Abstract
In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that technological advances of the twenty-first century will usher in a significant shift in how humans make important life decisions. Instead of turning to the Bible or the Quran, to the heart or to our therapists, parents, and mentors, people will turn to Big Data recommendation algorithms to make these choices for them. Much as we rely on Spotify to recommend music to us, we will soon rely on algorithms to decide our careers, spouses, and commitments. Harari also predicts that next, the state will take away individuals’ rights to make their own choices about their lives. If Google knows where your children would flourish best in school, why should the state allow a fallible human parent to decide? Liberalism—which, as Harari uses this term, refers to a state of society in which human freedom to choose is respected and championed—will collapse. In this paper, I argue that Harari’s conception of the future implications of recommendation algorithms is deeply flawed, for two reasons. First, users will not rely on algorithms to make decisions for them because they have no reason to trust algorithms, which are developed by companies with their own incentives, such as profit. Second, for most of our life decisions, algorithms will not be able to be developed, because the factors relevant to the decisions we face are unique to our situation. I present an alternative depiction of the future: instead of relying on algorithms to make decisions for us, humans will use algorithms to enhance our decision-making by helping us consider the most relevant choices first and notice information we might not otherwise. Finally, I will also argue that even if computers could make many of our decisions for us, liberalism as a political system would emerge unscathed.
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Notes
The term “liberalism” has many distinct meanings in different contexts, but I will not be exploring these various meanings in this paper. Instead, I will use the term as Harari uses it, to refer to social systems in which humans are left free to make their own decisions about their lives.
Readers interested in learning more about how Spotify’s recommendation system works might begin with this presentation by one of its creators: https://www.slideshare.net/MrChrisJohnson/algorithmic-music-recommendations-at-spotify/15-The_Netflix_Problem_Vs_The. For more on how recommendation algorithm present recommendations to users, see also (Zhao et al. 2017).
See, for example, Krizhevsky et al. (2012).
Issues of overfitting would be particularly nefarious here. See O’neil (2016).
The observation that many of our life decisions are unique and particular rather than general and universal was a cornerstone of Nietzsche’s philosophy. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil (198).
Nietzsche is the unsung hero of Harari’s book. And insofar as Harari’s argument is thoroughly Nietzschean, his prediction that big data algorithms will spell the end of liberalism falls prey to the same fallacy that Nietzsche failed to overcome. Nietzschean elements in Harari’s book are omnipresent. Like Nietzsche’s imagined prophet, Zarathustra, Harari proclaims throughout the book that “God is dead,” and that we have yet to grapple with the true consequences. He professes his love for Nietzsche’s genealogical method in the first chapter (without calling it such). Further, Nietzsche dreamed of philosophers of the future who would create new values for humanity, and Harari complains that “Since 1789, despite numerous wars…humans have not managed to come up with any new value.” Instead, the philosophy that Harari advocates, “Dataism,” is “the first movement since 1789 that created a really novel value: freedom of information.” (382) Nietzsche plays such a prominent role in Harari’s thinking to such an extent that one begins to seriously suspect that Harari sees himself (perhaps fittingly so) as the first of the “philosophers of the future” that Nietzsche desperately hoped for.
See Hunt (2007) for related arguments.
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Acknowledgements
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE 16-44869. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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First, D. Will big data algorithms dismantle the foundations of liberalism?. AI & Soc 33, 545–556 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0733-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0733-4