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An algorithm could then own a transportation empire or a venture-capital fund without having to obey the wishes of any human master.
most of our planet is already legally owned by non-human inter-subjective entities, namely nations and corporations.
In September 2013 two Oxford researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, published ‘The Future of Employment’, in which they surveyed the likelihood of different professions being taken over by computer
But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than current run-of-the-mill jobs, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!).
The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.20
What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?
After all, this is the divine mission its Creator gave it.
Google actually launched Google Flu Trends, which tracks flu outbreaks by monitoring Google searches. The service is still being developed, and due to privacy limitations it tracks only search words and allegedly avoids reading private emails. But it is already capable of ringing the flu alarm bells ten days before traditional health services.
US biotech companies are increasingly worried that strict privacy laws in the USA combined with Chinese disregard for individual privacy may hand China the genetic market on a plate.
The self-deceptions and self-delusions that trap people in bad relationships, wrong careers and harmful habits will not fool Google.
‘Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in different ways, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’
When everybody uses the same oracle, and everybody believes the oracle, the oracle turns into a sovereign.
Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.
the twenty-first century the individual is more likely to disintegrate gently from within than to be brutally crushed from without.
The liberal solution for social inequality is to give equal value to different human experiences, instead of trying to create the same experiences for everyone.
Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.
People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors.
But the age of the masses may be over, and with it the age of mass medicine.
However, whereas Hitler and his ilk planned to create superhumans by means of selective breeding and ethnic cleansing, twenty-first-century techno-humanism hopes to reach that goal far more peacefully, with the help of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and brain–computer interfaces.
(the joke is that in the Kalahari Desert, the typical hunter-gatherer band consists of twenty hunters, twenty gatherers and fifty anthropologists).
A bat can distinguish between a tasty moth species and a poisonous moth species by the different echoes bouncing back from their delicate wings.
Whales can hear one another from hundreds of kilometres away, and each whale has a repertoire of characteristic ‘songs’ that may last for hours and follow very intricate patterns. Every now and then a whale composes a new hit, which other whales throughout the ocean adopt.
If you sat among an archaic band debating whether to start a war against the neighbours, you could literally smell public opinion.
though we have more choice than ever before, we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose.6
The system may push us in that direction, because it usually rewards us for the decisions we make rather than for our doubts. Yet a life of resolute decisions and quick fixes may be poorer and shallower than one of doubts and contradictions.
Yet should we ever achieve such control, techno-humanism would not know what to do with it, because the sacred human would then become just another designer product.
organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data.
The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare.
In a chaotic system tunnel vision has its advantages, and the billionaires’ power is strictly proportional to their goals.
Freedom of information, in contrast, is not given to humans. It is given to information.
The seed algorithm may initially be developed by humans, but as it grows it follows its own path, going where no human has gone before – and where no human can follow.
The yardsticks that we ourselves have enshrined will condemn us to join the mammoths and Chinese river dolphins in oblivion.
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.
issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.
