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What do you do when nobody needs your cheap unskilled labourers, and you don’t have the resources to build a good education system and teach them new skills?
how to live a contented life in a post-work world has been conducted in Israel. There, about 50 per cent of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men never work.
the quest for meaning and for community might eclipse the quest for a job.
Referendums and elections are always about 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.
We no longer search for information. Instead, we google.
But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work and who to marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making. Democratic elections and free markets will make little sense.
what was good for survival and reproduction in the African savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible behaviour on twenty-first-century motorways.
If we teach Kant, Mill and Rawls to write code, they can carefully program the self-driving car in their cosy laboratory, and be certain that the car will follow their commandments on the highway.
Most said that in such a case the car should save the pedestrians even at the price of killing its owner. When they were then asked whether they personally would buy a car programmed to sacrifice its owner for the greater good, most said no.
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.
problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence, but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.
The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century – the attempt to concentrate all information in one place – might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century. As
Just as aeroplanes fly faster than birds without ever developing feathers, so computers may come to solve problems much better than mammals without ever developing feelings.
While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.
We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors.
we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.
Maybe in some parts of the world you should teach your kids to write computer code, while in others you had better teach them to draw fast and shoot straight.
We aren’t their customers – we are their product.
It is a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colourful beads and cheap trinkets.
people live ever more lonely lives in an ever more connected planet.
street. It is easier than ever to talk to my cousin in Switzerland, but it is harder to talk to my husband over breakfast, because he constantly looks at his smartphone instead of at me.
Facebook is committed ‘to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience’ with others.8 Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences.
Whether you are a chimpanzee or a gorilla depends on your genes rather than your beliefs, and different genes dictate distinct social behaviours.
Otto von Bismarck allegedly remarked (having read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) that the Bavarian is the missing link between the Austrian and the human.
In the economy, for example, division of labour cannot succeed unless everyone shares a single market.
People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam.
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.
it did not tear down the local hospitals. Rather, it launched an appeal to Muslim doctors and nurses throughout the world to volunteer their services there.
The people we fight most often are our own family members.
Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreements.
Tax evasion and nepotism come naturally to us, but nationalism says they are ‘corrupt’.
It isn’t a coincidence that scepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right.
when AlphaZero graduates from ordinary chess to nuclear chess?
The idea of establishing an independent Scotland or Catalonia looks more attractive when you don’t have to fear a German invasion and when you can count on a common European front against global warming and global corporations.
The kamikaze thus relied on combining state-of-the-art technology with state-of-the-art religious indoctrination.
It’s as if you take a seed of a eucalyptus tree from Australia and plant it in France. From an ecological perspective, eucalyptus trees are an invading species, and it will take generations before botanists reclassify them as native European plants. Yet from the viewpoint of the individual tree, it is French. If you don’t water it with French water, it will wither. If you try to uproot it, you will discover it has struck its roots deep in the French soil, just like the local oaks and pines.
protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and coca-colonialism.
Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of ‘culturists’.
Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.
‘Muslim culture is very intolerant’. The latter claim is just far too hazy. What do we mean by ‘intolerant’? Intolerant of whom, or what? A culture can be intolerant towards religious minorities and unusual political views, while simultaneously being very tolerant towards obese people or the elderly.
Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop.
Because we intuitively understand that terrorism is theatre, we judge it by its emotional rather than material impact.
Terrorism did not bother our medieval ancestors, because they had much bigger problems to deal with.
state is driven to respond to the theatre of terror with its own theatre of security.
that in the twenty-first century the most successful strategy is to sit on the fence and let others do the fighting for you.
waging a successful war means waging a limited war.
Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often discount it.
no god and no law of nature protects us from human stupidity.
For example, when wolf cubs play with one another, they have ‘fair game’ rules. If a cub bites too hard, or continues to bite an opponent that has rolled on his back and surrendered, the other cubs will stop playing with him.
