ZeV > Recent Status Updates

"when you watch the Tokyo Games in 2020, remember that this seeming competition between nations actually represents an astonishing global agreement. For all the national pride people feel when their delegation wins a gold medal and their flag is raised, there is far greater reason to feel pride that humankind is capable of organizing such an event."

"Global politics thus follows the Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way, by missing this or that ingredient of the dominant political package."

"Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills."

"human groups may have distinct social systems, but these are not genetically determined, and they seldom endure for more than a few centuries."

"the analogy between history and biology that underpins the "clash of civilizations" thesis is false. Human groups--all the way from small tribes to huge civilizations--are fundamentally different from animal species, and historical conflicts differ greatly from natural selection processes."

Tristan Harris's new metric of "time well spent"

"Pundits often blame such feelings of alienation on the decline of religious and national bonds, but losing touch with your body is probably more important."

"people live ever more lonely lives in an ever more connected planet."

"Even today most of us find it impossible to really know more than 150 individuals, irrespective of how many Facebook friends we boast. And if we don't belong to any intimate community, we humans feel lonely and alienated."

"we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task, because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as you want."

"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?"

"If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data."

"current populist resentment of "the elites" is well founded. If we are not careful, the grandchildren of Silicon Valley tycoons and Moscow billionaires might become a separate species superior to the grandchildren of Appalachian hillbillies and Siberian villagers."

"The two processes together--bioengineering coupled with the rise of AI--might therefore result in the separation of humankind into a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens."

"the rise of AI might eliminate the economic value and political power of most humans. At the same time, improvements in biotechnology might make it possible to translate economic inequality into biological inequality."

"ancient hunter-gatherer bands were still more egalitarian than any subsequent human society, because they had very little property. Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality."

"To avoid such outcomes, for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving artificial intelligence, it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in advancing human consciousness. Unfortunately, at present we are not doing much in the way of research into human consciousness and ways to develop it."

"The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans."

"In the late 20th century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing. A democracy diffused the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institution, where as a dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. ... However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction."

"autonomous weapon systems are a catastrophe waiting to happen, because too many governments tend to be ethically corrupt, if not downright evil."

"In a pioneering 2015 study people were presented with a hypothetical scenario of a self-driving car about to run over several pedestrians. Most said that in such a case the car should save the pedestrians even at the price of killing its owners. When they were then asked whether they personally would buy a car programmed to sacrifice its owner for the greater good, most said no."

The Princeton Theological Seminary experiment on human morality and hypocrisy. (December 1970)

"As authority shifts from humans to algorithms, we may no longer view the world as the playground of autonomous individuals struggling to make the right choices. Instead, we might perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organism as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe that humanity's cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system--and then merge into it."

"liberalism was correct in counseling people to follow their hearts rather than the dictates of some priest or party apparatchik. However, soon computer algorithms might be able to give you better counsel than human feelings."

"Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound "free will," that this "free will" is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free."