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In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to listen to themselves, be true to themselves, and follow their hearts – as long as they do ...
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famous interview in 1987, Thatcher said that ‘There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women … and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’
human feelings, not about human rationality. If democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely no reason to give all people equal voting rights – or perhaps any voting rights.
Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound ‘free will’, that this ‘free will’ is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free.
Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality – they embody evolutionary rationality.
As George Orwell envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the television will watch us while we are watching it.
we might perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system – and then merge into it.
The moral of the parable is that people’s merit should be judged by their actual behaviour, rather than by their religious affiliation.
Like all mammals, Homo sapiens uses emotions to quickly make life and death decisions. We have inherited our anger, our fear and our lust from millions of ancestors, all of whom passed the most rigorous quality control tests of natural selection.
Yet the real problem with robots is exactly the opposite. We should fear them because they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel.
The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence, but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.
In one tragicomic incident in October 2017, a Palestinian labourer posted to his private Facebook account a picture of himself in his workplace, alongside a bulldozer.
Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’.
individual discrimination.
Science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness, and assume that in order to match or surpass human intelligence, computers will have to develop consciousness.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger.
Consciousness is somehow linked to organic biochemistry in such a way that it will never be possible to create consciousness in non-organic systems.
We are researching and developing human abilities mainly according to the immediate needs of the economic and political system, rather than according to our own long-term needs as conscious beings.
In this, humans are similar to other domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors.
And yet we hardly invest much in exploring the human mind, and instead focus on increasing the speed of our Internet connections and the efficiency of our Big Data algorithms.
All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation, but from something far worse – irrelevance.
Already today, the richest 1 per cent owns half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly, the richest hundred people together own more than the poorest 4 billion.1
The two processes together – bioengineering coupled with the rise of AI – might therefore result in the separation of humankind into a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens.
In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data.
‘attention merchants’.
We aren’t their customers – we are their product.
meaningful communities’, but also ‘strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together
(A blueprint of such an alternative model has been suggested recently by Tristan Harris, an ex-Googler and tech-philosopher who came up with a new metric of ‘time well spent’.
The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas.
Athenian democracy was a half-hearted experiment that survived for barely 200 years in a small corner of the Balkans.
Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills.
War spreads ideas, technologies and people far more quickly than commerce.
Though it has no intrinsic value – you cannot eat or drink a dollar bill – trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords and North Korean tyrants.
Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreements.
During this period, known as the Holocene, Earth’s climate has been relatively stable.
According to a 2013 report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, it takes about 15,000 litres of fresh water to produce one kilogram of beef, compared to 287 litres needed to produce a kilogram of potatoes.
On the other hand, we might witness the complete decoupling of intelligence from consciousness, and the development of AI might result in a world dominated by super-intelligent but completely non-conscious entities.
nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption –
Technical problems.
Policy problems.
Identity problems.
A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.
Looked at from the outside, the religious traditions that divide people often seem trifling, and Freud ridiculed the obsession people have about such matters as ‘the narcissism of small differences’.
the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodge-podge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favourite spirits and local customs.
We know these missiles as the kamikaze.
The North Korean regime indoctrinates its subjects with a fanatical state religion called Juche.
Especially in a globalised world, all humans have moral obligations towards all other humans, and those shirking these obligations are egoists or even racists.
When evaluating the immigration deal, both sides give far more weight to violations than to compliance.
Both these cases may seem to smack of racism. But in fact, they are not racist. They are ‘culturist’.
Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of ‘culturists’.
