6. Jordan Weissmann, ‘iLawyer: What Happens when Computers Replace Attorneys?’, Atlantic, 19 June 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/ilawyer-what-happens-when-computers-replace-attorneys/258688; John Markoff, ‘Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software’, New York Times, 4 March 2011, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Adi Narayan, ‘The fMRI Brain Scan: A Better Lie Detector?’, Time, 20 July 2009, accessed 22 December 2014, http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1911546-2,00.html; Elena Rusconi and Timothy Mitchener-Nissen, ‘Prospects of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging as Lie Detector’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7:54 (2013); Steiner, Automate This, 217; Dormehl, The Formula, 229.
7. B. P. Woolf, Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors: Student-centered Strategies for Revolutionizing E-learning (Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010); Annie Murphy Paul, ‘The Machines are Taking Over’, New York Times, 14 September 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/how-computerized-tutors-are-learning-to-teach-humans.html?_r=0; P. J. Munoz-Merino, C. D. Kloos and M. Munoz-Organero, ‘Enhancement of Student Learning Through the Use of a Hinting Computer e-Learning System and Comparison With Human Teachers’, IEEE Transactions on Education 54:1 (2011), 164–7; Mindojo, accessed 14 July 2015, http://mindojo.com/.
8. Steiner, Automate This, 146–62; Ian Steadman, ‘IBM’s Watson Is Better at Diagnosing Cancer than Human Doctors’, Wired, 11 February 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor; ‘Watson Is Helping Doctors Fight Cancer’, IBM, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/watson_in_healthcare.shtml; Vinod Khosla, ‘Technology Will Replace 80 per cent of What Doctors Do’, Fortune, 4 December 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/04/technology-doctors-khosla; Ezra Klein, ‘How Robots Will Replace Doctors’, Washington Post, 10 January 2011, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/how-robots-will-replace-doctors/2011/08/25/gIQASA17AL_blog.html.
9. Tzezana, The Guide to the Future, 62–4.
10. Steiner, Automate This, 155.
11. http://www.mattersight.com.
12. Steiner, Automate This, 178–82; Dormehl, The Formula, 21–4; Shana Lebowitz, ‘Every Time You Dial into These Call Centers, Your Personality Is Being Silently Assessed’, Business Insider, 3 September 2015, retrieved 31 January 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mattersight-uses-personality-science-2015-9.
13. Rebecca Morelle, ‘Google Machine Learns to Master Video Games’, BBC, 25 February 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31623427; Elizabeth Lopatto, ‘Google’s AI Can Learn to Play Video Games’, The Verge, 25 February 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/25/8108399/google-ai-deepmind-video-games; Volodymyr Mnih et al., ‘Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning’, Nature, 26 February 2015, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature14236.html.
14. Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). Also see the 2011 film Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller and starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane.
15. Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Dormehl, The Formula, 225–6.
16. Tom Simonite, ‘When Your Boss is an Uber Algorithm’, MIT Technology Review, 1 December 2015, retrieved 4 February 2016, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543946/when-your-boss-is-an-uber-algorithm/.
17. Simon Sharwood, ‘Software “Appointed to Board” of Venture Capital Firm’, The Register, 18 May 2014, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/18/software_appointed_to_board_of_venture_capital_firm/; John Bates, ‘I’m the Chairman of the Board’, Huffington Post, 6 April 2014, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-bates/im-the-chairman-of-the-bo_b_5440591.html; Colm Gorey, ‘I’m Afraid I Can’t Invest in That, Dave: AI Appointed to VC Funding Board’, Silicon Republic, 15 May 2014, accessed 12 August 2015, https://www.siliconrepublic.com/discovery/2014/05/15/im-afraid-i-cant-invest-in-that-dave-ai-appointed-to-vc-funding-board.
18. Steiner, Automate This, 89–101; D. H. Cope, Comes the Fiery Night: 2,000 Haiku by Man and Machine (Santa Cruz: Create Space, 2011). See also: Dormehl, The Formula, 174–80, 195–8, 200–2, 216–20; Steiner, Automate This, 75–89.
19. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?’, 17 September 2013, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf.
20. E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAffee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington: Digital Frontier Press, 2011).
21. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
22. Ido Efrati, ‘Researchers Conducted a Successful Experiment with an “Artificial Pancreas” Connected to an iPhone’ [in Hebrew], Haaretz, 17 June 2014, accessed 23 December 2014, http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/health/1.2350956. Moshe Phillip et al., ‘Nocturnal Glucose Control with an Artificial Pancreas at a Diabetes Camp’, New England Journal of Medicine 368:9 (2013), 824–33; ‘Artificial Pancreas Controlled by iPhone Shows Promise in Diabetes Trial’, Today, 17 June 2014, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.todayonline.com/world/artificial-pancreas-controlled-iphone-shows-promise-diabetestrial?singlepage=true.
