Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: November 12, 2018 at 1:24:45 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Paul Pangaro.  DLH]
>
> Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer
> The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari thinks Silicon Valley is an engine of dystopian ruin. So why do the 
> digital elite adore him so?
> By Nellie Bowles
> Nov 9 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/business/yuval-noah-harari-silicon-valley.html>
>
> The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.
>
> He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is 
> obsolete.
>
> He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are 
> destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.
>
> He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a 
> tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”
>
> But lately, Mr. Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do 
> Silicon Valley C.E.O.s love him so?
>
> “One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Mr. Harari said 
> one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”
>
> When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. 
> Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive 
> research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating 
> writer”) in The New York Times.
>
> “I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, 
> they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and 
> engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and the 
> co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.
>
> Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. 
> The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might 
> not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation andcurious about 
> alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call 
> for California to secede or shatter, or forthe creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, 
> who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. 
> “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world 
> peace.”
>
> Mr. Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”
>
> Mr. Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew 
> University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: 
> to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not 
> break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is 
> an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Mr. Harari tied together existing 
> knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of 
> human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than eight million 
> copies and made Mr. Harari a celebrity intellectual.
>
> He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human 
> evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Mr. Harari’s future is one 
> in which big data is worshiped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike 
> abilities.
>
> Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” 
> It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how 
> your data could power it.”
>
> His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. 
> Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. “If you make people start thinking far more 
> deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might 
> not be what you want them to think about.”
>
> [snip]
>
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