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- Summary: Homo Deus
Summary: Homo Deus
These book summaries are designed as captures for what I’ve read, and aren’t necessarily great standalone resources for those who have not read the book. Their purpose is to ensure that I capture what I learn from any given text, so as to avoid realizing years later that I have no idea what it was about or how I benefited from it.
Concepts
Intelligence will decouple from consciousness.
Humanism is the obsession with human experience.
Liberalism is the obsession with human freedom.
Dataism is placing data processing at the center.
Dataism will be the end of humans because computers / AI will be better at data processing than we are.
As humans become transparent to data processing systems (and AI) they will know far better what we should do than we will.
AI will know us better than we know ourselves.
The goal changes from having experiences ourselves, to sharing those experiences and getting them into the collective.
People are going to have to become comfortable with the idea of giving up control to a system that they cannot understand. Already there are many systems that are basically black boxes to us, and that’s the way most everything will go.
People will think they can/will resist the temptation to depend on the system, but when they see how superior the results are, they’ll use it. Plus it’ll happen slowly so that people don’t just switch suddenly from not using it to doing so. It’ll take a couple decades for the tech to mature and for attitudes to change.
Interestingly, young people everywhere, and especially in Asia, are already very much in the Dataist mentality, where they don’t care nearly as much about personal privacy, and care much more about sharing and getting great recommendations from the system.
Find my other book summaries here.