It is these people, the rich with their greedy fearful brain structure, who are the true foes of the people. Let us not be diverted by the technological issues and stay focused on the root cause of inequality, the wealthy elite with their economic and political power structure. If ever there was a face to to world's suffering and inhumanity, it is these individuals. It is not the face of a robot.

Ratings firm Moody’s recently dropped a bombshell report showing that rising wealth and income inequality in the United States will likely lead to lower income growth, political unrest, and a drop in the credit rating of our government. This prediction may come as a shock to some, but this should hardly come as a surprise to anyone paying attention to the state of our country. We have a government run by politicians devoted to widening the gap between the rich and the poor, and as that gap widens, our economy and our governmental institutions become less and less stable, putting our social, economic, and political fabric in danger.

While inequality is an issue in many countries around the world, the United States is uniquely unequal when compared to other developed countries. It is no mystery why. Republican leaders in Washington have shown themselves to be unwilling to address this looming crisis. On the contrary, they have done everything in their power to make things worse.

Rather than work to make higher education more affordable, they have ignored the student debt crisis and proposed nearly $80 billion cuts to the Pell Grant program, which millions of Americans rely on to afford higher education. Rather than boost social safety nets to help low income families afford education, job training, or health care, they have proposed massive cuts to programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that help huge swaths of the population.

Rather than work to shape a federal tax code that limits the tax burden on poor and working class families, and requires the rich to pay what they owe, they passed a nearly $2 trillion tax cut just last year that was deliberately designed to provide massive cuts to millionaires, billionaires, and corporations while leaving crumbs for the rest of the nation.

The proxy corporations of these elite individuals carry out their directives to willfully create economic inequality.

SingularityNet
Disrupt the Disruption — The Tech Oligopoly Part 2
In the second part of this series, we analyze and shed light on the tools and tactics that tighten the oligopoly’s control on the AI ecosystem
Arif Khan, Oct 7, 2018, https://blog.singularitynet.io/disrupt- ... 8747b7e16d

Sitting at the top of the tech food chain, the five most valuable companies in the world: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook, have come to form the Tech Oligopoly. The members of this tech oligopoly are the largest lobbyists and political donors in Washington. They have more financial resources than several nation states. Their products and services have transformed our society.

As the members of the tech oligopoly promise to democratize AI, create an AI-First future, and launch a partnership on AI to benefit society, we have to question whether they can prioritize societal benefit over their penultimate value of increasing shareholder value.

The Conversation
How corporate America can curb income inequality and make more money too
September 20, 2016, Wallace Hopp, https://theconversation.com/how-corpora ... -too-62339

Scorpion met Frog on a river bank and asked him for a ride to the other side. “How do I know you won’t sting me?” asked Frog. “Because,” replied Scorpion, “if I do, I will drown.” Satisfied, Frog set out across the water with Scorpion on his back. Halfway across, Scorpion stung Frog. “Why did you do that?” gasped Frog as he started to sink. “Now we’ll both die.” “I can’t help it,” replied Scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

This centuries-old parable, which has been retold by Orson Welles and many others and sometimes refers to a turtle rather than a frog, is usually meant to show how a bad nature cannot be changed – even if self-interest and preservation demand it.

It’s also an apt metaphor for the growing scourge of income inequality, one of the defining issues of our age. A standard explanation for why income inequality is increasing, to borrow a quote from Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, is that “wealth begets power and power begets more wealth.”

That is, because the rich and corporate CEOs use their influence to promote their self-interest, inequality is built into the very DNA of capitalism. And to return to our metaphor, the rich scorpions sting the rest of us – by exacerbating income inequality through pay policies, stock buybacks and other actions – because it’s simply their nature.

Harvard Business Review-Economy
The Rise of Corporate Inequality
March 23, 2017

Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom discusses the research he’s conducted showing what’s really driving the growth of income inequality: a widening gap between the most successful companies and the rest, across industries. In other words, inequality has less to do with what you do for work, and more to do with which specific company you work for. The rising gap in pay between firms accounts for a large majority of the rise in income inequality overall.

Bernie
Issues
Income and Wealth Inequality
https://berniesanders.com/issues/income ... quality/

Today, we live in the richest country in the history of the world, but that reality means little because much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals.

The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time.

The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.

We must send a message to the billionaire class: “you can’t have it all.” You can’t get huge tax breaks while children in this country go hungry. You can’t continue sending our jobs to China while millions are looking for work. You can’t hide your profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens, while there are massive unmet needs on every corner of this nation. Your greed has got to end. You cannot take advantage of all the benefits of America, if you refuse to accept your responsibilities as Americans.

Stetson Law Review
INCOME INEQUALITY AND CORPORATE STRUCTURE
Matthew T. Bodie, https://www.stetson.edu/law/lawreview/. ... ure.p...

This Article contends that to a significant extent, the problem of
income inequality is not due to our failure to redistribute, but is rather
due to our original scheme of income distribution. Specifically, the role
of the corporation in wealth distribution is an underappreciated yet
significant factor in our increasingly tilted economic picture. The
corporation is designed to provide all of the power over the economic
firm, and all of the rights to its residual profits, to a set of capital investors.
Shareholders control the firm through their right to elect the board of
directors, and courts use the “shareholder primacy norm” to judge
whether the board has failed in its duty to maximize shareholder wealth.
Employees who work at the firm have no employment-related rights to participation or profit.
As a result, I argue income has been redirected
away from workers and towards capital and those professions that service
capital.

I have never been stung by a scorpion but I have been repeatedly stung by privileged individuals and their proxy corporations economically, socially, and politically. You see, it is in their nature. The DNA of the elite individual determines their rigid brain structure which in turn delineates their corporate structure to continually sting the less fortunate with their venomous poison. Sting they must, but this does not mean we need to tolerate their abuse.

~SV~

A whopping 87 percent of information security specialists believe we're in the middle of a global cyber war.

That comes from Venafi, a firm that provides technologies to large companies to protect their networks against cybercrime. Venafi got opinions expressing this sentiment from over 500 security professionals at the recent RSA conference in San Francisco.

Paul Nakasone, head of US Cyber Command, recently spoke about the growing threat of cyber war. In the cyber domain our adversaries continue to increase in sophistication, magnitude, intensity, volume and velocity, and remain a threat to our national security interests and economic well-being, Nakasone said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.

For many organizations, it would be better to focus on establishing stronger defense mechanisms, he added.

One can just look at the recent growth of Republican deregulation in the areas of business, science, climate change, and the environment, just to name a few, to see the lack of oversight and control for the sake of making larger profits.

But this is neither the time nor the field to deregulate. To the contrary, it is regulatory oversight and policy control we so critically need now both nationally and internationally to guide the growth of the emerging technology.

The dangers of sailing into uncharted waters are real. And so is an artificial neuron that fires 200 million times faster than the human brain as we just read about in the previous post. But this speed is just part of the equation. Once creativity, imagination, intuition, and emotional aspects such as anger, jealousy, and love are dissected by optogenetic techniques, a synaptome will chart all of these synaptic connections and the organic wet human brain will unequivocally no longer be needed.

What could possibly go wrong? Technology has always come with guarantees only to routinely disappoint us. Remember the Titanic that could never sink? As we blindly venture forth into this new technological world we may potentially poison humanity's chances for survival only to discover there is no antidote.

It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of all earthly life. It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly in the hominid line.

Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization.

Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press.
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Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer.

In less than thirty years, it will end.

Reading Yudkowsky's article, Tallinn, who is a proponent of AI safety, became convinced that superintelligence could lead to an explosion or breakout of AI that could threaten human existence, that ultrasmart AIs will take our place on the evolutionary ladder and dominate us the way we now dominate apes. Or, worse yet, exterminate us.

The encounter with Yudkowsky brought Tallinn purpose, sending him on a mission to save us from our own creations. He embarked on a life of travel, giving talks around the world on the threat posed by superintelligence. Mostly, though, he began funding research into methods that might give humanity a way out: so-called friendly AI.

"Friendly" means something much more fundamental: that the machines of tomorrow will not wipe us out in their quest to attain their goals.

Tallinn warns that any approach to AI safety will be hard to get right. If an AI is sufficiently smart, it might have a better understanding of the constraints than its creators do. Imagine, he said, waking up in a prison built by a bunch of blind five-year-olds. That is what it might be like for a super-intelligent AI that is confined by humans.

Ensure Artificial Intelligence Safety Before Worrying about the Singularity

With artificial intelligence (AI) research and development progressing at an unprecedented rate, artificial superintelligence seems closer than projected by most. It is more imperative to secure AI safety now as any later might be too late.

) A Trump presidency now tips the scale in the direction of a conservative ideological domination with the wealthy elites determined at all costs to control the technological Singularity. This is why your ideas and solutions are so important now, not later. In Singularity time, later is always too late. It is a now-or-never moment with the outcome of humanity hanging in the balance. Clearly, the FirstRateCrowd community business venture gives us a means to tip the scale back in our direction.

Trump and the Republican Congress will do anything to maintain their conservative agenda. They are determined at all costs to control this agenda which in turn largely supports their control of the technological Singularity. As an example of this determination, President Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey, as a clear affront to the rule of law. This transgression was and continues to be supported by the Congressional Republicans. It is an unabashed attempt to derail the FBI's investigation into the role of the Russians in the 2016 Presidential election and the possible role that President Trump and his administration may have played a role in this attempt. Such naked partisanship cannot hide their true intent; they will place party and conservative values over the security and good of the country at all costs. This determination and tenacity for their own agenda is expected to continue unabated until, if we are fortunate, a monumental change is made either legally or politically. But in the interim a great many individuals will suffer.

In summary, the future wealthy elite will use every means of control at their disposal and at any cost to maintain their predatory dominance over the poor. This includes the manipulation of future laws on their behalf with an obvious outcome being an increase of human rights abuse against the less fortunate.

This cycle of excitement and worry is normal for new technologies. When a technology is first developed, we dream about the good it might do, and as it matures, we worry about unforeseen risks. Taking both sides into account, Kurzweil said he comes out cautiously optimistic. He acknowledges there's risk, and suggests the answer isn't to halt progress, but to plan for it.

By creating safeguards and standards in advance, we can better defend against negative consequences. As an example, Kurzweil points to the 1975 Asilomar Conference, a meeting that sought to define the ethical boundaries of biotech research before it reached its full potential. He believes a similar approach might work for AI and other exponential technologies.

As our technologies change the world, the responsibility only grows deeper for each of us to take an active role in shaping it the way we want not the other way around.