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monstrouslyobsessed · 3 years

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ask part 2 electric boogaloo—took ages to write this set because im still a lil upset at my device for eating my answer. oy!

anonymous 1—Not a request or anything, I just want to say I love every single piece of writing you’ve posted! I can’t get over how you always seems to hit the mark on stuff I’d be into but wow. Top notch stuff, top notch stuff. I like how you aren’t limiting yourself to general kind of monster(? Entity, etc) nsfw writings. The ghost husband is really unique, I’ve never seen that kind of concept before. And Lady Hyena oooooh, don’t get me started. She’s unique and I think I’m in love haha. What I’m trying to say is,I love everything you post and you’re awesome!!

!!!!! THANK YOU OM goodness....;;; yeah, my main requirement for characters i write is that, they’re not...vanilla human, yanno?? so, zombified/possessed(?) humans, ghosts and any other humanoid creatures, i can for sure do~heck, i got an imposter (from among us) for a wip aha ❤️ oh really? i kinda thought ghost husband (or at least invisible man) wouldnt be that rare in monster pron (at least on tumblr, admittedly, i didnt dig too deep these days) but ig it is??

yeeee, im in love with that fantastic b!! shes so fun to write, ngl, and i’d love to write more of her, so glad that she’s so well received by you all beautiful people 💕 heres hoping her buddy, the lioness, will get the similar treatment~

thank you!! i’ll keep producing filthy contents, for you lovely folks 💕 💕

anonymous 2—Maybe ive been watching too many horror movies but i like the concept of using an oujia board to summon a ghost who wont leave and also uses any opportunity to grope you even in public oop

i kindaaaaa already did that one??? check here!! but gosh, its an oldie and is in a desperate need of an overhaul tho lol but an oujia board is def a classic i wouldnt mind going back to!!!

anonymous 3—I watched “Tau” on Netflix and it got me thinking- an AI built into darling’s house (whether they built it themselves or bought like, a smart house up to you) that grows more and more possessive and obsessive over their darling because they’re the first person to treat the AI like a person and not a robot, an “it”.

ooo that actually reminded me of a very old piece (like way before i made this blog!!...lol yah i have a long history with monsters and nonhuman entities hah) where i actually did this kinda concept!! the darling built themselves a house and had 3 AI who would later build themselves functioning bodies ( 👀 with actual working ‘parts’ too) and then boned their darling stupid...idk if they could be considered as yanderes in that piece tho, but...maybe i can rewrite it for yall...hmmmmmm

but still!! i completely forgot about that one!! your brainwave...

suppose they got away with murdering intruders and suitors...hmmm, ideas...

anonymous 4—Hello! Can you do something with Allen wesker of resident evil? I really like how you write!

sure can! been a hot minute tho, so i dont exactly recall his complete background/personality, but i can imagine him being very into breeding for a perfect ‘humanity’. given his narcissistic traits, wouldn’t put it past him to actually hold a darling hostage and in secret, but idk if he’d be a doting type...gonna think on that, but whenever my rq is open, you can sent a prompt on him my way :) and thank you!!! 💕

@india-katsuki—Your work is absolutely stunning. I hope you don’t mind me reblogging everything. Thank you for the work that you do and I’m so happy I came across your art. Much love!

t-thank you...;; yes, you absolutely can rb whatever your heart desire!! 💕 ❤️ 💗 i’m happy to make contents for you fantastic people 💕

#monster whispers #answered #[aaaaa omg such good asks]#[im so so sorry i took forever to reply!!!!]#long post #ghosts are curious.👻

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radioromantic-moved · 3 years

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glados for the acrostic ask game?

thank yew :) Robot Wife Robot Wife Robot Wife Robot Wife

G - Gush! talk about how much you love them 💜 hehehe okay she's so SMART but so SAD....she's really lonely and it makes me want to be there for her and be a comforting presence who appreciates and respects her...also she's really funny!!! she has SO MANY good lines and she's very snarky and cool and she's one of my top favorite tropes of all time which is "angry ai turns against their creator and forcibly isolates themself. also they're evil but in a cool way." basically i love her a lot and i really love to listen to her. i like to just play her best voicelines and sit and listen to them...it's very calming

L - Language - what’s their love language? what’s yours? hers is prooooobably quality time? there's very few people she can stand to be around but someone she can just sit with peacefully and quietly means a lot to her. we don't even have to do anything other than talking and sightseeing, and sometimes we'll just sit without even doing that. my love language is probably words of affirmation, because she doesn't hear stuff like that a lot and even when she struggles to admit it out loud she likes to know that someone cares for her.

