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My agenda here is global. I look at the major forces that shape societies all over the world and that are likely to influence the future of our planet as a whole.
This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.
Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition.”
But in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger.
Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.
War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does.
Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commands.” It means “reducing suffering.” Therefore in order to act morally, you don’t need to believe in any myth or story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering.
What then is the secular ideal? The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Secularists strive not to confuse truth with belief.
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
However, in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.
In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions,
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We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.
If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then again, if somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.
The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy, because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs.
Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.
Most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than by the strength of their foundations.
