More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realize this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realizing the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others and divert attention to external threats, either real
...more
According to some measures, Russia is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with 87 percent of wealth concentrated in the hands of the richest 10 percent of people.
In my travels around the world I have met numerous people in many countries who wish to immigrate to the United States, Germany, Canada, or Australia. I have met a few who want to move to China or Japan. But I have yet to meet a single person who dreams of immigrating to Russia.
For every Muslim youth from Germany who traveled to the Middle East to live under a Muslim theocracy, probably a hundred Middle Eastern youths would have liked to make the opposite journey and start a new life for themselves in liberal Germany.
At the end of the day, humankind won’t abandon the liberal story, he might think, because it doesn’t have any alternative. People might give the system an angry kick in the stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually return to it.
After all, weren’t all these global stories—even communism—the product of Western imperialism? Why should Vietnamese villagers put their faith in the brainchild of a German from Trier and a Manchester industrialist? Maybe each country should adopt a different idiosyncratic path, defined by its own ancient traditions. Perhaps even Westerners should take a break from trying to run the world, and focus on their own affairs for a change.
Donald Trump coupled his calls for American isolationism with a promise to “Make America Great Again”—as if the United States of the 1980s or 1950s was a perfect society that Americans should somehow recreate in the twenty-first century.
spreading its might from the Baltic to the Caucasus.
If liberalism, nationalism, Islam, or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms, and bioengineering but also to incorporate them into a new and meaningful narrative.
The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class,” leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle.
All the talk about technology and ideology might sound very abstract and remote, but the very real prospect of mass unemployment—or personal unemployment—leaves nobody indifferent.
Luddite
algorithms—and
and bodyguards in 2050.
Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined).
More than 90 percent of these accidents are caused by very human errors:
Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 percent.
In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year. It would therefore be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans—not jobs. Displaced drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.
serendipity
wallow
slavishly
In 1920 a farm worker laid off due to the mechanization of agriculture could find a new job in a factory producing tractors. In 1980 an unemployed factory worker could start working as a cashier in a supermarket. Such occupational changes were feasible, because the move from farm to factory and from factory to supermarket required only limited retraining.
Today, despite the shortage of drone operators and data analysts, the U.S. Air Force is unwilling to fill the gaps with Walmart dropouts. You wouldn’t want an inexperienced recruit to mistake an Afghan wedding party for a high-level Taliban conference.
we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class.
Many people might share the fate not of nineteenth-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of nineteenth-century horses, who were increasingly pushed out of the job market altogether.15
By 2050, not only the idea of a job for life but even that of a profession for life might seem antediluvian.
By 2050 a useless class might emerge due not merely to an absolute lack of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also to insufficient mental stamina.
the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 constituted just a small part of the tuition fees humankind had to pay.
“Protect workers, not jobs.”)
Some might argue
Nobody’s life’s dream is to be a cashier.
universal basic income. UBI proposes
Today millions of Bangladeshis make a living by producing shirts and selling them to customers in the United States, while people in Bangalore earn their keep in call centers dealing with the complaints of American customers.26
Yet with the rise of AI, robots, and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the United States, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon and print it in New York. The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3-D printing centers in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home. Simultaneously, instead of calling customer service in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google cloud (whose accent and
...more
What do you do when nobody needs your cheap unskilled laborers and you don’t have the resources to build a good education system and teach them new skills?27
stragglers?
If you believe that, you might just as well believe that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny will solve the problem.
From a purely biological perspective, a human being needs just 1,500–2,500 calories per day in order to survive. Anything more is a luxury.
If in 2050 the United World Government agrees to tax Google, Amazon, Baidu, and Tencent in order to provide basic support for every human being on earth—in Dhaka as well as in Detroit—how will it define “basic”?
Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people.
There, about 50 percent of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men never work. They dedicate their lives to studying holy scriptures and performing religious rituals. They and their families don’t starve partly because the wives often work and partly because the government provides them with generous subsidies and free services, making sure that they don’t lack the basic necessities of life. That’s universal basic support avant la lettre.30
yeshivas
Talmud.
Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.
In the United States, for example, both Republicans and Democrats should occasionally take a break from their heated quarrels to remind themselves that they all agree on fundamentals, such as free elections, an independent judiciary, and human rights. In particular, it is vital to remember that right-wing heroes such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were great champions not only of economic freedoms but also of individual liberties.
tapestry
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 at all.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, eminent biologist Richard Dawkins protested that the vast majority of the British public—including himself—should never have been asked to vote in the referendum, because they lacked the necessary background in economics and political science. “You might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right, or let passengers vote on which runway the pilot should land.”3
In the 2016 Brexit referendum the Leave campaign was headed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. After David Cameron resigned, Gove initially supported Johnson for the premiership, but at the very last minute Gove declared Johnson unfit for the position and announced his own intention to run for it.
parable
