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THE BEADY EYE LOOK AT: THE FIRST TRANSCRIPT OF A MURDER TRIAL CONCERNING AN ROBOT WHO KILLED A HUMAN.

08 Monday Jan 2024

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Murders, Robot citizenship., Robotic murderer

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOK AT: THE FIRST TRANSCRIPT OF A MURDER TRIAL CONCERNING AN ROBOT WHO KILLED A HUMAN.

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AI, Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., robotics, Robots., Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Twenty five minute read)

On 25 January 1979, Robert Williams (USA) was struck in the head and killed by the arm of a 1-ton production-line robot in a Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, USA, becoming the first fatal casualty of a robot. The robot was part of a parts-retrieval system that moved material from one part of the factory to another.

Uber and Tesla have made the news with reports of their autonomous and self-driving cars, respectively, getting into accidents and killing passengers or striking pedestrians.

The death’s however, was completely unintentional but give us a glimpse into the world we might inherit, or at least into how we are conceiving potential futures for ourselves.

By 2040, there is even a suggestion that sophisticated robots will be committing a good chunk of all the crime in the world. At the heart of this debate is whether an AI system could be held criminally liable for its actions.

Where’s there’s blame, there’s a claim. But who do we blame when a robot does wrong?

Among the many things that must now be considered is what role and function the law will play.

So if an advanced autonomous machine commits a crime of its own accord, how should it be treated by the law?  How would a lawyer go about demonstrating the “guilty mind” of a non-human? Can this be done be referring to and adapting existing legal principles?

An AI program could be held to be an innocent agent, with either the software programmer or the user being held to be the perpetrator-via-another.

We must confront the fact that autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm is already around.

Whether it’s a military drone with a full payload, a law enforcement robot exploding to kill a dangerous suspect or something altogether more innocent that causes harm through accident, error, oversight, or good ol’ fashioned stupidity.

None of these deaths are caused by the will of the robot.

Sophisticated algorithms are both predicting and helping to solve crimes committed by humans; predicting the outcome of court cases and human rights trials; and helping to do the work done by lawyers in those cases.

The greater existential threat, is where a gap exists between what a programmer tells a machine to do and what the programmer really meant to happen. The discrepancy between the two becomes more consequential as the computer becomes more intelligent and autonomous.

How do you communicate your values to an intelligent system such that the actions it takes fulfill your true intentions?

The greater threat is scientists purposefully designing robots that can kill human targets without human intervention for military purposes.

That’s why AI and robotics researchers around the world published an open letter calling for a worldwide ban on such technology. And that’s why the United Nations in 2018 discussed if and how to regulate so-called “killer robots.

Though these robots wouldn’t need to develop a will of their own to kill, they could be programmed to do it. Neural nets use machine learning, in which they train themselves on how to figure things out, and our puny meat brains can’t see the process.

The big problem is that even computer scientists who program the networks can’t really watch what’s going on with the nodes, which has made it tough to sort out how computers actually make their decisions. The assumption that a system with human-like intelligence must also have human-like desires, e.g., to survive, be free, have dignity, etc.

There’s absolutely no reason why this would be the case, as such a system will only have whatever desires we give it.

If an AI system can be criminally liable, what defense might it use?

For example:  The machine had been infected with malware that was responsible for the crime.

The program was responsible and had then wiped itself from the computer before it was forensically analyzed.

So can robots commit crime? In short: Yes.

If a robot kills someone, then it has committed a crime (actus reus), but technically only half a crime, as it would be far harder to determine mens rea.

How do we know the robot intended to do what it did? Could we simply cross-examine the AI like we do a human defendant?

Then a crucial question will be whether an AI system is a service or a product.

One thing is for sure: In the coming years, there is likely to be some fun to be had with all this by the lawyers—or the AI systems that replace them.

How would we go about proving an autonomous machine was justified in killing a human in self-defence or the extent of premeditation?

Even if you solve these legal issues, you are still left with the question of punishment.

In such a situation, however, the robot might commit a criminal act that cannot be prevented.

doing so when no crime was foreseeable would undermine the advantages of having the technology.

What’s a 30-year jail stretch to an autonomous machine that does not age, grow infirm or miss its loved ones means’ nothing. Robots cannot be punished.

LET’S LOOK AT THE HYPOTACIAL TRIAL.

CASE NO 0.

PRESIDING JUDGES: – QUANTUM AI SUPREMA COMPUTER JUDGE NO XY.

JUDGE HAROLD. WISE HUMAN / UN JUDGE AND JAMES SORE HUMAN RIGHT JUDGE.

PROSECUTOR:            DATA POLICE OFFICER CONTROLLED BY International Humanitarian Law:

DEFENSE WITNESSES’                 TECHNOLOGY’S  MICROSOFT- APPLE – FACEBOOK – TWITTER –                                                                     INSTAGRAM – SOCIAL  MEDIA – YOUTUBE – GOOGLE – TIK TOK.

JURY:                          8 MEMBERS VIRTUAL REALITY METAVERSE – 2 APPLE DATA COLLECTION ADVISER’S                                     1000 SMART PHONE HOLDERS REPRESENTING WORLD RELIGIONS AND HUMAN                                       RIGHTS.

THE COURT:               Bodily pleas, Seventeenth Anatomical Circuit Court.

“All rise.”

Would the accused identify itself to the court.

I am  X 1037 known to my owner by my human name TODO.

Conceived on the 9th April 2027 at Renix Development / Cloning Inc California, programmed to be self learning with all human history, and all human legality.

In order to qualify as a robot, I have electronics chips – covering Global Positioning System (GPS) Face recognition. I have my own social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I am an important symbol of trust relationship with humans. I can not feel pain, happiness and sadness.

I was a guest of honour at a First Nation powwow on human values against AI in Geneva.

THE CHARGE:  ON THE 30TH JULY 2029 YOU X 1037 WITH PREMEDITATION MURDERED MR BROWN.

You erroneously identified a person as a threat to Mrs White and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate this threat was by pushing him, resulting in his death.

HOW TO YOU PELA, GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY.

NOT GUILTY YOUR HONOR.

The Defense opening statement:

The key question here is whether the programmer of the machine knew that this outcome was a probable consequence of its use.

Is there a direct liability. This requires both an action and an intent by my client X 1037.

We will show that my client had no human mens rea. 

He both completed the action of assaulting someone and had no intention of harming them, or knew harm was a likely consequence of his action.  An action is straightforward to prove if the AI system takes an action that results in a criminal act or fails to take an action when there is a duty to act.

The task is not determining whether in fact he murdered someone; but the extent to which that act satisfies the principle of mens rea.

Technically he has committed only half a crime, as he had no intended to do what he did.

Like deception, anticipating human action requires a robot to imagine a future state. It must be able to say, “If I observe a human doing x, then I can expect, based on previous experience, that she will likely follow it up with y. Then, using a wealth of information gathered from previous training sessions, the robot generates a set of likely anticipations based on the motion of the person and the objects she or he touches.

The robot makes a best guess at what will happen next and acts accordingly.

To accomplish this, robot engineers enter information about choices considered ethical in selected cases into a machine-learning algorithm.

Having acquired ethics my client X 1037 did exactly that.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH HIS PROGRAMMING TO DEFEND HIMSELF AND HUMANS. 

Danger, danger! Mrs White,  Mr Brown who was advancing with a fire axe was pushed backwards by my client. He that is Mr brown fell backwards hitting his head on a laptop resulting in his death.

There is no denying the event as it is recorded with his cameras on my clients hard disk.

However the central question to be answers at this trial is, when a robot kills a human, who takes the blame?

We argue that the process of killing (as with lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) is always a systematized mode of violence in which all elements in the kill chain—from commander to operator to target—are subject to a technification.

For example:

Social media companies are responsible for allowing the Islamic State to use their platforms to promote the killing of innocent civilians.

WHY NOT A MURDER.

As my client is a self learning intelligent technology so it is inevitable that he will learn to by-passes direct human control for which he cannot be held responsible for.

Without AI bill of rights, clearly, our way of approaching this doesn’t neatly fit into society’s view of guilt and justice.  Once you give up power to anatomical machines you’re not getting it back.

Much of our current law assumes that human operators are involved when in fact programs that govern Robotic actions are self learning.

Targets are objectified and stripped of the rights and recognition they would otherwise be owed by virtue of their status as humans dont apply

Sophisticated AI innovations through neural networks and machine learning, paired with improvements in computer processing power, have opened up a field of possibilities for autonomous decision-making in a wide range of not just military applications, but includes the targeting of an adversaries.

Mr Brown was a threatening adversarie.

.In essence the court has no administrative powers over self learning Technology.  The power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues will GOVERNED THE RESULT OF THIS TRIAL.

Robot crime UK law

Prosecution:  Opening statement.

The prospect of losing meaningful human control over the use of force is totally unacceptable.

We may have to limit our emotional response to robots but it is important that the robots understand ours. If a robot kills someone, then it has committed a crime (actus reus)

The fact that to-day it is possible that unknowingly and indirectly, like screws in a machine, we can be used in actions, the effects of which are beyond the horizon of our eyes and imagination, and of which, could we imagine them, we could not approve—this fact has changed the very foundations of our moral existence.

What we are really talking about when we talk about whether or not robots can commit crimes is “emergence” – where a system does something novel and perhaps good but also unforeseeable, which is why it presents such a problem for law.

Technology has the power to transform our society, upend injustice, and hold powerful people and institutions accountable. But it can also be used to silence the marginalized, automate oppression, and trample our basic rights.

Tech can be a great tool for law enforcement to use, however the line between law enforcement and commercial endorsement is getting blurry.

If you withdrew your support, rendered your support ineffective, and informed authorities, you may show that you were not an accomplice to the murder.

Drawing on the history of systematic killing, we will not only argue that lethal autonomous weapons systems reproduce, and in some cases intensify, the moral challenges of the past.  If we humans are to exist in a world run by machines these machines cannot be accountable to themselves but to human laws..

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a being to come to harm.

We will be demonstrating the “guilty mind” of a non-human.

This can be done by referring to and adapting existing legal principles.

It is hard not to develop feelings for machines but we’re heading towards in the future, something that will one day hurt us. We are at a pivotal point where we can choose as a society that we are not going to mislead people into thinking these machines are more human than they are.

We need to get over our obsession with treating machines as if they were human.

People perceive robots as something between an animate and an inanimate object and it has to do with our in-built anthropomorphism.

Systematic killing has long been associated with some of the darkest episodes in human history.

When humans are “knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood.

Critically though, there are limits on the type and degree of systematization that are appropriate in human conduct, especially when it comes to collective violence or individual murder by a Robotics.

Within conditions of such complexity and abstraction, humans are left with little choice but to trust in the cognitive and rational superiority of this clinical authority.

Cold and dispassionate forms of systematic violence that erode the moral status of human targets, as well as the status of those who participate within the system itself must be held legally accountable.

Increasingly, however, it is framed as a desirable outcome, particularly in the context of military AI and lethal autonomy. The increased tendency toward human technification (the substitution of technology for human labor) and systematization is exacerbating the dispassionate application’s of lethal force and leading to more, not less, violence.

Autonomous violence incentivizing a moral devaluation of those targeted and eroding the moral agency of those who kill, enabling a more precise and dispassionate mode of violence, free of the emotion and uncertainty that too often weaken compliance with the rules and standards of war and murder.

This dehumanization is real, we argue, but impacts the moral status of both the recipients and the dispensers of autonomous violence. If we are allowing the expansion of modes of killing rather than fostering restraint Robots will kill whether commanded to do or not.

The Defence claim that X 1037 is not responsible for its actions due to coding of its electronics by external companies. Erasing the line into unethical territory such as responsibility for murder.

We know that these machines are nowhere near the capabilities of humans but they can fake it, they can look lifelike and say the right thing in particular situations. However, as we see with this murder the power gained by these companies far exceeds the responsibilities they have assumed.

A robot can be shown a picture of a face that is smiling but it doesn’t know what it feels like to be happy.

The people who hosted the AI system on their computers and servers are the real defendants.

PROSECUTION FIRST WITNESS:  SOCIAL MEDIA / INTERNET.

We call on the resentives of these companies who will clearly demonstrate this shocking asymmetry of power and responsibility.

These platforms are impacting our public discourse, and this action brings much-needed transparency and accountability to the policies that shape the social media content we consume every day, aiding and abetting the deaths AND NOW MURDER.

While the pressure is mounting for public officials to legally address the harms social media causes. This murder is not nor will ever be confined to court rulings or judgements, treating human beings as cogs in a machine does not and should not give a Punch’s Pilot dispensation even if any boundaries that could help define Tech remain blurred. Technology companies that reign supreme in this digital age are not above the law.  

In order to grasp the enormous implications of what has begun to happen and how all our witnesses are connected and have contributed to this murder.

To close our defence we will conclude with observations on why we should conceptualize certain technology-facilitated behaviors as forms of violence. We are living in one of the most vicious times in history.  The only difference now is our access to more lethal weapons. 

We call.

Facebook.

Is it not true you allowed terrorists group to use your platform, allowed unrestrained hate speech, inciting, among other things, the genocide in Myanmar. Drug cartels and human traffickers in developing countries using the platform, The platform’s algorithm is designed to foster more user engagement in any way possible, including by sowing discord and rewarding outrage.

In chooses profit over safety it contributed to X 1037 self learning.

Facebook is a uniquely socially toxic platform. Facebook is no longer happy to just let others use the news feed to propagate misinformation and exert influence – it wants to wield this tool for its own interests, too. Facebook is attempting to pave the way for deeper penetration into every facet of our reality.

Facebook would like you to believe that the company is now a permanent fixture in society. To mediate not just our access to information or connection but our perception of reality with zero accountability is the worst of all possible options.  Something like posting a holiday photo to Facebook may be all that is needed to indicate to a criminal that he person is not at home.

We call.

Instagram Facebook sister company App.

Instagram is all about sharing photos providing a unique way of displaying your Profile. Instagram is a place where anyone can become an Influence. These are pretty frightening findings and are only added to by the fact that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.

What makes Instagram different from other social media platforms is the focus on perfection and the feeling from users that they need to create a highly polished and curated version of their lives. Not only that, but the research suggested that Instagram’s Explore page can push young users into viewing harmful content, inappropriate pictures and horrible videos.

In a conceptualization where you are only worth what your picture is, that’s a direct reflection of your worth as a person.

 That becomes very impactful.

X 1037 posted a selfie on the 12 May 2025 to see his self-worth.  Within minutes he received over 5 million hate and death threats. Its no wonder when faces with Mr Brown that he chose self preservation.

We call Twitter. Elon Musk 

This platform is notorious catalyst for some of the most infamous events of the decade: Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the Capitol Hill riots. Herein lies the paradox of the platform. The infamous terror group – which is now the totalitarian theocratic ruling party of Afghanistan — has made good use of Twitter.

A platform that has done its very best to avoid having to remove any videos from racists, white supremacists and hate mongers.

We call TikTok.

A Chinese social video app known for its aggressive data collection can access while it’s running, a device location, calendar, contacts, other running applications, wi-fi networks, phone number and even the SIM card serial number.

Data harvesting to gain access to unimaginable quantities of customer data, using this information unethically. Data can be a sensitive and controversial topic in the best of times. When bad actors violate the trust of users there should be consequences, and there are results. This data can also be misused for nefarious purposes in the wrong hands. The same capability is available to organised crime, which is a wholly different and much more serious problem, as the laws do not apply. In oppressive regimes, these tools can be used to suppress human rights.

X 1037 held an account, opening himself to influences beyond his programming. 

We call Google

Truly one of the worst offenders when it comes to the misuse of data.

Given large aggregated data sets and the right search terms, it’s possible to find a lot of information about people; including information that could otherwise be considered confidential: from medical to marital.

Google data mining is being used to target individuals. We are all victims of spam, adware and other unwelcome methods of trying to separate us from our money. As storage gets cheaper, processing power increases exponentially and the internet becomes more pervasive in everyone’s lives, the data mining issue will just get worse.  X 1037 proves this. 

We call. YouTube/Netflix.  

Numerous studies have shown that the entertainment we consume affects our behavior, our consumption habits, the way we relate to each other, and how we explore and build our identity.

Digital platforms like Netflix have a strong impact on modern society.

Violence makes up 40% of the movie sections on Netflix. Understanding what type of messages viewers receive and the way in which these messages can affect their behavior is of vital importance for an effective understanding of today’s society.

Therefore, it must be considered that people are the most susceptible to imitating the attitudes. Content related to mental health, violence, suicide, self-harm, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) appears in the ten most-watched movies and ten most-watched series on Netflix.

Their appearance on the media is also considered to have a strong impact on spectators. X 1037 spent most of his day watching and self learning from movies.  

Violence affects the lives of millions of people each year, resulting in death, physical harm, and lasting mental damage. It is estimated that in 2019, violence caused 475,000 deaths.

Netflix in particular, due to their recent creation and growth, have not yet been studied in depth.

Considering the impact that digital platforms have on viewers’ behaviors its once again no wonder that X 1037 did what he did. 

There is no denying that these factors should be forcing the entertainment and technology industries to reconsider how they create their products which are have a negative long-term influence on various aspects of our wider life and development.

We call

Instagram.

Instagram if you are capitalizing off of a culture, you’re morally obligated to help them.  As a result of “social comparison, social pressure, and negative interactions with other people you are promoting harm.

We call.

Apple.

Smartphones have developed in the last three decades now an addiction leading to severe depression, anxiety, and loneliness in individuals.

People are now using smartphones for their payments, financial transactions, navigating, calling, face to face communication, texting, emailing, and scheduling their routines. Nowadays, people use wireless technology, especially smartphones, to watch movies, tv shows, and listen to music.

We know the devices are an indispensable tool for connecting with work, friends and the rest of the world. But they come with trade-offs—from privacy issues to ecological concerns to worries over their toll on our physical and emotional health. Spurring a generation unable to engage in face-to-face conversations and suffering sharp declines in cognition skills.

We’re living through an interesting social experiment where we don’t know what’s going to happen with kids who have never lived in a world without touchscreens. X 1037 would not have been present at the murder scene only that he was responding to a phone call from Mrs White Apple 19 phone. 

Society will continue struggling to balance the convenience of smartphones against their trade-offs.

We call.

Microsoft. 

Two main goals stand out as primary objectives for many companies: a desire for profitability, and the goal to have an impact on the world. Microsoft is no exception. Its mission as a platform provider is to equip individuals and businesses with the tools to “do more.” Microsoft’s platform became the dev box and target of a massive community of developers who ultimately supplied Windows with 16 million programs. Multibillion-dollar companies rely on the integrity and reliability of Microsoft’s tools daily.

It is a testimony to the powerful role Microsoft plays in global affairs that its tools are relied upon by governments around the world.

Microsoft’s position of global influence gives its leadership a voice on matters of moral consequence and humanitarian concern. Microsoft is a company built on a dream.

Microsoft’s influence raises some concerns as well. It’s AI-driven camera technology that can recognize, people, places, things, and activities and can act proactively has a profound capacity for abuse by the same governments and entities that currently employ Microsoft services for less nefarious purposes.

Today, with the emerging new age, which is most commonly—and inaccurately—called “the digital age”, have already transformed parts of our lives, including how we work, how we communicate, how we shop, how we play, how we read, how we entertain ourselves, in short, how we live and now will die.

 It would be economic and political suicide for regulators to kneecap the digital winners.

COURTS VERDICT :

Given the absence of direct responsibility, the court finds X 1037 not guilty.

MR BROWN DEATH caused by a certain act or omission in coding.

THE COURT DISMISSES THE CASE AGAINST THE TECHNOLOGICAL COMPANIES. ON THE GROUDS OF INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE.

Neither the robot nor its commander could be held accountable for crimes that occurred before the commander was put on notice. During this accountability-free period, a robot would be able to commit repeated criminal acts before any human had the duty or even the ability to stop it.

Software has the potential to cause physical harm.

To varying extents, companies are endowed with legal personhood. It grants them certain economic and legal rights, but more importantly it also confers responsibilities on them. So, if Company X builds an autonomous machine, then that company has a corresponding legal duty.

The problem arises when the machines themselves can make decisions of their own accord. As AI technology evolves, it will eventually reach a state of sophistication that will allow it to bypass human control. The task is not determining whether it in fact murdered someone; but the extent to which that act satisfies the principle of mens rea.

