Although there may be some beneficial uses for AI, the dark side of humanity will misuse it in extremely destructive ways. Already, AI has been elevated above the control of nation-states and human government, and its creators are intentionally recreating the future without public input. ⁃ TN Editor
The creator of the first robot artist is warning that the rise of artificial intelligence is “apocalyptic” – and we are “hurtling” toward AI taking over from humans.
Aidan Meller, who is behind the ultra-realistic Ai-Da robot, reckons within three years we will face unimaginable changes as man merges with machine.
He also believes Elon Musk is correct when he claims nuclear war would have less impact on mankind than AI.
Aidan says: “I agree with Elon Musk that AI is a bigger threat than nuclear war – but it could also be remarkable too.
“There is every right to feel nervous about the rise of AI.
“We are hurtling towards them taking over humans so we need to have a heart of ethics.
“We are merging with machines – be warned, this is a changing world.”
Aidan will be there with Ai-Da, who had an art exhibition at Glastonbury where she painted headliner Billie Eilish.
She will meet schoolchildren and create a new piece of artwork for the event.
Aidan adds: “AI is going to show a mirror to the dark side of being human.
“Technology is not good or bad, it’s how we use it. This exhibition will show how it came about and where we want to go.
The news station received confirmation from Xcel, which stated that 22,000 customers who signed up for the Colorado AC Rewards program were locked out of their thermostats on Tuesday.
Smartphones, smart meters, and smart thermostats are devices that will eventually be used against us all. It starts with the thermostat. Lou
As the summer heat reaches sweltering levels in Colorado, Xcel customers have found themselves unable to adjust their thermostats to keep temperatures down.
AP Photo/Eric Risberg
As the summer heat reaches sweltering levels in Colorado, Xcel customers have found themselves unable to adjust their thermostats to keep temperatures down.
After temperatures climbed to 90 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, Colorado residents subscribed to Xcel found that they were unable to cool their homes when they were informed by their thermostats that they were locked out from adjusting the air conditioning due to an “energy emergency.”
Xcel Energy is the company that makes these products.
“Normally, when we see a message like that, we’re able to override it,” said Arvada resident Tony Talarico in ABC’s Denver Channel:
In this case, we weren’t. So, our thermostat was locked in at 78 or 79.
Numerous Xcel customers took to Twitter to complain about their experiences, with some complaining that their homes were locked to a scorching 88 degrees.
The news station received confirmation from Xcel, which stated that 22,000 customers who signed up for the Colorado AC Rewards program were locked out of their thermostats on Tuesday.
Last summer, the Trump Administration loosened restrictions on Huawei stemming from the Commerce Department’s decision – made earlier in the year – to add Huawei to a “black last” barring American firms from selling their products to the company. The company has technically remained on the blacklist, but the export ban was, for the most part, not enforced (Commerce only intervened if it was a matter of important national security).
The decision comes not long after the UK decided to allow Huawei parts in “non-core” elements of its national 5G network.
But according to Politico, the Trump Administration and the Pentagon are conspiring once again to tighten the screws on the Chinese telecom behemoth. A meeting to discuss the proposed policy change is reportedly being held on Wednesday, and will include a smattering of cabinet members and other administration officials.
Pentagon undersecretary of policy John Rood is reportedly overseeing the new policy, and has overruled concerns about potential blowback to American semiconductor firms.
The Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy, John Rood, has overruled those concerns, the people said.
Defense and Commerce did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
U.S. semiconductor companies found other ways around the blacklisting, including supplying Huawei through subsidiaries or partners in foreign countries.
Currently, a foreign-produced good that contains 25 percent U.S.-origin content can be exported to a company on the entity list. The Commerce rule would cut that threshold down to 10 percent for any goods exported to Huawei or its in-house semiconductor business HiSilicon.
Politico doesn’t go into great detail on the policy, but it does say that it would reduce the threshold for companies on the Commerce Department’s “entities list” – that is, the blacklist. Under current rules, they can buy products that contain up to 25% American-made components. The new rule would lower that threshold to 10%.
The Commerce Department reportedly withdrew the plan at some point in the not-too-distant past because of these objections.
Further restricting sales of American made components and products to Huawei might hurt American tech firms and ultimately give China an advantage as the two countries battle for the best chip technology. But cutting Huawei off from the American market would create serious complications for the companies supply chain.
If anything, it shows us that Washington believes protecting the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance – the intelligence-sharing pact between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – might be worth destabilizing trade relations with Beijing and allowing American semiconductor producers to take a serious shellacking.
Most importantly, readers should remember that this report follows a series of reports yesterday claiming the German legislature is on track to follow the UK – and its conservative Trump ally leader PM Boris Johnson – and reject Washington’s arguments about Huawei being a national security threat.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has stressed the need for the U.S. and its allies to ensure that the century is governed by Western principles, not those of China. (Peter Summers/Getty Images)
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday sought to defuse tension over the United Kingdom’s decision to allow China’s Huawei a role in its communication network, but described the Chinese Communist Party as the biggest threat of the current era.
Speaking alongside U.K. foreign minister Dominic Raab, Pompeo said that he regarded the Chinese Communist Party as “the central threat of our times,” and urged the United States and its allies to ensure they have the military and technological power to ensure that this century is governed by Western principles.
The U.K. on Tuesday defied the U.S. by granting Chinese technology firm Huawei a limited role in its 5G network. The U.S., including Pompeo and President Donald Trump, had been lobbying the U.K. to exclude the firm on security grounds.
