Homo Deus by Yuval Harari was a book that largely shifted my mindset. It has led me to see the possibilities for the future in a different light. Harari uses his knowledge of history to predict the future. He highlights possibilities for genetic modification,

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JV5YisKWiaWxM3–w4nX6bWHNfItwIqhfZDAYFGyHec/edit?usp=sharing

The link has footnotes indicating which idea is on which page.

By Yuval Harari 

Humankind in the 21st century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: What are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? For thousands of years famine has been Humanity’s worst enemy. “About 2.8 million French starved to death between 1692 and 1694, while the Sun King, Louis XIV, was dallying with his mistresses in Versailles”  Most of us have never experienced starvation. This was a feeling our ancestors knew too well. During the last hundred years, technological, economic and political development have created an increasingly robust safety net. In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. With the black death 75 to 200 million people across the world died. in 1918 half a billion people were infected with the Spanish Flu.  

Throughout history most gods were believed to enjoy specific super abilities such as the ability to design and create living beings, to transform their own bodies, to control the environment and the weather, read minds and a communicate at a distance, to travel at very high speeds, and of course to escape death and live indefinitely. Humans are in the business of acquiring all these abilities and then some… Any prediction of the future must include the ability to re-engineer human minds.  Humans are acquiring traits of greater divinity ( greek gods, not biblical sky father)  The Old Testament was written for agricultural societies and primarily talks about how to increase agricultural output, even though today’s scientists can do better than Old Testament gods. In pursuit of health, happiness, and power humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another until they will no longer be human.  People are living much longer than expected, and there is not enough money to pay for their pensions and medical treatment. No one is an expert in all the fields, and therefore they cannot hit the breaks. If the brakes were hit – it could crash the economy – economies need constant growth. When it comes to medical technology, there is not a clear line separating healing and upgrading. – Plastic surgery use to be used to treat facial injuries in soldiers. Parents could through IVF have a bunch of embyros and then choose the ones with the best combination and least mutations.

It is feasible with current in vitro technology to overcome mitochondrial genetic diseases by creating a 3 parent baby. The baby’s nuclear DNA comes from two parents, while the mitochondrial DNA comes from a third person. This happened in 2000 and then the U.S. banned it. It is now allowed in the UK as of 2015. It may be possible to amend deadly genes and others like autism, stupidity, obesity and maybe even depression. What if you can also help them with an above avg. memory, stronger than normal immune system and a sunny disposition. What if you don’t want to do this, but the neighbors are doing it for their children and you don’t want it to lag behind? What if the U.S. bans it, but North Korea is allowing it and creating geniuses, artists and athletes that are outperforming ours… Healing is the justification for upgrades, Scientists would argue connecting brains and computers helps overcome schizophrenia… Once you achieve a momentous breakthrough, you cannot restrict its use to healing and completely forbid using it for upgrading. Even though human kind will be focusing on obtaining immortality, bliss, and divinity, many humans in developing countries and seedy neighborhoods will continue to deal with poverty. illness, and violence even as the elites are reaching for eternal youth and godlike powers. “ Those living in palaces have always had different agendas to those living in shacks, and that is unlikely to change in the 21st century.” Harari’s books is a possible prediction and not a manifesto. Capitalists adopted the Marxist diagnosis, and changed behavior accordingly. Capitalists in Britain and France strove to better the lot of workers.” … The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course. We have no idea how things will look in Europe in 2050 even though in 1016 they could predict how Europe would look in 1050. Studying history makes us aware of possibilities we don’t normally consider. Historians study the past not to repeat, but to be liberated from it.

We forget that our world was created by accidental chains of events. Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history- Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights- the first step is to retell their history. Lawns were for nobility in the 1600s, now it is something every middle class family has. One defect of humanism is evident in geriatric wards of hospitals. Homo Sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. Humanism has been around for 300 years. Many view the downfall of Pharoahs and the death of God as a positive thing, so maybe the downfall of humanism will be viewed as positive too. With regards to other animals, humans have long since become gods. 200,000 wild wolves roam the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs.- 40k lions compared to 600 million house cats 900k african buffalo versus 1.5 billion domesticated cows. Our ancestors wiped out mammoths unintentionally because Mammoths didn’t populate quickly enough. It took centuries for the extinction process to happen. “At most a nostalgic elder told skeptical youngsters that ‘when I was young, mammoths were much more plentiful than these days.” Anthropological and archaeological evidence indicates that archaic hunters were animists – talked with animals, trees, stones. The bible rejects animism – the only animistic story is right at the beginning with Adam, Eve and the snake.  Many animist cultures believe that humans descended from animals, including snakes and other reptiles. In most semetic languages, ‘Eve means ‘snake’ or even female snake. While animists saw humans as just another animal, the Bible argues that humans are a unique creation… When modern humans discovered they actually evolved from reptiles, they rebelled against God and stopped listening to him – or even believing in His existence… The advent of farming brought about the domestication of animals. The Agricultural Revolution has generated completely new kinds of suffering. What makes the fate of domesticated animals bad, isn’t just how they die, but how they live. What happens on farms goes against natural selection.  Animal’s same emotional instincts exist today  Pigs can rival primates in learning and playing computer games with snouts. Piglets are separated from mothers even though it is natural for them to suckle for 10 to 20 weeks. A need shaped thousands of generations ago continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer necessary for survival and reproduction in the present… Emotions are biochemical algorithms that are vital for survival and reproduction of all mammals.  The algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions, and thoughts.  Algorithms undergo constant quality control by natural selection. Natural selection evolved passion and disgust as quick algorithms for evaluating reproduction odds. Beauty means good chances for having successful offspring.  When humans, pigs and baboons feel fear there are similar neurological experiences happening. Leading childcare experts in first half of 20th century believed that children didn’t need love and attention. Kids that tried to get hugs were thought to be spoiled. In the 1950s and 1960s this idea was abandoned.- baby monkey experiment- those with cloth mother grew to be neurotic and asocial adults. 

Farmers who exploited animals and took young ones away from mothers justified it through religion During the Scientific Revolution humankind silenced the gods too… The soul is a story some people accept while others reject. The stream of consciousness, in contrast, is the concrete reality we directly witness every moment. It is surest thing in the world. Every subjective experience has sensation and desire… Sensations and emotions are biochemical data-processing algorithms. Descartes maintained only humans felt and other animals were mindless automata, akin to a robot or a vending machine. 17th century doctors and scholars dissected live dogs and observed the workings of internal organs without anaesthetics. Scientists can induce feelings of anger or love by electrically stimulating the right neurons. The best scientists are a long way from deciphering the enigma of mind and consciousness. Scientists can admit their ignorance.  Analogy of neurons firing – what does Homer Simpson think of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal? Organisms are algorithms. Maybe we need subjective experiences to think about ourselves  “An animal wandering the Savannah and calculating its chances of survival and reproduction must represent its own actions and decisions to itself, and sometimes communicate them to other animals as well. As the brain tries to create a model of its own decisions, it gets trapped in an infinite digression, and out of this loop consciousness pops out.  If we cannot explain the mind, and if we don’t know what function it fulfils, why not just discard it? The history of science is replete with abandoned concepts and theories. 

Scientists discarded an idea called ether the same goes for the soul and God even though some doctors and scientists may privately believe it, they do not write about it in scientific journals. If a scientist tries to argue that subjective experiences are irrelevant, then they have to explain why torture and rape are wrong without reference to subjective experience. It is simply neurons firing if looked without subjective experience. Some scientists argue it is mental pollution from the firing of complex neural networks. If this is true, then it implies that the pain and pleasure experienced by billions of creatures for millions of years is just mental pollution. 

We use the computer as an analogy for the human mind instead of the steam engine. Thousands of years ago philosophers realized there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone other than oneself has a mind. We cannot know for certain that others around us are not mindless robots or that everyone we meet is a character in our dream or that we are not trapped in a virtual world and all the beings we see are merely stimulations. It could be the year 2216 and you could be a bored teenager immersed inside a virtual world game that stimulates the primitive and exciting world of the early 21st century. This idea can lead to scary mathematical calculations: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.  The Turing test helps us know if a computer has a mind like a human. It was invented by British mathematician Alan Turing who was gay when it was illegal in Britain. He was chemically castrated and committed suicide two years later. Experts signed the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness indicating that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Many corporations recognize animals as sentient beings, but they routinely use rats as experimental subjects in the development of antidepressants. They put them in jars of water and see if rats injected with an antidepressant struggle for longer than those who were not injected. Chimps could potentially be aware of time and plan for the future. One chimpanzee would hide rocks under straw in the early morning, so he could throw them at visitors later. Some still argue that is is an unconscious algorithm like a new squirrel gathering nuts before its first winter. There was an experiment where free rat helped a cage rat escape, this was the case even sometimes when there was chocolate. Some skeptics said they did it to stop annoying sensation of caged rat crying. – Humans similar idea with beggars? A horse could tap hoove 12 times when asked what is 3×4. This was the case even when separated from owner. One psychologist finally figured it out. The horse would watch the humans tense up as it was getting closer. When the tension was at its peak, the horse would stop and the clapping or approval let the horse know it got it right. Hans the clever horse was actually a genius in reading people. I couldn’t tap my foot the correct amount of times if someone asked me in Mandarin what 3×4 is. 20k years ago the avg sapien probably had higher intelligence and toolmaking skills than the avg sapiens of today. Modern schools and employers may test our aptitudes from time to time but, no matter how badly we do, the welfare state always guarantees our basic needs. Despite their better tool making abilities and sharper minds that were needed for survival, humankind was much weaker 20k years ago… The crucial factor in our conquest of the world was our ability to connect many humans to one another. If humans had not learned to cooperate with flexibility in large numbers, our crafty brains and deft hands would still be splitting flint stones rather than uranium atoms. Bees cooperate in sophisticated ways, but they cannot reinvent their social system overnight. The bees cannot guillotine the queen and establish a republic. Rome conquered Greece because they cooperated more effectively. In 1914, 3 million Russian noblemen, officials and business people lorded it over 180 million peasants and workers. The Russian elite knew how to cooperate in defence of of its common interests, whereas the 180 million commoners were incapable of effective mobilisation The Russian Revolution happened when the Communists organized themselves well. Effective organization kept them in power eight long decades and they eventually fell as a result of defective organization…  In December of 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu the Communist dictator of Romania, organized a mass demonstration of support in the center of Bucharest.  Over the previous months the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support from the eastern European communist regimes, the Berlin wall had fallen, and revolutions had swept Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Ceausescu had ruled Romania since 1965, so he believed he could withstand the Tsunami, even though riots against his rule had erupted in one city. He organized this rally to prove to Romanians and the rest of the world that the majority of the populace still loved him – or at least feared him. The creaking party apparatus mobilized 80,000 people to fill the city’s central square, and citizens throughout Romania were instructed to stop all their activities and tune in on their radios and televisions. As the dictator was speaking, someone booed and then more people started booing. The secret police ordered the broadcast to be stopped, but the television crews disobeyed… The wife of Ceausescu began scolding the audience, “Be quiet! Be quiet! until Ceausescu yelled at her, “You be quiet.”  “Romania crumbled when 80k people in Bucharest central square realized they were much stronger than the old man in the fur hat on the balcony. What is truly astounding, however, is not the moment the system collapsed, but the fact that it managed to survive for decades.  

What better way to give heart to a revolution than to broadcast it on t.v.? The Romanian Revolution was hijacked by the self-proclaimed National Salvation Front, which was in fact a smokescreen for the moderate wing of the Communist Party. These leaders reinvented themselves as democratic politicians and proclaimed they were the leaders of the revolution. Romania privatized all assets, selling them at bargain prices to ex-communists, who alone grasped what was happening. The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families. The Generals took over after the Egypt Revolution of 2011.

