#Dataism : Yuval Noah Harare on big data, Google and the end of free will : Homo Deus
▻https://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c
Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.
Now, a fresh shift is taking place. 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.
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.
[...]
As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, so connecting to the system becomes the source of all meaning. The new motto says: “If you experience something — record it. If you record something — upload it. If you upload something — share it.”
The book:
▻https://www.amazon.fr/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/1910701882
backup of article:
▻https://www.docdroid.net/file/download/NJ2zTkj/yuval-noah-harari-on-big-data-google-and-the-end-of-free-will.pdf