Technology shatters humanity’s big stories

Imagine you have built a teleportation machine. One day, a situation arises that forces you to make use of the device to teleport yourself to some place elsewhere. The caveat: You have never tried to teleport a living creature before. You are quite convinced that it should work after all the research that you have conducted and the hundreds of hours you have invested in the construction process. All your teleportation experiments with physical objects were successful. Yet, you cannot be sure what happens once you step into the machine and hit the “Teleport me” button. You could instantly find yourself at the destination. Or you might just cease to exist or reemerge on 3 different places simultaneously, with 3 heads instead of 1…

How would that moment before pressing the button feel to you? You’d probably be extremely excited in anticipation of the amazing opportunities that teleportation will offer you and everyone else. But at the same time you would be scared, because you really have no clue how this procedure will end.

We haven’t invented teleportation technology (yet?), but in a figurative sense, I see humanity in a similar situation right now. At the point right before stepping into a ground-breaking but pretty experimental machine.

Thanks to a couple of hundred years of pursuing science and particularly because of the advances in information technology, the human race is getting close to acquire abilities that can free it from many of the physical, intellectual and geographical boundaries. This happens either through modifications on the human body/brain or through increasingly intelligent machines that act on behalf of humans.

But as with the teleportation example, this moment is also characterized by massive, near-existential uncertainty. Uncertainty about whether humans will be able to handle such a quantum leap. While progress is moving forward, the big stories that humanity so far relied on, are being dismantled by what the brilliant Yuval Harari has dubbed “Dataism” in his recent book “Homo Deus”.

These stories from the realms of religion, spirituality, esotericism, philosophy, morality, ethics and humanism, have been the cornerstones of human existence and civilization. What’s special about them though is that they are not concerned with their own truth. Either, because there is no one truth, or because they are not falsifiable. The intention of these stories has never been to be definitely right, but to be powerful enough to be accepted by the people as guidance and orientation in life, as quasi-rule books, as tools to help people cope with hardships and to find motivation for activity as well as to pursue greater goals together with others.

This approach overall worked quite well for humanity at large, if you look at where we are today. But now technology is advancing to the point at which it shatters the credibility of many of these stories. Thanks to information technology, big data and artificial intelligence, human beings not only suddenly are facing the possibility to lose the title of most intelligent “life form” on the planet (the world’s top Go player was just defeated by an algorithm — something considered unimaginable a few years ago). We also suddenly appear as much less of the unique, slightly mystical creatures that many of humanity’s big stories have claimed us to be. In fact, there is very little mystical stuff going on. As proper analysis of sufficient behavioral pattern data can reveal, in the end each of us features a combination of largely ordinary characteristics , values and thinking patters. With today’s technology, these are easily quantifiable and in many regards even predictable. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s recent book “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” gives a good overview of what can be done with the data that we are all creating on a day-to-day basis.

And even though parts of the functionality of the brain and especially the state of consciousness still are not fully understood by experts, it’ll just be a question of time until the human code has been cracked.

What I’ve just described is toxic material to the big stories of humanity. We can’t really logically combine popular spiritual ideas about the soul or the promise of “the One” or the idea of mystically unique personalities with the realization that we are just another form of biological algorithm that comes with some magnificent strengths and some astonishing flaws. Attempting to create coherence out of this leads to massive cognitive dissonance.

And yeah, these lines feel unsettling while writing them.

Of course people won’t just give up on the big stories of humanity. These stories’s persistence over centuries or even millennia is part of their success concept. It’s essentially an evolutionary process. The most resilient stories survive for the longest time. If they’d have been perfect, they’d have prevented humans from reaching enlightenment and from institutionalizing science. But in the end, the collective will to freedom was greater than the stories’s power to contain this will. And so, with the insights that follow current technological advances and the utilization of data, the contradictions between these stories and the actual reality will grow. Some people will use increasingly drastic measures to defend “their” stories against the scientific and technological attacks. (Violent) religious extremism might be one of such counter reactions. Other people will eventually give up on some of these stories, as has been a constant process over the past centuries.

But what are we without our stories? We’d be like machines made of flesh. Not really appealing. So we need stories. If the old ones are being destroyed by technology, then new resilient stories have to be created. But this looks to become a struggle.

This is the scary part mentioned in the beginning. As with the teleportation example, the potential for what the newly created abilities could be used for is unfathomably huge. But there is no guarantee that we will make it through the process unharmed. And no way around it, either.

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