As we look around us it is very difficult not to see the accelerating pace at which the world is changing. I am not speaking purely in the physical sense such as climate. I am speaking of the things that man creates, the doors these open, the new information that floods in, and the impact this sensory onslaught of information seems to be having.

It is beginning to show new social directions that will likely have some ramifications on the future. It is showing changes in the needs in the labor force, and how this will change. It is showing changes in access to information and there is a very present and ongoing effort to control this.

Social

The ways we interact are increasingly becoming by keyboard, mouse, touch screen, or voice over device. We potentially have a lot more digital interaction with a lot more people than ever before. On the flip side there is a growing trend of not really needing the physical interaction at the level of before. This has many ramifications and I believe we've all experienced or been guilty of meeting with a friend and one of us spends most of our time poking at our phone and such, and rarely looks up to make eye contact. Did we meet purely out of obligation to avoid guilt? We may have had a more engaging conversation if the other person had pulled out their phone and they simply texted each other back and forth though they are only a few feet from each other. This may seem farcical but it is quickly becoming reality.

The thing I keep finding my mind circling back around to is over population. With the changing world I believe that our current social trends and the advent of things like Teledildonics, and VR will further distance the amount of actual physical interaction people have to have. They can be protected in their home and having a "relationship" with someone on the other side of the planet. That someone may look completely different in reality than the Avatar or person they present themselves as, but it doesn't truly matter, for in this environment it is more the minds and personalities that merge. So is this a positive? In some ways it is.

It certainly should likely help with the over population issues. As this trend continues I expect to see a decline in births. In fact this may be one of the most effective forms of birth control ever invented. Whether this is proven to be true or not remains to be seen. I'll say now that I believe that in nations that have access to such things for the average population that we will see a decline in pregnancies at least partially due to this technology.

There are also negatives to that though. Who is likely to be having the most births? It would seem reasonable that it would be the people who do not have access to this technology, and/or the type of person that cannot grasp or understand how to use it. I will make no predictions in this space.

I don't wish to speak more on this subject, I more wanted to plant a seed so others can consider it and discuss as well.

Labor Force / AKA Jobs

There has been a cry of lost jobs throughout the history of the creation of new tools. This has never been more common than the age we are in right now. In the past the ideas that an automated assembly line, or a robot would steal jobs proved to be unfounded. Yes, there were less jobs of that type but generally new jobs to maintain those things were created. They were not on equal quantity with the jobs that were REPLACED by these technologies, but they were not the only jobs. Generally the products that came off of the assembly lines also required new workers to support them. These became new and never before seen jobs.

The computer is a good example of this. A spreadsheet program is so powerful compared to what was available pre-Computer Age that it allows one person to do what before took many people to do. So did the jobs disappear? Not really, the fact you could do more tended to make people start requesting extra charts, make new lists, run new reports, etc. These things were not important before, but suddenly they were ALL important and if you couldn't make one then you'd likely not get the job. Pretty soon though the computer made these tasks easier people found themselves doing just as much work as before, and in some cases more.

We had entered the information age. More information was imperative! We gathered and produced more information than the history of man, in a relatively short period of time. Yet it did not stop, it accelerated. A lot of the new jobs that arose from this were finding ways to DEAL with this massive amount of information. We created new tools to deal with the new flood of information. We created new tools for people to interact. The flood of information is ever accelerating.

I do predict we are approaching a point where we may have more people than we have actual jobs. We may already be there and it just isn't completely obvious yet. We have reached a level of machine learning that even a lot of the tasks you'd need a human to do in the past can be done without a human. This is going to continue and is not avoidable. So rather than focus on the negative and shout "stop taking our jobs" we need to begin to plan for what a world would be like when there are not enough jobs. How does a person fend for themselves? Is this via something like Universal Basic Income? We must also keep in mind that in this world there is no such thing as FREE. It is paid for in some way. If we had a UBI and someone without a job was being paid it, where are the funds coming from? Most likely taxes. Which means other people are being forced to pay for them. This may not seem a bad thing when we consider the person being supported as someone actively seeking work and trying to better their hireability. Yet, that is being selective. There naturally would be people that survived just fine on UBI that really don't put forth any effort to create, produce, or better themselves. Is this a problem? If so, what do you think solutions might be in the future? (the point I made above under social could reduce population and offset this some)

Access to Information

We are in age where we have an unprecedented level of access to information. We have created the tools to make finding our way through this information easier and easier. I have been known to say that "I used Google Fu" to solve a problem, as I am technical enough that most questions these days if I truly put the time into it I can actually find the answers to simply by using Google.

This has freed the mind of man. Yet there are indicators that this is not exactly desirable by some groups of people.

Propaganda is very effective when you control the sources of information. It is less effective when there are other sources that are not controlled. As the population learns to search for information, they also can learn to verify themselves, and go back to older articles and such. This has lead to cases where propaganda blows up in the faces of those that would employ it. This is not always the case, but it is an increasing one.

It is starting to seem that those who would prefer to control the populations likely view the internet as mistakenly opening Pandora's Box, rather than simply letting the Djinni out of the bottle.

They seem to be taking steps to try to close that box. They seek to control the flow of information as before, for then the propaganda will go back to working, and outcomes can be predicted an manipulated to more closely follow their intended plans as they have in the past. The current steps that seem to have been increasingly used to attempt to do this to varying degrees are...

• Censorship
• Conspiracy Theorist - throw the term out there and watch the conditioned minds immediately turn away and stop questioning, for they don't want the stigma of being considered a conspiracy theorist, or associating with such people.
• Laws - Attempt to pass laws that restrict internet freedoms, and typically state it is for "security" or "safety" reasons
• Fake News - The latest is to call any of the non-official propaganda outlets "Fake News". If they do not have the official stamp of approval from some mysterious group. They are now fake. If you study journalism and the history of journalism this should have you screaming to your very roots. It immediately makes it apparent that the non-Fake news sites are controlled, and by complying they are not Fake. This is not journalism. It is propaganda. Entertainment magazines like The Onion, National Inquirer, etc have been around a long time and make no qualms about them being fake. Yet, now "fake news" is making the propaganda not so effective.

With the presidential election I was one of those that was 100% certain that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I actually said this at least a year BEFORE the election. I'd seen the propaganda build up, and who she was working with. I could see the media force feeding her to us. I figured it was a done deal, a song and dance. (I would have voted for any other candidate before her)

Then the impossible happened. Trump won. Regardless of the popular votes. He won. I didn't vote for him either. Yet, it was a big "WTF!" moment. The propaganda and near non-stop Trump bashing for the previous months did not work.

A lot of it seems to be tied to 1) how bad of a candidate she actually is with her record, 2) and more people going to other news sources and perhaps cluing in on how the media was trying to tell them who they SHOULD and SHOULD NOT vote for. I'd clued into that long before this election as I am a former Ron Paul supporter, but I didn't think the population at large had reached this point.

The reaction by the media in a truly unprecedented manner after this election began to show the man behind the curtain clearly for the first time. The rambling emotional "but you didn't do what I said to do" type antics were everywhere. The wide and insane embrace of hypocrisy became rampant. Bash Trump for any and everything you can think of even if it is something Obama and other people did before him. Find anything and everything you can and bash him.

Look at the news sources that were CORRECTLY predicting the outcome of the election. Let's start calling those places "Fake News" because they were correct, but it was not the desired outcome. You see, Fake News, is not about those sites being truly fake. It is about convincing the public that they are so that they can pass laws to regain control of the flow of information. This is necessary for the propaganda machine to return to normal functional order.

Thus concludes my mental ramblings for today.

Steem On!