The World Economic Forum (“WEF”) Transhumanist movement is more or less open about the fact that they want to trade our self-governed and representative democracies in for AI-managed surveillance systems that will ration resources and keep tabs on individual performances. And from the various promotional videos and speeches made by the WEF, we can gather that an Internet of Things and Internet of Bodies is slated to replace the functions of community and social and political structures.
But, in the essay below V. N. Alexander argues that WEF members have simplistic views of, not only human nature but also of ecosystems and societies.
One of the complexities that WEF members have failed to grasp is free will. Yuval Noah Harari, for example, seems to think free will is merely an output of what has been input into the “machine” – the machine is us. There is nothing in the machine to transform what is input. Instead, there is an algorithm in the machine that can be decrypted and reprogrammed – that can be hacked. How wrong they are.
“Liberalism tells us that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, and that we should think for ourselves and follow our hearts. Unfortunately, ‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of ‘free will’ to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices.”
– Yuval Noah Harari
Although World Economic Forum (“WEF”) transhumanists may not have a unified ideology per se, we may look to Yuval Noah Harari, a WEF member who is a prolific writer and voluble frontman, to get a general sense of the assumptions held by that coterie of financial elites who think they can alter the course of human civilization, human evolution, and re-codify human rights. While their grandiose narcissism verges on the cartoonish-ness of the comic book villain seeking world domination, we must, nevertheless, take their words and their plans seriously because their claims to ownership and/or control of monetary systems, communication infrastructure and natural resources do, unfortunately, lend them quite a bit of power over us – at the moment.
What is the WEF Transhumanist movement? Although their stated objectives are cloaked in tones of benevolent concern, they are more or less open about the fact that they want to trade our self-governed and representative democracies in for AI-managed surveillance systems that will ration resources and keep tabs on individual performances.
The proposed tools for this include, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), Social Impact Investing, and gamified software for education, health monitoring, welfare recipient monitoring, and job skills training.
As Harari argues in an essay in The Guardian, liberal democracy and the belief in free will are “dangerous,” because governments and corporations that have access to everyone’s digital histories will soon “know you better than you know yourself” and they will be able to “hack” you, put ideas in your head, get you to buy bad things and vote for bad people. Without supplying a rationale, he adds, “the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.”
In contrast, the ones who know they can’t think for themselves, Harari further argues, will be saved by their personalised AI babysitters. In Harari’s future world, there will be no God dangling the carrot or brandishing the stick, but there will be an all-seeing AI that does. What “we need,” he goes on, is “an antivirus for the brain. Your AI sidekick will learn by experience that you have a particular weakness…and would block [it] on your behalf.” The obvious alternative solution, fully protecting privacy and making data collection by governments and corporations illegal without full informed consent,1 seems not to have occurred to Professor Harari.
From the various promotional videos and speeches made by the WEF, we can gather that an Internet of Things and of Bodies is slated to replace the functions of community and social and political structures. In the future, researchers will develop Brain-Machine-Interfaces (BMI) that will monitor, and eventually help cause, our thoughts and actions as well as diagnose and treat any mental health conditions. We will be ushered into Smart Cities (think luxury Borg condos). While the countryside is left to re-wild (for the pleasure of oligarchs on safari), agriculture will move into laboratories, and we will be fed synthetic chicken, wormburgers and LED-grown medicated lettuce in exchange for doing some kind of work that will probably involve operating mining robots or drones using Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. I wish I were exaggerating for comic effect, but these are the kinds of programs being promoted by the WEF and in Klaus Schwab’s book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The objective of this essay is not to win a philosophical debate against Harari. In fact, it’s better for us if all the WEF members continue in their simplistic views of, not only human nature but also of ecosystems and societies. Their ignorance is their Achilles’ Heel. It allows them to believe it is possible to achieve top-down control over a complex system like the planet and all its inhabitants. They are certain to fail. The danger is, of course, that they will take us down with them. Catastrophic change is already underway with regard to our food supply and health systems. We have limited time to position ourselves to save as many people as possible. But we do have a chance.
A complex system like human society, interconnected in so many ways, maintains itself to a great degree automatically by self-organisation (and to a lesser degree by conspirators). The role of habit in maintaining the system and suppressing change cannot be overstated. To implement technocratic totalitarian rule, the Fourth Industrial Revolutionists won’t be able to just fine-tune the present system; they will have to take down the system that they have corrupted and abused to get to their positions of power. That will leave them vulnerable. If they want us to become dependent on their lab-grown food rations, they will have to sink shipping, lose food processing plants to suspicious fires, outlaw fossil fuel agriculture and slaughter the herds in factory farms. So many aspects of the economy and society hinge upon the present system that when it is disassembled, it will be a devastating shock. We can expect chaos. The outcome will be impossible for them to control, even with all their economic powers. During that time of chaos, we will have as much of an opportunity as the WEF, if not more because there are so many more of us, to pivot to local food production, regenerative grazing and permaculture farming.
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