When the Nazis overran France a lot of the Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south.  In order to cross the border, they needed to get visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without propr approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Artistides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks, were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion. French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats accepted the visas. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.

From 1956 to 1961 China undertook the Great Leap Forward, when Mao wished to rapidly turn China into a superpower. Intending to use surplus grain to finance ambitious industrial projects, Mao ordered the doubling and tripling of agricultural production. From the government offices in Beijing his impossible demands made their way down the bureaucratic ladder, through provincial administrators, all the way down to the village headmen. The local officials, afraid of voicing any criticism and wishing to curry favour with their superiors, concocted imaginary reports of dramatic increases in agricultural output. As the fabricated numbers made their way back up the bureaucratic hierarchy, each official exaggerated them further, adding a zero here or there with a stroke of a pen. Consequently the Chinese Government was informed that annual grain production 50% more than it actually was. Believing the reports, the government sold millions of tons of rice to foreign countries in exchange for weapons and heavy machinery, assuming that enough was left to feed the Chinese population. The result was the worst famine in history and the death of tens of millions of Chinese. Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality… As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories.

Priests used to define what was right and wrong. Today many will say it is our feelings. Some of the most interesting discussions come with humanist ethics. When feelings collide, what happens when the same actions causes one person to feel good, and another to feel bad? Humanism teaches that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad. Murder is wrong not because some God once said. It is bad because of the suffering it afflicts on the person, their family, friends and acquaintances. This applies to homosexuality for humanists. At one point priests would tell them they were sinning and they were punished. Today they are generally encouraged by society. When Muslims attacked French magazine editors that had made fun of Mohammed, some Muslim organizations condemned the attack, but added a but clause of how the French magazine was wrong hurting millions of feelings (they didn’t use religion as the reason.) People in the Middle Ages would have thought it was truly foolish to determine elections by letting the people vote. All political authority came from God. Today everything is about human feelings, including art. What is art? 

Liberal humanists believe it is all about feelings. Socialist humanists believe it is all about the collective. Mao and Lenin didn’t believe in self-reflection and individuality. They believed we were products of ou your income, although you can call For Any Of The injury pattern of your bedroom window bedroom window that r culture and that therapists in capitalist societies wouldn’t help because they wouldn’t acknowledge the poor being exploited. 

Hitler said war helped him overcome nerves. Evolutionary humanists believe that the strong should survive and the weak should be exploited for the betterment of the human race. Hitler wasn’t a senior officer. He had no formal education, no professional skills and no political background. He wasn’t a successful businessman or a union activist. He didn’t have friends or relatives in high places nor money. Hitler believed that nations could be the engines of human progress and should exterminate anyone standing in their way. “Nazism was born from the pairing of evolutionary humanism with particular racial theories and ultra-nationalist emotions.”.. But not every belief in humankind’s potential for further evolution necessarily calls for setting up police states and concentration camps. Evolutionary humanism played an important part in shaping modern culture, and is likely to play an even greater role in the shaping of the 21^st century. 

Mao once said, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.” 

