Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote a monumental book about the new economic order that is alarming. „The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,“ reveals how the biggest tech companies deal with our data.
How do we regain control of our data? What is surveillance capitalism? In this documentary, Zuboff takes the lid off Google and Facebook and reveals a merciless form of capitalism in which no natural resources, but the citizen itself, serves as a raw material. How can citizens regain control of their data? It is 2000, and the dot.com crisis has caused deep wounds. How will startup Google survive the bursting of the internet bubble? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don’t know anymore how to turn the tide. By chance, Google discovers that the „residual data“ that people leave behind in their searches on the internet is very precious and tradable. This residual data can be used to predict the behavior of the internet user. Internet advertisements can, therefore, be used in a very targeted and effective way. A completely new business model is born: „surveillance capitalism.“ Original title: De grote dataroof Director: Roland Duong Research: Tom Reijner, Halil Ibrahim Özpamuk Camera: Adri Schrover Sound: Jochem Salemink Editing: Roland Duong, Paul Delput, Rinze Schuurman Production: Marie Schutgens Production assistant: Britt Bennink Image Editing: Rob Dorrestijn, Paula Witkamp Online Coordinator: Arja van den Bergh Commissioning Editors: Bregtje van der Haak, Doke Romeijn On VPRO broadcast you will find nonfiction videos with English subtitles, French subtitles and Spanish subtitles, such as documentaries, short interviews and documentary series. This channel offers some of the best travel series from the Dutch broadcaster VPRO. Our series explore cultures from all over the world. VPRO storytellers have lived abroad for years with an open mind and endless curiosity, allowing them to become one with their new country. Thanks to these qualities, they are the perfect guides to let you experience a place and culture through the eyes of a local. Uncovering the soul of a country, through an intrinsic and honest connection, is what VPRO and its presenters do best. So subscribe to our channel, and we will be delighted to share our adventures with you! more information at https://www.VPRObroadcast.com
How the Internet was Stolen
look at the history of the internet, from ARPANET & NSFNET, through privatization, to Tim-Berners Lee, Yahoo, Netscape, Google, eBay, and Facebook, examining Microsoft’s antitrust court case and their battle against Open Source and Free Software, Bill Gate’s Open Letter to Hobbyists and the leaked Halloween Documents. Then we take a look at the emergence of Surveillance Capitalism, and how platforms like AirBnb & Uber coopt the idea of the community and lobby politicians. Finally, we take a look at some alternatives.
Thank you to @WereInHell@zoe_bee@Tom_Nicholas@epochphilosophy@RadicalReviewer@unlearningeconomics9021@James_Muldoon for their help with this video. Bibliography: https://lewwaller.com/how-the-interne… Chapters: 00:00 – Introduction to the History of the Internet 04:06 – Building the Net 20:37 – The Browser Wars (Microsoft vs the United States) 44:35 – The Californian Ideology (eBay, Yahoo, Google and the Libertarian Mind) 01:07:26 – The Raiding of Privacy (Surveillance Capitalism) 01:18:05 – Facebook 01:26:07 – The Theft of the Community (Airbnb & Uber) 01:40:31 – No Place (Utopian Dreams) 01:49:38 – Open Source vs Microsoft 01:59:24 – Conclusion: Politics, Policy, and Alternatives Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Or send me a one-off tip of any amount and help me make more videos: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr… Buy on Amazon through this link to support the channel: https://amzn.to/2ykJe6L Follow me on: Facebook: http://fb.me/thethenandnow Instagram: / thethenandnow Twitter: / lewlewwaller Subscribe to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast…https://open.spotify.com/show/1Khac2i… Credits: Babbage Engine video – Seth Ladd, CC BY 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Pierre Omydar photo – Joi 15:42, 2 August 2007 (UTC), CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Yahoo Sign, Beraldo Leal from Natal / RN, Brazil, CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Page & Brinn photo, Ehud Kenan, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Yahoo sign photograph, Sebastian Bergmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Napster Screenshot, Njahnke, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Sean Fanning, Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Metallica photo, Kreepin Deth, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Bill Gates portrait, By Kuhlmann /MSC – https://securityconference.org/en/med…, CC BY 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index… Richard Stallman Photograph, Sam Williams, CC BY-SA 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…, via Wikimedia Commons GNU Manifesto, Raghavendra Kamath, CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Linus Torvalds photo, Unknown photographer who sold rights to the picture to linuxmag.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…, via Wikimedia Commons Wikipedia globe, Slashme, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Wikimania, Rory O’Connor, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/… , via Wikimedia Commons Bill Gates photograph, Kees de Vos from The Hague, The Netherlands, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Mark Andreessen photo, JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons AOL disc, Thiago A. from Brazil, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons Ebay photo, Michael Rivera, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…, via Wikimedia Commons
A GREAT RESET HISTORIAN MUSES ON WHAT TO DO WITH “USELESS” PEOPLE
Speakers: Prof. Yuval Noah Harari (Israeli Public Intellectual) and Sir Klaus Schwab (WEF Founder) Harari speaks on inequality involving the creation of the new global useless class, data colonies and algorithmic AI implications, digital dictatorships through The Danger Formula „the defining equation of life in the 21st century’“, allowing the ability to hack humans. Schwab speaks on the ownership of personal data, policy shaping with regard to the fourth industrial revolution (the 4th Reich). Focuses on the fusion of our physical, digital, and biological identities… think sensors implanted into our brains. How to Survive the 21st Century | DAVOS 2020 – Jan 23, 2020 • How to Survive the 21s…
Creating the Useless Class, Digital Dictatorship, and Hacking Humans
Transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari, a key advisor to the World Economic Forum, thinks free will is “dangerous” and a “myth”NEWS JUNE 9, 2022 6Share
Historian Yuval Noah Harari an advisor to Klaus Schwab, co-author with Thierry Malleret of COVID-19: The Great Reset, and head of the World Economic Forum, had some interesting things to tell the movers and shakers of the world about ordinary people last April:
Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?
The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?
My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening…
I think once you’re superfluous, you don’t have power.– FROM A TRANSCRIPT AT RIELPOLITIC ALEXANDRA BRUCE, “BRAVE NEW WORLD: YUVAL NOAH HARARI ASK’S, ‘WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THESE USELESS PEOPLE?’,” (MAY 17, 2022)
Harari goes on to outline a transhumanist vision of the future in which brain-computer interfaces make our footedness in the material world obsolete, human relationships become meaningless due to artificial substitutes, and the poor die but the rich don’t.
Transhumanism, boiled down to its bones, is pure eugenics. It calls itself “H+,” for more or better than human. Which, of course, is what eugenics is all about.
Alarmingly, transhumanist values are being embraced at the highest strata of society, including in Big Tech, in universities, and among the Davos crowd of globalist would-be technocrats. That being so, it is worth listening in to what they are saying under the theory that forewarned is forearmed. WESLEY J. SMITH, “TRANSHUMANISM IS PURE EUGENICS” AT EVOLUTION NEWS (APRIL 27, 2022)
The introductory material for the video tells us who admires Harari’s vision:
Yuval Noah Harari is a lead advisor for Klaus Schwab. Klaus Schwab is the author of COVID-19 / The Great Reset and the founder of The World Economic Forum. Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum Are Implementing “The Great Reset.” Yuval is praised by the likes of Klaus Schwab, Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, who reviewed Harari’s latest book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Harari speaks at the World Economic Forum at Davos, New York Times, Stanford, TED, and TimesTalks. At the time of this writing, his books occupied the top two slots on the New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list.
An aphorism from Harari’s own site:“History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.” But not all humans, as he makes clear in the video; only the non-“useless” one who go along with transhumanism.
So that’s part of what they mean by “The Great Reset,” in case we wondered…
What to make of itall? In 2018, Slateaccounted for Harari’s rapid rise to influence as follows:
… it’s all due to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a book based on that survey course that no one else wanted to teach—a book that has leapt far beyond the original audience for which Harari intended it and has been embraced by the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. On the West Coast, half a world away, this young Israeli academic has been informally elected the man best equipped to tell those industries what matters to them most: what will happen next. He can explain why the sleek, friction-free technological utopia they once promised has slid back in primal conflict and turmoil. And he assures them that they—the engineers, the scientists, and the storytellers—still hold the power to radically transform the world.LAURA MILLER, “THE HISTORY DISRUPTOR” AT SLATE (NOVEMBER 1, 2018)
Clearly, the prospect of becoming gods when the rest of humanity sinks into uselessness and drug abuse excites some people. But how probable is it?
Tech philosopher George Gilder,author of Life after Google (2018) and Gaming AI (2020), dismisses the assumption that artificial intelligence is so much better than the human intelligence that created it, an assumption that seems implicit in Harari’s vision. Gilder points out that AI has triumphed over humans in games like chess because the map is the territory. Thus programming for the rules of chess and vast calculation power enable powerful computers to win over humans:
Games like chess, go, and poker are vastly more complex than checkers in their degrees of freedom. But they all resemble checkers in one important way: In all cases, the map is the territory. And that limits the resemblance to reality. As Gilder puts it, “Go is deterministic and ergodic; any specific arrangement of stones will always produce the same results, according to the rules of the game. The stones are at once symbols and objects; they are always mutually congruent.” (Gaming AI, pp 50–51)MIND MATTERS NEWS
However, that all falls apart in situations where the map is not the territory: “That’s one reason that AI has had more mixed results in medicine than in Go: Diseases don’t have to follow rules.”
Business prof Jay Richards, author of The Human Advantage (2018), points out that the main change AI will truly make in the workplace is to enable workers to focus more on the creative aspectsof their work: “The kinds of jobs that are not going to go the way of the dodo bird are both manual and mental jobs that involve, as I have said a number of times, creativity—but also complex modeling, know-how, and movement.”
Similarly, business prof Gary Smith (The AI Delusion, 2018) and data analyst Jeffrey Funk, point out that “doomsayers typically don’t notice that many jobs have components that can be automated but others that can’t be. That would apply to, say, law, medicine, accounting, career advice, fashion design, hairdressing, interior design, creative writing and many other tasks.” Sop how many people will really be “useless”?
But there’s another side to all this — probably a more important one: Harari considers free will a “dangerous” myth,a point on which neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has taken issue with him here. On the contrary, Egnor argues, denial of free will is a cornerstone of totalitarianism: “Without free will, we are livestock, without the presumption of innocence, without actual innocence, and without rights.”
But then, it’s not clear that, given his intense, dramatic focus on “useless,” “meaningless,” and “worthless” people, that Harari is far off from totalitarianism anyway.
Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Societal Structure – The Rise Useless Class
Yuval Noah Harari argues that when artificial intelligence pushes many out of work, we must forge new economic, social, educational systems. Those people who will become unemployed will create a “useless class” which will need to be redirected, as opposed to the remaining “working class” which will be entrusted with the operating of the machinery. The article provides few ideas on how to prepare for the rise of the “useless class.” Looking at the consequences of the AI revolution, possible solutions that will change our societal structure are discussed.
Introduction
Harari argues that when artificial intelligence will push many out of work, in order to deal with that part of the community, which could risk being marginalised, we must forge new economic, social, and educational systems. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter “AI”) and the use of algorithms, it is inevitable that computerised devices will be invented to perform working functions in the form of hardware or software-based routines that will consequently force a huge portion of the population out of work. Automation will inevitably substitute many jobs causing the rise of a new “useless class,” as it is called by Harari, transforming the current societal structure.
Who will be part of the useless class?
In the aftermath of the AI revolution, “just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class.” The useless class, or “Homo Inutilis”, will be composed by those people working jobs that can easily be automated. In society, we will see a polarisation between two classes: i) a class that will remain as the only workforce in the society, who will take care of the functioning of the machines, and continue driving innovation, and ii) a useless class, that deprived of work, will not have any source of revenue. In this scenario, the military, tailors, factory workers will be substituted by machines; doctors will not be required anymore to perform surgeries or provide diagnosis as a machine will take their place, as well as robots will be able to find the best arguments to win a case instead of lawyers. By contrast, innovation, research, and creativity will arguably remain entrusted to humans. However, realistically we will have to deal with the portion of the society which will become unemployed, and possibly, unemployable.