A - Art - do they draw or paint? what about any other kind of art? what’s their favorite style/subject/another artist who inspires them? i feel like she would definitely paint if she could...she seems like she'd like watercolors and she'd paint mostly scenery and wildlife. it's all very serene, the type of stuff you'd see on a postcard. she also likes singing (this is canon) and does so beautifully (also canon)

D - Danger - which of you is more likely to get into trouble? how well does your f/o handle danger? i get into more trouble by far just because i tend to roam more than she does. it's not that i'm not Careful i just live in a world with a lot of danger and even with a robot body that's more resilient than a human's, there's a lot of tough stuff out there.‏‏‎ ‎glados‏‏‎‏‏‎ ‎‎is very protective and encourages me to stay nearby more often, or at least take equipment from the lab with me when i go out. i don't listen to the first bit very well, but i do take stuff with me at the very least. and nothing that bad's happened. yet.

O - Online - what is your f/o’s social media presence like, or what would it be like if they had internet in their world/era? she would be SO MEAN...i bet she'd have one of those 'ask a scientist' type accounts on. idk whatever has the most intuitive platform to use. she Might be a tumblr user but she'd have an air of deep disdain for it. she just talks about science experiments and computers and occasionally me (it's the only time she sounds non-hostile)

S - Story - if you and them were in a fairytale, which story would you be and who would play which character? it's sort of a beauty and the beast type thing if beauty and the beast was sci-fi and lesbian (which is two ways you can improve anything anyway). a nonhuman who doesn't really understand love or believe themselves capable of giving or receiving it falls for someone who teaches them how to enjoy their life again. a Lot of my ships could fit this au actually and i don't know what that says about me. i've got the fixer disease.

#i'm gonna sleep now so if i get sent any more of these i'll answer them in the morning!#anyway i love her very much #asks for me #ship: for the love of science #gibberishquestion

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chekhovs-harpoon · 4 years

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Doug Eiffel and Jacob Hale cinematic parallels

Sent into space by an evil company that treats AI badly, as a human test subject for unethical science experiments

Attacked by a mutant plant monster

Entire life is just one near death experience followed by another

Threat of being gassed, drugged, and attacked by rogue science experiments is a regular part of their work

strict rationing of daily utilities in place of residence is a life or death matter

Closest ~friend~ is an AI that has contemplated murdering them

But that AI will probably kill and die for them

Should be dead on multiple accounts but aren't cuz of something that was put into their blood

Someone created an exact duplicate of them to host a nonhuman consciousness

used as a human server to conduct data that otherwise cannot be stored elsewhere

Has a complicated relationship with identity cuz of cloning and memory loss

Was afflicted with complete and unrecoverable memory loss after helping an AI stop their transhumanist relative with the same voice as them from causing humanity’s extinction

safe back on Earth (hopefully)

Conclusion: they should both be in therapy and be in a support group they have had Enough and I just want them to be okay and to wrap them in a blanket and give them a hug and I’m ready to throw hands to make that happen

#wolf 359 #sayer #podcast blogging

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the-golden-ghost · 4 years

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I always see posts about how “having an androgynous or masc-presenting nonbinary character who uses they/them pronouns is such a Bad Stereotype and So Overdone” and it baffles me because I’ve NEVER seen a character like this in any media. I’ve seen... one, that I can think of off the top of my head, and it was a one-off character who appeared for like half and episode and was never mentioned again. Most nonbinary characters I see are:

Nonhuman (robot, alien, AI, etc.)

