Breaking Walls of Hate and Building Walls of Understanding
It is always heartening to receive feedback on one’s blog. There is nothing more frustrating for a journalist when he finds that nobody reads his articles. It does not matter if the reader does not agree with what is written. At least, the writer knows that his opposition has read his articles. One can write away to the world with quixotic zeal but very often to no avail. I had a response this evening on my cell phone from a source least expected.
We are ordinary people yearning for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Since Israel was established, this country never knew a day of peace. The hate between Israel and her neighbours runs so deep that any form of compromise or discussions on achieving a peace settlement is ever evasive.
A few months ago I received an email from a 30 year old lady graduate who studied computer engineering at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. She lives in Tulkarem which is near Bat Chefer where I live. She had picked up my blog site from an MSN search. She told me how she has become interested in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. She was very moved by my Ramadan greeting card to the Muslim Community which I had published on my blog at the start of the Moslem Fast, Ramadan.
While she appreciated my greeting card, she also told me about her frustrations as a Palestinian being denied basic human rights because of the Israeli occupation. She mentioned the road blocks, check posts and the degrading body searches that many Palestinians undergo before crossing into Israel. She asked me about my attitude towards Israel being a racist state, the apartheid wall, the refugee problem, the occupation and the illegal settlements. Her family came from an Arab village called Jatt which is a few kilometers from Bat Chefer. She told me that she couldn’t get a permit to visit Jatt where members of her family still live. She cannot understand why people like me are free to immigrate to Israel from our former countries of origin while she and her family are denied the right to visit their families who remained behind in Israel since 1948. Her email was bitter.
Of course, I explained the various reasons why the Palestinians cannot visit Israel without security clearance. I sent her links on the internet on the history of the conflict hoping that she would gain an understanding of the Israeli point of view. I also went to great lengths explaining why Israel is not a racist state giving an example where I could to refute that claim.
That same evening she phoned me on my cell phone to thank me for the correspondence and we had a long sincere chat on the hopeless situation between our two peoples. It was different chatting one to one rather than getting emails. We found that we had much in common in that both of us believe in the fight for human rights for both our peoples and for an end to the conflict and our common desire for peace, dignity and coexistence. Both of us oppose the occupation since the 1967 Six Day June War between Israel and her Arab neighbours.
I was very surprised to receive the phone call from her. I appreciated her boldness in phoning me. I told her that she must feel free to express her opinions to me even if they may sound jarring and hard for me to hear. This is the only way we can understand each other. We must have chatted for close to half an hour. I was amazed at her excellent Arabic tainted English. We ended our conversation with “Inshallah!†and that impressed her. We promised to remain in touch and try to find ways whereby we can encourage dialogue amongst ourselves.
I do believe that we must try to find moderate Palestinians with whom we can communicate. Despite all the anti-Israel rhetoric that I heard, I somehow managed to portray to her my understanding of her feelings about the hopeless situation of her people and empathize with her. She thanked me for the time spent in our conversation. She felt that she had made a new friend. I promised to send her more internet sites that would give her a wider perspective on our problem.
Now nearly six months later, we are still carrying on our dialogue on a regular basis. We discuss our hopes, frustrations and the futility of this conflict. Hopefully, more people living in the Middle East will emulate this example of Internet dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis in the future. Dialogue between people on both sides of the conflict can move mountains where governments have failed.
What happens when companies become number one?
(this was written as a comment on Frank Shilling’s blog. Regarding Google making a deal with Dell to install by default what looks like spyware in Dell’s computers) As time goes by, Google will start to pay the price for being number one. Their previous (current?) motto “Don’t be evil” just makes matters worse.
I think Google is being led too agressively towards the money making side of things, and the guys in the PR departments have to deal with these storms later. They should balance their priorities and public perception before they make this kind of deals. Today it is google, but expect more evil deals in the months to come.
I think that the idealistic spirit on which the company was built is quickly vanishing.
Some days ago I predicted in my personal blog that at some point, Google may well be forced to split up somehow. I know it is an outrageous claim today, but most people and companies underestimate the power of public perception. We can see the public’s perception of Google changing very rapidly before our eyes, with and without reason. People hate number ones, that’s why -responding to a previous comment- they’ll go heavier on Google than on Yahoo making the .cm deal.
We just saw all this with Microsoft some years ago. Same thing:
1) company offers quality
2) company grows and becomes market leader
3) people start to dislike them (with or without reason). At the same time, due simpply to their speed of growth, they start to take the “wrong” decisions, and their corporate image suffers
4) they make enemies all over the place, since they became so big that they start to choke the niche niche players
5) they may be sued (it has already started with Viacom) or their products boycotted in many different ways (remember McDonalds related riots in France)
6) once they are sued, the judges are influenced by public perception against the company (although they shouldn’t be) and the company is seriously and excessively fined (”after all, they can pay”) or forced to split in one way or another. That was the beginning of the end for Msoft (that and many strategic mistakes along the way)
In essence, most people in this society, as Mark J. in his recent article puts it, hate number ones. It is psychological and unavoidable. Human nature. Will always be so.
Domainers and other successful people would do well to keep a low profile. If the “what is in it for me” question is increasingly unanswered for most people, expecting them to react in any other way presuposses most individuals have an intelligence and good heart that unfortunately, most lack.
regards
Javier
Trendirama.com
The power of blogs
Apple stock plunged to the tune of $4 billion in only six minutes after a hoax email sent to Engadget was published on their site on May 16, 2007. The email detailed that the iPhone would be seriously delayed and would not meet it’s production deadline in June 2007
Israel and Apartheid South Africa
There are Islamist fundamentalist sympathizers who compare Israel to apartheid South Africa ad nauseam. As I had mentioned, in a previous post that I wrote on my blog site about a year ago, nothing could be further from the truth. Those who wish Israel’s destruction make the comparison.
I had lived in South Africa during the height of the apartheid period. We had experienced a Special Branch search in our home because of purchasing a book on South Africa’s Third Reich written by Brian Bunting. Some friends, living in London during the 1960s, sent the book to us in a plain cover. The book was published in 1964. The South African Police hounded those who opposed the apartheid government without mercy. I remember my late father, Chaim Eli Klein, burning many banned political books because of fears of police raids that could occur at any time.
Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu are great people and they both had achieved very much in the liberation of South Africa from fascism and apartheid. Both these leaders made a tremendous contribution to uniting all South Africans irrespective of their skin colour, race or creed. They found a common denominator in all South Africans who share a common homeland and destiny. All South Africans owe a tremendous amount of gratitude towards these incredible leaders.
The frivolous use of the term “ethnic cleansing†of the Palestinians when referring to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians shows total ignorance of the situation. If anything, there is an attempt by Hezbollah and Hamas (had they been stronger) to ethnically cleanse Israel of the Jews. Sheik Nasrallah has made this more than clear in his rabble-rousing addresses to his supporters and in his terrorist activities against the Jews even beyond the borders of Israel.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to give a chance to those with authority vested in them by the apartheid SA regime, who abused human rights, to obtain forgiveness from those who had suffered under white rule. Many whites who were involved in suppressing blacks came out of the cupboard and confessed the cruelties that they had committed against their black victims. This commission was highly successful and played a part in the healing process to unite South Africans in a common destiny. All races, despite the terrible bloody history of white supremacy, were prepared to forgive and rebuild the new South Africa from scratch.
As great as these two leaders are, they had one failing. Their knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian problem is poor and inadequate. Their intentions are good but they fail to understand the major difference between Israel’s problems with the Palestinians and with the fundamentalist Islamist terrorist groups who are committed to Israel’s total destruction. These Islamist terrorists are highly motivated in wreaking havoc and terror on innocent Israelis irrespective of their creed.
