Emerging powers such as AI, quantum computing, the internet of things, virtual currencies, information warfare, dis-information and intentional media bias cant be jammed into one of your preconceived categories... can't be jammed into a box according to how they might serve a particular political agenda or any ideological framework for that matter. Jamming might be counterproductive to any of your causes, no matter how fun or rewarding jamming stuff into boxes might be. Evolving technologies and their social impacts don't fall neatly into place like carefully cut puzzle pieces.
Observations concerning the relationship between privacy, persuasion and personhood are tentative, maybe obscure. Unconstrained by any pretense of perfect objectivity and hopefully not indulging in objectionable (boring really) partisan opinion... the path of the open mind veers into grey areas - overgrown terrain where the wild things are. Here, persons of good faith may disagree. As long as respect and an open mind are valued... we should bring differences. Here is where stories of courage, true friendship, and spectacular breakthroughs begin. In any case, there's nothing as boring as a closed mind or as cowardly as valuing disrespect.
In a Technological World, Does Intuition Still Serve Us Well?
THE LEANS
A friend of mine who's got a plane described something pilots call the leans. Try it... fly into a cloud bank. There are no visual clues... no up, down, left, or right. Feel the panic. Everybody shakes a bit. Bogart, Bond, even Clooney - whoever. In front of you there are only quiet, dim dials.
You suddenly get the feeling you are rolling (leaning) to the left... The Leans. You are not rolling to the left. You're experiencing something to do with your inner ear lying to your brain. Your natural reaction? You lean to the right. Over time that adds up to too much right - and that's wrong. Dead wrong. Pilots need to be taught to recognize the leans. Even after you learn it - you have to learn to act on it - there's always an issue of trust. You'd rather trust your body than the flight instructor. And the instruments? You've never even had coffee with the instruments. You want to lean right.
You learned how to keep your balance a long time ago. It's pretty much the key to walking. You were VERY proud of yourself when you learned how to walk. You don't remember, but it was a BIG deal. You worked hard to please some very insistent people for God knows what payoff (dog biscuits?). For most of us, it turns out there was a good reason to trust their guidance. Walking around was AWESOME! Still is - if your lucky. It felt great, opened up a lot of possibilities (you called your broker) ...everybody smiled.
Your newfound independence, the screaming adulation, and smiling approval... it all had its effect. It's hard to get things like "I must keep my balance" out of your head after all that approval. When you later learn that balance also protects you from the pain of falling into a canyon - of hitting your head in general - the importance of balancing is reinforced. Psychologists call this kind of learning - from biscuits AND pain - a "double burrito." Actually, it's called positive and negative reinforcement. Usually, just one or the other is enough to teach you something. Both pain AND pleasure... Double Burrito. It's VERY hard to get these things out of your head. Especially if your messing with a new technology, flying a plane for instance. You pay careful attention, you bring your best game to the table. You try real hard to leverage all your (old) skills. Death is on the line. If things are rolling to the left - you're rolling to the right by God.
Please don't. The point is - If you don't trust your instruments more than your instincts wrought from your years of ego-affirming-body-knowledge... you are going to die. Or at least find yourself flying over Siberia if that's any better. Blame technology. Things have gotten more complicated since you first learned to walk. Now, having a flight instructor - an expert - is essential for your long term survival. So that's what can happen when you *always* trust your body and nothing else. We are strongly biased towards our body-knowledge. Every time an animal takes a walk the trust of body-knowledge keeps it from thinking too hard about every step. The slow ones are lunch.
ONE OF THESE STICKS
Like a trust in balance, a trust in social relationships was and is essential to survival. Again, we are being strongly influenced by what worked in the past. Here, your tribe is an extension of your brain. Conforming to tribal behavior was - and still is - essential to human survival. But there is an issues with trust in people, in society.
Here's an example old thinking gone wrong in a social situation; we used a plane before, so this time, let's use sticks. Take your friend out of the plane and put him into a room with 4 sticks. One stick is a little longer than the others. Ask him which is longer and he gives you the right answer every time. Pretty impressive, right? Put 6 more people in the room, ask them all - one at a time - which is the long stick? Same results. Duh.
Now... this time, put the guy in a room with six stealth researchers (no white coats - they look normal). Every once in a while one of the clever researchers gives a wrong answer. Sometimes two of them say they think a shorter stick is the long one. Sometimes all 6. What happens to the perfectly-intelligent-friend when everyone else states the wrong answer? Nothing good. Apparently he's lost the ability to say the long stick is the long stick. He's not batting 1000 anymore. Why? Our hero didn't want to look stupid... bummer. How did that work out?
Now, your friend wonders how this could happen... especially after the experiment wraps up and he's not the stick-length-guesser he thought he was. Not feeling so heroic. What? Not you? You wouldn't be in the 80% who went along with the crowd? Perhaps. Some never go along with the crowd. That would be you. Some go along most all the time. hat would be your friend. Or that would be 'them.' Solomon Asch (1958)
Trust in people is, like body-knowledge, a cognitive bias. It is a heuristic. A heuristic is a shortcut so you don't have to think about everything all the time. Either your brain figured the heuristic for you, or it's been passed down through culture. In either case, heuristics generally make life tolerable. But sometimes they're a train wreck, a plane crash, lemmings off the cliff. When the tendency to cling to cognitive shortcuts can't be overcome, we get crashed planes and so on. Suggest thinking in another way would is in order. But we prefer to be happy. Happy being "obviously right." To later be embarrassed when "stubbornly wrong?" Inconceivable! Blindly honoring - not ignoring - the heuristics, is an escapable part of the human condition. Some things that helped us survive up to this point, are now really dangerous (unhelpful) and, seeing we're all grown up now and have real airplanes, we should look into them. They are escapable. To look for, discover, fight, and escape our biases... is difficult but doable. Things that were helpful in the past and questionable now... are Cognitive Biases. An awareness of these biases refines intuition. Below, Julia discusses one called the Conformity Bias and how one man overcame it. They are not inescapable.