Immortality

I don't want to live to a hundred & I certainly don't want to be immortal. I would quite like to think that I would remain in the memories of family & friends for a while after the part of me that matters, my brain & soul, has departed this body. Dying isn't a problem really. The possible problem is how you die & the legacy you leave behind.

In living for 77 years I must have impacted in some way on a huge number of people. Not least all the children I taught. Looking back & comparing education then & now I realise that I didn't always get it right, either in teaching or running schools. Everything is in a state of change & over years they do improve. Human beings can learn to do things better.

I've made mistakes as a parent & as a friend too. The thing about ageing is that if you have the capacity to reflect, honestly, you do know you could have been a better person. When the responsibilities of managing a family, a home & a job lessen you have the time to observe & reflect more. It isn't possible to change the past. All you can do is try to be the best you can be now. 

Old people are no different to young people really. Although they may not be as conversant with technological change & modern thinking, they do have more experience. Society needs a balanced age mix where every voice can be heard & valued. I don't think that is actually the case though. The old criticise the young for their naivety, the young criticise the old for being out of touch.

Interestingly this Blog will possibly make me immortal. I never set out with that aim in mind. It was my way of coping with the awful events in my life in 2009. It has helped me cope with the huge adjustments  in the last 13 years. In the absence of my husband & friend it allowed me to externalise the day to day things that impacted on me. It has become far more political & philosophical & less personal over time.

But my immortality will depend on there still being people reading it. So my thanks to the thousands of readers over the years.

 

Artificial Intelligence, Robotics & Virtual Reality

A I is transforming our lives & businesses worldwide. Already algorithms are used everywhere, supposedly overcoming human subjectivity, bias, and prejudice. The danger is that algorithms replicate and embed the biases that already exist in our society. Computers learn & understand language & behaviour & adapt & predict. A I not only learns but also makes decisions. Humans are becoming unnecessary in processes. A I replaces them. A I systems are already being used to improve business strategies, customer service, market research, advertising, predictive maintenance, autonomous cars, video surveillance, medicine and more.

There are 3 major areas of ethical concern for society: privacy and surveillance, bias and discrimination, and perhaps the most difficult philosophical question of the era, the role of human judgment. Michael Sandel a Harvard philosopher and many others raise important questions about the direction A I is taking the world in. 

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/10/ethical-concerns-mount-as-ai-takes-bigger-decision-making-role/

Automation is here to stay. It's impact on jobs & manufacturing will become ever more obvious. This changes the skill sets needed to be employable. The benefit may be that the routine, boring, mundane, unskilled jobs can be done by machines or software. The downside is what becomes of unskilled people who don't have the capacity to be upskilled?

Our lives are generally overseen & regulated to ensure compliance with some sort of ethical code. Who is regulating the huge Tech monolith? No one. Companies that develop or use AI systems largely self-police, relying on existing laws and market forces. They also rely on shareholders & highly-prized AI technical talent to keep them in line. How naive is that considering the risks?

Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are all considered under the umbrella of Extended Reality 'XR' - The development of increasingly realistic virtual worlds is used in training, education, psychotherapy, physical and mental rehabilitation, marketing, entertainment, and for further applications in research. This definitely needs to be regulated. Researchers, content creators, and distributors of XR systems need to determine what should be within a code of conduct. At the very least it should be, like Hippocrates, "First, do no harm”. 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2020.00001/full

The potential for harm to people & the planet is enormous, as well as possibly very beneficial. These developments in the wrong, unscrupulous, profit driven, hands could literally mean the end of life as we know it. Or it could lead to Nirvana.

 

The problem is human beings are not infallible. They make mistakes. Mistakes with this technology could be catastrophic. No Governments seem to have a plan for technological development, oversight & legislation enforcement. 

We have opened Pandoras Box & we haven't got a clue. 

 

 

COP 27 - 30 Years of Lobbying & Greenwashing

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. COP = Conference of the Parties. In diplomatic language “the parties” refers to the 197 nations that agreed to the new environmental pact.

Thirty years of talking about Climate Change. Thirty years of empty promises, agreements & resolutions not fulfilled. Thirty years of increasing scientific evidence of just how much we are destroying the world we live in. 

The Paris Agreement is the legally binding international treaty on climate change. It was a landmark in the multilateral climate change process because, for the first time, a binding agreement brings all nations into a common cause, to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, adopted by 196 Parties at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015 and entered into force on 4 November 2016. Its goal is to limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement

Iran and Libya – both among the 14-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) – as well as Yemen and Eritrea have not ratified the agreement. The US withdrew under Trump, from November 2020. Biden rejoined the pact on his first day in office, 20 January 2021, and formally re-entered the global treaty 30 days later.

