Technological developments around both human perception of reality and human ability to act on the world are gathering an incredible pace. These are a few developments going on at the same time :
- Intimate knowledge of every aspect of every individuals life data minable
- Artificial algorithmes being developed to exploit economic opportunity tailored to every individual
- Genetic / biometrics on record on every individual
- Augmented and virtual reality driven by its ability to trick us in believing the unreal
- Augmented bionics, brain implants (was possible in 2001 as I witnessed it then)
- Artificial organs, printed limbs, stem cell implants, advanced plastic surgery
- Walking robots (see Boston dynamics Atlas), advanced artificial intelligence
- Memristor based and micro amp using processors that don’t die or live of ambient power
- Ability to store data permanently at extreme low cost (in glass, which last for billions of years)
These are just a few examples of the marvels of technology we are currently creating due to our drive to protect ourselves, our lives, our lifestyles which depend on generating fossil fuel credit cashflow. A lot of these developments are dangerous, and most of them do one significant thing : They do not respect the integrity of the individual. They blurr the border between an individuals intentions, capacity, ability to exist and the ability of technology to take over.
Forget about human rights, rights assume an authority and our world is not likely to develop a single one soon. If we are going to be subject to an authroity it is most likely a infotech monster serving the US fossil fuel industrie’s elite. The trick in economics is to either automate or find crazy individuals that can’t see they can be happy without serving and protecting an abusive system. A banker can be destroying millions of lives with oppressive credit interest rates just to be able to sit in a country club with equally crazy friends and eat some cottage cheese on sunday.
Robocop is a few years away
Before we are trumped by all these technologies, which is not a wierd choice of words, Donald Trump is now using tech that was not available to Obama to brainwash and decieve the US public into choosing for someone that doesn’t give a flying shit about anyone. Mining facebook in a region tells you exactly how people feel, how they are doing, which can then shape the image presented that they will accept and feel for. Maybe better to say : As the technology hits us we need to start to put a defensive perimeter around the individual. Its not privacy, or intimacy, which have already been breached, it is the power of the individual to exist as an autonomous agent. In a sense technology makes us lose our intelligence to the point that we can no longer protect ourselves.
Human integrity must be defined first. It is the ability for an individual to choose his or her experiences. It is the right of an individual to experience unadulterated reality for the majority of time. It is the reduction of power of an individual so that his or her decisions do not influence more than say 250 lives. This is a similar principle as not allowing a company to operate beyond a 100 km radius. Reality should be such that people are happy, it should be such that people can sustain themselves, it should be such that people can be safe. This is never robust when it depends on a centralized system (like our fossil fuel economy), it won’t be robust when we are all hacked by our innate reflex to immitate and be social, share our feelings and experiences.
The Human Integrity Charter can contain these points :
- The option to live a basic real life
- The option to work with nature to provide for oneself in a way of choice
- The option not to be known in any database or record
- The restriction on applications and software to not keep more data than needed
- The restriction on applications of not being available for data mining or aggregation
- The ability to ban artificial images and sounds from perception
- The ability to choose one’s own consumption of information
- The ability to live free of debt
- The ability to express ones self in every possible way without any restriction
- Protection against augmented individuals
- Protection against artificial intelligence in all it’s forms
The artificial environment that is growing around us has a goal, namely maximizing fossil fuel cashflow while increasing power of the banks. This may give it its massive impetus, but that does not justify it or grant it permission to weaken us as individuals. We may be weakend to a point where we can no longer exist, and frankly the economic system can do without a lot of individuals because the lifestyles of some of the people in control would not be affected. Say the Babyboomers all died today. Would that negatively impact anyone in charge? Nope.
As with human rights the Human Integrity Charter needs an authority, and this can only be the individual humans themselves. The political arena barely has options to vote and gain actual power for anyone that is interested in the points above, because 1. there is no economic incentive and 2. you get smeared as antisocial. Also people are not organized and barely cooperate most of the time. The way one implements this charter is by finding a zone, territory, small commune to exercise it and then expanding it, cooperating with other communities that think the same thing. The Amish exist, as do other enclaves where facebook has not invaded. It is not that one needs to keep to this charter per se, but that it is possible to opt in to any of its provisions at any time.
If we don’t institute something like the HIC, then whoever is economically irrelevant will be wiped out, and whoever is economically interesting will be fleeced until he/she is economically irrelevant. This will be easier and easier, and most of it will happen out of sight of those who control or enable the process. Our ability to imagine options and use them will be reduced as it is f.i. by copyright laws (which now protect all imagined things in comic books, so you can not create anything that is in them and sell it commercially).
Facebook owns Whatsapp, so my whatsapp contacts are showing up as suggestions on facebook
The only way to make the HIC known is by enacting it, by refering to it and taking a position as individual. I want to know if I am in a european gene bank that opens up all info on my genetic weaknesses to insureres. I want to know who has my financial data. I want to know if my internet experience has not been tailored, adds inserted at various points. I want to know if my google searches are the same as that of anybody else. I want to be able to own something without having to pay rent, interest or a mortgage and be able to gain from it if I can. I want to be unpressured to engage in virtual reality or artificiall intelligent systems that use knowledge about me that I can not remember having shared.
It may be so that companies and their politicians will say “well, if you don’t want to come along with us then you can move to Africa” but that is not the point, the point is that we should be safe from commecial/political interference in any place we are. The people wanting to expand their powers (like the insureres who now tacitly break patient-doctor privacy) only do so because they are not being stopped and don’t ask for permission (or stealthily lobby permission into law). Ultimatly it’s what you and I want against what some CEO or manager trying to get his/her bonus wants, and that battle has to be made fair. If it is you against some optimization algorithm for sure the power should lie with you.