Tag Archives: Visions of the future.

The Beady Eye looks at “biology as technology”

11 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Big Data., Environment, Humanity., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future, Where's the Global Outrage.

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Artificial intelligence is all around us.

But what is the most powerful technology on Earth?

You may think of a B-2 bomber, or a nuclear reactor, or maybe even far-reaching social media platforms.

But there is only one technology known to man that can heal itself, adapt to its environment, sustain itself for decades, replicate, and evolve:

The living organism.

Biological systems have the ability to do things that no human-made machine or chemistry can begin to approach: the ability to replicate, to learn, to scale from one to billions, to adapt, and to evolve.

By gaining control over biological systems and their biochemical pathways — and designing new pathways by rewriting the DNA “software” in cells — synthetic biologists are ushering in the “Biological Age.”

Creating substances with not only superior electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, but with properties that we have never seen before in man-made materials: materials that can regenerate, that respond to the environment, that learn and evolve.

We’re “on the cusp of revolutionary change” coming much “sooner than you think.”

Sugar-fueled biological actuators for hybrid robotics are on the horizon, all grown in “living foundries.

You might think that this is science fiction but it is becoming tangible due to the rapid, simultaneous development of genome-scale engineering tools, enormous data sets of genome sequences, new imaging and analytical capabilities, and the convergence of advances in information science and engineering with biology..

While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict future consumer applications.

If we could harness the power of biology in a predictable manner, then we could create living materials that perform functions seamlessly, cheaply, and with very low energy requirements, like walking, talking, dancing, killing, Robots.

A goal along these lines, of course, raises a lot of questions:

Better for whom? Better in what way? For biological humans? For all conscious beings? If that is the case, who or what is conscious?

Evolutionary biological changes move every which way with no apparent direction.

Yet, we continue nonetheless to see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution’s supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking we are now on the verge of  creating  a “post human” stage of civilization.

This stage may be only a few decades away.

Unfortunately if all the AI systems decided to go on strike tomorrow, our civilization would be crippled: Primitive human societies might then remain on Earth indefinitely but not to worry we’ll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years.

Ray Kurzweil - director of engineering at Google - claims that by 2045 humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity

The simple act of connecting with someone via a text message, e-mail, or cell-phone call uses intelligent algorithms to route the information. (The number of people using Twitter and Facebook daily is around 1,138,000,000)

So a digital brain will need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human.

I could at this stage give your brain a more ambitious goal, such as contributing to a better world which is badly needed considering that we are well on the way to extinction. However there is no justification for thinking that our own species will be especially privileged or protected from future technological disasters.

We tend to view the existence of our race as constituting a great ethical value when in fact our existence in a biology sense it is not worth the steam off our piss.

Why?

Because in the future almost every product we touch will be originally designed in a collaboration between human and artificial intelligence and then built-in automated factories.

Because we will continue to pollute our planet and the sky’s above to appease the Stock Exchange.  

Because there will be many ways in which humanity could become extinct before reaching post humanity by wiping out what we should be rely on.

Perhaps the most natural interpretation of disaster is that we are likely to go extinct as a result of the development of some powerful but dangerous technology to combat climate change. We would do well to remember Robert Oppenheimer words when he first viewed an atomic explosion ” Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”

Extinction might be the best option.

It is not clear that creating a new human race is immoral.

As non biological brains become as capable as biological ones of effecting changes in the world—indeed, ultimately far more capable than unenhanced biological ones—we will need to consider their moral education.

The question is can they have any morals and if so what left of us will have to dumb itself down considerably. For any post human stage system that displayed the knowledge of Watson, (Watson is technology that works to understand us) for instance, would be quickly unmasked as non biological.

So what does the Future of Tech Robots.

The power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing. Technological singularity is the development of  ‘super intelligence’ brought about through the use of technology.

Itself imply that we are likely to go extinct soon, and we are unlikely to reach a post human stage.

What would be left of humanity would be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious.

HOWEVER ALL IS NOT LOST

This possibility of a post human stage  is compatible with us remaining at, or somewhat above, our current level of technological development for a long time before going extinct.

We are still lacking a “theory of everything”, but we cannot rule out the possibility that novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be utilized to transcend those constraints.

If we could create quantum computers, or learn to build computers out of nuclear matter or plasma, we could push closer to the theoretical limits. At our current stage of technological development, we have neither sufficiently powerful hardware nor the requisite software to create conscious minds in computers.

Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously in feasible, unless radically new physics is discovered.

As we gain more experience with virtual reality, we will get a better grasp of the computational requirements for making new worlds appear realistic to their visitors.

These shortcomings will eventually be overcome.

At the moment the amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can be roughly estimated. Memory seems to be a no more stringent constraint than processing power.

Our current understanding impose theoretical limits on the information processing attainable in a given lump of matter. We can with much greater confidence establish lower bounds on post human computation, by assuming only mechanisms that are already understood.

One candidate is molecular nanotechnology, which in its mature stage would enable the construction of self-replicating nanobots capable of feeding on dirt and organic matter – a kind of mechanical bacteria. Such nanobots, designed for malicious ends, could cause the extinction of all life on our planet.

So we are able to gain an insight into how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics).

In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between both.

As you cannot create energy or destroy it and energy can only move from a state of higher activity to one lower activity it stands to reason that biological evolution, simple put, is descent with modification.

To acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most of us believe in nationalism, capitalism, and human rights. There is no proof that history is working for the benefit of humans.

Now you might think that all of this is hog wash, but every point in history is a crossroads and sometimes history- or the people who make history – takes unexpected turns.

