Now, philosophising is catching up with the newness we are growingly getting into - the new engendered by the old-shattering technologies (See the very thought provoking write up of Harari linked below). Harari, to my understanding, asserts that the power of algorithm, data-crunching, and automation together while liberate us from many of the earlier constraints but it , at the same time, also threatens our freewill very substantially. I feel thathuman mind has always been controlled by some or other agencies but now it is 'hack-able'. The process is very subtle and imperceptible and it's happening right now. But the answer to the challenge again is the free market . When different agencies would compete to hack our minds, we can easily make out the grander design. There is another safeguard and that is inbuilt in the services provided by new the technologies. The cyber platforms allow us to share our experiences and we know each other better. This sharing enhances our knowledge of our collective self. Moreover, though Harari is in some doubt about this, the new technologies (he says laboratories) threaten liberalism but my take is that new technologies have only threatened the ethereal, never the earthy (as he says so at the end of his essay). The vested interests and the entrenched powers are trying to hijack the new technologies but my reckoning is that the new technologies will only strengthen liberalism on the balance. I also feel that Harari somehow fails to define freewill appropriately. True, what we perceive our freewill is substantially pre-determined but free will is not that substance. It is about the edge, no matter how insignificant it may be, over the substance we are mostly guided by. And it is only liberalism, which gives us the edge. Kudos to Harari for getting us into the debate on our new self!
Niraj Kumar Jha
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy
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