CityReads│History of Tomorrow: Who Will Become the Homo Deus?

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A Brief History of Tomorrow: Who Will Become the Homo Deus?

In his new book, Homo deus: a brief history of tomorrow, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari examines the future of humankind: some will upgrade and switch from homo sapiens to homo deus while many will be rendered as useless class. 

Yuval Harari, 2016. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Penguin.

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Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari described how humans conquered the world thanks to their unique ability to believe in collective myths about gods, money, equality and freedom in his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. His next title, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, was first published in Hebrew in 2015 by Dvir publishing. The English version will be published in September 2016 in the UK and in February 2017 in the US. 

But early copies have begun to circulate. There appears multiple book reviews in media, such as Guardian and DailyMail. Yuval Noah Harari also published an excerpt on Financial Times. There are good reasons why this book draws so much attention. Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast, and Slow, make a comment, ”Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. Above all, it will make you think in ways you had not thought before”.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow examines what might happen to the world when these old myths are coupled with new godlike technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

More specifically, what will happen to democracy when Google and Facebook come to know our likes and our political preferences better than we know them ourselves? What will happen to the welfare state when computers push humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class”? How might Islam handle genetic engineering? Will Silicon Valley end up producing new religions, rather than just novel gadgets?As Homo sapiens becomes Homo deus, what new destinies will we set for ourselves? As the self-made gods of planet earth, which projects should we undertake, and how will we protect this fragile planet and humankind itself from our own destructive powers? The book Homo Deus gives us a glimpse of the dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century.

Sapiens explained how humankind came to rule the planet. 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?).

We are probably the last generation of homo sapiens. In one century or two, we will either destroy ourselves or far more likely, we will use technology to upgrade ourselves into something different. We are facing a change in the basic rule of the game of life. 

For 4 billion years of evolution, life evolved by natural selection and life was confined to the organic realm. Life will evolve by intelligent design and it will break the organic realm into the inorganic realm with the creation of inorganic lifeforms. There will be still beings and entities but they will be much different from us than we are from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees. 

source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p045q3yq

It is a complete game changer. It will also enable us to break out the planet earth to the outer space. It is almost impossible to sustain an organic life in space or in other planets. But once you make the switch from organic to inorganic, there will be no problem to sustain artificial intelligence in space. The being flying spaceship is not something like us. It is evolutionary, but it is not evolution by natural selection. It is evolution by intelligent design.

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.

source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p045q3yq

To read excerpt of Homo Deus, please refer to the following link:

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