How we using and develop Technology will determine the forming any new Monotheism Global Society.

Are we heading towards ecological disaster or technological paradise?  Both do not seem bound by any deterministic laws.

You may rest assured that when Cognitive computers and Quantum computers get together with Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality along with the Arms race, biochemical pathways will not enhance human well-being.

Because human brains suffer from minimal development.

Instead of concentrating on developing technologies beneficial to mankind we are developing  autonomous weapons with no accountability to select, to kill, or destroy ( which means no deterrence of future crimes, no retribution for victims, no social condemnation, no meaningful human control)

Individual humans like me are far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to my own advantage. It for some mysterious reason like all of us follows one path then another like a gene that has no awareness, or consciously seek to survive.

The next effort of science will be to create a new body for the human being. It will have a perfect brain-machine interface to allow control and a human brain life support system so the brain can survive outside the body.

A computer environment into which human minds can be uploaded.

These are daunting challenges, to say the least.

Each will require the commitment and individual efforts of literally billions of our fellow humans, as well as many careful, specific programs put into effect by entire populations. But there is one action that we must take, individually and as a world, if any of the others are to be successful. It directly contradicts some of our deepest evolutionary programming, but if we are to survive as a species, we must stabilize or even reduce population size.

God forbid. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.

However it is conceivable to imagine history going on for generations upon generations while bypassing the Scientific Revolution as modern culture and science have to rely on religious and ideological beliefs to justify and finance its existence and scientific research.

So the below fellows might be the very thing to complete the Job. Rid the world of the very thing that is destroying it. 

One last thought try not to join the shadow people by pressing the like button.  Leave a comment. When you comment, you inspire, when you press the like button you expire.

Here a few links that might open your eyes.

https://youtu.be/XNbaR54Gpj4            https://youtu.be/PVXQUItNEDQ

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT WHAT WRONG WITH THE WORLD.

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Humanity., Sustaniability, Technology, The Future

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OK, a list of what is wrong will go from here to eternity, so before you read this post take a look at the two U tube videos below, and then do something.

If you Goggle the question you will quickly find that there’s no shortage of people who know what is wrong with the world.

The most frequently cited reason is probably the decline of religion, specifically the religion of the person writing it.

Second to “the fall of religion” the most popular answer is probably “religion.” But there are other themes too: lack of respect for elders, unregulated capitalism, greed, alcohol, the economy, the rich, attachment, premarital sex, liberals, the unemployed, pride, lawyers, apathy, Starbucks, Mc Donalds.

Googling the question myself, they all sounded more like symptoms to me.

If certain behaviors are widespread and problematic, whatever causes them must be a bigger, more fundamental problem. Right? Maybe not.

Most people cannot even intelligently discuss the pressing issues of our day.

For me it is that we are too ignorant to open our minds to the problems around us. To selfish to open our hearts to what else is out in the world. To indoctrinated to accept an opinion other than our own, deaf to other people’s voices, blind to the pain and suffering we see in the streets and scared to do anything about it.

Our planet is now slowly dying and we are the reason to blame for its slow demise.

We fill her oceans with black poison. We fill her skies with acid. We cut down all the trees she spent years to grow. We cover her soil with blood and we use her as our own personal dump.

Worst of all we just sit back and watch as it falls apart.

Why?

Because as the twenty-first century unfolds, immensely powerful currents of capitalism, labour, and information turn and shape the world with a growing disregard for the boards and opinions of states.

So the world we see in front of our eyes is not governed by any particular state, organisation or ethic group, but by greed and profit. All run by the stock exchanges and algorithms

What is left is mindless adoption of technology as the end-all-be-all solution to humanity’s problems rather than global cooperation to the appearance of essentially global problems.

I think most people would not say there isn’t something wrong.

But if we’re going to regard the world as if there’s something wrong with it, shouldn’t we be able to identify it, at least with ballpark-level precision?

Here the Beady eye list of what is wrong.  Feel free to add.

Climate Change: Overpopulation: Thirst:  Poverty:  Inequality of opportunity:  Equal rights:  A lack of Education:  Terrorists:  Atomic arsenals:  Corruption:  Distribution of Wealth:  Religious Extremists: Political Extremists of Far Left & Far Right: Lying Politicians:Racists:  Class structure: Reality TV:  Farmer Subsidies:  Sexists:  Bestiality:  High Cost of Space Programmes:  Hopeless addiction to entertainment, technology, and celebrity gossip:  Soulless of suburbs, sprawls, and office parks create stress, malaise, and depression:  The existence of Hollywood, which poisons the world’s culture by normalizing narcissism, consumerism, and bad movies:  Pervasive politically correct environment where dissenting thought is labeled sexist, racist, or homophobic:  Treatment of smartphones as both friend and passionate lover, which replaces time spent in face-to-face interactions with real friends and lovers:  Universities that serve as liberal brainwashing factories instead of palaces of wisdom, enlightenment, and masculinity:  Disposable culture where still-functional items are thrown away instead of being repaired or reconditioned:  Competitive conversation culture where people talk about themselves instead of listening. Contemplative silences are looked upon as boring or even creepy:  Rule by an oligarchy that spies on citizens who don’t even care about its government’s illegal acts because they are too busy playing Candy Crush: Homosexuality openly embraced and displayed in public around children who don’t yet understand the nature of human sex:  Complete ignorance of world affairs by citizens due to being comically manipulated by media propaganda. Russia bad! Saudi Arabia good!:  People who can no longer handle original thoughts without being offended or“triggered.”: Militarization of police whose monopoly on violence allows them to taze and kill with impunity:  Welfare state that redistributes money from hard-working provider men to a growing population of single mothers who are subservient to the state instead of husbands:  Calling corporate customer service and having to converse with robots:  People who favor tweets for no apparent reason:

Out of date World Organisation are in need of radical reform.