Some had predicted a backlash from Trump’s administration during Pompeo’s two-day visit to the nation. But while the U.S. secretary of state showed no softening in his opposition to Huawei, he was keen to downplay the broader impact.
“When you allow the information of your citizens or the national security information of your citizens to transit a network that the Chinese Communist Party has a legal mandate to obtain, it creates risk,” Pompeo told reporters.
“I am very confident that our two nations will find a way to work together to resolve this difference,” Pompeo said, adding that the Five Eyes intelligence alliance would remain.
The U.K.’s Huawei decision came at a critical juncture, as the country prepares to leave the European Union on Friday and begin negotiating a trade deal with the U.S. that it hopes will allow more and freer transatlantic trade.
Pompeo said that the “special relationship” — a term used to describe the close Anglo-American alliance — remains in good health, and that he wanted to prioritize a post-Brexit trade deal with Britain.
“The previous administration took a view that if the United Kingdom made this decision, they’d be at the back of the line — we intend to put the United Kingdom at the front of the line,” Pompeo told the Policy Exchange think-tank event.
An app called Clearview allows the user to snap a photo of anyone. Once that’s done, the person who took your picture will have access to all of your information. Privacy is now all but obsolete.
People will not, for much longer, be able to walk down the street minding their own business anonymously. According to a report by The New York Times,it won’t be long before anyone at any time knows exactly who you are while you’re in public.
What if a stranger could snap your picture on the sidewalk then use an app to quickly discover your name, address and other details? A startup called Clearview AI has made that possible. Perhaps the worst news is that the police state is already using this technology in some parts of the “land of the free.” The app is currently being used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies in the United States, including the deep state FBI, says a Saturday report in The New York Times.
Our Orwellian future has arrived. We are to be tracked, monitored, spied on, and have no privacy whatsoever at any time. And now, other strangers will have access to your private information is you dare to show your face in public.
According to the Times, this human rights violating app works by comparing a photo snapped to a database of more than 3 billion pictures that Clearview says it’s scraped off Facebook, Venmo, YouTube and other sites. It then serves up matches, along with links to the sites where those database photos originally appeared. A name might easily be unearthed, and from there, other info could be dug up online.
The size of the Clearview database dwarfs others in use by law enforcement. The FBI’s own database, which taps passport and driver’s license photos, is one of the largest, with over 641 million images of US citizens.
The Clearview app isn’t currently available to the public, but the Times says police officers and Clearview investors think it will be in the future. –CNET
Even though law enforcement says they’ve used the app’s technology to solve horrible crimes, human rights advocates warn that the privacy violations are going to be immense. Privacy advocates are warning that the app could return false matches to police and that it could also be used by stalkers and other creeps. They’ve also warned that facial recognition technologies, in general, could be used to conduct mass surveillance.
Most facial recognition technology is already used for Orwellian and tyrannical purposes by the powers that shouldn’t be. It should come as no surprise that this will also be used by the ruling class to eliminate basic human rights.
The new regulation would be Beijing’s first known public directive that sets specific limits in China’s use of foreign technology
China has ordered that all hardware and software from the United States be removed from government offices and public institutions within three years.
After little progress in the negotiations between the two countries, the government directive is likely to be a blow to U.S. multinational companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft, as the trade war between the countries turns into a technological cold war.
The Trump administration banned U.S. companies from doing business with Chinese telecommunications company Huawei this year and Google, Intel and Qualcomm announced that they would freeze cooperation with Huawei.
By excluding China from Western technology, the Trump administration has made it clear that the real battle is over which of the two economic superpowers would have the technological edge for the next two decades.
This is Beijing’s first known public directive that sets specific lines that limit China’s use of foreign technology, although it is part of a broader movement within China to increase its dependence on domestic technology.
#China sets itself apart from foreign computers: State offices must be equipped with Chinese equipment in three years. – A government initiative to reduce dependence on foreign technologies, according to the Financial Times. – Full technological sovereignty in the face of imperial threats.
According to analysts, the order sent from the central office of the Chinese Communist Party earlier this year would involve the replacement of 30 million pieces of hardware, a process that would begin in 2020.
Replacing all devices and software in this time period will be a challenge, as many products were developed for U.S. operating systems such as Windows.
Chinese government offices tend to use Chinese owned Lenovo company desktops, but computer components, including processor chips and hard drives, are manufactured by U.S. companies.
In May, Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times newspaper in China, said the withdrawal of U.S. companies from their business with Huawei would not be a fatal defeat as the Chinese company would boost its own microchip industry to compete with the United States.
“What you have just heard; Only a handful of people on earth know, even in classified projects; Is highly compartmented. This is really way past TSSCI – Top Secret Special Compartmented Intelligence.” | Dr. Steven Greer
Technology has advanced to the point that many Americans have artificial intelligence devices in their homes. But what the majority of the sleeping masses don’t realize, is that AI is watching us and judging us.
This should concern everyone because it isn’t just tyrannies like China that are employing AI as a way to control and further enslave the population. The United States government is doing it also – and for the same reasons – complete domination over everyone.
Artificial intelligence has tremendous power to enhance spying, and both authoritarian governments and democracies are adopting the technology as a tool of political and social control.
The potential of AI surveillance is the subject of the third installment of the Sleepwalkers podcast. The episode examines how AI consolidates power and control and asks if we can limit this troubling trend.