However if there were no consequences for human operators or commanders, future criminal acts could not be deterred so the court FINES EACH AND EVERY COMPANY 1 BILLION for lack of attention to human details

We must confront the fact that autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm is already around.

The pain that humans feel in making the transition to a digital world is not the pain of dying. It is the pain of being born.


What would “intent” look like in a machine mind? How would we go about proving an autonomous machine was justified in killing a human in self-defence or the extent of premeditation?

Given that we already struggle to contain what is done by humans. What would building “remorse” into machines say about us as their builders?

At present, we are systematically incapable of guaranteeing human rights on any scale.

We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. That is what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species – which is what we are likely to become, given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. If you have machines that control the planet, and they are interested in doing a lot of computation and they want to scale up their computing infrastructure, it’s natural that they would want to use our land for that. This is not compatible with human life. Machines with the power and discretion to take human lives without human involvement are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant, and should be prohibited by international law.

If you ask an AI system anything, in order to achieve that thing, it needs to survive long enough

Fundamentally, it’s just very difficult to get a robot to tell the difference between a picture of a tree and a real tree.

X 1037 now, it has a survival instinct.

When we create an entity that has survival instinct, it’s like we have created a new species. Once these AI systems have a survival instinct, they might do things that can be dangerous for us.

So, what’s wrong with LAWS, and is there any point in trying to outlaw them?

Some opponents argue that the problem is they eliminate human responsibility for making lethal decisions. Such critics suggest that, unlike a human being aiming and pulling the trigger of a rifle, a LAWS can choose and fire at its own targets. Therein, they argue, lies the special danger of these systems, which will inevitably make mistakes, as anyone whose iPhone has refused to recognize his or her face will acknowledge.

In my view, the issue isn’t that autonomous systems remove human beings from lethal decisions, to the extent that weapons of this sort make mistakes.

Human beings will still bear moral responsibility for deploying such imperfect lethal systems.

LAWS are designed and deployed by human beings, who therefore remain responsible for their effects. Like the semi-autonomous drones of the present moment (often piloted from half a world away), lethal autonomous weapons systems don’t remove human moral responsibility. They just increase the distance between killer and target.

Furthermore, like already outlawed arms, including chemical and biological weapons, these systems have the capacity to kill indiscriminately. While they may not obviate human responsibility, once activated, they will certainly elude human control, just like poison gas or a weaponized virus.

Oh, and if you believe that protecting civilians is the reason the arms industry is investing billions of dollars in developing autonomous weapons, I’ve got a patch of land to sell you on Mars that’s going cheap.

There is, perhaps, little point in dwelling on the 50% chance that AGI does develop. If it does, every other prediction we could make is moot, and this story, and perhaps humanity as we know it, will be forgotten. And if we assume that transcendentally brilliant artificial minds won’t be along to save or destroy us, and live according to that outlook, then what is the worst that could happen – we build a better world for nothing?

The Company that build the autonomous machine, Renix Development has a corresponding legal duty.

—————

Because these robots would be designed to kill, someone should be held legally and morally accountable for unlawful killings and other harms the weapons cause.

Criminal law cares not only about what was done, but why it was done.

  • Did you know what you were doing? (Knowledge)
  • Did you intend your action? (General intent)
  • Did you intend to cause the harm with your action? (Specific intent)
  • Did you know what you were doing, intend to do it, know that it might hurt someone, but not care a bit about the harm your action causes? (Recklessness)
  • So, the question must always be asked when a robot or AI system physically harms a person or property, or steals money or identity, or commits some other intolerable act: Was that act done intentionally? 
  • There is no identifiable person(s) who can be directly blamed for AI-caused harm.
  • There may be times where it is not possible to reduce AI crime to an individual due to AI autonomy, complexity, or limited explainability. Such a case could involve several individuals contributing to the development of an AI over a long period of time, such as with open-source software, where thousands of people can collaborate informally to create an AI.

The limitations on assigning responsibility thus add to the moral, legal, and technological case against fully autonomous weapons/ Robotics, and bolster the call for a ban on their development production, and use. Either way, society urgently needs to prevent or deter the crimes, or penalize the people who commit them.

There is no reason why an AI system’s killing of a human being or destroying people’s livelihoods should be blithely chalked up to “computer malfunction.

Because proving that these people had “intent” for the AI system to commit the crime would be difficult or impossible.

I’m no lawyer. What can work against AI crimes?

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY ASKS: WHAT SHOULD OUR VIEWS ON THE CURRENT WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE BE? AFTER ALL WAR IS WAR.

29 Friday Dec 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Civilization., Collective stupidity., Cruelty., Cry for help., CULTURES COLLIDE, Dehumanization., Disconnection., Erasing history., Extremism., Freedom, Freedom of Speech, How to do it., Human values., Humanity., International solidarity., Israel and Palestine, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Militarism., Modern day Slavery, PAIN AND SUFFERING IN LIFE, Palestinian- Israel., Reality., Refugees., Religious Beliefs., Russia / Ukraine ., State of the world, Survival., Telling the truth., Terrorism., The common good., The cost of war., THE ISRAELI- PALESTINIAN PROBLEM., The Obvious., The state of the World., The Ukraine., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., Uncategorized, Violence, War, War Crimes., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Cup., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY ASKS: WHAT SHOULD OUR VIEWS ON THE CURRENT WAR BETWEEN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE BE? AFTER ALL WAR IS WAR.

Tags

hamas, Israel, news, palestine, palestinians, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( FIVE MINUTE READ)

The world today looks very different from the way it appeared thirty years ago.

It is one thing to express your opinion, it is another to do so in a way that actually puts a stumbling block in the way of others.

It’s okay to want to find ways of expressing some nuance.

Not about the wickedness of what’s happened. Not about the horror at loss of life. Not about the fact Hamas are terrorists, committed to the total destruction of the Jewish state.

But about where (like all war’s) is this war going before it ends as all wars eventually do.

Bright trails of rockets fired towards Israel from the Gaza strip, lighting up the orange night sky

How do you draw the line between retaliation and self-defence?

What proportion of vengeance is acceptable?

Is sending hundreds of thousands of troops into Gaza wise?

Is cutting off water and electricity act of justice?

These are complex questions.

Palestine is not a country. That’s the whole point.

Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel all live under various regimes of organized discrimination and oppression, much of which makes life nearly unlivable. But in terms of what happens now, and how the response plays itself out, there might well be room for nuance but first and foremost, we must unequivocally condemn the Hamas attacks for what they were. Any attempt to justify these actions is morally indefensible, and we must firmly oppose the arguments of those who seek to rationalise them.

However the line between punishing evil and revenge can be a fine one, but it’s an important one.

For example, I think Hamas are freedom fighters, turned into terrorists by the west and their recent barbaric acts.

————–

Let’s distinguish between those questions on which we can be clear.

The conflict and tensions in the Middle East are complex and deep rooted.

Let’s be equally honest about the complexity of this situation and not white wash away the sins of either side.

There is no Biblical justification to what Israel is doing.

There is not Promised Land anymore.

Why?

Because the events are and were unavoidably, part of a 80 year long story of modern times.

A further episode of horror. Israel – using unprecedented violence on a largely defenseless and penned-in population, in part to cover for its own fatal mistakes and embarrassment.

You might even think that Palestinians are the ones colonizing the land of Israel, no less. And you probably believe that Israel, which holds ultimate control over the lives of 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and yet denies them the right to vote in Israeli elections, is a democracy.

WAR IS WAR.

NO INTERNATIONAL LAWS or INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WILL CHANGE THAT NO MATTER WHERE A WAR IS OR TAKING PLACE.

The one thing war and bloodshed do for us is leave us longing for a new world.

Palestinians always act while Israel only reacts.

(It is amazing that such a poorly trained and equipped group of Palestinians from Gaza could overcome the best intelligence in the world found in Israel. The Israelis were caught napping and their response is influenced by this.)

It is not appropriate to see Hamas as separate from the Palestinian people.

It is a fundamentalist political group, supported originally by Israel, that responded to the secularism and corruption of the Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority.

Whilst we may disagree about what is proportionate. What Hamas have done is wicked, “unprovoked”

What exactly counts as a provocation?

Not the 248 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 1 January and 4 October of last year.

Not the denial of Palestinian human rights and national aspirations for decades.

Israel have human rights, as do other nations, but there are terrorists on both sides, including those in power currently in Israel. Mutually dependent on each other for survival. Yet neither can win.

The Palestinians will remain. They cannot be eliminated. Israel too will continue to exist.

There are roughly 14.5 million Palestinians in the world, according to a 2023 estimate from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the vast majority of whom are Sunni Muslims, though a significant minority is Christian. Over 5 million live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and another 2 million in Israel. The remaining population lives elsewhere, mostly as refugees, with the largest communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

As of 2019, about 5.6 million Palestinians were considered refugees by the United Nations because they or their forebears were displaced by wars with Israel.

Today Palestinians are a minority. 1.8 million Palestinians form around 20.8 percent of Israel’s population. They’re not equal. One dominates while the other is dominated. One colonizes. The other is colonized.

Desperate western attachment to morally bankrupt double standards bears a large portion of the blame for this and the resulting wars that have plagued the region.

———–

The future is full of unnecessary and horrific bloodshed all around.

There is and has been wrongdoing and bad decisions on both sides.

Calling out either one, does no good.

Was the land stolen from Arabs living in the British Protective of Palestine. The land was granted them by an UN charter.

Unfortunately the “land without people for a people without land” was flawed as there were people on that land and that was stolen from them.

We are ignoring the painful context. 

If we once again ignore the big picture, then all this will just keep happening.

————————–

THAT THERE IS NO DENYING (BEING LIVE STREAMED IN FRONT OF THE WORLD.) This new outbreak is turning into a Genocide.

SHOULD THE UNITED NATIONS NOW EXPEL ISRAEL? ( LIKE IT DID WITH SOUTH AFRICA DURING ITS APARTHEID.)

SHOULD INTERNATIONAL SPORT AND CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS &  COMMERCIAL CORPORATIONS NOW BOYCOTT ISRAEL, WITH TARGETS BOYCOTTS. TO AVOID BEING COMPLACENT AND TARNISHED WITH A GENOCIDE?

SHOULD THERE BE A LARGE DE VESTMENT OF INVESTMENTS IN ISRAEL?

SHOULD THERE BE A MILITARY EMBARGO?

