The book mainly talks about how science and technology change the ideology and trajectory of society. For example, science can constrain and verify religious judgments about facts, causing the rise and fall of a kind of doctrine. This led to the abdication of theocracy and the rise of humanism. Now it seems leading to the ebb of humanism - because of the existence of free will is constantly questioned. Science striped people from animals and is making people return to animal nature again (may be even to an inorganic nature -- robot).
The book describes a future picture and ideology: dataism. The universe consists of data streams, and the value of any phenomenon or entity lies in its contribution to data processing. The human experience will be equated with the data model, and the information flow of human society will be centralized and optimized. A specific but one-sided example is the use of a smart ride system to efficiently use private car idle time, the computer knows when everyone needs a car, and the self-driving car receives signals from the central system. At that time, car accidents were reduced; Parking space demand was reduced; Gas emissions and pollution were reduced.
In the last century, Fukuyama proposed that history has reached its end, but ten years later he re-proposed the conception of a post-human era because we did not fall into the scientific end. Although I know that there are many geographical and environmental factors that determine the development of society, especially thousands of years ago, now the rapid development of scientific discovery has made it occupy a dominant position influencing society. So I guess it is quite reasonable to use science as a starting point to discuss the future of human society.
The political model is not a simple binary question - democracy or autocracy. It is a complex optimization problem. Every country is affected by its own environment. They evolve, operate, reform, and optimize in high-dimensional space. No one actually knows how to really manage the government. The development of science and technology has given us the opportunity: First, the development of human intelligence makes it possible for us to use the agent to process information and coordinate the operation of the world society. The agent can be updated during this process, just as how Uber controls and optimizes the behaviors of a bunch of drivers through a set of algorithms; Second, advances in life technology may allow us to even modify humans themselves: human-computer fusion or genetic engineering, which help us 'design' ourselves to better operate the society (this will definitely bring a great many problems hehe). The above is how science can subvert the social system from the hardware level.
In the meantime, I believe that science and technology have a great influence on the software level and ideology. What dominates the world today is liberalism and democracy. Its roots are: people are independent and individuals have free will. But what if people's decision making has a physiological basis? Specifically, what if the decision-making and our behaviors is a physiological response to external forces and random events. Physiologically, a specific genetic structure causes the brain to produce an electrochemical reaction given the external signal. The genetic structure is the result of evolutionary pressures and mutations from ancient times to the present. Of course, this physical response may be random to some extent. But this does not prevent us from doubting the existence of free will. For example, we build a robot to connect to a piece of radioactive uranium. As long as the robot is encountered a binary question, the number of uranium atoms decaying in the previous minute is calculated. It determines its choice by even or odd numbers of atoms. Such a robot can never be predicted, but it is obvious that he has no free will. As brain science progresses, the concept of free will will be greatly impacted, and then a large number of today's ethical paradigms will be overthrown.
In fact, people have long questioned the concept of free will and personal. As early as 2000 years ago, some people suspected that personal concept and self-identity are a kind of illusion. However, unless it can influence economics, politics, and daily life, it is only doubtful and not enough to change history. Humans are very good at coping with cognitive contradictions. Just as Christianity did not disappear on the day Darwin published The Origin of Species. Liberalism does not perish just because scientists believe that there is no concept of individual and free will. In fact, even the supporters of the new scientific worldview, such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, have not given up on liberalism. Even if they have used rich theories and hundreds of pages to structure the so-called concept of free will, they can do all the amazing discoveries in evolutionary biology and brain science without affecting the ideas put forward by Locke, Rousseau and Jefferson. However, when these scientific insights gradually become commonplace in technology, daily activities, and economic structure, we should construct a new set of religious beliefs and political systems.
When we look at the future with such a mentality, it will become extremely interesting, and how people will choose the future. Will we hand over the rights in the hands to the machine and the data?