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Distracted, angry, and anxious human drivers kill more than a million people in traffic accidents every year. We
disjunction
infernal
Most said that
On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went berserk in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai and massacred about four hundred civilians. This war crime resulted from the local initiative of men who had been involved in jungle guerrilla warfare for several months. It did not serve any strategic purpose and contravened both U.S. legal code and military policy. It was the fault of human emotions.24 If the United States had deployed killer robots in Vietnam, the massacre at My Lai never would have occurred.
In July 1995 Bosnian Serb troops massacred more than eight thousand Muslim Bosniaks around the town of Srebrenica.
gulag
In one tragicomic incident in October 2017, a Palestinian laborer posted to his private Facebook account a picture of himself in his workplace, alongside a bulldozer. Adjacent to the image he wrote “Good morning!” An automatic algorithm made a small error when transliterating the Arabic letters. Instead of ysabechhum (which means “good morning”), the algorithm identified the letters as ydbachhum (which means “kill them”). Suspecting that the man might be a terrorist intending to use a bulldozer to run people over, Israeli security forces swiftly arrested him. He was released after they
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Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech.
Instead of just collective discrimination, in the twenty-first century we might face a growing problem of individual discrimination.32
banal
My boss wants me to answer emails as quickly as possible, but he has little interest in my ability to taste and appreciate the food I am eating. Consequently, I check my emails even during meals, which means I lose the ability to pay attention to my own sensations.
Today, the richest 1 percent own half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly, the richest one hundred people together own more than the poorest four billion.1
Throughout history the rich and the aristocracy always imagined that they had skills superior to everybody else’s, which is why they were in control. As far as we can tell, this wasn’t true. The average duke wasn’t more talented than the average peasant—he owed his superiority only to unjust legal and economic discrimination. However,
By 2100, the richest 1 percent might own not merely most of the world’s wealth but also most of the world’s beauty, creativity, and health.
Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be connected starting in the womb, and if later in life you choose to disconnect, insurance agencies might refuse to insure you, employers might refuse to employ you, and healthcare services might refuse to take care of you. In the big battle between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down.
conundrum:
cataclysm.
Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible.
scaffolding
The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberty and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion, and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level.
Even today most of us find it impossible to really know more than 150 individuals, irrespective of how many Facebook friends we boast.
ideological commitments.
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.7
foragers
Humans lived for millions of years without religions and without nations; they can probably live happily without them in the twenty-first century too. Yet they cannot live happily if they are disconnected from their bodies. If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.
Beyond a certain point, the time and energy you spend on getting to know your online friends from Iran or Nigeria will come at the expense of your ability to know your next-door neighbors.
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. If
We may come to miss the good old days when online was separated from offline.
Islam is anything Muslims make of it,
To be German in 2018 means to grapple with the difficult legacy of Nazism while upholding liberal and democratic values. Who knows what it will mean in 2050.
In 2011, a scandal erupted when the ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn paper Di Tzeitung published a photo of American officials watching the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound but digitally erased all women from the photo, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The paper explained it was forced to do so by Jewish “laws of modesty.” A similar scandal erupted when the paper HaMevaser expunged Angela Merkel from a photo of a demonstration against the Charlie Hebdo massacre, lest her image arouse any lustful thoughts in the minds of devout readers. The publisher of a third ultra-Orthodox newspaper,
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temerity
Islam has no fixed DNA. Islam is whatever Muslims make of it.9
Since individuals belonging to different species cannot produce fertile offspring together, species can never merge. Gorillas cannot merge with chimpanzees, giraffes cannot merge with elephants, and dogs cannot merge with cats.
inextricably
meshed
People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam.
When Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, Kurds and Turks compete for the favors of global public opinion, they all use the same discourse of human rights, state sovereignty, and international law.
A color-blind person could hardly tell the difference between the flags of Belgium, Chad, Ivory Coast, France, Guinea, Ireland, Italy, Mali, and Romania—they all have three vertical stripes of various colors.
send
For the dollar bill is universally venerated across all political and religious divides. 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.
cornucopia
After the Islamic State captured Raqqa and Mosul, 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.15 Presumably even Islamist doctors and nurses believe that the body is made of cells, that diseases are caused by pathogens, and that antibiotics kill bacteria.
nationalism is not a natural and eternal part of the human psyche, and it is not rooted in human biology.
it is hardly natural for humans to be loyal to millions of utter strangers. Such mass loyalties have appeared only in the last few thousand years—yesterday morning, in evolutionary terms—and they require immense efforts of social construction.
coalesced
nebulous
benign
morphs
