Whilst thinking about Openness and Sharing of knowledge my brother who is an ophthalmologist focussed on delivering more affordable and effective healthcare to the patient instead of enriching big hospital groups and healthcare funders shared a TED Talk by Yuval Noah Harari about Globalism vs. Nationalism. The talk is below:

It raises some important thoughts:
1) Politics has remained a nationalistic pursuit and has not adapted to the global trend of many other pursuits like technology, commerce, economics, ecosystem management, human-activity-driven and amplified global warming/climate change – e.g. “close the borders of the country in question and remove the influence of foreigners.

2) Job security will not be compromised by immigrants but by artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms and neural networks.

3) Steady progress has been made in artificial intelligence but not artificial conscience.

4) If an event induces suffering, then it is real.

5) History is built of collective narrative stories. Some are truths. Some are lies. If lies are told often enough, Joseph Goebbels from Nazi Germany once said they become more believable. This is used by Harari to deduce that fake news is not new. It is merely easier to spread and harder to discern.

Items 1), 2), perhaps 3) and 5) could be changed for the better by having a more open knowledge transfer system. This is seen on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration website, a Shuttleworth initiative.

The knowledge we have gained and technology we use to improve this knowledge to adapt to and make our world better has actually made it more complex – see the above TED talk where this is referred to. This is one reason why we now may not be able to manage the technology we create but will instead need to rely on artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms and neural networks. This brings me to the second video I found. The chairman of Nokia has decided to understand artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms and neural networks as this is what underpins big data. The Talk is narrated here. The Youtube video with the presentation is here and embedded below:

We need to get to grips with this and use open learning and knowledge access to harness artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms and neural networks and big data to improve our world.