Oliver Sacks - The Machine Stops

I want to point MindBlog readers to a wonderful short essay written by Oliver Sacks before his death from cancer, in which he notes the parallels between the modern world he sees around him and E.M. Forster's prescient classic 1909 short story "The Machine Stops," in which Forster imagined a future in which humans lived in separate cells, communicating only by audio and visual devices (much like today the patrons of a bar at happy hour are more likely to looking at their cells phones than chatting with each other.) A few clips:

I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture. When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour.

A few anti-technology screeds:

German artist, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl writes an impassioned diatribe titled "Technology Has Destroyed Reality":

In this new age of artificial stupidity, technological disruption has turned destructive. Its greatest victim is reality itself...It is a far cry from an earlier period of digital expansion, when internet communication was seen to promote global exchange and understanding...The online world seemed like a Disney vision of multiculturalism, promoting sterile tolerance from above. Now technology divides and fragments; it identifies and ranks people.

The norms of reality TV have found a foothold in the digital age. The point is not that there is no reality — the point is that it’s every fact for itself, competing against all others, while social media multiply alternative versions of it...This is our real, existing digital world: nothing more than hourly waves of feverish and toxic agitation, played out over stale mainstream channels that discourage innovation and experimentation, drown in excruciating advertisements and drain people’s attention and souls...An unpopular truth cannot survive online in such a world, because traction is privileged over veracity. And to artificially stupid automatons and algorithms, reality is defined as brute quantity, by ranking, ratings and elimination.

And author Erin Griffith does two pieces. "Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?" very much describes the culture of techie 20-35 year old workers in Austin, Texas - where I now live - where performative workaholism and 18 hour work days have become a lifestyle.

“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers...This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream. Most visibly, WeWork — which investors recently valued at $47 billion — is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries...Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds...The ideal client, one imagines, is someone so enamored of the WeWork office aesthetic...that she sleeps in a WeLive apartment, works out at a Rise by We gym, and sends her children to a WeGrow school.

In the same vein see Roger Cohen's piece on the harm in hustle culture.

Griffith's second piece, "The Other Tech Bubble", describes the growing disenchantment with tech companies:

As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. It feels ugly and rotten. Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.

In 2008, it was Wall Street bankers. In 2017, tech workers are the world’s villain. “It’s the exact same story of too many people with too much money. That breeds arrogance, bad behavior, and jealousy, and society just loves to take it down,” the investor said. As a result, investors are avoiding anything that feels risky. Hunter Walk, a partner with venture capital firm Homebrew, which invested in Bodega, attributes the backlash to a broader response to power. Tech is now a powerful institution, he says. “We no longer get the benefit of the doubt 100 percent of the time, and that’s okay.”

Evidence is mounting that that the world is no longer fascinated with Silicon Valley: It’s disturbed by its callous behavior. But it will take a massive shift to introduce self-awareness to an industry that has always assumed it was changing the world for the better. Cynics would argue it doesn’t matter. The big tech companies are too big to fail, too complicated to be parsed or regulated, and too integral to business, the economy, and day-to-day life. We’re not going to abandon our cell phones or social networks. This is how we live now.

And finally, a cartoon from the NYTimes on our evolution:

Oligarchia - the rise of autonomous analog computing

I want to pass on the final paragraphs of a piece done by George Dyson for Edge.org:

We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way the world now works.

The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind.

These new hybrid organizations, although built upon digital computers, are operating as analog computers on a vast, global scale, processing information as continuous functions and treating streams of bits the way vacuum tubes treat streams of electrons, or the way neurons treat information in a brain. Large hybrid analog/digital computer networks, in the form of economies, have existed for a long time, but for most of history the information circulated at the speed of gold and silver and only recently at the speed of light.

We imagine that individuals, or individual algorithms, are still behind the curtain somewhere, in control. We are fooling ourselves. The new gatekeepers, by controlling the flow of information, rule a growing sector of the world.

What deserves our full attention is not the success of a few companies that have harnessed the powers of hybrid analog/digital computing, but what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world.

The next revolution will be the ascent of analog systems over which the dominion of digital programming comes to an end. Nature’s answer to those who sought to control nature through programmable machines is to allow us to build machines whose nature is beyond programmable control.

Homo Prospectus - the brain as a time traveler - augmentation by A.I.?

Steve Johnson does an engaging article on the discovery and significance of the default mode network of our brains, which has been the subject of numerous MindBlog posts. This system recruits association cortices of the brain that are the last to become fully operational and our brain development continues through early adulthood, into our 20s. It is central to our internal mind wandering between past, present, and future.

...this aptitude for cognitive time travel, revealed by the discovery of the default network, may be the defining property of human intelligence. “What best distinguishes our species,” Seligman wrote in a Times Op-Ed with John Tierney, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” He went on: “A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise.”

Johnson discusses the augmentation of our future predicting by A.I. algorithms:

Accurate weather forecasting is merely one early triumph of software-based time travel: algorithms that allow us to peer into the future in ways that were impossible just a few decades ago...In machine-learning systems, algorithms can be trained to generate remarkably accurate predictions of future events by combing through vast repositories of data from past events. An algorithm might be trained to predict future mortgage defaults by analyzing thousands of home purchases and the financial profiles of the buyers, testing its hypotheses by tracking which of those buyers ultimately defaulted.

Machine-learning systems will also be immensely helpful when mulling decisions that potentially involve a large number of distinct options. Humans are remarkably adept at building imagined futures for a few competing timelines simultaneously: the one in which you take the new job, the one in which you turn it down. But our minds run up against a computational ceiling when they need to track dozens or hundreds of future trajectories. The prediction machines of A.I. do not have that limitation, which will make them tantalizingly adept at assisting with some meaningful subset of important life decisions in which there is rich training data and a high number of alternate futures to analyze.

These algorithms can help correct a critical flaw in the default network: Human beings are famously bad at thinking probabilistically. The pioneering cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky once joked that where probability is concerned, humans have three default settings: “gonna happen,” “not gonna happen” and “maybe.” We are brilliant at floating imagined scenarios and evaluating how they might make us feel, were they to happen. But distinguishing between a 20 percent chance of something happening and a 40 percent chance doesn’t come naturally to us. Algorithms can help us compensate for that cognitive blind spot.

Whether you find the idea of augmenting the default network thrilling or terrifying, one thing should be clear: These tools are headed our way. In the coming decade, many of us will draw on the forecasts of machine learning to help us muddle through all kinds of life decisions: career changes, financial planning, hiring choices. These enhancements could well turn out to be the next leap forward in the evolution of Homo prospectus, allowing us to see into the future with more acuity — and with a more nuanced sense of probability — than we can do on our own. But even in that optimistic situation, the power embedded in these new algorithms will be extraordinary, which is why Ludwig and many other members of the A.I. community have begun arguing for the creation of open-source algorithms, not unlike the open protocols of the original internet and World Wide Web. Drawing on predictive algorithms to shape important personal or civic decisions will be challenging enough without the process’s potentially being compromised or subtly redirected by the dictates of advertisers. If you thought Russian troll farms were dangerous in our social-media feeds, imagine what will happen when they infiltrate our daydreams.

TODAY, IT SEEMS, mind-wandering is under attack from all sides. It’s a common complaint that our compulsive use of smartphones is destroying our ability to focus. But seen through the lens of Homo prospectus, ubiquitous computing poses a different kind of threat: Having a network-connected supercomputer in your pocket at all times gives you too much to focus on. It cuts into your mind-wandering time. The downtime between cognitively active tasks that once led to REST states can now be filled with Instagram, or Nasdaq updates, or podcasts. We have Twitter timelines instead of time travel. At the same time, a society-wide vogue for “mindfulness” encourages us to be in the moment, to think of nothing at all instead of letting our thoughts wander. Search YouTube, and there are hundreds of meditation videos teaching you how to stop your mind from doing what it does naturally. The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedule — and perhaps even in our schools — to let minds drift.

According to Marcus Raichle at Washington University, it may not be too late to repair whatever damage we may have done to our prospective powers. A few early studies suggest that the neurons implicated in the default network have genetic profiles that are often associated with long-term brain plasticity, that most treasured of neural attributes. “The brain’s default-mode network appears to preserve the capacity for plasticity into adulthood,” he told me. Plasticity, of course, is just another way of saying that the network can learn new tricks. If these new studies pan out, our mind-wandering skills will not have been locked into place in our childhood. We can get better at daydreaming, if we give ourselves the time to do it.

What will happen to our own time-traveling powers as we come to rely more on the prediction machines of A.I.? The outcome may be terrifying, or liberating, or some strange hybrid of the two. Right now it seems inevitable that A.I. will transform our prospective powers in meaningful new ways, for better or for worse. But it would be nice to think that all the technology that helped us understand the default network in the first place also ended up pushing us back to our roots: giving our minds more time to wander, to slip the surly bonds of now, to be out of the moment.

The passing of governance to corporate oligarchies serving the top 10%?

Three recent articles suggest to me a direction for our future. Bret Stephens' article describes the U.S. and Great Britain as rudderless and scarcely able to govern themselves, never mind shape world order. Several other Western democracies are facing crises in governance. Into this void steps Larry Fink (the chief of BlackRock and the world's biggest investor) whose annual letter lectures corporations that it is now their duty to look beyond profits, and contribute to society, serving a social purpose. The mega-corporations that dominate the U.S. and international capital flows are now a more stable buffer against chaos that any individual governments. BUT, ultimately who do these titans serve? Not the top 0.1%, but, as matthew stewart documents in excruciating detail, a more broad aristocracy, in America the top 9.9%. His article presents a mind-numbing list of the hundreds  of ways, both through legal and social customs, that the meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people's children.

Why 2018 was the best year in human history.

Nicholas Kristof provides an antidote to the doom and gloom surrounding national and international politics in his Op-Ed piece, which is essentially an update of Pinker's recent book "Enlightenment Now," which I made the subject of several MindBlog posts starting last March 1st.  News media thrive on reporting wars, massacres and famines but are less focused on progress. Meanwhile, in the background, a lot of boring good stuff is happening which is ignored by the press. Clips on what happened in 2018:

 - Each day on average, about another 295,000 people around the world gained access to electricity for the first time...another 305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time...an additional 620,000 people were able to get online for the first time...86 percent of all 1-year-olds have been vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis

-about 4 percent of children worldwide now die by the age of 5. That’s still horrifying, but it’s down from 19 percent in 1960 and 7 percent in 2003.

 -nine out of 10 Americans say in polls that global poverty is worsening or staying the same, when in fact the most important trend in the world is arguably a huge reduction in poverty... in the early 1980s, 44 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty (defined as less than about $2 a person per day). Now, fewer than 10 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, as adjusted for inflation.

The return of paganism

Continuing in the thread of the 12/28/18 post below, I want to point to a piece by Ross Douthat that suggests the return (or emergence) of a new spirituality that returns humans to their more fundamental roots of being a part of the natural order rather than its master. Some clips:

Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since the 1960s...The mainline-Protestant establishment is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back.

...the secularization story — in which modern societies inevitably put away religious ideas as they advance in wealth and science and reason...is insufficient, because even with America’s churches in decline, the religious impulse has hardly disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40 percent of Americans answered with an emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if “a profound religious experience or awakening”

...perhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about a fragmentation and personalization of Christianity...in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs.

Might there be

...a genuinely post-Christian future for America...the return of a pagan religious conception...A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac.” Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what’s actually happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.

...What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.

...you can build a plausible case for a “pagan” (by Smith’s definition) tradition in Western and American religion, which takes two major forms...First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club...Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse.

These do not offer

...a practice of ritual and prayer of the kind that the paganism of antiquity offered in abundance. And that absence points to the essential weakness of a purely intellectualized pantheism..However, there are forms of modern paganism that do promise this help...the countless New Age practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise...To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America...the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they discern.

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." abstracted - Part 5 - Resilience

This is the fifth installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part V. My idiosyncratic choices of text reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter.

Part V Resilience - How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?

Chapter 19 - Education - Change is the only constant

A baby born today will be thirtysomething in 2050…What kind of skills will he or she need in order to … navigate the maze of life?…At present, too many schools focus on cramming information into kids’ brains...the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. .. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information…to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world...Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs”—critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity…In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again…From time immemorial life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working…accelerating change plus longer life spans will make this traditional model obsolete…you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty…To succeed at such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard at getting to know your operating system better—to know what you are and what you want from life…you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you… you and your organic operating system… we are living in the era of hacking humans…if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it yourself, authority will shift to them… Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms… If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Chapter 20 - Meaning - Life is not a story.

In almost all cases, when people ask about the meaning of life, they expect to be told a story…To give meaning to my life, a story …must give me some role to play….it must extend beyond my horizons…Given everything we know about the universe, it would seem utterly impossible for any sane person to believe that the ultimate truth about the universe and human existence is the story of [any particular nation's nationalism]. A story that ignores almost the whole of time, the whole of space, the Big Bang, quantum physics, and the evolution of life is at most just a tiny part of the truth… a good story .. need not be true… yet [can] provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding, none of the thousands of stories that different cultures, religions, and tribes have invented throughout history is true. They are all just human inventions. If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer…How do we make the story feel real? Priests and shamans discovered the answer to this question thousands of years ago: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real…in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the “self” is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite…We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality. Overlooking this difference has been a matter of survival for us. If you nevertheless want to know the difference, the place to start is with suffering. Because as noted earlier, the realest thing in the world is suffering…Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big, incomprehensible words. Be particularly careful about the following four words: “sacrifice,” “eternity,” “purity,” “redemption.”…always try to translate such hogwash into real terms: a soldier crying out in agony, a woman beaten and brutalized, a child shaking in fear…If you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is. The answer isn’t a story.

Chapter 21 - Meditation - Just observe.

Now that I have criticized so many stories, religions, and ideologies, it is only fair that I put myself in the firing line too, and explain how somebody so skeptical can still manage to wake up cheerful in the morning…When I began studying at university, I thought it would be the ideal place to find answers. But I was disappointed….my good friend Ron suggested that I try putting aside all the books and intellectual discussions for a few days and take a Vipassana meditation course. … after a year of patient nudging, in April 2000 he convinced me to go to a ten-day Vipassana retreat…The first thing I learned by observing my breath was that .. I knew almost nothing about my mind, and I had very little control over it…If you try to objectively observe your sensations, the first thing you’ll notice is how wild and impatient the mind is, and how difficult it is to focus it even on a relatively distinct sensation such as breath…I think I learned more about myself and about humans in general by observing my sensations for those ten days than I had learned in my whole life up to that point… I just had to observe reality as it is. Since that first course in 2000, I began meditating for two hours every day, and each year I take a long meditation retreat of a month or two. It is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality…Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens or Homo Deus…Over the millennia humans have developed hundreds of meditation techniques, which differ in their principles and effectiveness….but in principle meditation is any method for the direct observation of one’s own mind…Serious meditation demands a tremendous amount of discipline…If we are willing to make efforts to understand foreign cultures, unknown species, and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us…For a few more years or decades, we still have a choice. If we make the effort, we can still investigate who we really are. But if we want to make use of this opportunity, we had better do it now.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." abstracted - Part 4 - Truth

This is the fourth installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part IV. My idiosyncratic choices of text reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter.

Part IV - Truth - If you feel overwhelmed and confused by the global predicament, you are on the right track. Global processes have become too complicated for any single person to understand. How then can you know the truth about the world, and avoid falling victim to propaganda and misinformation?

Chapter 15 - Ignorance - You know less than you think.

If you are left with the nagging feeling that this is too much, that you cannot process it all, you are absolutely right. No person can…In the last few centuries, liberal thought developed immense trust in the rational individual…[which] may well be a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of upper-class white men…behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than on rational analysis…woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age… We think we know a lot (“the knowledge illusion.”), even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own…People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged…The problem of groupthink and individual ignorance besets …also presidents and CEOs…great power inevitably distorts the truth. Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is.

Chapter 16 - Justice - Our sense of justice might be out of date.

Like all our other senses, our sense of justice also has ancient evolutionary roots. Human morality was shaped over the course of millions of years of evolution to deal with the social and ethical dilemmas that cropped up in the lives of small hunter-gatherer bands…Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases…In previous eras …you weren’t responsible for the plight of people halfway across the world. If you made an effort to sympathize with your less fortunate neighbors, that was usually enough. But today major global debates about things such as climate change and artificial intelligence have an impact on everybody—whether in Tasmania, Hangzhou, or Baltimore—so we need to take into account all viewpoints. Yet how can anyone do that? How can anyone understand the web of relations among thousands of intersecting groups across the world?…we now suffer from global problems, without having a global community.

Chapter 17 - Post-Truth - Some fake news lasts forever.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree.…humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions…Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath)… For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible.you cannot organize masses of people effectively without relying on some mythology… We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency…Instead of accepting fake news as the norm, we should recognize it is a far more difficult problem than we tend to assume, and we should strive even harder to distinguish reality from fiction.

Chapter 18 Science Fiction - The future is not what you see in movies.

…perhaps the worst sin of present-day science fiction is that it tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness. As a result, it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens…[Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is]… the most prophetic science-fiction book of the twentieth century…Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions…The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realize that they are already trapped inside a box—their brain—which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix…According to the best scientific theories and the most up-to-date technological tools, the mind is never free of manipulation. There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell. Since your brain and your “self” are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self. That, however, is a possibility worth exploring. Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." - abstracted - Part 3 - Despair and Hope

This is the third installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part III. My idiosyncratic choices of text reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter.

Part III - Despair and Hope - Though the challenges are unprecedented, and though the disagreements are intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

Chapter 10 Terrorism - Don’t panic.

Terrorists are masters of mind control. They kill very few people but nevertheless manage to terrify billions and rattle huge political structures such as the European Union or the United States… the terrorists hope that even though they can barely make a dent in the enemy’s material power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact.that he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create. …States find it difficult to withstand these provocations because the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence…The success or failure of terrorism depends on us. If we allow our imagination to be captured by the terrorists and then we overreact to our own fears, terrorism will succeed. If we free our imagination from the terrorists and then we react in a balanced and cool way, terrorism will fail.

Chapter 11 War - Never underestimate human stupidity.

The last few decades have been the most peaceful era in human history. … in a world now filling up with saber-rattling and bad vibes, perhaps our best guarantee of peace is that major powers aren’t familiar with recent examples of successful wars…even if it remains impossible to wage successful wars in the twenty-first century, that would not give us an absolute guarantee of peace. We should never underestimate human stupidity…One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious, and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion, and my culture are the most important in the world— and therefore my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole.

Chapter 12 Humility - You are not the center of the world.

Most people tend to believe they are the center of the world, and their culture is the linchpin of human history…I will leave it to readers around the world to puncture the hot-air balloons inflated by their own tribes…morality in fact has deep evolutionary roots predating the appearance of humankind by millions of years…It makes absolutely no sense to credit Judaism and its Christian and Muslim offspring with the creation of human morality…the birth of bigotry…What about monotheism, then? Doesn’t Judaism at least deserve special praise for pioneering the belief in a single God, which was unparalleled anywhere else in the world…From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history…What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars…among all forms of humility, perhaps the most important is to have humility before God. Whenever they talk of God, humans all too often profess abject self-effacement, but then use the name of God to lord it over their brethren.

Chapter 13 God - Don’t take the name of God in vain.

Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind: the cosmic mystery, or the worldly lawgiver? The missing link between the cosmic mystery and the worldly lawgiver is usually provided through some holy book. The book is full of the most trifling regulations but is nevertheless attributed to the cosmic mystery…unlike the God of the Islamic State and the Crusades—who cares a lot about names and above all about His most holy name—the mystery of existence doesn’t care an iota what names we apes give it. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need.

Chapter 14 Secularism - Acknowledge your shadow

…secularism is a very positive and active worldview, defined by a coherent code of values rather than by opposition to this or that religion. Unlike some sects that insist they have a monopoly over all wisdom and goodness, one of the chief characteristics of secular people is that they claim no such monopoly. … Rather, they view morality and wisdom as the natural legacy of all humans. ..secular people are comfortable with multiple, hybrid identities…The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Secularists strive not to confuse truth with belief…secular movements repeatedly mutate into dogmatic creeds…Many capitalists keep repeating the mantra “free markets and economic growth” irrespective of realities on the ground, no matter what awful consequences occasionally result from modernization, industrialization, or privatization…Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naive reassurance that “it cannot happen to us.” Secular science has at least one big advantage over most traditional religions—namely, that it is not inherently terrified of its shadow, and it is in principle willing to admit its mistakes and blind spots.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons..." - abstracted - Part 2 - The Political Challenge

This is my second installment of clips taken from "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," Harari, Yuval Noah. Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group. Part II. My idiosyncratic choices of text reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter.

Part II - The Political Challenge - The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberty and equality. Any solution the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion, and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level.

Chapter 5 Community - Humans have Bodies

 …over the past two centuries intimate communities have been disintegrating. …Zuckerberg promised that Facebook would lead the charge to rebuild communities and that his engineers would pick up the burden discarded by parish priests. priests. .. “make it easier to build communities.”…in order to truly flourish it will have to put down roots in the offline world too…Humans have bodies. During the last century technology has been distancing us from our bodies. We have been losing our ability to pay attention to what we smell and taste….Humans … cannot live happily if they are disconnected from their bodies. If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world…this appreciation too has its downside...Once the tech giants come to terms with the human body, they might end up manipulating our entire bodies in the same way they currently manipulate our eyes, fingers, and credit cards. We may come to miss the good old days when online was separated from offline.

Chapter 6 Civilization - There is just one civilization in the world Today

...a single political paradigm is accepted everywhere. The planet is divided between about two hundred sovereign states, which generally agree on the same diplomatic protocols and on common international laws….they share many more political ideas and practices than not, including at least a token belief in representative bodies, political parties, universal suffrage, and human rights…almost everybody believes in a slightly different variation on the same capitalist theme, and we are all cogs within a single global production line…the dollar bill is universally venerated across all political and religious divides…when it comes to the practical stuff—how to build a state, an economy, a hospital, or a bomb—almost all of us belong to the same civilization.

Chapter 7 Nationalism - Global problems need global answers

Will we make a world in which all humans can live together, or will we all go into the dark? Do Donald Trump, Theresa May, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and their colleagues save the world by fanning our national sentiments, or is the current nationalist spate a form of escapism from the intractable global problems we face?…A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity, and humankind now has at least three such enemies—nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption. If despite these common threats humans choose to privilege their particular national loyalties above everything else, the results may be far worse than in 1914 and 1939.

Chapter 8 Religion - God now serves the nation.

So far, modern ideologies, scientific experts, and national governments have failed to create a viable vision for the future of humanity. Can such a vision be drawn from the deep wells of human religious traditions?..No matter how technology will develop, we can expect that arguments about religious identities and rituals will continue to influence the use of new technologies, and might well retain the power to set the world ablaze. The most up-to-date nuclear missiles and cyber bombs might well be employed to settle a doctrinal argument about medieval texts…all of this really makes traditional religions part of humanity’s problem, not part of the remedy…humankind now constitutes a single civilization, and problems such as nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption can only be solved on the global level. On the other hand, nationalism and religion still divide our human civilization into different and often hostile camps.

Chapter 9 Immigration - Some cultures might be better than others.

Though globalization has greatly reduced cultural differences across the planet, it has simultaneously made it far easier to encounter strangers and become upset by their oddities…Do we enter the immigration debate with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal, or do we think that some cultures might well be superior to others? Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists.”…culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and importance of cultural differences…At present, it is far from clear whether Europe can find a middle path that will enable it to keep its gates open to strangers without being destabilized by people who don’t share its values. If Europe succeeds in finding such a path, perhaps its formula could be copied on the global level.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")

Yuval Harari - "21 Lessons.." abstracted - Part 1 - The Technological Challenge

In this and the next four posts I'm passing on the result of something I do for myself when reading an interesting book - attempt to get the essence of the arguments by assembling summary clips of text, in this case reducing the contents of each chapter to a single paragraph. (The clips are taken from Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Kindle Edition, Random House Publishing Group.) My idiosyncratic choices of text miss many important points, and don't begin to replace a full reading of the chapter. I find that re-reading the clips is a nudge to my memory of the whole chapter. To avoid posts of excessive length, I am using five posts, once for each section of the book. Here is the first installment:

Harari - 21 Lessons for the 21st century 

Part I - The Technological Challenge - Humankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of biotech and infotech confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered.

Chapter 1 Disillusionment - The end of history has been postponed

 …during the twentieth century the global elites in New York, London, Berlin, and Moscow formulated three grand stories that claimed to explain the whole past and to predict the future of the entire world: the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. .. since the global financial crisis of 2008 people all over the world have become increasingly disillusioned with the liberal story…In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero…Just as the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution gave birth to the novel ideologies of the twentieth century, so the coming revolutions in biotechnology and information technology are likely to require fresh visions.

Chapter 2 Work - When you grow up, you might not have a job.

If we manage to combine a universal economic safety net with strong communities and meaningful pursuits, losing our jobs to algorithms might actually turn out to be a blessing. Losing control over our lives, however, is a much scarier scenario. Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.

Chapter 3 Liberty - Big data is watching you

As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens… Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel, but it could make you feel whatever it wants. … Even if democracy manages to adapt and survive, people might become the victims of new kinds of oppression and discrimination.. more and more banks, corporations, and institutions are already using algorithms to analyze data and make decisions about us…just as Big Data algorithms might extinguish liberty, they might simultaneously create the most unequal societies that ever existed. All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.

Chapter 4 Equality - Those who own the data own the future

If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data…The race to obtain the data is already on, headed by data giants such as Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Tencent...Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place can engineer some technological solution. For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his two billion friends to join forces and do something together.

(As an antidote to Harari's doomsaying and dystopian futures, you might glance back at a similar abstracting series of posts,starting March 1, 2018, that I did on Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now.")

Reimagining the human

Eileen Crist does a perspective essay in Science Magazine. Some clips:

Earth is in the throes of a mass extinction event and climate change upheaval, risking a planetary shift into conditions that will be extremely challenging, if not catastrophic, for complex life. Although responsibility for the present trajectory is unevenly distributed, the overarching drivers are rapid increases in (i) human population, (ii) consumption of food, water, energy, and materials, and (iii) infrastructural incursions into the natural world. As the “trends of more” on all these fronts continue to swell, the ecological crisis is intensifying. Given that human expansionism is causing mass extinction of nonhuman life and threatening both ecological and societal stability, why is humanity not steering toward limiting and reversing its expansionism?

