Sublime

We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves.

One of our favorite quotes of his is, “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.”21 When we look at the amount of digital data being created and think about how much more insight there is to be gained, we’re pretty sure he’s not wrong, either.

Massive copying is here to stay. Massive tracking and total surveillance is here to stay. Ownership is shifting away. Virtual reality is becoming real. We can’t stop artificial intelligences and robots from improving, creating new businesses, and taking our current jobs.

If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and

by 2100, it’s predicted there will be 11.2 billion people on the planet, all of them connected by an even more powerful Internet. Just thinking about how radically our way of life has changed in the past one hundred years gives you an idea of how different this future world could be. (It’s stunning how different life is now. Around a hundred years

The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.