I had witnessed cruelty to blacks who happened to be in “white areas†at the wrong time and who never had their passbooks (reference books or identity document “dompasâ€) on their person. The police arrested them and their white employers bailed them out the following day when they showed the police the relevant papers proving that they were under their employment.
Under Apartheid South Africa, Blacks, Coloureds (people of mixed race), Moslems and Indians had very few basic human rights. There were so many draconian laws that prevented these people from competing in the employment market. There was the Job Reservation Act that reserved professional jobs for whites. There was the Groups Areas Act, the Mixed Marriages Act that prevented people of different colour from living in select White areas. Whites and blacks were forbidden to marry and if they did, they were sentenced to prison.
There was total separation between whites and blacks. Law enforced this. Despite all these travesties of justice, goodwill between the various races in South Africa remained a uniting factor. The desire to end apartheid by all races won the day. South Africa was fortunate that they had Nelson Mandela as leader. He had served so many years in prison and came out without any malice towards anybody. He even hosted his former adversaries who imprisoned him when he became President of South Africa. This proves his greatness.
South Africa’s new leaders are unable to accept the fact that Israel’s problem with her Palestinian neighbours is existential. There are not even the basic ingredients for some kind of rapprochement with the Palestinians. The ruling ANC (African National Congress) never had a manifesto that promoted destruction of the whites like Hamas and Hezbollah that has destruction of the Jews and Israel as an essential goal (genocide). Their manifesto is filled with hate for Israel and there is nothing even hinting at recognizing Israel’s right to exist let alone making peace with Israel. Where are the parallels between apartheid South Africa and Israel? Only a wild imagination of the likes of Israel-bashers could find a perverse parallel. There is no racism in the ANC manifesto in contrast to the Islamist terrorist groups’ manifestos.
Much has been written about the rights of Arab citizens in Israel in previous posts and I shall not repeat that again. Suffice it to say, Israel’s Arabs have equal rights, have representation in the Knesset and there are no separate facilities such as for “Jews Only†or signs such as “Arabs not allowedâ€. In apartheid South Africa, signs such us “Europeans or Whites only†on park benches and public facilities was commonplace. Every public place, including public telephone booths, was segregated. The list was endless. Apartheid signs on buses insured very little seating accommodation for blacks.
Much remains to be achieved in Arab human rights in Israel. It is not one hundred per cent perfect. However, there is no discriminatory legislation on the statute books preventing Israeli Arabs from competing in the job market or any professional spheres.
Israel is fighting a war for its survival. This has been the case since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Those who use the apartheid South African parallel are delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist. There is no parallel whatsoever. The South African experience is not applicable to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The basic ingredient – the desire for coexistence and an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is not there. There is no desire from Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist. The suffering of the Palestinian People is due to the desire of their Hamas leadership to carry on terror against Israel’s citizens. The rain of Qassam rockets in the south and Katyushas in the north is not a fight against “the occupation†but an attempt to bring Israel to her knees.
The ANC never used violence against innocent people to promote their liberation struggle against apartheid. Suicide bombings, kidnappings, murders and blowing up people in their daily business was never part of their manifesto to achieve human rights. The “brutal oppression†of the Palestinian people is a result of the violence that the Palestinians have wrought on Israel. Israel has a right to protect herself from Palestinian violence against her citizens. Hezbollah in the north in Lebanon and Hamas in the south in Gaza are responsible for the retaliations that Israel has wrought on their respective peoples.
Even if Israel carries out further disengagements without any watertight peace treaties with the Palestinians, the vacuum created will result in the rearmament of the Palestinians with Qassams and Hezbollah Katyushas in their quest to destroy Israel. It is not a matter of “liberation from the occupation†anymore. Their purpose is to establish an undemocratic caliphate or fundamentalist Islamic state replacing Israel. How does this compare with apartheid South Africa?
How long before copyright laws change to adapt to the times?
“”may make it more attractive to advertisers than conventional TV, because viewers can’t risk leaving their screens to make a cup of tea during every commercial break.”"
That’s old and wishful thinking, in my view. Most consumers of video on the internet are early adopters, familiar with technology. As soon as one particular system gets mainstream (e.g msoft products, gmail, skype) it will be hacked, or tweaked by users, to see and do with it exactly what they want…and the information on how to do this, will be spread overnight and access facilitated to “newbies” through graphic interfaces that don’t take much technical knowledge -or none at all- to be mastered. (e.g. serials2000)
The shift in consumptions of media patterns is even more profound than most people think.
I am not sure what’s the next way for publishers, musicians, writers, to make money, I am deciphering that as we go along, but I have the strong impression that from now on, anything that is digital, will be free.
Of course this is a strong assumption and I have no proof today of this. But look at what happened with Pirate Bay, what happened to the HDVD key on digg…the younger generations, that are the ones fueling these trends, don’t want to pay anymore, are resouceful, and have tools of mass distribution of knowledge that make any kind of locked system totally irrelevant in hours (e.g. Vista OS). It only takes one decoder getting around it, posting it on Digg or similar clone, and that’s it.
The magnitude of this change, for its speed and span, is leaving us in awe. Certainly many thousands of people will be out of work. Certainly many TV stations will go broke. Certainly wages in the content producer industry may well go down for everyone…the social change in developed countries will be phenomenal. Copyrights laws will have to change, since you can’t effectively protect your content around the world, prosecuting every single uploader when next day that content is back up online be it in YouTube, Pirate Bay or Emule.
However, all this doesn’t mean that it’ll be the end of content, as some argue. Writers love their craft, and they won’t stop. So do musicians and other artists. They won’t stop producing content overnight. Real artists will keep on producing even if nobody pays them for it. Some even if they have to pay for it. Producing art and communicating are basic human needs that have been with us for millions of years and won’t dissapear just like that, no matter what big corporations say to scare the populace and protect their content.
However, getting rich out of that content alone will be much more difficult, if not impossible, in the future.
If we don’t give our content free, someone else will do (e.g. hotornot, linux…) somehow, somewhere. And that will be available to us all at the click of a button.
Now the interesting thing is, where will jobs be created to allow the producers of content to keep on producing for free in their spare time?
That’s the question of our times, not if things will be free.
If it can be uploaded, it can somehow be copied. If it can be copied, it will be copied. If it is copied, it’ll be free.
Good news: we’ll have a whole world of knowledge and entertainment as we’ve never seen it before, anywhere in the world, no matter how much money we have, when we turn on our network connecting device.
Bad news: we may not have the money to buy or switch on that device in the first place.
In any case, business leaders should already be trying to adapt, instead of trying to resist the inevitable.
Regards,
Javier Marti
Drug maker payments to psychiatrists
From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold.
Those who took the most money from makers of atypicals tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often, the data suggest. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from atypical makers from 2000 to 2005 appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who received less or no money.
Next time you are prescribed something, you know why it may be…perhaps the psychologically unhealthy person is not you, but your doctor.
How to make wealth, from Paul Graham
A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don’t see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.
http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Inflation, Dow 13K and the Second Great Depression
By Michael Nystrom
When I was about 9 years old, my father took my elder sister and me to see a performance by a famous magician called Blackstone. What I remember most about the show is when Blackstone, with a flourish of his cape, made an elephant appear onstage out of thin air. It was an astonishing feat, and the crowd - including me - went wild with applause. I had no idea how he did it. After the show however, as we were exiting the theater, my elder sister said, “I didn’t see what was so great about that elephant. It just walked onto the stage and everyone started clapping.”
My sister’s revelation was just as amazing as the trick itself, which suddenly made perfect sense. Blackstone had used some kind of sleight of hand, distracting the audience over here while he got the elephant to walk on stage over there. With this simple, well-known magician’s tactic, he managed to fool just about everyone.
Yesterday, as the Dow “smashed its all time high,” closing above 13,000 for the first time in history, I was strangely reminded of Blackstone’s performance that day some thirty years ago. The Dow’s current levitating act is the result of another well-known sleight of hand trick used by central bankers. It’s called inflation. Even so, most everyone is mesmerized by the performance. Everyone seems transfixed, clapping in amazement at this spectacular feat.
But at the margins of society, far from the action on Wall Street,
a silent depression has already begun – one that is affecting
the most vulnerable members of our society. This depression
is documented in two books that I recently finished reading: Tamara
Draut’s Strapped:
Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead,
and Anya Kamenetz’s Generation
Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young. Both
were recently released in paperback, and I was able to find the
hardcopy editions at the local library.
What both of these books confirm, though painstaking research and in painful detail, is what today’s younger generation has already long known: Simply surviving in this hyper competitive world is harder than ever, to say nothing of getting ahead. As Draut points out, a college degree is the new high school diploma; to be considered for any kind of a “good job,” you’ve got to have one. The problem is that college tuition costs have been rising three to four times as fast as inflation for the past few decades, and financial aid hasn’t kept up. Whereas the Baby Boom generation had the hat-trick advantage of cheap tuition, ample grants and scholarships, and a booming economy providing well paying jobs upon graduation, the younger generation has had none of these advantages.
Financial aid has shifted increasingly towards loans instead of grants. Because of higher tuition costs and generalized chronic inflation (in spite of official Federal government statistics), housing and food are more expensive too. Many kids who want to go to college simply can’t because they just can’t afford it. Of those who can cobble together enough money – and here I’m talking about working class families, not the privileged minority whose families can college without much pain - many have to work full time to make ends meet. And even then, in this inflation-ravaged world, it still isn’t enough. So they turn to credit cards, which are amply peddled on college campuses to bright-eyed, green newbies who don’t know a thing about debt or personal finance.
Welcome to higher education - at the school of hard knocks.
Today it is not uncommon for young adults to graduate with unmanageable thousands of dollars in combined student loans and credit card debt. “The next generation is starting their economic race 50 yards behind the starting line,” says Elizabeth Warren, co-author of The Two Income Trap. The debt is unmanageable because good jobs are hard to find. This is not your father’s economy. Sure, there are plenty of jobs available. How does $8 per hour sound, no benefits? As Kamenets, a recent Yale grad points out:
…when the Boomers were entering the workforce in 1970, the nation’s largest private employer was General Motors. They paid an average wage of $17.50 an hour in today’s dollars. The largest employer in the post-industrial economy is Wal-Mart. Their average wage? Eight dollars an hour. The service-driven economy is also a youth-driven economy, burning young people’s energy and potential over a deep-fat fryer…The entire labor market is downgrading toward what was once entry level.
In case you missed it, this week GM was dethroned by Toyota as the world’s top automobile producer. Earlier this year, in an effort to shore up American manufacturing, the Bush Administration considered reclassifying hamburger flipping as “manufacturing." The times indeed are changing, and the experiences of the younger generation shine a light on the terrifying leading edge of that change.
The Second Great Depression is Here
For the past five years I’ve been saying ‘The second great depression will not be televised.’ In addition to paying homage to the 60’s civil rights activist and poet Gil Scott Heron (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised), it is a jab at the inadequacy of the mainstream news to actually report the news. The composition of the American economy is changing in fundamental ways — ways that will not, in the long run, be favorable to most Americans if current trends continue. The younger generation is simply the first to bear the brunt of these changes, and as a result, is the first to grow up poorer than the generation preceding it. This, ladies and gentlemen, is known as national economic decline.
This is unpleasant news, and is therefore completely unacceptable to the mainstream media. It’s easier to sell the idea that the younger generation is just plain lazy, stupid and hopelessly screwed up. After all, didn’t you hear? The Dow just hit 13K! How can the economy be bad?
