Disillusionment

Humans think in stories rather than in facts.

formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the facist story, the communist story, and the liberal story.

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail; in 2018 we are down to zero.

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED talks, government think tanks and hi-tech conferences – globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning.

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 deed them any more.

The major movements of the twentieth century all had a vision for the entire human species – bt it global domination, revolution or liberation. But most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety – they lost faith mainly in its globalization part. and they still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights and social responsibility, but then think these fine ideas can stop at the border.

Abraham Lincoln’s principle:

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Any story that seeks to gain humanity’s allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to deal with the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech.

Work

It turns out that our choices of every thing from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather than billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second

Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability.

What we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers. Rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network. We should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.

It will be much more difficult to replace humans with machines in less routine jobs that demand the simultaneous use of a wide range of skills, and that involve dealing with unforeseen scenarios.

In 2050, a cashier or textile worker losing their job to a robot will hardly be able to start working as a cancer researcher, as drone operator, or as part of a human-AI human-AI banking team.(not have the necessary skills)

We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor.

Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.

Liberty

In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to listen to themselves, be true to themselves, and follow their hearts – as long as they do not infringe on the liberty of others.

Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality, If democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely no reason to give all people equal vote rights – or perhaps any voting rights.

You might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right, or let passengers vote on which runway the pilot should land.

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.

Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration or freedom – they are based on calculation.

Already today, ‘truth’ is defined by the top result of the Google search.

But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and who to amrry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making.

As authority shifts from humans to algorithms, we may no longer see 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 organisms 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.

The moral of good Samaritan parable

People’s merit should be judged by their actual behavior, rather than by their religious affiliation.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness.

Equality

Government in both democracies and dictatorships invested heavily in the health, education and welfare of the masses, because they needed millions of healthy laborers to operate the production lines and millions of loyal soldiers to fight in the trenches.

Already today, the richest 1 percent owns half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly, the richest hundred people together own more than the poorest 4 billion.

Consequently, instead of globalization resulting in global unity, it might actually result in ‘speciation’: the divergence of humankind into different biological castes or even different species. Globalization will unite the world horizontally by erasing national borders, but it will simultaneously divide humanity vertically.

In ancient times land was the most important asset in the world, politics was a struggle to control land, and if too much land became concentrated in too few hands – society split into aristocrats and commoners. In the modern era machines and factories became more important than land, and political struggles focused on controlling these vital means of production. If too many of the machines became concentrated in too few hands – society split into capitalists and proletarians. In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands – humankind will split into different species.

They capture out attention by providing us with free information, services and entertainment, and the then resell out attention to advertisers.

Their true business isn’t to sell advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers – we are their product.

The new model is based transferring authority from humans to algorithms, including the authority to choose and buy things.

If Google can give us a good answer to that, and if we learn by experience to trust Google’s wisdom instead of our own easily manipulated feelings, what could possibly be the use of car advertisements?

Selling advertisements may be necessary to sustain the giants in the short term, but they often evaluate apps, products, and companies according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate.

But 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 something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the ‘likes’. In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions.

The average Homo sapiens is probably incapable of intimately knowing more than 150 individuals.

War

A successful war could theoretically still bring huge profits by enabling the victor to rearrange the global trade system in its favor, as Britain did after its victory over Napoleon and as the USA did after its victory over Hitler.

Humility

bear a grudge

a feeling of dislike for someone because you cannot forget that they harmed you in the past

grudge against

Is there anyone who might have had a grudge against her?
Wallace said the rumors had been started by someone who bore a grudge against him.