Our political and social choices are shaped by all-seeing, compassionate algo-savants. Every entity is a unit that processes data at different levels of complexity (“from giraffe to tomato to human”). To be honest, it sounds like a Buddhism of the Cloud. Towards the end, there is much rumination about the possibility of a new “religion” called Dataism. Rather than being a beach-read celebration of our imminent divinity, Homo Deus actually pulls the towel out from under its own flip-flops. But you eventually realise that playfulness constitutes its entire structure. Sentence by sentence, there is much street-corner humour in this book. Which is less difficult than it may sound, given that most people don’t really know themselves well.” Liberalism’s collapseįor Harari, a seasoned meditator, liberalism collapses the day the algorithm-driven system “knows me better than I know myself. Reality will be “a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs”. Our precious selves will be regarded by these systems as a collection of manageable, mostly predictable functions. And based on their panoptical view of us, Harari anticipates a future where individuals will be replaced by “dividuals”. Yet in order for smart machines to help us pursue our happiness, we have allowed them to quantify and measure our lives via algorithms.Įvery day we interact through the likes of Google and Facebook. By displacing God, and placing human will (and our elemental dissatisfaction) at the centre of existence, we have until now successfully bent science and technology to our ends. Increasingly, says Harari, the algorithm will rule humans – and our humanism, ironically, is to blame. But these algorithms are indifferent to the “substrate” that enables their operations – be it organic or inorganic, carbon or silicon. (“Organisms are algorithms” is Harari’s pithy and challenging slogan.) Whether it’s made from DNA or digital bytes, an algorithm is a program, a set of instructions, that incessantly makes effective choices. He gathers together extensive research to show that there is now “scientific orthodoxy” about the continuity between the rules of natural selection in evolution and the rules computing information in our devices. “Increasingly the algorithm will rule humans – and our humanism, ironically, is to blame“ In his zeal for algorithms as the “master science” of the future, Harari draws on this world view. Much Buddhist practice aims at the dissolution of the ego into a world of flowing and connecting processes. Harari’s first hobby horse is Buddhism: he is an ardent student of its Vipassana version, and his late teacher takes prime position in acknowledgements.
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