In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.
The invisible hand of the market will force upon you its own blind reply. Unless you are happy to entrust the future of life to the mercy of quarterly revenue reports, you need a clear idea what life is all about.
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.
If mosquitoes buzzed in our ears and disturbed our sleep, we knew how to kill the mosquitoes; but if a thought buzzed in our mind and kept us awake at night, most of us did not know how to kill the thought.
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 any more.
Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘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’.
The expert goes over my text, and says ‘Don’t use this word– use that word instead. Then we will get more attention from the Google algorithm.’ We know that if we can just catch the eye of the algorithm, we can take the humans for granted. There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women… and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’
In the wake of the Brexit vote, eminent biologist Richard Dawkins protested that the vast majority of the British public– including himself– should never have been asked to vote in the referendum, because they lacked the necessary background in economics and political science. ‘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.
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. Already today we are becoming tiny chips inside a giant data-processing system that nobody really understands.
If the bank refuses to give you a loan, and you ask ‘Why?’, the bank replies ‘The algorithm said no.’ You ask ‘Why did the algorithm say no? What’s wrong with me?’, and the bank replies ‘We don’t know. No human understands this algorithm, because it is based on advanced machine learning. But we trust our algorithm, so we won’t give you a loan.’