Inside Climte News reports “Our results indicate that the framework of the agreement is working pretty well. The Paris Agreement is getting countries to make ambitious pledges; last year nearly all countries updated those pledges and made them even more ambitious. What’s needed next is better systems for checking to see whether countries are actually delivering what they promise.”

We have to continue to hold countries & politicians to account. Greta Thunberg notably isn't going to COP27. She reckons it’s just a chance for the powerful to get away with “greenwashing, lying and cheating”, and that the annual summits of national governments, policy experts, spruikers and hangers-on aren’t working. At COP26 Countries agreed to limit global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – an advancement on the landmark 2015 Paris agreement – and acknowledged that meant immediately considering how to ratchet up action this decade. But 2022 has not delivered on that promise. Only 24 countries have updated their voluntary pledges to the UN, and only India and Australia have taken noteworthy strides forward, the latter from a very low base.

 

An estimated 35,000 people from government, Indigenous nations, climate groups and fossil-fuel multinationals will be getting on planes to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in the hopes of hastening (or hindering) the global movement to net zero. “It’s like a giant trade fair with Greenpeace at one kiosk and Exxon at the next,” said one lifelong environmentalist who stayed home. 

My cynical brain asks what the Carbon cost of that will be.

Open Fires, Paraffin Heaters & Heat Pumps

When I was a child there was only heating in one room - An open coal fire. We did have an electric bar fire, but in winter, in most rooms, there was frost & even snow on the inside of windows. Bedrooms & the bathroom were not rooms you wanted to spend any time in in winter. The front room was hardly ever used. I remember practicing the piano with freezing cold hands. The windows were single glazed, houses were not insulated, doors were draughty. Fitted carpets were unheard of, bare boards, lino & rugs on the floors.

When I was first married we lived in a council house with no heating whatsoever. We had paraffin heaters which were dangerous & smelly & inefficient electric fires. Still lino tiles, floorboards & rugs.

We moved to the first home of our own & had the luxury of a gas fire in the sitting room & radiators. Central heating for the first time in our lives. It was absolutlely life changing. Still not much in the way of insulation, no double glazing & draughty doors. We could afford fitted carpets, which gave the illusion of warmth.

Then a really modern detatched house. Gas central heating & double glazing, plus loft insulation. As we became more financially secure we were able to take advantage of the improvements in heating & insulation.  

The next house was an extended old brick & flint cottage in the country. A backward step & big renovation project. As draughty as anything, with poor double glazing, ill fitting doors, no insulation & an oil fired central heating system that just about took the edge off the cold. We modernised & extended & eventually had 3 wood burning stoves which were wonderful. You could even cook on one, which was just as well because we had serial power cuts, often for days on end. I loved it.

We moved to a converted 60's bungalow. Big on expensive fixtures & fittings, but long & very expensive to centrally heat. Cold marble floors to the ground floor & no underfloor heating. Lovely to look at, but hopeless in winter. A very expensive custom made wood front door which swelled in winter & shrank in summer. All the rooms had outside walls, some had three. It did have triple glazing though. A wood burner helped, but not enough. 

When I was widowed I moved to Oxford to an amazing architect designed house which was really efficient. Underfloor heating to the ground floor, radiators to the upper floors. A very efficient Gas heating system. Huge south facing windows, so solar gains throughout the year. It was comfortable year round & relatively cheap to run.

Now I'm in the largely untouched 1930's house I bought last year & have spent months & a lot of money renovating & building an extension to it. It is extremely well insulated, (single brick construction), has new double glazing & modern well fitting doors. It's as cosy as I could make it. But it has a new gas boiler & radiators becuse when I looked into ground source & air source heat pumps I realised;-

• I couldn't afford either
• I didn't have enough land for a ground source system unless I bored down very deep
• The air source system would be noisy & if you don't have passive house levels of insulation wouldn't be warm enough in winter.

Now we have an energy crisis & bills are increasing worryingly. Today 95% of UK homes are centrally heated. Everyone wants to be warm in winter. Some people really can't tolerate cold. The UK has some of the least energy-efficient homes in Europe, with 19 million houses and flats needing extra insulation. There isn't much government incentive to make householders & landlords undertake the work.

The cost of upgrading your heating, glazing & insulation is enormous & you will have to wait a long time to get payback in lower energy costs. I doubt I will live long enough to make my outlay worthwhile. But hopefully I will be warm.