectively become meaningless.

This is not a satisfactory outcome, especially for those who strongly feel that they identify as one particular gender. 

Shifting our definition of what it means to be a woman so that it no longer has any grounding in the material or social reality of

what it means to be a woman helps no one.

Should parents who allow their children to choose their own gender be considered irresponsible … or enlightened?

Should robots be allocated a gender?

All human comments appreciated no matter what gender. All like click and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS IT NOT TRAGIC TO SEE WHAT BRITIAN IS DOING TO ITS SELF?  

13 Friday Jan 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection.

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( Six minute read)

Six hundred MPs and seven hundred and fifty one members of the house of lords, the crew of the Titanic Brexit Britain.

We literally have no comparisons for the sheer scale of what is happening in Britain there is simply no reference point for it whatsoever.

To call it a statistical outlier would be making a mockery of statistics.

More than 100,000 excess deaths that are on track to happen by the end of this year.

What else killed 100,000 people?  Well, the bomb that fell on Hiroshima did. The only other comparison of death at this scale that can really be offered is Covid deaths, during the pandemic’s absolute peak. But then? Societies were in a completely different place. Locked down. At a standstill. Those are the only events in contemporary history, outside war, which produce….absolutely shocking numbers…like this.  Perhaps the best way to understand what’s happening to Britain is that it appears to be a society at war. With itself.

This was a choice, and the only one of those that’s a choice falls into the category of war.

Britain appears to be experiencing something so extreme that it can only really be likened to a war by any other name.

This is the kind of calamity that’s needed to contextualize, properly, what Britain’s done to itself.

Britain’s economy is about to be 11% smaller than it would’ve been if Brexit hadn’t happened. 

The only point of comparison, really, is the Great Depression.

Consider, let’s say, Russia. Guess how much its economy shrank last year — as the entire world ostracized it, banned it, shut down its access to financial networks, sanctioned it. 8.5% — Less than Britain’s will, thanks to Brexit.

What’s the point, even, of telling you all this, you might be wondering, a little angrily, especially if you’re British?

The point is very simple. These are the facts. And you should know them. If you’re British, something historically singular is happening to your history, and your society made it happen.

If you’re not British, the reason for telling you all this is even simpler. You had better learn something. 

Brits wanted to backwards, in time, to an imaginary nostalgic, driven into a nationalistic frenzy which soon became ugly xenophobia and hate — the kind that’s still keeping the left, LOL, the left, from hiring doctors and nurses to save those future tens of thousands of dead Brits.

You had better learn something. This is where it ends. The road of nationalism, hubris, Big Lies, the ones the lunatics around the world now tell — Brittania Uber Alles, Sweden for the Swedes, Make America Great Again, whatever flavour they come in.

Just a decade ago, Britain was still the envy of the world.

And today?

It is something history books will teach — as an example of how fast even a developed, wealthy, secure, stable country can not just lose it all, but how much there is to really lose, and how hard it is, then, to teach what has been lost at all, because by then, all that’s left is the lie, sneering at truth, stamping like a boot on the face of history.

Watching Britain turn into what it is now — the first rich European country to become a failed state, which in itself is mind-boggling — is to witness something historic.

“Fear” “danger” “panic” “double panic”. These are the kinds of words we often hear when we talk to people about the economy. The economy is described as “a giant blob” that is “vast and never ending”, “one big circle”, even “a monster”.

So what exactly is the economy?

Where is it?  And who controls it?

The economy is nothing but the cumulative result of the way you live your life, and the way everyone around you lives theirs. It’s how we make the things we want and decide who gets what.

Trying to draw hard boundaries around the edges of the economy is a fool’s errand. It doesn’t take much to link almost everything in our world to the system of making and using things. But claiming that anything and everything has to do with economics is a step too far when there’s so many other things that shape our lives.

Economics is just seven billion stories, experiences, and choices. This morning, you decided what time to get up, whether or not to go to work, what eat, and whether to go for a jog or laze on the sofa. Each of those decisions affected the economy in some way, and each were economics.

Many millions of words have been written about what has happened since, but three clear facts stand out from this lost decade.
The first is that people who did not cause the crisis and who had no say in the risks taken in financial markets on their behalf have paid the highest price. Taxpayers’ money bailed out the banks; that was unavoidable.

