Society 4.0
Society 4.0
Society 4.0 ?
8 core themes that will influence society in 2030, and which we need to think differently about in the future:
It is still natural that we earn our money by working. Robot development means that people like you and me are no longer able to distinguish robot and human. And that means they can also do work that requires more empathy, such as a care for the elderly.
The Singularity or the Panopticon?
Surveillance capitalism
Everything around us – our cars (telematics data based on geolocating intelligence), on-board cameras, refrigerators, washing machines, smartphones, solar panels/inverters, Wifi, 5G, and so on – is spying on us, under the guise of wanting to know their customers better.
Surveillance capitalism is the panopticon built by private corporations, which is collecting and selling those data of their customers. It turns out these companies are making profit for their shareholders. A lot of car companies are now selling data to private groups, who then sell it to the government for spying and military operations. The only countries where this cannot be done is N-Korea and Cuba. McKinsey projects that by 2030, global revenue from car-data will be over half a Trillion dollars.
This is data rapture. An infinite amount of data is transmitted infinitely in real time and in historical formats, which are then stored as NFT’s at low cost, although de-globalization that will occur when national governments keep/protect their locally accumulated data, called digital Umang, which will drive the cost up.
The data can be used to track, tip, and cue other sensors, identify networks and relationships, analyze and develop patterns from that. This will lead to a Surveillance State whose 3 components are bandwidth, digital storage, and digital processing.
The outcome of the globally collected data will be that we are not moving, we are all in a complete state of homeostasis, we become one with the data, lose this corporeal mantle, and simply enter into the infosphere and unify. In fact, nothing is changing. This is called Singularity.
Corporate states
Neither those large companies nor organizations such as the WHO and the WEF have been democratically elected. When they make decisions, there is no feedback mechanism. In normal democracy, that feedback loop is there. The government makes some decisions, people disagree, and next time they vote for someone else.
But if that mechanism is missing, the system becomes irrevocably corrupt. And that is worrying because those corporate states practically have a monopoly position. Only the United States and China are big enough to make decisions, the rest of the countries are offside. And the citizen has no idea who is governing him.
Look at large tech companies, pharmaceutical multinationals, and large financial institutions. They often have more capital than countries; you could refer to them as corporate states. And look at organizations such as WHO and the World Economic Forum (WEF). These are public institutions, and they should control those private companies.
But in reality, those two groups have joined forces, for example to combat the corona crisis. Although that often happens with the best of intentions, it is still a questionable development.
Direct democracy
How to break this trend? By a much more direct form of democracy. The separation between capital and labor will become much less important in the future, simply because the concept of labor will gradually disappear. With that, the difference between left and right is also off the track, and thus our democratic structure.
This leads to a pointless fragmentation of parties, like a party for the animals, a party for the elderly, and even a party against scooters.
Instead, create a system where citizens can contribute their own topic. If there is enough support for this, you can vote on it, with special software on your smartphone. Technically it is possible: it is already happening in cantons in Switzerland and in certain states in the US. And the huge advantage is that you will get rid of the undemocratic lobbying in back rooms.
How about the risk that those citizens will make decisions about things they don't understand? Naturally, we must continue to invest in good training. So you have to give people all the information, and also enable them to form their own opinion, without outside influence.
But I also rely on the wisdom of the crowd. Do you know that experiment with the ox at the annual fair? That ox stood on a platform, and the bystanders had to estimate how much it weighed. Some were close, some were far off. Still others were so far away that you wondered if they had understood the question. But the great thing was that the mean of all estimates was terribly accurate. All people together were only 2% off. You can also see this in birds and ants. Especially those ants are very stupid individually, but the swarm as a whole is extremely smart.
We are in a transition phase to a new era. Such a phase is often restless. The parties with money and power will do anything to maintain the status quo, as they have always done. But history also shows what happens when the value distribution in the economy grows too skewed. Then there is unrest, revolution.
That could happen now, for example if it is the elite who are benefiting from Elon Musk's human upgrade idea. On the other hand, if that elite immediately has an IQ of 300, that revolution may have little chance of success. So it is high time to think about this carefully, to discuss these things. And I hope that my book provides the impetus for this:
The World’s New Power Brokers that undermine
Democracy, Government, and the Free Market
The NEOCON CORE
Since 1980 the Political culture has made it easier, and often obligatory, for individuals to mask their true agendas and conflicts of interest in creating policies, mostly due to the 75% privatisation of public functions in the USA, after Reagan declared the need for a new “lean” government.
As a result, these type of governments make bad decisions, based on bad information supplied by people with camouflaged agendas, called “Flexians”, who often work simultaneously for private interests, academia and government.
“Flexians”, or “Flex nets” (networks of Flexians) take the notion of conflict of interest to a whole new level. They are not the “old boys network” and cannot be reduced to lobbyists or interest groups. They are individuals who combine an academic or journalistic position with a political one, and a commercial one. More than opportunists, they are often ideologues whose primary purpose is to push a cause rather than significantly enriching themselves.
Their true motives often get lost amid the various conflicting agendas they must juggle. Obtaining reliable information about a player’s roles, sources of funds, and actual track record are difficult, as viable monitoring systems are lacking. Flexians can thus continue unchecked to convert their environment into one that is friendly to them.
Since it is virtually impossible to keep track of everyone’s agendas, the temptation is simply to ignore them. Instead of careful analysis, we rely on appearances of the moment, which are easy to manipulate. Anyone can be a flexion. All it takes is commitment, an education and a BlackBerry. If you are unhappy with the way the Flexians are running things, then go out and be one yourself.
By blending, blurring, and creating ambiguity, they can operate very well because of:
A new system that is the product of an unprecedented confluence of 4 transformational developments, that arose over the past 40 years:
This allows these people to play with how they present themselves (identity) to the world, regardless of fact or track record. Appearances of the moment have become all-important. Acting is thus required.
Todays, Flexians and their Flexnet, the shadow elite, can weave new institutions of power & influence. Official & private power are interdependent and reinforce each other, w/o public input or notice. Gone is the, often messy, but more transparent and diverse democratic process. By using social networks, these Flexians have become the Pinnacle of Power:
It is different from past Elites, because the present Elite is less visible, less stable, more elastic in their engagements, and more global, across organizations and nations. They specialize in branding. BRANDING IS KEY!
Standard forms of accountability and monitoring cannot stand up to those new forms of corruption and sticky forms of interrelationships of these Flexnets. They are immune from prosecution, even after the facts are made public.
These power brokers colonize policy to serve their own agendas and are more harmful than just wasting taxpayer dollars. Since this phenomenon is a trust-based system, it is a huge threat to a democratic society.
The new power-brokers play many different roles and can therefore easily deny and hide behind them. These Shadow-elite espouses ideology, intertwining W-DC and Wall St. Failure does not preclude a seat on a future “Decider’s” table.
How to identify these New Power Brokers:
Flexians: “THERE IS NO CONFLICT OF INTEREST, BECAUSE WE DEFINE THE INTEREST !”
"The public is vulnerable because of the greater potential for players,
who are supposedly guardians of official information and public policy,
to further their own rather than the public interest, and to do so unnoticed.
The rise of shadow elite warrants revisiting age-old thinking on corruption.
This is corruption at its most basic: a violation of public trust.
Flexians and flexnets pursue the ends of their own ideological masters,
which often contradict the other masters they supposedly serve."
J. Wedel (author of the above, 2009)
In hindsight, the Twin-Towers' "controlled demolition" - the means/method to get the Patriot Act ratified by Congress - which was clearly designed, executed, and managed by the Shadow Elite, heralded the dawn of an era of global political trauma and immense turbulence, suffering, and death of tens of millions, that snuffed out a very brief period when a prosperous US had basked in a post-Cold War glow of peace, standing as a lone superpower!
All of the above appears to have been planned by the cosmic planners, whose face will at some time be revealed. No need to fear, because each of us will have our "quantum realization" moment of a Quantum Cosmos, which is the moment of Singularity. We just have to be our deepest and truest selves and trust that our cosmic overlords, our higher Selves, wrote the proper script.