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what defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut
After repeating this experiment many times Gazzaniga concluded that the left hemisphere of the brain is the seat not only of our verbal abilities, but also of an internal interpreter that constantly tries to make sense of our life, using partial clues in order to concoct plausible stories.
Retrieving memories, telling stories and making major decisions are all the monopoly of a very different entity inside us: the narrating self.
The value of the whole experience is determined by averaging peaks with ends.
Crucially, the narrating self is duration-blind, giving no importance to the differing lengths of the two parts.
Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration and adopts the ‘peak-end rule’ – it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and assesses the whole experience according to their average.
Indeed, from the viewpoint of the narrating self, the doctor should add a few completely superfluous minutes of dull aches at the very end of the test, because it would make the entire memory far less traumatic.
Truth be told, the experiencing self and the narrating self are not completely separate entities but are closely intertwined.
The different meanings ascribed to our hunger by the narrating self create very different actual experiences.
Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.
In politics this is known as the ‘Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain’ syndrome.
It is much easier to live with the fantasy, because the fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.
If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced they will be of the existence of the imaginary recipient.
as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.
On the mass battlefields of modern industrial wars and in the mass production lines of modern industrial economies, every human counted.
Is it a coincidence that universal rights were proclaimed at the precise historical juncture when universal conscription was decreed?
This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness?
Digital teachers will closely monitor every answer I give, and how long it took me to give it. Over time, they will discern my unique weaknesses as well as my strengths and will identify what gets me excited, and what makes my eyelids droop.
It remains unclear, however, why on earth I would need to know thermodynamics or geometry in a world containing such intelligent computer programs.
For all their vaunted emotional intelligence, human beings are often overwhelmed by their own emotions and react in counterproductive ways.
As I have repeatedly stressed, AI is nowhere near human-like existence. But 99 per cent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs. For AI to squeeze humans out of the job market it needs only outperform
According to the life sciences, art is not the product of some enchanted spirit or metaphysical soul, but rather of organic algorithms recognising mathematical patterns. If so, there is no reason why non-organic algorithms couldn’t master it.
Whereas EMI composed music according to predetermined rules, Annie is based on machine learning. Its musical style constantly changes and develops in response to new inputs from the outside world. Cope has no idea what Annie is going to compose next.
The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.
However, the life sciences challenge all three assumptions. According to them: 1. Organisms are algorithms, and humans are not individuals – they are ‘dividuals’. That is, humans are an assemblage of many different algorithms lacking a single inner voice or a single self. 2. The algorithms constituting a human are not free. They are shaped by genes and environmental pressures, and take decisions either deterministically or randomly – but not freely. 3. It follows that an external algorithm could theoretically know me much better than I can ever know myself. An algorithm that
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Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self.
Liberalism will collapse on the day the system knows me better than I know myself. Which is less difficult than it may sound, given that most people don’t really know themselves well.
Yet once biologists concluded that organisms are algorithms, they dismantled the wall between the organic and inorganic, turned the computer revolution from a purely mechanical affair into a biological cataclysm, and shifted authority from individual humans to networked algorithms.
The shifting of authority from humans to algorithms is happening all around us, not as a result of some momentous governmental decision, but due to a flood of mundane personal choices.
In the twenty-first century the individual is more likely to disintegrate gently from within than to be brutally crushed from without.
Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.
People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors.
But the age of the masses may be over, and with it the age of mass medicine. As human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm.
Modern Western culture is therefore unique in lacking a specialised class of people who seek to experience extraordinary mental states. It believes anyone attempting to do so is a drug addict, mental patient or charlatan.
If we start using the attention helmet in more and more situations, we may end up losing our ability to tolerate confusion, doubts and contradictions, just as we have lost our ability to smell, dream and pay attention.
Yet a life of resolute decisions and quick fixes may be poorer and shallower than one of doubts and contradictions.
The second cognitive revolution, dreamed up by techno-humanists, might do the same to us, producing human cogs who communicate and process data far more effectively than ever before, but who can barely pay attention, dream or doubt.
According to modern psychiatry, many ‘inner voices’ and ‘authentic wishes’ are nothing more than the product of biochemical imbalances and neurological diseases.
As we learn to turn our inner volume up and down, we give up our belief in authenticity, because it is no longer clear whose hand is on the switch.
In practice, this means that Dataists are sceptical about human knowledge and wisdom, and prefer to put their trust in Big Data and computer algorithms.
You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and it is changing our world beyond recognition.
Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing.
According to this view the stock exchange is the fastest and most efficient data-processing system humankind has so far created.
Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.
Dictatorships use centralised processing methods, whereas democracies prefer distributed processing.
As both the volume and speed of data increase, venerable institutions like elections, political parties and parliaments might become obsolete – not because they are unethical, but because they can’t process data efficiently enough.
Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century politics is bereft of grand visions.
The individual is becoming a tiny chip inside a giant system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the greater scheme of things, or how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers.
Just as free-market capitalists believe in the invisible hand of the market, so Dataists believe in the invisible hand of the data flow. As the global data-processing
Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.’
