Reading Homo Deus
Picking up where he left off with Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes “a brief history of tomorrow” in Home Deus. The book begins with a discussion of how humanity has addressed, and largely conquered, two of our traditional nemeses - disease and famine. As examples, whereas the Black Death killed between 75 and 200 million people in the 1300’s and 15 percent of the French population died of starvation during the reign of King Louis XIV, today famine and malnutrition kill about one million per year worldwide. Obesity, on the other hand, kills 3 million per year out of 2.1 billion overweight human beings worldwide compared to about 850 million undernourished people. Today more humans are dying from excess than from the lack of anything.
Exposure of the native peoples of Mexico to Spanish explorers and conquerors in the 1500’s likewise had catastrophic implications in terms of disease. The native Mexican population numbered about 22 million when the Spaniards arrived. Within about eight months the diseases the Europeans brought with which the natives had no immunity reduced the population to 14 million. Smallpox, flu and measles, among other infectious diseases, further reduced the population to less than 2 million within a few decades.
Such enormous catastrophes are far less likely today thanks to antibiotics, better hygiene, and more stable food production and distribution. “Famine, plague, and war will probably continue to claim millions in the coming decades,” writes Harari. “Yet they are no longer unavoidable tragedies beyond the understanding and control of a helpless humanity. Instead, they have become manageable challenges.” (page 19)
In fact, advanced technologies today go far beyond merely alleviating these forms of mass human suffering. Today we are extending human life to the point where we are, for the first time, seriously considering the possibility of challenging death itself. “The breakneck development of fields such as genetic engineering, regenerative medicine, and nanotechnology fosters ever more optimistic prophecies. Some experts believe we will overcome death by 2200, others say 2100." (page 25)
Even if immortality turns out to be a pipe dream, life extension is not. “In the twentieth century we have almost doubled life expectancy from forty to seventy, so in the twenty-first century we should at least be able to double it again to 150. Though falling far short of immortality, this would still revolutionize human society.” (page 26)
Harari stresses that he is not attempting to predict the future impact of these “revolutionary” forces. Rather, Homo Deus is intended as an overview and discussion of the possibilities currently before us. He thinks a likely outcome of these converging new technologies and the subsequent evolution of human knowledge will be “upgrades” to Homo sapiens, gradual improvements to our lives that blur the distinction between technology and being human.
He stresses that there is not going to be an apocalyptic robot revolt. The future will move more slowly and imperceptibly until, one day, our ancestors will look back and wonder how we ever were the way we are now just as we today look back at a world without fax machines and smart phones and the internet (or pacemakers, kidney dialysis, and controllable artificial limbs) and wonder how it could have been like that in our past.
This is all by way of introduction to the book. Harari sets the table with a message that Homo sapiens use technology to increasingly control their lives for the better. This level of control and its enormous impact upon the Earth (as elaborated in Sapiens) leads Harai to conclude that since the Cognitive Revolution we have witnessed the dawn of a new geologic era (which I have blogged about before and have an entire e-magazine devoted to) called the Anthropocene.
“For Homo sapiens has rewritten the rules of the game. This single ape species has managed within 70,000 years to change the global ecosystem in radical and unprecedented ways. Our impact is already on par with that of ice ages and tectonic movements. Within a century, our impact may surpass that of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.” (page 73)
Thanks to human sprawl over the planet, ecological diversity is being minimized. The world is becoming a collective ecosystem rather than a diverse and disparate one. Though the modern human footprint is greater than ever, the Anthropocene has been a long time coming. Our ancestors not only drove all other human species to extinction, they were responsible for the extinction of 90% of the large animals of Australia, 75% of America’s large mammals, and about half of the large mammals of the planet as a whole before they could write or make iron tools or even farm.
With the Agricultural Revolution humanity developed a more pronounced sense of religion, most likely beginning with animism. With the Industrial Revolution, humanism began to replace religion – a process that is still continuing today. According to Harari, as humanism is replacing religion, so too are humans replacing gods, and the Anthropocene is becoming more fully expressed.
Over the past 20,000 years Sapiens have come to dominate the planet. What made this possible? According to Harari, all animals (mammals anyway) possess some level of complex objective and subjective experience. Sapiens are not so different from chimpanzees or elephants or even dolphins in that regard. What we have that no other species possesses, however, is an “intersubjective” dimension to our experience. A band of chimps might be able to organize several dozen of their fellow beings into unified action. But human beings are able to create large scale “imaged orders” (religions, myths, royalty, commerce, etc.) that allow millions of Sapiens to behave in an orchestrated fashion.
“Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organize crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.” (page 150) This intersubjective dimension to Sapiens is plastic in that it is literally applicable to every aspect of human communication and culture. Critically and fundamentally for Harari, with the discovery of writing the intersubjective dimension became functionalized as algorithmic.
“Writing has thus enabled humans to organize entire societies on an algorithmic fashion. We encountered the term ‘algorithm’ when we tried to understand what emotions are and how brains function, and defined it as a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. In illiterate societies people make all calculations and decisions in their heads. In literate societies people are organized into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.” (page 160)
But, also: “Writing thus facilitated the appearance of powerful fictional entities that organized millions of people and reshaped the reality of rivers, swamps and crocodiles. Simultaneously, writing also made it easier for humans to believe in the existence of the fictional entities, because it habituated people to experiencing reality through the mediation of abstract symbols.” (page 163)
Sapiens became more adept story tellers which allowed for more complex forms of imagination than the oral tradition alone. Writing made our imagined forces and entities seem more real to us, more endearing and powerful. “Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.” (page 177, my emphasis) Harari’s profound understanding of the necessity of intersubjective imagination in human evolution the greatest insight I read in any of his books to date. I plan to blog more about the importance of this in the future.
This intersubjectivity has some strange bedfellows. There is an obvious and natural animosity between science and religion, for example. Science emerged out of religious institutions and, even though science finds many core religious beliefs to be exactly what they are – imagined – religion is still necessary. “Without the guiding hand of some religion, it is impossible to maintain large-scale social orders. Even universities and laboratories need religious backing. Religion provides the ethical justification for scientific research, and in exchange gets to influence the scientific agenda and uses scientific discoveries. Hence you cannot understand the history of science without taking religious beliefs into account.” (page 198)
This is but one aspect of the dynamic between intersubjective forces. Another is the emergence of “new religions” like capitalism and consumerism. Capitalism is a primary force driving away famine, plague, war, while achieving an unprecedented global growth in wealth across the spectrum of humanity. Economic inequality is a concern, but the fact is a wider range of people possess more money and are above the poverty line today than ever before.
With science making new religions possible Sapiens have entered a Humanist Revolution. Traditional religious power is weakening and the power of the new religions is rising. Money, algorithms, growth and progress are our new gods. Though human life is itself essentially meaningless in the universe, this does not mean that we are forced to exist in a nihilistic, materialistic void. There is a strong basis for an enlightened and ethical humanism.
“We aren’t born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately, and others show compassion to us. If we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens, and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am….Humanism thus sees life as a gradual process of inner change, leading from ignorance to enlightenment by means of experiences. The highest aim of the humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a wide variety of intellectual, emotional, and physical experiences.” (page 240)
Harari divides humanism into three categories. The first is liberalism, which believes that each human is a unique person with a distinct human voice and deserves full liberty to express their self. The second is socialist humanism, arguing that the experience of the human group or collective is more important than individual liberties. The third is evolutionary humanism which emphasizes natural selection; that humans are genetically unequal and where unequal parts interact the strongest will tend to survive.
Liberalism was initially in favor until, for much of the last century, socialism in the form of fascism and communism made a serious bid for power among Sapiens. The emergence of recent technology and science has given us unprecedented powers over natural selection. Millions of babies are born (and grow up to reproduce their genetics) that would have died just 100 years ago, for example. With that, liberalism has made a comeback and now is once again the primary force of humanism. The significance of this cannot be overstated.
“The triumphant liberal ideals are now pushing humankind to reach for immortality, bliss and divinity. Egged on by the allegedly infallible wishes of customers and voters, scientists and engineers devote more and more energies to these liberal projects. Yet what the scientists are discovering and the engineers are developing may unwittingly expose both the inherent flaws of the liberal world view and the blindness of customers and voters. When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.” (page 278)
The fact is Harari believes that the great advances of science and technology and democracy and capitalism might be creating imagine forces over which Sapiens have no control. MRI technology proves that our brains reveal what our conscious reactions will be before we are aware of them. This “pre-conscious” self is our experiential self. We largely have no control over a lot of how we interpret our experiences. We can be easily manipulated by commercial advertising and political messaging, for example. Moreover, being expert story tellers, our liberalism has reinforced a narrative sense of self that we have invented which pretends we have more conscious control over ourselves than we actually possess.
The result is a mixture of the narrative self and the experiential self. “The narrating self uses our experiences as important (but not exclusive) raw materials for its stories. These stories, in turn, shape what the experiencing self actually feels.” (page 306) So, in manner of speaking, we have random and indirect control over ourselves. “We see that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and day dreams we’ve savored, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself.” (page 306)
This is our present situation as invented forces of technology and engineering influence us. Harari believes we are on the verge of another evolutionary shift, the natural consequence of the Anthropocene and the Humanist Revolution. Ironically, as humans control more about the Earth they might be about to lose control of the very forces shaping our planet. Basically, this is because the algorithms that intersubjectively emerged long ago with the invention of writing are now taking on their own evolution, with humans as optional accessories rather than masters.
“In fact, as time goes by it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms, not merely because algorithms are getting smarter, but also because humans are professionalizing….over the last few thousand years we humans have been specializing. A taxi driver or a cardiologist specializes in a much narrower niche than a hunter-gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI. As I have repeatedly stressed, AI is nowhere near human-like experience. But 99 percent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs.” (page 326)
In next few decades, AI algorithms will simply make most of present human employment obsolete, being able to do it faster, better, and more intelligently. This is not the same as human consciousness, but that difference might not matter. It might be that in the future intelligence is valued more than conscious experience. And that will create a very different world indeed. One where the narrating self, intersubjectivity and imagined categories are transcended.
Harari does not despair about the possible emergence of a “useless” class of virtually all of humanity, with enormous wealth and power held by elite humans who own the algorithms. By nature the basic needs of the useless class will have to be met in order for the algorithms, and those who own them, to peacefully evolve. A more difficult question is what will the useless class do with their lives? Liberalism, as we know it, will become irrelevant in a world where individuals are generally unnecessary. Algorithms like Google and Facebook are in the unintended process of supplanting our narrating self.
“Unlike the narrating self that controls us today, Google will not make decisions based upon cooked-up stories…Google will actually remember every step we took and every hand we shook. Many of us would be happy to transfer much of our decision-making processes into the hands of such a system, or at least consult with it whenever we face important choices.” (page 342)
“The new technologies of the twenty-first century may thus reverse the humanist revolution, stripping humans of their authority, and empowering non-human algorithms instead. If you are horrified by this direction, don’t blame the computer geeks. The responsibility actually lies with the biologists. It is crucial to realize that this entire trend is fueled more by biological insights than by computer science. It is the life science that concluded that organisms are algorithms.” (page 349) To a large degree, the “great decoupling” of consciousness and intelligence is a logical step in evolution.
“The great human projects of the twentieth century – overcoming famine, plague, and war – aimed to safeguard a universal norm of abundance, health and peace for everyone without exception. The new projects of the twenty-first century – gaining immortality, bliss and divinity – also hope to serve the whole of humankind. However, because these projects aim at surpassing rather than safeguarding the norm, they may well result in the creation of a new superhuman caste that will abandon its liberal roots and treat normal humans no better than nineteenth-century Europeans treated Africans.” (page 355)
But the algorithms are not in control yet. Therefore, two new religions are emerging out of capitalism and liberal humanism – data religion and techno-humanism. As to the later, we are already using (and will continue to use) technology and science to “upgrade” Sapiens “…in order to create Homo deus - a much superior human model. Homo deus will retain some essential human features, but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against to most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms.” (page 357) Harari believes, however, that this will ultimately, fundamentally change what it means to be human. Our narrating self disappears into an experience driven by artificial intelligence and biotechnology and robotics and nanotechnology. Subsequently, the narrating self is transformed into the algorithmic self, which will (ironically perhaps) be more closely allied with our experiencing self (algorithms work on biological facts not fictitious stories) while simultaneously opening up the possibilities for new forms of experience.
