You’ll have noticed no new posts for quite a while. This is because I’m busy moving into my new house. So, expect a very quiet few days, at least until I get everything moved, unpacked, and my internet reconnected.

Today’s quote is via the German newspaper, Spiegel Online, and concerns the recent alarming reports of the destruction of German (and American) bee populations. In it, they refer to Albert Einstein as saying:

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

It seems that the exact cause of the decline of bee populations in Germany and America may have a large number of causes. In Germany, it has been attributed to an alien invader from Asia called the varroa mite, the use of pesticides on wild flowers, and monoculture. More worryingly, it is also suspected that it may be as a result of genetically modified crops. In America, similar reasons have been given to account for their loss, also citing a “vampire” mite that destroys bee hives.

The phenomenon of entire hives being destroyed is called “colony collapse disorder“, and it appears to have spread to regions in Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Poland, and also Britain. An astonishing 24 states in America have reported a 50 to 90 percent loss in bee colonies.

Most interestingly of all is a recent German study that claims that radiation from mobile phones is the cause because it “interferes with bees’ navigation systems” and prevents them from finding their way back to their hives.

All the reasons do seem to have one thing in common, however: us. Not really a newsflash, but still, it’s sad.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.

Kurt Vonnegut,  born November 11, 1922 and died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007. If you don’t know who he is, read his book Slaughterhouse Five.

Today’s quote comes from the UK Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, which recently published a report entitled Global Strategic Trends 2007-2036. The report’s purpose is to analyse a wide range of potential outcomes over the next thirty years, ranging from the impact of globalization, inequality, and poverty, to terrorism, climate change, and future technologies and weapons. There are several fantastic quotes scattered throughout the document, but one of the more interesting ones is this:

The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoplesâ?? attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the worldâ??s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

I find that particularly fascinating (and promising, in fact). I’ve always found Marx’s works to be interesting and still relevant in today’s society, especially in the fields of sociology and political economy, despite some of my friends still having a chuckle and saying that he has absolutely no relevance in today’s world. In fact, one of the first lines of an economics text I read a while ago said that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Marx was proved “wrong”, never mind that since the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 it was recognised amongst the Left and others that Lenin’s revolution bore no resemblance to Marx’s ideas. At any rate, it seems he may have relevance in tomorrow’s world.

On a related note, this document ties in nicely with another paper I’ve started reading from the Oxford Research Group entitled Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century, which argues “that international terrorism is actually a relatively minor threat when compared to other more serious global trends”, such as climate change and resource competition.

(And if you want a summarised version of the Global Strategic Trends report, the Guardian have done an article on it).

Here’s an interesting hypothesis that I came across recently, reading through an article in the latest edition of the IEEE Spectrum about digitally animated faces. It’s called the “Uncanny Valley” effect, formulated by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and it basically says that, as a robot becomes more human-like in appearance, the more humans are likely to empathise with it. However, this effect reaches a point where empathy is reversed, and humans are likely to be repulsed instead. This, too, is then reversed and replaced with positive empathy once more as the appearance of the robot becomes even closer to that of a human being.

I’d be extremely interested if this hypothesis could work in reverse. For example, could individuals who believe in cyborgization i.e. integrating themselves with machines actually decrease the amount of empathy fellow humans feel for them?