Data collected from apps and websites already help optimize ads and social feeds. The same data can also reveal someone’s personal life and political leanings to the authorities. The trend is advancing thanks to smartphones, smart cameras, and more advanced AI. -Wired
In fact, a 2017 algorithm developed at Stanford claimed to be able to tell if a person was gay. Even if it’s inaccurate, it will eventually be used by governments as a tool of persecution. Imagine being told AI could tell you political affiliation and whether or not you approve of the current or future regime. The outcome would be complete authoritarianism and enslavement regardless of which government chooses to use it. And we are NOT safe from it here in the U.S. Sadly, most Americans are embracing AI with open arms.
“Take this type of technology, feed it to a citywide CCTV surveillance system, and go to a place like Saudi Arabia where being gay is considered a crime,” says Lisa Talia Moretti, a digital sociologist.
“Suddenly you’re pulling people off the street and arresting them because you’re gay because the computer said so.”
Even if China’s AI capabilities are exaggerated, the AI boom there is having a chilling effect on personal freedom, says Ian Bremmer, an expert on global political risk and founder of the Eurasia Group. “You just need a government that is starting to get that capacity and make it known, and have a few people that are sort of strung up as examples, and suddenly everyone is scared,” he says. -Wired
Law enforcement in the U.S. is embracing AI. The podcast concludes with the New York Police Department testing technologies including facial recognition. Although AI promises to make the department more effective and even more accountable, whether we accept this troubling trend may determine whether the West sleepwalks towards its own form of technological tyranny, reported Wired. “In America, the liberty we take for granted is hard-won and fragile,” says Oz Woloshyn, the host of Sleepwalkers. “So much hangs in the balance, and the decisions we take will affect our lives profoundly, and echo through the lives of our children.”
Most disruption predicted in San Jose, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Boulder, Detroit, Huntsville, Louisville, and more…
82% of Americans think Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more harmful than helpful. Reports indicate there are many good reasons for this and it’s not just about massive job loss (see 1, 2, 3).
Proponents insist we’ll all be okay though – we just need UBI (Universal Basic Income). $1000/month might be okay for some, but not everyone could live off that. For those who manage to keep their jobs – they’ll still be more “exposed” to AI. They also may be forced to “merge” with it. Oh the humanity – or inhumanity.
White-collar jobs (better-paid professionals with bachelor’s degrees) along with production workers may be most susceptible to AI’s spread into the economy
AI could affect work in virtually every occupational group. However, whereas research on automation’s robotics and software continues to show that less-educated, lower-wage workers may be most exposed to displacement, the present analysis suggests that better-educated, better-paid workers (along with manufacturing and production workers) will be the most affected by the new AI technologies, with some exceptions.
Our analysis shows that workers with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree. Holders of bachelor’s degrees will be the most exposed by education level, more than five times as exposed to AI than workers with just a high school degree.
Our analysis shows that AI will be a significant factor in the future work lives of relatively well-paid managers, supervisors, and analysts. Also exposed are factory workers, who are increasingly well-educated in many occupations as well as heavily involved with AI on the shop floor. AI may be much less of a factor in the work of most lower-paid service workers.
Men, prime-age workers, and white and Asian American workers may be the most affected by AI
Men, who are overrepresented in both analytic-technical and professional roles (as well as production), work in occupations with much higher AI exposure scores. Meanwhile, women’s heavy involvement in “interpersonal” education, health care support, and personal care services appears to shelter them. This both tracks with and accentuates the finding from our earlier automation analysis.
Bigger, higher-tech metro areas and communities heavily involved in manufacturing are likely to experience the most AI-related disruption
Progress now means “life getting worse all the time”. We are living in a dangerous world on a giddy-go-round to doom.
LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Over 180 scientists and doctors in almost 40 countries are warning the world about 5G health risks. These scientists spell it out in a recent letter in response to ‘Resolution 1815 of the Council of Europe’:
“We, the undersigned scientists, recommend a moratorium on the roll-out of the fifth generation 5G until potential hazards for human health and the environment have been fully investigated by scientists independent from industry. 5G will substantially increase exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF)… and has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.”
If you’re not alarmed about 5G radiation dangers, you should be.
With download speeds up to 20-30 times faster than 4G, 5G promises a new world, including becoming the foundation for self-driving cars while also causing a long list of potential health risks. “5G Cancer” is actually a thing. The cities of Brussels and Geneva have even blocked trials and banned upgrades to 5G out of this concern.
LD: Let me explain briefly for the benefit of beginners.
Before 2G, 3G, and 4G, radio frequencies were benign. This was when we had 1G. A simple landline telephone with wires is the usual example. No health hazards here. You couldn’t get cancer by calling someone on your landline phone — nor would you experience nausea, headaches, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, or the compulsion to commit suicide.
With each upgrade thereafter — from 2G to 3G and then to 4G—wireless communication became increasingly faster and more sophisticated, with proportionately increasing health hazards. It’s now a completely different ball game with 5G technology.
The dangers we now face are truly horrendous, with government and big transnational corporations doing their best to conceal these dangers from us. The reasons for this deliberate deception will become clearer to you after you have watched the 8-minute video at the end of this article and listened to the testimony of one of the world’s most highly qualified and respected authorities on 5G technology. This expert tells us he does not own a cell phone and never has. Confession. I have never owned a cell phone myself, and have somehow managed to survive so far without one.
As the writer of this article notes: “We never worried whether or not our drive-time radio shows would fry our brains. Sadly, once the concept of wireless “G” technology was initiated, we began exposing the global public to frequencies akin to microwaves at 1 billion cycles per second. Humans, animals and the environment have all been at risk for years. While 4G was bad enough, 5G takes the game to a whole new level of insanity.” [LD]
5G (or 5th Generation) refers to the latest advancement in wireless systems. 5G promises to bring larger channels, higher speeds, larger packets of data, exponential responsiveness, and the ability to connect a host of devices from a single location. At the start, 5G networks won’t all work the same. Some will be slow, and some of these networks will be super-fast, but with limited coverage. Eventually, they will form a global grid, unlike anything the Earth has seen.
While it would be fair to assume that 5G technology has been tested for risks, this is simply not the case. There is no compelling data on health risks. When 5G launches, it will be the first actual test on human beings ever performed.
LD: The public, in short, are being used as guinea pigs. They can’t test this new technology on rats for obvious reasons. So they have no other option but to test it on human beings. To quote a friend of mine: “They’ll mop the blood up from the floor later on.”
“Help! — Get me outa here!”
While 4G’s wavelengths travel along the surface of the skin, 5G’s millimeter waves are more insidious. When 5G wavelengths are emitted, our skin will automatically absorb them, which will naturally cause the skin to rise in temperature. Already live in three countries, 5G is the first global electromagnetic radiation test on human beings in the history of Planet Earth. While most wireless industry executives kibosh the long list of legitimate 5G health concerns, most scientists believe that the public is in danger and that further tests are needed.
The launch of 5G will be similar to turning on your microwave, opening its door, and leaving it on for the rest of your life.
Every cell tower in your neighborhood emits radio frequency (RF) radiation. Radiation causes cancer. By 2021, every city will have 5G towers and cell stations. These devices will be on the top or side of millions of buildings throughout the world. The wireless industry is not just building an infrastructure that provides faster downloads; it’s building a global microwave oven.
Yes, 5G towers and mini-stations are extremely dangerous.
Not only are the shorter millimeter waves more hazardous to human beings, because of the intensity of the technology, but it will also require millions of more mini cell towers than before, potentially one tower per 2 to 8 houses. This means a human being’s RF radiation exposure will not only increase, but it will also exponentially increase within months.
These towers are not only dangerous; they’re lethal. They should be considered a crime against humanity.
— § —
In general, radiation does one major thing to human beings and animals – it destroys our DNA, either by forcing the DNA to mutate or by killing specific groups of cells, all of which lead to cancer.
Here’s what to expect if you experience prolonged exposure to radiation: Nausea, swelling, hair loss, decreased appetite, low energy, general malaise, damaged bone marrow, damaged organs, more infections, confusion, anxiety, panic attacks, crippling depression, suicidal impulses, incapacitation, death.
“The clock is ticking . . .”
Besides moving to Mars or the Moon, we are limited in ways to protect ourselves from this dangerous technology. Here are a few ideas to give you a fighting chance:
— Do not live near a cell tower or mini station.
— Purchase an EMF shield, and continue to measure the levels of radiation within 100 feet of your home.
— Eat healthily and take immune-boosting supplements.
— Spend lots of time in the forest.
— Refrain from using your cell phone for long periods, including never keeping your cell phone in your bedroom.
— When traveling with your cell phone, store it in an EMF protective bag.
An artificial neural network has been used to accurately predict a person’s chances of dying within a year by analyzing heart scans, even where doctors can find no issues, leaving scientists equal parts baffled and thrilled.
Researchers led by Brandon Fornwalt at the Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health System put their machine learning model to work studying the results of some 1.8 million electrocardiogram (ECG) heart scans, hoping the neural network would derive patterns from the heaps of data.
Predicting the risk of a heart attack or other heart-related issues, the AI performed better than its human counterparts, consistently scoring above flesh-and-blood doctors. Even for ECG results that cardiologists determined to be normal, the AI was able to pick up on other patterns and accurately predict fatal health risks within a year’s time.
“That finding suggests that the model is seeing things that humans probably can’t see, or at least that we just ignore and think are normal,” Fornwalt said.
AI can potentially teach us things that we’ve been maybe misinterpreting for decades.
To further compare the AI’s methods to present-day doctors, the researchers also set up a second algorithm to consider other factors commonly measured by physicians, including age and gender, but the first model designed to crunch raw ECG data alone still won out in its forecasting abilities.
The AI was trained based on historical ECG data, meaning that researchers already knew the outcome in each patient’s case and could measure the algorithm’s precision. But it is yet to be checked on real-time data in clinical studies to verify it can indeed predict and improve health outcomes. The research team at Geisinger will present its findings later this month at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in Philadelphia.
This is exciting and provides more evidence that we are on the verge of a revolution in medicine where computers will be working alongside physicians to improve patient care.
Internet access is already notoriously restricted in China, but things are about to get a whole lot worse. Chinese citizens are currently forced to show their ID Card in order to get the internet installed in their house, but that identification database will soon be tightened with facial recognition technology.
Starting on December 1st, Citizens of China will be required to scan their faces before gaining access to the internet or buying a smartphone.
The new regulation is a part of China’s controversial social credit system, which records the actions of every citizen and scores those actions according to their compliance with Chinese laws and customs.
If a person’s credit score drops too low, they can be banned from flying or using public transit systems, have their internet access restricted, or have their children blocked from going to the best schools. Low social credit scores can also result in being fired from a job, banned from hotels, and even having pets taken away. On the other hand, high social credit scores will result in better interest rates at banks, lower energy costs and even prioritized listing on dating sites.
According to a report from the Associated Press, millions of people have already been blocked from buying airplane and train tickets due to their social credit score. In some cases, people could have their name, photo, and violations listed in LED billboards in busy city areas.
