Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (64 page)

28
.  Angelina Jolie, ‘My Medical Choice’,
New York Times
, 14 May 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/opinion/my-medical-choice.html.

29
.  ‘Google Flu Trends’, http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html; Jeremy Ginsberg et al., ‘Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data’,
Nature
457:7232 (2008), 1012–14; Declan Butler, ‘When Google Got Flu Wrong’,
Nature
, 13 February 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nature.com/news/when-google-got-flu-wrong-1.12413; Miguel Helft, ‘Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread’,
New York Times
, 11 November 2008, accessed 22 December 2014, http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/docs/nytimes/2008-11-11_nytimes_google_influenza.pdf; Samantha Cook et al., ‘Assessing Google Flu Trends Performance in the United States during the 2009 Influenza Virus A (H1N1) Pandemic’,
PLOS ONE
, 19 August 2011, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023610; Jeffrey Shaman et al., ‘Real-Time Influenza Forecasts during the 2012–2013 Season’,
Nature
, 23 April 2013, accessed 24 December 2014, http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/131203/ncomms3837/full/ncomms3837.html.

30
.  Alistair Barr, ‘Google’s New Moonshot Project: The Human Body’,
Wall Street Journal
, 24 July 2014, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-collect-data-to-define-healthy-human-1406246214; Nick Summers, ‘Google Announces Google Fit Platform Preview for Developers’, Next Web, 25 June 2014, accessed 22 December 2014, http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/06/25/google-launches-google-fit-platform-preview-developers/.

31
.  Dormehl,
The Formula
, 72–80.

32
.  Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, ‘Computer-Based Personality Judgements Are More Accurate Than Those Made by Humans’,
PNAS
112:4 (2015), 1036–40.

33
.  For oracles, agents and sovereigns see: Bostrom,
Superintelligence
.

34
.  https://www.waze.com/.

35
.  Dormehl,
The Formula
, 206.

36
.  World Bank,
World Development Indicators 2012
(Washington DC: World Bank, 2012), 72, http://data.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/wdi-2012-ebook.pdf.

37
.  Larry Elliott, ‘Richest 62 People as Wealthy as Half of World’s Population, Says Oxfam’,
Guardian
, 18 January 2016, retrieved 9 February 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/richest-62-billionaires-wealthy-half-world-population-combined; Tami Luhby, ‘The 62 Richest People Have as Much Wealth as Half the World’,
CNN Money
, 18 January 2016, retrieved 9 February 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/17/news/economy/oxfam-wealth/.

10
The Ocean of Consciousness

1
.   Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, ‘The Weirdest People in the World’,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
33 (2010), 61–135.

2
.   Benny Shanon,
Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

3
.   Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’,
Philosophical Review
83:4 (1974), 435–50.

4
.   Michael J. Noad et al., ‘Cultural Revolution in Whale Songs’,
Nature
408:6812 (2000), 537; Nina Eriksen et al., ‘Cultural Change in the Songs of Humpback Whales (
Megaptera novaeangliae
) from Tonga’,
Behavior
142:3 (2005), 305–28; E. C. M. Parsons, A. J. Wright and M. A. Gore, ‘The Nature of Humpback Whale (
Megaptera novaeangliae
) Song’,
Journal of Marine Animals and Their Ecology
1:1 (2008), 22–31.

5
.   C. Bushdid et al., ‘Human Can Discriminate More Than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli’,
Science
343:6177 (2014), 1370–2; Peter A. Brennan and Frank Zufall, ‘Pheromonal Communication in Vertebrates’,
Nature
444:7117 (2006), 308–15; Jianzhi Zhang and David M. Webb, ‘Evolutionary Deterioration of the Vomeronasal Pheromone Transduction Pathway in Catarrhine Primates’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
100:14 (2003), 8337–41; Bettina Beer, ‘Smell, Person, Space and Memory’, in
Experiencing New Worlds,
ed. Jurg Wassmann and Katharina Stockhaus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 187–200; Niclas Burenhult and Majid Asifa, ‘Olfaction in Aslian Ideology and Language’,
Sense and Society
6:1 (2011), 19–29; Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott,
Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell
(London: Routledge, 1994); Amy Pei-jung Lee, ‘Reduplication and Odor in Four Formosan Languages’,
Language and Linguistics
11:1 (2010), 99–126; Walter E. A. van Beek, ‘The Dirty Smith: Smell as a Social Frontier among the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and North-Eastern Nigeria’,
Africa
62:1 (1992), 38–58; Ewelina Wnuk and Asifa Majid, ‘Revisiting the Limits of Language: The Odor Lexicon of Maniq’,
Cognition
131 (2014), 125–38. Yet some scholars connect the decline of human olfactory powers to much more ancient evolutionary processes. See: Yoav Gilad et al., ‘Human Specific Loss of Olfactory Receptor Genes’,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
100:6 (2003), 3324–7; Atushi Matsui, Yasuhiro Go and Yoshihito Niimura, ‘Degeneration of Olfactory Receptor Gene Repertories in Primates: No Direct Link to Full Trichromatic Vision’,
Molecular Biology and Evolution
27:5 (2010), 1192–200.

6
.   Matthew Crawford,
The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction
(London: Viking, 2015).

7
.   Turnbull and Solms,
The Brain and the Inner World
, 136–59; Kelly Bulkeley,
Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion and Psychology
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1999); Andreas Mavrematis,
Hypnogogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep
(London: Routledge, 1987); Brigitte Holzinger, Stephen LaBerge and Lynn Levitan, ‘Psychophysiological Correlates of Lucid Dreaming’,
American Psychological Association
16:2 (2006), 88–95; Watanabe Tsuneo, ‘Lucid Dreaming: Its Experimental Proof and Psychological Conditions’,
Journal of International Society of Life Information Science
21:1 (2003), 159–62; Victor I. Spoormaker and Jan van den Bout, ‘Lucid Dreaming Treatment for Nightmares: A Pilot Study’,
Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
75:6 (2006), 389–94.

11
The Data Religion

1
.   See, for example, Kevin Kelly,
What Technology Wants
(New York: Viking Press, 2010); César Hidalgo,
Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies
(New York: Basic Books, 2015); Howard Bloom,
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the
21
st Century
(Hoboken: Wiley, 2001); DuBravac,
Digital Destiny
.

2
.   Friedrich Hayek, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’,
American Economic Review
35:4 (1945), 519–30.

3
.   Kiyohiko G. Nishimura,
Imperfect Competition Differential Information and the Macro-foundations of Macro-economy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Frank M. Machovec,
Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics
(London: Routledge, 2002); Frank V. Mastrianna,
Basic Economics
, 16th edn (Mason: South-Western, 2010), 78–89; Zhiwu Chen, ‘Freedom of Information and the Economic Future of Hong Kong’,
HKCER Letters
74 (2003), http://www.hkrec.hku.hk/Letters/v74/zchen.htm; Randall Morck, Bernard Yeung and Wayne Yu, ‘The Information Content of Stock Markets: Why Do Emerging Markets Have Synchronous Stock Price Movements?’,
Journal of Financial Economics
58:1 (2000), 215–60; Louis H. Ederington and Jae Ha Lee, ‘How Markets Process Information: News Releases and Volatility’,
Journal of Finance
48:4 (1993), 1161–91; Mark L. Mitchell and J. Harold Mulherin, ‘The Impact of Public Information on the Stock Market’,
Journal of Finance
49:3 (1994), 923–50; Jean-Jacques Laffont and Eric S. Maskin, ‘The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Insider Trading on the Stock Market’,
Journal of Political Economy
98:1 (1990), 70–93; Steven R. Salbu, ‘Differentiated Perspectives on Insider Trading: The Effect of Paradigm Selection on Policy’,
St John’s Law Review
66:2 (1992), 373–405.

4
.   Valery N. Soyfer, ‘New Light on the Lysenko Era’,
Nature
339:6224 (1989), 415–20; Nils Roll-Hansen, ‘Wishful Science: The Persistence of T. D. Lysenko’s Agrobiology in the Politics of Science’,
Osiris
23:1 (2008), 166–88.

5
.   William H. McNeill and J. R. McNeill,
The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

6
.   Aaron Swartz, ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’, July 2008, accessed 22 December 2014, https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf; Sam Gustin, ‘Aaron Swartz, Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist, Is Dead at 26’,
Time
, 13 January 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://business.time.com/2013/01/13/tech-prodigy-and-internet-activist-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide; Todd Leopold, ‘How Aaron Swartz Helped Build the Internet’, CNN, 15 January 2013, 22 December 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/15/tech/web/aaron-swartz-internet/; Declan McCullagh, ‘Swartz Didn’t Face Prison until Feds Took Over Case, Report Says’, CNET, 25 January 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57565927-38/swartz-didnt-face-prison-until-feds-took-over-case-report-says/.

7
.   John Sousanis, ‘World Vehicle Population Tops 1 Billion Units’,
Wardsauto
, 15 August 2011, accessed 3 December 2015, http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/world-vehicle-population-tops-1-billion-units.

8
.   ‘No More Woof’, https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/no-more-woof.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the following humans, animals and institutions:

To my teacher, Satya Narayan Goenka (1924–2013), who taught me the technique of Vipassana meditation, which has helped me to observe reality as it is, and to know the mind and the world better. I could not have written this book without the focus, peace and insight gained from practising Vipassana for fifteen years.

To the Israel Science Foundation, that helped fund this research project (grant number 26/09).

To the Hebrew University, and in particular to its department of history, my academic home; and to all my students over the years, who taught me so much through their questions, their answers and their silences.

To my research assistant, Idan Sherer, who devotedly handled whatever I threw his way, be it chimpanzees, Neanderthals or cyborgs. And to my other assistants, Ram Liran, Eyal Miller and Omri Shefer Raviv, who pitched in from time to time.

To Michal Shavit, my publisher at Penguin Random House in the UK, for taking a gamble, and for her unfailing commitment and support over many years; and to Ellie Steel, Suzanne Dean, Bethan Jones, Maria Garbutt-Lucero and their colleagues at Penguin Random House, for all their help.

To David Milner, who did a superb job editing the manuscript, saved me from many an embarrassing mistake, and reminded me that ‘delete’ is probably the most important key on the keyboard.

To Preena Gadher and Lija Kresowaty of Riot Communications, for helping to spread the word so efficiently.