Writing Option: Defend, support, or complicate Yuval Noah Harari's contention that we do not possess free will but are helpless pawns to algorithms of big data.
One. What is the primary value of liberal democracy?
Human liberty is the number one value. All authority stems from free will of individual. “The voter knows best.”
“Be true to yourself.”
“Follow your heart.”
You are an agent of your own free will.
Politically speaking, both liberals and conservatives belief in the free will doctrine of liberal democracy.
Two. What vulnerabilities do we face as a society of people who should “know what’s in their best interests”?
For one, people may be ignorant, misinformed, manipulated by bots and trolls and fake news.
For two, a society where education is not equally distributed based on economic class, huge masses of people don’t have the information required to develop informed opinions essential for a healthy democracy.
For three, people tend not to vote with their rational intellect; they tend to vote on emotion for the politicians who tell the most convincing stories. Feelings, not a deep knowledge of politics, economics, and current events, drive elections.
Harari concludes that “This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy. For once somebody . . . gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.”
Three. What sources of authority have governed societies over time?
Harari observes that the liberal belief in feelings and free choices of individuals is “neither natural nor very ancient.” God as defined by societies’ dominant religions, not the human heart, has the been the authority for thousands of years.
Only in the last few centuries have we given authority to humans.
Divine, Human, Algorithm
Harari observes that human authority may collapse in the era of the disruptive technological revolution and give way to “Big Data algorithms, while undermining the very idea of individual freedom.”
“However, soon computer algorithms might be able to give you better counsel than human feelings. As the Spanish Inquisition and the KGB give way to Google and Baidu, ‘free will’ likely will be exposed as a myth, and liberalism might lose its practical advantages.”
We cannot evaluate our feelings as well as Big Data, Harari surmises, as he seems to dismiss our free will. But by immersing ourselves in Big Data, we lose our humanity. Jaron Lanier discusses this in his BUMMER YouTube video.
It appears to me that as we surrender more and more of our judgment to Big Data algorithms, we will become more and more dependent on it. This dependence will make us lazy, and as a result we will lose our freedom. Or as Harari puts it: “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 int it.”
Or put it this way, Big Data will spare us the “drama of decision making” in choosing a mate, a college major, an employee, a house, a computer, a playlist, a movie, etc. Think of all the energy we’ll save for doing bigger and better things? Like what?
Of course, Big Data could qualify some for college and disqualify others, pre-arrest people for being criminals before they do actual criminal activity, designate human beings to Desirable or Undesirable status, determine who gets to reproduce and who doesn’t, and affect a host of policy decisions that many would consider a violation of human rights.
Cow Analogy on page 71
We may not care about losing our human rights. Yuval Harari compares humans in smartphone age to “docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful.”
Four. What is the big threat to human equality in the information age?
As early as 2012, people sang praises to Internet as a way of spreading equality such as in Arab Spring. But since then, illiberal society has spread and with it growing inequality.
Yuval Harari observes: Hunters and gatherers didn’t have property so inequality was kept to a minimum. Agricultural Revolution created property and with it inequality, the Haves and Have Nots.
AI could worsen inequality by eliminating economic value of most humans who will be relegated to unemployment and UBI.
The rich will be the only ones able to afford biotechnology bodies, which will be healthier, stronger, and prone to live perhaps 50 years longer than everyone else. That won’t bring the pitchforks and torches out, will it.
The super rich will be able to buy their own genetic intelligence to “justify” the gap between them and everyone else.
Harari writes: “bioengineering coupled with 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” (75).
Big Data
Yuval Harari: But for all the inequality caused by AI and bioengineering, nothing plays as big a role as Big Data. Whoever owns Big Data owns all the wealth. The capitalists own Big Data, and the rest of us are proletarians. Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Tencent are in the power grab.
In this power grab, Google, Facebook and others have become Attention Merchants, giving us free information, services, and entertainment in exchange for our personal data, turning us into their product. This is why Jaron Lanier calls social media BUMMER, because we’re being manipulated to become products to be mined.
The social media business model of making humans products for Big Data transfers authority from humans to algorithms.
Soon, we won’t need car advertisements, Harari notes, because we’ll be eager to ask Google to tell us what car we should buy. We will trust Google's algorithm more than ourselves.
Harari notes: Popular app may lack good business model and lose money but still be worth billions as long as it sucks our personal data. Accumulation of this data is apotheosis of wealth. Companies can’t resist mining our data.
Big Data and healthcare will merge, Harari notes, so that if we don’t give up our personal data we will be refused healthcare. In battle between health and privacy, health wins.
Yuval Harari: “As more and more data flows from your body and brain to smart machines via biometric sensors, it will become easy for corporations and government agencies to know you, manipulate you, and make decisions on your behalf.” They could gain power to engineer life.
