A little post on finishing Homo Deus and the future
One of my goals for 2019 is to finish 2 books a month and I thought what better way to keep me going then to write a few thoughts on each.
This week I finished reading Homo Deus, the epic look into the future by author Yuval Noah Harari who was shot into fame after his best-seller book, Sapiens. A two part series, Sapiens is an all-encompassing look at where we came from and Homo Deus is a look at where we’re heading. It explores how we became gods of planet earth putting ourselves above all other living beings, through religion and then science and now humanism, and what might happen with continued advancements in technology –– at what point do we cease being Homo Sapiens and become Homo Deus?
3 Important Questions to Ponder
I’m going to start with the end of the book as it summaries the contents and ‘feel’ well. These are great (unanswered) questions for anyone to ponder:
- Are organisms truly indistinguishable from algorithms?*
- What’s more valuable — intelligence or consciousness?**
- What happens to society when non-sentient algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
I enjoy anyone that can explain and argue for various viewpoints and that’s exactly what Harari does as he touches on each of the questions above. Harari is a regular meditator and I believe this shows through with his strong analysis of various perspectives.
Will a new ‘techno-humanism’ religion will exist in the future?
A big portion of the book is devoted to explaining how Sapians became to view themselves with such high importance, diving into societal ideologies – socialism versus liberalism and knowledge creation – religion versus science/technology.
In particular, he believes there are 3 core sources of knowledge which are the basis of quasi-religions of the world:
- Religious Knowledge = Scripture x Logic. Read the Bible and connect the text’s dots to answer your questions.
- Scientific Knowledge = Empirical data x Math. Run experiments, and calculate conclusions.
- Humanist Knowledge = Experiences x Self-awareness. Search your feelings, and choose what you know to be true.
In explaining these three sources of knowledge he touches on the future. Insofar that religious scripture does a bad job guiding us into the future e.g. sexual diversity, creation of new knowledge and new technology, and that scientific and humanist knowledge may not have answers too e.g. when biotechnology will change us in ways we can’t anticipate, giving brith to AI that bridges intelligence and consciousness or advance Sapiens that live longer and are better in every way and thus have very different experiences to Sapiens.
I believe we’re already seeing the seeds of a new religion being planted today. A steady shift away from religion as the only ethical and moral answer, diminishing trust (and reliance?) on the state to provide services and an increasing hunger for new technology and innovation to solve all our problems. And importantly, the entrepreneurs behind the scenes pioneering these endeavours may be the ones with the ultimate power (or opportunity to amass it).
Also, read it just for his bombastic writing style
Harari has a fascinating writing style. Delving into the logic of each argument followed by compelling example and then the after effects. He hammers home many human trajectories and plays them out in front of you in a single paragraph. It is pretty mesmerising.
Read the book just to experience the thrilling mix of philosophy, history and tech futurism.
So, what will the dominant way of life be in 100 years?
I’m not sure. But I think it will be wildly different to today in many important ways — a new religion, a new way of life, changing what it means to derive meaning from the world.
I think I’ll write more on this in another blog post…
For fun, I’ve included recently released footage of Paris in the 1890s that has been edited to include sounds. Even from the above, you can see how much cities have changed and how much technology (cars, materials, electricity and the internet) has played an impact.
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Footnotes
- *This book was released a few years ago and there’s been a lot more discussion on this topic. The initial answer seems to be a sound ‘no’ – reducing the human brain to ‘algorithmic chemical reactions’ or raw computer calculations analogies is not the same thing as an actual human brain. I recommend reading Incognito by David Eagleman as a great exploration into this topic.
- **Okay, this is a super hairy question too. Which is precisely why it is so good. Before we have any hope of explaining this one we need a better definition on consciousness which is starting to appear (see above). Just remember you have more connections in your brain then stars in our galaxy. So we have a while to go on this topic.