  • For some reason THE US GOVERNMENT still thinks they should have to take care of the whole planet. The U.S. national debt is over 14 times larger than it was back in 1981:
  • OPEC nations are going to bring in over a trillion dollars from exporting oil this year:

So where do we stand in regard to Solutions.?

I would really love to hear your answer to that question, in the comment section below. Whatever comes to mind. The question does presume that there is actually something wrong with the human world. If you think there isn’t, please say so too.

Fans of singer Justin Bieber scream as he performs on NBC's Today Show in New York

I know it’s a pretty broad question, and any answer is welcome. There’s no need to do up an essay or anything, but you’re welcome to. I know Raptitude readers are a thoughtful bunch and I just want to know what kinds of ideas you people have in your minds about what’s wrong with this world.

Here are few Solutions:

Make education FREE not a product.

Place a World Aid commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency Trading, on all Sovereign wealth Funds Acquisitions, on all Foreign Exchange transactions over 20,000 dollars, creating a perpetual World aid fund. ( See previous posts) This would close down all need for Charity.

The poverty trap,” “the ladder of development”—go limp under the magnifying glass of actually being tested.

Leaders who lack wisdom approach problems with linear vision – thus only seeing the problem that lies directly in front of them and blocking the possibilities that lie within the problem. As such, they never see the totality of what the problem represents; Problem solving is the greatest enabler for growth and opportunity.

Out of this fund make available non repayable solar-panel grants. The direction to go is obvious: toward energy independence. THIS IS WHAT THE PARIS CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT IN PARIS SHOULD BE LOOKING AT. (https://youtu.be/qlTA3rnpgzU  Probably, a key factor, if not the key factor, in solving our environmental problem is time.

2.5bn people still lack basic sanitation and diarrhoea is the second largest killer of children. 1.1 billion people, or 15 percent of the world’s population, practice open defecation.

Parts of the world could see a supply-demand gap of up to 65% IN WATER RESOURCE BY 2030. Currently, more than one billion people don’t have access to clean water. And with 70 percent of the world’s freshwater used for agriculture, water’s critical role in food production must be considered as climate and resource conditions change.

Reform the United Nations giving equal rights to all Nations.

Legalism of Soft Drugs would reduce the prison population.

Re Introduce National Service to deliver dignity not war.

People think about their own perceived world and part of the challenge is to get people out of that world.

The question now for all of us in the 21st century is will we realize that this is indeed an urgent problem and take bold enough action in sufficient time? The answer to this question is yet to be given.

Here lies the land of technology opportunity, a place where the upside of technology benefits is enormous and world changing.” We’re just the technologists. And actually I think those questions are for society as a whole.” Wrong.

What would happen if we applied our knowledge and skills in these pockets with the resources, creativity and speed of giants like Google and Apple? Let’s give it a try. Let’s encourage our biggest companies to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems. Let’s apply technology tools like hackathons and lab days and rapid prototyping toward solving social and environmental issues. Let’s do some good.”Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the world"

 

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I want the UN Scraped. Replaced

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by in Politics., Uncategorized

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I have written on this subject before but of course you are all to preoccupied to comment.

With the major powers refusing to give up their prerogatives and hogging most of the world’s resources, a new organisation of the global community must be invented soon.

The main challenge would be to define and defend mankind’s common resources.

The spread of conventional and nuclear weapons, and terrorism and genocide through such rudimentary means as the machete, are violence that goes beyond state borders.

We need to examine the reasons for this violence. Hunger, indecent development gaps, inequality in the face of natural disasters (particularly climatic ones), the major powers’ encouragement of arms sales and other trafficking, ideologies that breed racism and discrimination (neo-Nazi factions in European and Russian countries, “Ivoirité” in the Ivory Coast, discriminatory Zionism against Arabs in Israel, with implications for the failure of the peace process, radical Islam).

Human beings will always be confronted by their own violence.

Globalisation is leaving many more poor by the wayside, provoking new forms of violence and widespread terrorism. The UN has done nothing about the protection and equitable sharing of such vital resources as water, energy, knowledge and medication.

It’s a worthless gossip shop given that international law, which remains the framework for any reform, leaves sovereign states totally free in their commitments.

The complexity of a global society is totally ignored.

If we want to imagine another worldwide institutional system, we must examine the world we live in and ask ourselves what our goals should be.

Peacekeeping has become a belated, often useless, stopgap.

The UN manages inter-state relations, albeit feebly. The intense relations established directly between populations outside state control are developing into a power struggle to the detriment of the human rights they pretend to observe – ISIS. The peace dividend promised at the end of the cold war was an illusion.

Arms sales are soaring  because the major powers chose to militarise their economies. While the UN is still dominated by the victors of the second world war. It has not lived up to its mandate and will not be now or in the future be able to do so.

Its composition bears no relation to the declared intention of equality between members. The status of the permanent members and their veto remains intact as unjustified positions of power. This permanence of power remains unchallenged even though it is ephemeral by nature and the legitimacy of the five second world war victors has been eroded years ago.

President George Bush’s unilateral decision to invade Iraq removed a dictatorship only to plunge that country into chaos and violence, further confirming the helplessness of the UN.

Not mention current wars between states, civil violence, poverty, infectious diseases, environmental degradation, terrorism, organised crime, nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons.

There is no hope of the UN reforming itself any amendment must receive two-thirds of the vote in the General Assembly. To be enforced, it must then be ratified by two-thirds of the member states, including the five permanent members, and we all know what they will do.

Any proposal to democratise the council is a sham.

The history of democracy has been a constant struggle against the usurpation of power by the richest and strongest.

Where does this leave us?

The universal spread of extreme free-market values is calling for a universal political community, not to replace national communities but to complement them and cater for the complexity of a society that combines inter-state and inter-individual relations.

Technology is driving the world apart not together. Them and US.

The geopolitical shifts in Asia and in Asia’s relations with the rest of the world could lead to a redistribution of power and patterns of participation, with or without formal, structural reform.

The UN is already unable to adapt to global dynamics. Peacekeeping missions have developed exponentially, often leading to fiascos.

Is there is no one in power that can see that we need to look impartially at international trends that are challenge the world?

The need for democracy (by the elimination of all prerogatives that benefit only a few states), for law ( A world Court of Human Rights.The establishment of an international court of human rights, which would enforce the rights laid down in international treaties and hear individual appeals in special circumstances.) and justice (by the mandatory nature of international law).

These cannot be ignored for much longer. The world needs a new Organisation, not called Google.

Of course any New Organisation will need financing.

This can only be achieved by Independent funding. Any other form of funding is useless. Globalization and technology stop at no borders and capitalism continues to privatize the planet our collective destiny.

( See previous posts: A 0.05% aid commission on all High Frequency trading, on all Foreign Exchange transaction over $20,000, on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisition. This will create a perpetual fund of billions)

I for one am fed up of seeing people dying while our world leaders have another conference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Our greatest motivations in life come from NOT knowing the future.”

14 Saturday Mar 2015

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“If you think we’re electronically dependent now, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Wireless communications will dominate everything, everywhere.

“Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history.”

From the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport, even transforming what it means to be human.

In my last three post I addressed the subject of Society changes due to Technologies : The Internet, Big Data, and Smart Phones.  So it would seem remiss of me not to inform the sixteen years old of today what is in store for them when they are, lets say 65.

It’s hard to focus on the future when the present is changing so rapidly before our very eyes let alone what will happen in 50 years’ time.

I could predict that this and that is going to happen.

From the capturing and digitizing the entire information content of your brains to chips that will eventually may have the ability not just to store information, but to learn and remember, just as real brain cells do to create complete copies of our brains’ content.

I could draw up a list of WHAT IF’s:

Like: Like what if you could finding a method of copying and uploading human consciousness into a machine, or even a holographic virtual body — basically, a software replica of a person. Or what if Traditional pharmaceuticals is replaced by hyper-individualized medicines that are manufactured at the time they are ordered, or that most people will have stopped taking pills in favor of a new device that causes the body to manufacture it’s own cures.

I am sure they are (without looking) many sites that are doing exactly this; covering Science, Nature, Transport, Medical, and every other aspect of Life.

Happiness is a direction, not a place or perhaps it is dark matter yet to be discovered.

One way or the other it’s pretty clear that the future remains radically uncertain, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Living a public life is the new default.

It is not possible to live modern life without revealing personal information to governments and corporations. Few individuals will have the energy, interest, or resources to protect themselves from ‘data surveillance’; privacy will become a luxury.

It is also clear that there will be a need for a trusted infrastructure to be created in order to prevent massive fraud and massive public distrust in online transactions, and in online life, in general.

We will have to reinvent the entire Internet as we know it, shifting power from a few American tech companies to the individual who creates, and therefore owns, the data.

It is also clear that greed makes monsters of men and unless we put a harness on greed and make it serve the needs of humanity the next 50 and beyond will not be worth living.

We will need to create a personal dashboard, a safe haven, for every individual’s dossiers, transactions, money, and profiles.  In this dashboard, you could set your privacy and communications settings.

All of this will create a big struggle about the question: Who owns (my) data?

My statement:

There is no way the world’s varied cultures, with their different views about privacy, will be able to come to an agreement on how to address civil liberties issues on the global Internet.

In 2065, we will have a post-Facebook and post-Google world.

We will have new business models in which facilitating data is more lucrative than owning data. As I have said if we do not make this transition, we face a privacy and fraud nightmare in which our lives are dominated by a few global tech companies.

We will have new generations of psychoactive drugs and eventually emerge, cognitive technology is likely to really, really rock our world.

We will run out of resources. We will have Climate change. We will have wars, and massive inequality, we will get humans to the nearest stars, we will be using English if not in the same form.

We will be wearing smart cloths connected to the internet (and even have linked stuff inside their bodies), we will be walking into internet-connected rooms and down networked streets, driving in the connected cars and public transit, get food and other goods from smart refrigerators/toasters/ovens, move through spaces bristling with connected sensors, and monitor remote places via apps and cameras.

Hal Varian on the future of privacy

The backlash against this most egregious privacy invasions will bring a new equilibrium between consumers, governments, and businesses—and more-savvy citizens will get better at hiding things they do not want others to see.

However predicting how it will all shake out is just fantasy.

Governments trying to protect themselves and their cultures might split the global internet into divided mess of networks.

The situation will worsen as the Internet of Things arises and people’s homes, workplaces, and the objects around them will ‘tattle’ on them.

The incentives for businesses to monetize people’s data and governments to monitor behavior will become extremely potent.

On the other hand citizens and consumers will have more control thanks to new tools that give them the power to negotiate with corporations and work around governments. Individuals will be able to choose to share personal information in a tiered approach that offers varied levels of protection and access by others.

The constellation of economic and security complexities will get bigger and harder to manage, belittling micro religions and what it means to be ‘educated’ will be replaced by other capacities.

People will get used to this, adjust their norms, and accept more sharing and collection of data as a part of life—especially Millennials and the young people who follow them some will complain but most will not object or muster the energy to push back against this new reality in their lives.

Society’s definitions of ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’ will have changed so much by 2025 that today’s meanings will no longer apply.

We will certainly leave nothing behind that survives long in the digital age other than a future of “unevenly distributed” one with more social fissures might arise, presenting hurdles to people who do not have the resources to afford the gadgetry or the skills and tech-literacy to navigate the more complicated environment of 2025 never mind 2065.

Over 50% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will have disappeared.

The terms of citizenship and social life will rapidly change.

70% of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation, with most coming back in different forms in different industries, with over 50% structured as freelance projects rather than full-time jobs.

50% of traditional colleges will have collapsed, and India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world.

Advocacy groups, service providers, large e-commerce companies, Google/Amazon/Facebook/Twitter, secret services, security officers in companies and consultancies, and individual Internet users… will  also be very much involved with ongoing tension between these groups,

We’ll play games to solve problems.

There will be an extensive rise of anti-capitalism.

The Future will be an eerie spot.

Predicting the Future is much like predicting the weather, the farther we move into the future, the less accurate our predictions become. So why do we make them?

So we don’t wake up one morning and get a shock.

Feel free to giving serious consideration to each of them and deriving your own conclusions for good or bad.

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Where has the Present gone?

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Technology

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We are the first humans to live in the future.

In my last post ” You are not a Gadget. Yet ” I attempted to outline how society is being reinvented by the internet, our connected devices – the internet of things.

You might not agree that they are having an effect. If not, you need to wake up.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself it is the storage of Data that will shape the future. 

Big Data is used almost anywhere these days; A vast subject- from news articles to professional magazines, from tweets to YouTube videos and blog discussions, impacting across virtually all academic disciplines.

Every minute of your existence is being stored and this vast storage is the most relevant subject of our times. DATA NOW STREAM from our daily life:

Today, machines seem to get better every day at digesting vast gulps of information from phones and credit cards and televisions and computers; from the infrastructure of cities; from sensor-equipped buildings, trains, buses, planes, bridges, and factories, you name it —

And they remain as emotionally inert as ever.       But for how long.

It is estimated that if all the data used in the world today were written to CD-ROMs and the CD-ROMs piled up in a single stack, the stack would stretch all the way from the Earth to the Moon and a quarter of the way back again.

The data flow so fast that the total accumulation of the past two years—a zettabyte—dwarfs the prior record of human civilization.

A report by the International Data Corporation in 2010 estimated that by the year 2020 there will be 35 Zettabytes (ZB) of digital data created per year.

All of what we do today leaves a digital trail:

Every bit of that information is being stored—but by whom? for what?

The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total.

Kilobyte     1,000 bytes

Megabyte  1,000,000 bytes

Gigabyte  1,000,000,000 bytes

Terabyte  1,000,000,000,000 bytes

Petabyte   1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Exabyte    1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Zettabyte   1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Yottabyte    1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Just in case you have no concept of a byte.  A byte is a sequence of 8 bits (enough to represent one alphanumeric character) processed as a single unit of information. A single letter or character would use one byte of memory (8 bits), two characters would use two bytes (16 bits).

So you would want to be certified to think that Society as we know it is not a changing. 

The question is:  What is all of this information going to produce.

There is already an algorithm to detect when women were pregnant by tracking purchases of items such as unscented lotions—and offered special discounts and coupons to those valuable patrons. To plunder the Stock Exchange/Foreign Exchange. (See previous Posts)

Credit-card companies have found unusual associations in the course of mining data to evaluate the risk of default: people who buy anti-scuff pads for their furniture, for example, are highly likely to make their payments.

They are trained computers to identify deep patterns in vocal pitch, rhythm, and intensity; their software can scan a conversation between a woman and a child and determine if the woman is a mother, whether she is looking the child in the eye, whether she is angry or frustrated or joyful.

Other machines can measure sentiment by assessing the arrangement of our words, or by reading our gestures. Still others can do so from facial expressions.

Before you think about anything it has already being done. Good bye to the Present.

Big data is not just about helping an organization be more successful – to market more effectively or improve business operations. It reaches to far more socially significant issues as well. It is transforming science, engineering, medicine, healthcare, finance, business, and ultimately society itself.

The first full human genome sequence took five to 15 years to complete, and cost $1 billion to $3 billion. Now a genome sequence takes a little more than 24 hours and costs about $1,000.

NASA receives over 4 TB of new Earth Science data each day.

It Uses THE SHADOW Internet THAT’S 100 TIMES FASTER THAN GOOGLE FIBER.

Like me you problem never hear of it and will never get to use it.

Google's data centre in Douglas Country, Georgia: The amount of data held by the internet giant means there may soon need to be a new number created to measure the quantity

So what am I exactly trying to say here.

I suppose the best starting point is the Human Brain.

Your brain is home to around 100 billion neurons, all of which are perpetually establishing and breaking connections, known as synapses, with other neurons.

There are trillions of these connections throughout your brain helping orchestrate everything from movement, to learning, to establishing and recalling memories. Just to give you some perspective on the storage capacity of your brain: It has a storage capacity of some estimates come in as low as 1 terabyte, or approximately 1,000 gigabytes.

You can easily buy a 1 gigabyte USB drive for under £15. A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, so that means you’ve got three brains right there.

For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

Now consider this:

A sweet little external hard drive can give you an entire terabyte of memory for about £70. That’s 1000 gigabytes, and roughly 3333 human brains. So for £70 bucks, you could store 3333 people’s brains in your backpack.  Nice!