Looked at in the context of Harari’s claim that liberal democracy was conceived by global elites and imperialists, does liberal democracy have any credibility to the world as the only viable alternative for making the best society? Consider the fact that Millennials value democracy less than previous generations. See Ian Brenner, Washington Post, Forbes, New York Times, New Republic, Bloomberg, and arguments for the epistocracy.
Essay Option B
Develop an argument that addresses the effectiveness of Universal Basic Income as a necessary safeguard from irrelevance in a world where the job market has created permanent mass unemployment. Consider: Is the premise even valid? Is UBI necessary to stop “the pitchforks from coming?” Can we psychologically survive having “free money” or will we withdraw into a slovenly zombie state of spiritual emptiness and despair?
Essay Option C
Develop an argument that addresses Yuval Harari's contention that Big Data, AI, and biotech revolution will further separate the Haves from Have-Nots and diminish human liberty and free will.
Lesson One
One. In Chapter 1, Disillusionment, Harari asserts that “Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.” Explain.
We develop stories or myths because they pull our emotional heart strings, and these narratives give meaning to our lives. The mean good be real or false, moral or immoral, but we are drawn to a sense of purpose even if that sense of purpose is based on false mythology.
Stories are what bind tribes together, what give us emotional intensity, and what inspire us to write music and poetry.
Since the twentieth century, the “global elites” have created “three grand stories” that explain our past and predict our future.
After World War II, the fascist story was killed as a competing story.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist story was killed.
That left is with one story: the liberal democracy story.
But in 2008, after the global financial crisis, liberal democracy mutated into illiberal democracy or Fascism Light. What is illiberal democracy?
Two. Explain the fascist, communist, and liberal story.
The liberal story embraces the value and power of liberty. Life is the struggle between oppressors and individual rights. Democracies must replace dictatorships. An educated public can think for themselves and determine their society’s destiny.
The move toward liberal society, opens us to the world. Harari writes: “Open roads, wide bridges, and bustling airports replaced walls, moats, and barbed-wire fences.”
In the liberal story, we must value education and make sure the masses are educated so that the masses can think critically. Critical thinking for all is essential for a flourishing liberal society.
On the other hand, tyrants oppose critical thinking. They want to be able to manipulate the masses and make “truth” whatever they want “truth” to be.
If tyrants can make “truth” relative to their needs, then those tyrants need not be accountable to objective moral standards.
In the liberal story, the spread of democracy will result in world peace and prosperity. Countries that live in tyranny will see the benefits of liberal society, and those tyrants will be overthrown and replaced with democratically-elected leaders.
In the liberal story, nations work with each other and find common ground in liberal democratic values.
According to the liberal story, writes Harari, “It may take time, but eventually even North Korea, Iraq, and El Salvador will look like Denmark or Iowa.”
This story was famously published in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which posits that liberal societies are spreading with no viable opposition. The book was written in the 1990s, and the book proved to be wrong.
Challenge to the Liberal Story: 2008 Financial Crisis
After the global financial crisis of 2008, the liberal story suffered a kick in the pants: “Walls and firewalls are back in vogue. Resistance to immigration and trade agreements is mounting. Ostensibly democratic governments undermine the independence of the judiciary system, restrict the freedom of the press, and portray any opposition as treason.”
In 2016, Britain succumbed to the Brexit vote, a move away from the rest of Europe and the world; America voted for Trumpism, a nationalist, anti-global movement.
Britain and America, some argue, are fighting against liberal democracy with nationalism, a variation of fascism, and this nationalist story argues, wrongly Harari writes, that “liberalization and globalization are a huge racket empowering a tiny elite at the expense of the masses” (5).
The 3 Great Stories Mutated into 4
One. Communism: All our problems result from not owning the means of production.
Two. Fascism: People are dumb animals and need to be controlled by rule of law, an autocrat, or an elite.
Three. Liberal Democracy: People can be educated critical thinkers capable of electing their own government.
Four. Illiberal Democracy, also known as Fascist Light: There is a veneer of democracy with underlying fascist elements.
We develop stories or myths because they pull our emotional heart strings, and these narratives give meaning to our lives. The mean good be real or false, moral or immoral, but we are drawn to a sense of purpose even if that sense of purpose is based on false mythology.
Stories are what bind tribes together, what give us emotional intensity, and what inspire us to write music and poetry.
The Signs and Symptoms of Illiberal Democracy
According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, since the twentieth century, the “global elites” around the world’s major cities, have created “three grand stories” that explain our past and predict our future.
After World War II, the fascist story was killed as a competing story.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist story was killed.
