World

Focusing on Geopolitics, Politics & Economics

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Taking part in the debate about impact of AI on society  Feb 2018

Digitisation, AI, and a host of other technologies, sweeping humanity in the name of progress, pose some fundamental questions: they are like juggernauts heading straight to our towns and villages, our streets and our homes, at speeds unimaginable only a few years ago …

The question we face is not how to tweak their brakes to slow them down, but rather why we, all of us, are rushing to build them AND put them on the roads that lead to our homes? Because that’s exactly what we, human societies, are doing.

At the heart of this question is the fact that we have forgotten the real meaning of Economics. You know, Economics was supposed to be a Human Science but somehow, somewhere, we have dropped the ‘Human’ part, and moved into an all-money science.

What this means is that our systems and models for understanding and analysing economic phenomena can only deal with monetary parameters. And what this means is that our systems do not attribute a value to the ‘human societal contribution’. Our systems are simply not designed to do so, leading necessarily to, at best, a partial view of economic reality.

You know, a human being does a lot more than what a company accountant calculates he does: a human being socialises, attends PTA meetings at school, expresses views and supports sports, the arts, charities, as well, of course, as purchasing goods and paying taxes .… in other words does all the things without which a ‘society’ of human beings does not exist. But the company accountants do not concern themselves with all that: they calculate what a person ‘produces’ in money terms, and what he/she costs.

And thereby lies the problem: because by doing so we de-humanise a person to the level of a machine and can now make a direct comparison, which the machine will ultimately win! But the fact is that any company or organisation only exists by virtue of its societal credentials: you can only produce a service or product that is of use to society, and you can only survive by virtue of a society’s ‘acceptance’ of what you produce, and not solely by virtue of the funding from shareholders. There is, therefore, surely an obligation to account for the ‘human societal contribution’ when deciding fates of employees ..

But we don’t, and so you get these astounding figures about how many humans will lose out to the machines ..

And so the juggernauts roll on, the juggernauts that we built by accepting this twisted economic reality ..

Of course the juggernauts have been rolling since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. But they were smaller and much slower then, and so we could get out of the way in time!

Not now.

They are getting bigger and faster by the minute. The human’s curiosity, creativity and intelligence make a formidable combination, so there is no stopping the juggernauts: the only question we should answer is how to stop the de-humanising process. Because only in doing so we might find a way to have the ‘right juggernauts’ and get them to go on the ‘right roads’, and at the ‘right speeds’ …

 

 

The Middle East  c. 2017

There is a misunderstanding. A major misunderstanding. About the Middle East conflict.

Over the last seventy years, because of the relentless mainstream mass media reporting, commentary, news analysis ..etc., a notion has seeped through the consciousness of the Western men & women in the street that the conflict in the Middle East is all about the mutual animosity between Jews and Arabs/Moslems.

It is not.

The conflict is political, and its roots have nothing to do with who the two sides are. It is between an indigenous population, and a political entity planted and populated by foreign powers, in total disregard to the rights of the indigenous population.

The indigenous population, the Palestinian Arabs, are in conflict with the ‘foreign’ political entity and its planted population, Israel.

Had the planted political entity been created for and populated, for example, by Red Indians from America, Christians from the Philippines, Hindus from India, Buddhists from Thailand, or for that matter, Moslems from Indonesia, the same conflict would have raged.

Hatred did not cause the conflict: it was the conflict that led to the hatred and animosity, which became all too visible and displayed to the whole world after 1946.

It is a matter of historical records that Arabs and Moslems co-existed with Jews over millennia, peacefully, without major conflicts. Moslems believe in Judaism and Christianity as the only ‘God Religions’ besides Islam; all other religions are considered heresy.

It is also a matter of historical records that European Christians persecuted Jews over centuries, culminating in the Holocaust, perhaps the most vile act of cruelty man has ever carried out.

The creation of the political entity of Israel, in an irony very little understood and even less discussed, transposed the positions of the Arabs and Europeans overnight.