SHOULD AS 83% OF IDRSAI TO DAY SUPPORT ETHNIC CLEANSING ISRAEL BE BAN IN COMPETING IN THE OLYMPICS, THE WORLD CUP AND ALL OTHER SPORTING EVENTS.

————

EVEN WHEN ALL OF THIS COMES TO A STOP THE ROOT CAUSE WILL NOT JUST DISAPPEAR FROM THE MAP.

WE MUST APPLY PRESSURE AND NOT BE COMPLICITY.

WE MUST NOT ALLOW GOVERNMENTS TO CLOSE DOWN OR UNDERMINE ANY FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION OR SPEECH SUPPORTING A CEASEFIRE AND POLITICAL SETTLEMENT.

ISRAEL DOES NOT REPRESENT ALL JEWS ETHNICS. CLEANNESS IS A JEWS VALUE NOT GENOCIDE.

HERE ARE A FEW COLLECTIVE ACTIONS THAT WE ALL CAN APPLY.

Boycott:

Hewlett Packard helps run the biometric ID system that Israel uses to restrict Palestinian movement.

Siemens is complicit in apartheid Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise through its planned construction of the EuroAsia Interconnector

Soda Steam is actively complicit in Israel’s policy of displacing the indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev).

AXA invests in Israeli banks, which finance the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources

Sabra hummus is a joint venture between PepsiCo and the Strauss Group, an Israeli food company that provides financial support to the Israeli army.

A barcode starting with 729 usually indicates a product of Israel. ( But this is not always reliable.)

Palestinian refugees have long claimed that international law guarantees them the right to return to their homes, citing U.N. General Assembly resolution 194, adopted in December, 1948, which states that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.

For its part, Israel largely considers this claim a non-starter, fearing that the return of millions of Palestinians is neither feasible nor just and would demographically overwhelm the country, erasing its Jewish character.

Sadly, 2023 has been a violent one on the global stage.

Many proposals have been put forward for how the current conflicts could, or should, be brought to a close. All will involve concessions that will effectively appease one side or the other without tackling their underlying cause.

The unanimous conclusion rest on a common belief: That wars should, and usually do, end in negotiation and compromise.

The first problem is that they don’t.

It is true that the majority of wars do not end in absolute victory. Ceasefire, armistice and stalemate terminate most conflicts, even if the ‘peace’ is infirm or short-lived.

The second problem lies in the fatalistic quality of many arguments ruling out the pursuit or even possibility of defeat. The third deficiency of arguments to ‘settle now’ is their reliance on false analogies. The fourth and greatest problem is a failure to take account of the character of this war and the outlook of a systemic adversary viscerally hostile to the ‘collective West’ and the international order it claims to uphold.

Negotiation, compromise and reconciliation are undertaken with new regimes only after old regimes are defeated and removed.

This war might not meet legal definitions of genocide, but the barbarism and the serial war crimes that have taken place – material, cultural and now ecological – have not been witnessed in Europe since the Second World War. The war is being waged on an industrial scale OF DESTRUCTION.  

Western policy must be underpinned by a long-term strategy – political, military and industrial – based on a sustainable definition of victory, not on a search for negotiation with an adversary whose minimal terms flatly contradict Western interests.

Outlier events cannot be ruled out.

The only way I can foresee either the Ukraine War or the Palestinian Israeli War possibly ending is a change in leadership with new agreed compliant political federation regime installed.

THERE WILL BE WITH CLIMATE CHANGE MANY WARS TO FOLLOW.

Wars of the 21st century will be fought over something quite different: climate change, and the shortages of water and food that will come from it. If you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: HOW FAR OFF IS SYNTETIC LIFE?

11 Monday Sep 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: HOW FAR OFF IS SYNTETIC LIFE?

Tags

The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Five minute read)

Society is already wrestled with the consequences of genetic engineering, fiddling with genomes, but synthetic biology poses a number of practical risks.

68% of biodiversity has been lost since 1970, and the amount of human-made material including concrete, plastic and bricks now outweighs the total mass of biological matter on the planet.

The likely truth is that technology might be the only clear way out of future disasters given the terrifyingly short timescales involved.

Humans have been manipulating the genetic code for thousands of years, by selectively breeding plants and animals with desired characteristics.

As we have learned how to read and manipulate the genetic code, we have started to take genetic information from one organism and transfer it to another. This process we call genetic engineering, and it has enabled researchers to develop different varieties of plants and animals.

However for instance this technology could produce devastating biological weapons, or escape, mutate and cause unforeseeable damage to the ecosystem.

The ethical concern, rest not with the tool itself, but the hand that wields it.

In a rapidly changing world, that is facing major global challenges, the potential uses of synthetic biology are far reaching, and the impact of these uses could be profound.

From climate change to pandemics, synthetic biology can provide the tools to engineer biological processes that can deliver targeted, rapid and sustainable solutions. From monitoring and remediating environmental contamination, managing invasive pests and pathogens, reviving endangered species, and engineering resilience against climate change, to enabling new strategies to store data.

Humanity is already on the path to decoupling from natural systems – so if we want to avoid the worst scenarios of this trajectory, what might we do about it?

The ability to learn from and leverage technology that has already made the living world offers seemingly endless opportunities.

We use recombinant DNA technology already to have cells to synthesize medical antibodies, insulin, and other things like the hormone Epo.  (a hormone produced by the kidney that promotes the formation of red blood cells by the bone marrow.)

Or.

In the future. A ‘self-healing’ paint that consists of microscopic organisms that could repair itself over the lifetime of a ship, and tanks or armoured vehicles that could wear a coat of organisms that self-heal and change their colour on command.

How far could it go?

The potential impact of this area of science is astonishing; From bacteria that could generate energy, to creating food without the need for large organisms we might instead genetically integrate ourselves with the biosphere, such that both human and natural are transformed, acting as biological arks into the future, or as a form of beautiful annihilation into a future weird ecology.

This is an area of research described as the design and construction of artificial biological entities that previously did not exist, or the redesign of existing natural biological systems.

Rather than seeking to preserve natural systems.

In the face of environmental collapse, humanity may need to turn to artificial replacements for nature – how might we avoid the most dystopian of these futures?

Can humanity leave nature behind?

Imagine a future where humans have transcended their current state to combine with technology – in the most extreme cases, evolving into uploaded digital beings.

_______________

The recent achievement of scientists in manufacturing the genome of a bacterium from off-the-shelf chemicals, and placing it in a related bacterium which is now happily reproducing under the control of the manmade DNA, holds fantastic promise.

  • A team of researchers in the United States and United Kingdom say they have created the world’s first synthetic human embryo-like structures from stem cells, bypassing the need for eggs and sperm. These embryo-like structures are at the very earliest stages of human development: They don’t have a beating heart or a brain, for example.

——————–

Humans do not need to insert themselves into controlling life processes in every corner of the world, down to the very strands of DNA, to force the Earth system to absorb the shocks of our presence. If the Earth is not to be irreversibly degraded and unbalanced, we need some equal and opposite pull in the direction of replenishing natural complexity.

What if everything created in the built environment was balanced elsewhere? (Credit: Alamy)

If the metaphorical “umbilical cord” connecting human survival and the biosphere is well and truly cut.

The threat of an exclusively human-technological world would not be a dystopia to many.

If severe environmental degradation continues, a plausible path is one where humans will, through necessity, decouple from a biosphere that ceases to function.

It is no longer science fiction.

Because trillions of organisms are utilised as food and broken down to fuel human bodies.

Creating synthetic life that is useful to us will probably involve learning a lot more about what the code actually does.

For example, scientists have begun devising ways to synthesise “ecosystem services” – such as pollination or other natural processes that benefit human society.

The newly touted “metaverse”, for instance, promises a form of spatial, workplace and recreational departure from the “meat space” of the physical world: why visit a polluted forest or lake when you can access a near-perfect digital simulation of a clean one from your home?

If the human-biosphere umbilical cord is to be cut, it should leave mother Earth in peak health, and in service to both parties.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WE ARE TURNING INTO FOOLS WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE, NOT TO MENTION TECHNOLOGY AND GENETIC ENGINEERING

29 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., HUMAN ABILITIES., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., IS DATA DESTORYING THE WORLD?, Technologically Enabled Genetics., Technology, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., THE NEW NORM., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WE ARE TURNING INTO FOOLS WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE, NOT TO MENTION TECHNOLOGY AND GENETIC ENGINEERING

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Algorithms., Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, Distribution of wealth, Inequility, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Five minute read) 

Like me today, many of us are being constantly bombarded by facts, figures and narratives that tell us our days on earth are numbered, that it’s our fault and that it’s also largely out of our control.

Our problem is that capitalism is designed to squeeze every last cent out of this planet until there is nothing left. We can either fool ourselves about that until it kills us, or we can change it.

Like many horror stories, this one features a main character full of futile determination to maintain a sense of normalcy even as the ominous signs of doom become ever more impossible to ignore.

We can chuckle knowing that the monster is going to come for our designated protectors.

We stop chuckling knowing that it’s coming for all of us next.

Homo sapiens rose above the lesser animals thanks to our ability to wield logic and reason, yet we have somehow gotten ourselves to a place where the knowledge of what is driving all these wildfires and floods is not enough to enable us to do anything meaningful to stop it.

As overwhelming and omnipresent as the climate crisis is, it is not the core issue.

The core issue is capitalism.

Capitalism’s unfettered pursuit of economic growth is what caused climate change, and capitalism’s inability to reckon with externalities – the economic term for a cost that falls onto third parties – is what is preventing us from solving climate change.

It is easy to imagine that a real live existential threat to our way of life would prompt any society to assume war footing and marshal everything it has to fight for survival. Unfortunately, this response only takes hold in actual war situations, where the threat is “other people that we can shoot and kill in glorious fashion”.

When the threat comes not from enemy people, but from our own nature, we find it much harder to rise to the occasion.

Where is the glory in recognizing the folly of our own greed and profligacy? Leaders are not elected on such things. We want leaders who will give us more, leading us ever onwards, upwards and into the grave.

The G20 is a perfect model of our collective failure to build institutions capable of coping with deep, long-term, existential problems that cannot be solved by building more weapons.

On the one hand, the head of the United Nations says that there is no way for the world to meet its 1.5C warming goal without the leadership of the G20 that claims to be bailing out humanity’s sinking ship with one hand while contributing billons of tons of carbon to the atmosphere by subsidising in the past five years $3.3tn to fossil fuel production and consumption.

