https://www.sedaily.com/NewsVIew/1KV6BDN9US
Diamond “Finite Resources and Human Inequality will weigh human life down”
Harari “Whether could handle the body and brain or not affects the destiny of a country”
Diamond will give keynote speech at 'the Seoul Forum 2016' on May 11 in Korea
Guess what would be the answer from two great scholars-Jared Diamond, who is called Charles Darwin of 21st century and the author of ‘Guns, germs and steel’, and Yuval Harari, who is a professor of history and the author of the international bestseller ‘Sapiens’?
The big talk of the century which Dr.Diamond and Prof.Harari had had, was arranged by Seoul Economic Daily, one of the oldest economic daily in Korea, celebrating the Seoul Forum 2016.‘SEOUL FORUM 2016’ will take place at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul, Korea, from May 11 to 12.
And for now Seoul Economic Daily releases a full talk of two great scholars ahead of the ‘SEOUL FORUM 2016’.
Throughout history humans have changed the world around them - they cleared fo-rests, domesticated plants and animals, dug irrigation canals and built roads, bridges and cities. But humans did not have the power to change themselves. We still have the same bodies and minds we had in the Stone Age. In the coming century, humans will of course continue to change the outside world, but for the first time in history they will also gain the power to reshape their own bodies and minds.
With regard to finite resources, much of the work of economists is focused on growth, as if that will forever be possible. But a textbook of economics carried on its title page the following sentence: “In our world of finite resources, the only people who believe in the possibility of indefinitely continued growth are - idiots, and economists.”
Limits to the growth of human populations and consumption are set by world resour-ces: water,seafood, land and soil for agriculture, sunlight, space,and other resources. Already, with human population and consumption just as they are at present, a sub-stantial fraction of the world‘s people are living below the poverty level. The world currently holds almost seven and a half billion people, of whom South Koreans and Americans and Europeans and Japanese and Australians enjoy a First World life-style and consumption rates, while most people make do with consumption rates up to 32 times lower. If all of those poor countries (including China and India and others) succeed in their goal of achieving First World consumption rates, then the world’s consumption will be equivalent to that of 75 billion people with the same distribution of consumption rates as at present. While one hears some optimists talking about how the world might perhaps be able to cope with nine billion people, I haven‘t encountered anyone silly enough to say explicitly that the world can hold 75 billion people. Nevertheless, there was a famous economist 20 years ago who said that humans could continue their current rate of population growth indefinitely. If one goes through the numbers, that means that the Earth will hold 10 people per square meter of land in 774 years, a mass of people equal to the mass of the Earth in less than 2,000 years, and a mass of people equal to the mass of the universe in 6,000 years. I‘m glad that I won‘t be alive in that world where I have to share my one square meter of land with nine other people.
In short, resource limits will be one of the two greatest driving forces for change. The other factor driving change will be inequality among the Earth’s people. In today‘s globalized world, poor people in remote countries (like Somalia and Afghanistan) still have access to information about lifestyles of people in rich countries. In today’s globalized world, those people in Somalia and Afghanistan and other poor countries now also have the means to emigrate to rich countries, where they want to achieve a First World lifestyle now, rather than wait for their grandchildren to achieve it 80 years from now. We can‘t have a stable world as long as there are big inequalities among human societies around the globe. Those inequalities are already a big driving force for change today: just read the newspaper any day. They will be an even bigger force in the future.
At the same time, the technologies that have enabled us to overcome famine and plagues have also produced completely new problems, such as global warming, which nobody in 1816 feared or expected. Back then, people couldn’t imagine that human industry might change the global climate.
In the coming decades breakthroughs in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence may make present-day concerns irrelevant - while creating far worse un-foreseen problems. For example, whereas today we are concerned about inequality between different human nations, by 2100 the main concern may be inequality between different human species or even between humans and robots.