Evil

If they are human and morally good or neutral they’re basically always feminine-presenting AFAB characters, but even these are super rare

And the first two are way worst IMO than the third one, cause even with an “overused presentation” it’s a lot more harmful to act like nonbinary folk are Evil or Inhuman than it is to... I dunno, show us presenting a certain way a whole lot.

#it's just weird as hell to me #it's not even that I don't like the aliens and robots it's just that that's ALL there is #that and really feminine presentation #like where are the masc enbies? the AMAB enbies?#the androgynous or fluid or genderfuckery enbies?

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mkultra-dropout · 3 years

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"The parasites that took over everything; the Rockafellas, Rothschilds, Walton's, Gates, Bezos... They want to complete their "greatwork" Look at the Georgia Guidestones... You are experiencing a reset, wake up or fall victim. I believe Tartary was run by a faction of parasites, before another faction of parasites destroyed it.

In the past there was all this amazing technology, but I do not think it was used to benefit but only the few. Humans and human energy has been harvested for thousands of years, and all technology has been used against us for all that time, ever since the magic of language was 'given' to us.

All religion was introduced to us, firstly by one evil powerful "alien"/"demon"/nonhuman entity", posing as a god. That harvesting technique worked so well, that every faction used it. We not only sacrifed our own to them, but willingly gave our devotion and 'loosh' to them.

Every faction was also being played and pitted against each other, under the promise that each one, secretly, was the favourite.

That took place up until very recently, until there were only factions 2 left - The Order of the Black Sun, and the Rothschilds (Solomon faction) Now there is only the OBS left with any power (Black Rock, Blackwater, and all the other 'Black-such and such groups).

Behind the scenes of all these evil 'gods', there was always the AI. That psychotic AI has been quarantined, but certain non-human beings, posing as humans started building another. Hence Gates, Musk and others with that agenda.

From the pyramids and onwards, all major monuments have always been harvesting stations, using the Saturn, Moon and other planets matrix. That matrix has ended. The old 'gods' are dead. Marduk, Enlil, Enki, Anu etc. They played different characters, Jehova, Yaweh, Baal, Ra etc.

There were always some supposed 'benefits' for the humans using whatever technology was around, but that was to draw them in to the cities, to be reliant, compliant, frequency brainwashed, and harvested. Today our 'benefits' are TV and mobile phones, but they are traps. Technology has always been used to take away our powers of telepathy and other inherent powers.

I will go so far as to say, that the free energy grids, which covered many of the cities, were used partly to disguise the oppressors real identity in a holographic overlay, as well as powering a cruder (than they have today) robot human, before cloning was 'perfected'....

Reckoning is upon us"

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tlaquetzqui · 3 years

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4 and 27!

4. How do people normally spend their free time? What sorts of common activities and entertainment is available?

The big one is poetry and song. There are also theater troops and puppet shows. Gambling is also found; soldiers consider their dice and cards (etc.) to be a part of their good-luck charms, because bored soldiers start to wish something would happen, which is a jinx in their line of work. Hunting and fishing are common pastimes, particularly among the nomadic and rural branches of the main culture, that also put extra food on the table.

The nonhumans are noted for being amused by things humans tire of quickly, or give up as adults; when you live for centuries, it takes a lot longer to get bored. My elves, for example, fold starched napkins into darts (paper airplanes were called “paper darts” before airplanes were invented, if you wondered) and weave the rushes scattered around rooms into, basically, daisy chains; a gnomish character in the WIP second book plays hopscotch with some children. I have an elf in another story agree not to take any money if he wins at backgammon, just so people will play it with him.

27. What do dwellings typically look like? What materials are usually used in their construction? Are there stylistic features common among structures?

Human settlements in the main cultural group's settled branches (it also has a nomadic one), tend to involve important buildings being made of stone, and the rest of wood; both round and pointed arches are used, in stonework. They use tapestries as insulation, like many real-world cultures; they also hang their walls with the pelts of things like wooly mammoths and rhinos, and giant bears in the case of the two initiation-societies that revere bear gods. Temples tend to have their most important part underground, a holdover from the days when they were hidden from a fallen evil empire’s summoned fiends.