Liberal Democracy increasingly looked like an exclusive club for ageing white imperialists… Most of their allies were either authoritarian kings or military dictators. Liberal Democracy was saved only by nuclear weapons. The Mad doctrine (Mutually assured destruction) saved the free market and liberal democracy. Without nukes there would have been no Beatles and woodstock. In the 1970s, it seemed that the future belonged to socialism. “And then everything changed. Liberal Democracy crawled out of history’s dustbin, cleaned itself and conquered the world. As the Soviet Union collapsed liberal democracies replaced communist regimes… Even Russia pretends to be a democracy these days… The entire 20th century looks like a mistake, but it did bring us antibiotics, feminism, computers and de-colonialism. Liberalism also smarted and gained ideas and institutions from its fascists and socialist rivals. The occupy wall-street movement take governments to task for not allowing liberal ideals to thrive. They protest banks too big to fail. They call for truly representative democracies that serve interests of ordinary citizens instead of lobbyists serving corporate interests. China doesn’t know what it believes… This will make them a promising new breeding ground for techno religions.  Radical Islam poses no serious threat the liberal package, because for all their fervor the zealots don’t really understand the world in the 21st century, and had nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities the new technologies are generating all around us… New technologies kill old gods and create new ones. That’s why agricultural deities were different from hunter-gatherer spirits. The Revolutionary Technologies of the 21st century are four more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds.”  Will be the political impact of the massive new class of economically useless people? What will happen when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies that open up unprecedented  gaps between rich and poor? The Bible and Quran don’t have these answers because it was written by people who didn’t live in these societies. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by backward-looking masses. In 1850 more than 90% of humans were peasants and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or Telegraph lines. Yet the fate of those peasants had already been sealed the Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of Engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution.  In the 19th century as today there were priests, mystics and gurus who argued that they alone held the solution to all of humanity’s woes. Even as the Industrial Revolution was taking off before clean to religious leaders. When we think of nineteenth-century Visionaries were far more likely to recall Marx, Engels and Lenin then these religious leaders. If you value National Health Services, Pension funds and free schools, you need to thank Marx and Lenin and Otto von Bismarck far more than religious leaders … Marx and Lenin devoted more tension understanding the technological and economic realities of their time into scrutinizing ancient tax and prophetic dreams.“  

Lenin once said that communism is electrification of the whole country. There can be no communism without electricity, without railroads come without radio. You couldn’t have an established communist regime in 16th century Russia because communism necessitates the concentration of information and resources in one hub.  from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs only works when produce can easily be collected and distributed across vast distances common when  activities can be monitored and coordinated over entire countries.  The Socialist created a brave new religion for a Brave New World. They promised salvation through technology in economics, that’s establishing the first techno religion in history, and changing the foundations of ideological discourse.  Before Marx, people defined and divided themselves according to their views about God, not about production methods. Since Marx, questions of technology and economic structure became far more important and divisive than debates about the soul in the afterlife. India was so concerned with God instead of industrialization and they were occupied and then and exploited by industrial Britain. The train is again leaving the station. This time the main products will be bodies, brains in mines, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dicken’s Britain Mahdi’s Sudan.  It will be bigger than sapiens and Neanderthals. In the 21st century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire Divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those Left Behind will face Extinction.Socialism, which was very up-to-date hundred years ago, failed to keep up with new technology. Leonardo Brezhnev in Fidel Castro held on I did the Marx and Lenin formulated in the age of steam, did not understand the power of computers and biotechnology. Liberals and contrast adapted far better the information age is partly explains why Khruschev’s  1956 prediction never materialized and why it was liberal capitalists who eventually buried the Marxists 

Radical Islam is in a far worse position than socialism. It has not yet come to terms even with the Industrial Revolution. In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. Monasteries were the first places to use clocks and Cathedral schools were the most important Learning Centers of Europe. Today the Catholic Church is busy rear guarding  operations more than with pioneering novel Technologies. Church’s mostly act in a reaction or a way to new technologies and ideas to spread. Ask yourself what was the most influential Discovery, invention or creation of traditional religions in the 20th century? Traditional religions offer no real alternative to liberalism. Do their scriptures have anything to say about genetic engineering or artificial intelligence?...When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets may become as obsolete as Flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam, and communism. If the whole universe is pegged to The Human Experience, what will happen once The Human Experience becomes just another designable product, no different Essence from any other item in a supermarket?  

PART III HOMO SAPIENS LOSE CONTROL 

21st century science is undermining the foundations of the liberal order. Today When a man stabs another man geneticists and brain scientist may say it is due to such and such electrochemical processes in the brain that were shaped by a particular genetic makeup. If a robot presses a button based on how many uranium atoms decayed in a minute we wouldn’t call that free and we wouldn’t dream of allowing it to vote in Democratic elections or holding it legally responsible for its actions. To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for Freedom. Sacred word Freedom turns out to be, just like Soul, a hollow term empty of any discernible meaning. Free Will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans invented. According to the theory of evolution, all the choices animals make whether of habitat, food or mates reflect their genetic code. I am confronted with such scientific explanations and people off and brush them aside, pointing out that they feel free and that they act according to their own wishes and decisions. This is true. Humans act according to their desires. If by free will we mean the ability to act according to our desires then yes, humans have free will but so do chimpanzees, dogs and parrots.