2. How do you expect the future of human society after 100 and 200 years?
Ever since the appearance of life on earth, four billion years ago, life was governed by the laws of natural selection. During all these eons, whether you were a virus or a dinosaur, you evolved according the principles of natural selection. In addition, no matter what strange and bizarre shapes life undertook, it remained confined to the organic realm. Whether a cactus or a whale, you were made of organic compounds. Now science might replace natural selection with intelligent design, and might even start creating non-organic life forms. After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, science is ushering the era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design. Nobody has the faintest idea what the consequences will be.
3. There are lots of views that the robots will have an enormous influence on the future of human society. What influence do you think the robots including artificial intelligence will have on humanity?
Many new kinds of jobs will probably appear, but that won‘t necessarily solve the problem. Humans have basically just two types of skills - physical skills and cognitive skills - and if computers and robots outperform us in both, they might outperform us in the new jobs just like in the old ones. So what will be the use of humans in such a world? What will we do with billions of economically useless humans? We don’t know. We don‘t have any economic model for such a situation. This may well be the greatest economic and political question of the twenty-first century.
AI is nevertheless different from telephones and cars, because unlike them, it has the power to redesign our bodies and minds, or to replace us altogether. If AI replaces humans as the dominant force on the planet, then for the first time in many millions of years earth will be dominated by beings who have no children, who do not grow old, and who don’t need emotions in order to resolve disputes.
4. In terms of the development of bio-health care technology, what influence do you think life extension and organ transplant will have on the change and form of human societies?
Since people will live much longer in a world undergoing ever more rapid upheavals, they will have to reinvent themselves again and again. By the time you are 50, what-ever you learned as a teenager would be completely irrelevant, but the new know-ledge acquired in your fifties will again become obsolete by the time you are 80 or 100. This may result in enormous levels of stress. Longevity itself may become an additional source of stress. The longer you expect to live - the fewer risks you would be willing to take. People will become ever more obsessed with health and security.
Family structure,marriages and child-parent relationships would also be transformed. Today, people still expect to be married ’till death us do part‘, and much of life revol-ves around having and raising children. Now try to imagine a person with a lifespan of 150 years. Getting married at forty, she still has 110 years to go. Will it be realistic to expect her marriage to last 110 years? Even Catholic fundamentalists might baulk at that. So the current trend of serial marriages is likely to intensify. Bearing two child-ren in her forties, by the time she is 120,the years she spent raising them are a distant memory - and a rather minor episode in her life. It’s hard to tell what kind of new parent-child relationship might develop under such conditions.
At the same time, since people will not retire at 65, they will not make way for the new generation with its novel ideas and aspirations. The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one gene-ration passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones. This is true not only of science. Think for a moment about the political sphere. Would you mind having Putin stick around for another ninety years? On second thoughts, if people lived to 150, then in 2016 Stalin would still be ruling in Moscow, going strong at 138, and Mao would be a middle-aged 123-year-old.
Dr. Diamond:Life extension and modern medicine, including organ transplants, have already caused an increase in the proportion and longevity of old people, and a de-crease in the proportion of young people. Already, your neighbor Japan has the se-cond highest life extension in the world, and the lowest birth rate. If those trends are extrapolated lineally, one calculates that there won‘t be any more babies born in Ja-pan after 17 years from now! Obviously, that won’t be the outcome, and the extrapo-lation won‘t be linear, but - it remains clear that fewer and fewer young people will be supporting more and more older people.
5. There are worries that money could decide the quality of human life in the future with the development of robots, bio-health, and especially artificial intelligence. Is it possible to expect bright future for our society?
There are still wars in some parts of the world - I come from the Middle East,so I know that very well. But for the first time in history, large parts of the world are completely free from war. In ancient agricultural societies, about 15% of all deaths were caused by human violence. Today, in the world as a whole, less than 1.5% of deaths are caused by human violence. In fact, the number of suicides is today higher than the number of violent deaths! You have a greater chance of killing yourself than of being killed by some enemy soldier, criminal or terrorist. People today are terrified of terro-rism.But in fact,for every human killed by terrorism,a thousand die of eating too much. For the average American, McDonalds poses a much greater threat than Al Qaeda.