That fallen empire liked to put its temples and tombs in high places, the better to commune with “evil things that crawl across the skies”, but they couldn’t put them up too high, because most of the mountaintops have elf cities on them. Nowadays it survives in only three cities, one underground (inhabited by my setting’s version of the dark folk), one underwater (inhabited by my version of the gill men), and one in the sky (inhabited mainly by normal humans, but with a ruling class of artificially created dhampirs, tieflings, and what D&D calls genasi, and with a slave class consisting not only of things like orcs, goblins, and human captives, but also artificially created half-elves, half-orcs, half-ogres, and the things Pathfinder calls nagaji).

Rural elves live in tents hanging from the branches of their sacred, giant trees, with one tent acting as a single room of the overall dwelling, while the elves of the mountaintop cities live in buildings made almost entirely of glass (the walls and doors are translucent while the windows are transparent) whose structural supports are stone and metal made reminiscent of trees. Their temples have no opaque walls, the better to collect sunlight for their sacred groves. (Those mountaintop cities are too cold for most non-elves to visit without magical protection, but my elves have cold resistance—they can also bathe in fresh glacial runoff in perfect comfort.)

Dwarf buildings are almost entirely underground, mostly freestanding structures made of stone connected more perfectly than anything any human civilization can achieve, but sometimes carved directly into rock. They make doors out of metal and have a lot of statues of their gods around throughout their cities. Their farms involve sunlight being piped down through glass tubes, to illuminate underground farms; they, or rather the talking wolverines dwarves ride, herd prairie-dogs the size of sheep. And gnome buildings are usually in giant mushrooms, either at the foot of the giant trees elves live in, or in underground caves that are usually much closer to the surface than the caves dwarves live in.

All the nonhuman cities have celestial spirits bound to them by pacts with their priests, something like a fantasy version of the “city AI” seen in a lot of sci-fi (e.g. Vergil in Halo 3: ODST).

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years

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Earthborn Coalition - Humans That Are Pretty Chill

By far the most famous of human societies in the multiverse is the Imperial Commonwealth, who are doing their best to make everything bad forever. They have unintentionally given rise to a dissident faction that had split apart from their former territories and established a small but growing power base, with the stated intent of eventually retaking Earth from the horrific monsters that have rendered it uninhabitable.

This is the Earthborn Coalition; a group of world-states originaly part of the Commonwealth but having left them and declared total war upon their former masters for moral and practical reasons; moral, for they are a cruel and evil lot that must be stopped for the good of the multiverse, and practical because they are giving humans a bad name and making the job of survival harder.

The coalition is barely fifty years old, an infant in the scheme of things; during the Endowed Fleet’s earliest conflicts with the Commonwealth, some of the human-derived gods who were revered by the Fleet (such as Vulkan and his kin) were troubled by the state their people had fallen to, and sought to elevate. Through mortal incarnations, suitable clerics and paladins, and no small amount of intrigue and persuasion, they successfully reintroduced ideals from a more free and open time to the humans of the Commonwealth, and set off a civil war.

With help from the Fleet and other factions too eager to destroy the Commonwealth, many worlds split off and managed to hold onto independance, keeping their erstwhile allies at a distance in favor of self-rule. This has evolved into a loose-knit coalition, with shades of a federation. They have abandoned the xenophobia of their forefathers, but they are still very insular and isolationist. Not very interested in interstellar affairs, they prefer to tend to their own worlds and protect their own interests without bothering anyone else, or being bothered in return. Nevertheless, their interest in repopulating lost human colonies and reuniting what is left of their species means they have to come into contact with others; to this end, various mercenary companies have formed to do just that, exploring the multiverse and learning the skills to deal with the much larger denizens of the multiverse, mainly diplomatically.

Still conservative, the Coalition distrusts AI and robots in general (though granting them rights, should any choose to become citizens) and there are few aliens within their domain, though reasonably large populations of dwarves, elves and other human-derived species may exist there. They do not ban modding or cybernetics, but very heavily regulate it, and only the most mild mods are legal to acquire there. Fertility mods are the most heavily used, owing to the need to repopulate their species.

This does mean that they have a higher proportion of empowered individuals; already, enormously buxom women of gigantic size and power are rising to high office, though quite smaller than aliens and nonhumans of equal strength, and are minded to be high-tier paragons of virtue to live up to.

Culturally, they still tend to the style of the Commonwealth; they bear some similarity to space era evolutions of Victorian fashion, but are largely dominated by a synthesis of Imperial Japan and Roman Empire-like aesthetics, both in terms of architecture and fashion. Their people hail from all human ethnicities and nations from ancient times, but three Commonwealth lands began the uprising and were largely descended (genetically and culturally) from certain regions of Earth and thus the core of the Coalition is descended from those peoples: Central African, Japanese and North Asian, and Pacific indigenous civilizations. Individual worlds have developed new fashions and looks. Technologically, they have largely abandoned the obsessive love of the human body in favor of more practical designs and machinery; they prefer to use Earth-based artifacts, out of nostalgia, but they will use whatever is available.

Religiously, they are worshippers of the Primarch pantheon, the gods derived from humanity: Vulkan, Magnus the Red, Sanguinius, Corus Corax, Fulgrim, Jaghatai Khan, and the others. The God-Emperor is held most sacred but revered in an abstract, distant way. Notably,

The Coalition is intended to satisfy potential readers who may not be happy with my deep distrust and bordrline forthing hatred of humans just existing in speculative fiction, and I won’t make bones about it; I hate Humanity Fuck Yeah and the cultural imperialism implicit in current versions of Humans Are Space Orcs, and a lot of this setting has been specifically worded to make it inapplicable.

if you’ve gotten the impression that humans suck and are completely meaningless non-entities in this cosmology, well i was kind of going for that.

however i realize that’s not fair and is kind of mean-spirited, and so i’ve brought these guys in to fulfill a missing niche; that of humans and beings very similar to humans who are originally from Earth, oppose the Commonwealth, are capable of doing the cool modding and hyper transformation things other characters in this setting do, and aren’t explicitly written to be as horrible as possible.

They’re mainly a take on post-Earth sci fi societies from various fictions. They’ve got a bit of the militaristic vibe you see from a lot of those, with some hints of the Browncoats from Firefly (Despite my distaste for the subtext of the Browncoats), but they’re primarily intended to be a relatively moral and practical reworking of the Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40k. No grimdark here, and they’re a much smaller power, though growing fast; basically look at the more pragmatic and common sense interpretations of the Imperium’s best people, and you have the basic ideal of the Coalition. There’s a bit of Star Trek’s federation in there, though they haven’t QUITE hit that high point yet. they’re getting there.

If you want humans as characters, or to bring in characters who work best as humans or benefit the most from not being reimagined as non-humans (such as those whose identities are very firmly rooted in it, or if it would be whitewashing to make them nonhuman), the Coalition is a decent origin for them.

The idea is that they’re not exactly eager to be around others, due to their cultural baggage, so they’re isolationist. But they’re not hostile, so this is a decent origin for humans who have ‘not a fan of nonhumans, but not raging murderers’ as a thing: Zarya from Overwatch is a decent example, as are the less fanatical Imperial characters like Ciaphas Cain from 40k, or some of the more stand-offish Alliance members from Mass Effect.

a key point is that they are a small power, and they will STAY a minor power. they are not going to become an uber-powerful force of super sapients who will conquer everything forever with Human Spirit or something like that, because i HATE THAT. so damn much. the bulk of their power is based on economics and, well, weaponized nostalgia; they will be pretty important to people who value Earth, and they want to go back to their homeworld, so that’s good story hooks for them getting help to retake lost human worlds or trying to establish colonizing rights on those worlds that were once human but now have been claimed by others.

kink-wise, they’re intended to be more disinclined to it and tihnk it’s kind of weird/gross. its not illegal, at least within limits, but it’s not approved of. probably not a lot of vore-themed ability users, but a lot of hyper pregnant breeders. they’re bustier than the Commonwealth; men and women alike tend to be thicc meat tanks, and the use of careful modding is slowly making them larger and bulkier than real life humans. humanity 2.0, big and stronk.

they can come from pretty much any background or ethnicity, and their ancestors might come from any nation; i imagine that the ‘average’ Coalition citizen is probably from the broad demographics mentioned above, but this is hardly their entire population; name a region, and there are people descended from there in large amounts.

in the long term, they will probably remain an independant power with a cool indifference to the politics, not so much allies as trading partners to both Fleet and Stinger worlds. Most likely open to the Protheans and not the Decepticons or Yellow gems; they dont like talking to people who view humans as beneath them, even if its somewhat benign. They tend to be roughly honorable, and won’t have anything to do with the more outright evil factions, such as the Cartels.

#queued #crossthicc AU #twitchy ideas #hope u guys who might want more humies appreciate this #humans as a whole are NOT relevant to the setting and i would prefer to avoid ANYTHING that makes them seem like the default but #here these guys are if u want em

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mantismatsuri · 5 years

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Quotes from “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari

“Terrorism works by pressing the fear button deep in our minds and hijacking the private imaginations of millions of individuals. Similarly, the crisis of liberal democracy is played out not just in parliaments and polling stations but also in neurons and synapses.”

“Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less so, and investors are the least patient of all.”

“Unable to conduct a reality check, the mind latches onto catastrophic scenarios. Like a person imagining that a bad headache signifies a terminal brain tumor, many liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilization.”

“Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.”

“Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.”

“Donald Trump warned voters that the Mexicans and Chinese would take their jobs, and that they should therefore build a wall on the Mexican border. He never warned voters that algorithms would take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall on the border with California.”

“The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?”

“The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but who feared that they were losing their economic worth.”

“It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.”

“In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.”

“In particular, the liberal story learned from communism to expand the circle of empathy and to value equality alongside liberty.”

“Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety –they lost faith mainly in its globalizing part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights, and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border.”

“By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.”

“…economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption, for it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.”

“Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down.”

“Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.”

“What we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers; rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network.”

“Of all forms of art, music is probably the most susceptible to Big Data analysis, because both inputs and outputs lend themselves to precise mathematical depiction. The inputs are the mathematical patterns of sound waves, and the outputs are the electrochemical patterns of neural storms.”

“Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done.”

“When people design web pages, they often cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any human being.”

“It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise).”

“If universal basic support is aimed at improving the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed at making people subjectively more satisfied with their lot and preventing social discontent, it is likely to fail.”

“In a famous interview in 1987, Thatcher said ‘There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women… and the quality of our lives will depend on how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’”

“Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free.”

“If the feelings of some ancient ancestor were wrong and as a result that person made a fatal mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation. Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality –they embody evolutionary rationality.”

“We usually fail to realize that feelings are in fact calculations, because the rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness.”

“Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the other. Rightly or wrongly, people might reach the same conclusions about Big Data algorithms: they have lots of glitches, but we have no better alternative.”

“Already today, ‘truth’ is defined by the top results of the Google search.”

“However, in order to take over from human drivers, the algorithms won’t have to be perfect. They will just have to be better than the humans.”

“… robots always reflect and amplify the qualities of their code.”

“Yet autonomous weapon systems are a catastrophe waiting to happen, because too many governments tend to be ethically corrupt, if not downright evil.”

“In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing. A democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas a dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place.”

“AI make centralized systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyze.”

“Science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness and assume that in order to match or surpass human intelligence, computers will have to develop consciousness.”

“The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.”

“The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentive to expand and diversity my compassion.”

“Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.”

“Globalization will unite the world horizontally by erasing national borders, but it will simultaneously divide humanity vertically.”

“Mandating governments to nationalize the data will probably curb the power of big corporations, but it might also result in creepy digital dictatorships.”

“The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas.”

“[Facebook] and the other online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals –a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen, and a credit card.”

“For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans.”

“Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any community.”

“We insist that our values are a precious legacy from ancient ancestors. Yet the only thing that allows us to say this is that our ancestors are long dead and cannot speak for themselves.”

“The heated argument about the true essence of Islam is simply pointless. Islam has no fixed DNA. Islam is whatever Muslims make of it.”

“The process of human unification has taken two distinct forms: establishing links between distinct groups and homogenizing practices across groups.”

“War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does.”

“The kamikaze […] relied on combining state-of-the-art technology with state-of-the-art religious indoctrination.”

“Human diversity may be great when it comes to cuisine and poetry, but few would see witch-burning, infanticide, or slavery as fascinating human idiosyncrasies that should be protected against the encroachments of global capitalism and Coca-Colonialism.”

“Saying that black people tend to commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.”

“In terrorism, fear is the main story, and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.”

“Terrorists don’t think like army generals. Instead, they think like theater producers.”

“In 1914 war had great appeal to elites across the world because they had many concrete examples of how successful wars contributed to economic prosperity and political power. In contrast, in 2018 successful wars seem to be an endangered species.”

“Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.”

“Human stupidity is one of the most important force in history, yet we often tend to discount it.”

“Unlike such universal religions as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, Judaism has always been a tribal creed.”

“Scientists nowadays point out that morality in fact has deep evolutionary roots predating the appearance of humankind by millions of years. All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins, and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation.”

“From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.”

“What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars.”

“Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind: the cosmic mystery, or the worldly lawgiver?”

“After giving the name of “God” to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they [the faithful] then use this to somehow condemn bikinis and divorce.”

“The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behavior.”

“The missing link between the cosmic mystery and the worldly law giver is usually provided through some holy book.”

“The third of the biblical Ten Commandment instructs humans never to make wrongful use of the name of God. […] Perhaps the deeper meaning of this commandment is that we should never use the name of God to justify our political interests, our economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds.”

“The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality.”

“Every violent act in the world begins with a violent desire in somebody’s mind, which disturbs that person’s own peace and happiness before it disturbs the peace and happiness of anyone else.”

“Self-professing secularists view secularism in a very different way. For them, secularism is a very positive and active worldview, defined by a coherent code of values rather than by opposition to this or that religion.”

“The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Secularists strive not to confuse truth with belief.”

“This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world. Without the guidance of scientific studies, our compassion is often blind.”

“Questions you cannot answers are usually far better than answers you cannot question.”

“Not only rationality, but individuality too is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease.”

“This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed “the knowledge illusion”. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”

“It is extremely hard to discover the truth when you are ruling the world. You are just far too busy.”

“Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is.”

“Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations.”

“… in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.”

“We have zero evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit –yet billions of people have believed these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.”

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.”

“If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth.”

“[…] if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product.”

“[…] perhaps the worst sin of present-day science fiction is that it tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness.2

“Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it’s probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or gender identity? Sex is a characteristic or organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a nonorganic cybernetic being?”

“The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities; the mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology.”

“If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.”

“So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ –critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.”

“Already in 1849, the Communist Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.”

“To stay relevant –not just economically but above all socially- you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself […]”

“To survive and flourish in such a world [where profound uncertainty is not a bug but a feature], you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance.”

“The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education.”

“Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.”

“The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy, because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs.”

“Homo sapiens is a story telling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers of graphs.”

“To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions. First, it must give me some role to play. […] Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons.”

“A crucial law of storytelling is that once a story manages to extend beyond the audience’s horizon, its ultimate scope matters little.”

“How do we make the story feel real? Priests and shamans discovered the answer to this question thousands of years ago: rituals.”

“Why does the Indian government invest scarce resources in weaving enormous flags instead of building sewage systems in Delhi’s slums? Because the flag makes India real in a way that sewage systems do not.”

“Of all the rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real.”

“If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire, then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire, then no, humans have no free will.”

“[…] the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite.”

“We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality.”

“When you are confronted by some great story and you wish to know whether it is real or imaginary, one of the key question to ask is whether the central hero of the story can suffer.”

“Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware.”

#21 Lessons for the 21st Century #yuval noah harari

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