The challenges of the useless class
Clearly, the useless class is a threat to the peace of the community for two main reasons: i) they will need a stream of revenue to survive, and ii) they will need a new purpose in life. The creation of the two classes will drive inequality even further and this would possibly give rise to malcontent and disorder within a community. Moreover, even with assured revenue streams provided by governments to the unemployed, the human psychology of this class needs to be considered. Can humans live happily without purpose in their life? How can we deal with the boredom of the useless class? According to Harari, “… nobody has any idea what kind of jobs or skills people will need in 30 years. Which means that we have absolutely no idea what to teach our children at school today (Speech by Harari, 2020). He continues claiming that even if the AI revolution would create new job opportunities, those opportunities would be for high-skilled jobs and most of the unemployed mass departing from less-skilled jobs will not be able to make the transition. So, what to do with the newly established useless class, “which has no military or economic usefulness, and therefore no political power?” and what to do with the new socio-economic bias created by the AI revolution?
Universal Basic Income Programs
A solution to the loss of revenue stream is to urge governments to implement Universal Basic Income programs. Social policy reforms are surely needed to deal with the changing society structure and to avoid excessive inequality. Universal Basic Income programs provide for the government to tax big corporations and the rich, and subsequently use the revenues collected for every adult in society. Every citizen in society would receive a certain amount of money during the year to sustain themselves. Proponents of basic income claim that it is the best way to combat poverty and inequality (Samuel, 2020).
Along these lines, Paul Mason, a British commentator, proposes the transition of society towards a new form of socialism (Post-Capitalism, 2015). Mason believes that in the face of the issues of the digital age, the reality is that capitalism cannot continue forever: the State must do more to tame private finance, and individuals must do more to bypass it. Several countries, such as Finland between 2017 and 2018, have been starting to toy with the idea of introducing a basic income; and so far, the evidence suggests that the programs introduced increased happiness, health, school attendance, trust in social institutions, and reduced crimes (Samuel, 2020).
Societal revolution
Nonetheless, loss of revenue stream for the unemployed class is not the only problem which the AI revolution will bring. We will also need to deal with the boredom of the useless class including mental health implications. New socio-economic systems need to be created; we need to redirect or altogether forge new economic, social, and educational systems that will permit us to deal with the issue. A complete reform of the educational system seems obvious, although it is not as obvious what should be taught. According to Murky Watersthere will be no need to teach any more data to our children, but we will need to focus on liberating their creativity.
Conclusion
With the rise of the AI revolution and the imminent challenges that will be experienced by the useless class, new ethical principles, laws, social and labour market reforms will be needed (Van Duüren, 2020). As the useless class will have virtually no political power, as economically and military useless, should the values in the society be recalibrated? Can character and creativity become more important than knowledge for the success of a person? One thing that seems clear is that we need to brace ourselves for this transition, help each other, and be open-minded in light of future societal changes.
References & Links
- Speech by Harari, J. N. (2020). Workplace automation & the ‘Useless Class. Available at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMDlfNWM1fA.
- Harari, J. N. (2017). Reboot for the AI Revolution. 550 Nature 324-327.
- Harari, J. N. (2017). The rise of the useless class. Ideas TED. Available at: https://ideas.ted.com/the-rise-of-the-useless-class/.
- Samuel, S. (2020). Everywhere basic income has been tried in one map. VOX. Available at:https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map.
- Runciman, D. (2015). Post capitalism by Paul Mason review: a worthy successor of Marx? The Guardian. Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/15/post-capitalism-by-paul-mason-review-worthy-successor-to-marx.
- Murkey Waters (2020). Yuval Noah Harari’s “Useless Class”. Available at:https://murkywater.medium.com/yuval-noah-hararis-useless-class-1207bf9c457e.
- Van Duüren, O. (2020). The birth of the Homo Inutilis: the useless class, the unemployed, and the unemployable. Available at:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/birth-homo-inutilis-useless-class-unemployed-olivier-van-du%C3%BCren/.
Sofia Ghezzi holds a LLB in European Law from Maastricht University, and a LLM in European Competition Law and Regulation from the University of Amsterdam. She worked as an intern in the team of Integrity & Compliance at AkzoNobel in Amsterdam, and she is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Climate Change Law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Sofia is passionate about the intersection of law, technology, and culture, and the underlying influences of society in law. She is fluent in Italian, English, and can communicate in French.
How AI was Stolen
CHAPTERS:
SCRIPT & BIBLIOGRAPHY: https://www.thenandnow.co/2024/04/26/…
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