Cultural Intelligence – Page 567 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/05/112014/05/12

Berto Jongman: Philosophers and Ubber-Technos Get Funding to Announce End of Humanity — And They Get It WRONG.

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me?

Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

Sometimes Stephen Hawking writes an article that both mentions Johnny Depp and strongly warns that computers are an imminent threat to humanity, and not many people really care. That is the day there is too much on the Internet. (Did the computers not want us to see it?)

Hawking, along with MIT physics professorMax Tegmark, Nobel laureateFrank Wilczek, and Berkeley computer science professor Stuart Russell ran a terrifying op-ed a couple weeks ago in The Huffington Post under the staid headline “Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines.” It was loosely tied to the Depp sci-fi thriller Transcendence, so that’s what’s happening there. “It's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction,” they write. “But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.”

And then, probably because it somehow didn’t get much attention, the exact piece ran again last week in The Independent, which went a little further with the headline: “Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—but Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?” Ah, splendid. Provocative, engaging, not sensational. But really what these preeminent scientists go on to say is not not sensational.

“An explosive transition is possible,” they continue, warning of a time when particles can be arranged in ways that perform more advanced computations than the human brain. “As Irving Good realized in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a ‘singularity.'”

Get out of here. I have a hundred thousand things I am concerned about at this exact moment. Do I seriously need to add to that a singularity?

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Philosophers and Ubber-Technos Get Funding to Announce End of Humanity — And They Get It WRONG.”

2014/05/102014/05/10

Berto Jongman: Being Anonymous a Virtual Crime

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military

Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail

The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become

John Naughton

The Observer, 10 May 2014

When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – “Orwellian” is the word that people generally reach for.

But “Kafkaesque” seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”, but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. “What's Kafkaesque,” he once told the New York Times, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”

A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.

Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.

. . . . . . . .

In preparing for the birth of her child, Vertesi was nothing if not thorough. Instead of using a web-browser in the normal way – ie leaving a trail of cookies and other digital tracks, she used the online service Tor to visit babycenter.com anonymously. She shopped offline whenever she could and paid in cash. On the occasions when she had to use Amazon, she set up a new Amazon account linked to an email address on a personal server, had all packages delivered to a local locker and made sure only to pay with Amazon gift cards that had been purchased with cash.

The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite's equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they're obviously money launderers.

. . . . . . . .

Even more sobering, though, are the implications of Professor Vertesi's decision to use Tor as a way of ensuring the anonymity of her web-browsing activities. She had a perfectly reasonable reason for doing this – to ensure that, as a mother-to-be, she was not tracked and targeted by online marketers.

But we know from the Snowden disclosures and other sources that Tor users are automatically regarded with suspicion by the NSA et al on the grounds that people who do not wish to leave a digital trail are obviously up to no good. The same goes for people who encrypt their emails.

Read full article.

2014/05/102014/05/10

Anthony Judge: Investing Attention Essential to Viable Growth Radical self-reflexive reappropriation of financial skills and insights

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Gift Intelligence

Investing Attention Essential to Viable Growth

Radical self-reflexive reappropriation of financial skills and insights

Introduction
Beyond investing attention in attention economics
Psychology of investing attention as a missing dimension
Investing attention in interesting opportunities
Varieties of investment and their implication for investment of attention
Alternative “alternative investments” — of attention?
Reconciling varieties of investment of attention: a periodic table?
Cognitive implication and engagement through investing attention
Investment strategies, portfolios, risk and requisite attention
Attentive reinterpretation of glossaries of financial terms
Individual reframing of global investment of attention
References

2014/05/102014/05/10

SchwartzReport: Cheney Rules

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Here is a very good assessment discussing what I think is wrong with American foreign policy first under Bush and, now, under Obama. In my view Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are mass murderers no less than John Wayne Gacy, Jr., and ought to be in prison. It is it any wonder we are hated around the world?

‘We’re All Cheneyites Now’
MAJOR TODD PIERCE, USA (RET.) – Consortium News

Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Dick Cheney’s ideology of U.S. global domination has become an enduring American governing principle regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, a reality reflected in the recent Ukrainian coup, the 2011 ‘regime change” in Libya and drone wars waged in several countries by President Barack Obama.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Cheney Rules”

2014/05/092014/05/09

Rickard Falkvinge: Ruling Class War on Truth

Cultural Intelligence

The Ruling Class Wages War On Truth Itself

Civil Liberties – Henrik Alexandersson: The ruling class and the governments are waging a war against truth itself. Governments are demanding control over citizens and their communications. Governments don’t hesitate to persecute and imprison people who tell the truth about what’s going on, defending citizens’ rights. There is reason to worry.

Chelsea Manning gave the West the true picture about what’s happening in the wars waged in our name. She gave us the truth about the political and diplomatical double-crossing that happens when powerholders believe that the people aren’t watching. This was punished with 35 years in prison.

WikiLeaks distributed this knowledge to the world. The U.S. Adminsitration reacted with fury against the truth coming out. American politicians have threatened the Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, with the death penalty – and it is unclear what would happen if the United States would manage to sink its claws into him.

When the United States lacked legal options to punish WikiLeaks, the administration convinced its friends in Big Business to cut its payment channels. The credit card companies, banks, financial institutions, and PayPal became a weapon for Power, when Power wanted to proceed beyond the Law.

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower on the United States NSA, is one of the planet’s most hunted individuals – for telling the truth about the global mass surveillance under construction by (among others) the NSA, the GCHQ, and the Swedish equivalent, the FRA. He has been branded a traitor for telling the people at large what the ruling political and bureaucratic class is actually doing.

And now we’re being told that European politicians, diplomats, and reporters are at risk of prosecution in the United States if they’re digging too deeply into Snowden’s revelations. If they learn too much about what’s actually going on. If they seek the truth.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Ruling Class War on Truth”

2014/05/082014/05/08

Berto Jongman: General Stanley McChrystal — Stop Classifying Information, Start Sharing Information – The Military Case

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Military

Secrecy as part of the existing DNA — and a major cancer.

When General Stanley McChrystal started fighting al Qaeda in 2003, information and secrets were the lifeblood of his operations. But as the unconventional battle waged on, he began to think that the culture of keeping important information classified was misguided and actually counterproductive. In a short but powerful talk McChrystal makes the case for actively sharing knowledge.

QUOTE: “In a tightly coupled world, it's hard to predict who will need what information.”

QUOTE: “Change from ‘who needs to know' to ‘who doesn't know.'”

QUOTE: “Information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it.”

VIDEO (6:44)

Interactive transcript (1 language)

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: General Stanley McChrystal — Stop Classifying Information, Start Sharing Information – The Military Case”

2014/05/082014/05/08

Tom Atlee: “Dark Google,” privacy and power

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Impotency

As the information age and big data colonize everything in life – expanding now into reality itself – we face an erosion not only of privacy but of choice. Even as we think we have greater choice and power, really important choices and power are being subtly stolen from us by folks who don't want us to know or do anything about it. We need to take back our lives while we still can.

“Dark Google”, privacy and power

Dear friends,

Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes told us that “Knowledge is power.” We need to integrate their insight with Sir John Acton's observation that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In this runaway Information Age we need to realize that one-way concentrations of knowledge power are dangerous when they are not answerable, not responsive to oversight and feedback. The article below, “Dark Google”, makes this point powerfully regarding Google and the NSA. The author, Harvard's Shoshana Zuboff, is eminently qualified to issue this warning.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: “Dark Google,” privacy and power”