Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
Below are quotations from his site.
He was born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is now a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He specialized in World History, medieval history and military history. His current research focuses on macro-historical questions: What is the relation between history and biology? What is the
essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded?
Sapiens explained how humankind came to rule the planet.
We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. All other animals live in an objective reality. Their reality consists of objective entities, like rivers and trees and lions and
elephants. We humans, we also live in an objective reality. In our world, too, there are rivers and trees and lions and elephants. But over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this
objective reality a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities, like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations. And what is amazing is that as history
unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities. Today, the very survival of rivers and trees and
lions and elephants depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities, like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank -- entities that exist only in our own imagination.
Homo Deus examines our future. It blends science, history, philosophy, and every discipline in between, offering a vision of tomorrow that at first seems incomprehensible but soon looks
undeniable: humanity will soon lose not only its dominance, but its very meaning. And we shouldn’t wait around for the resistance, either – while our favourite science fiction trope sees humans
battling machines in the name of freedom and individualism, in reality these humanist myths will have long been discarded, as obsolete as cassette tapes or rain dances. This may sound alarming,
but change is always frightening.
Over the past century, humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague and war. Today, more people die from obesity than from starvation; more people die from old age than
from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed in war. We are the only species in earth’s long history that has single-handedly changed the entire planet, and we no
longer expect any higher being to shape our destinies for us.
Success breeds ambition, and humankind will next seek immortality, boundless happiness and divine powers of creation. But the pursuit of these very goals will ultimately render most human beings
superfluous. So where do we go from here? For starters, we can make today’s choices with our eyes wide open to where they are leading us. We cannot stop the march of history, but we can influence
its direction.
Future-casting typically assumes that tomorrow, at its heart, will look much like today – we will possess amazing new technologies, but old humanist values like liberty and equality will
still guide us. Homo Deus dismantles these assumptions and opens our eyes to a vast range of alternative possibilities, with provocative arguments on every page:
- After four billion years of organic life, the era of inorganic life is now beginning.
- The main products of the twenty-first century economy will not be textiles, vehicles and weapons, but bodies, brains and minds.
- While the industrial revolution created the working class, the next big revolution will create the useless class.
- The way humans have treated animals is a good indicator for how upgraded humans will treat the rest of us.
- Radical Islam may fight rearguard actions, but the truly impactful religions will now emerge from Silicon Valley rather than the Middle East.
- Democracy and the free market will both collapse once Google and Facebook know us better than we know ourselves, and authority shifts from individual humans to networked algorithms
- We will knowingly renounce privacy in the pursuit of better health.
- Humans won’t fight machines; they will merge with them. We are heading towards marriage rather than war.
- Most of us will not get to decide how technology will affect our lives because most of us don’t understand it (how many of us voted on how the Internet would work?).
This is the shape of the new world, and the gap between those who get onboard and those left behind will be bigger than the gap between industrial empires and agrarian tribes, bigger even
than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.
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Given the current pace of technological development, it is possible we destroy ourselves in some ecological or nuclear
calamity. The more likely possibility is that we will use bioengineering and machine learning and artificial intelligence either to upgrade ourselves into a totally different kind of being or
to create a totally different kind of being that will take over.
In any case, in 200 or 300 years, the beings that will dominate the Earth will be far more different from us than we are
different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees.
Intelligence is not consciousness. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel
things. In humans and other animals, the two indeed go together. The way mammals solve problems is by feeling things. Our emotions and sensations are really an integral part of the way we
solve problems in our lives. However, in the case of computers, we don't see the two going together.
Over the past few decades, there has been immense development in computer intelligence and exactly zero development in
computer consciousness. There is absolutely no reason to think that computers are anywhere near developing consciousness. They might be moving along a very different trajectory than
mammalian evolution. In the case of mammals, evolution has driven mammals toward greater intelligence by way of
consciousness, but in the case of computers, they might be progressing along a parallel and very different route to intelligence that just doesn't involve consciousness at all.
We may find ourselves in a world with nonconscious super intelligence. The big question is not whether the humans
will fall in love with the robots or whether the robots will try to kill the humans. The big question is how does a world
of nonconscious super intelligence look? Because we've absolutely nothing in history that prepares us for such a scenario.
references:
What
explains the rise of humans?
Yuval Harari on why humans won’t dominate Earth in 300 years
