“Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing,” (Harari, Yuval Noah – Homo Deus)
For thousands of years humans put their faith in god. Then in the 18th century humanism gradually shifted authority away from gods to humankind itself. Now in the 21st century a new religion might be rising that does away with humanism or the traditional notion of god, replacing him with an algorithm.
Introduced by high-tech gurus and Sillicon Valley prophets, this new religion called Dataism states that freedom of information is the greatest good of all. Proponents of Dataism perceive the entire universe as a flow of data and work towards their ultimate goal: creating a more efficient system called Internet-of-All-Things – that connects everything, from humans to trees, cars and even your toothbrush.
The roots of Dataism date back to humans learning how to pass information form one person to another creating the first information networks. These information networks have grown tremendously through the rise of globalization and now exponentially with internet connectivity. Note that humans are not at the center of Dataism, rather they serve as a tiny data processor in a giant system that nobody really understand. With computers surpassing our capability of data processing, from a dataist perspective we humans should relinquish our decisions to the algorithms that know us better.
Harari claims that if Dataism has a martyr, it would be Aaron Swartz; a genius hacker who published his manuscript ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’ along with thousands of research papers from JSTOR using a guest account at MIT university. Swartz believed that scientific information should be freely available for all individuals. He was arrested and put on trial, and faced up to 35 years in prison, but took his own life before being convicted. After this tragedy, JSTOR decided to publish more articles free-of-charge.
What role do you think will the human species possess in a future where data is at the core of our universe?
Copyrights picture: Janne Iivonen
References
Brinsom, S., 26 June 2018, Dataism: God is in the Algorithm. Retrieved from: https://medium.com/understanding-us/dataism-god-is-in-the-algorithm-84af800205cd
Harari, Y. N., (2016). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Harari, Y. N., Financial Times, 26 August 2016, Yuval Noah Harari on big data, Google and the end of free will. Retrieved from: https://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c
Miessler, D., 6 October 2017, Some thoughts on Dataism. retrieved from: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/some-thoughts-on-dataism/
Reviglio, U., 14 October 2018, What is Dataism? Retrieved from: https://theteknologist.wordpress.com/2018/10/14/what-is-dataism/
