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Nor do vampires use loans in order to finance new businesses or encourage growth in the blood-sucking market.
This fundamental dogma can be summarised in one simple idea: ‘If you have a problem, you probably need more stuff; and in order to have more stuff, you must produce more of it.’
Just as Christians and Muslims all believe in heaven, and disagree only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method.
When the Singaporean economy grows, government ministers get a raise, as if that is what their jobs are all about.
Much of the credit for overcoming famine and plague belongs to the ardent capitalist faith in growth.
You begin a game of chess with sixteen pieces, and you never finish a game with more.
So chess players never have to consider investment. In contrast, many modern board games and computer games focus on investment and growth.
there are three kinds of resources: raw materials, energy and knowledge.
A billion Chinese and a billion Indians want to live like middle-class Americans, and they see no reason why they should put their dreams on hold when the Americans are unwilling to give up their SUVs and shopping malls.
Who knows if science will always be able to simultaneously save the economy from freezing and the ecology from boiling.
Protecting the environment is a very nice idea, but those who cannot pay their rent are worried about their overdraft far more than about melting ice caps.
In the premodern world, people were akin to lowly clerks in a socialist bureaucracy. They punched their cards and then waited for somebody else to do something. In the modern world we humans run the business, so we are under constant pressure day and night.
philosophers have argued that if humans stopped believing in a great cosmic plan, all law and order would vanish. Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and His all-encompassing plans.
Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.
The rich are taught to disregard the poor, while the poor are taught to disregard their true interests.
Hitler wasn’t a senior officer – in four years of war, he rose no higher than the rank of corporal. He had no formal education, no professional skills and no political background. He wasn’t a successful businessman or a union activist, he didn’t have friends or relatives in high places, nor any money to speak of. At first, he didn’t even have German citizenship. He was a penniless immigrant.
They warned that if all humans were given equal value and equal breeding opportunities, natural selection would cease to function.
Technology depends on religion because every invention has many potential applications, and the engineers need some prophet to make the crucial choices and point towards the required destination.
but in order to navigate a storm you need a map and a rudder rather than just an anchor.
History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.
Before Marx, people defined and divided themselves according to their views about God, not about production methods.
Monasteries were the first institutions to use clocks, and for centuries they and the cathedral schools were the most important learning centres of Europe, helping to found many of Europe’s first universities, such as Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca.
The Bible is kept as a source of authority, even though it is no longer a true source of inspiration.
Since humanism has long sanctified the life, the emotions and the desires of human beings, it’s hardly surprising that a humanist civilisation will want to maximise human lifespans, human happiness and human power.
And when random accidents combine with deterministic processes, we get probabilistic outcomes, but this too doesn’t amount to freedom.
But the million-dollar question is not whether parrots and humans can act upon their inner desires – the question is whether they can choose their desires in the first place.
Scientists observing neural activity in the brain can predict which switch the person will press well before the person actually does so, and even before the person is aware of their own intention.
did Eve desire to eat the forbidden fruit offered to her by the snake? Was this desire forced upon her? Did this desire just pop into her mind by pure chance? Or did she choose it ‘freely’? If she didn’t choose it freely, why punish her for it?
However, if and when such manipulations become routine, the supposedly free will of customers will become just another product to purchase. You want to master the piano but whenever it comes time to practise you prefer to watch television? No problem: just put on a helmet, install the right software, and you will be downright aching to play the piano.
However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If I look really deep within myself, the seeming unity that I take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self’. Humans aren’t individuals. They are ‘dividuals’.
In another experiment Gazzaniga and his team flashed a picture of a chicken claw to the left-half brain – the side responsible for speech – and simultaneously flashed a picture of a snowy landscape to the right brain. When asked what he saw, patient PS answered ‘a chicken claw’. Gazzaniga then presented PS with a series of picture cards and asked him to point to the one that best matched what he had seen. The patient’s right hand (controlled by his left brain) pointed to a picture of a chicken, but simultaneously his left hand shot out and pointed to a snow shovel. Gazzaniga then asked PS the
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left hemisphere of the brain is the seat not only of our verbal abilities, but also of an internal interpreter that constantly tries to make sense of our life,
pleasant. For the experiencing self, it is impossible that adding a slightly unpleasant experience to a very unpleasant experience will make the entire episode more appealing.
The narrating self is akin to Gazzaniga’s left-brain interpreter. It is forever busy spinning yarns about the past and making plans for the future.
it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and assesses the whole experience according to their average.
We experience hunger differently when we fast during Ramadan, when we fast in preparation for a medical examination, and when we don’t eat because we have no money.
The different meanings ascribed to our hunger by the narrating self create very different actual experiences.
Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.
It is much easier to live with the fantasy, because the fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.
commandments. If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable.
Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going.
Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.
countries now need only small numbers of highly trained soldiers, even smaller numbers of special forces super-warriors and a handful of experts who know how to produce and use sophisticated technology.
It is telling that already today in many asymmetrical conflicts the majority of citizens are reduced to serving as human shields for advanced armaments.
An ordinary farm horse can smell, love, recognise faces, jump over fences and do a thousand other things far better than a Model T Ford or a million-dollar Lamborghini. But cars nevertheless replaced horses because they were superior in the handful of tasks that the system really needed.
On 23 April 2013, Syrian hackers broke into Associated Press’s official Twitter account. At 13:07 they tweeted that the White House had been attacked and President Obama was hurt. Trade algorithms that constantly monitor newsfeeds reacted in no time and began selling stocks like mad.
Yet most run-of-the-mill lawyers devote their time to perusing endless files, looking for precedents, loopholes and tiny pieces of potentially relevant evidence.
With such a Watson around, there is not much need for Sherlocks.
Algorithmic calculations are not affected by the materials from which the calculator is built. Whether an abacus is made of wood, iron or plastic, two beads plus two beads equals four beads.
However, over the last few thousand years we humans have been specialising. A taxi driver or a cardiologist specialises in a much narrower niche than a hunter-gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI.