The result of these new forms of experience could emerge as a “data religion” – a belief that the universe is best viewed as a diverse amalgamation of data flows. Further, Sapiens are not presently equipped to process the immense amount of data we can potentially experience today. Our narrative stories are no longer capable of transforming everything happening to us into knowledge and wisdom. Instead, we are quite clearly confused and anxious. But the twin fields of computer science and biology promise “a world-shattering cataclysm that may completely transform the very nature of life.” (page 373)
“Dataism isn’t limited to idle prophecies. Like every religion, its practical commandments. First and foremost a Dataist ought to maximize data flow by connecting to more and more media, and producing and consuming more and more information. Like other successful religions, Dataism is also missionary. Its second commandment is to link everything to the system, including heretics who don’t want to be plugged in.” (page 387)
Harari hastens to point out that the Dataist is not necessarily anti-human. “It has nothing against human experiences. It just doesn’t think they are intrinsically valuable.” (page 393) Then comes what might well be the most important line in the book: “Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity; appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data processing mechanisms.” (page 394, my emphasis) This transformation from a narrating self to a algorithmic self is functional in nature, our humanity becomes fully a function of pure intelligence rather than of freely created and narrated consciousness.
“Dataism thereby threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo sapiens has done to all other mammals. Over the course of history humans created a global network and evaluated everything according to its function within the network. For thousands of years this inflated human pride and prejudices.” (page 400) Harari merely points out that there are clear forces transforming us today. In fact, nothing seems more powerful about humanity than our development of algorithms.
Which is a springboard to what Harari admits is a “possibility”, not intended to be a “prophecy.” Our future is likely to turn out differently than even Harari envisions. But he is right about all this rapid change, and the functionalization of intersubjectvity and the separate paths of technologies converging upon a possible Homo deus. Just because it will likely turn out differently does not preclude the fact that Harari has written a bold and insightful and accessible assessment of how things might play out between us and biotechnology and artificial intelligence, between our traditional narrating self and the evolution of algorithms. At the very least, he points out that these are fundamentally important imagined forces impacting our near-future in the Anthropocene.
Exposure of the native peoples of Mexico to Spanish explorers and conquerors in the 1500’s likewise had catastrophic implications in terms of disease. The native Mexican population numbered about 22 million when the Spaniards arrived. Within about eight months the diseases the Europeans brought with which the natives had no immunity reduced the population to 14 million. Smallpox, flu and measles, among other infectious diseases, further reduced the population to less than 2 million within a few decades.
Such enormous catastrophes are far less likely today thanks to antibiotics, better hygiene, and more stable food production and distribution. “Famine, plague, and war will probably continue to claim millions in the coming decades,” writes Harari. “Yet they are no longer unavoidable tragedies beyond the understanding and control of a helpless humanity. Instead, they have become manageable challenges.” (page 19)
In fact, advanced technologies today go far beyond merely alleviating these forms of mass human suffering. Today we are extending human life to the point where we are, for the first time, seriously considering the possibility of challenging death itself. “The breakneck development of fields such as genetic engineering, regenerative medicine, and nanotechnology fosters ever more optimistic prophecies. Some experts believe we will overcome death by 2200, others say 2100." (page 25)
Even if immortality turns out to be a pipe dream, life extension is not. “In the twentieth century we have almost doubled life expectancy from forty to seventy, so in the twenty-first century we should at least be able to double it again to 150. Though falling far short of immortality, this would still revolutionize human society.” (page 26)
Harari stresses that he is not attempting to predict the future impact of these “revolutionary” forces. Rather, Homo Deus is intended as an overview and discussion of the possibilities currently before us. He thinks a likely outcome of these converging new technologies and the subsequent evolution of human knowledge will be “upgrades” to Homo sapiens, gradual improvements to our lives that blur the distinction between technology and being human.
