Eldon-Online

Season of Goodwill?

This time of year traditionally, and for a whole variety of reasons, is known as being a season of goodwill. I have to be honest and say that this year, more than most, has left me with more a feeling of nausea than goodwill. 

The senselessness of it all came to a head with a video clip that was sent to me two weeks ago. It was one I had seen before but given that North Korea has spent so much of this year in the news, I thought it worth sharing once again. As if you ever needed reminding, it does in fact highlight the situation faced by ordinary North Koreans and which for as long as the current regime is in piace will not change. But it makes one very telling remark - which says concentrate on the plight of North Koreans and focus less on the leadership. If you have time - click on the link. Even if you’ve seen it before I think it merits a re-watch.

Season of Goodwill? Fat chance ... or not?

This has turned into a “season of contrasts”. In many places Christmas is celebrated by hanging up all sorts of ornaments and encouraging consumers to go out and spend, spend, spend. Quite probably NOT what Jesus would have intended. Christmas is above all a Christian festival, although some cities in Britain, which is supposed to be a predominantly Christian country, have banned the celebration in deference to the feelings of “other religions”. Not that in the countries where those other religions are practised would generally think of reciprocating.

Of course there are many suggestions and counter arguments as to whether the Winter Solstice festivals of the Pagans that pre-date Christianity is not in fact the reason why 25 December was chosen as being a suitable day for celebration. But let’s be honest, if you want to end up having a heated, tending to acrimonious, debate - even with close friends - choose a topic like religion. Because of all the issues surrounding Da’esh or ISIS, Islam is a favoured topic these days and more often than not results in derogatory comments about Islam in general as there is no distinction made between Da’esh and Islam proper. Given DA’esh seem hell bent on blowing up anyone who does not believe in the same as they believe, and particularly at this time of year ... it’s not surprising where the talk goes.

These days I really do not profess to be a religious practicioner of anything - Christian or whatever. My own faith and belief in Christianity has been dented by what appears to be an enormous hypocrisy. Churches that have hidden rampant paedophilia, and practitioners who seem to prefer glitz and glamour in their churches to the more austere version of how I think Christianity should be practiced. But doesn’t interpretation stretch to all beliefs? Spreaders of rhetoric - compulsive, believable people who attract their own brand of followers who can do either good or evil. But even though I personally think as I do, does not mean that I have the right to be critical of people who believe otherwise - or in the broader sense, critical of other religions or beliefs. There is something in the world today that is seriously lacking - and that is respect.

You know that I spend quite a lot of time in the Middle East. I am lucky enough to count many people of differing beliefs as people who extend an arm of friendship. It came therefore as no surprise to me to receive messages in the last week or two wishing me a Happy Christmas from people in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but elsewhere in the region. Not westerners, you will understand, but local people of the Muslim faith. I was also sent a book by one of the correspondents written by an eminent Muslim scholar about the true interpretations of the Koran - not those snippets taken out of context by Da’esh et al. And you will have heard that Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, wants Saudi to return to being the moderate face of Islam. Some people laughed at that suggestion ... but having first lived in Saudi almost 50 years ago I can tell you first hand that it’s a lot different now from what it was.

When I lived in Malaysia years ago and when it was Ramadan the majority of people - be they Hindu or Christian respected the behaviour of their Muslim colleagues and in most cases became a part of the month. At Diwali the celebrations were joined in by everyone and it was the same with Christmas. What has happened to our world? Why have we become more isolationist in our beliefs, and in our geographies and in our trade. You name it - we are becoming insular,

If you live in someone else’s country - respect their beliefs or don’t go live in it in the first place. If you accept someone into your country, don’t shut them out but encourage their integration. Can it really be so hard to put aside ones differences - if you have the right mindset?

We enter 2018 in a state of nervousness. Belligerent rhetoric, an “it’s actually all about me” mindset, senses of “entitlement” - a growing wealth gap where the rich get obscenely richer and the poor do a little better, a world where water will become a commodity far more precious than oil or anything else - and over which wars will likely start. And the thing is, as we become apparently more civilised, we behave in a less civilised manner.

It’s not a pretty picture in this “season of goodwill”. And why should goodwill be for just a season anyway - why can’t it always be like that - but there I go, being naive again!!

Happy New Year.

Britain - Redefining The Third World

When you hear stories about injustice in countries such as China, Indonesia, Zimbabwe the natural reaction from the west is to shrug and say, "well, what do you expect from these developing or third world countries"? Uncivilised, corrupt, uneducated and generally not a part of the rest of the civilised world. Well guess what folks, Britain is catching up rapidly. The country of my birth, but one I have watched now from overseas just one month short of 50 years, is filling me with dismay. A young man, accused of rape and facing a significant jail sentence was only saved at the last minute by the prosecution lawyer who discovered the police had sufficient evidence in their possession to prove the man was innocent, but they had failed to hand it over. What? And this, say the lawyers is just the tip of the iceberg. Let's be honest (okay ... not a great choice of words), the police in Britain have not come across very well in the last few years with cover-ups and other misdemeanours. They blame it on underfunding - so let's just get convictions and forget the ethics then! How embarrassing.

Then you read on ... same newspaper ... where it reports that thirty per cent of the UK does not have good enough mobile coverage to make calls and texts on all four networks. M-Pesa in Kenya is one of the fastest developing-world Banks using telephony. The citizens of Shenzhen in Southern China now do not need to carry cash because all payments - stores, transport, and restaurants are done using payment channels like WePay or Alipay, and other cities in China are going the same way. Alright, you say, but UK has legacy systems that take time to change, I understand that - but surely if Kenya and China have coverage in some out of the way places you would think Britain should be better equipped. And take Korea (South of course) - now a developed country admittedly and with legacy systems, but it is the world leader in internet connectivity, with the world's fastest average internet connection speed. About 45 million people or 92.4% of the population are internet users.

Medical services - and actually I am a fan of the NHS given the amazing way they treated my Mother - is continuously being criticised in Britain again for being under-funded, facing staff shortages and doctors leaving in droves. And what they will do when all the foreign doctors they have in place are forced to leave, following Brexit, who knows? Oh, by the way whatever happened to the money the Brexit supporters were persuaded would go the N HS rather than to Europe?  What I do know is that my annual medical visits to the hospital I have used in Thailand for well over a decade, for a very modest fee, does me very well. It reminds me also of a trip I made to Ecuador a few years back to visit my daughter who was studying there and I ended up with an eye problem. My inclination was to put up with it and wait until I was back in Hong Kong to have it dealt with, but the pain became too much so I succumbed to an Ecuadorian ophthalmologist who, frankly, was brilliant and charged very little.

Then there are negative reports on education, train services, roads ... the list goes on. It can't all be fake news - can it?

Now, you say, what a "moaning minnie" and what is the point of all this? My point is simply that Britain for many years was at the forefront of world opinions and impressions. It had an acute sense of morals and ethics. It had a judicial system that was the envy of many and a police force that people looked up to (my rather famous amateur running uncle - Stan Eldon - was a policeman and you wouldn't find someone straighter). It had a good health service, and a reputation for being innovative, particularly in the engineering sector. It didn't necessarily hand over its colonies in the greatest shape, but had provided initial infrastructures in many countries and therefore a base from which to work, but without always telling them how to do it.

But today I feel personally, and although many will disagree with me there are many others who see it the same way - the shine, almost a halo even, has gone. The reputations gained, indeed hard won, are being eroded but - even from a distance I have considerable affection for the place. And let's be honest where I live now, and the other countries where I have resided, are not perfect - as does everywhere for that matter but what I see around me in this region in particular is a desire to improve and get better, while at the same time the more I read about Britain suggests the movement is in the opposite direction.

Can I just say, then, that as with all these things at least in a democracy, the solutions are in the hands of the people. The interested, not the self-interested!

 

From One End To The Other

It’s all very well isn’t it to think that after many years of work and knowledge acquisition you are up to date with, and still a participant in, world affairs. Maybe still invited to take part in debate, public or private, that you think is meaningful. To demonstrate that you are worldly wise and making some sort of important contribution.

I wrote recently about the inevitable rise of Artificial Intelligence, pointing out that the ability to prevent this new technology from taking over the human race in due course was at least for the time being still very much in our control. Then this week we have had “important” events like the Bitcoin rise - a bubble if ever I saw one, a boost for Theresa May in the Brexit negotiations albeit a small step forward in what - for me - is not a clever strategy to leave Europe in this manner, and President Trump leading us all closer to global violence with his announcements about Jerusalem.

And then I was brought back to earth with a bump!

I was in Dubai and had been invited by my colleagues at HSBC Middle East to attend a workshop for young  people about finance. Right up my street, you might think. But actually it has been a long year what with one thing and another - no complaints, it’s what I do because I want to, although the health bit in the middle was something of a distraction (mending nicely thank you) - and after a particularly taxing week I admit it, I was tired and honestly, less than enthusiastic.

However, I duly turned up with some fellow Directors to participate in this “workshop”. It was in a warehouse-like space that was rented out for events like this, and after a general briefing on what was expected of us the attendees came to join us. Sixty of them, boys and girls - aged variously from about 14 up to early 20s. Many of them - but not all - born in the UAE of originally immigrant parents who themselves had been in the UAE maybe for 20 or 30 years. A few recent arrivals from Syria/Palestine. None of them with citizenship they could use, the majority of them without schooling or at best very elementary, from low-income families, a few with jobs - but my goodness, all of them eager and with aspirations and with hope. A hope that was etched on their faces as they sought even the most rudimentary knowledge and took in the sort of advice that said, for example, if you were lucky enough to get a job and receive money, the idea was to resist the temptation to immediately go and spend it. All of it. “Save” was the word of the day

They were asked to create a future time-line of their lives and put their aspirations on paper taking into account that everything they did cost money, and pointing out that the more attention they paid to learning the better equipped they were to get jobs, and fulfil some of their dreams. The young 16 year old boy on my right said “you know, dreams never come true”. I asked him how he knew, and of course he didn’t really have an answer but it was a belief borne of the life he had lived so far. I gave him and the others at my table some of the background to my life (readers of my Blog know the history) and said that although I agreed life was made up of many combinations of things including luck and opportunity you also had a part to play in making your own luck. He understood what I was saying although I’m not sure I convinced him - but despite that, he did still want a better future. And he wanted to work for it. And as for the young man opposite me - he will either rise to the top of the pile or sink (and then probably come back up again). He gave a really good impromptu rap performance and was prepared to get up and give a presentation on some of the things we had spent time talking about - with a bit of prompting. But lively - oh yes.

The aspirations were interesting. They wanted to go to college and study; own their own businesses - anything from construction companies to car sales to restaurants. But what I found really interesting was that many of them wanted to devote some of their time and money to helping those who were even worse off than they were. That was a lesson for me - not a lesson from me! 

I left the workshop refreshed, energised and ... humbled. And it was not purely and simply that I had been a part of something that I was not initially looking forward to and realised that I had done something that was truly worthwhile, and clearly I was impressed by the enthusiasm of the young people themselves. But I was also very taken by the dedication of the adults who were giving their time to try and ensure that these children had better lives than their parents, and were in a position to make a difference, including I am pleased to say colleagues from the HSBC team in Dubai who are fully involved and unstinting in their support.

Similar sentiments have been expressed by others - but in relation to the UAE most vocally by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Ruler of Dubai, - whose view is that if we do not educate our children we are making them vulnerable to pressures representing elements that will only lead our world down a slippery slope of temptation and make them easy targets for the recruiters of terrorists.

How true!

The Artificial Intelligence Phenomenon

Let me start with a non-artificial albeit not very intelligent, apology.

