Humanities in the Age of Big Data: an historian tries to unravel the consequences for ourselves and our way of life.

Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, 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. The tipping point is when you have an external algorithm that understands you — your feelings, emotions, choices, desires — better than you understand them yourself…. [Y]ou are shifting the authority to algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.

We become less important, perhaps irrelevant. In the humanist age the value of an experience came from within yourself. In a Dataist age, meaning is generated by the external data processing system…. If you don’t share your experiences, they don’t become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning…. A thousand years ago you’d turn to a church. Today, we expect algorithms to provide us with the answer — who to date, where to live, how to deal with an economic problem. So more and more authority is shifting to these [technology] corporations.

Yuval Harari, interview with Olivia Solon in Wired, March 2017, about his new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow