5 Lessons I Learned From ”Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari
What’s the future of mankind?
Back in 2020, I read Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century for a university assignment. The book is a collection of transcripts from his lectures, scripts and notes that he used before his captivating speeches.
I loved the book. Harari makes a flawless analysis of past events in human history to formulate predictions for the future. He isn’t scared of telling his unadulterated opinion, he doesn’t sugarcoat pessimist takes on the future of humankind. His discourse about the future of humanity revolves around algorithms and AI: What will happen when data will dictate every single event of our daily life? Are we ready to give up our private life to create an impeccable world led by algorithms?
As I was curious to know the answer to these questions, I decided to buy his 2016 book, Homo Deus. It’s a pun on the biggest-selling title he published two years earlier, Sapiens. If in Sapiens Harari elaborates on the evolution of mankind from hunter-gatherers to world dominators, in Homo Deus the main subject is overcoming human nature, death, and the striving for immortality.
Let me tell you straight away, it’s one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.
This is neither a summary nor a review. Rather, it’s a personal reflection on my favorite parts of the book, and the arguments that resonated with me the most.
1. The Human Soul Doesn’t Exist
What is the soul?
According to the Oxford Dictionary, the soul is:
The spiritual part of a person, believed to exist after death.
The concept of the soul has existed for decades. In its Christian meaning, the human soul departs from the body after death and is destined to the celestial realms — or if you didn’t commit repentance for your sins, to the eternal damnation of hell. But it’s not just Christianity: A similar notion of the human soul has always existed among different religions.
But whether or not you’re a believer, everyone agrees upon the existence of the soul. We like to think of the human soul as an abstract entity that defines consciousness. Matter of fact, the soul is such a common element of collective imagination that everyone takes it for granted.
However, Dr. Harari doesn’t agree.
He argues that science found no such thing as a human soul yet. When we wonder what made humans prevail other every other animal, we see the soul as the tool that gave us superiority. We have a consciousness that comes from the soul, while animals have nothing.
For Harari, this sounds too pretentious. As much as we know, our brain works the EXACT same way as other animals, and no evidence suggests the presence of superior consciousness. Instead of a human soul, we have electronic waves that are triggered in different parts of our brains and then translated into emotions. This indeed is a great mystery to which science can’t answer yet: how are emotions created out of neural waves? What’s the bond that links the two elements?
Some people also argue that human beings experience a deeper emotional landscape than other animals, and that self-consciousness is a uniquely human trait.
Dr. Harari dismantles these arguments, for how much our emotional landscape might be vast, animals might experience totally different sensations than ours.
A common example of this argument is the paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel.
According to Nagel, bats have reduced eye vision, but use echolocation to navigate through space. By emitting ultrasound, bats can collect information about the world just by analyzing the echo. In this regard, echolocation allows bats to have a “visual” perception of the world that is as powerful, if not more, than eye vision. For the American philosopher, we could spend hours trying to guess how it feels to be a bat and perceive the world through echolocation, but won’t be able to perceive it.
Bats are just an example of how limited our vision of the animal world can be. Dr. Harari brings up numerous experiments that proved that most mammals and birds actually have consciousness. Nevertheless, we will never be able to determine to which extent their emotional landscape is either wider or narrower than ours.
As far as science is concerned, consciousness and the way our brain works are mere algorithms dictated by natural selection. This is true for humans and animals, and there’s no difference between them.
The human soul might just be a splendid fantasy to convince ourselves of eternal life. For as far as science is concerned, there’s no such thing as a soul.
2. Thanks to Modern Science, Fiction Will Blend with Reality
So what, then, allowed humans to prevail over animals?
Fiction.
When you think about money, political leaders, enterprises, or brands, they’re all fictional entities. They don’t exist in reality. What makes them real is our ability to believe in fictional stories and to create collective convictions.
Money, in reality, is just fancy pieces of paper with cool drawings or dead presidents painted on it. But its worth comes from the common value that humankind assigns to it.
It sounds silly, but that’s how the human species gained the upper hand. When billions of people believe in a few fictional stories, enormous institutions are created. Storytelling enabled humankind to do extraordinary things. From sovereign states to technological advancements, these are entities that owe their existence to fictional stories and the human ability to believe in them.
In the future painted by Harari, biotechnology and computer algorithms will become so powerful that fiction will blend with reality. Fictions might become so powerful that it would be wiser to call them ‘totalitarian religions’.
However, the fiction of the future might look very different from today’s, and science will the responsible for this change.
Fictional stories of the past relied on few objective elements. Just think about religions or monarchies: saints, gods, and dynasties were shaped by unique stories that had little to do with science. The fiction of the future, however, will be based on bioengineering, big data, and virtual worlds tailored to our personal needs. New post-humanist religions shall be born from science, and people will be able to take full control of objective and subjective realities.