The issue with these experimental R&D AI/FRT projects is that they use real production systems and data. Realtime security footage from governmental buildings and actual police data sets used in open systems grating access to active third party mass surveillance systems in China. pic.twitter.com/ohLc7pbkuc
According to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, requiring citizens to submit to facial recognition in order to access the internet is intended to improve the country’s internet security and help to fight against “terrorism.” However, it is important to note that the Chinese government has labeled peaceful protesters in Hong Kong as “terrorists,” so it is likely that this measure will be used to stifle dissent as well.
The recent protests in Hong Kong may have even provoked the Chinese government to implement these measures as soon as possible, to keep news of the protests away from citizens of mainland China, especially those who may not be entirely loyal to the regime in the first place. Restricting internet access in this fashion was surely a part of the social credit system plan all along, but the timing is suspect, considering the situation that the Chinese government is dealing with in Hong Kong
While China may be the testing ground for a social credit system, governments all over the world have been considering similar measures, including Australia and Canada.
About the Author
John Vibes is an author and journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture, and focuses solutions-oriented approaches to social problems. He is also a host of The Free Your Mind Conference and The Free Thought Project Podcast.
The former naval radar operator noted that “everyone is seeing” the UFOs since a certain secret upgrade was introduced to US warships “fleet-wide”.
It appears that the infamous encounter of an unidentified “Tic Tac”-shaped object by the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was made possible due to a certain upgrade introduced to the warships’ spyware, according to the recent revelations made by a retired US Navy Senior Chief Operations Specialist named Kevin Day.
During a recent interview on the “Truth Be Told” podcast, Day, who served as a radar operator on the USS Princeton, part of the aforementioned carrier group, mused that UFOs might’ve been around for quite sometime before the Nimitz incident when mankind upped its detection game
“There had been a top-secret upgrade of our system that had gotten underway”, he said as quoted by the Daily Star. “They upgraded our cooperative engagement capability and did some tweaking on our spy radar and the way that it all works. I think because of these upgrades we were suddenly able to see things that had always been there.”
Day also remarked that the hypothesis about the older detection systems simply being unable to spot UFOs might explain why “everyone is seeing them” now, after the radar upgrade in question was introduced “fleet-wide.”
And when the host asked him whether he thinks that the object they encountered back then was an extraterrestrial craft, Day said yes.
“This was non-newtonian, it was non-classical physics we’re seeing so it had to be something”, he said. “What other explanations are there?”
We will be battling the greedy and souless corporations soon, as there will not be enough jobs for everyone within the next 20 years. I have heard some estimates that claim that over 50% of the population will be jobless.
As Labour’s 2019 party conference started yesterday, the party’s leadership was busy selling their slate of far-left policies.
In addition to support for a ‘Green New Deal’ (not dissimilar to the one from the US) and the abolition of private schools, the Labour Party is pushing a plan for a four day work week.But don’t worry: workers will still earn the same amount of money, they’ll just need to work less for the money.
By Labour’s reasoning, since the link between increasing productivity and expanding free time has been broken, it’s time for the government to step in and set the trend right. After all, increasing automation was supposed to allow Britons to work less, not more.
But with the next general election expected in the coming months, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell pledged during a speech on Monday that Labour would implement the 32-hour-work-week within 10 years if votes deliver a majority.
McDonnell’s pledge stopped short of making a 32 hour week compulsory, saying that only “average” hours worked would be cut. But he insisted that lower in the number of hours worked by most Britons is the right course of policy: “millions are exhausted from overwork,” McDonnell said to the audience at Labour’s Party conference in Brighton. And that must end.
“As society got richer, we could spend fewer hours at work.But in recent decades progress has stalled,” McDonnell added. “People in our country today work some of the longest hours in Europe.”
That’s actually not true, according to official EU data, which found that Greeks put in the longest work weeks (at an average 42.3 hours per week), followed by Bulgaria and Poland. The only western European nation that made the top ten was Portugal.
Before the conference, a report commissioned by crossbench peer Robert Skidelsky found that working fewer hours would be good for Briton’s wellbeing but that “a rigid four-day week was not realistic or desirable.”
But Labour clearly can’t resist the headline: A 32 hour work week! With no loss in pay!
Unsurprisingly, McDonnell received a standing ovation when he finished his speech. But just wait until this crosses the pond.
When it comes to the impact of automation (robots, AI, etc.) on jobs, there are two schools of thought:
one holds that technology has always created more and better jobs than it destroys, and this will continue to be the case.
The other holds that the current wave of automation will destroy far more jobs than it creates, but the solution is to tax the robots and use these revenues to distribute the wealth to everyone who no longer has a livelihood.
In either case, we’ll get richer: if technology generates more high-quality jobs, replacing lower-quality jobs lost to automation, we’ll collectively get richer, and if technology destroys jobs but creates immense profits that can be distributed to everyone as Universal Basic Income (UBI), then we’ll get richer via distributing profits to everyone.
But what if neither option is realistic? What if the jobs that are created in the wake of automation are lower-quality, lower pay and far more insecure? And what if automation leads to much lower profits rather than much higher profits? What if there’s nowhere near enough profits to distribute to everyone as Universal Basic Income? If that’s the case, we’re collectively becoming poorer, even if a small percentage of the population is reaping wealth from automation.
Consider this first-hand account from a reader on Facebook (used with permission):
“With almost 40 years in the pipeline business I have seen detecting and locating leaks in pipelines go from 6-8 men, 2-3 trucks, maybe an airplane and take days. With three pieces of equipment (Laser methane detector and a Optical Gas Imaging camera), $300 drone and a 4 X 4 pickup, one person can cover in a few hours what could take days to weeks to find years ago.
The work I do has displaced at least 6 if not more workers plus the capital cost of the equipment. The total cost of all my equipment is less than $200K and labor cost of less than $2K.
A ‘Smart Pig’ can detect, measure and locate a corrosion indication within mm’s. The fixed cost of the equipment is high but the incremental cost per use is low. Manpower and equipment has gone from 12 workers to 4-5 depending on size. The information found can prevent loss resulting in environmental damage and economic loss to the pipeline owner.
Less people doing more work to find problems. Using technology instead of manpower.”
Between half and two-thirds of this workforce has been obsoleted by these technologies. If there is any competition in the manufacture of the equipment, it’s likely prices will fall as components become commoditized and decline in price.
Sectors of the economy many hope will create more jobs are seeing the same dynamics. A friend recently described the technologies being deployed to increase the yields and reduce labor in organic sustainable farming: drones that monitor the water and nutrient needs of crops with sensors and relay the data to drip-irrigation systems.
As for training students to code/program: many of these tasks are being automated as well.
Even as we wring our hands over the potential for individually-targeted advertising to sway elections, we also have to ask: why should any advertiser pay marketing firms to distribute bulk emails and mailers, buy TV/radio/print adverts, etc. when an essentially automated technology can craft a data-driven micro-targeted pitch to individuals?
My point here is that it’s not just blue-collar jobs that are being obsoleted, but well-paying white-collar jobs are increasingly being automated as well.
The jobs that are being created are low-pay, contingent, insecure service jobs that cannot support a middle-class life or accumulation of capital.
If we look at the gig economy that’s arisen to staff on-demand services (Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, etc.), we find low earnings, no benefits and the costs and risks of auto ownership being offloaded from the corporation to individual owners.
These jobs may be “new” (although they look very similar to “old” jobs such as delivering milk) due to the interface of smartphone technology, they lack the security and compensation needed to afford a middle class lifestyle in most U.S. urban areas. In other words, they are not replacing jobs lost with equivalent jobs.
The idea that profits will pay for Universal Basic Income is simply not realistic. Even we taxed all the Big Tech corporations at a rate of 75% (a rate that’s politically unrealistic), that would yield up $100 billion, one-tenth of UBI’s minimum cost.
As I’ve discussed in my books, there’s another crisis of work that UBI doesn’t solve: the majority of people want and need the purpose, meaning and structure of a job–a positive social role, a way to gain self-respect, an avenue of control of one’s life, a source of dignity and a means of getting ahead.
Technology, like natural selection, has no goal. Technology doesn’t have a teleological drive to employ humans, save the planet or any other goal we might choose. In the current socio-political-economic system, technology is mostly aimed at maximizing profits. The surest way to reduce costs is to replace costly humans with automated tools.
If we want technology to help us create gainful work, we’ll have to set that goal, and create incentives other than maximizing short-term profits. Perhaps one first step might be to broaden our definition of “profit” from the purely financial to one that includes “utility” and “value” for local and global communities. That’s the goal of my work.
Google’s new quantum computer reportedly spends mere minutes on the tasks the world’s top supercomputers would need several millennia to perform. The media found out about this after NASA “accidentally” shared the firm’s research.
The software engineers at Google have built the world’s most powerful computer, the Financial Times and Fortune magazine reported on Friday, citing the company’s now-removed research paper. The paper is said to have been posted on a website hosted by NASA, which partners with Google, but later quietly taken down, without explanation.
Google and NASA have refused to comment on the matter. A source within the IT giant, however, told Fortune that NASA had “accidentally” published the paper before its team could verify its findings.
In the research, Google reportedly claimed that it takes their new quantum processor just around 200 seconds to make calculations that existing supercomputers would require around 10,000 years to perform. They also said the processor requires mere 30 seconds to complete a task the Google Cloud server would need 50 trillion hours to do.
Quantum computing allows evaluating multiple possibilities at once and performing complex calculations not possible on normal computers. So, if proven true, Google’s new processor would be a real breakthrough, propelling the firm way ahead of giants like Microsoft, IBM and Intel, all of whom compete in building quantum processors.
Quantum processors will help create new, advanced chemicals and develop next-level artificial intelligence, among other things.
More and more concerned citizens are asking tough questions about the safety of 5G wireless networks. Are big tech companies trying to quash their dissent? Action Alert!
Over the last few months, we’ve been reporting on the planned deployment of 5G wireless networks and some of the health and safety issues that are being swept under the rug by telecom companies and their enthusiasts in the government. Some communities, like Sacramento, California, have already seen the installation of “small cell” towers near homes. When activists in Sacramento started speaking out, it appears as though YouTube and other sites have silenced their criticisms of 5G.
Noah Davidson, an activist in Sacramento, noticed his young nieces started experiencing health problems after Verizon installed a small cell just 45 feet from their home. Other members of the community also started experiencing adverse effects after small cells were installed. Davidson has worked to start a grassroots movement to raise awareness about 5G in the community and to work with telecom companies to establish an opt-out program for those who do not want 5G in their neighborhood.
In so doing, it appears as though Davidson has incurred the wrath of the Internet censors. His account was apparently suspended, without explanation, by YouTube. One of the two videos on his YouTube account was footage of Sacramento activists speaking at a city council meeting. This seems deeply suspicious. YouTube is owned by Google, a company that we know is aggressively censoring content on dubious grounds. It doesn’t seem outlandish to conclude that Google and YouTube are quashing dissent about a technology they want to see implemented across the United States.
Activists are not the only ones advising us to pump the breaks on 5G. A group of hundreds of scientists from around the world recently sent a letter to the United Nations and the World Health Organization warning of “serious concerns regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) generated by electric and wireless devices.” The scientists explain that EMF “affects living organisms at levels well below most international guidelines,” causing increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in free radicals, genetic damage, changes to the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, and neurological disorders.
We must keep speaking out about this crucial public health issue in defiance of the censors and the crony capitalists railroading us into accepting this technology with no questions asked.
Our previous articles have covered some of the other dangers associated with 5G networks. For example, 5G utilizes millimeter waves—a shorter wavelength than the current 4G networks in use. Millimeter wavelengths have been used in crowd control devices that shoot high-powered millimeter waves that make the target feel like their skin is burning. Other research has shown that our sweat ducts can act like antennas for the shorter millimeter waves, meaning we absorb more of this energy into our bodies.
Keep in mind that we will be exposed to EMF generated by wireless devices on an unprecedented scale for two reasons. First, short millimeter waves cannot travel as far as longer waves, which is why many more “small cell” units must be installed to create a 5G network. Some neighborhoods would see dozens of small cells installed, all of them emitting microwave radiation. Second, the sheer number of wireless devices will increase. More and more systems are becoming wireless, or will become reliant on wireless technology. “Smart cities” will use wireless networks to collect and analyze data about the environment, traffic, water, transit, lighting, waste management, security, and parking. Millimeter-wave-emitting devices will saturate our environment, and the fact that we’re plunging head-first into deploying this technology without knowing the health consequences is shocking.
Action Alert! Write to the FCC and Congress, urging them to stop the spread of 5G until its safety can be determined. Please send your message immediately.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Caitlin Johnstone discards the high-flown dogma around space colonization and challenges readers to accept themselves and life on planet Earth.
It’s rare to get a billionaire to share their grand plans for the future, which is weird because billionaires pretty much rule the world. Whenever they do, though, it’s always something incredibly sociopathic, like replacing all jobs with billionaire-owned automation/AI and giving people a Universal Basic Income set by the billionaire-owned government. Or loading all the humans onto rocket ships and sending them to live on Amazon Space Dildos.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who hates unions and wants to implant AI into human brains, has been continuing this trend of idiotic plutocratic futurology with a new campaign to detonate nuclear weapons on the planet Mars. This is not because Musk hates Mars, but because he wants to colonize it; the idea is to vaporize the red planet’s polar ice caps and throw carbon dioxide into the air to ultimately make the planet more habitable.
Scientists are voicing skepticism that such a plan could even work, before even opening up the “Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should” debate. Sending nuclear weapons into space for any reason whatsoever should receive an outright rejection from all of humanity, since getting nukes into earth’s orbit has been the wet dream of war machine engineers for decades and pretending they went to Mars would serve as an ideal cover story to circumvent international space treaties until it’s too late to prevent it.
Musk claims he wants to colonize Mars because a new dark age ensuing from a third world war appears “likely,” and he wants to ensure that there will be humans living off of the planet to re-populate it after we wipe ourselves out here. Rather than pouring wealth, brainpower and resources into pushing for a change in the status quo which has set the world’s nuclear-armed powers on a collision course for a world military confrontation that will destroy our biosphere, this billionaire has decided it’s better to nuke Mars so that a back bench of reserve humans can live on a desert space rock.
This is the class of people who are calling the shots in our world. These are the minds who are choosing our fate for us. I wouldn’t trust them to run a gas station.
I’m going to take a lot of flak for saying this, but I honestly believe that the impulse to colonize space is one of the more pernicious cultural mind viruses in our society. I mean, think about it: we’ve got a planet right here for which we are perfectly adapted, and we’re burning it to the ground while looking up at a red dot in the sky going “You know I bet if I nuked that bitch I could build a hermetically sealed house on it someday.” How much more insane could you possibly get?
I’m pushing against a cultural dogma that’s been mainstream doctrine for generations, but I really find all this blather about adventure and the indomitable human spirit of exploration quite tedious and idiotic when it comes to space colonization. We’ve got creatures swimming in our own oceans with brains many times larger than our own, and we’re killing them all off before we’ve even developed any kind of real theory about what they’re doing with all that extra gray matter. There are parts of the moon that are better explored than vast expanses of our own seas. We don’t even know what consciousness is, and science is largely uninterested in answering this question. I don’t believe the spirit of exploration and adventure is what’s driving our longing to break for the stars. I think it’s nothing but garden variety escapism.
We’ve all got that one friend or family member who’s completely miserable and is always quitting jobs and relationships and moving house and changing their diet in a desperate attempt to find happiness. They rearrange their lifestyle for the umpteenth time and they’re barely settled in before their gaze lands on some other aspect of their life and they think, “That’s the source of my unhappiness right there. If I can only escape from that, I’ll be happy.”
Such people are exasperating to be around, because you can see what they’re doing and you just want to sit them down and go “The problem is in you, babe. Moving won’t help; your inner demons will follow you every time. You’ve got to stay put and deal with your issues.”
Looking for Escape Routes
Our species reminds me of that type of personality right now. So many of us are looking forward to some escape route coming from outside of us to rescue us from ourselves; some are looking forward to the second coming of Jesus, some are looking forward to the aliens coming in to save the day, some are looking forward to the Democrats or the Republicans finally capturing the whole entire government and setting things right with the world, and some are looking forward to billionaires setting up a space colonization program so we can get off this accursed blue orb before we destroy it. But there is no deus ex machina here. No one’s going to save us from ourselves. Even if we do succeed in running away from home, we’ll inevitably bring the same inner demons with us that got us into this mess in the first place.
We’ve got to turn inward and evolve beyond our self-destructive impulses. The only way out is through. The mind virus of celestial escapism stops us from doing this, because it offers us yet another false promise of deus ex machina. It lets us run away from doing the hard but necessary real inner work, just like doing drugs or binging on Netflix or any other kind of escapism.
Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz
Bezos Reveals His Ugly Vision For The World He’s Trying To Rule
Can you try a little thought experiment for me? Imagine, just for a moment, if we took space colonization off the table. Completely. Forever. We just decided that it’s never going to happen and we all moved to accept that. Really imagine it. Really put yourself there for a minute.
What does that change in you? What does that change about your attitude toward our future? If we’re honest with ourselves, I think it would change quite a bit. For me, when I take space conquest off the table, it takes me in a direction that just so happens to look extremely healthy. It makes me say, “Oh, okay, so we’ll obviously have to get rid of the status quo of endless war and ecocide, since those will ruin this place, and that will mean radically changing our relationship with each other and with our ecosystem. It will mean getting women around the world full reproductive sovereignty and education since that’s proven to reverse population growth. It will mean ceasing to think like a cancer, believing that endless growth is a virtue. It will mean ceasing to believe that the existence of trillions of humans is the best our species can hope for, when we have yet to even scratch the surface of our own potential on a large scale. And I suppose it will mean getting together and figuring out how to detect and neutralize the threat of apocalyptic meteor strikes, too.”
Imagine
Imagine that. Imagine if instead of trying to figure out how to fill the sky with trillions of mediocre humans we turned inward, healed our inner demons, and realized our full potential. Such a world would be a paradise. I know from my own experience that humans are capable of so very, very much more than what we have attained so far; we really haven’t scratched the surface at all. If we’re going to explore, the direction of that exploration ought to be inward.
I really think the mainstream idea that we can always make a mad dash for the black emptiness in the sky if things go to shit here keeps us from truly confronting our urgent need to preserve the ecosystemic context in which we evolved, and which there’s no evidence that we can live without.
I mean, we don’t even know that space colonization is possible. As of yet we have no evidence at all that humans are sufficiently separate and separable from Earth’s biosphere for survival apart from our ecosystem to be a real thing. Humans aren’t really separate “things;” they’re a symbiotic collaboration of organisms with ecosystems of their own, all of which as far as we know are entirely dependent on the greater ecosystem from which we blossomed. So far all our attempts at creating independent biospheres have failed miserably, and the closest we’ve come to living in space has consisted of nothing but glorified scuba excursions: visits to space stations fully dependent on a lifeline of terrestrial supplies. That’s the difference between flying and jumping. It might be as delusional as our brains thinking they can hop out of our skulls and live independently of our bodies, or some river eddies saying they’re moving to dry land.
Silicon Valley wants to read your mind – here’s why you should be worried
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is developing a brain implant to connect people’s minds directly to a computer. These mind-reading systems could affect our privacy, security, identity, equality, and personal…
And even if it is possible, why would you want it? Do people not know what space is? Are they aware that it’s nothing but boring desert wasteland that’s really, really, hard to get to and survive on? Have you ever been trapped for a long time surrounded by nothing but man-made things, like on an airplane or a cruise ship? Picture that, but way worse and for much longer. It would be a sterile, artificial existence; even if you managed to bring in plants and animals it would be ordered in a man-made way that is no more natural than the saplings grown on traffic islands. At best it would be like being in a mall your entire life. You’d be cut off from the primordial thrum of your home world. There’d be no real life there. No real soul.
Imagine never feeling the starry spatter of a shower of rain on your face. Imagine never ever again hearing the roar of wind on a wintry night or experiencing the thunder of the ocean on a big surf day. Imagine never again being blown away by the brightness of a rainbow or the thrilling crack of lightning or the astonishing beauty of a sunset or the first rays of springtime sunshine fondly warming the back of your neck. Imagine never again coming across a friendly squirrel or a shy possum or a little feast of wild blackberries. Imagine never again lying in the dappled light filtered through a magnificent tree. I don’t know about you but I would just miss the breeze playing in my hair too terribly to ever leave. I love it here and it loves me like a mother loves her child. This is not just my home, I grew from the earth as surely as a mushroom or a seahorse. I am a part of the earth and the earth is a part of me. We belong together.
It’s easy to feel helpless. The wise ones do not have any money and therefore any power. We are being run by a handful of coddled man-children and it seems like they might have the last word. But I have been thinking about Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas on morphic resonance a lot lately and I’m increasingly convinced that even just one of us bringing consciousness to an aspect of our collective darkness is enough to wordlessly and instantly inform the herd. So, do me a favor if you are willing. Go and run one more experiment for me. Go outside now and place your hand on the ground and say to the Earth these words — “I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.” Say it as many times as you feel like. Say it, and mean it.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
It’s rare to get a billionaire to share their grand plans for the future, which is weird because billionaires pretty much rule the world. Whenever they do, though, it’s always something incredibly sociopathic, like replacing all jobs with billionaire-owned automation/AI and 
Tales from the Conspiratum 