“By equating the human experience with data patterns, Dataism undermines our main source of authority and meaning, and heralds a tremendous religious revolution, the like of which has not been seen since the eighteenth century. In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that ‘God is a product of the human imagination’. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: ‘Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is the product of biochemical algorithms.’ In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view. The Dataist revolution will probably take a few decades, if not a century or two. But then the humanist revolution too did not happen overnight. At first, humans kept on believing in God, and argued that humans are sacred because they were created by God for some divine purpose. Only much later did some people dare say that humans are sacred in their own right, and that God doesn’t exist at all. Similarly, today most Dataists say that the Internet-of-All-Things is sacred because humans are creating it to serve human needs. But eventually, the Internet-of-All-Things may become sacred in its own right.” GodHumanismDataism Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow Source: Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
“We are striving to engineer the internet of all things in hope to make us healthy, happy and powerful. Yet once the internet of all things is up and running, we might be reduced from engineers to chips then to data and eventually, we might dissolve within the data torrent like a clamp of earth within a gushing river. Dataism, thereby, threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo sapiens has done to all other animals. In the course of history, humans have created a global network and evaluated everything according to its function within the network. For thousands of years this boosted human pride and prejudices. Since humans fulfilled the most important function in the network, it was easy for us to take credit for the network’s achievements and to see ourselves as the apex of creation. The lives and experiences of all other animals were undervalued because they fulfilled far less important functions. And whenever an animal ceased to fulfil any function at all it went extinct. However, once humans loose their functional importance to the network, we’ll discover that we are not the apex of creation after all. The yardsticks that we ourselves have enshrined will condemn us to join the mammoths and the Chinese river dolphins in oblivion. Looking back, humanity will turn out to be just a ripple within the cosmic data flow.” HumanityNatureEvolutionCosmosNetworksInternet Of ThingsDataism Book:Homo Deus Source: Homo Deus
“That’s the capitalist secret of success. No central processing unit monopolises all the data on the London bread supply. The information flows freely between millions of consumers and producers, bakers and tycoons, farmers and scientists. Market forces determine the price of bread, the number of loaves baked each day and the research-and-development priorities. If market forces make the wrong decision, they soon correct themselves, or so capitalists believe. For our current purposes, it doesn’t matter whether the theory is correct. The crucial thing is that the theory understands economics in terms of data processing.” CapitalismData ProcessingDataism Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow Source: Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow