What if I told you that the stock market was going to crash tomorrow? Or the next big disaster is looming? If you trust me, I would be playing into your confirmation bias when I have no idea if those things are going to happen or not.
They are honestly, virtually unpredictable. Believe it or not, confirmation biases may be affecting ALL parts of your lives. Curious? I was too, so I wrote this week’s post about it.
Or perhaps the flash crash in reality looks exactly like everything we are experiencing right now: rising economic inequality, the breakdown of the nation-state and the militarisation of borders, totalising global surveillance and the curtailment of individual freedoms, the triumph of transnational corporations and neurocognitive capitalism, the rise of far-right groups and nativist ideologies, and the degradation of the natural environment. None of these are the direct result of novel technologies, but all of them are the product of a general inability to perceive the wider, networked effects of individual and corporate actions accelerated by opaque, technologically augmented complexity.
Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?