That left is with one story: the liberal democracy story.
But in 2008, after the global financial crisis, liberal democracy mutated into illiberal democracy or Fascism Light. What is illiberal democracy?
The Spread of Illiberal Democracy After 2008: Putinism and Trumpism
Wage war against the free press in favor of state-run propaganda
Make truth a relative term so that government officials need not be accountable to objective truth by gaslighting the public with false moral equivalencies and other classic gaslighting methods.
Discourage education and critical thinking because an uneducated populace can be more easily manipulated.
Suppress voting through gerrymandering and other suppression methods.
Have mechanisms in place to rig the elections but make them appear to be legit so that the kleptocracy can stay in power.
Put an end to government transparency and accountability. Your country can, for example, use military might to take over another country for some imperialist enterprise, but your country says it was protecting national interests from a hostile foreign entity, and the public praises the leader.
Use the government for your own financial gain and that of your cronies, also known as a kleptocracy.
Suppress freedom of speech through persecution and intimidation.
Champion ethnic nationalism, nostalgia for a mythological glorified past by using racist dog whistles and other means to make a country hostile to diversity.
Scapegoat minorities and immigrants in order to make a closed society.
Effects of Illiberal Democracy on the Citizens
Apathy sets in so that you’re too tired to protest or try to affect any kind of meaningful change. You simply accept the status quo.
You live in fear and darkness because there is no free flow of credible information, only reports of political enemies being killed or disappearing.
You lack the education and critical thinking skills to even evaluate what the government is doing.
You lack historical context to even see where your country ranks in the democracy scale. Do you live in anything that even resembles a legitimate democracy? Is your country evil? Is your country normal? Why? Why not? You’re at a loss to answer these questions.
You become like a fish trapped in a small aquarium. Your reality becomes the enclosed world that is all around you. You can’t even imagine life outside the aquarium because murky water is all you have ever seen. There is no beyond to aspire to, no dreams to long for. The kleptocracy has sucked the life out of you, and power exists to perpetuate itself, so change is unlikely.
Our Faith in Governments Is Collapsing, So the Stories That Uphold These Governments Are Dying
Harar observes that the three stories don’t always exist: In 1938, we had all 3; in 1968 we had 2; in 2018 we have zero.
In 2018, there is no story. Without a story, there is just chaos.
“Nothing makes any sense” in our current world. As a result, we are in a panic and fear Armageddon.
Brexit, Trumpism, and new technologies such as AI and biotech (CRISPR, genetic engineering) are causing us panic with end-of-the-world scenarios. We feel we cannot control the world outside us and we are scared.
Liberal democracies becoming illiberal, meaning they are hostile to diversity, public education, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and government transparency.
Reality Bubbles
Another source of craziness is we not only have different opinions; we have different “facts” because on social media information is algorithmically tailored to conform to our cognitive biases so we isolate ourselves in our custom-made information silos or reality bubbles, resulting in division and acrimony for other humans of different reality bubbles.
The liberal democracy story is no longer challenged by communism and fascism but something far worse: nihilism.
Nihilism is anti-world, pro-nation, so it closes the borders. Why? Because the outside is looked as a chaotic force that will bring upheaval to an already chaotic society.
Oligarchy or Kleptocracy
In a nihilistic world, we have societies like Russia, which Harari labels an oligarchy, also known as a kleptocracy: This is a corrupt government that allows a few oligarchs to monopolize most of the country’s wealth and power. Combine this with state-run media, and you can pull the wool over the people’s eyes.
Russia is a fake country. It pretends to uphold Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity when in fact its real allegiance is to the oligarchy. Russia has unequal wealth distribution. 87% of wealth is concentrated in 10% of the richest people.
Oligarchy creates artificial crises to distract public from real problems like lack of healthcare or overcrowded prisons.
Three. Looked at in the context of history of competing stories and the Harari’s claim that it liberal democracy was conceived by global elites and imperialists, does liberal democracy have any credibility to the world as the only viable alternative for making the best society?
Liberalism faces huge challenges.
For one, Millennials don’t rely on it as the default setting for a better society in part because they feel burned by it. They may be more inclined to embrace socialism or some other variant.
For two, liberal democracy has not addressed “ecological collapse,” structural inequality, and “technological disruption” in a way to garner confidence from anyone.
For three, during the later part of the twentieth century, liberal democracies saw growth in real spending power for the middle class; however, in the last three decades, real wages have gone down every year as the middle class gets smaller and smaller.
The liberal story isn’t looking so good these days.
Competing stories such as nationalism and religion may get into the mix.
Nihilism During Transition
Harari asserts we are living “in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger” and we await the next story that will convince us that it has the power to take us to the promised land. Until such a story emerges, we languish in darkness, uncertainty, and despair. In this state, bad stories can emerge to deceive us.
