When tech knows you better than you know yourself — Yuval Noah Harari & Tristan Harris
Yesterday I published an interview with Gerd Leonhard and Sole recommended me to watch / read another interview, in this case from Wired to two recognized names at the intersection between new technologies, humanities and futurism: Yuval Noah Harari, who we have already mentioned on different occasions within “Future Today”, and Tristan Harris, a name that sounds for the first time in this publication but to whom we will shortly dedicate a post for his work on ethics for designers and the Center for Humane Technology initiative, where they try to realign technology with human interests.
Very powerful questions and super interesting reflections raise from both thinkers. Here you have the complete video of the interview, in Wired you have the whole transcription and here are some highlights.
YNH: To hack a human being is to understand what’s happening inside you on the level of the body, of the brain, of the mind, so that you can predict what people will do. You can understand how they feel and you can, of course, once you understand and predict, you can usually also manipulate and control and even replace. And of course it can’t be done perfectly and it was possible to do it to some extent also a century ago. But the difference in the level is significant. I would say that the real key is whether somebody can understand you better than you understand yourself. The algorithms that are trying to hack us, they will never be perfect. There is no such thing as understanding perfectly everything or predicting everything. You don’t need perfect, you just need to be better than the average human being.
YNH: So you need to get to know yourself as best as you can. It’s not a perfect solution but somebody is running after you, you run as fast as you can. I mean it’s a competition. So who knows you best in the world? So when you are 2 years old it’s your mother. Eventually you hope to reach a stage in life when you know yourself even better than your mother. And then suddenly, you have this corporation or government running after you, and they are way past your mother, and they are at your back. They’re about to get to you — this is the critical moment.
TH: So it’s basically we’re racing as fast as possible to create the things we should probably be going as slow as possible to create. And I think that you know much like high-frequency trading in the financial markets, you don’t want people blowing up whole mountains so they can lay these copper cables so they can trade a microsecond faster. So you’re not even competing based on you know an Adam Smith version of what we value or something like that. You’re competing based on basically who can blow up mountains and make transactions faster. When you add high-frequency trading to who can program human beings faster and who’s more effective at manipulating culture wars across the world, that just becomes this like race to the bottom of the brainstem of total chaos.
YNH: One thing is to change the way that — if you go to university or college and learn computer science then an integral part of the course is to learn about ethics, about the ethics of coding. And it’s really, I think it’s extremely irresponsible, that you can’t finish, you can have a degree in computer science and in coding and you can design all these algorithms that now shape people’s lives, and you just don’t have any background in thinking ethically and philosophically about what you are doing.
#365daysof #futurism #transhumanism #ethics #technology #day227
