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Humanity is in the early stages of the most significant evolution in its history: learning to think as a species.
This is the linking of human minds, values, information and solutions at lightspeed and in real time around the planet, via the internet and social media, says science writer Julian Cribb.
Global thought is opening the way to solve some of humanity's greatest threats – including climate change, famine, global poisoning, weapons of mass destruction, environmental collapse, resource scarcity and overpopulation, says Mr Cribb, who is the author of 'Surviving the 21st Century' (Springer 2017), a new book describing the ten mega-threats and what can be done about them.
"Thanks to the internet and social media, people are for the first time communicating across the barriers of language, race, nationality, religion, region and gender. While the internet contains much rubbish and malignance, it also contains huge amounts of goodwill, trustworthy science-based advice, practical solutions to problems – and people joining hands in good causes."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:53AM (12 children)
The scary thought about a world hive-mind is that it means equal volume is given to all the voices in all aspects of thought.
What separates us now is that scientists do the science, religious do the religions so on and so on. If the internet truly does bring together all manner of thought into such a single point, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish those statements which are fact from those which are opinion. This is already being shown in an exceptionally scary demonstration by the Trump administration with the whole "Alternative Facts" which simply proves that if you don't have issues with misleading statements, playing brinkmanship with statements, then recalling them/saying you didn't say that etc. For the average person, it is getting harder to distinguish what's true versus what's complete rubbish.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by khallow on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:02AM
What separates us now is that scientists do the science, religious do the religions so on and so on. If the internet truly does bring together all manner of thought into such a single point, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish those statements which are fact from those which are opinion. This is already being shown in an exceptionally scary demonstration by the Trump administration with the whole "Alternative Facts" which simply proves that if you don't have issues with misleading statements, playing brinkmanship with statements, then recalling them/saying you didn't say that etc. For the average person, it is getting harder to distinguish what's true versus what's complete rubbish.
Sorry, I don't buy that it's that hard. And I certainly don't buy the sudden concern among politically-orient folk with alternative facts when these things have been around for millennia. The old tools and tricks for dealing with rumors, innuendo, propaganda, and outright lies still work. You just have to use them.
The scary thought about a world hive-mind is that it means equal volume is given to all the voices in all aspects of thought.
Actually, no it doesn't. Dampening noise from ignorant or false sources would be one of the first things tackled. Because otherwise it wouldn't work at all. It's a necessary precondition. And specialization still is relevant. Experts still are experts, even if they routinely have conflicts of interest that warp their communication. Let us keep in mind however that we have rather weak means of determining who is an expert in a field.
Finally, if you can't present a topic in a way that is understandable by the educated layman (particularly, understandable enough to make a society-wide decision on the matter), then there's probably serious problems lurking in the experts' understanding of the matter as well.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:08AM
What you fear is entirely what the social justice warrior desires most. They crave the death of individual exceptionalism. You could have a doctor of incredible skill, and then have 10 doctors of lessor skill than the first, but a more appropriate gender or race, and they would make such a monster of the first person.
Doctor Strange would never exist in a SJW world, unless he was a female muslim.
To put it another way that might resonate with nerds here, they are the White Wolf Technocracy. They desire the world to be a static, wholly measurable thing that is never, ever without civil planning and development. They reduce everything to static values, and forever demand that everyone else does the same to fit their personal dogma. They are the disease that occurs when you unleash the internet upon undeveloped minds.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @04:09AM (5 children)
I think your statement is a bit ironic.
Very little has changed in Washington. The main thing is that this administration is not friendly to the media and so the media is doing something more closely resembling their job than they have in decades, though I think they've taken it to the point of partisanship which is headed down the other end of this horseshoe. So for instance you probably believe Obama signed an amazing environmental treaty with China. It was lauded by the media as a "landmark", "sweeping", a culmination of Obama's "environmental protection legacy" and more. In reality it said, "Hey China - feel free to pollute as much as you want and increase it as much as you want until 2030 when we'd like you to start rolling it back." If we had a nonpartisan media, they would have bashed the president as he rightfully deserved for making such a mockery of a deal. This is not a one-off example, but a typical pattern that emerged during his administration. It's what sent me from being a proud Obama voter to someone who is far more critical of both sides now a days, and especially the media.
If you think it's partisan to mention them giving free passes to Obama, we can go back to Bush. The evidence for Iraq's WMD was always, at best, flimsy and there was never any clear link given between Iraq and Al Qaeda because, of course, there was none. Nonetheless all of the typical establishment media from CNN to NYT was beating the war drums and unquestionably pitching the case for war to the American people working as little more than a government propaganda machine. The media in general is heavily biased towards establishment politicians. And I don't think it's exactly a secret why. How interested do you think companies like Time Warner and Comcast are in the social good? Guess who owns CNN and NBC, respectively. The problem is I think many people today, who think they're 'in the know', don't understand that they're being manipulated in the same way that Breitbart manipulates their viewers. In one way I think that's made organizations like CNN and the NYT far more harmful than, let's say, Fox News. Everybody with half a brain cell knew "Fair and Balanced" was tongue in cheek. Yet people think when they're reading something from more left leaning corporate media that it's suddenly genuinely fair and balanced.
The matter of the fact is that getting any sort of impartial reporting is becoming extremely challenging and the vast majority of people who'd lay claim to either side of the fence are becoming increasingly oblivious to this.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:26AM (2 children)
Little has changed in D.C.? I wish! D.C. hasn't been in this bad a shape anytime in the last 100 years. Even total Republican control in the early 2000s wasn't as bad then as now. The US is showing all the signs of relative decline. The Republican party in particular has switched from hard headed realism to peddlers of propaganda and fantasies of returning to a 1950s Golden Age. It's why the whole MAGA slogan resonated. That in combination with their gerrymandering and vote suppression tactics has handed the whole government to them. Last time the Republicans controlled everything, they threw fiscal prudence to the wind and went charging into Iraq. Iraq was a costly disaster. And now? We may blow billions on an idiotic border wall, and gut the rest of government to boost the military even more.
Meanwhile, the Democrats just can't seem to seal the deal and win majority status. They keep veering off course, turn all snotty, and bog down in corruption. Not the kind of blatantly illegal corruption, but a softer inept kind in which they somehow can't fix anything, not Wall St., not wealth inequality, not the job market, and not electoral fraud.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:44AM
The Republican party in particular has switched from hard headed realism to peddlers of propaganda and fantasies of returning to a 1950s Golden Age.
Well, it worked for Reagan, and he is revered as a model president.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:05PM
This is the thing, you see the two parties as substantively different. They're not.
I think politics in D.C. is really most effectively seen as good cop, bad cop. The republicans openly sell America to the highest bidder while using rhetoric of free market, deregulation, and personal accountability to justify. The democrats on the other hand act as if this is unthinkable and oppose it on social grounds, moral grounds, economic grounds and we have the basic outlines showing up for our tug of war. What you and many people miss however is that when push comes to shove democrats line up to sell out the country just as quickly. The TPP trade agreement is a great example here. There's really nothing in there that was good for the American worker at all. It was little more than a massive handout to multinational corporations. For one tiny fragment of the things in it, it was set to greatly expand the scope and scale of ISDS [wikipedia.org] agreements. ISDS clauses essentially allow a corporation to sue a government for, quite literally, doing anything that might negatively affect their 'right' to profit. These settlements would be resolved in opaque private tribunals. And in cases where the corporations win, it would override national law. This is how, for instance, Phillip Morris was able to sue the entire country of Urugay for having the audacity to put labeling and advertising restrictions on tobacco along with Australia because they had the audacity to put labeling and advertising restrictions on tobacco as well as doing awful things like preventing smoking in public places. Uruguay eventually came out on top (... after 6 years) but had they not, they would have had to have rolled back all their laws and also given Phillip Morris a massive chunk of taxpayer dollar in compensation "lost profits." ISDS clauses in effect let corporations overrule national sovereignty.
Now think about the fact that the TPP was being pushed hard by Obama and was a no-go topic for nearly all of the corporate media in the US. And what coverage it did receive had more spin than Ma Long's backhand. And as we could expect nearly all republicans duely signed up except for a handful running for immediate major office like Rand Paul. But when Obama needed some democrat votes to get our representatives to do things like override their own right to review and amend the bill, democrats dutifully signed on because that's totally something you should agree to...