The planetwide sense of entitlement bequeathed by a supremacist worldview blinds the human collective to the wisdom of limitations in several ways...First, because the worldview demotes the nonhuman in favor of the human, it blocks the human mind from recognizing the intrinsic existence and value of nonhumans and their habitats...Second, a worldview founded on the elevation of the human impairs the experience of awe for this living planet, inducing instead the perception that viewing the ecosphere as a container of natural resources, raw materials, and goods and services makes sense...Third, based on the conviction of the special distinction of the human, the worldview fosters the belief that humans are resourceful, intelligent, and resilient enough to face any challenges that may come...Fourth, the worldview impedes humans from recoiling from, or even seeing, the violence of an expansionism that fuels extinctions, population plunges, mass mortality events, and starvations of nonhumans...Lastly, the supremacist worldview insinuates that embracing limitations is unbefitting of human distinction. Whether openly or implicitly, limitations are resisted as oppressive and unworthy of humanity's stature.

To pursue scaling down and pulling back the human factor requires us to reimagine the human in a register that no longer identifies human greatness with dominance within the ecosphere and domination over nonhumans. The present historical time invites opening our imagination toward a new vision of humanity no longer obstructed by the worldview of human supremacy. Learning to inhabit Earth with care, grace, and proper measure promises material and spiritual abundance for all.

Are we getting too hysterical about the dangers of artificial intelligence?

It is certainly true that A.I. might take away the current jobs of people like lawyers and radiologists who scan data looking for patterns, or those who are now doing tasks that can be accomplished by defined algorithms. A series of articles, such as those by and about Yuval Harari, predict that most of us will become a human herd manipulated by digital overlords that know more about us than we know about ourselves.  These have to be taken very seriously. (See, for example "Watch Out Workers, Algorithms Are Coming to Replace You — Maybe,"Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer," and "Why Technology Favors Tyranny")

However, there are arguments that one fear - that machines having a general flexible human like intelligence really similar or even superior to our own will render common humans obsolete - is not yet even remotely realistic. The current deep learning algorithms sifting deep data for patterns and connections work at the level of our unconscious cognition, and don't engage context, ambiguity, and alternative scenarios in the way that our cognitive apparatus can. One can find some solace in how easy it is to fool A.I. sophistical pattern recognition systems (see "Hackers easily fool artificial intelligence") and how hapless A.I. systems are in dealing with the actual meaning of what they are doing, or why they are doing it (See "Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning". Intelligence is a measure of ability to achieve a particular aim, to deploy novel means to attain a goal, whatever it happens to be, the goals are extraneous to the intelligence itself. Being smart is not the same as wanting something. Any level of intelligence — including superintelligence — can be combined with just about any set of final goals — including goals that strike us as stupid.

One clip from the last link noted above, a choice quote from A.I. researcher Pedro Domingos:

People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.

The human herd and its digital overlords.

We've been seeing articles about the downside of young children and teenagers using digital social platforms, and the family conflicts resulting from trying to restrict smartphone use among teenagers. Several recent NYTimes articles note striking class differences in screen use between rich and less affluent households - the rich are reducing screen use in their home and private schools, while public schools are promoting digital tablet use. The Silicon Valley technologists who know know how smart phones really work don't want their own children anywhere near them.

For a chilling vision of our future if we continue the current trajectory I recommend the article by Yuval Harari in the August issue of the Atlantic. He suggests that most humans run the risk of becoming similar to domesticated animals, with only a small elite training their children to maintain the expertise and competence required to run the whole show. From his concluding paragraphs:

...if we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, we must regulate the ownership of data...Unfortunately, we don’t have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task than regulating land or machines...The race to accumulate data is already on, and is currently headed by giants such as Google and Facebook and, in China, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these companies have acted as “attention merchants”—they capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and then they resell our attention to advertisers. Yet their true business isn’t merely selling ads. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which are worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers—we are their product.

Ordinary people will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, many of us are happy to give away our most valuable asset—our personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. But if, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they are likely to have trouble doing so, especially as they may have come to rely on the network to help them make decisions, and even for their health and physical survival.

Nationalization of data by governments could offer one solution; it would certainly curb the power of big corporations. But history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overmighty governments. So we had better call upon our scientists, our philosophers, our lawyers, and even our poets to turn their attention to this big question: How do you regulate the ownership of data?

Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximize their human potential. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

If you find these prospects alarming—if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.

What is the last question?

After 20 years, the Edge.org annual question exercise seems to have run out of steam. John Brockman, author of "The Third Culture" and the guru who has led the effort, says:

After twenty years, I’ve run out of questions. So, for the finale to a noteworthy Edge project, can you ask "The Last Question"?

Two hundred and eightyfour respondents offer single sentence questions. Scrolling through these, I pull out a few that strike me, sometimes suggesting my immediate flippant answer to the question:

Are complex biological neural systems fundamentally unpredictable? (Yes)

Are the simplest bits of information in the brain stored at the level of the neuron? (No)

Does consciousness reside only in our brains? (No)

Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body? (Yes)

Is there a fundamental difference between the biological world and the physical world? (No)

Will some things about life, consciousness, and society necessarily remain unseen? (Yes)

Will we soon cease to care whether we are experiencing normal, augmented, or virtual reality? (Yes)

Is our brain fundamentally limited in its ability to understand the external world? (Yes)

And, finding myself running out of steam only a quarter of the way through the list, I zoom to the end and find Robert Sapolsky's question:

Given the nature of life, the purposeless indifference of the universe, and our complete lack of free will, how is it that most people avoid ever being clinically depressed?

Digital media and developing minds

I want to point to the Oct. 2 issue of PNAS, which free online access to a Sackler Colloquium on Digital Media and Developing Minds. The place to start is the introductory article by David Meyer, "From savannas to blue-phase LCD screens: Prospects and perils for child development in the Post-Modern Digital Information Age." Some clips from his article:

The Sackler Colloquium “Digital Media and Developing Minds” was an interdisciplinary collaborative endeavor to promote joint interests of the National Academy of Sciences, the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, and the Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.‡‡ At the colloquium, a select group of media-savvy experts in diverse disciplines assembled to pursue several interrelated goals: (i) reporting results from state-of-the art scientific research; (ii) establishing a dialogue between medical researchers, social scientists, communications specialists, policy officials, and other interested parties who study media effects; and (iii) setting a future research agenda to maximize the benefits, curtail the costs, and minimize the risks for children and teens in the Post-Modern Digital Information Age.

Christakis et al. (36) report on “How early media exposure may affect cognitive function: A review of results from observations in humans and experiments in mice,” reviewing relevant results from empirical studies of humans and animal models that concern how intense environmental stimulation influences neural brain development and behavior.

Lytle et al. (37) report on “Two are better than one: Infant language learning from video improves in the presence of peers,” showing that social copresence with other same-aged peers facilitates 9-mo-old infants’ learning of spoken phonemes through interactions with visual touch screens.

Kirkorian and Anderson (38) report on “Effect of sequential video shot comprehensibility on attentional synchrony: A comparison of children and adults,” using temporally extended eye-movement records to investigate how “top-down” cognitive comprehension processes for interpreting video narratives develop over an age-range from early childhood (4-y-old) to adulthood.

Beyens et al. (39) report on “Screen media use and ADHD-related behaviors: Four decades of research,” systematically surveying representative scientific literature that suggests a modest positive correlation—moderated by variables such as gender and chronic aggressive tendencies—between media use and ADHD-related behaviors, thereby helping pave the way toward future detailed theoretical models of these phenomena.

Prescott et al. (40) report on “Metaanalysis of the relationship between violent video game play and physical aggression over time,” applying sophisticated statistical techniques to assess data from a large cross-cultural sample of studies (n = 24; aggregated participant sample size > 17,000) about associations between video game violence and prospective future physical aggression, which has yielded evidence of small but reliable direct relationships that are largest among Whites, intermediate among Asians, and smallest (unreliable) among Hispanics.

Uncapher and Wagner (41) report on “Minds and brains of media multitaskers: Current findings and future directions,” evaluating whether intensive media multitasking (i.e., engaging simultaneously with multiple media streams; for example, texting friends on smart phones while answering email messages on laptop computers and playing video games on other electronic devices) leads to relatively poor performance on various cognitive tests under single-tasking conditions, which might happen because chronic media multitasking diminishes individuals’ powers of sustained goal-directed attention.

Finally, Katz et al. (42) report on “How to play 20 questions with nature and lose: Reflections on 100 years of brain-training research,” analyzing how and why past research based on various laboratory and real-world approaches to training basic mental processes (e.g., selective attention, working memory, and cognitive control)—including contemporary video game playing (also known as “brain training”)—have yet to yield consistently positive, practically significant, outcomes, such as durable long-term enhancements of general fluid intelligence.

Is Democracy Dying? - Irrelevance of most humans in a technocratic future...

I want to point to the October issue of the Atlantic Magazine, which carries out the manifesto published in its first issue, in 1857, to “endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.” Editor Jeffrey Goldberg has solicited a series of articles on the current state of the U.S. The Anchor article is Jeffrey Rosen's "Madison vs. the Mob." Some comments by Rosen:

The goal in America today is to resurrect the primacy of reason over passion—what we are watching now is the struggle between logos and pathos. The central question in our democratic age is this: Is it possible to slow down the direct expression of popular passion? The answer to this question is not obvious...Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare.

I find the article by Yuval Noah Harari (author of "Sapiens" and "Homo Deus") titled "Why Technology Favors Tyranny" most sobersing and compelling. Echoing the arguments in his second book, he asserts that

...together, infotech and biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.

He points to the coming irrelevance of most humans beings, except for a small elite caste that runs the whole show.

Even if some societies remain ostensibly democratic, the increasing efficiency of algorithms will still shift more and more authority from individual humans to networked machines. We might willingly give up more and more authority over our lives because we will learn from experience to trust the algorithms more than our own feelings, eventually losing our ability to make many decisions for ourselves. Just think of the way that, within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust Google’s search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: finding relevant and trustworthy information...What will happen to this view of life as we rely on AI to make ever more decisions for us? Even now we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Spotify to pick music we’ll like. But why should AI’s helpfulness stop there?...

It’s not so hard to see how AI could one day make better decisions than we do about careers, and perhaps even about relationships. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision making, and our conception of life will need to change. Democratic elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking Siri whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky.

Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals. We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious, and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly maximize their human potential. If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

If you find these prospects alarming—if you dislike the idea of living in a digital dictatorship or some similarly degraded form of society—then the most important contribution you can make is to find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands, and also find ways to keep distributed data processing more efficient than centralized data processing. These will not be easy tasks. But achieving them may be the best safeguard of democracy.

I insert here a clip from the end of Harari's "Homo Deus" book:

…if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:

1.​Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing.

2.​Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.

3.​Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.

These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book:

1.​Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?

2.​What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?

