Have you ever thought about the next 100 Years of Humanity? This is quite a provocative video where Yuval Harari presents his vision about the future of the Human Kind. Yuval is a Historian and Author of the Best-Seller: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
For me, the core message behind this video is that Data is Power and that who controls it will shape the fate of HumanKind. The problem is, as he points out, that only a handful of people and institutions really understand the Power of Data and it’s (potential) meaning to Humanity. Watch the Mark Zuckerberg hearings last week to understand how little did the lawmakers of one of the most important nations in the world understand about Data and Technology.
The Big question is: what happens when you match infotech with biotech?
The highlights:
– Those who control the data control the future of humankind. Data is power: Data is the new land, Data is the new manufacturing machinery, 2 forces that shaped how humanity organised itself: It determined the economy and society.
– Organisms are Biochemical Algorithms. And we are learning how to decipher them. With the association of data and the new technologies (supercomputers + biometrics sensors + billions of points of data collection about human biology and behaviour), who controls the data will be able to hack the human body. We will challenge 4 billion years of biology and we will possible transition from Natural Selection to Intelligent Design. (Hi to CRISP, Design Babies, 3D Organ Printing, etc).
– Democracy (Distributes) and Dictatorships(Concentrates) are essentially 2 ways of processing data and making decisions (processing information). The technological and economic context allowed these ways of self-organisation of society. If control over data is centralised in the hand of few, this can lead to a new kind of Digital Dictatorship. (Hi CHINA, NSA. Keep an eye on FB, Google, Amazon). This means we shouldn’t give permission to Organisations nor governments to have control over data. (Keep an eye on US Congress and EU GDPR).
My observations:
– Cambridge Analytica is a proxy to the potential to use data to change human behaviour or to engineer society. Check this link where Christopher Wylie, the C.A. “Whistleblower”* talks about changing the units of culture to change the culture. That’s is why this matter is so troubling. And why the hearings were so important.
– The blockchain is a technology that has the POTENTIAL (doesn’t mean it will succeed) to change society, because it changes how data is collected and stored. And that’s is why it is so interesting.
If people don’t understand the potential and impact that the merge of Data and Biotech will have on humanity, how dangerous is to let a fragile and unprepared society ask governments to protect their data.
As it was said in the video: this makes 1984 seem like a child play.
What do you think? How data will shape the future of HumanKind.
#DataIsPower
* I don’t like the term Whistleblower in this case, as it sounds pejorative.