Climate change agreements are another typical good cop, bad cop play in D.C. I could go into so much more detail but I suspect the TPP stuff alone has already made start to approach the tl/dr range for most folks.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:48PM (1 child)
"Hey China - feel free to pollute as much as you want and increase it as much as you want until 2030 when we'd like you to start rolling it back."
China is world’s largest investor in renewable energy [publicfinanceinternational.org]
China blazed ahead of the rest of the world in terms of investment in renewable energy last year, spending a total of $103bn, or 36% of the world total.
The country, notorious for its dangerous levels of pollution, invested more than the US ($44.1bn), the UK ($22.2bn) and Japan ($36.2bn), put together...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:27AM
"Largest investor" means nothing that matters. All that means is money spent. Money spend has nothing to do with how well that money was spent nor the amount of their pollution levels.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:45AM (1 child)
> The scary thought about a world hive-mind is that it means equal volume is given to all the voices in all aspects of thought.
IMHO, democracy (as conceived in the modern time, entirely different in Greek polis, some people go as far as saying the election method was randomized to avoid cronyism) gave equal vote to everybody so that the easily bought very poor could mess with the difficult to control "i have enough money to get by thanks" crowd. Democracy as the "best system money can buy", not as a joke but as a design goal. The revolution was about the industrial society getting rid of obstacles, not masses rising. After it has done the destruction, in fact, it is being retired.
Back to topic, the Hive mind will never be egalitarian, can never be egalitarian, because the effort to synchronize over decisions of an artificially conceived multicultural global mass is unsustainable mathematically.
Do you remember what they taught you about good software project? LOCALIZATION, MODULAR, CLEAR PROTOCOLS. Wonder what society is bent on instead? EU dictating the size of veggies? global finance? a couple factories flooded in Malaysia causing shortage of HD worldwide? Currernt society is an example of spaghetti code because spaghetti code never get you away from needing the programmers to fix it. And the programmers do not function because they are good, but because they know where spaghetti go.
We will never be in borg, we are ending up in systemd.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:35AM
IMHO, democracy (as conceived in the modern time, entirely different in Greek polis, some people go as far as saying the election method was randomized to avoid cronyism) gave equal vote to everybody so that the easily bought very poor could mess with the difficult to control "i have enough money to get by thanks" crowd. Democracy as the "best system money can buy", not as a joke but as a design goal. The revolution was about the industrial society getting rid of obstacles, not masses rising. After it has done the destruction, in fact, it is being retired.
You seem to skip very lightly over "money for support" aspect. While it is true that wealthy are buying support from the poor, the poor are getting something in exchange, and furthermore, there is a competition among various factions of the rich, driving the price of popular support up. Revolution was no different: the masses got something, the rich commoners got much more, gentry and class barriers were mostly removed, but the pattern is the same: the masses were bought with something. The masses could bargain for an even better deals, if they could organize without their leadership defecting to the other side (which routinely and even systematically happens). The society naturally forms a pyramid of the steepness equal to amount of humans one human can control. Retirement you are talking about is actually a balance between push for change (revision, or even just restoration of the original deal) and an active resistance by the beneficiaries of the deal in its present (d)evolved form. "Nice ... not as bad as it could become life you have in this here system. It would be a shame if it would break down and go to waste."
So, the future is gloom for the masses and their position will be going only to worse, unless there 'd be another new social power looming on horizon, offering a better deal in exchange for their support. Machiavellian A.I. , perhaps?
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Wednesday March 29 2017, @05:14PM
". This is already being shown in an exceptionally scary demonstration by the Trump administration"
You're right - the establishment government and 4th estate have never lied to the American people before. This is truly concerning.
Thankfully we can always trust the MSM. Don't forget - reading Wikileaks is actually illegal.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:11AM
What separates us now is that scientists do the science, religious do the religions so on and so on. If the internet truly does bring together all manner of thought into such a single point, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish those statements which are fact from those which are opinion.
I don't buy that at all.
If I read serious philosophy, I'm not left in a confused state as to what is opinion, what is fact, and what is really true.
It also has nothing at all to do with the constant incompetent lying of the POTUS.