3.​What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

The war for our attention - an existential threat.

I want to pass on some edited clips from an article by Casey Schwartz on fundamental threats to individual and societal well-being posed by the new “attention economy.”

Earlier this month, Facebook and Instagram announced new tools for users to set time limits on their platforms, and a dashboard to monitor one’s daily use, following Google’s introduction of Digital Well Being features…In doing so the companies seemed to suggest that spending time on the internet is not a desirable, healthy habit, but a pleasurable vice: one that if left uncontrolled may slip into unappealing addiction.

James Williams, a technologist turned philosopher has written a new book, “Stand Out of Our Light.” During a decade-long tenure at Google, he worked on search advertising, helping perfect a powerful, data-driven advertising model...Mr. Williams compares the current design of our technology to “an entire army of jets and tanks” aimed at capturing and keeping our attention. And the army is winning...This is us: eyes glazed, mouth open, neck crooked, trapped in dopamine loops and filter bubbles. Our attention is sold to advertisers, along with our data, and handed back to us tattered and piecemeal.

”In the same way that you pull out a phone to do something and you get distracted, and 30 minutes later you find that you’ve done 10 other things except the thing that you pulled out the phone to do — there’s fragmentation and distraction at that level,” he said. “But I felt like there’s something on a longer-term level that’s harder to keep in view: that longitudinal sense of what you’re about.”

The constant pull on our attention from technology is no longer just about losing too many hours of our so-called real lives to the diversions of the web. Now, they are telling us, we are at risk of fundamentally losing our moral purpose.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist for Google…has been playing the role of whistle-blower since he quit Google five years ago…he notes that the constant pull on our attention from technology…is changing our ability to make sense of what’s true, so we have less and less idea of a shared fabric of truth, of a shared narrative that we all subscribe to…Without shared truth or shared facts, you get chaos — and people can take control.

…a whole industry has sprung up to combat tech creep…HabitLab, developed at Stanford, stages aggressive interventions whenever you enter one of your self-declared danger zones of internet consumption…Like Moment, an app that monitors screen time and sends you or loved ones embarrassing notifications detailing exactly how much time has been frittered away on Instagram today, HabitLab gets to know your patterns uncomfortably well in order to do its job. Apparently, we now need our phones to save us from our phones. 

Researchers have known for years that there’s a difference between “top-down" attention (the voluntary, effortful decisions we make to pay attention to something of our choice) and “bottom-up” attention, which is when our attention is involuntarily captured by whatever is going on around us: a thunderclap, gunshot or merely the inviting bleep that announces another Twitter notification.

At Tufts University, Nick Seaver, an anthropology professor, just finished his second year of teaching a class he designed called How to Pay Attention…Dr...Seaver, 32, is no Luddite… “Information overload is something that always feels very new but is actually very old..It is the 16th century, and there are so many books; or it is late antiquity and there is so much writing...It can’t be that there are too many things to pay attention to: That doesn’t follow...But it could be that there are more things that are trying to actively demand your attention.”

Sherry Turtle, M.I.T. sociologist and psychologist:…there is not only the attention we pay to consider, but also the attention we receive…Rather than compete with their siblings for their parents’ attention, children are up against iPhones and iPads, Siri and Alexa, Apple watches and computer screens…A generation has grown up that has lived a very unsatisfying youth and really does not associate their phones with any kind of glamour, but rather with a sense of deprivation.

We’re starting to see people inching their way toward ‘time well spent,’ Apple inching its way toward a mea culpa…And the culture itself turning toward a recognition that this can’t go on.

Building molecular machines.

In an open source PNAS news article, Stephen Ornes describes efforts to build molecular machines modeled on our own biochemical processes - possibly artificial muscles or molecular electronics. It makes a fascinating read. A few clips:

Some of the smallest, most useful machines known to science are the biological molecules that keep living things living. The protein myosin drives the contraction and relaxation of muscle. Kinesin drags cellular cargo around the cell. Motor enzymes unwind, rewind, and maintain DNA, and bacteria use a molecular motor to rotate their whip-like flagella up to 100,000 times per minute, propelling them forward. These machines turn chemical energy into motion. They’re very efficient at their jobs.

The idea of using molecules to build minuscule machines that perform useful tasks dates back at least to a lecture given in 1959 by physicist Richard Feynman titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.”* More recently, demonstrations of artificial molecular machines offer good reasons to think that such devices are feasible. Researchers have forged motors, shuttles, elevators, walkers, and pumps out of molecules, and powered them with electrical energy, chemical reactions, or light. Tiny motor by tiny motor, these demonstrations are inching toward future applications that could range from molecular electronics to artificial muscles.

...molecular machines are by nature floppy, like the soft matter that makes up the human body, whereas macroscopic machines are typically made from rigid materials such as metal. But it’s also a consequence of scale. Although the laws of physics don’t change in the nanoworld, their relative influences do. Concepts such as inertia and momentum—critical to the design of machines like cars and planes—become irrelevant. So does gravity, because molecules have such a small mass. Movement at the nanoscale is dominated instead by viscosity and Brownian motion, the random bumbling of individual molecules caused by thermal fluctuations...Katsonis calls this molecular environment a “Brownian storm.” In a 2007 article on the physics of nanoscale machines, physicist R. Dean Astumian at the University of Maine in Orono, ME, likened the challenges to swimming in molasses and walking in a hurricane.

The article gives numerous examples of efforts to develop nanoscale motors driven by electrical energy, chemical energy, or light.