Harari’s subsequent chapters attempt to guide us out of the darkness.
Infotech and Biotech
Whatever story we embrace, Harari observes that infotech and biotech will be disruptive forces that shape the winning story.
Infotech will according to many experts result in taking away billions of jobs and creating a massive “useless class” of people. Mass unemployment coupled with genetically-engineered “super babies” will have a huge influence on the Story we embrace.
Four. What makes infotech such a threat to employment?
In the past, machines did physical work, but humans still did cognitive work. But now machines can do cognitive work, even better than humans.
By cognitive work, we are talking about AI machines that can do what humans do in the realm of the mind: “learning, analyzing, communicating, and above all understanding human emotions.”
AI hacks humans, mines their data, conditions them through behavior modification, and proves a superior way to control human behavior in general and consumer habits specifically.
AI already exists in social media and controls human addictions through dopamine allocation. More and more people throughout the world are addicted to social media and their behavior is controlled against their own understanding through basic methods of algorithmically-generated behavior modification.
Machines can control and manipulate human behavior better than humans. If you run a business based on human attention and consumption, you will want this kind of behavior modification.
Harari writes: “What brain scientists are learning today about the amygdala and the cerebellum might make it possible for computers to outperform human psychiatrists and bodyguards in 2050.”
Self-driving vehicles, while not perfect, will cut down drastically the 1.25 traffic deaths a year worldwide, mostly from human error.
He observes that we can have an AI doctor on our smartphone, but we will be less likely to have a nurse robot because he or she must do too many human functions.
Creative jobs will still be in demand, but less than 1% of the population flourish in the creative businesses such as screenwriting, music composition, literary criticism, visual design, fashion designers, and multimedia artists.
However, AI will start writing music, books, and compose other art projects. How good it will be compared to human creativity remains to be seen.
Hot New Jobs
Lab research
Cybersecurity
Data analysis
Actuarial math (risk assessment)
Applied mathematics
Remote Control Drone Operation
According to Time, the trending 6 jobs of 2040 will all be in the tech industries:
Virtual store manager
Robot mediator
Robot trainer
Drone traffic controller
Augmented reality designer
Micro gig agent (you sign up gadget inventors to your company or hire out these gadget producers as independent contractors to companies who need those gadgets and services)
Jobs in nursing aren’t going away. Robots can’t do all the variables a nurse does.
Jobs in biotech research, medical research, and energy production (lithium batteries, for example) will continue to thrive.
Five. What are the 3 challenges we face in the disruptive job market?
How do we prevent the loss of jobs?
How do we create new jobs?
What is our contingency plan if new jobs can replace the lost ones?
Can liberal democracy and its free markets address these questions?
Cost and Time of Education Will Continue to Soar
Humans will need higher and higher education, including constant retraining in technology, to keep up with changing job market.
For example, if you learn how to manage drones, your expertise could become obsolete within three years if a superior drone technology replaces its predecessor.
Six. Will people become obsolete in the disrupted world?
People may become obsolete both as workers and consumers, we read on page 36, in which Harari gives example of a mining corporation producing and selling iron to robotics corporation. The robots work in the mines and the robot corporation buys the material.
What story or societal model do we have to address this new landscape? Human will be crushed psychologically and spiritually if they are rendered irrelevant.
One model proposed to address this crisis is Universal Basic Income.
Harari writes that “UBI proposes that governments tax the billionaires and corporations controlling the algorithms and robots, and use that money to provide every person with a generous stipend covering his or her basic needs. This will cushion the poor against job loss and economic dislocation, while protecting the rich from populist rage” (37).
Universal Basic Income would have to be supplemented with free services: childcare, healthcare, education, transportation, and so on.
The debate, Harari observes, is compounded by these questions: What is “universal” and what is “basic”?
Do new immigrants qualify for UBI?
What is enough money to live a decent life?
Under Universal Basic Income, will I get enough calories to satisfy me, which is 3,500 a day, or is government going to limit me to 2,200 calories a day?
What is basic education? Vocational job training? PhD in any major? Doctorate in violin? Who decides?
Under Universal Basic Income, what are my fashion choices? Skinny jeans or canvas hand-me-downs retrieved from a former Soviet warehouse?
Who makes these determinations?
What kind of structured requirements will recipients have, if any? Or can they simply luxuriate in bed their whole lives with their favorite treats while binge watching Netflix?
Is a life of recreation and consumer activity enough for the human soul or will we create a Depressed Society?
Even if UBI gives poor people their basic human needs, will the underclass be angry for the lack of social mobility that will afflict them.
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