Continuing on with World Economic Forum activities and ideas – Humans are Hackable.

I don’t want to take a sensationalist approach or vilify any individuals, but I’ve included below a presentation and interview with a World Economic Forum advisor, Professor Yuval Noah Harari, where he talks about how now, with data and advances in computing power, humans have become “hackable animals”.  And so as to not take his talks too far out of context, I’ve provided both below in their entirety.  Professor Harari is incredibly intelligent; he does mention a lot of good ideas along with aspects of concern, and it does seem as though he cares about the human population and where this advancement in technology could take us if in the wrong hands, but there are a few pieces that stand out for me.  The first comes during his 2020 interview with journalist Romi Noimark between 23:50 and 28:50 below, and to me, probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to many:

HARARI: “The government has enormous power to shape the opinions and desires of the population…  The government is not just responsive to the will of the people; it can shape the will of the people…  We need to reinvent democracy for this new era in which humans are now hackable animals.  You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so whatever I choose whether in the election or whether in the supermarket this is my free will, that’s over…  today we have the technology to hack human beings on a massive scale.”

…The whole idea that the customer is always right, we just do whatever the customers want.  Yes!  But, you can now hack the customers, you can manipulate the customers to want what you tell them to want.  So this whole idea that corporations just serve the needs of the customers, this is over.”

INTERVIEWER: “Maybe the pandemic, this destruction of world pandemic is an opportunity to change…”

HARARI: “We were already in a process of rapid change fueled by new technologies, COVID just accelerated it…  It’s often said that you should never allow a good crisis to go to waste, because a crisis is an opportunity to also do good reforms that in normal times people will never agree to.”

The second comes during his 2018 speech at a World Economic Forum event in Davos between 12:50 and 15:50:

HARARI: “Already at present we are seeing the formation of more and more sophisticated surveillance regimes throughout the world.  Not just by authoritarian regimes, but also by democratic governments.  The US, for example, is building a global surveillance system, while my home country of Israel is trying to build a total surveillance regime in the West Bank.

But control of data might enable human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships.  By hacking organisms elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself.  Because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it.  And if indeed we succeed in hacking and engineering life, this will be not just the greatest revolution in the history of humanity, this will be the greatest revolution in biology since the very beginning of life 4 billion years ago.

…Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design.  Not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds, but our intelligent design.  And the intelligent design of our clouds – the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud.  These are the new driving forces of evolution.”

Harari then goes on to talk about ownership of data and the dangers of it ending up in the hands of a “tiny elite”.

Any technology or tool can be used for good or bad.  A pen can be used to write with, or it can be used to stab somebody.  Whether we like it or not, the technology described above is here, and it isn’t going anywhere.  My only concern (not a fear, because I don’t fear) is that those hoping to maintain their dominant positions within the global economic game will obtain it, since they have the ultimate means to, and use it to do just that – maintain their dominant positions to ensure they will never be unseated…as they always have.

Maybe they will acquire it and use it for benevolent purposes, but in my opinion it can’t come at the price of free will and experiencing the adventure of life, complete with its ups and downs.  Whatever “good” ends they would hope to achieve, it can’t come through manipulation and control, as it’s already been used for.

But who knows.  Maybe I’ve been off my rocker for the last decade.

Oh, and my book, where I talk about technological advancements, can be found here – The Pit:Transcend Money, Save the World.