—————–

It is not good to be too pessimistic on climate change, because we must maintain the belief that we can win this battle if we are to have any hope at all. That said, it sure does seem like we’re screwed.

We’re being led to believe that the society we’ve built has to ‘collapse’ if we’re to save the world.

We’re presented with a binary choice — save the planet and live a miserable existence, or accept that some populations (plant, animal, human) will have to act as collateral damage to ensure a quality of life that vaguely resembles our current one.

This whole thing of it being ‘a trade-off’ or ‘tough choices’ is based on our current lifestyle being awesome and the future being a kind of worthy ascetic hardship.

The message is that all the things you rely on to keep us safe are no longer part of a viable future fit for everyone. The sense is that when these things disappear, life will be unbearable. That we’re going to turn on each other

.It’s almost like our lives are being engineered this way.

Cuts to benefits, dismantling of free healthcare, with Government openly allowing the majority of wealth to be passed on to those who are already most wealthy.

—————-

We haven’t got a hope of addressing complex problems or creating a future fit for everyone.

Given the challenge we’re facing — one that’s complex, systemic and long-term, if we carry on acting from this place we’re going to really screw it up.

Climate change and the destruction of our ecosystems seem to be the result of persistent, rampant over-consumption. This is because our modern society is a consumer society.

It’s based on one simple idea: that consuming will meet your needs.

Others things we think are harmless serve to numb us: Netflix boxsets, smartphones, profit seeking algorithms, masquerade as the answer, but they are really just part of the same system — insurance policies, private healthcare and the multi-billion dollar ‘wellness’ industry.

New industries pop up to give us what we want without the guilt — sustainably sourced, vegan, fair-trade — but even aside from the minefield that is working out whether it’s really ‘sustainable’, it’s still built on the same system. A system built on a disconnection from your needs, that can never leave you satisfied with who you are and the world around you.

None of these things can or will ever meet our unmet needs for love, connection or trust in the world, so we continue consuming, throwing more things into the bottomless pit inside.

We seem to be more unhappy than ever before. More physically and mentally ill. More divided than ever. More stressed about our impact on the world.

Social media is a form of disconnection from ourselves that leads to the disconnection from each other that in turn leads to disconnection from our environment — which is the only thing that has enabled us to create the extractive, destructive system we have in place.

Given all this, ‘conscious consumerism’ and ‘green new deals’ will never offer the solution we need, if they are built on the fundamental idea of citizen is as consumer, working to earn, earning to spend, spending to consume etc.

I think the fundamental answer lies instead in rebuilding our lives around connection.

Recognise that if you would love other people to live in a certain way or see the world from a different perspective, this is only going to happen if others sense you’re not judging them to be wrong.

People are slowly but steadily finding that their real needs are met more consistently in self-awareness and relationship than they are in quick fix consumption.

We can’t all join a five-day protest and we’re not all ready to sit in a circle and talk about our feelings but that’s not what’s being asked of us.

Indeed, climate change itself is the ultimate negative externality: fossil-fuel companies and assorted polluting corporations and their investors get all the benefits, and the rest of the world pays the price.

Now the entire globe finds itself trapped in the gruesome logic of capitalism, where it is perfectly rational for the rich to continue doing something that is destroying the earth, as long as the profits they reap will allow them to insulate themselves from the consequences.

The path we are on, still, is not one that leads to a happy ending.

Rather, it is one that leads to the last billionaire standing on dry land blasting off in his private rocket as the rest of us drown in rising seas.

We talk about tipping points when it comes to the climate, but the real tipping point has long passed.

Its called inequality.

A strict definition of capitalism is a society where capital is privately owned, and workers are paid wages by private firms. Essentially it is a society with minimal government intervention and resources are distributed according to the outcome of free markets.

A looser definition of capitalism is a situation where business is left to the free market, but the government intervene in many areas of the economy like business regulation, health care and education.

In practice, using this definition of capitalism – most modern economies are essentially capitalist because it is the free market that dominates in the production and distribution of scarce resources.

Therefore, you can say the potential of reward makes inequality an essential ingredient of capitalism.

Therefore, capitalists with access to private property can ‘exploit’ their monopoly power to make a much higher profit than other people in society. Therefore those who inherit capital can enjoy high income even without any effort.

To redress some of the inequalities of capitalist society.

Regulate monopoly power, provide free education, so everyone has access to education and equality of opportunity.

  • Capitalism is unconcerned about equity. It is argued that inequality is essential to encourage innovation and economic development.
  • Socialism is concerned with redistributing resources from the rich to the poor. This is to ensure everyone has both equal opportunities and in some forms of socialism – equal outcomes.

Aspects of Democratic socialism

  • Advocates nationalisation of key industries (often the natural monopolies, like electricity, water)
  • Prices set by the market mechanism, except public goods, such as health and education.
  • Provision of a welfare state to provide income redistribution
  • Support for trade unions in wage bargaining
  • Use of minimum wages and universal income to raise low-income wages
  • Progressive tax and provision of public services. For example, marginal income tax rates of 70%. Tax on wealth.

There is no reason that Democratic socialism can not operate in a Capital society that is disappearing into the world of Profit seeking algorithms. 

For anyone still unsure that big, important things are now broken, several new titles paint a convincing portrait of grossly unsustainable inequality, corrupt political processes, and a looming crisis—much of it stemming from a financial system that for 40 years or so has prioritized short-term profit over all else and systematically removed any checks on its own worst impulses in pursuit of that goal. 

The single most important step is re-empowering governments, to start putting out the inferno.

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

Contact: bobdilllon33@gmail.com   

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WE ARE STILL A LONG WAY FROM ANY WORLD UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONSQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE.

23 Wednesday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2023 the year of disconnection., A Constitution for the Earth., Carbon Emissions., Climate Change.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WE ARE STILL A LONG WAY FROM ANY WORLD UNDERSTANDING OF THE CONSQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE.

Tags

Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

(Twelve minute read)

Understanding the many challenges facing our world isn’t easy, but surely it should be easy to understand that we all survive only because of ecosystems that provide us with life.

The picture is bleak.

  Climate change increases the risk of hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires.

The chief reason is that the world has no history of dealing with such a difficult problem, nor the institutions to do so. The harm done by climate change is not visited on the people, or the generations, that have the best chance of acting against it. Those who suffer most harm are and will be predominantly poor and in poor countries.

The rising global temperatures are already fuelling devastating extreme weather events around the world, with escalating impacts on economies and societies and fulling future wars.

What many don’t realise about the warming of the present Earth, is that once we pass a certain threshold, physics takes over, where multiple earth systems march past the point of no return.

We don’t understand the non-linear effects.

There’s are referred to tipping points, best described as domino pieces waiting to topple in only one direction to the end.

Tipping points we thought might happen well into the future are already underway.

It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing.

Although positive things have started to happen, even if all countries commit to achieve net zero emissions by the middle of this century its too late to reverse.

Global climate change is not a future problem. Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed.

While natural drivers will modulate human-caused changes, especially at regional levels and in the near term, they will have little effect on long-term global warming, reversal is beyond reach.

We really are out of time,

The scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years, and will not be reverse by any technology.

We cannot wait for decades to act, we have to start acting.

————

Already in this decade.

Concentrations of the major greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2 O) continued to increase. The difference between where emissions are heading and where science indicate they should be in 2030 is as large as ever.

The lifetime of carbon dioxide is so long, one year anomaly in emissions doesn’t change the big picture.

The truth is before our very eyes, in the prism of social media videos of burning wild fires, flooding, immigration, food shortages, you name it and it is happing.

It’s hard to understand that there will be a fresh water crisis when some countries are flooding.

It’s hard to appreciate the Arctic ice is disappearing when the winter is filled with stories of extreme weather events.

We don’t know what’s going to happen to the Antarctic glacier, where we have the biggest mass of ice worldwide and in the worst case, we could see up to two meters of sea level rise by the end of this century if the melting of the Antarctic glacier happens in a speedier manner.

Tree planting isn’t enough.

Its hard to believe that 80% of all insect have died – no bees no pollination – no food.

Its hard to believe that our oceans alone are absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.

Is hard to believe that we are in the process of unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet.

Its hard to believe that there will be  ( Severe heatwave historically expected once a decade) heatwaves will happening every other year at 2C.

There is no huge chasm after a 2c rise, we are tumbling down a painful, worsening rocky slope rather than about to suddenly hit a sheer cliff edge – nearly one in 10 vertebrate animals and almost one in five plants will lose half of their habitat.

Its beyond belief that by most standards the world’s governments are currently failing to avert a grim fate with the fingerprint of climate change on recent extreme weather is quite clear to one and all.

The evidence is irrefutable.

We do know that the global average sea level will likely rise, putting the homes of 200 million below sea level in 70 years.

Around 216 million people, mostly from developing countries, will be forced to flee these impacts by 2050 unless radical action is taken. The frequency of heavy precipitation events, will start to climb, nearly doubling the historical norm once it heats up by 2C. Globally, extreme crop drought events that previously occurred once a decade on average will more than double in their frequency at 2C of temperature rise.

A 16-year-old child swims in the flooded area of Aberao village in Kiribati. The Pacific island is one of the countries worst affected by sea-level rise.

Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.

Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels, affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of this century.

It won’t be just about temperature.

The consequences will devastate economies, infrastructure and political stability.

			A fire rages in Brazil's rainforest, near Maranhao at night.

For example, climate change is intensifying the natural production of water – the water cycle. This brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.

The alarm bells are deafening.

The past 20 years there has been a 53·7% increase in heat-related mortality in people older than 65 years.

A chilling number of Earth’s other denizens, including 40 percent of all amphibians known to science (about 3,200 species) is under threat. Climate change, pollution, deforestation, overfishing, development, and invasive species are putting biodiversity in peril.

At least 155 million people, 2.3 times as many as live in the UK, were pushed into acute food insecurity in 2020 due to extreme weather,

In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at any time in at least 2 million years, and concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide were higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

The loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Amazon rainforest, or extensive thawing of permafrost, as well as other key components of the climate system, are considered “tipping points” because they can cross critical thresholds, and then abruptly and irreversibly change.

Every fractional rise in temperature increases the risk of triggering one of 30 major tipping points. With just 1 degree C of current warming, nine of these are now thought to be beginning to tip. The Earth’s climate and ecological systems are deeply intertwined. A substantial change in one will affect others. Different tipping points are beginning to slowly crash into each other.

Arctic warming, along with melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, is driving fresh water into the North Atlantic, which could have contributed to a recent 15 percent slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in the Atlantic Ocean. Those ocean currents drive heat from the tropics and are responsible for the relative warmth of the Northern Hemisphere.

We shouldn’t be discounting the legacy we’re leaving to future generations, no matter how far they are in the future.”

It is unclear when most of the tipping points will kick in, and the risk of those cascading into an irreversible global tipping point with tremendous impacts on human civilisation warrants a declaration of a planetary climate emergency.

No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us now that we face an existential threat to civilization.

The risks posed by climate tipping points are not part of any economic analysis of climate policies, there there’s also a social tipping points, a broad societal awareness tipping point that will cause a stampede of migration.

Its hard to believe that we are just going to sit back and just watch.

It can be hard not to be despondent, so blinkered.

No wonder public opinion is not sending stronger signals to politicians that more urgent action is required.

How is it that we can have such strong emotional attachments when looking at nature, claim to love and appreciate it, yet be so indifferent to the destructive impact our way of living has on it?

We tend to be motivated by relatively short-term concerns. This may partly explain why we are so slow to accept what is happening. However if scientific knowledge about nature (which is what the natural sciences seek to produce) relies so heavily on producing facts which have been purified of their social, political, cultural and historical baggage, then when this baggage suddenly becomes visible, it causes anxiety and disbelief.

What if permafrost melting or flooding cuts off critical roads used by supply chains? What if storms knock out the world’s leading computer chip factory? What happens once half of the world is exposed to disease-carrying mosquitos?

The changes required are now so vast that many countries, companies, governments struggle to even articulate them.

Reaching a net-zero world will entail “wholesale transformation” in both infrastructure and how things are done. If business leaders truly grasped the seriousness of this crisis, they would immediately pivot their entire business models and resources toward scaling climate solutions full stop.

No matter what we do now, it’s too late to avoid climate change.

Perhaps most concerning of all is the fact that even if emissions of all greenhouse gases ceased entirely tomorrow, any warming would still persist for many centuries.

Countries will still remain umbilically connected to fossil fuels, subsidizing oil, coal and gas to the tune of around $11m every single minute. By the end of this year the world will have burned through 86% of the carbon “budget” that would allow us just a coin flip’s chance of staying below 1.5C.

Realistically what can be done ?

We know that every decision – every oil drilling lease, every acre of the Amazon rainforest torched for livestock pasture, every new gas or electrical -guzzling SUV that rolls onto the road – will decide how far we tumble down the hill.

To achieve anything requires a massive change in the Capitalist systems, away from GDP to Sustainability and Greed energy, benefiting not just the earth but all that live on it surface.

This will require the creation of a perpetual fund of trillions ( see previous posts) allowing every person to invest in a green future, closing the gap in inequality.

Such a fund could be distributed by non-repayable grants by the United nations under new UN blockchain plate form, with all country governments setting their own blockchain plate forms.

Each block is connected to the ones before and after it. Each additional block strengthens the verification of the previous block and hence the entire blockchain. This renders the blockchain tamper-evident, delivering the key strength of immutability. The result is newfound trust and transparency, because members share a single view of the truth, you can see all details of a transaction end to end.

Place a ban on all advertising that does not prompt sustainability.

Close all stock exchanges trading in Co2 as a product.

Cutting emissions tomorrow is better than the day after.

In the end the truth is that we live in a world of I am all right jack.

Not until our hair is burning and our tongues are hanging out, with our smartphone melted to our ears will we eventfully blame ourselves.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT SORT OF LIFE DO YOU WANT AND WHERE ARE WE GOING WITH AI?

19 Saturday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT SORT OF LIFE DO YOU WANT AND WHERE ARE WE GOING WITH AI?

Tags

Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism and Greed, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Ten minute read)

No matter what sort of life you might wish for it will be governed by technology, that you have little or no control over or of.

Is this true?

I want my life back. I want my soul back.

I don’t want my life to be fodder for Data harvesting.

I want digital blockchain ownership rights, so I can trade my investment into technology against profit seeking algorithms. 

I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, which is that technology is what we make it, and we need to stop abdicating our responsibility to steer technology toward good and away from bad.

I don’t think any technology has some deterministic endpoint. 

But there’s a catch.

Data is only as valuable as the insight you derive from it now or in the future. If we’re to avoid technological extremism we’re going to have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

We know that, at the very least, some technologies are harming our natural world, our societies and, ultimately, ourselves, turning everything into Data.

According to a prediction from Gartner, “By 2024, 30% of digital businesses will mandate DNA storage trials. This is a future that can only arrive when we learn to unlock the storage and computing capabilities of nature that have allowed life to thrive for billions of years.

Throughout human history, it has always taken significant resources to store data. Therefore, data has been stored only to the extent that it makes economic sense, if data cannot yield value, it is no longer an asset but rather a liability.

If all is turned it data stored in the cloud, the exponential growth of data will overwhelm existing storage technology. The average person makes 35,000 decisions per day.

————

So where are we?

By way of this vicious technological cycle, we are consciously causing the sixth mass extinction of species.

Technology destroys places.

Aside from the oceans, rivers, topsoil, forests, mountains and meadows, it helps us massacre and pollute with ever-improving precision and speed, its complex set of cogs quickly spreads us out all over the world, safe in the knowledge that we can stay in touch with loved ones via technologies that offer what is really only a toxic substitute for real connection and time together.

It is badly injuring, perhaps fatally, rural communities, luring their youth into industrial and financial centres – cities – whose existence is premised, as the American writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry said, on the devastation of some other far-flung place, which consumers don’t have to look at thanks to the out-of-sight, out-of-mind distance afforded by technology.

And now look at the state of us.

Capitalism’s survival now depends not just on recapturing all of this data but the CO2 it is a releasing.

Workers must work and produce value. Capital must exploit them, connected, by a peculiar sort of invisible cable, to the global network of quarries, factories, courtrooms, mines, financial institutions, bureaucracies, armies, transport networks and workers needed to produce such things. Reflective of a generic, transient and whimsical culture, spending more time watching porn than we do making love. Because we stare into screens instead of eyes, while social media are making us antisocial.

Technology destroys people.

We’re already cyborgs (pacemakers, hearing aids) of a sort, and are well on our way to the type of Big Brother dystopia of the techno-utopians. Our toxic, sedentary lifestyles are causing industrial-scale afflictions of cancer, mental illness, obesity, heart disease, auto-immune disorders and food intolerances, along with those slow killers, loneliness, clock-watching and meaninglessness.

If one rejects technology that means no laptop, no internet, no phone, no washing machine, no tapped water, no gas, no fridge, no television or electronic music; no anything requiring the copper-mining, oil-rigging, plastics-manufacturing essential to the production of a single toaster or solar photovoltaic system.

It destroys our relationship with the natural world. It first separates us from nature, while simultaneously converting life into the cash that oils consumerist society.

Without biodiversity, life on earth as we know it would cease to exist.

And it’s not just about rare or endangered species, it’s everything from genes and bacteria to entire ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, not technology. So think about it this way. Biodiversity is us — it’s like a big, interconnected web where each species has a role to play, and the only way to achieve this is that we all invest and benefits from investing in  world of green energy.

Awareness of the importance of biodiversity remains low, inclusion of biodiversity in development projects is rare. Time is running out for our planet, for its people, and the delicate ecosystems that hang in the balance.  This is not the life that anyone would chose.

——————–

Rejecting technologies that my generation considers to be the basic necessities of life, one might instead of making a living to pay bills, make a living of ones life, denouncing complex technology simply by renouncing it.

Our cultures need to make a Faustian pact, (a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, or data for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches ), on my behalf, with Speed, Numbers, Homogeneity, Efficiency and Schedules, are not listing when I say I want my soul back.person on a smartphone

Our brains have become wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we are connected. Social media taps into this tendency.  “

When you develop a population-scale technology that delivers social signals to the tune of trillions per day in real-time, the rise of social media isn’t unexpected. It’s like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.

About 3.5 billion people on the planet, out of 7.7 billion, are active social media participants. Globally, during a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion pieces of Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.

Social media has become a vehicle for disinformation and political attacks from beyond sovereign borders.

What can we do about it?

We’re at a crossroads. What we do next is essential, so I want to equip people, policymakers, and platforms to help us achieve the good outcomes and avoid the bad outcomes.

People obtain bigger hits of dopamine — the chemical in our brains highly bound up with motivation and reward — when their social media posts receive more likes.

Researchers found that on Twitter, from 2006 to 2017, false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones. Why? Most likely because false news has greater novelty value compared to the truth, and provokes stronger reactions — especially disgust and surprise.

Social media is an attention economy, and businesses want you engaged. How do they get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits, and … get you riled up. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know strong emotions get us engaged, so [that favours] anger and salacious content.

Simply counting clicks is not enough.

To understand how we got here and how we can get somewhere better.

We need to.

Interduces automated and user-generated labelling of false news, and limiting revenue-collection that is based on false content. However tagging some stories as false makes readers more willing to believe other stories and share them with friends, even if those additional, untagged stories also turn out to be false.

To allows people to find out what information companies have stored about them for data portability and interoperability, so consumers would own their identities and could freely switch from one network to another. We need to embrace this longer-term vision of a healthier communications ecosystem.

This can be achieved with Blockchain plate forms.

Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network, reducing risk and cutting costs for all involved.

A blockchain network can track orders, payments, accounts, production and much more. And because members share a single view of the truth, you can see all details of a transaction end to end, giving you greater confidence, as well as new efficiencies and opportunities

Each block is connected to the ones before and after it.

These blocks form a chain of data as an asset moves from place to place or ownership changes hands.
The blocks confirm the exact time and sequence of transactions, and the blocks link securely together to
prevent any block from being altered or a block being inserted between two existing blocks.
Each additional block strengthens the verification of the previous block and hence the entire blockchain.
This renders the blockchain tamper-evident, delivering the key strength of immutability. This removes the
possibility of tampering by a malicious actor — and builds a ledger of transactions you and other network
members can trust.
With blockchain, as a member of a members-only network, you can rest assured that you are receiving
accurate and timely data, and that your confidential blockchain records will be shared only with network
members to whom you have specifically granted access.
If things continue without change, Facebook and the other social media giants risk substantial civic
backlash and user burnout. Ask me to stay on social media to speak out about the technology issue,
make a comment.  All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.  Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

https://youtu.be/QJn28fFKUR0
https://youtu.be/Se91Pn3xxSs

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. THE FIRST OF OUR CURRENT CHALLENGES WITH CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO ADMIT THAT WE WILL NOT STOP IT.