Now we are facing new threats, such as global warming and the rise of AI. The dan-ger is very big, but nothing is determined. Humankind can still rise to the challenge.
6. Do you think that East Asia including Korea is able to be the leader of human society?
Prof. Harari: We are in an analogous situation to the nineteenth century. Back then, the world underwent the Industrial Revolution. This revolution was led by very few countries such as Britain, the USA and Japan. These few countries conquered the world. Most other countries failed to understand what was happening, and they there-fore missed the train of progress, and were occupied and exploited by the industrial nations.
In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station. Whereas in the nineteenth century industrialization was fueled by steam power, che-mistry and electricity, now progress is fueled mostly by biotechnology and computer science. And whereas nineteenth-century industry produced mainly food, textiles, ve-hicles and weapons, the new biotech and cybernetic industries will produce bodies, brains and minds.The gap between those who will know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who will not, will be far bigger than the gap between nineteenth-century Britain and India. Those who will lead the next revolution will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind might face extinction.
Which nations and areas are likely to lead the revolution? At present it is led by East Asia and the North Atlantic region. Other areas, such as Africa, the Middle East and South America are being left behind. This may change, of course. But I think that all countries in the world face today an existential question: will they be part of the next revolution, or will they be left behind?
I expect that the world leaders will continue to be East Asia,Europe,and North Ameri-ca for the foreseeable future, at least for the next several decades. For each of these areas, it‘s easy to point out advantages, and to point out disadvantages of the other areas. But all three areas will continue to dominate the rest of the world because of unchanging facts of geography. Which of those regions dominates the other two will depend upon changing facts of human society.
https://youtu.be/1287qRqw-Ts
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Näin huijari kääntää asiat ylösalaisin...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/sunday/global-cabal-conspiracy-theories.html
When the World Seems Like One Big Conspiracy
Understanding the structure of global cabal theories can shed light on their allure — and their inherent falsehood.
By
Mr. Harari is a historian and author.
- Nov. 20, 2020
Credit...Max Löffler
Conspiracy theories come in all shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common form is the global cabal theory. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.”
Thirty-seven percent of Americans replied that this is “definitely or probably true.” So did 45 percent of Italians, 55 percent of Spaniards and 78 percent of Nigerians.
Conspiracy theories, of course, weren’t invented by QAnon; they’ve been around for thousands of years. Some of them have even had a huge impact on history. Take Nazism, for example. We normally don’t think about Nazism as a conspiracy theory. Since it managed to take over an entire country and launch World War II, we usually consider Nazism an “ideology,” albeit an evil one.
But at its heart, Nazism was a global cabal theory based on this anti-Semitic lie: “A cabal of Jewish financiers secretly dominates the world and are plotting to destroy the Aryan race. They engineered the Bolshevik Revolution, run Western democra-cies, and control the media and the banks. Only Hitler has managed to see through all their nefarious tricks — and only he can stop them and save humanity.”
Understanding the common structure of such global cabal theories can explain both their attractiveness — and their inherent falsehood.
The Structure
Global cabal theories argue that underneath the myriad events we see on the surface of the world lurks a single sinister group.The identity of this group may change: Some believe the world is secretly ruled by Freemasons, witches or Satanists; others think it’s aliens, reptilian lizard people or sundry other cliques.
But the basic structure remains the same: The group controls almost everything that happens, while simultaneously concealing this control.
Global cabal theories take particular delight in uniting opposites. Thus the Nazi con-spiracy theory said that on the surface,communism and capitalism look like irreconci- lable enemies,right? Wrong! That’s exactly what the Jewish cabal wants you to think! And you might think that the Bush family and the Clinton family are sworn rivals, but they’re just putting on a show — behind closed doors, they all go to the same Tupperware parties.
From these premises, a working theory of the world emerges. Events in the news are a cunningly designed smoke screen aimed at deceiving us, and the famous leaders that distract our attention are mere puppets in the hands of the real rulers.
