Working for the Machines
we can see that technology companies have already replaced some portion of human decision-making. Eventually machines will replace ALL of your decisions.
How’s that possible?
It’s possible because machines make better decisions than humans. Or they will. Consider your health-monitoring wristband. Someday it will tell you when you need to eat and what to eat. It will tell you when you are dehydrated and suggest that you take a drink. It will tell you the best time to exercise, and it will “train” you to do so, with rewards. In the short run, you will see your machines as making helpful suggestions. But once you learn that the machines always make good suggestions – and you do not – you will start taking the machine’s suggestions simply because it is easier.
I would argue that your political choices are already largely determined by Facebook, Google, Twitter and the other media companies. It feels exactly like free will to you, but it isn’t. And someday soon our technology will tell us how to eat, when to sleep, when to sip water, when to exercise, and even who to date. Once married, technology will tell you the best time of the month for procreation. It might even clear your calendar by rescheduling your day.
The inevitable conclusion of all of these forces is that machines will someday make all of our important decisions. We are probably less than ten years away from that.
Losing your free will to machines might sound scary. But you never had free will in the first place. It was always an illusion.
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