Philosophers From Israel

"Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite - politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable."

"International wars became rare only after 1945, largely thanks to the new threat of nuclear annihilation."

"For 2500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and cause of happiness. which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices."

"Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods."

"In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism's original characteristics."

"[I]f humankind doesn’t annihilate itself... the Scientific Revolution... may turn out to be the most important bological revolution..."

"There is nothing new about biological engineering per se. People have been using it for millennia..."

"Scientists believe that we will soon have bionic arms that will... be able to transmit signals back to the brain... enabling... the sense of touch."

"The era of personalised medicine... that matches treatment to DNA... has begun."

"[T]he Frankenstein story appears to warn... that if we try to... engineer life we will be punished..."

"When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination... everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people will be living... on Mars and Pluto. ...[N]obody foresaw the Internet."

"Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal... in... Africa. ...[I]t transformed... into the master of the... planet and... terror of the ecosystem.., on the verge of... eternal youth... [with] divine abilities of creation and destruction."

"[H]ow did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts..? ...[H]umans created imagined orders and devised scripts... The imagined orders sustaining... networks... divided people into [a] make-believe hierarchy. Superiors got... the good things... Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained."

"[F]or the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe."

"Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the... life of most humans ran... within three ancient frames: the nuclear family.., extended family and... local intimate community. ...The family was... the welfare.., health.., education system.., construction industry.., pension fund.., insurance company.., radio.., television.., newspapers.., bank and... police."

"Buddha’s recommendation was to stop... the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings."

"How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? ...[N]ever admit that the order is imagined."

"[F]rom a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has... no meaning... the outcome of blind evolutionary processes... without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of... divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up... the universe would... keep going... business as usual. ...[H]uman subjectivity would not be missed. ...[M]eaning ...people ascribe to their lives is... delusion."

"[P]erhaps happiness is synchronising... personal delusions.. with... prevailing collective delusions."

"Dualism... has a... simple answer to the... Problem of Evil... Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain... suffering... One... explanation.., [w]ere there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil.., hence... no free will. Dualisim... is unnerved by the Problem of Order. ...[I]f Good and Evil battle for control... who enforces the laws. [M]onotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. ...[S]olving the riddle: ...there is a single omnipotent God... and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such..."

"[T]he modern world fails to square liberty with equality."

"[[Contradiction|[C]ontradiction]]s are culture’s engines, responsible for... creativity and dynamism... Just as... clashing musical notes... force... music forward.., discord in... thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds."

"We have... increased food production, built cities, established empires and created... trade networks. But did we decrease... suffering..? ...[M]assive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals."

"[W]e have... made... progress... with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating... and the improvement in... humanity is... fragile..."

"Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history."

"Today more than ninety per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Consider the chicken, for example. Ten thousand years ago it was a rare bird confined to small niches of South Asia. Today billions of chickens live on almost every continent and island, bar Antarctica. The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering."

"The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities."

"The fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue. It concerns the majority of Earth's large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but who live and die as cogs in an industrial production line."

"As human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm."

"The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support these useless masses even without any effort from their side. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D-virtual-reality worlds, that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What's so sacred about useless bums who pass their time devouring artificial experiences in ?"

"In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction."

"In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens."

"Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals."

"In the past there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness and start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness."

"Of course, by 2033 many new professions are likely to appear, for example, virtual-world designers. But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than current run-of-the-mill jobs, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if they do so, the pace of progress is such that within another decade they might have to reinvent themselves yet again. After all, algorithms might well outperform humans in designing virtual worlds too. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms."

"...Suppose you have two free hours a week, and are uncertain whether to use them playing chess or tennis. A good friend might ask: 'What does your heart tell you?' 'Well,' you answer, 'as far as my heart is concerned, it’s obvious tennis is better. It’s also better for my cholesterol level and blood pressure. But my fMRI scans indicate I should strengthen my left pre-frontal cortex. In my family dementia is quite common, and my uncle had it at a very early age. The latest studies indicate that a weekly game of chess can help delay its onset.'"

"Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia."

"...Meanwhile in the USA paranoid Republicans have accused Barack Obama of being a ruthless despot hatching conspiracies to destroy the foundations of American society – yet in eight years of his presidency he barely managed to pass a minor health-care reform."

"From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system through four basic methods:"

": 1: Increasing the number of processors."

": 2: Increasing the variety of processors."

": 3: Increasing the number of connections between processors."

": 4: Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections."

"Without criticising the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or go beyond it. But please note that this book could have been written only when people are still relatively free to think what they like and to express themselves as they wish. If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression."

"In the beginning, the liberal story cared mainly about the liberties and privileges of middle-class European men, and seemed blind to the plight of working-class people, women, minorities and non-Westerners. When in 1918 victorious Britain and France talked excitedly about liberty, they were not thinking about the subjects of their worldwide empires."

"But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts."

"The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures."

"As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel – it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’."

"But in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way."

"The race to obtain the data is already on, headed by data-giants such as Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of ‘attention merchants’. They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers. Yet the data-giants probably aim far higher than any previous attention merchant. Their true business isn’t to sell advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers – we are their product."