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Of course, 7 billion people have 7 billion agendas, and as already noted, thinking about the big picture is a relatively rare luxury.
It is a cliché to note that the personal is the political.
A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality. Each of us is ensnared within numerous all-encompassing spider webs, which on the one hand restrict our movements, but at the same time transmit
Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse – irrelevance.
claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story.
In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail; in 2018 we are down to zero.
Disorientation causes them to think in apocalyptic terms, as if the failure of history to come to its envisioned happy ending
Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches on to catastrophic scenarios. Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor,
Governments might therefore need to invent entirely new taxes – perhaps a tax on information (which will
be both the most important asset in the economy, and the only thing exchanged in numerous transactions).
The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside us, and will enable us to engineer and manufacture life.
Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
globalisation, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning – and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms? In the twentieth century,
Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.6 This
Allegedly, the unprecedented butchery had taught humankind the terrible price of imperialism, and now humanity was finally ready to create a new world order based on the principles of freedom and peace. Then came the Hitler
The full context of the world war and unfair aftermath on the losing forces
No wonder that many national liberation movements throughout the world placed their hopes on communist Moscow and Beijing rather than on the self-proclaimed champions of liberty in the West.
Was nehruvin thought thus influenced?
Liberty is not worth much unless it is coupled with some kind of social safety net.
that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets and government welfare services remained the only game in town.
Xi Jinping looks like Obama’s real successor. Having put Marxism–Leninism on the back burner, China seems rather happy with the liberal international order.
Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.
By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.8 Yet though enduring
Russia is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with 87 per cent of wealth concentrated in the hands of the richest 10 per cent of people.
For the first time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills
fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents.
But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse an...
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Humans have two types of abilities – physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition.
turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality ‘pattern recognition’.
Yet if these emotions and desires are in fact no more than biochemical algorithms, there is no reason why computers cannot decipher these algorithms – and do so far better than any Homo sapiens.
Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability.
These potential advantages of connectivity and updateability are so huge that at least in some lines of work it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.
Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime and terrorism combined).
AI might help create new human jobs in another way. Instead of humans competing with AI, they could focus on servicing and leveraging AI.
We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labour.
when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated
AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.18
By 2050, not just the idea of ‘a job for life’, but even the idea of ‘a profession for life’ might seem antediluvian.
By 2050 a ‘useless’ class might emerge not merely because of an absolute lack of jobs or lack of relevant education, but also because of insufficient mental stamina.
The potential social and political disruptions are so alarming that even if the probability of systemic mass unemployment is low, we should take it very seriously.
Feudalism, monarchism and traditional religions were not adapted to managing industrial metropolises, millions of uprooted workers, or the constantly changing nature of the modern economy.
Potential solutions fall into three main categories: what to do in order to prevent jobs from being lost; what to do in order to create enough new jobs; and what to do if, despite our best efforts, job losses significantly outstrip job creation.
(This kind of scheme is currently being pioneered in Scandinavia, where governments follow the motto ‘protect workers, not jobs’.)
already today computers and algorithms are beginning to function as clients in addition to producers.
One new model, which is gaining increasing attention, is universal basic income.
utopian vision of communism.
Universal basic support is meant to take care of basic human needs, but there is no accepted definition for that.
Whichever way you choose to define ‘basic human needs’, once you provide them to everyone free of charge, they will be taken for granted, and then fierce social competitions and political struggles will focus on non-basic luxuries – be they fancy self-driving cars, access to virtual-reality parks, or enhanced bioengineered bodies.
Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.
But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and for community might eclipse the quest for a job.
In politics, liberalism believes that the voter knows best. It therefore upholds democratic elections.
In economics, liberalism maintains that the customer is always right. It
