"We Penetrate the Cabinets"
The Fourth Industrial Revolution & the Digitization of Humanity
Meet Yuval Harrari Head Advisor to The World Economic Forum
We are probably the last of Homo sapiens. In a century or two the earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us than we are different from the Neanderthals or chimpanzees because in the coming generations we will learn to engineer bodies and brains and minds how will the future masters of the planet look like? This will be decided by the people that own the data those that control the data not only control the future of humanity but the future of life itself. Today data is the most important asset in the world. Now data is replacing machinery as the most important asset and if the data becomes concentrated in too few hands humanity will split not into classes it will split into different species. As technology advances, it allows us to connect our brains and nervous systems directly to the internet.
The most important thing to know about living in the 21st. century is that humans are now hackable animals. To hack a human being means to understand that the human better than he or she understands themselves, which was never possible in history before on a massive scale. On an individual level yes, my mother at least until a certain age new me better than I knew myself and that was good because her interest were aligned with mine and then after a certain age it is not so good if a mother still knows you better than you know yourself. But it is much, much worse if a corporation or a government rather than a parent that knows you better than you know yourself. But is it falls into the hands of a 21st century Stalin, the result is the worst totalitarian regime in history.
Science is not really about truth, it is about power. I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back, the thing that they will remember from the COVID-19 crisis is that this is the moment when everything went digital. This was the moment when everything became monitored, that we agreed to be surveyed all the time not just in an authoritarian regime but even in democracies and maybe the most important thing of all this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin, I think at the big process that is right now in the world is hacking human beings to understand deeply what is happening within you, what makes you go, and for that the most important data is not what you read and who you meet or what you buy it is what is happening inside your body.
This debate about privacy versus security is as old as civilization you could say, but there is something new now for the first time in history it is possible to completely illuminate privacy it was not possible before, but it is now. Something has fundamentally changed. When dictators dreamt about totally illuminating privacy monitoring everybody all the time and knowing everything you do, not just everything you do but knowing everything you think and everything you feel. Whether it is a tyrant in Ancient Greece or whether it is Stalin they always dreamt about it, they could never do it because it was technically impossible. Now it is possible.
Now in the coming years and the coming decades we will face individual discrimination, and it might actually be based on a good assessment of who you are if the big algorithms they follow you around they look up your face book profile your DNA, your records from kindergarten until today they would be able to figure out who you are and for example that they find out that you lack motivation on the x scale of self motivation 0 to 10 is just 7.1, and we don't want to accept to our company people that have a score of 8.2 and that yes we could give you a little push, but you are not what we need, You will not be able to do anything about this discrimination.