For the first time in modern records, ‘economic growth’ – a hollow and moribund concept – has ceased to deliver pay rises for many.

There is a growing sense that the economy is not something that should be done to people, but rather with and by them.
Add to this the constantly accelerating pace of digital innovation – both a profound threat and a real opportunity
– and the outline of a world in which policymaking and economics is never going to be the same again is discernible

Here is what is needed to be done. Truly radical thinking for truly radical times.

To realize that you live on an island and the markets that  you sell into controls the economy.

To build a purposeful economy. Doing economics as if people and planet mattered – and fashioning the economy to serve the people and the thriving and healthy natural world on which we all depend – is now the most important project of our time.

It is beyond comprehension not to build a green economy self sufficient in green energy, creating millions of jobs and revenue.

A guarantee of basic goods and services for all, in which a basic income and universal public services, such as childcare, health, and social care, are combined with common or co-operative ownership of essentials like energy, water and transport to
ensure a decent quality of life.

Investment in a massive, genuinely affordable, green social housebuilding programme, with local development dictated by
community need.

Create a Working Hours Commission, alongside the Low Pay Commission, to set out a framework for achieving shorter
and more flexible hours of paid work for all.

Not building two new aircraft, a high-speed worthless railway, quantitative easing, not deporting badly needed immigrants that can and will contribute to supporting an aging population, not building new nuclear plants, not sending the young into the world  with crippling educational debts, not allowing London to suck the life out of the country for the sake of profit.

Renewed prioritisation and a focus on fewer projects might lead government teams to be able to deliver projects to the best of their ability – doing ‘fewer things really well, rather than trying to do everything in a less successful way.’

In 2020, 11 projects in the GMPP (9%) were considered to be ‘unfeasible’ in their delivery. The ICT and digital transformation category had the highest proportion of projects rated ‘unfeasible’ or ‘in doubt’ (53%) which is a record high – no ICT projects were rated ‘highly likely’, which is a drop from 7% in 2019.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS 2023 GOING TO BE THE YEAR THAT HUMANITY FINDS OUT THAT IT IS NOT THE DOMINANT FORCE OF CHANGE ON PLANET EARTH?

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( Three minute read)

What can be achieved in this decade to put the world on a path to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity?

Temptation is to say, that you may rest assured that it will be another year of unadulterated verbal dioramas diarrhoea.

With humanity waging war on nature the risks we are taking are astounding.

What did Earth look like from space in 2022?

It looked beautiful, it looked dangerous. It looked small and inconsequential, it looked incredible.iss066e109851

Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.

About 96% of all mammals by weight are now humans and our livestock, like cattle, sheep and pigs. Just 4% are wild mammals like elephants, buffalo or dolphins. Seventy-five percent of Earth’s ice-free land is directly altered as a result of human activity, with nearly 90% of terrestrial net primary production and 80% of global tree cover under direct human influence.

We have grossly simplified the biosphere, a system of interactions between lifeforms and Earth that has evolved over 3.8 billion years. As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so, too, does the hope that technologies such as artificial intelligence will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. That will only happen, however, if we act forcefully in ways that redirects the direction of technological change towards planetary stewardship and responsible innovation.2022-05_geocolor_20220505180018_logos-1

Rising greenhouse gas emissions means that “within the coming 50 years, one to 3 billion people are projected to experience living conditions that are outside of the climate conditions that have served civilizations well over the past 6,000 years.

In this decade we must bend the curves of greenhouse gas emissions and shocking biodiversity loss. This means transforming what we eat and how we farm it, among many other transformations.

Nature has now become for us a kind of glossy cardboard, digitized and virtualized, increasingly distant from our lives.

The recent Covid-19 global pandemic is an Anthropocene phenomena. It has been caused by our intertwined relationship with nature and our hyper-connectivity. ( We order Pizza by sending messages into space.)

However our actions are making the biosphere more fragile, less resilient and more prone to shocks than before.

Humans use the majority of natural geo-resources, like minerals, rocks, soil and water.