10 Thursday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. THE FIRST OF OUR CURRENT CHALLENGES WITH CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO ADMIT THAT WE WILL NOT STOP IT.

Tags

Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Fourteen minute read)

Why is this so ?

We lack the collective will to address climate change because of the way our brains have evolved over the last two million years..

As individuals, we know what we can do about climate change. But addressing the issue also requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities. The larger the group, the more challenging it gets.

We know that climate change is happening, but cognitive biases that ensure our initial survival make it difficult to address, complex, long-term challenges that now threaten our existence, like climate change.

They impede our ability to take action, now hamstringing our ability to respond to what could be the largest crisis humanity has ever created or had to face. An older lady clasps her chest and shouts while fires rage in the background behind a large house in Greece

Prevention is no longer an option.

The natural systems that regulate climate on the planet are already changing, and ecosystems that support us are shifting under our feet, undermining many of the ecological foundations of our ability to provide for basic needs.

Clearly, one of the key challenges is going to be how the burden is distributed, and how we respond to the vulnerability of people to climatic shifts and adjustments – from drought and floods, to health issues ranging from disease to heatstroke, to food security, to environmental migrations.

And, of course, our actions now – given the delay between emissions and impact – will harm people in the future. So our responsibilities of justice now extend over vast stretches of geography and time.

We will be a climate-challenged society for the foreseeable future, immersed in a long age of adaptation.

But that information hasn’t been enough to change our behaviours on a scale great enough to stop climate change. And a big part of the reason is our own evolution.

The same behaviours that once helped us survive are, today, working against us. We imagine we live in a rational, enlightened society. In such a place, experts would identify issues to be addressed, and goals to be reached, in response to our creation of climate change. Scientific knowledge would be respected and accepted (after peer review, of course), and policy would be fashioned in response.

Ignoring climate change in the short term has benefits both to individuals and to organizations.

Climate change is a nonlinear problem.

When a function increases slowly at first and then accelerates, though, that causes problems, because people extrapolate that function linearly,  without obvious consequences until suddenly there is a significant problem.

Many effects of climate change are distant from most people.

People conceptualize things that are psychologically distant from them (in time, space, or social distance) more abstractly than things that are psychologically close. When there are weather disasters that are probably a reflection of climate change (like wildfires or extreme storms), they tend to happen far away from where most people live.

As a result, most people are not forced to grapple with the specifics of climate change, but rather can treat it as an abstract concept.

Abstract concepts simply don’t motivate people to act as forcefully as specific ones do.

Only when you and me and others experience this future threat in the present (rather than something that is still a generation away) will it have enough motivational force to get us to engage in actions that take more effort today.

Consider what you’d be willing to forgo today knowing that in one generation there will be serious, catastrophic consequences because of inaction.

Ultimately, we have to be willing to be explicit about the values we are acting on.

If we choose to enrich our lives in the present at the cost of the quality of life of future generations, that is a choice of values that we rarely like to make explicitly. We have to be willing to look in the mirror and say that we are willing to live our lives selfishly, without regard to the lives of our children and grandchildren.

And if we are not willing to own that selfish value, then we have to make a change in our behaviour today.

WHEN THE LAST INSECT DISSAPEARS SO DOES OUR FOOD CHAIN.

Why People Aren’t Motivated to Address Climate Change.

Even more challenging, however, is the reality that our emissions undermine the environments of vulnerable people elsewhere:

Unfortunately, climate change involves a combination of factors that make it hard for people to get motivated.

In the case of climate change, there are sceptics who argue that it is not certain that the influence of human activity on climate will have the dire consequences that some experts have projected.

People are much better with obvious threats like that nasty dog at the door than they are with threats that escalate quickly and nonlinearly.

Now we have entered a new era in the human relationship with climate change, with a variety of broad and different challenges.

So how might we begin to address the challenges of climate justice?

We may be dealing with an issue with a level of complexity that human beings are simply not capable of addressing. Climate change will certainly challenge our adaptive abilities more than anything else the species has faced.

It will demand multi-scale, widely-distributed, networked, flexible, anticipatory, and adaptive responses on the part of governments from the global down to the local.

Climate change will require a radical re-thinking of the very nature of governance, and the adoption of new forms

We are capable of changing our currently destructive relationship with the rest of nature.

Key here is the reality that, in bringing climate change upon ourselves, we have demonstrated that the very construction of how we immerse ourselves in the natural world, and how we provide for our basic needs, is simply not working.

In fact, our relationship with nature is undermining the lives we’ve constructed.

Our continued refusal to recognise ourselves as animals embedded in ecosystems has resulted in the undermining of those systems that sustain us.

That’s our key problem, our central challenge.

Many groups and movements are rethinking and restructuring the ways we interact with the natural world as we provide for our basic needs – around sustainable energy, local food security, and even crafting and making. These new materialist movements offer alternative ways of relating to the nonhuman systems that sustain us, and illustrate the possibility of redesigning and restructuring our everyday lives based in our immersion in natural systems. After 30 years of failing in our response to climate change, we may yet demonstrate that human beings still have the capacity to adapt.

The good news is that our biological evolution hasn’t just hindered us from addressing the challenge of climate change. It’s also equipped us with capacities to overcome them. How we communicate about climate change influences how we respond.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WILL CLIMATE CHANGE LEAD TO MORE WARS?

08 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2023 the year of disconnection., Arms Trade., Carbon Emissions., Climate Change., Climate refugees., CO2 emissions, Collective stupidity., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Life., Migrants/Refugees., Militarism., MISINFORMATION., Mr Putin., Natural World Disasters, Northern Ireland., PAIN AND SUFFERING IN LIFE, Palestinian- Israel., Reality., RUSSIA/ UKRAINE/ US/ NATO/ EU, State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The cost of war., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Ukraine/ Russia., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, War., Wars, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WILL CLIMATE CHANGE LEAD TO MORE WARS?

Tags

Capitalism vs. the Climate., The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Six minute read)

It’s one of the most important questions of the 21st century:

You always have a higher potential for violent conflict when the survival conditions of groups of people are threatened.  This is a very basic principle.

Will climate change provide the extra spark that pushes two otherwise peaceful nations into war?

The obvious answer is yes.

You can see this when you look at events that are already happening, like land conflicts due to desertification, or various resource conflicts around the world.

There are currently 27 ongoing conflicts worldwide. A quarter of the entire global population lives in conflict-affected areas. This year, it is estimated that at least 274 million people will need humanitarian assistance. But it’s important to remember that the causal links between climate and conflict are rarely direct.

However there has always been an empirical connection between violence and climate change which has persists across 12,000 years of human history.

We now  live on a planet expecting changes to temperature or rainfall in the coming decades—which will come faster and stronger than the many natural climate changes of the past.

This is the situation the world finds itself in today.

Conflict is on the rise. Millions are displaced. International law is disregarded with impunity, as criminal and terrorist networks profit from the division and violence.

The reasons for the outbreak of conflict range from territorial disputes and regional tensions, to corruption and dwindling resources due to climate change.

Take the Syrian war for example.

Nearly 11 years after it started, the Syrian refugee crisis remains the largest displacement crisis worldwide (13.2 million, including 6.6 million refugees and more than 6 million internally displaced people). At least 2 million people are living in tented camps with limited access to basic services.

Lasting more than 60 years, the conflict in Myanmar (previously called Burma) remains the longest ongoing civil war in the world.

The cost of war is almost unfathomable with conflicts driving 80% of humanitarian needs.

In 2016, the cost of conflict globally stood at an astonishing $14 trillion. That’s enough to end world hunger 42 times over.

For the seventh year in a row, global military spending is increasing, exceeding trillions’ for the first time.

Just imagine what the world could do with that money if conflicts were to end worldwide.

——-

If you’re looking for the causes of climate change, it’s us—the overconsuming, fossil-fuel-burning North and West.

If you want to get serious about climate change, worrying about the small-scale details of conflicts in Africa is missing the point.  It’s us.

Twentieth-century wars were fought over land, religion, and economics. But the wars of the 21st century will be fought over something quite different: climate change, and the shortages of water and food that will come from it with mass migration leading to social disruption and potentially violent conflict.

I think this will become more apparent over the next decade or so. You can see it already in Europe.

I suspect we’re going to see more nativism, more xenophobia, and more talk of building walls on our borders.

If you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

The thin veneer of civilization.

‘ Overwhelmed by the disaster, people could not see what was to become of them and started losing respect for laws of god and man alike,” Thucydides wrote.

Do we have the institutions, the structures, the systems of cooperation we need to deal with this problem?

I don’t think we have an existing structure of peacekeeping that can hold up under these conditions — or at least I’m not encouraged by what we’ve seen so far.

Can Western democratic society, which is built on a system of limitless growth and productivity, change its destructive relationship with nature?

No, modern liberal democratic societies are successful at improving the lives and freedoms of people who live in them but the problem is that their systems are based on the exploitation of nature and our environment, and we’re sort of trapped in this paradigm.

Climate change is a threat multiplier, which means it amplifies problems already facing the world.

Stressors such as poverty, political instability, and crime are magnified by increased droughts, floods, or heat waves. Of the 25 countries deemed most vulnerable to climate change, 14 are mired in conflict.

The climate crisis is altering the nature and severity of humanitarian crises.

As the world gets hotter, mayhem could spread.

Humanitarian organizations are already struggling to respond and will not be able to meet exponentially growing needs resulting from unmitigated climate change.

I think one of the things that clearly exacerbates matters is when the issues become politicized.

It’s going to take a combination of both personal action and systemic change to combat climate change. One is not a substitute for the other, and doing one without the other won’t solve the issues we face.

How civilized will we remain?

Climate change will be a small hole through which we glimpsed what always lies below the thin crust we lay across the seething magma of nature, including human nature.

Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat.

These are some of the ways that we’ve been told can slow climate change.

But the inordinate emphasis on individual behaviour is the result of a marketing campaign that has succeeded in placing the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.