If you want to back up your brain and upload it to a cylon body, IBM’s “neurosynaptic” chips are the closest thing to a synthetic brain yet.

Also, consider this:

A typical 3-minute song takes up about 5 megabytes of space. So that means your brain, can hold about 60 songs.

A computer chip that emulates the human brain - and might one day replace it

Now don’t get me wrong I acknowledge that every major scientific revolution has been driven by one thing, and that is data.

Data is pouring in from every conceivable direction: from operational and transactional systems, from scanning and facilities management systems, from inbound and outbound customer contact points, from mobile media and the Web.

Organizations are inundated with data – terabytes and petabytes of it. According to IDC, “In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes), growing by a factor of nine in just five years.

That’s nearly as many bits of information in the digital universe as stars in the physical universe.

I have nothing against the collection of Data nor with sharing the data, which ultimately could improve the lives of the millions of people who are generating it—and the societies in which they are living – to provide a beneficial impact on society as a whole.

The potential for doing good is perhaps nowhere greater than in public health and medicine, fields in which, “People are literally dying every day” simply because data are not being shared.

There are over 200 satellites in orbit continuously collecting data about the atmosphere and the land, ocean and ice surfaces of planet Earth which might save us from Climate Change.

Some of this data is held in transactional data stores – the byproduct of fast-growing online activity. Machine-to-machine interactions, such as metering, call detail records, environmental sensing and RFID systems, generate their own tidal waves of data.  All these forms of data are expanding, and that is coupled with fast-growing streams of unstructured and semi structured data from social media.“

The challenges facing big data today and going forward including, but not limited to: data capture and storage; search, sharing, and analytics; big data technologies; data visualization; architectures for massively parallel processing; data mining tools and techniques; machine learning algorithms for big data; cloud computing platforms; distributed file systems and databases; and scalable storage systems.

In bio medicine the Human Genome Project is determining the sequences of the three billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA.

Big Data is further expected to add more than €250 billion a year to the European public sector administration. Thus, the whole European Union could benefit from the cumulative financial and social impact of Big Data.

One clear example of Big Data is the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) (www.skatelescope.org) planned to be constructed in South Africa and Australia. When the SKA is completed in 2024 it will produce in excess of one exabyte of raw data per day (1 exabyte = 1018 bytes), which is more than the entire daily internet traffic at present.

Another example of Big Data is the Large Hadron Collider, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which has 150 million sensors and is creating 22 petabytes of data in 2012 (1 Petabyte = 1015 bytes).

Smart cities, data gathered by sensors integrated with transport data, financial transactions, location of users, social network interaction will provide an entirely new dimension to thinking about how cities function.

These three examples are only scratching the surface.

Google almost certainly has more data storage capacity than any other organization on Earth. Their biggest data centers cost half a billion to a billion dollars, so they can’t have more than 20 or so of those. These are the storage centers we know about.

  1. Berkeley County, South Carolina
  2. Council Bluffs, Iowa
  3. Atlanta, Georgia
  4. Mayes County, Oklahoma
  5. Lenoir, North Carolina
  6. The Dalles, Oregon
  7. Hong Kong
  8. Singapore
  9. Taiwan
  10. Hamina, Finland
  11. St Ghislain, Belgium
  12. Dublin, Ireland
  13. Quilicura, Chilie
  14. Eemshaven, Netherlands
  15. Groningen, Netherlands
  16. Budapest, Hungary
  17. Wrocław, Poland
  18. Reston, Virginia
  19. Additional sites near Atlanta, Georgia

In 2010, they were operating around a million servers, with close to 10 exabytes of active storage attached to running clusters. Google has a hard drive die every few minutes.

Let’s assume Google has a storage capacity of 15 exabytes, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

  • Amazon (They’re huge, but probably not as big as Google.)
  • Facebook (They’re on the right scale and growing fast, but still playing catch-up.)
  • Microsoft (They have a million servers, although no one seems sure why.)

However, it’s nothing compared to the ridiculous claims by some news reports about the NSA datacenter in Utah. This facility could hold “between an exabyte and a yottabyte” of data.Microsoft data center

Apple tends to make between three and five times as much revenue as Google does. Whether it is Apple or Google at the top of the heap, you cannot deny that they are both building platforms and business models that will shape the next decade in the tech industry.

Computing is definitely moving to the cloud, and Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all in it to win it by manipulate us all.

Because the shifts in both the amount and potential of today’s data are so epic, businesses require more than simple, incremental advances in the way they manage information.

Public Sector Information (PSI) is the single largest source of information in Europe. Its estimated market value is €32 billion.

The value of Big Data to the UK economy alone, being £216 billion and 58,000
jobs in the next 5 years.

Data traffic is expected to grow to 10.8 Exabyte per month by 2016.

Could we have foreseen the mortgage meltdown, the financial institution crisis and the recession, if only we had gotten our arms around more data and done more to correlate it?

Could we trim millions of dollars in fraud from government programs and financial markets?

But big data wants more.

Not satisfied with seeing everything about everybody it wants to store your spoken words which for thousands and thousands of year were private and should remain private.

For us to allow or turn a blind eye to this kind of monitoring and storage would be the first steps to towards slavery.  

Such a move by Governments under the cloud of spotting terrorists plots is a form of terrorism on free speech.  All Smart Phone should be be encrypt to ensure the freedom of mankind.

So I will leave you with this.

Modern science demands the use and understanding of numerical methods.