The Lure
Global cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes. Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of global cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything.
The war in Syria? I don’t need to study Middle Eastern history to comprehend what’s happening there. It’s part of the big conspiracy. The development of 5G technology? I don’t need to do any research on the physics of radio waves. It’s the conspiracy. The Covid-19 pandemic? It has nothing to do with ecosystems, bats and viruses. It’s obviously part of the conspiracy.
The skeleton key of global cabal theory unlocks all the world’s mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle - the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellec-tual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook - or what they try to conceal.
The Flaw
Global cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that history is very simple. The key premise of global cabal theories is that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics.
Particularly remarkable is this group’s ability to see 10 moves ahead on the global board game. When they release a virus somewhere, they can predict not only how it will spread through the world, but also how it will affect the global economy a year later. When they unleash a political revolution, they can control its course. When they start a war, they know how it will end.
But of course, the world is much more complicated. Consider the American invasion of Iraq, for example. In 2003, the world’s sole superpower invaded a medium-size Middle Eastern country, claiming it wanted to eliminate the country’s weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some suspected that it also wouldn’t have minded the chance to gain hegemony over the region and dominate the vital Iraqi oil fields. In pursuit of its goals, the United States deployed the best army in the world and spent trillions of dollars.
Fast forward a few years, and what were the results of this tremendous effort? A complete debacle. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the country was plunged into chaos. The big winner of the war was actually Iran, which became the dominant power in the region.
So should we conclude that George W.Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were actually un- dercover Iranian moles, executing a devilishly clever Iranian plot? Not at all. Instead, the conclusion is that it is incredibly difficult to predict and control human affairs.
You don’t need to invade a Middle Eastern country to learn this lesson. Whether you’ve served on a school board or local council, or merely tried to organize a sur-prise birthday party for your mom, you probably know how difficult it is to control hu-mans. You make a plan, and it backfires. You try to keep something a secret, and the next day everybody is talking about it. You conspire with a trusted friend, and at the crucial moment he stabs you in the back.
Global cabal theories ask us to believe that while it is very difficult to predict and con-trol the actions of 1,000 or even 100 humans, it is surprisingly easy to puppet master nearly eight billion.
The Reality
There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world. Individuals, corporations, organizations, churches, factions and governments are constantly hatching and pur-suing various plots. But that is precisely what makes it so hard to predict and control the world in its entirety.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union really was conspiring to ignite communist revolutions throughout the world; capitalist banks were employing all kinds of dodgy strategies; the Roosevelt administration was planning to re-engineer American society in the New Deal; and the Zionist movement pursued its plan to establish a homeland in Pa- lestine. But these and countless other plans often collided, and there wasn’t a single group of people running the whole show.
Today, too,you are probably the target of many conspiracies.Your co-workers may be plotting to turn the boss against you.A big pharmaceutical corporation may be bribing your doctor to give you harmful opioids. Another big corporation may be pressuring politicians to block environmental regulations and allow it to pollute the air you breathe. Some tech giant may be busy hacking your private data. A political party may be gerrymandering election districts in your state. A foreign government may be trying to foment extremism in your country. These could all be real conspiracies, but they are not part of a single global plot.
Sometimes a corporation, a political party or a dictatorship does manage to gather a significant part of all the world’s power into its hands.But when such a thing happens, it’s almost impossible to keep it hush-hush. With great power comes great publicity.
Indeed, in many cases great publicity is a prerequisite for gaining great power. Lenin, for example, would never have won power in Russia by avoiding the public gaze. And Stalin at first was much fonder of scheming behind closed doors, but by the time he monopolized power in the Soviet Union, his portrait was hanging in every office, school and home from the Baltic to the Pacific. Stalin’s power depended on this per-sonality cult. The idea that Lenin and Stalin were just a front for the real behind-the-scenes rulers contradicts all historical evidence.
Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and the author of “Sapiens: A Graphic History.”
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