Data

"Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing."
-Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, 2017), Chapter 11, p. 428.

This sounds like Poul Anderson's Genesis where space traveling post-organic intelligences exchanging data across the galaxy and beyond are becoming a galactic brain. However, Anderson's imagined intelligences are conscious whereas Harari asks:

"...if we can replace not just taxi drivers and doctors but also lawyers, poets and musicians with superior computer programs, why should we care if these programs have no consciousness and no subjective experiences?" (op. cit., pp. 452-453)

Harari is suggesting not that the people who serve human society as drivers, doctors, lawyers, poets or musicians might be replaced by unconscious computers but that all people might be replaced by such computers, thus terminating human society:

"When cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, we didn't upgrade the horses - we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens.
"Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity, appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data-processing mechanisms. If we develop an algorithm that fulfills the same function better, human experiences will lose their value." (op. cit., p. 452)

The Nazis terminated human lives that they regarded as without value. I have noticed that the word "we" changes its meaning in discourse. It can mean:

the human race;
the people currently living on a particular part of the Earth's surface;
the speaker's particular historical nation-state;
the present economic and political system;
those who manage society ("What should we do with the unemployed?" clearly excludes the unemployed);
the British (or US etc) economy as against its competitors, the Japanese etc;
the British (or US etc) electorate;
the speaker and his co-religionists (e.g., "we believe that Christ is God but Muslims do not...");
innumerable sub-groups, including just the speaker and auditor.

Who are "we" when Harari:

asks why we should care whether human beings are replaced by unconscious computers;
suggests that we should retire homo sapiens as we retired horses;
suggests that we might develop algorithms that somehow render human experiences valueless - not to human beings themselves but to an unconscious process?

Only conscious beings can value anything. Not being an unconscious algorithm, I will shortly attend a meditation group but will return to this theme soon after that.