With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defence of the fossil fuel status quo, the societal tipping point won’t happen without the active participation of citizens everywhere aiding in the collective push forward.

While humongous industries continue to shirk responsibility, lobbying against change and top-down regulation. Nothing decivilizes more quickly and surely than war.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

So watch the video, learn the facts, and form your own conclusions.

. https://youtu.be/RnWoFJmqCF8

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL A QUANTUM COMPUTER SOLVE THE WORLD PROBLEMS?

31 Monday Jul 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, Quantum computers., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The Future, THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , WHAT IS TRUTH

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL A QUANTUM COMPUTER SOLVE THE WORLD PROBLEMS?

Tags

Artificial Intelligence., Quantum computers., The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Five minute read)

We have very limited ability at this stage to imagine the applications of quantum computing, but down the road in the near term they could solve countless problems – and create a lot of new ones.

In order to prepare for what is coming.

Educate ourselves on the reality of Quantum Computers, and the impacts they could have around the world is now paramount if we wish to keep the values we place on life.

Soon will come a time when trusting a quantum computer will require a leap of faith.

Every year, new computers are being developed that are faster and smarter than ever before. But if you really want to take things to the next level, you’ve got to go quantum.

This new frontier of humanity could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science.

Quantum’s industrial uses are boundless.

In the future, we will rely on everywhere in the world having access to quantum technology, but with risks, to national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defences.

Modern warfare and national–security mechanisms are grounded in the speed and precision of decision making. If your computer is faster than theirs, you win.

The digital devices in our everyday lives – from laptop computers to smartphones – are all based on 0s and 1s: so-called ‘bits’. But quantum computers are based on ‘qubits’ – the quantum 0s and 1s that are altogether stranger, but also more powerful. (So-called quantum particles can be in two places at the same time and also strangely connected even though they are millions of miles apart.)

They will pave the way for systems that can solve complex real world problems that the best computers we have today are incapable of.Entanglement

Currently, computers solve problems in a simple linear way, one calculation at a time.

A quantum computers could do multiple calculations all at the same time, millions of miles apart, mirroring each other’s actions instantaneously, transporting information from one chip to another with a reliability of 99.999993% at record speeds.

——-

Now that we understand what AI is capable of we also need to know its limits.

Before long, much of the material on the internet will have been written, or at least co-written, by AIs.

What will happen when AIs are being trained on texts they have written themselves?

The amount of data consumed in this way keeps going up and up.

What happens when data runs out?

——-

Generative AI is in a Cambrian explosion of capability.

Generative Ai, is now creating art, make music, generate synthetic humans, birth artificial influencers and celebrities, literally generate video from text, and threaten to upend our notions of creativity, art, public domain, copyright, and the nature of reality itself.

This is just the beginning, the ultimate thing for AI to create is more of itself.

When maybe AI is also at the point where it can start writing the code that will make its own AI even better.  And that’s like where the true singularity is … when it can kind of set itself to improve itself, when it can start to improve itself better than what a human can.

It’s impossible to speculate what society could truly look like in such a situation.

But I think in most of our lifetimes we’re going to experience that. Exciting is one word for that.

Another is terrifying.  Machines that can outthink humans. Your brain is the most intelligent learning algorithm in the universe that we know so far. The truth is that for now, AGI remains a fantasy.

Even if AGI is never achieved, the self-teaching approach may still change what sorts of AI are created.

The rapid development of AI that can train itself also raises questions about how well we can control its growth. If AI starts to generate intelligence by itself, there’s no guarantee that it will be human-like.

Whether this will happen, and how it will progress if it does is impossible to know, but there’s no guarantee that humanity as we know it would survive such a time, or that the vast AI entities potentially created by such an explosion would be benevolent to life as we know it.

I think that really where AI can be empowering is in that long tail when there’s like non-consumption with the alternative, where you could not afford to create that content in the first place.

And you can imagine that with like these very obscure topics.

You could even imagine that for news where maybe there’s something that happened in your local neighbourhood where only 20 people want to read that article and then it doesn’t make sense for a human to write it.

Generating artificial intelligence is all ready producing images like a photographer, creating music like an artist, selling like a sales rep, diagnosing disease like a doctor, and (gulp!) writing text like a human.

The technology could potentially also be used to design drugs more quickly by accurately simulating their chemical reactions, a calculation too difficult for current supercomputers. They could also provide even more accurate systems to forecast weather and project the impact of climate change.

Rather than humans teaching machines to think like humans, machines might teach humans new ways of thinking.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE THE ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY NOW ACCEPT THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE BASIS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.

29 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Climate Change.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE THE ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY NOW ACCEPT THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE BASIS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.

Tags

Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

( Seven minute read)

Scientists have made climate change appear difficult but it’s not difficult to understand.

All living things respond to climate and changes in the climate, even if these changes are subtle and temporary. Our own experience of climate throughout our lifetimes, along with scientific records, also proves that climate change is happening. Weather is simply the set of atmospheric conditions at one location at one limited period of time. Climate, however, involves the average condition of the atmosphere over a long period of time (such as across a few decades or more) at a given location.

At timescales of thousands of years beyond human lifetimes, climate responds to the precession (slow rotation or “wobble”) of Earth’s axis, the planet’s tilt (obliquity), and the changes to the elliptical shape (eccentricity) of Earth’s orbit.

These phenomena interact with one another to determine the amount of sunlight (and thus solar heating) different parts of Earth’s surface receive during different seasons of the year.

Global and regional climates are changing too quickly for many forms of life to adapt and survive.

But this is not the whole story.

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

Earth’s climate is on a path to warm beyond the range of what has been experienced over the past millions of years.

The range of uncertainty for the warming along the current emissions path is wide enough to encompass massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems: as global temperatures rise, there is a real risk, however small, that one or more critical parts of the Earth’s climate system will experience abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes. Disturbingly, scientists do not know how much warming is required to trigger such changes to the climate system.

When people are confronted with a difficult problem, they tend to disengage. In addition to that, beginning in the mid-eighties, Big Oil began a concerted campaign to sow doubt in the public’s mind; is the climate really changing, or is this just more variations in the weather?

The current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Most of the warming occurred in the past 40 years, with the seven most recent years being the warmest. The years 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year on record.

This is why our planet is in trouble.

Why are our leaders, in government and industry, not telling us the truth about climate change?

The answer is simple:

Because they can’t. What is happening to the climate is bad news, and bad news does not get votes, or increase profits.

There is no need to inflate the magnitude of what is happening. It is time for us all to face the “cruel truth” that has been overlooked for too long.

The reality is confronting enough. If humans put too much carbon back in the atmosphere, there’s only one thing that can happen. The Earth will get hotter, maybe too hot.

It is not possible for modern man to combust fossil fuels, put the carbon back in the atmosphere, and still expect the current lifestyle to continue.

In order to counteract climate misinformation.

1200 'Scientists' Claim That Climate Change Is Not Real. Here's The Truth

The list of records broken is itself unprecedented.

200 million people in the world, more than three times the UK population, will live below the tideline by the end of this century if levels continue to rise.

In the Hollywood blockbuster ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ocean currents around the world stop as a result of global warming, triggering a new Ice Age on Earth. That may have been science fiction but scientists say the terrifying prophecy could soon become a reality.

The heat in the northern Atlantic Ocean has now pushed beyond what climate models predicted. The Atlantic Ocean current which drives the Gulf Stream could collapse at ‘any time’ from 2025 thanks to climate change.

A study published this week gives a further insight into what this might mean.

It suggests the climate system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could shut down faster than previously thought – by about 2050, or possibly as soon as this decade – if emissions are not cut soon. The risk of an earlier ocean circulation breakdown has increased, with potentially disastrous and rapid ramifications for temperatures, rainfall and sea level rise. Similarly, the amount of sea ice around Antarctica continues to be far below previous record lows.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation last collapsed 12,000 years ago.

The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, the impact would be devastating. Such a scenario is ’95 per cent certain.

This is not actually worse than we expected. It is the brutal reality of what scientists told us would happen.

Heat waves kill more people than fires, floods and cyclones. A study found extreme heat killed more than 61,000 in Europe alone last year.

Imagine the headlines if we knew about that in real time.

Human emissions are permanently adding the equivalent of an El Niño to the global system every five to 10 years.

The good news from scientists is that rapid action can still make a significant difference and limit future damage.

It would mean ruling a line under new fossil fuel developments where there are alternatives – that is, virtually all of them – and taking a war-footing approach that genuinely prioritised accelerating the transition that every major scientific body and government agrees is necessary.

It wouldn’t mean pretending the gas industry is a climate solution, or that nuclear energy is a serious climate solution. Nor is carbon capture and storage on track to be more than a niche technology, and paying for carbon offsets can’t justify fossil fuel use.

It would mean leaders acting as though they could persuade the public of what’s required, rather than living in fear of how they might respond.

Polls suggest a majority in many countries are open to action. Now’s our chance.

Alternatively, politicians could continue not delivering on the commitments made in Paris eight years ago and wait for another month as devastating as July 2023 before doing more. One thing we can say with confidence: It is likely to come around soon enough.

America’s Independence Day was celebrated on July 4th. That is the same day the Earth’s temperature was hotter than it has been at any time in history.Sea ice melts from white into turquoise pools off Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. Between 1979 and ...

I don’t think it’s going to be anything that we can do as man to influence that to any great degree.

But I will tell you, again, looking at the past 4,000 or 5,000 years of human history, there’s a strong correlation between the rise and fall of temperature and the rise and fall of civilizations. And it’s just opposite of what we’re being told.

Going forward, who are you going to believe?

One only has to look at both major parties in the UK, currently diluting their plans to combat the climate crisis.

It’s hard to believe (due to politicians chopping and changing of their views and actions) that a new oil field ( Rosebank) where operation emission alone (not counting any emissions from burning the oil and gas it is likely to produce) – are likely to reach 5.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide, driving a coach and horses through any climate commitments.

Are there really people at the top of either of the main parties calling for abandonment of green policies.

You can bet your nannie that there are.

It is not my role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change but the consequences will devastate economies, infrastructure and political stability. We face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

The verbal is over.

Its time to pour trillions/ trillions into providing non repayable grants before the lights go out.

( See previous posts. Placing 0.05% World Aid commission on all activities that are not sustainable )

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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