It sounds daunting and intriguing at the same time, and we might as well get ready for this new era with no boundaries between fiction and reality.
“We will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens. Being able to distinguish fiction from reality and religion from science will therefore become more difficult but more vital than ever before.”
- Yuval Harari
3. Free Will Doesn’t Exist
If you think humans take decisions with absolute freedom, you can’t be more wrong.
The book challenges the idea of free will as the cornerstone of democratic liberalism. According to liberal thinking, citizens are entitled to their own decisions: They can vote for whomever they want, marry a woman instead of another, and many other life decisions according to free will. Democracy represents the full realization of this preaching by bolstering the uniqueness of individuals. After all, we decide our way.
For how romantic this vision might be, it may also be quite old-fashioned and, most importantly, fatally wrong.
Dr. Harari argues that liberalism and democracy were born in times when science had little knowledge of our brains. We had no evidence of how crucial thoughts are shaped. However, research showed that our decisions aren’t really a result of free will. Rather, they are the outcome of biological algorithms in our brains, and just as algorithms replaced the human soul, free could go the same way.
Artificial intelligence might control every single aspect of our life in the future. Ranging from health issues, driving assistance, and work life, machines, and algorithms could become so powerful that their decision-making process would simply become better than ours.
This isn’t even science fiction: software and applications already get the job done better than us. When you need to go places in your car, chances are Google Maps has figured it out in a flawless way: It calculates traffic, reports ongoing accidents, and presents you with different routes. No matter how much you’re familiar with the roads, Google Maps knows better.
As we learn more and more about our minds, we might come to the conclusion that free will has never existed all along.
“Organisms are algorithms, and humans are not individuals — they are ‘dividuals’. That is, humans are an assemblage of many different algorithms lacking a single inner voice or a single self.”
-Yuval Harari
4. Covid Proved that Algorithms Can’t Prevent Pandemics (Yet)
This part of the book made me chuckle.
Harari explains that Google’s powerful databases and omnipresence could predict pandemics before an outbreak. If, for instance, a few people from London searched the same symptoms on Google, it was a clear indicator of the early phase of a viral outbreak.
In 2016, this argument sounded very convincing. But then, Covid happened.
How ironic, right? Google wasn’t certainly aware of a novel virus that began to infect the entire world in 2020. The almighty and godlike company from Silicon Valley failed to protect the planet from tragedy.
According to the Italian National Cancer Institute (INT), lung cancer patients in the city of Milan, some Italian citizens developed Covid antibodies in September 2019, if not earlier. The research proved that Coronavirus was already around Europe before the new year’s break. Has Google caught wind of this?
Data and algorithms might be strong, but not as strong as how Dr. Harari depicted them in 2016. However, they still have a long way to go, and technology can only improve in the future. It’s very likely that Google or another company will have enough tools and data to predict (and prevent) pandemics. As Harari puts it:
If we connect all the dots, and if we give Google and its competitors free access to our biometric devices, to our DNA scans and to our medical records, we will get an all-knowing medical health service that will not only fight pandemics, but will also shield us from cancer, heart attacks and Alzheimer’s.
We just need to give up all our data and lose our privacy.
5. People Will Lose Any Type of Privacy
Yes, it sounds dystopian when you read it. Liberal democracy made a cult around data privacy and many people still cling to its dogma. But where does this obsession come from? Have we ever been obsessed with our personal information this much?
The answer is yes — and no. Keeping things private is a natural instinct of human nature, we have been doing it for centuries. Yet, social media technologies revolutionized the relationship between our private and public life. When you post videos on Instagram and TikTok, you’re revealing an astounding amount of information to the wider public — your clothes, how your house is furnished, your intimate habits — all these things weren’t accessible in any way in the last centuries. Social media changed everything, and we now live in an age of disclosure. The philosopher Umberto Galimberti called it the publicization of private life.
Hence, data privacy has become an all-present topic in public debates. Is it fine if a bunch of American companies owns the personal data of billions of people? Who knows. Dr. Harari, however, takes one thing for certain: the total loss of privacy will be inevitable in the future, and that might be for our own good.
As we said before, algorithms know better. They’ll become so powerful that they’ll be world rulers, but to obtain this power we need to give up the entirety of our personal life. Algorithms are terrific learners and they’ll be able to predict our preferences, our desires, our health situation, manage our personal finance, and much more. After all, our brain also functions under algorithms, albeit biological and sometimes faulty. Giving it up to technology would only mean relying on a better algorithm.
The future painted by Harari looks grim and tantalizing at the same time. And no matter if we embrace it or resist it, we can’t do much to change the course of history.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
-Marcus Aurelius
