Philosophy for techies: Dataism is bad for mankind and worse for Big Tech

IN A recent interview in the New York Times, Yuval Harari, acclaimed author of Sapiens,states that people in Silicon Valley lack a deep understanding of human society. It is the all the more revealing as Harari has become the go-to thinker, historian-cum-philosopher, of tech luminaries including Mark Zuckerberg with whom he engaged in a face-to-face dialogue in 2019.

Among the views discussed by Harari, there is one in particular that he identifies as crucial: dataism - the view that human beings can be reduced to sources of continuous data flows within an all-pervasive technological apparatus which powers itself with its users' lives and comes to dominate the whole world.

In the dataist perspective as described by Harari in Homo Deus(2015), the Internet-of-all-Things becomes a deity whereas man is simply an organism among organisms, an algorithmic source of data points comparable to a tomato or a giraffe.

This is possible because human achievements such as the arts, for example a Da Vinci painting or a J S Bach cantata, are nothing but the products of human algorithms which can be replicated and possibly surpassed by better, more efficient nonhuman data-generating algorithms to be developed (like AI).

When these super algorithms are eventually implemented, mankind will be eradicated from Earth, an eugenic process which should take between 100 and 200 years. Dataism's radical perspectives are so dumbfounding that they have even stumped their author who explains in the NYT interview that he has not yet been able to conceptualise dataism's implications in political and social terms since he introduced the concept.

Ignoring fundamental philosophical principles is a dead-end for tech firms

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Admittedly, dataism's perspectives on human society would seem ludicrous if they were not taken seriously by Silicon Valley whose mission might be to turn them into reality. Dataism as a possible path for mankind's future has been met with fierce opposition by leading public intellectuals. Notable among them is the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations) in his 2020 book Morality.

Sacks - who studied philosophy at Cambridge, Oxford and King's College London, characterises Harari's claims on dataism as "exaggerated and intrinsically misleading", and demonstrates how they are flawed based on the philosophical concepts of freedom, self-consciousness and morality.

The fact is that many decisions made by Big Tech ignore, and even trample on, fundamental philosophical principles which have underpinned human societies for millennia. For instance, the crucial question of digital personhood, the recognition of a user as a person with rights in digital space, has been swept under the carpet by technology firms.

Personhood is linked to man's individual freedom. It is a major contribution of the Judeo-Christian heritage to Western civilisation. Big Tech have refused to acknowledge their users' digital personhood with the rights attached to it, granting them only a digital identity. As digital space covers a growing realm of human activities (from shopping online to stepping into a smart building or, in the future, immersing into a metaverse), the question of digital personhood is hardly anecdotal.

Hence, can one be a decision maker, let alone a leader, in the tech sector without being somehow well versed in philosophy, that is, the study of fundamental questions affecting human society?

Is the great partnership between digital technology and society possible?

Given the breadth and practicality of the challenges posed by our societies' ever-expanding embeddedness with digital technologies, philosophy can bring extensive insights. Ignoring its teaching is a mistake.

Dataism is bad for mankind, and worse for Big Tech. It will lead them to a dead end in terms of business inasmuch as adopting a philistine attitude to social responsibilities can only damage their reputations and alienate increasingly socially conscious users (and investors). If tech leaders had any philosophical insights, they would probably opt for more sustainable strategies with respect to what it means to be a free person when using their products and services, and thus avoid becoming whistle-blowers' targets.

If only for the sake of long-term self-preservation, Big Tech should start paying attention to what social scientists and philosophers have been saying about the impact of technology on human lives. It is ultimately about the Great Partnership between science and society described by Sacks in his eponymous book (2011).

Neither nature nor human lives should be standing reserves for technology

So, what authors should be listed in Philosophy for the Techies' curriculum? There are many worthy thinkers, big names from the past (such as Carl G Jung, John Locke, Norbert Weiner) but also many contemporary researchers who might not be on international bestseller lists.

A good start is Martin Heidegger's The Question concerning Technology (1954). It is especially relevant as climate change has now firmly taken centrestage in the public debate. Heidegger identifies that since the late 19th century, man has turned nature into a standing reserve to benefit from it and that this process will lead to massive destructions and damages to nature. Heidegger then explains that akin to what happened to nature, a few men might be tempted to use technology to turn human existence into a standing reserve to profit from it. This is the ultimate danger for mankind insofar as man will be under the illusion that he is fully in control.

However, there will be no way to escape from technology's grasp since technology is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The damages to mankind resulting from this process of "enframing" will be unprecedented.

Indeed, what would be mankind's ability to escape from pervasive smart technologies in a dataist world? That's an open question for Big Tech and dataism evangelists to answer before we trustfully commit more of our lives to the digital realm.

The writer is a professor in the School of Management, University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada.