When Tech Loves Its Fiercest Critics, Buyer Beware

From John Battelle's SearchBlog, Nov 12:

H5N1 twelvemonth as well as a one-half agone I reviewed Yuval Noah Harari’s Tech C.E.O.s Are inwards Love With Their Principal Doomsayer. The subhead continues: “The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari thinks Silicon Valley is an engine of dystopian ruin. So why create the digital elite adore him so?”

Well, I’m non sure if I qualify equally ane of those elites, merely I bring a theory, ane that wasn’t quite raised inwards the Times’ otherwise compelling profile. I’ve been a pupil of Harari’s work, as well as if there’s ane clear message, it’s this: We’re running headlong into a populace controlled past times a tiny elite of superhumans, masters of novel technologies that the “useless class” volition never understand. “Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm,” Harari writes inwards Homo Deus. H5N1 novel organized religious belief of Dataism volition top our electrical flow obsession amongst ourselves, as well as nosotros volition “dissolve inside the information torrent similar a clump of populace inside a gushing river.” In other words, nosotros humans are f*cked, salvage for a few of the lucky ones who stimulate out to top their fate as well as larn masters of the machines. “Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class,” the Times writes, paraphrasing Harari’s work, “and a teeming, furious “useless class.””

So here’s why I intend the Valley loves Harari: We all believe we’ll endure members of that tiny ruling class. It’s an indefensible, mathematically impossible belief, merely equally Harari reminds us inwards 21 Lessons, “never underestimate human stupidity.” Put about other way, nosotros are  fooling ourselves, content to imagine we’ll somehow all earn a ticket into (or onto) whatsoever apocalypse-dodging leave of absence conception Musk, Page or Bezos powerfulness dream upward (they’re all obsessed amongst leaving the planet, afterwards all). Believing that impossible fiction is surely a lot easier than doing the quotidian move of genuinely fixing the problems which orbit earlier us. Better to endure ane of the winners than to risk losing along amongst the remainder of the useless class, no?...

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