Two of the biggest barriers are unsustainable levels of inequality and technology that undermines societal goals.

Inequality and environmental challenges are deeply linked. Reducing inequality will increase trust within societies.

It is time to flick the “green switch.   We have a chance to not simply reset the world economy but to transform it.

It is time to integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal policies and decisions. And to make climate-related financial risk disclosures mandatory.

It is time to transform humankind’s relationship with the natural world – and with each other. And we must do so together.

It’s is time to get off your smart phone and start to demand transparency of Algorithms that are plundering the world for profit. .

The state of the planet is much worse than most people understand and that humans face a grim.

Because as of yet there is no political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action

The problem is compounded by ignorance and short-term self-interest, with the pursuit of wealth and political interests stymying the action that is crucial for survival.

Most economies operate on the basis that counteraction now is too costly to be politically palatable. Combined with disinformation campaigns to protect short-term profits it is doubtful that the scale of changes we need will be made in time.

We need to be candid, accurate, and honest if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face in creating a sustainable future.

Without political will backed by tangible action that scales to the enormity of the problems facing us, the added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of the Earth’s life-support system upon which we all depend.

Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals, and catastrophe will surely follow.

So the Beady Eye wishes all a Happy New Year with the near certainty that the abovementioned problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come, if we dont now get our fingers out of where the sun does not shine.

No one has a right to pollute the air or the water, which are the common inheritance of all.

We have not inherited the Earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.

The time has come to re-educate to nature and contact with it as a lever to ensure collective well-being, physical and mental; to restore beauty, kindness, ecosystem thinking, emotional intelligence and a formation of values, heritage inherited from the wisdom of the past but negligently neglected.

After all, this is what ecology is all about: looking at reality as it is, understanding its connections, accepting its complexity, and striving for harmony between all parts.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS DATA DESTORYING THE WORLD?

29 Thursday Dec 2022

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(Fifteen minute read)

The short answer: Yes, and it comes with a cost, we now have Apps you pay for to stop data collection

Technological advancements are difficult to forecast, but several models predict that data centre’s energy usage could engulf over 10% of the global electricity supply by 2030 if left unchecked.

There is no denying that the future of technology will continue to revolutionize our lives, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t care about their privacy. It’s human nature. You want control over what private information you share and who you share it with. Unfortunately, you can lose this control with a careless click.

Various entities handle your private data. The first among them is the government and its institutions. You can’t get public services (for example, electricity, a high school education, healthcare) without identifying yourself.

You can buy apples at a stand and remain a stranger to the fruit seller. But buy apples online, and you’ll give away private information about yourself. It may be a fact as simple as that you like apples. This information will be sold to an advertiser, and the next time you go online, an ad for apples will pop up on your screen.

Almost everything you do online leaves a data breadcrumb. You have little control over how these breadcrumbs are collected.

Usually, it works like this. Before you start using a new online service, you have to read a wall of fine print. You do not do so, because you don’t want to wade through paragraphs of jargon. You click that you agree, and that’s how you begin to give away your private data. You cannot change the agreement, and you cannot bargain — it’s take it or leave it and if you reject all, rest assured it is logged as data. 

There are countless technology advances in hospitals and medicine but as data penetrates deeper into biologically and culturally diverse corners of the world is technology a sustainability hero or villain?

Information privacy will become an even hotter topic once technologies create more invasive tools. You’ll be surrounded by facial-recognition cameras, smart speakers that listen to your conversations, e-textiles, wearable health monitors, and other data-gathering gadgets.

                                                                          ——————————–

All-together, this paints a challenging picture for the future of our environment. Many technology companies have yet come to grips with the environmental impact associated with their products and services.

Analysis by Veritas estimates that 5.8 million tonnes of CO2 will be pumped into the atmosphere this year as a result of storing unnecessary ‘dark data’ – this translates to more emissions than 80 individual countries.

Destroying our planet is no easy task. Sure, you could bomb us back to the stone age, introduce a plague to wipe out all complex life or whip up some sort of nanomachine to completely eliminate the entire biosphere. But in all those cases, the rock we stand on would still remain, lifelessly circling the sun for billions of years to come.

Getting a handle on wayward data is becoming as big a problem as Climate Change.