Data is like an object approaching a fixed point. It is travelling at a constant speed, such that, after one second, the distance is halved: after 1.5 seconds, the distance is halved again; after 1.75 seconds, it is halved again and so on. So data will never actually reach the fixed point, because with each fraction of a second it only halves the distance remaining.  Both the Data and the distance can theoretically be split infinitely.

Big Data technologies to analyse and properly compare disperse and huge data sets would provide huge benefits in terms of discoveries in experimental sciences.

And you think you live in the Present- think again.

Exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes definitely are on the horizon.

But tell me where is hindsight located? Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time.

No single person can make sense of what a billion other people are saying. The best way to Safeguard personal data is not to give it in the first place.

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The Future of the Consumer Society will decide our Future.

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Consumerism quotes

The world-wide spread of extremely resource-intensive lifestyles and economic practices has become one of the most important challenges we face.

There is an increased awareness of human impact on the environment, however, the rate of environmental degradation is still on the rise.

Although many people are uncomfortable with the way things are, they are not motivated to act on their beliefs because they see no other way.

The environmental discourse is still confined to a relatively small minority
of elites and ‘experts’, and it remains incredibly top-down but there are no experts as we are all dancing on the edge of acceptable risk.

Is economic growth making us happier?

What type of change is possible?

By addressing things such as human well-being and the meeting of the needs in environmentally in a sound way, the discourse brings economy down to the grass root level of everyday life.

It enables us to ask questions such as:

How do we change the present day short-shortsightedness which is the source of most modern environmental and economic problems?

Messages of environmental risk should be effective in relaying seriousness and immediacy, but arguably, they are also in danger of breeding hopelessness and fatalism. Although many people are uncomfortable with the way things are, they are not motivated to act on their beliefs because they see no other way.

This is tragic because the way in which we perceive the future has a significant influence on the choices we make.

It affects our values, attitudes, coping mechanisms, expectations feelings, motivations and behaviors. The very act of articulating a future presents a tendency and inclination, which increases its likeliness of occurrence.Consumerism quotes

Could it therefore be possible to produce a set of different outcomes by providing engaging, lucid and optimistic alternative ecological future narratives?

I have posted many posts on the Subject but let’s try an other approach.

Suggest an inexpensive tool that could make a difference.  

Sufficient living questions the connection made between growth and quality of life.

The last time climate change happened was approximately 55 million years ago and it took 1000 years to recover from the level of elevated carbon after the extinction of dinosaurs.

Imagine a world without pollution and waste: Products are made from materials that are beneficial for humans and their surroundings. Imagine a world where humans can be glad that their actions benefit those around them.

It seems that people are not good at providing (quasi) exact statements of the future, but they can be better in stating whether the past trend will change and in which direction.

Over a hundred species are still becoming extinct everyday.  One and a half acres of rain forest is still disappearing every second.

These problems are link to a lack of ideas concerning how to deal with environmental problems and the future of our society.

It is always useful to conceive futures in a generational paradigm, because we find it easier to think of futures in terms of our children and grandchildren’s lifetimes. The decisions we make in the next 20 years will determine the fate of the earth and human civilization for centuries to come.

In this context, online news gives a quick overview on what is happening in the world and the use of the Internet as information source has become an inherent part of everyday life  leading to a sort of “big brother feeling” of being observed.

Unfortunately, most of our ecological future narratives are ambiguous or inherently pessimistic.

For instance, one of the most popularized means of living within nature are ‘sustainable futures. However this vision lacks clarity or a consensus over what it means to live ‘sustainably’. Moreover, a proliferation of ‘sustainability’ definitions leave some to regard it as a landfill dump for everyone’s environmental and social wish list.

In a sense of powerlessness. people perceive the environment to be a single totalising entity that is ‘out there,’ enabling them to remain emotionally distant, despondent and in a state of resignation.

High levels of non-engagement are further exacerbated by the lack of faith in the institutions tasked with combating the problems. People are choosing not to dwell on ecological problems by using reflexive strategies of non-engagement with global issues including the future.

The apparent lack of desirable alternatives is highly dangerous.

Could it therefore be possible to produce a set of different outcomes by providing engaging, lucid and optimistic alternative ecological future narratives?

In other words, if governments continue to think in four-year election cycles, businesses work from one financial year to the next and stock markets re-start everyday there is no hope of achieving anything.

When imagining futures, we also need to invent time for change.

What is needed is long-term thinking that reconciles itself to a planet that is 4.6 billion years old?

We support in the capacity to imagine and articulate preferred outcomes, which in turn mobilise action and creates an opportunity for the visions to embed themselves as possibilities in reality.  As opposed to the current approach of endlessly treating symptoms of a much deeper problem that is both out of sight and out of control.

Each and every individual needs to be actively (and creatively) involved by, possibly, visualising, spreading and implementing ideas of alternative societal models. We need a method that enables us to think beyond existing societal models.

While Industrial welfare state mainly defends business-as-usual change can only be achieved in the world to-day by what I call,

– An Universal Electronic Voice that demands change –
# UEV- Universal Electronic Voice.
When we want to enable consumers to execute truly effective change it is central to empower them to understand their role as important actors in the field.

This is beyond governments, and our present day world institutions.

Governments:  Because before they can mend a road there is an other government.  Institutions:  Because they have turned into gossip shops with no funds, run by the market.

We need to re-define what it meant by people power.

A unified electronic voice will do just that resulting in a movement that unified our cohesive efforts. That will enable the ‘democratisation’ of modern environmentalism that are fixated on finding solutions to one that imagines entirely new possibilities

The debate over climate change and whether it is being influenced by man’s activity has ceased. The prevailing view is that climate change is real and that it is influenced by human activity. The link between rising consumption and climate change is becoming clear and opposition to consumerism is growing.

