Free You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Page A

explain what we don’t understand.
    What I’m struck by is the lack of intellectual modesty in the computer science community. We are happy to enshrine into engineering designs mere hypotheses—and vague ones at that—about the hardest and most profound questions faced by science, as if we already possess perfect knowledge.
    If it eventually turns out that there is something about an individual human mind that is different from what can be achieved by a noosphere, that “special element” might potentially turn out to have any number of qualities. It is possible that we will have to await scientific advances that will only come in fifty, five hundred, or five thousand years before we can sufficiently appreciate our own brains.
    Or it might turn out that a distinction will forever be based on principles we cannot manipulate. This might involve types of computation that are unique to the physical brain, maybe relying on forms of causation that depend on remarkable and nonreplicable physical conditions. Or it might involve software that could only be created by the long-term work of evolution, which cannot be reverse-engineered or mucked with in any accessible way. Or it might even involve the prospect, dreaded by some, of dualism, a reality for consciousness as apart from mechanism.
    The point is that we don’t know. I love speculating about the workings of the brain. Later in the book, I’ll present some thoughts on how to use computational metaphors to at least vaguely imagine how a process like meaning might work in the brain. But I would abhor anyone using my speculations as the basis of a design for a tool to be used by real people. An aeronautical engineer would never put passengers in a plane based on an untested, speculative theory, but computer scientists commit analogous sins all the time.
    An underlying problem is that technical people overreact to religious extremists. If a computer scientist says that we don’t understand how the brain works, will that empower an ideologue to then claim that some particular religion has been endorsed? This is a real danger, but over-claiming by technical people is the greater danger, since we end up confusing ourselves.
It Is Still Possible to Get Rid of Crowd Ideology in Online Designs
    From an engineering point of view, the difference between a social networking site and the web as it existed before such sites were introduced is a matter of small detail. You could always create a list of links to your friends on your website, and you could always send e-mails to a circle of friends announcing whatever you cared to. All that the social networking services offer is a prod to use the web in a particular way, according to a particular philosophy.
    If anyone wanted to reconsider social network designs, it would be easy enough to take a standoffish approach to describing what goes on between people. It could be left to people to communicate what they want to say about their relationships in their own way.
    If someone wants to use words like “single” or “looking” in a self-description, no one is going to prevent that. Search engines will easily find instances of those words. There’s no need for an imposed, official category.
    If you read something written by someone who used the term “single” in a custom-composed, unique sentence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of the subtle experience of the author, something you would not get from a multiple-choice database. Yes, it would be a tiny bit more work for everyone, but the benefits of semiautomated self-presentation are illusory. If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it.
    This is an example of a simple way in which digital designers could choose to be modest about their claims to understand the nature of human beings. Enlightened designers leave open the possibility of either metaphysical specialness in humans or in