He stresses that there is not going to be an apocalyptic robot revolt. The future will move more slowly and imperceptibly until, one day, our ancestors will look back and wonder how we ever were the way we are now just as we today look back at a world without fax machines and smart phones and the internet (or pacemakers, kidney dialysis, and controllable artificial limbs) and wonder how it could have been like that in our past.
This is all by way of introduction to the book. Harari sets the table with a message that Homo sapiens use technology to increasingly control their lives for the better. This level of control and its enormous impact upon the Earth (as elaborated in Sapiens) leads Harai to conclude that since the Cognitive Revolution we have witnessed the dawn of a new geologic era (which I have blogged about before and have an entire e-magazine devoted to) called the Anthropocene.
“For Homo sapiens has rewritten the rules of the game. This single ape species has managed within 70,000 years to change the global ecosystem in radical and unprecedented ways. Our impact is already on par with that of ice ages and tectonic movements. Within a century, our impact may surpass that of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.” (page 73)
Thanks to human sprawl over the planet, ecological diversity is being minimized. The world is becoming a collective ecosystem rather than a diverse and disparate one. Though the modern human footprint is greater than ever, the Anthropocene has been a long time coming. Our ancestors not only drove all other human species to extinction, they were responsible for the extinction of 90% of the large animals of Australia, 75% of America’s large mammals, and about half of the large mammals of the planet as a whole before they could write or make iron tools or even farm.
With the Agricultural Revolution humanity developed a more pronounced sense of religion, most likely beginning with animism. With the Industrial Revolution, humanism began to replace religion – a process that is still continuing today. According to Harari, as humanism is replacing religion, so too are humans replacing gods, and the Anthropocene is becoming more fully expressed.
Over the past 20,000 years Sapiens have come to dominate the planet. What made this possible? According to Harari, all animals (mammals anyway) possess some level of complex objective and subjective experience. Sapiens are not so different from chimpanzees or elephants or even dolphins in that regard. What we have that no other species possesses, however, is an “intersubjective” dimension to our experience. A band of chimps might be able to organize several dozen of their fellow beings into unified action. But human beings are able to create large scale “imaged orders” (religions, myths, royalty, commerce, etc.) that allow millions of Sapiens to behave in an orchestrated fashion.
“Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organize crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.” (page 150) This intersubjective dimension to Sapiens is plastic in that it is literally applicable to every aspect of human communication and culture. Critically and fundamentally for Harari, with the discovery of writing the intersubjective dimension became functionalized as algorithmic.
“Writing has thus enabled humans to organize entire societies on an algorithmic fashion. We encountered the term ‘algorithm’ when we tried to understand what emotions are and how brains function, and defined it as a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. In illiterate societies people make all calculations and decisions in their heads. In literate societies people are organized into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.” (page 160)
But, also: “Writing thus facilitated the appearance of powerful fictional entities that organized millions of people and reshaped the reality of rivers, swamps and crocodiles. Simultaneously, writing also made it easier for humans to believe in the existence of the fictional entities, because it habituated people to experiencing reality through the mediation of abstract symbols.” (page 163)
Sapiens became more adept story tellers which allowed for more complex forms of imagination than the oral tradition alone. Writing made our imagined forces and entities seem more real to us, more endearing and powerful. “Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.” (page 177, my emphasis) Harari’s profound understanding of the necessity of intersubjective imagination in human evolution the greatest insight I read in any of his books to date. I plan to blog more about the importance of this in the future.
This intersubjectivity has some strange bedfellows. There is an obvious and natural animosity between science and religion, for example. Science emerged out of religious institutions and, even though science finds many core religious beliefs to be exactly what they are – imagined – religion is still necessary. “Without the guiding hand of some religion, it is impossible to maintain large-scale social orders. Even universities and laboratories need religious backing. Religion provides the ethical justification for scientific research, and in exchange gets to influence the scientific agenda and uses scientific discoveries. Hence you cannot understand the history of science without taking religious beliefs into account.” (page 198)
This is but one aspect of the dynamic between intersubjective forces. Another is the emergence of “new religions” like capitalism and consumerism. Capitalism is a primary force driving away famine, plague, war, while achieving an unprecedented global growth in wealth across the spectrum of humanity. Economic inequality is a concern, but the fact is a wider range of people possess more money and are above the poverty line today than ever before.
With science making new religions possible Sapiens have entered a Humanist Revolution. Traditional religious power is weakening and the power of the new religions is rising. Money, algorithms, growth and progress are our new gods. Though human life is itself essentially meaningless in the universe, this does not mean that we are forced to exist in a nihilistic, materialistic void. There is a strong basis for an enlightened and ethical humanism.
“We aren’t born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately, and others show compassion to us. If we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens, and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am….Humanism thus sees life as a gradual process of inner change, leading from ignorance to enlightenment by means of experiences. The highest aim of the humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a wide variety of intellectual, emotional, and physical experiences.” (page 240)
Harari divides humanism into three categories. The first is liberalism, which believes that each human is a unique person with a distinct human voice and deserves full liberty to express their self. The second is socialist humanism, arguing that the experience of the human group or collective is more important than individual liberties. The third is evolutionary humanism which emphasizes natural selection; that humans are genetically unequal and where unequal parts interact the strongest will tend to survive.
Liberalism was initially in favor until, for much of the last century, socialism in the form of fascism and communism made a serious bid for power among Sapiens. The emergence of recent technology and science has given us unprecedented powers over natural selection. Millions of babies are born (and grow up to reproduce their genetics) that would have died just 100 years ago, for example. With that, liberalism has made a comeback and now is once again the primary force of humanism. The significance of this cannot be overstated.
“The triumphant liberal ideals are now pushing humankind to reach for immortality, bliss and divinity. Egged on by the allegedly infallible wishes of customers and voters, scientists and engineers devote more and more energies to these liberal projects. Yet what the scientists are discovering and the engineers are developing may unwittingly expose both the inherent flaws of the liberal world view and the blindness of customers and voters. When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.” (page 278)
The fact is Harari believes that the great advances of science and technology and democracy and capitalism might be creating imagine forces over which Sapiens have no control. MRI technology proves that our brains reveal what our conscious reactions will be before we are aware of them. This “pre-conscious” self is our experiential self. We largely have no control over a lot of how we interpret our experiences. We can be easily manipulated by commercial advertising and political messaging, for example. Moreover, being expert story tellers, our liberalism has reinforced a narrative sense of self that we have invented which pretends we have more conscious control over ourselves than we actually possess.
The result is a mixture of the narrative self and the experiential self. “The narrating self uses our experiences as important (but not exclusive) raw materials for its stories. These stories, in turn, shape what the experiencing self actually feels.” (page 306) So, in manner of speaking, we have random and indirect control over ourselves. “We see that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and day dreams we’ve savored, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself.” (page 306)
This is our present situation as invented forces of technology and engineering influence us. Harari believes we are on the verge of another evolutionary shift, the natural consequence of the Anthropocene and the Humanist Revolution. Ironically, as humans control more about the Earth they might be about to lose control of the very forces shaping our planet. Basically, this is because the algorithms that intersubjectively emerged long ago with the invention of writing are now taking on their own evolution, with humans as optional accessories rather than masters.
“In fact, as time goes by it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms, not merely because algorithms are getting smarter, but also because humans are professionalizing….over the last few thousand years we humans have been specializing. A taxi driver or a cardiologist specializes in a much narrower niche than a hunter-gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI. As I have repeatedly stressed, AI is nowhere near human-like experience. But 99 percent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs.” (page 326)
In next few decades, AI algorithms will simply make most of present human employment obsolete, being able to do it faster, better, and more intelligently. This is not the same as human consciousness, but that difference might not matter. It might be that in the future intelligence is valued more than conscious experience. And that will create a very different world indeed. One where the narrating self, intersubjectivity and imagined categories are transcended.
Harari does not despair about the possible emergence of a “useless” class of virtually all of humanity, with enormous wealth and power held by elite humans who own the algorithms. By nature the basic needs of the useless class will have to be met in order for the algorithms, and those who own them, to peacefully evolve. A more difficult question is what will the useless class do with their lives? Liberalism, as we know it, will become irrelevant in a world where individuals are generally unnecessary. Algorithms like Google and Facebook are in the unintended process of supplanting our narrating self.
“Unlike the narrating self that controls us today, Google will not make decisions based upon cooked-up stories…Google will actually remember every step we took and every hand we shook. Many of us would be happy to transfer much of our decision-making processes into the hands of such a system, or at least consult with it whenever we face important choices.” (page 342)
“The new technologies of the twenty-first century may thus reverse the humanist revolution, stripping humans of their authority, and empowering non-human algorithms instead. If you are horrified by this direction, don’t blame the computer geeks. The responsibility actually lies with the biologists. It is crucial to realize that this entire trend is fueled more by biological insights than by computer science. It is the life science that concluded that organisms are algorithms.” (page 349) To a large degree, the “great decoupling” of consciousness and intelligence is a logical step in evolution.
“The great human projects of the twentieth century – overcoming famine, plague, and war – aimed to safeguard a universal norm of abundance, health and peace for everyone without exception. The new projects of the twenty-first century – gaining immortality, bliss and divinity – also hope to serve the whole of humankind. However, because these projects aim at surpassing rather than safeguarding the norm, they may well result in the creation of a new superhuman caste that will abandon its liberal roots and treat normal humans no better than nineteenth-century Europeans treated Africans.” (page 355)
But the algorithms are not in control yet. Therefore, two new religions are emerging out of capitalism and liberal humanism – data religion and techno-humanism. As to the later, we are already using (and will continue to use) technology and science to “upgrade” Sapiens “…in order to create Homo deus - a much superior human model. Homo deus will retain some essential human features, but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against to most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms.” (page 357) Harari believes, however, that this will ultimately, fundamentally change what it means to be human. Our narrating self disappears into an experience driven by artificial intelligence and biotechnology and robotics and nanotechnology. Subsequently, the narrating self is transformed into the algorithmic self, which will (ironically perhaps) be more closely allied with our experiencing self (algorithms work on biological facts not fictitious stories) while simultaneously opening up the possibilities for new forms of experience.
The result of these new forms of experience could emerge as a “data religion” – a belief that the universe is best viewed as a diverse amalgamation of data flows. Further, Sapiens are not presently equipped to process the immense amount of data we can potentially experience today. Our narrative stories are no longer capable of transforming everything happening to us into knowledge and wisdom. Instead, we are quite clearly confused and anxious. But the twin fields of computer science and biology promise “a world-shattering cataclysm that may completely transform the very nature of life.” (page 373)
“Dataism isn’t limited to idle prophecies. Like every religion, its practical commandments. First and foremost a Dataist ought to maximize data flow by connecting to more and more media, and producing and consuming more and more information. Like other successful religions, Dataism is also missionary. Its second commandment is to link everything to the system, including heretics who don’t want to be plugged in.” (page 387)
Harari hastens to point out that the Dataist is not necessarily anti-human. “It has nothing against human experiences. It just doesn’t think they are intrinsically valuable.” (page 393) Then comes what might well be the most important line in the book: “Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity; appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data processing mechanisms.” (page 394, my emphasis) This transformation from a narrating self to a algorithmic self is functional in nature, our humanity becomes fully a function of pure intelligence rather than of freely created and narrated consciousness.
“Dataism thereby threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo sapiens has done to all other mammals. Over the course of history humans created a global network and evaluated everything according to its function within the network. For thousands of years this inflated human pride and prejudices.” (page 400) Harari merely points out that there are clear forces transforming us today. In fact, nothing seems more powerful about humanity than our development of algorithms.
Which is a springboard to what Harari admits is a “possibility”, not intended to be a “prophecy.” Our future is likely to turn out differently than even Harari envisions. But he is right about all this rapid change, and the functionalization of intersubjectvity and the separate paths of technologies converging upon a possible Homo deus. Just because it will likely turn out differently does not preclude the fact that Harari has written a bold and insightful and accessible assessment of how things might play out between us and biotechnology and artificial intelligence, between our traditional narrating self and the evolution of algorithms. At the very least, he points out that these are fundamentally important imagined forces impacting our near-future in the Anthropocene.
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