Dataism: A rising philosophical threat to freedom or a scientific revolution?

[C C]

https://singularityhub.com/2018/09/30/th...evolution/

EXCERPT: What would happen if we made all of our data public—everything from wearables monitoring our biometrics, all the way to smartphones monitoring our location, our social media activity, and even our internet search history? Would such insights into our lives simply provide companies and politicians with greater power to invade our privacy and manipulate us by using our psychological profiles against us?

A burgeoning new philosophy called dataism doesn’t think so. In fact, this trending ideology believes that liberating the flow of data is the supreme value of the universe, and that it could be the key to unleashing the greatest scientific revolution in the history of humanity.

First mentioned by David Brooks in his 2013 New York Times article “The Philosophy of Data,” dataism is an ethical system that has been most heavily explored and popularized by renowned historian, Yuval Noah Harari. In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Harari described dataism as a new form of religion that celebrates the growing importance of big data.

Its core belief centers around the idea that the universe gives greater value and support to systems, individuals, and societies that contribute most heavily and efficiently to data processing. In an interview with Wired, Harari stated, “Humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case.”

Now, big data and machine learning are proving themselves more sophisticated, and dataists believe we should hand over as much information and power to these algorithms as possible, allowing the free flow of data to unlock innovation and progress unlike anything we’ve ever seen before....

MORE: https://singularityhub.com/2018/09/30/th...evolution/

[stryder]

The Freedom for data isn't something new, during WWII there was a Science convention were a number of notable scientists protested the nature of war because of how it undermined the data flow. Science is about knowledge that's built up from both the capacity for peers to review what the current consensus queries and for studies to assert what is a truly empirical axiom.

The problem was at the time anyone apparently undermining state or sovereign security with such notions was labelled a Communist.

The problems in this day and age aren't much different, people might crave that freedom of information but there is a whole host of chokes set upon it, from state secrets to corporate espionage, right down to the concerns over Terrorism. Countries as they are currently in a constant agoraphobic state while the expound their concerns through paparazzi'd hysteria.