The list of significance of data analytics just goes on and on – you need data to pitch stocks, file financial reports and provide better service to your clients, arrive at projections, assess performance. Objects that use IoT today include driverless cars, fitness trackers like Fitbit, thermostats, and doorbells. Objects that use IoT are also commonly referred to as smart objects. smart thermostat online shopping.  voice assistants. integrate your voice assistant with any smart device. food delivery.

Who hasn’t heard of Facebook, Twitter, or Skype? They’ve become household names. Even if you don’t use these platforms, they’re a part of everyday life and not going away anytime soon.top reads of 2022

Communication tools offer one of the most significant examples of how quickly technology has evolved.

Technology has changed money

No more do you have to enter a bank to withdraw money or transfer it to someone. With your cell phone and a banking app, you can manage all of your necessary bill payments online.

The smartwatch is a relatively new technology that captures almost all the capabilities of smartphones in a convenient touch-screen watch. You can receive notifications, track your activity, set alarms, and even call and text directly through these wearable devices. Technology has changed how we watch television, what news we get.  More and more TVs these days are even designed for streaming. “Smart TVs” have Wi-Fi capability. Paper books aren’t going anywhere. We can access our music no matter where we are. For better or worse, technology has also made it possible for you to find other people’s personal information on the Internet through social media. You can gain access to the information you want to know about a particular person.

Medical Guardian Medical Alert System

So is Data screwing up the world?

Well, neither really but should we be steering technological innovation and deployment to drive social progress.

Technology encompasses a broad range of products and systems, some of which will help us live more sustainably and others that won’t.  The production and use of technology will always involve the consumption of energy and materials, but if that same technology helps us minimise our consumption in other ways or allows us to use more sustainable methods of production, then the net effect will be positive.

Over the years, technology has revolutionized our world and daily lives. The amount of active web users globally is now near 3.2 billion people. That is almost half of the world’s population adoption of new technologies, like smartphones and wearables, may have slowed down significantly in the last few years, but data usage is only continuing to grow—massively.

In 2012, there were only 500,000 data centres worldwide to handle global traffic, but today there are more than 8 million according to IDC.

As data becomes more siloed and fragmented, it gets increasingly harder to find and manage.

Take Bitcoin mining network which are now consumes more energy than the whole of Ireland. And it’s growing at about 30% a month.

Take Netflix binging. Storing and streaming all that digital content requires a lot of energy, and as consumers expect regular new content and ever better video quality, the energy demands spiral upwards.

It’s not just Netflix of course. In total, data centres consume roughly 3% of the world’s energy supply, and this amount is estimated to treble in the next decade.

Take that every year, millions of data centres worldwide are purging metric tons of hardware, draining country-sized amounts of electricity, and generating carbon emissions as much as the global airline industry. Data centres energy usage could engulf over 10% of the global electricity supply by 2030 if left unchecked. It is double every four years. Analysis by Veritas estimates that 5.8 million tonnes of CO2 will be pumped into the atmosphere this year as a result of storing unnecessary ‘dark data’ – this translates to more emissions than 80 individual countries.

All-together, this paints a challenging picture for the future of our environment because  it’s one of the largest and most unappreciated blind spots in the fight against climate change.

The most important next step right now is simply education – and getting companies to realize that the importance and benefits of more eco-friendly data centres, but the impact is also determined by how we, the consumers, use that technology.

Heading into 2023 the signals are mixed turning millions of us into remote-workers.

Perhaps the most concerning way that technology impacts our environment is through the mining of vast quantities of rare metals. Metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel are used to make critical hardware components – batteries in particular – for things like computers, smartphones and electric cars. Unfortunately, mining these metals is energy intensive and comes not just at an environmental cost, but often a terrible human cost too. Moreover, these rare metals are just that: rare. Without large investment in recycling facilities, using these limited natural resources is unsustainable. The planned obsolescence of consumer gadgets only exacerbates the problem.

We will not likely get through the coming year without some sort of catastrophic attack on a very strategic and important network or service provider like Gmail, WhatsApp, or Microsoft.

The revolutions that will surface in years to come will continue to make profound changes in our everyday lives.

