Marx's theory in its essence is: whoever owns the means of production commands. This is capitalism or its nemesis, socialism. Today it should be amended as follows: whoever has the data, commands. This is dataism. To expose this theory is the young and strong-willed Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, whose latest book, Homo deus. A History of tomorrow, we are busy in a post from last week. Harari recently wrote an extensive article on dataism for the Financial Times weekend supplement. We offer it to our readers in an Italian translation edited by Ilaria Amurri. Enjoy the reading.
From God, to man, to the algorithm
Forget about listening to yourself. In the age of data, algorithms give you the answers you are looking for. For thousands of years mankind believed that authority came from gods, then, during the modern age, humanism gradually displaced it from gods to people. Jaean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile (1762), his famous treatise on education, in which he explains that he found the rules of behavior to adopt in life "at the bottom of my heart, written by nature in indelible. I only have to consult myself on what I want to do: everything I feel to be good is good, everything I feel to be bad is bad”.
Humanist thinkers like Rousseau convinced us that our feelings and desires were a supreme source of meaning and that our free will was therefore the highest authority.
Now a new change is taking place. Just as divine authority had been justified by religions and human authority had been legitimized by humanist ideologies, in the same way the high-tech gurus and the prophets of Silicon Valley are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes d' authority of algorithms and Big Data, a new creed that we could call “Dataism”. The most extreme supporters of dataism perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and are convinced that humanity's cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing system of data processing and then merge with it.
The data: the invisible hand
We are already becoming small components of an immense system that no one really understands, I myself receive countless fragments of data every day, including emails, phone calls and articles, I process them and then retransmit them with other emails, phone calls and articles. I'm not really aware of where I fit in the grand scheme of things, or how my data relates to that produced by millions of other humans and computers, and I don't have time to find out, because I'm too busy. to answer emails. The fact is that this incessant flow gives rise to inventions and breaking points that no one can plan, control or understand.
In reality, no one is required to understand, the only thing you need to do is respond to emails as quickly as possible. Just as liberal capitalists believe in the invisible hand of the market, dataists believe in the invisible hand of data flow. As the global computing system becomes omniscient and omnipotent, the connection to it becomes the origin of all meaning. The new motto is: “If you do something, record it. If you record something, upload it. If you upload something, share it”.
Dataists also believe that based on biometric data and computing power, such an all-encompassing system can come to understand us much better than we understand ourselves. When this happens, human beings will lose their authority and humanist practices such as democratic elections will become as obsolete as the rain dance and flint knives.
Go where your heart takes you
When Michael Gove announced his short-lived candidacy for Prime Minister in the aftermath of June's Brexit referendum, he explained: “At every stage of my political career I have asked myself one question, 'What is the right thing to do? Do? What does your heart tell you?'”. For this reason, according to him, he fought so strenuously to get Britain out of the European Union, he felt compelled to stab his former ally Boris Johnson in the back and compete himself for the role of leader, because his heart told him to.
Gove is hardly alone in listening to his heart at critical moments. In recent centuries humanism has regarded the human heart as the supreme source of authority not only in politics but in any field of action. Since childhood we have been bombarded with slogans that give us advice such as: "Listen to yourself, be honest with yourself, trust yourself, follow your heart, do what makes you feel good".
In politics it is believed that authority depends on the free choice of voters, the market economy assumes that the customer is always right, in humanist art beauty is in the eye of the beholder, humanist education teaches us to think about ourselves and humanist ethics teach us that if something makes us feel good we must go ahead and do it.
Emotion: a biological algorithm
Of course, humanist ethics often find itself in difficulty in situations where what is good for me is bad for you. For example, every year, for ten years, the Israeli gay community has held a Gay Pride in the streets of Jerusalem. It is the only day of harmony for a city split in two by the conflict, because only on this occasion do Jews, Muslims and Christians finally unite in a common cause, lashing out en bloc against Gay Pride. The most interesting thing, however, is the argument of religious fanatics, who don't say "You shouldn't have Gay Pride because God forbids homosexuality", but declare in front of microphones and television cameras "Seeing a Gay Pride pass through the streets of the holy city of Jerusalem hurts our feelings. Just as homosexuals ask us for respect, we ask them for it”. No matter how you feel about these paradoxical claims, it's much more important to understand that in a humanist society, ethical and political debates are conducted in the name of conflicting human feelings, not in the name of divine commandments.
Yet today humanism is facing an existential challenge and the concept of "free will" is under threat. Scientific research on the functioning of the brain and body suggests that feelings are not purely human spiritual qualities, but biochemical mechanisms used by all mammals and birds to make decisions by quickly calculating their chances of survival and reproduction.
Contrary to popular opinion, emotions are not the opposite of reason, on the contrary, they are the manifestation of an evolutionary rationality. When a baboon, a giraffe or a human being see a lion they are afraid because a biochemical algorithm calculates the relevant data concluding that the probability of death is high. Similarly, sexual attraction manifests itself when other biochemical algorithms calculate that an individual close to us offers a high probability of fruitful mating. These algorithms have developed over millions of years of evolution: if the emotions of some old ancestor were wrong, the genes that determined it did not pass on to the next generation.
The convergence of biology and software
Although the humanists were wrong to think that feelings reflect a mysterious "free will", their excellent practical sense came in very handy, because even if our emotions had nothing magical about them, they were still the best existing method for making decisions and no external system could hope to understand them better than we do. Even if the Catholic Church or the KGB had spied on every minute of my day, they would have lacked the biological knowledge and computer power necessary to calculate the biochemical processes that determine my choices and my desires. So the humanists were right to tell people to follow their hearts, given the choice between listening to the Bible and their own feelings, the second option was much better. After all, the Bible represented the opinions and interests of the few priests of ancient Jerusalem, while emotions are born of a wisdom resulting from millions of years of evolution, subjected to the rigid qualitative tests of natural selection.
Nonetheless, as Google and Facebook have taken the place of the Church and the KGB, humanism has lost its practical benefits, as we are now at the confluence of two scientific tsunamis. On the one hand, biologists are deciphering the mysteries of the human body, especially the brain and emotions, and at the same time computer scientists have acquired unprecedented power in data processing. Putting the two together we get external systems able to monitor and understand our feelings better than us, at this point the authority would pass from humans to algorithms and Big Data could lay the foundations for Big Brother.
It has already happened in the medical field, an area where the most important decisions are based less and less on a sense of well-being or discomfort or on the opinion of a doctor and much more on computer calculations that know us better than ourselves. A recent example is that of Angelina Jolie, who in 2013 underwent a genetic test from which she was found to be the carrier of a dangerous mutation of the BRCA1 gene. According to statistical databases, women with this mutation have an 87% chance of developing breast cancer. While not sick, Jolie decided to prevent cancer with a double mastectomy. She didn't get sick, but she wisely listened to software algorithms that said “Maybe you feel fine, but your DNA hides a time bomb. Do something now!"
Amazon's A9 algorithm
It is likely that what is already happening in the medical field could extend into other areas. We start with the simplest things, like books to buy or read. How do humanists choose a book? They go to the bookstore, begin to browse around, browse here and there, read the first few lines, until instinct connects them to a particular book. Dataists, on the other hand, rely on Amazon: as soon as I enter the virtual store, a message appears that tells me: “I know which books you liked. People with tastes similar to yours tend to like this or that new book.”
This is just the beginning. Devices like the Kindle are able to constantly collect data about users as they are reading. They can monitor which parts you read fastest and which parts slowest, which parts you linger on, and the last sentence you read before leaving the book without finishing it. If the Kindle were to be updated with facial recognition software and biometric sensors, it would know how each sentence affects the reader's heart rate and blood pressure. He would know what makes us laugh, what makes us sad or makes us angry. Soon books will be reading you as you read them and while you may quickly forget what you have read rest assured that computers will not. All this data is intended to allow Amazon to select your books with staggering precision, as well as to know exactly who you are and how to play on your emotions.
If Google knows us better than we do
By jumping to logical conclusions, people could entrust algorithms with the most important decisions of their lives, such as who to marry. In medieval Europe it was the priests and parents who decided it, while in humanist societies feelings are listened to. In the dataist society I will ask Google to choose for me: “Look, Google”, I will say, “John and Paul are courting me. I like them both, but in different ways and I just can't make up my mind. Given all you know, what do you recommend?” and he'll answer “Well, I've known you since you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls and know your favorite movies, your DNA and the entire biometric history of your heart. I have the exact data of each of your appointments and I can show you graphs of your heart rate, which I plotted second by second, your pressure and blood sugar levels at each meeting with John and with Paul and, of course, I know them both like I know you. Based on all of this information, my superb algorithms, and decades of statistics on millions of relationships, I recommend that you go with John, with an 87% chance that you will be more satisfied with him in the long run.
In fact, I know you well enough to know that you don't like this answer. Paul is much more attractive and since you place too much emphasis on appearance you secretly wished I would say 'Paul' to you. Appearance is important, sure, but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms, which developed tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah, give beauty a 35% weight in classifying potential mates, while mine, which are based on the most recent studies and statistics, say that the impact of physical appearance on the long-term success of romantic relationships is 14%. So even taking into account Paul's good looks, I keep telling you that you would be better off with John."
Google won't be perfect, it won't even have to be constantly corrected, it will just be better on average than me, which isn't difficult, given that many people don't know themselves well and most make serious mistakes in the most important choices.
The dataist perspective and its remedy
The dataist perspective appeals to politicians, entrepreneurs and consumers alike because it offers revolutionary technologies as well as immense new powers. After all, while fearful of compromising their privacy and freedom of choice, most consumers would put health first when choosing between privacy and access to superior healthcare.
For academics and intellectuals, however, Dataism holds the promise of a scientific holy grail that has eluded us for centuries: a single theory that would unify all disciplines, from musicology to economics to biology. According to dataism, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a financial bubble and the flu virus are nothing more than three streams of data that can be analyzed through the same concepts and tools. The idea is extremely attractive, as it offers science a common language, builds bridges across academic divides, and easily exports research beyond industry boundaries.
Certainly, like the previous all-encompassing dogmas, dataism too could be based on a misunderstanding of life, in particular it does not solve the infamous "problem of consciousness". We are currently a long way from being able to explain consciousness in terms of data processing. Why are billions of neurons exchanging messages giving rise to subjective feelings of love, fear or anger? We don't have the faintest idea.
Either way, Dataism would take over the world even if it were wrong. Many ideologies have gained consensus and power while presenting concrete inconsistencies. If Christianity and Communism did it, why shouldn't Dataism do it? Its prospects are particularly good, because it is currently spreading in different scientific fields and a unified paradigm could easily become an unassailable dogma.
If you don't like all this and want to stay out of the reach of algorithms, maybe there's only one piece of advice I can give you, an old trick: know yourself. After all, it is a fact: as long as you know yourself better than the algorithms do, your choices will still be superior to theirs and you will continue to have some authority, but if the algorithms seem about to take over, the main reason is that many human beings do not know each other at all.