23. Dormehl, The Formula, 7–16.
24. Martha Mendoza, ‘Google Develops Contact Lens Glucose Monitor’, Yahoo News, 17 January 2014, accessed 12 August 2015, http://news.yahoo.com/google-develops-contact-lens-glucose-monitor-000147894.html; Mark Scott, ‘Novartis Joins with Google to Develop Contact Lens That Monitors Blood Sugar’, New York Times, 15 July 2014, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/business/international/novartis-joins-with-google-to-develop-contact-lens-to-monitor-blood-sugar.html?_r=0; Rachel Barclay, ‘Google Scientists Create Contact Lens to Measure Blood Sugar Level in Tears’, Healthline, 23 January 2014, accessed 12 August 2015, http://www.healthline.com/health-news/diabetes-google-develops-glucose-monitoring-contact-lens-012314.
25. Quantified Self, http://quantifiedself.com/; Dormehl, The Formula, 11–16.
26. Dormehl, The Formula, 91–5; Bedpost, http://bedposted.com.
27. Dormehl, The Formula, 53–9.
28. Angelina Jolie, ‘My Medical Choice’, New York Times, 14 May 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/opinion/my-medical-choice.html.
29. ‘Google Flu Trends’, http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html; Jeremy Ginsberg et al., ‘Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data’, Nature 457:7232 (2008), 1012–14; Declan Butler, ‘When Google Got Flu Wrong’, Nature, 13 February 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nature.com/news/when-google-got-flu-wrong-1.12413; Miguel Helft, ‘Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread’, New York Times, 11 November 2008, accessed 22 December 2014, http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/docs/nytimes/2008-11-11_nytimes_google_influenza.pdf; Samantha Cook et al., ‘Assessing Google Flu Trends Performance in the United States during the 2009 Influenza Virus A (H1N1) Pandemic’, PLOS
ONE, 19 August 2011, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023610; Jeffrey Shaman et al., ‘Real-Time Influenza Forecasts during the 2012–2013 Season’, Nature, 23 April 2013, accessed 24 December 2014, http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131203/ncomms3837/full/ncomms3837.html.
30. Alistair Barr, ‘Google’s New Moonshot Project: The Human Body’, Wall Street Journal, 24 July 2014, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-collect-data-to-define-healthy-human-1406246214; Nick Summers, ‘Google Announces Google Fit Platform Preview for Developers’, Next Web, 25 June 2014, accessed 22 December 2014, http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/06/25/google-launches-google-fit-platform-preview-developers/.
31. Dormehl, The Formula, 72–80.
32. Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, ‘Computer-Based Personality Judgements Are More Accurate Than Those Made by Humans’, PNAS 112:4 (2015), 1036–40.
33. For oracles, agents and sovereigns see: Bostrom, Superintelligence.
34. https://www.waze.com/.
35. Dormehl, The Formula, 206.
36. World Bank, World Development Indicators 2012 (Washington DC: World Bank, 2012), 72, http://data.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/wdi-2012-ebook.pdf.
37. Larry Elliott, ‘Richest 62 People as Wealthy as Half of World’s Population, Says Oxfam’, Guardian, 18 January 2016, retrieved 9 February 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/richest-62-billionaires-wealthy-half-world-population-combined; Tami Luhby, ‘The 62 Richest People Have as Much Wealth as Half the World’, CNN Money, 18 January 2016, retrieved 9 February 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/17/news/economy/oxfam-wealth/.
10 The Ocean of Consciousness
1. Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, ‘The Weirdest People in the World’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010), 61–135.
2. Benny Shanon, Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3. Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review 83:4 (1974), 435–50.
4. Michael J. Noad et al., ‘Cultural Revolution in Whale Songs’, Nature 408:6812 (2000), 537; Nina Eriksen et al., ‘Cultural Change in the Songs of Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) from Tonga’, Behavior 142:3 (2005), 305–28; E. C. M. Parsons, A. J. Wright and M. A. Gore, ‘The Nature of Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) Song’, Journal of Marine Animals and Their Ecology 1:1 (2008), 22–31.
5. C. Bushdid et al., ‘Human Can Discriminate More Than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli’, Science 343:6177 (2014), 1370–2; Peter A. Brennan and Frank Zufall, ‘Pheromonal Communication in Vertebrates’, Nature 444:7117 (2006), 308–15; Jianzhi Zhang and David M. Webb, ‘Evolutionary Deterioration of the Vomeronasal Pheromone Transduction Pathway in Catarrhine Primates’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100:14 (2003), 8337–41; Bettina Beer, ‘Smell, Person, Space and Memory’, in Experiencing New Worlds, ed. Jurg Wassmann and Katharina Stockhaus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 187–200; Niclas Burenhult and Majid Asifa, ‘Olfaction in Aslian Ideology and Language’, Sense and Society 6:1 (2011), 19–29; Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994); Amy Pei-jung Lee, ‘Reduplication and Odor in Four Formosan Languages’, Language and Linguistics 11:1 (2010), 99–126; Walter E. A. van Beek, ‘The Dirty Smith: Smell as a Social Frontier among the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and North-Eastern Nigeria’, Africa 62:1 (1992), 38–58; Ewelina Wnuk and Asifa Majid, ‘Revisiting the Limits of Language: The Odor Lexicon of Maniq’, Cognition 131 (2014), 125–38. Yet some scholars connect the decline of human olfactory powers to much more ancient evolutionary processes. See: Yoav Gilad et al., ‘Human Specific Loss of Olfactory Receptor Genes’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100:6 (2003), 3324–7; Atushi Matsui, Yasuhiro Go and Yoshihito Niimura, ‘Degeneration of Olfactory Receptor Gene Repertories in Primates: No Direct Link to Full Trichromatic Vision’, Molecular Biology and Evolution 27:5 (2010), 1192–200.
6. Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (London: Viking, 2015).
7. Turnbull and Solms, The Brain and the Inner World, 136–59; Kelly Bulkeley, Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion and Psychology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999); Andreas Mavrematis, Hypnogogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep (London: Routledge, 1987); Brigitte Holzinger, Stephen LaBerge and Lynn Levitan, ‘Psychophysiological Correlates of Lucid Dreaming’, American Psychological Association 16:2 (2006), 88–95; Watanabe Tsuneo, ‘Lucid Dreaming: Its Experimental Proof and Psychological Conditions’, Journal of International Society of Life Information Science 21:1 (2003), 159–62; Victor I. Spoormaker and Jan van den Bout, ‘Lucid Dreaming Treatment for Nightmares: A Pilot Study’, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 75:6 (2006), 389–94.
11 The Data Religion
1. See, for example, Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking Press, 2010); César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (Hoboken: Wiley, 2001); DuBravac, Digital Destiny.
2. Friedrich Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, American Economic Review 35:4 (1945), 519–30.
3. Kiyohiko G. Nishimura, Imperfect Competition Differential Information and the Macro-foundations of Macro-economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Frank M. Machovec, Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics (London: Routledge, 2002); Frank V. Mastrianna, Basic Economics, 16th edn (Mason: South-Western, 2010), 78–89; Zhiwu Chen, ‘Freedom of Information and the Economic Future of Hong Kong’, HKCER Letters 74 (2003), http://www.hkrec.hku.hk/Letters/v74/zchen.htm; Randall Morck, Bernard Yeung and Wayne Yu, ‘The Information Content of Stock Markets: Why Do Emerging Markets Have Synchronous Stock Price Movements?’, Journal of Financial Economics 58:1 (2000), 215–60; Louis H. Ederington and Jae Ha Lee, ‘How Markets Process Information: News Releases and Volatility’, Journal of Finance 48:4 (1993), 1161–91; Mark L. Mitchell and J. Harold Mulherin, ‘The Impact of Public Information on the Stock Market’, Journal of Finance 49:3 (1994), 923–50; Jean-Jacques Laffont and Eric S. Maskin, ‘The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Insider Trading on the Stock Market’, Journal of Political Economy 98:1 (1990), 70–93; Steven R. Salbu, ‘Differentiated Perspectives on Insider Trading: The Effect of Paradigm Selection on Policy’, St John’s Law Review 66:2 (1992), 373–405.
4. Valery N. Soyfer, ‘New Light on the Lysenko Era’, Nature 339:6224 (1989), 415–20; Nils Roll-Hansen, ‘Wishful Science: The Persistence of T. D. Lysenko’s Agrobiology in the Politics of Science’, Osiris 23:1 (2008), 166–88.
5. William H. McNeill and J. R. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
6. Aaron Swartz, ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’, July 2008, accessed 22 December 2014, https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf; Sam Gustin, ‘Aaron Swartz, Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist, Is Dead at 26’, Time, 13 January 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://business.time.com/2013/01/13/tech-prodigy-and-internet-activist-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide; Todd Leopold, ‘How Aaron Swartz Helped Build the Internet’, CNN, 15 January 2013, 22 December 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/15/tech/web/aaron-swartz-internet/; Declan McCullagh, ‘Swartz Didn’t Face Prison until Feds Took Over Case, Report Says’, CNET, 25 January 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57565927-38/swartz-didnt-face-prison-until-feds-took-over-case-report-says/
.
7. John Sousanis, ‘World Vehicle Population Tops 1 Billion Units’, Wardsauto, 15 August 2011, accessed 3 December 2015, http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/world-vehicle-population-tops-1-billion-units.
8. ‘No More Woof’, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/no-more-woof.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the following humans, animals and institutions:
To my teacher, Satya Narayan Goenka (1924–2013), who taught me the technique of Vipassana meditation, which has helped me to observe reality as it is, and to know the mind and the world better. I could not have written this book without the focus, peace and insight gained from practising Vipassana for fifteen years.
To the Israel Science Foundation, that helped fund this research project (grant number 26/09).
Homo Deus Page 45
