Sunday, 22 December 2024

 

Subject: Population growth the true conundrum

As the population of the world expands to 8.3 billion from 1 billion in 1800 it's obvious that given the constraints of the globe to feed us that we are on a calamitous trajectory.
The Wold Health Authority have warned of pandemics, the scientists have projected glockenspiel warming and crop failures and yet we still continue to worry about the immediate future and who will win the League this year.
Child mortality is outpaced by child birth and the resultant call for aid from the rich to the poor. The Web has brought it all into our living rooms with calls for charity ranging from child impoverishment to maimed donkeys all whilst the same old malcontents try to eradicate each other.
Perhaps the only true humanitarian cause is to limit population, much as the Chinese tried to do but with more finesse. Can it still be a right to have a child if you don't have the means, these fundamental rights that were never fundamental but rather selfish and self serving ( perhaps the proper meaning of fundamental)
"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous prejudice or, take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end it".
Listening to Elon Musk pronounce his fear over the uncontrolled growth of Artificial Intelligence, his acknowledgement, that the gene is out of the bottle and that's it's only a matter of time before we humans are relegated and made subservient.
My question is that given the poor job we have made of our opportunities, other than the odd epoch here and there do we not deserve to be superseded even if the new category of human doesn't have the collective ideals we are supposed to have, morality, ethics and philosophical reasoning. These yardsticks will have been replaced with a google type question and answer system with reasoning based on enormous experience recall and a cognitive reasoning based on trillions of experiences which are being gathered each second we are on the Internet to become billions of artificial doppelgänger of ourselves.
The link between our cortex which reflects the body we carry around with us and we recognise as our human identity and that amorphous mass of information we currently carry around in our heads is in the process of being transferred onto hard drives which will then reflect our total knowledge. The processors will then be free to develop thought in conjunction with the stored knowledge and fathom new ways of thinking and doing without human input.
Perhaps the bright side of all this is that AI will have routed out our obsession with celebrity and the ghost of Oasis will be no more.
Staring into our smart phone we listen to a Palestinian man standing on the streets of war torn Gaza describing his feelings and in a Nano second, then to a Chinese diplomat or Russian oligarch, an Aussie Opal miner, or the MP for Basildon each is as different as chalk is from cheese, each convinced in his or her understanding of their particular situation but each bearing no relation to mine. A cacophony of issues tied together by the binding of human rights legislation.
The  uproar over  the PMs decision to withhold winter fuel payments to pensioners who don't qualify as needy has set fire to the undergrowth we call informed opinion. The issue of ‘need’ rather than ‘a right’ has turned our national finances into a mess. People who don't need help and can easily meet the cost themselves are breathlessly up in arms on the assumption that the winter payment, which is there to help pay for heating bills, is a right and one they equate with clawing back some of the tax they have already paid. Those on 'Pension Credit' will get it by right (as a need) and those who don't, don't need it.
One of the drawbacks of the socialised state hand out is that it pidgin holes thinking, it induces in both the recipient and non recipient, one of entitlement.

No comments:

Post a Comment