On Dataism

"Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system, and then merge into it."

"Humanist ethics often run into difficulties in situations when something that makes me feel good makes you feel bad. For example, every year for the past decade the Israeli LGBT community has held a gay parade in the streets of Jerusalem. It is a unique day of harmony in this conflict-riven city, because it is the one occasion when religious Jews, Muslims and Christians suddenly find a common cause, they all fume in accord against the gay parade. What’s really interesting, though, is the argument the religious fanatics use. They don’t say: “You shouldn’t hold a gay parade because God forbids homosexuality.” Rather, they explain to every available microphone and TV camera that “seeing a gay parade passing through holy city of Jerusalem hurts our feelings. Just as gay people want us to respect their feelings, they should respect ours.” It doesn’t matter what you think about this particular conundrum; it is far more important to understand that in a humanist society, ethical and political debates are conducted in the name of conflicting human feelings, rather than in the name of divine commandments."

"Contrary to popular opinion, feelings aren’t the opposite of rationality; they are evolutionary rationality made flesh. When a baboon, giraffe or human sees a lion, fear arises because a biochemical algorithm calculates the relevant data and concludes that the probability of death is high. Similarly, feelings of sexual attraction arise when other biochemical algorithms calculate that a nearby individual offers a high probability for successful mating. These biochemical algorithms have evolved and improved through millions of years of evolution. If the feelings of some ancient ancestor made a mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation."

"Even though humanists were wrong to think that our feelings reflected some mysterious “free will”, up until now humanism still made very good practical sense. For although there was nothing magical about our feelings, they were nevertheless the best method in the universe for making decisions — and no outside system could hope to understand my feelings better than me."
http://tinyurl.com/hewopfc

Quoted from the Financial Times Article by Yuval Noah Harari