As a result, Draut and Kamenetz take the brunt of Boomer criticism from elders who dismiss their claims and only hear what they believe to be whining. But all these authors are doing is telling the story of their generation, pointing out how times have changed, and just how difficult it is to be young, broke, in debt and with little hope for the future. To me, it is the story of a second great depression. College, housing and food are more expensive, taxes, debt and interest rates are higher, (In spite of the fact that official rates hover near historic lows, one late or missed payment by a financially strapped young person sends credit card interest rates soaring across the board — 29% or higher), wages are lower, competition is fiercer and most of the good jobs have moved away. Given the facts, it is amazing there is not more complaining or real demands for change. Draut points out that this younger generation was thoroughly “Reaganized” – raised under a steady diet of conservative rhetoric which they have fully internalized: The government is the problem, the free market is the solution – if you fail, it is your own fault, so don’t complain and don’t ask for help. Even though youths 18 – 24 are the most likely to hold minimum wage jobs, giving them a poverty rate of 30% in 2000, we’ve heard pitifully little about this in the MSM.
But poverty is a big impediment to getting higher education. Kamenetz points out that the nationwide high school graduation rate peaked in 1970 at 77%. It was around 67% in 2004….For every 100 young people who begin their freshman year of high school, just 38 eventually enroll in college, and only 18 graduate in a timely manner. This is especially worrisome as the world continues its march towards a knowledge-based economy. America is clearly falling behind.
The question of particular interest to readers of all ages should be whether the current decline in living standards is a one-generation anomaly, or the start of a new American trend. The problems afflicting the young – the outsourced jobs, the low wages and high levels of debt – are increasingly moving up the generational ladder. Just ask the entire city of Detroit, where a house can now be purchased for less than the price of a new car. This year also marks the first time in history that the median American home price is likely to decline.
Transition Ahead
What these two important books demonstrate clearly is that at the margins – where all the interesting economic (and other) activity takes place – the US economy is no longer able to provide its citizens with an increasing standard of living. Having read Jeremy Rifkin’s 1992 classic The End of Work a few years ago, the only surprise to me is that his scary predictions of the disappearing jobs are actually coming true. And with “Outsourcing 2.0,” things are only bound to get worse. Yet as Boomers retire – the first crop starts retiring next year – it is young people that they will be relying on (i.e. taxing) in order to maintain their disproportionately wealthy lifestyle. A Generational Storm indeed looms on the horizon.
What will this mean for the future? Neither Draut nor Kamenetz offer a comprehensive view, but James Fallows had an excellent piece in the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago that remains relevant today: Countdown to a Meltdown, a look back from the year 2016.
Lack of Awareness
To my disappointment, neither author goes deep enough into the root
causes of the inflation that makes life for young people so difficult:
The Federal Reserve System. We all know by now that the Fed
has a “printing
press” with which it can mint money, but like the 70%
of Americans who don’t know that plastic is made from oil,
the majority of Americans don’t realize that a fiat money
printing press is the cause of currency inflation. The result
of this inflation is more expensive food, housing, college tuition,
and (surprise!) Dow 13K. You certainly won’t read about
that in the New York Times. The information
is, however, widely and freely available on the internet, as my
friend Charles
Zentay points out. All it takes is some thinking to figure
out what is really going on.
Not surprisingly, many of Kamenetz’s interviewees regret ever having gone to college in the first place. They’re saddled with debt and working in jobs that are completely unrelated to what they studied – if they even graduated at all. As a result, she makes the daring recommendation that kids think hard about whether college is right for them or not. Before deciding to become an indentured servant to the bank in exchange for a college diploma, she recommends investigating this book: 300 Best Jobs Without a Four-Year Degree. The key point, which I wholeheartedly agree with is to look at the landscape of the world, see it with clear eyes and think! Don’t go to college just because everyone is doing it and because your parents want you to. The world is changing and navigating it will require a new set skills and street smarts – smarts you’re likely not going to get in school. More on this in future installments. Sign up here to be notified.
I urge everyone to go to the library or the bookstore and take a look at the books. For young people, I give the nod to Kamenetz’s book. Her writing is more urgent, more suited, I think to the younger crowd.
Each generation reshapes the country in its own image. The Boomer generation is the current cultural center, but its cultural power will soon be in decline, and as they fade from the national spotlight, a new generation is rising. Based on Strauss & Howe’s generational analysis in The Fourth Turning, the current young generation will likely be shaped by an extreme crisis – brought on by the exiting Boomer generation - sometime quite soon. It is from this crisis that a new America will be born – perhaps it will be the Golden Age that Ravi Batra writes of, or the complete reorganization that Peter Drucker predicted in 1993.
Every few hundred years in Western Civilization, there occurs a sharp transformation . . . Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself - its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world, and the people born can’t even imagine the world in which their grandparents live and into which their own parents were born.
We are currently living through just such a transformation.
Conclusion
Thirteen is considered an unlucky number in American culture. Strangely, most American buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor. Both the income tax and the Federal Reserve were established in 1913. The much-maligned Generation X is the thirteenth born on American soil. It makes me wonder just what Dow 13K will bring.
Getting back to the theme with which I began this piece, Dow 13K is a kind of sleight of hand, brought about by inflation, and distracting the majority of people from the true condition of the economy. Inflation makes the economy less prosperous, not more. If the younger generation is any indication, prepare yourselves, for the times indeed they are a changin’.
The way that is bright seems dull;
The way that leads forward seems to lead backward;
The way that is even seems rough.
The highest virtue is like the valley;
The sheerest whiteness seems sullied;
Ample virtue seems defective;
- Tao Te Ching 41
Michael’s article was originally published here
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Click Here if you would Like to Upload your Brain and Upgrade to Human 2.0!
Yes! …it’s looking more likely that upgrading to human 2.0 will be the next great step in human Bio-evolution before the idea of Singularity occurs. Singularity by the way is supposed to occur around 2045 assuming all targets are met and Singularity basically means non-biological intelligence or AI (Artificial Intelligence) takes over and exceeds biological intelligence; thereby evolution of human kind becomes non-biological thereafter.
Does all this sound far fetched?
Well, that’s what I first thought when I picked up a copy of James Martin’s “Meaning of the 21st Century” a highly recommended book! James gives us an overall snapshot of human development in the 21st century, mostly in terms or social, biological, technological, environmental and global economics. The book infers to GNR (Genetics, Nano-Technology and Robotics) quite frequently as this is quite clearly our next step in human development. It was by reading this book that I first learnt about the “Singularity” so I decided to carry out further research. Further research on the web, led me to a highly elite group of techno-scientists, philosophers and others interested in the Singularity, convened at a thought provoking seminal conference at Stanford, California in August 2006, to discuss the viability of Singularity occuring.
I watched with great curiosity the 3 to 5 hour video seminar and what struck me was, they all conceded that singularity will most certainly occur; the only difference was the timescale! Ray Kurzweil the most eminent Singularitarian, reckons we will reach singularity by 2045, fifteen years after brains on the computer passes the so called “Turing Testâ€. Turing test which is anticipated around 2029 is when I could not tell the difference between your cognitive thoughts in person, and your cognitive thoughts on the computer or internet!! Anyways, some at Stanford reckoned singularity will not occur until 2100 or further on. So maybe I could buy so more time…perhaps!
So what should a lay man with modest intelligence like myself think? After a lot of my research in the last several weeks, I reckon we would certainly have the first set of humans uploading their brains to the internet within the next 10 years at most! This is very likely to occur due to exponential technological growth at enormous speeds. Think about it! …within the last 3 years alone, we now have blogs, wikis, ipods, social networks like My space and You tube, Me.tv a new roll out will allow anyone to pretty much start a syndicated video/tv channel and mobile internet is going to be massive! And the next trend in my opinion is Virtual Reality. I believe all social networks will start taking place in virtual reality environments. Very soon, I can imagine inviting my friends in California on My space, to hangout with me over coffee at my local Star bucks here in Bristol, UK and it will feel very real indeed. Do not doubt this sort of thing, its coming or already here, it’s only a question of which social network offers me this virtual reality opportunity first!
Oh by the way, the Daily Mail newspaper here in the UK wrote an article just a week ago alerting us all to get ready for the first set of Robots! …remember iRobot? well, the Daily Mail reckons we will soon have these robots as child minders, prison wardens and other communal services, and in only 5 years time! Even if the first set of robots are clumsy and fall over themselves at first, I’m pretty certain they will get smarter and smarter over months and years once introduced in to the human system. The same newspaper also suggested some of us will evolve into Super Humans in coming years, at first I didn’t quite get it until I read James Martin’s Meaning of the 21st Century, where he suggests the first set of human brain uploads will occur within the next 10 years and lead to more global excitement than the Internet itself. The idea is, those of us who opt to upload our brains become far more intelligent beings than those who do not upload. Once you upload your brain to the internet, you essentially become super intelligent like computers and are consequently capable of carrying out extraordinary tasks, far more efficiently. For instance, you could perform much better at predicting stock price movements and act on impulse accordingly; thereby making a fortune for yourself and the firm you work for. You may be a super surgeon capable of identifying human ailments even before they are likely to occur, thereby your surgery services are the most sought after locally..etc etc.. in any professional field.
James Martin suggests super humans will be in high demand and earn fantastic salaries than normal human beings and through all this it is quite possible that super humans will live much longer, perhaps an extra 100 years or so or maybe even forever if you believe Ray Kurzweil, a singularitarian. All this happens because the new “Super Human Race” learns how to effectively adapt and deploy its newly gained intelligence over time. This also leads to sustainable and healthier lifestyles, more environmentally friendly humans and effective space exploration leading to new cosmos colonization’s. Human 2.0 it is suggested may not even need the physical body at all times as we do in human 1.0. Super Humans may simply morph between the physical body and virtual space as it suits. Hey! they figured everything is pretty much controlled by the brain. Hence, if your brain now resides in cyberspace, why even bother very much with the inferior wear and tear of the physical body! (Read: http://marshallbrain.com/discard1.htm)
So, what are you going to do when this new form of technology arrives within a decade huh?
Let me give you a clue:
Many thousands of years ago, all human beings came from a continent we call Africa. Over time, human beings evolved and started a massive migration west wards out of Africa into Europe, Asia and other continents. I believe this massive migration inevitably led to all kinds of intelligent adaptations as human beings now had to get used to harsher and colder environments in the west. His mind was forced to innovate in order to stay alive and in the process, all kinds of advanced civilizations emerged out of Africa…hence the west today.
The only problem is, he looked down on the beings he left behind in Africa and sometimes exploited them to further his own self-development. If a new Super Human species or race were to evolve this century as I think it would, its unlikely to exploit other beings along racial lines this time, instead it is more likely to exploit along knowledgeable lines. Therefore, I doubt very much that Human 2.0 will give a damn for Human 1.0 unless we entirely discard the aggressive gene before he upgrades!
That’s my 2 cents today.
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About Javier Marti
As an independent strategy consultant, futurist, speaker and founder of Trendirama.com Consulting, Javier is dedicated to help organizations, small businesses and individuals to optimize systems, increase profits and make better choices in business and in life. He is the author of the book "Mobile, Domains & The Future"
When not consulting for clients, Javier shares his knowledge and experience through information-packed, yet entertaining presentations in a wide range of subjects in English and Spanish.
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