In the end, the environmental impact will depend not only on choices that we make as consumers, but on the social and political choices that we make collectively as citizens.

Our data centres don’t have to harm the environment, if we take the proper actions today.

Only 12% of today’s data centres that are green. According to analyst firm IDC, in 2012, there were only 500,000 data centres worldwide that were handling global traffic, but today there are more than 8 million.

“The time for pure national interests has passed, internationalism has to be our approach and in doing so bring about a greater equality between what nations take from the world and what they give back. The wealthier nations have taken a lot and the time has now come to give.”

Why destroy the planet if we don’t have to.

Whole industries (think telemarketers, corporate law, private equity) whole lines of work (middle management, brand strategists, high-level hospital or school administrators, editors of in-house corporate magazines) exist primarily to convince us there is some reason for their existence.

It’s not our pleasures that are destroying the world. It’s our puritanism, our feeling that we have to suffer in order to deserve those pleasures. If we want to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working in bullshit jobs.

It is ironic that the technologies most responsible for the mood of today’s world are also best positioned to improve it.

AI must be programmed to enhance human life as opposed to imitating it.

From social media to the climate crisis, Big Data is helping to ruin everything. The total lack of legal data rights for individuals is a violation of autonomy, privacy, and even freedom of thought and speech.

Currently we have no rights at all to own our data, and it can be sold easily to the highest bidder to do with it as they please.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

There are fantastic things that can be done with data, and it is absolutely essential to so much of modern scientific and engineering feats which we hope might save the world. Without data, none of our interventions in great problems like climate change would be able to do anything at all. In fact, without adequate data collection and analysis, we might never have noticed that climate change is happening at all.

Just remember these few things:

  • Data is not your ally — especially not when you are trying to convince somebody of something. Changing a whole mindset requires more than just statistics, and raw data is so abstract and such a broad category that there can easily be conflicting data sets that lead to impasses in conversation. Data is a crucial tool, but you need to build trusting mutual relationships, too.
  • Data is not your friend — it does not care whether you think you have a right to it or not. Data will be owned by and used by those who created the platform you are using, until the law changes. And the law will not change unless you start caring.
  • Data is not “things” — objects are totally separate from the data abstracted from them in a way that is metaphysically irreconcilable. There is no way to recreate an apple from mere data about an apple, nor to exhaust the nature of an apple by reducing it to data-form. This is an important principle that should be remembered whenever we deal with data: data is no more than what it is, and potentially much less.
  • Data is now just such a frontier — you are the product.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE’S. 2023 MESSAGE TO THE YOUNG GENERATION. IT WON’T BE EASY AND IT WON’T COST TRILLIONS TO CREATE A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE WORLD.

19 Monday Dec 2022

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( SIX MINUTE READ. )

Your time is now,  to step up to the plate and start taking responsibility for the biggest growth opportunity in human history.

Unfortunately its starts with facing global challenges that are causing and will continue to cause our globally societies to change  radically. 

You don’t have be told that we are on track to a catastrophic 2.7c of global warming.

You don’t have to be told that the population of the world  will be near 10 billion of us by 2050.

You don’t have to be told that as a result the demand for freshwater and food will increase.

You don’t have to be told that it is going to take a substantial portion of the worlds annual GDP to convert to a green sustainable economic system.

You don’t have to be told that the transition will not be orderly while we have I am all right Jack attuites, with profit seeking algorithms, while we have privileged positions and assets harvesting profits by using the current recession fever for overly aggressive job cuts, while we have education at a premium, while we have immigration and countries turn  inwards.

You don’t have to be told that the Ukraine Russian war is showing the urgency to develop new energy solutions.

You don’t have to be told that people world wide must rally to collaboratively research and share Covid -19 vaccines.

You don’t have to be told that companies must stop paying out excessive dividends and share paybacks.

You don’t have to be told that there is a boom of innovations in all technologies, that it must be turned into an interdisciplinary revolution.

You don’t have to be told that old industries and jobs will disappear.

You don’t have to be told that there will be more floods, wild fires, droughts, and conflict are on the horizons.

You don’t have to be told that 80% of world wide agricultural land is using 10% of available freshwater.

You don’t have to be told that we are looking at the disappearance of our polar caps , glaciers,  forests, rivers.

You don’t have to be told that by 2025 over half the world’s population will live in water- stressed areas with rising oceans.

You don’t have to be told that that we needs new materials to build with. Steel responsible for 11% of yours days carbon emissions, concerts 8% plastics 4%

You don’t have to be told that if we do nothing you will see the biggest human migration in world history.  As environmental, political and economic refugee grow to numbers never witnessed in the World.

You don’t have to be told that the Biodiversity of the world is under treat of extinction.

You don’t have to be told that you will most likely be living through these changes.

You don’t have to be told that solutions will not be found in impact start-up but by becoming leaders in business and government.

You don’t have to be told that sooner that later the world will rally to address all of the above.

YOU DO HAVE TO BE TOLD THAT THE NEXT THIRTY YEARS COULD BE TRAGIC AND TUMULTUOUS.

Your response to the megatrends will shape what is meant for human to survive.

Addressing the 60 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases we emit every year, through point – of source will be a multitrillion opportunity and more.

Don’t be distracted.

Every generation has the ability to effect changes, your generation must do so, because the age of technology combined by the current Capitalists Systems will and is  turning almost ever thing in to a product to trade.

There is no reality in the metaverse a “computer generated universe. ”

You have a weapon called the smartphone which ironically is both the cause and the solutions to effect change.

If you want a living world now is the time to use this power, to attack the unsustainable consumerism’s of profit for profit sake.

Bombard their operations with millions of messages to block their activities.

THIS IS ONE LOUD VOICE THAT CANNOT NOT BE ARESSTED.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com.

THE BEADY EYE SAYS: AS USUAL THE BRITISH GOVERMENT PUT PROFIT BEFORE ITS PEOPLE

08 Thursday Dec 2022

Posted by in 2022: The year we need to change., A solution to Climate change., Carbon Emissions. New British Coalmine,

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( Two minute read)

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

CAN THERE BE ANY TRUST IN THE BRITISH (WHO HOSTED THE 26 CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE IN GLASGOW LAST YEAR.) advocating the phaseout of coal around the world while planning its expansion at home.dirty coal miner wear hardhat with a hammer drill - coal mine stock pictures, royalty-free photos & images

To watch a Conservative MP defended its decision by saying that it is good for the environment to stop importing and start exporting is beyond farcical and worthy of  historic accolades for stupidity beyond the call of duty.

Some one should tell him that no transport emissions will make up for emissions produced by mining the coal.

Woodhouse Colliery won’t be carbon neutral with its plans to extract 2.43 million tons of coking coal per year. That will produce 9 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, a measure of greenhouse emissions based on their global warming potential, per year.“

A few hundred precarious jobs in a dying industry would be worth it.

Indeed, framing the need for continued investment in fossil fuels as important for jobs and arguing that moving away from fossil fuels will hurt jobs and the economy is a classic talking point the fossil fuel industry has used for decades to thwart climate action.

To move ahead with plans to develop the country’s first deep coal mine in 30 years, despite warnings that doing so could destroy any chance of achieving the country’s climate change target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The Cumbria County Council, which approved the project, said it did so because it will create jobs in an area of high unemployment, will dig up coking coal, also known as metallurgic coal, from beneath the Irish Sea in order to make coke, a “form of almost pure carbon” that is used to make steel.

Opening a coalmine in the UK now is a serious mistake: economic, social, environmental, financial and political.

Economically, it is investing in the technologies of the last century, not this, and that is the wrong path to growth.

Socially, it is pursuing jobs in industries that are on the way out, creating future job insecurity.

Environmentally, it is adding to world supply and thus consumption of coal and releasing greenhouse gases, when there is an urgent need to reduce them.

It could even put at risk global progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions because laggard countries will be able to point to the UK’s hypocrisy as an excuse for their own inaction.

And politically, it is undermining the UK’s authority on the most important global issue of our time.

Turning Britain into a “hypocritical” developed country interested only in the rhetoric  of I am all right Jack is sad.

The coalmine would increase emissions by about 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or the equivalent of 200,000 cars on the road.

God save the Planet.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com