 The real question is not whether humans and animals can act on their desires but whether they can choose their desires in the first place. I don’t choose any of my wishes. I do a particular way swelling up with any because this is the feeling created by the biochemical processes in my brain. Today we can use brain scanners to predict people’s desires and decisions well before they are aware of them. People argue about free will because even scientists all too often continue to use outdated theological Concepts. Once we accept that there is no soul in the human Samuel interactions called the self, it no longer makes sense to ask, how does the self choose its desires? If you want to see philosophy in action, pay a visit to a robo rat Laboratory. Experiments performed on Homo sapiens indicate that like rats humans too can be manipulated, that it’s possible to create or annihilate even complex feelings such as love, anger, fear and depression by stimulating the right spots in the human brain.  

The American Military is experimenting with helmets fitted with electrodes. The helmet can stimulate or inhibit specific areas of the brain. One journalist was able to shoot far better with the helmet in a virtual stimulation. People could use this technology in the future to study harder and work more efficiently. This begs the question- Will the technology strengthen or weaken free will? Science actually undermines the liberal belief in individualism. For liberalism to make sense, I must have one- and only one – true self. .. If I look really deep within myself, the seeming unity that I take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is my true self’ Data from patients who had schizophrenia and and had their neural cable connecting the two hemispheres cut showed that the brain had two parts that would give different answers to different questions. A man shown a chicken claw with the left part of the brain and a snow shovel with the right part pointed to the two different pictures with different hands.  The left side of the brain then invented a reason of why the two were together – the shovel cleans the chicken shed.  There was a cold water experiment with two parts. In the short part their hand was in cold water for 60 seconds and then they pulled it out. In the second part their other hand went into cold water for 60 seconds and then warm water was secretly added to the water for 30 seconds before they pulled it out. Most people preferred the first part of the experiment because they remembered it as less painful. This experiment shows the two sides of us the narrating self and the experiencing self. The narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discount their duration and adopts the “peak-end rule’   A variation of this was repeated with colonoscopy patients. Patients whose colonoscopy was 3 times longer, but the very end was less painful reported it overall being less painful. Pediatricians and vets know this trick, which is why many of them give treats to the dogs or kids. “When the narrating self remembers the visit to the doctor, ten seconds of pleasure at the end of the visit will erase many minutes of anxiety and pain.”… Evolution discovered this trick aeons ago. At the end of labour and in the following days the hormonal system secretes cortisol and beta-endorphins, which reduces the pain and creates a feeling of relief and sometimes even of elation.  Moreover, the growing love towards the baby and the acclaim from friends, family members, religious dogmas and nationalist propaganda, conspire to transform childbirth from a trauma into a positive memory. 90% of Swedish women recounted their labor as positive or very positive. Our boys didn’t die in vain synydrome –  Example of Italy in WW1 – when a country loses first battle they can admit they made a mistake and sign a peace-treaty or they can keep fighting and double down. This helped Mussolini rise to power when he promised he would obtain proper compensation for the sacrifices the Italians had made. A crippled solidier would rather tell themselves I sacrificed myself for the glory of the nation (or freedom/democracy) than “I lost my legs because I was stupid enough to believe self-serving politicians.” It is easier to live in fantasy because fantasy gives meaning to the suffering. Priests learned this.

Governments, business corporations, and private individuals fall into this. clinging onto dysfunctional marriages and dead-end jobs. Our narrating self would much prefer to continue to suffer in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning.  The self is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies… Liberalism holds that we craete our own meaning. The life sciences undermine liberalism, arguing that the free individual is a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithims. Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker refuse to abandon liberalism and perform intellectual somersaults. With a flood of extremely useful devices, tools and structures that make no allowance for the free will of indiviual humans. Will Democracy, the free market and human rights survive the flood? 3 practical developments might make belief in democracy and individualism obsolete: 

economic and political system will stop attaching much value to them. 

1. Humans will lose their economic and military usefulness, hence the ecn
2. The system will continue to find value in humans collectively, but nt in uniwur individuals
3. The system will still find value in some unique individuals, but these will constitute a new elite of upgraded superhumans rather than the mass of the population. 

Liberalism succeeded because there was abundant political, economic, and military sense in ascribing value to every human being. Cyber wars will potentially be won or lost in a matter of minutes whereas actual wars with people used to drag on for years. Even if you care more about justice than victory, you should probably opt to replace your soldiers and pilots with autonomous robots and drones. Human soldiers murder, rape and pillage, and even when they try to behave themselves, they all too often kill civilians by mistake…In many if not most cases it was the economic rather than the moral argument that convinced tyrants and juntas to liberalise. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.   

In 2013 two Oxford researchers published the future of employment in which they surveyed the likelihood of different professions being taken over by Computer  algorithms within the next 20 years . It was estimated that 47% of the jobs are at high risk. The jobs required for the future will take a lot more education than jobs that are typical today.

Humans will use their economic and military usefulness, so the economic and political system will stop attaching much value to them.  The system will continue to find value in humans collectively, but not in unique individuals. The system will still find value in in some unique individuals, but these will constitute a new elite of upgraded superhumans rather than the mass of the population.[1] Watson an AI could replace doctors. IT will be familiar with patient’s medical history genomes and the medical history of parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors and friends. It can also know if an entire town is sick one morning.[2] In 2011 a pharmacy opened in San Francisco manned by a single robot.[3]  Eventually AI will even be able to detect emotional state when breaking difficult news.[4]  The most important question in twenty-first century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. By 2010 78% of workers worked in the service industry.[5] In the 1980s people believed that humans would always win computers in chess. This was proven false in 1996.[6] AI taught itself to play 49 atari games better than humans.[7] Specialized jobs make it easier for AI to overtake humans.[8] AI taking over is likely going to usher in an unprecedented time of wealth inequality. The same way corporations can own land, algorithms may come to own wealth and land.[9] This isn’t too far fetched when so much land is owned by non-human intersubjective entities today.[10] The useless class in the future will be unemployable.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the Cuban communist. Rather capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing can at least in a period of accelerating technical change.   As both the volume and speed of data increase, institutions like elections, political parties in Parliament might become obsolete not because they are unethical, but because they can’t process data efficiently enough.  Those institutions evolved in an era when politics moved faster than technology.

One genius who believed data should be free hacked into Jstor and downloaded a lot of articles. He then made them public and was then arrested and put on trial. When he understood that he would likely be convicted and sent to jail he hanged himself. Hackers reacted with petitions saying academic and govt. institutions persecuted Swartz and that infringes on the freedom of information. Jstor was under pressure and apologized for its part. Today they allow access to a lot, but not all of its data. Dataists believe that free access to information will make the world better. Individual is  becoming a tiny chip inside a giant system nobody really understands.  Data is still left in the Invisible Hand of the data flow. Did a religion house and did your every word in action as part of the Great dataflow, and that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about you and everything you do and feel.   Dataism is all about uploading experiences. Humanism emphasizes internal feelings and encourages journal writing, while dataism is all about uploading thoughts and ideas.  Dataists believe that turning experiences into free-flowing data has value and sets us apart from animals. 

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[10] 328

[11] 330 fifth

The dataist Revolution will probably take a century or two. Humanism commands listen to your feelings, dataism commands listen to the algorithms they how you feel. If you want to really know who you are have your DNA sequenced. Tell your family members to have theirs as well.  Wear  a biometric device that monitors your blood pressure and heart rate at all hours of the day  Algorithms like the Google search algorithm is created by a huge team. Each member knows one small part of the puzzle. Dataism threatens to do to Homo sapiens what homo sapiens have done to other animals. The scenarios in this book should be viewed as possibilities and not prophecies.  In the 21st century censorship works by flooding  people with irrelevant information. We just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.