Can you program happiness?

That sounds crazy, right?
Is this article is about happiness or programming or what?

If you really excited to know what this is all about before continuing reading, just scroll to the end.

I’m writing this because just thought about it. Just Kidding 😊

For many people, the smartphone is the first and only computer they have.

Over the past few years, automation and machine learning have developed at a rapid rate. Apps such as Uber and “digital assistants” like Siri and Alexa are already transforming the way we do everyday tasks. Innovation is changing businesses too, and this is only set to continue with disruptive technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

Machines that make high-risk decisions still require humans to approve them, as we currently can’t trust machines to make life-or-death or important financial decisions by themselves. As such, new tools need to be applied in the right way and their limits understood. Smart people with skills and experience will play an important role in a world of new and improving technologies.

That sounds good. It’s true that we’re evolving with the technology and keep updating ourselves about the trends and technology, but about the other things?

Happiness cannot be programmed into machines, automated, or sold. It cannot be copied, codified, or deep-learned. It needs to emanate from and grow within us, and in between, we, and technology is here to help us — as a tool. We are a species that uses technology, not a species that is destined to be(come) technology.

We are dealing with a digital nuclear bomb, and it might explode before we realize what we have gotten ourselves into. Exponential technology could soon trigger a chain of “A-bomb challenges” or “digital Hiroshimas”.

Yes, your guess is right. This article is all about what we’re going to lose/already lost because of technology.

Dark Side

1. Dependency — Leaving our thinking to software and algorithms because it’s just so much more convenient and fast.
2. Confusion — Not knowing if it was the intended human who replied to my emails, or her AI assistant. Or even not knowing if I made my own decision or if I was manipulated by my IDA.
3. Loss of control — Not having a way of knowing if the AI’s anticipation was correct or not, as we could not possibly track the system’s logic or even comprehend the workings of a quantum computing-fueled, machine-learning system. In other words, we would need to either trust it completely or not at all, similar to the dilemma that some airplane pilots are already facing with their autopilot systems.
4. Abdication — Being tempted to leave more tasks to systems that would handle them for us, whether it is coordinating personal schedules, making appointments, or answering simple emails. Then, of course, it would be very likely that we would simply blame the cloud/bot/AI if something went wrong.

Do you think AI will let us when it has taken over?

More Dark side

1. Social autism (we love our screen more than we love people).
2. Addiction to technology (“mobile devices are the new cigarettes”).
3. Digital obesity — Every consumer in developed countries unwittingly ingests an estimated 150 pounds of additives — mostly sugar, yeast, and antioxidants, as well as truly nasty stuff such as MSG. Thus consumers have strung along by cleverly engineering a “need-for-more” so that it becomes very hard to find the exit from that kingdom of endless, happy consumption. If this sounds like Facebook or your smartphone, you are getting my drift. The food industry actually calls this craveability or crave-ability. In the world of technology, marketers call it magic, stickiness, indispensability, or more benignly, user engagement. Craving and addiction as tech’s business model. Think 2020 and imagine billions of hyperconnected consumers becoming digitally obese, hooked on a constant drip of information, media, and data — and their own feedback loops.
4. Digital feudalism (winners, ie platform winning it all).
5. Security, because virtualization comes decentralizing with many fewer points of physical control.
6. Software soon eating biology,” and the increasing temptation to virtualize humans via brain-uploading or cyborgism — the dream of many transhumanists.
7. Forgetting ourselves exponentially and sleepwalking through digital life, opening the door to a kind of global digital feudalism — where the overlords of technology rule us in ways that are beyond our understanding.
8. Treating people in a social security environment just by the numbers, as disembodied data sources.
9. The development of digital egos as a true copy of ourselves thanks to a combination of fast, cheap, and ultra-powerful tools, including mobile cloud technologies, personalization, voice and image recognition, mood analytics, and sentiment analysis. Eventually, we will be constantly connected to machines, and they are getting better and better at reading our minds. It will lead to the end of free will.
10. How our choices will be shaped if what we see and hear about each other is determined purely by algorithms that are designed to make your stay and view ads as long as possible, rather than by people? What if these tools are not publicly controlled, supervised, or regulated…? As Taleb said, “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free”.
11. Software no longer just “eating the world” but increasingly “cheat the world.”
12. Everyone and everything becomes a data beacon, generating thousands of gigabytes per day, collected, filtered, and analyzed in the cloud by armies of IBM’s Watsons and Google’s DeepMinds applying their hungry, self-learning global AI brains every second.
13. Low-cost, ubiquitous digital technologies have made it possible for us to outsource our thinking, our decisions, and our memories to ever-cheaper mobile devices and the intelligent clouds behind them. These “external brains” are morphing quickly from knowing-me to representing-me to being-me.

In its darkest variation, the IoT could be the climax of machine thinking — the most perfect spying operating system (OS) ever devised, the largest real-time surveillance network ever contrived, enforcing total human compliance and killing off all remaining semblance of anonymity.

And finally sitting ducks

We will become sitting ducks for manipulation and undue influence by anyone who knows how to use the system. As biology gives way to technology, our biological systems will become increasingly optional, replaceable, and finally even vestigial.

Humanity is at risk

The risk with that is that we will be losing humanity. Automation is exploding because it’s abundantly clear that humans are expensive, slow, and often inefficient, whereas machines are cheap, fast, ultra-efficient, and becoming exponentially more so.

Note
This article is not to blame the technology and its darker side.
Just saying that let the technology be a part, not the life.