When prompted to re-start my Blog-writing at the beginning of this year I was determined not to let there be large gaps in production ... and if the gaps re-appeared, then to give it up for good for lack of time. I have let two and a half months go by since my last submission - it's too long, and it was not for lack of trying to get something out. I won't go into the details - they're boring, but if it happens again then I will need to heed my own advice.

Anyway, back to the topic in hand. I think we all understand what is meant by the word artificial - being something that is unreal, insincere, often man-made, but I - for one, am less clear about the word intelligence. For example I have never felt able to describe myself as being particularly intelligent. Lots of common sense - I believe, but intelligence? Although the basic definition of intelligence says something along the lines of "having the ability to learn or understand" is something that all of us, including me, can do to some extent or another. But I suppose I just look around me at people who I would consider to be far more intelligent than I am based on a variety of criteria, and judge myself accordingly.

We are now, though, bombarded daily by the term "artificial intelligence". That ability of humankind (forgive me for being so gender-specific - but I haven't found hupeoplekind yet!) to create the artificial means to do many of the jobs that are undertaken by living people in the workforce now. And there are two particular aspects of this that concern me.

Firstly, the dire warnings being talked about where we will find all of our jobs taken over by machines, leaving us out of work, out of money, and out of our minds with boredom. The second, and the follow-on, is the lack of solutions being put forward to deal with this phenomenon.

On the first issue, I recall various predictions in history where warnings of impending doom due to automation never fully came to fruition - at least in the time frame predicted. The industrial revolution comes to mind, so does the advent of accounting machines that automated much of the back office work in banks for example - and Automated Teller Machines that were introduced in the mid 1960s and were going to revolutionise bank branches and result in hundreds of thousands of bank job losses over the subsequent 10 years. And yes, banks are now beginning to close branches, but for a variety of reasons other than the ATM revolution, but it has taken 40 more years for those early predictions to come to bear, and the job losses have not been so dramatic as people have been trained in other roles. The world has moved on and we are still able to find paid employment.

Let's not be ostrich-like and stick our heads in the sand, because the speed of change and of development has undoubtedly changed the landscape. So we should recognise that artificial intelligence - in whatever format - will indeed become a feature of our lives and the lives of the generations that follow us, if they are still around!! But I nevertheless feel that human ingenuity, creativity, empathy, emotion and basic common sense has the ability to help us deal with this "brave new world" - and that we have time to prepare,  as long as we do not ignore what is happening around us.

The second issue is that in the midst of all these warnings about the future, and how useless we are going to become, is the general lack of suggestion about what we are going to do about it. There is a school of thought that suggests - as in the paragraph above - that robots/artificial intelligence, whatever, will find it hard to develop such things as common sense and creativity. They will not be programmed that way, although they could perhaps go some way to developing these emotions through copying. We do, though, need people to seriously consider our options, and to start now. Obviously use robotics and artificial intelligence to undertake the work being done by manual labour as long as they can do it effectively, or to interrogate data files at a far greater speed than can be achieved by the human brain (the banks should benefit from this in their "Know Your Customer" programmes, rather than chasing us all to determine the source of the last deposit made to your account) and therefore take the drudgery out of that work - but what then do you give those people to do who have been displaced. This for me is the big dilemma, and brains far greater and better than mine need to be looking at the various options.

It is all very well creating an environment in which we are all living longer (and therefore becoming more prone to developing dementia because heart disease and other potential killers are being better diagnosed and treated), but if we have nothing to do and no way of generating a living wage - what then? I said earlier that dire predictions have been around over the centuries and we have always found a way to deal with them - but this seems to me to be somethings different. The people that I speak to about it all acknowledge that AI is the future. The question is how do we keep it under control and stop it from eventually taking over the world - our world in case you needed reminding.

We have to remember that - at this moment in time - it is us that is developing AI, not the other way round. We are in control - so far. As a result, there is of course one sure-fire way of ensuring this does not become a problem which is to recognise at what point you need to pull out the damn plug!