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The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.
If you don’t know what to do with the power to engineer life, market forces will not wait a thousand years for you to come up with an answer. The invisible hand of the market will force upon you its own blind reply.
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.
Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED Talks, government think tanks, and high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning—and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?
Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.
What's the relation between irrelevance and the losing of economic power of people who have political power?
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.”
But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption.
Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition.”
Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.
Walmart cashier who through superhuman effort manages to reinvent herself as a drone pilot might have to reinvent herself again ten years later, because by then the flying of drones may also have been automated.
How do you unionize a profession that mushrooms and disappears within a decade?
These corporations can grow and expand to the far reaches of the galaxy, and all they need are robots and computers—they don’t even need humans to buy their products.
What's the meaning?
But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making. Democratic elections and free markets will make little sense. So would most religions and works of art.
and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system—and then merge into it. Already today we are becoming tiny chips inside a giant data-processing system that nobody really understands.
But the experimenters planted in their path a shabbily dressed person who was sitting slumped in a doorway with his head down and his eyes closed. As each unsuspecting seminarian hurried past, the “victim” coughed and groaned pitifully. Most seminarians did not even stop to inquire what was wrong with the man, let alone offer any help. The emotional stress created by the need to hurry to the lecture hall trumped their moral obligation to help strangers in distress.
(For the first time in history, you might be able to sue a philosopher for the unfortunate results of his or her theories, because for the first time in history you might be able to prove a direct causal link between philosophical ideas and real-life events.)
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.
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.
The algorithm discriminates against you not because you are a woman or an African American but because you are you.
in the twenty-first century we might face a growing problem of individual discrimination.32
Consciousness is somehow linked to organic biochemistry in such a way that it will never be possible to create consciousness in nonorganic systems. Consciousness is not linked to organic biochemistry, but it is linked to intelligence in such a way that computers could develop consciousness, and computers will have to develop consciousness if they are to pass a certain threshold of intelligence. There are no essential links between consciousness and either organic biochemistry or high intelligence. Therefore computers might develop consciousness—but not necessarily. They could become
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the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.
human consciousness.
we have no idea what our full human potential is,
If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.
For without a social safety net and a modicum of economic equality, liberty is meaningless.
American welfare state.
make common cause
In the long run, such a scenario might even deglobalize the world,
In the medium term, this data hoard opens a path to a radically different business model whose first victim will be the advertising industry itself.
If we want to prevent a small elite from monopolizing such godlike powers, and if we want to prevent humankind from splitting into biological castes, the key question is: who owns the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?
how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era.
our sociopolitical system might collapse.
Tristan Harris, a tech philosopher and former Google employee who came up with a new metric of “time well spent.”)9
It is therefore more accurate to see even the Islamic State as an errant offshoot of the global culture we all share, rather than as a branch of some mysterious and alien tree.
how to explain the fact that when archeologists excavated ancient synagogues in Israel from the time of the Mishnah and Talmud, they found no sign of gender segregation, and instead uncovered beautiful floor mosaics and wall paintings depicting women, some of them rather scantily dressed?
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the Bavarian is the missing link between the Austrian and the human.
the division of labor cannot succeed unless everyone shares a single market. One country cannot specialize in producing cars or oil unless it can buy food from other countries that grow wheat and rice.
The process of human unification has taken two distinct forms:
War also makes people far more interested in one another.
Hitler wasn’t less European than Churchill. Rather, the very struggle between them defined what it meant to be European at that particular juncture in history.
twenty-first-century Europeans are different from their ancestors in 1618 and 1940 but are increasingly similar to their Chinese and Indian trade partners.
Though humankind is very far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a single rowdy global civilization.
My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors but a miracle of recent history.
nationalist excesses,
in the nuclear age a global community gradually developed over and above the various nations, because only such a community could restrain the nuclear demon.
while the vital contribution of the EU to European and global peace has largely been ignored.
it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas.
In order to avoid such a race to the bottom, humankind will probably need some kind of global identity and loyalty.
