Category: ideas

“Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modern life, which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past.”

Gabriel Rockhill: “Since I recognized eternal transcendence as nothing more than a comforting illusion, the only thing left was my finite life in the here and now, which was destined to disappear forever in an instantaneous blackout. It is now patently unclear to me, however, that we ever actually die in this way. Our existence has numerous dimensions, and they each live according to different times.”

“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.”

“We are not in competition with our creations. They are the stuff we are made of. They are stuff we use to construct ourselves, together – a language, a culture, a looping feedback between things we have made but did not choose. If this is a crisis, it is one characterized not by winners and losers, but by shifts in what we believe ourselves to be.”

“The brain is the most metabolically expensive tissue in the body. It consumes 20 percent of our energy despite taking up only 2 to 3 percent of our mass. Because neurons are so energy-hungry, the brain is a battleground where precision and efficiency are opponents. Glimcher argues that the costs of boosting our decision-making precision outweigh the benefits. Thus we’re left to be confounded by the choices of the modern American cereal aisle.”

“We are at a crossroads, trying to figure out what’s next, and in order to get to the other side, we have to wade in the water. Perhaps, this is us reckoning with our muddy past, crossing over the River Jordan. Even some of the antiquated questions being asked, some of the objectionable books that are being published, might, oddly, be necessary blunders that bring us closer to becoming more human. Like our students.”

“When you divide the brain into bitty bits and make millions of calculations according to a bunch of inferences, there are abundant opportunities for error, particularly when you are relying on software to do much of the work.”

“By spreading a utopian view of technology, a view that defines progress as essentially technological, they’ve encouraged people to switch off their critical faculties and give Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers free rein in remaking culture to fit their commercial interests.”

“We know that people scoring higher in openness tend to endorse more liberal and unconventional values, and so the evident tolerance of people high in openness might actually just be tolerance for people who share their own values. Alternatively, the evident prejudice of people low in openness might actually be prejudice towards people who do not share those values. That is, openness might be bounded by the conventionality of the social groups.”