Ephemeris of the Mind (Book Review) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow [ההיסטוריה של המחר]
Time to read: 3 min read
Book Cover
Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.
Past Harari review:
Review
Harari returns and this time tries to tackle the future of humanity. Harari first sets the context by explaining humanity's progress, how humanity is faring better against famine, disease, and war. Harari then makes three bold predictions about humanity’s goals for the future: how humans will achieve happiness through engineering their biology, how humans will live forever, and how humans can transcend and become gods.
This book is much less founded in science and history than Sapiens, mainly because it tries to deal with what hasn’t happened yet. There are some interesting futurist ideas though, such as transhumanism and techno-humanism and the ethical problems that may arise because of said ideas. To be honest, I have read many of the ideas Harari brings up before I read his book but I still found his style of distilling complex ideas into digestible pieces very informative.
While celebrating humanity’s accomplishments is healthy and AIs will most likely become more than what humans intend for it to, I would’ve liked Harari to address some of the risks humanity faces in the more immediate future, such as global pandemics in an increasingly connected world and the effects of climate change which will most likely worsen.
As with Sapiens there are many interesting ideas but here are my three main takeaways:
Humans achieved dominance over other animal species because of humanity’s ability for mass collective cooperation. Humans used belief systems such as religions to organize with one another. Today humans are replacing religion with science as their belief system. There are several implications of this. Religion is focused on ethics while science deals with facts. The move away from traditions means that humans need a new religious belief system (humanism) to replace the ethical components of traditional religions. Traditional religions were optimized for order whereas science is optimized for power. In a sense, humans today are signing an implicit contract to give up meaning (derived from traditional religions) in exchange for power (provided by science).
The advancement of technology, especially biotechnology, will allow some humans who have the means to embrace the technologies to become more powerful than their non technically-enhanced peers. This will greatly improve the life for the technological elite while also creating a “Useless Class” of people who are automated away from their jobs and provide little value to society. This is already happening today as software engineers and data scientists automate away previously human jobs such as data processing and admin work.
Harari proposes a new future religion called Dataism, where instead of the homo-centric view of the world, people (and AIs) take a data-centric view, where everything is thought of in terms of data and processing data. There are many interesting philosophical implications of the switch to Dataism involving the meaning of humanity (especially if AIs can process data faster and better than humans).
Conclusion
Some parts of the book overlap with Sapiens and not many of the ideas are original, but Harari is an excellent writer and this book makes for an informative read.