I've never been a Harari fan, but this just scales new heights in vapid prophesizing. Briefly, human notions of free will are obsolete (or even dangerous!) because AI will get to the point it can influence us into doing or buying anything.https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy …
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Replying to @kareem_sabri
I read Sapiens and mostly liked it. He has a real gift for exposition and storytelling. But since then, I can see a certain formula repeating itself, with less and less actual novel thought in the mix.
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Replying to @antoniogm
To be fair, the argument in the latest book is not that we will outsource decision-making to ad companies but rather that algorithms will know us much better than we know ourselves. The full argument in the book is extremely persuasive and frankly hard to refute.
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Replying to @MarceloPLima @antoniogm
And once the algorithms are that good and deliver provably better predictions, why not then just let them tell us what to do? A rudimentary example today is allowing Google Maps do the navigation since it knows the traffic jams/bottlenecks in real time.
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A big stretch....
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Replying to @antoniogm @kareem_sabri
His argument: in principle, sensors could detect neurotransmitter levels based on outside stimuli. You could feed this data into a machine learning model, and spit out predictions. With enough data, the predictions would get so good, the algos would "know" us better than we do
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We're going to face so many other issues before we even get to the level of control Harari describes, it's pointless to talk about that risk vs. others that are far more proximal (like the rise of tribalism, the threat of automation, etc.).
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