Book Review – Homodeus (How will the anti-datacide movement arise in a dystopian age?)

The book Homodeus warns of the possibility of dystopia in a big data-driven future society, and argues that anti-datacratic movements will arise as a counter-movement. He uses the Luddite and Chartist movements as examples to illustrate the potential for a backlash against superhumans and artificial intelligence.

 

Homodeus describes a future in which human life is not bright. There’s a small problem with the author’s dystopian argument. It’s the possibility of a backlash against the arrival of dystopia. The authors warn that “all the scenarios presented in this book should be taken as possibilities rather than prophecies. If you don’t like these possibilities, you can think and act in new ways to prevent them from coming true,” as the authors say. This new way is the anti-datacracy movement. People will reject the absurdity of the future society, and in doing so, they will reclaim their rights.
The anti-datacracy movement will happen. It’s easy to predict what it will look like by comparing it to past examples. It’s similar to what happened in England during the Industrial Revolution. New technologies led to people losing their jobs and living lives dominated by a small group of people. The Luddite and Chartist movements occurred during the Industrial Revolution, and I would like to suggest the possibility of social movements against the big data society based on this fact. History has already proven how such movements will arise.
First of all, let’s go back to the time of the Luddite movement, which is the starting point of this idea. In the 18th century, England was experiencing a very rich economy due to the Industrial Revolution, but it was also bringing suffering to many people. Employers exploited their workers severely, and the workers were dissatisfied and rebelled. This led to the Luddite movement. The Luddite movement was a powerful way of destroying machines, but in the end, it failed to bring about decisive change and was defeated by the Industrial Revolution. This story has led many to believe that humans will not be able to survive the data age. But it’s not just the Luddite movement. The Chartist movement followed, and workers won their rights.
The point here is not to destroy data. We can’t deny the need for data. The breakthrough of the brain’s data-processing limits with the invention of writing and money had a tremendous impact on the creation of huge civilizations. But now, the world is so dependent on data that it’s turning people over, and a growing number of people are resisting. Modern technology has created artificial intelligence to a certain extent, and when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, people were shocked. It is safe to say that people are already hostile to beings with excessive intelligence to some extent. This fear is one of the reasons why science fiction movies often feature the theme of AI dominating humans. We can’t ignore the antipathy toward data either. We will soon reach a point where we need to play a moderate tug-of-war with data.
The anti-data movement is exactly what we need for this tug of war. As I mentioned, it’s not a Luddite movement, but a Chartist-like movement. The Chartist movement was a British grassroots movement in the mid-1830s where workers with economic and social grievances banded together to gain the right to vote. Of course, they didn’t succeed, but no one can deny that they had a major impact on the labor movement and politics in the UK. There are already people who oppose the reorganization of society into a big data-driven society, and such movements will happen eventually. Some say that people are stupid, but history shows that people have always stood up against what is wrong and tried to change it. Just look at the candlelight vigils that happened just a few years ago.
The anti-datacracy movement is about rejecting a system dominated by superhumans and computer algorithms. It will be a struggle for coexistence, neither domination nor exclusion. People cannot defeat superhumans and computers, nor can they ignore their superior abilities. But the power of the rest of us is not insignificant either. Consider the structure of society, which is made up of many people. Even if we were superhumans, we wouldn’t be able to live on Earth with just a few people. We need to interdepend on each other, just like companies need consumers to make money. So, superhumans would also need to live in symbiosis with the majority of the rest of us in order to survive. Consider the ecosystem of our world. If all the predators, the wolves, are hunted down, the ecosystem below them collapses. The same goes for social structures. So superhumans can’t just dominate the rest of us.
Of course, it’s possible for a fully conscious AI to dominate humans. However, Homo sapiens introduces a new superior class, the superhumans, which rules out the case of a perfect AI. Even if A.I. were perfect, it is assumed that they would make the same choices as superhumans because they have perfect self-awareness. If an A.I. decides that humans are harming the planet, it will make a pact with humans to preserve the ecosystem rather than slaughtering them. The reason for this is that AI will see humans as living beings, so it will decide that coexistence is the right thing to do.
Through the anti-data movement, the world will be divided into human, superhuman, and other forms of humanity. However, a fair life is impossible. Just as there is a gap between the rich and the poor in today’s society, there will be in the future. But at least it won’t be the same world as the old caste system, where someone is ruled by someone else.
It’s possible that the movements that happened in the UK didn’t or won’t happen in the same way, because not all societies are the same. However, they have a similar thread, and people have always fought for their rights. Because humans have consciousness and will, they have come together in times of national distress and organized violent and non-violent movements. The March 1 Movement was also a united effort by the people of Korea in a world dominated by the Japanese Empire. Therefore, I believe that anti-datacracy movements are inevitable in any way, at any time, in any period.
In addition, people are worried that in a world centered on big data, humans will be replaced by algorithms and most jobs will disappear. But the disappearance of something has always led to the rise of something. People thought they would lose their jobs as technology progressed, but new jobs were created. Some people argue that this relationship is not a law of nature, but just a fact of history, and that the data age may unfortunately lead to the disappearance of human jobs altogether. However, this is also a possibility. While the authors say that most jobs can be replaced by algorithms, some, like archaeology, cannot. “The key is not just to create new jobs, but to create new jobs that humans are better at than algorithms,” he writes. And who knows, maybe there will be a new concept of “job” that we haven’t thought of yet.
Homodeus envisions a future where society is reorganized around big data. I thought about what humanity would do if faced with a situation such as the destruction of the world, and I thought that it would create an anti-data movement, and it can be assumed that such an anti-data movement will succeed based on the fact that superhumans are also one of the beings living on the earth, and history has shown that it will succeed. Not that it will succeed all at once, but that it will be a gradual process of many actions, and that we will be able to break free from the domination of superhumans. The best case scenario is a future in which superhumans don’t rule humanity with computer algorithms from the beginning.