448 pages in 5 sentences: Homo Deus
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Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
- Author: Yuval Noah Harari
- Publisher: Harper
- Publication: 2016
What’s next for the human race? In Homo Deus — A Brief History of Tomorrow, historian and author of the bestselling Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari turns to the past to predict the future.
- Homo Sapiens are striving to become Homo Deus.
Homo Sapiens (wise humans) are evolving into Homo Deus — human gods, with mastery over our environment and the ability to create (and destroy) life. Since problems of human survival (pandemics, famine and violence) have met with effective remedies thanks to the scientific revolution, humans increasingly value our happiness, emotions, and desires as of utmost importance in our lives, which steers us even more towards reaching for immortality, bliss and divinity — This then leads to the rise of Techno-Humanism. In our pursuit of immortality and happiness, we will turn to technology to upgrade ourselves through biological (genetic) engineering, cyborg (bionic) engineering and computer (AI) engineering. This goal could very well backfire when post-humanist technologies are produced and our innate craving for “human experiences” becomes simply another designable product.
2. Countless neurons with ultra complex algorithmic interactions vs. Conscious beings with subjective experiences: Which one are we and which one will we become?
Harari discusses how not just human behaviour, but even human thought processes and feelings can be explained through biochemical reactions occurring within our brain. When our brain registers an event or situation for e.g. a car approaching from the side at high speed, innumerable neurons are firing signals at each other instantaneously, therefore triggering a series of actions that ensues from what our brain processes. He thus posits that if our thought processes are wired via an algorithmic pattern, the belief in the presence of a mind within us individuals is seemingly obsolete.
However when one weighs in the ethicality of certain human behaviours such as murder and rape, subjective experiences such as our emotions becomes an indispensable contributor to the final verdict, therefore humans cannot simply dismiss the presence of consciousness due to the significant political and ethical value that they can still offer. Harari therefore, attests that as of what contemporary science proposes, consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes; when neurons fire signals at each other, the subjective experiences such as anger, fear or pain are merely mental pollution elicited from the presence of our consciousness.
Applying the same logic, for some reason menstrual pain came to mind. Assuming that an average female first experiences menstruation at the age of 12 and hits menopause at 55, that would be equivalent to 44 years of menstrual pain i.e. going through the same excruciating process 528 times over the span of her lifetime. What a heck ton of mental pollution that is if they were all simply our consciousness at play.
3. Fiction is necessary to muster the masses (and dominate the world), period.
Religion is probably the first thing that comes to anyone’s mind regarding this point. The story of the Crusades on mission was given as an example in the book — Clinging on to the tiny remnants of my knowledge of Art History 101, during the Medieval Ages in Europe, Pope Urban II initiated the Crusades on mission as a propagandistic tool in the early Romanesque period to unify Christendom. More importantly, it was a political tool to amass his influence and authority as the head of the unified church and his own papacy. The illiterate majority were “educated” through architectural sculptures that served “didactic” purposes. If you look at the tympanum found in Basilica St Madeleine, Vézelay or the Last Judgment tympanum found in Cathedral of St Lazare, you can tell how significant narratives were employed by the church then, deliberately representing the host peoples of the earth and the strangeness of the world beyond Christian borders, as the Europeans did not know about anything beyond that then.
Drawing similarities from the story of the Crusades to global political and social movements since the 20th century, it is evident how leaders, activists or religious fanatics have been employing the same tactics to convince the masses. If Donald Trump is able to sell his American pipe dream “Make America Great Again” to the most powerful country in the world (period), I think it is pretty clear that narratives function a lot more than just figments of someone’s imagination.
4. Liberal humanism (a.k.a. Liberalism) in the 21st century is nearing its death.
Unlike in the 20th century where capitalism was the dogma adopted across almost every country in the world, today humanism has superseded the need for economic growth and consumerism. In his book, Harari discusses the journey of how 3 different types of humanism namely — liberal, socialist and evolutionary has shaped the world over the past century, and alas liberal humanism triumphs over the other 2 in the current world that we live in.
Liberalism preaches the need for us to find and listen to our “inner voice” and reflect on what we feel, need and want as an individual. Since every single person has a different interpretation of their own “free will” and “inner voice”, every human is a uniquely valuable individual, thus warranting us, numerous separate entities as the ultimate source of authority. It is the most widely accepted ideology now because we see political, economic and military value in ascribing value to each and every individual, which is the basis of the formation of economic and political systems that we have today; each individual voter, customer and viewer has the right and authority to create meaning not just for his or her sake, but for the universe beyond as well.
However, as humans, we suffer from a mental handicap also known as cognitive bias. What we think and behave often times are the result of our inherently flawed bounded rationality. On top of that, it is more often than not that we experience conflicting desires and noises in our heads, which hampers our ability to truly sieve out our authentic will. To overcome this, humans developed Artificial Intelligence to solve the problem. Linking back to point 2, if all our thoughts and actions can be explained and predicted with extremely high accuracy via an amalgamation of biochemical data, AI will not just be a solution to the inherent flaws of humanity. AI will become the parent of humanity, providing advice that we know we will never be able to resist when we have to make the most important decisions in our lives.
When that happens, it will be the death of liberalism where individuals voluntarily give up their “free will” and warrant non-conscious superintelligent algorithms to determine the fundamental existence of humanity.
5. Make way for Dataism.
Once the fundamental ideals of humanism becomes obsolete, “Dataism” will replace a once homo-centric world view in favour of a data-centric world view. Already with adepts in Silicon Valley, Dataism celebrates life as data processing, individuals and organisations as algorithms, and the value of human life in terms of its capacity to transform experience into data. If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, then our output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things (AKA The Matrix). Once AI starts to have a mind of its own, coupled with the invincible knowledge of countless data, it should not be surprising at all that humans might eventually end up with an algorithmic upper class dictating what homo sapiens should and can do.The next step in evolution will ultimately see humans transform from semi-evolved simians into pure information and in doing so break free from their carbon-based biological chains.
Thank you for reading up till now and here’s just a little bit more if your attention isn’t already preoccupied with something else…
If by this point somehow the scenes from the movie I, Robot or the novel of the same name by Isaac Asimov comes to mind and you feel a shiver running down your spine, don’t worry because you are not alone. I am merely an intern who is still desperately trying to grasp my very own meaning and value as a human being with no definite answer as to what I can and want to become, let alone the thought of the futility of my very own existence when AI strips off everything that I can and want to do as a human being. Therefore I am not going to be pretentious and end off with some inspirational call to action for you who is reading this (I don’t even know why and how you’ve reached thus far you probably just wasted 10 minutes of your life). Because I simply can’t. And to be honest, at this point I don’t even know whether a call to action for how and what we homo sapiens should do matters anymore. Why bother if our desire for the almighty humanism is the very reason that will cripple us, and even while knowing so, we aren’t showing any signs of deliberation anyway?
Pessimism is my thing :)