Images of the future in which the Universal E Voice should be used as tools for making images become part of reality, it can be used to direct actions and decision-making.

Of course none of the above has any hope of becoming a reality unless we tap into the world of greed.

This can only be done by a collective demand to place a world aid commission of 0.05% on all High Frequency trading, Sovereign wealth funds acquisitions and foreign exchange transactions over $20.000, creating a perpetual funded fund. ( see previous posts)

As such UEV(universal electronic voice) does not describe the actions needed to achieve the described future however it would be the first step in the right direction to be heard.  We all know timescales are the best until after the critical period is over and we have the benefit of hindsight.

Now it the time to combine all of those how are Whining on the Internet and Social Media into one voice.

With the rather elusive and volatile character of the Internet creating a focus point for the over strain user of the Net when it comes to selecting individually important and relevant information to establish a collection pool offering one voice has many difficulties to over come.

Perhaps # UEV- Universal Electronic Voice might to the trick.

I am all ears to any suggestions.

The mere fact that more of these devices are constantly introduced to the market and the ways in which they are advertised show that yet again a different perception of the future.

This is only the top of the iceberg.

What more ecologically benign consumption and production patterns would mean in practice? is another question to be discussed.

And to what extent it is fruitful to talk about economy beyond the social? Is another in dire need of serious discussion.

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Trans humanist philosophy :

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

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Don’t read this if you have a closed mind.

As If we need more problems in the world here is one that is going to blow the minds of our children’s children.

It’s the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.

If you were to build a human from scratch, from the bottom up, at some point you cross the threshold into humanity — if you believe in evolution, at some point we ceased being a great ape and became human.

Likewise, if you slowly remove parts from a human, you cross the threshold into inhumanity. Again, though, we run into the same problem: How do we codify, classify, and ratify what actually makes us human?

Does adding empathy make us human? Does removing the desire to procreate make us inhuman? If I physically alter my brain to behave in a different, non-standard way, am I still human? If I have all my limbs removed and my head spliced onto a robot, am I still human?

As technology advances, so do our visions of the future.

Artificial wombs? Not so far-fetched. We already have the ability to keep donor hearts pumping externally with nutrient-rich oxygenated blood before transplants are performed.  We are already putting animal brain cells into robots as a control system.

The only thing creeper than a baby robot named Diego-San is a cyborg fetus with no name. It’s an interesting concept that before long we might be incubating our unborn children in tanks, but we might want to think about what that means for population control.

We can’t find a single reason to make a human-gazelle hybrid, but fusing animals and humans (however frightening the concept may be) could be good for something.

It’s only a matter of time before we start digging up skeletons of robots past. With all of these robot dogs walking around and being taught new tricks, how long will it take for robots to adopt other more efficient animal designs?

Whether or not you’re a Transhumanist, future society and all of the potential it brings does seem exciting.

Now all we need is a box that keeps our brain working long enough for a cyborg transplant. Sounds routine enough.

Humans are extending current biological limitations, and in the next few decades what it means to be human might change considerably.

At first glance these questions might sound inflammatory and hyperbolic, or perhaps surreal and sci-fi, but don’t be fooled: In the next decade, given the continued acceleration of computer technology and bio medicine, we will be forced to confront these questions and attempt to find some answer.

Through genetic engineering, nano tech, cloning, and other emerging technologies, eternal life may soon be possible.

So what will happen when we finally craft a computer with greater-than-human intelligence? (the technological singularity).

If every human on Earth suddenly stopped dying, overpopulation would trigger a very rapid and very dramatic socioeconomic disaster. Unless we stopped giving birth to babies, of course, but that merely rips open another can of worms: Without birth and death, would society and humanity continue to grow and evolve, or would it stagnate, suffocated by the accumulated ego of intellectuals and demagogues who just will not die?

Likewise, if only the rich have access to intelligence and strength-boosting drugs and technologies, what would happen to society? Should everyone have the right to boost their intellect? Would society still operate smoothly if everyone had an IQ of 300 and five doctorate degrees?

Humans have always used technology, but never has society been so intrinsically linked and underpinned by it as is to days Society.

As we have seen in just the last few years, with the advent of the smart phone and ubiquitous high-speed mobile networks, just a handful of new technologies now have the power to completely change how we interact with the world and people around us.

In just the last 100 years, we’ve doubled our life span again, created bionic eyes and powered exoskeletons, begun to understand how the human brain actually works, and started to make serious headway with boosting intellectual and physical prowess. Trans cranial direct current stimulation is being used to boost cranial capacity, and as we’ve seen in recent years, sportspeople have definitely shown the efficacy of physical doping.

If you were born 500 years ago, odds are that you wouldn’t experience a single societal-shifting technology in your lifetime — today, a 40-year-old will have lived through the creation of the PC, the internet, the smart phone, and brain implants, to name just a few life-changing technologies.

Just think about how many industries and jobs have been obliterated or subsumed by the arrival of the digital computer, and it’s easy to see why we’re wary of transhumanist technologies that will change the very fabric of human civilization.

That all changes with the children of today, however.

To them, anything that isn’t computerized, digital, and touch-enabled seems unnatural. To them, the smart phone is already an extension of the brain; to them, mind uploading, bionic implants and augmentations, and powered exoskeletons will just be par for the course. To them, transhumanism will just seem like natural evolution — and anyone who doesn’t follow suit, just like those fuddy-duddies who still don’t have a smart phone, will seem thoroughly  inhuman.

For the children of tomorrow, living through a series of disruptive technologies that completely change their lives will be the norm.

      

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