Homodeus

A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

  • For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
  • Humans are rarely satisfied with what they already have. The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more. Humans are always on the lookout for something better, bigger, tastier.
  • Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to set itself even more daring goals. Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity.
  • In the twenty-first century humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality.
  • An increasing minority of scientists and thinkers state that the flagship enterprise of modern science is to defeat death and grant humans eternal youth.
  • Today, people expect to be married ‘till death us do part’, and much of life revolves around having and raising children. Now try to imagine a person with a lifespan of 150 years. Getting married at forty, she still has 110 years to go. Will it be realistic to expect her marriage to last 110 years?
  • In truth, so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year. Its great achievement has been to save us from premature death, and allow us to enjoy the full measure of our years.
  • Nowadays thinkers, politicians and even economists are calling to supplement or even replace GDP with GDH – gross domestic happiness. After all, what do people want? They don’t want to produce. They want to be happy.
  • It took just a piece of bread to make a starving medieval peasant joyful. How do you bring joy to a bored, overpaid and overweight engineer?
  • We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon.
  • For better or worse, a growing percentage of the population is taking psychiatric medicines on a regular basis, not only to cure debilitating mental illnesses, but also to face more mundane depressions and the occasional blues.
  • The second great project of the twenty-first century – to ensure global happiness – will involve re-engineering Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure.
  • Nobody can absorb all the latest scientific discoveries, nobody can predict how the global economy will look in ten years, and nobody has a clue where we are heading in such a rush. Since no one understands the system any more, no one can stop it.
  • Designer babies may one day become technologically feasible.
  • The more we know, the less we can predict. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.
  • The best reason to learn history is not to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.
  • The same technologies that can upgrade humans into gods might also make humans irrelevant.
  • In recent decades, life scientists have demonstrated that emotions are not some mysterious spiritual phenomenon that is useful just for writing poetry and composing symphonies. Rather, emotions are biochemical algorithms that are vital for the survival and reproduction of all mammals.
  • Due to an uncompromising humanist belief in the sanctity of human life, we keep people alive till they reach such a pitiful state that we are forced to ask, ‘What exactly is so sacred here?’
  • People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.
  • An algorithm isn’t a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation.
  • 99 per cent of our decisions – including the most important life choices concerning spouses, careers and habitats – are made by the highly refined algorithms we call sensations, emotions and desires.
  • We Sapiens love telling ourselves that we enjoy some magical quality that not only accounts for our immense power, but also gives moral justification for our privileged status.
  • The best scientists are a long way from deciphering the enigma of mind and consciousness.
  • To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability – rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness – explains our mastery of planet Earth.
  • Research indicates that Sapiens just can’t have intimate relations (whether hostile or amorous) with more than 150 individuals.
  • Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.
  • Large numbers of people behave in a fundamentally different way than do small numbers.
  • 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 organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.
  • Science and religion are like a husband and wife who after 500 years of marriage counselling still don’t know each other.
  • As long as we haven’t deciphered the mysteries of consciousness, we cannot develop a universal measurement for happiness and suffering, and we don’t know how to compare the happiness and suffering of different individuals, let alone different species.
  • The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.
  • When disaster strikes, the poor almost always suffer far more than the rich, even if the rich caused the tragedy in the first place.
  • It wasn’t very hard to convince individuals to want more. Greed comes easily to humans.
  • Artificial intelligence is now poised to surpass human intelligence.
  • Experiments performed on Homo sapiens indicate that humans can be manipulated, and that it is possible to create or annihilate even complex feelings such as love, anger, fear and depression by stimulating the right spots in the human brain.
  • If you enter medical school today in the expectation of being a family doctor in twenty years, maybe you should think again (AI might make doctors irrelevant). This threat hovers over the heads not only of general practitioners, but also of experts. Indeed, it might prove easier to replace doctors specialising in relatively narrow fields such as cancer diagnosis.
  • For all their vaunted emotional intelligence, human beings are often overwhelmed by their own emotions and react in counterproductive ways. For example, encountering an angry person they start shouting, and listening to a fearful person they let their own anxieties run wild.
  • The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.
  • As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. Human law already recognises intersubjective entities like corporations and nations as ‘legal persons’. Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to algorithms.
  • In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society. This ‘useless class’ will not be merely unemployed – it will be unemployable.
  • Since we do not know what the job market will look like in 2030 or 2040, already today we have no idea what to teach our kids. Most of what they currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are forty.
  • The only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly.
  • If you wish to obey the old adage and know thyself, you should not waste your time on philosophy, meditation or psychoanalysis, but rather you should systematically collect biometric data and allow algorithms to analyse them for you and tell you who you are and what you should do. The movement’s motto is ‘Self-knowledge through numbers’.
  • In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.
  • As of early 2016, the sixty-two richest people in the world were worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people!
  • Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy. People want superior memories, above-average intelligence and first-class sexual abilities.
  • The most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley. That’s where hi-tech gurus are brewing for us brave new religions that have little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes – happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life – but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.
  • Modern humanity is sick with FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – and though we have more choice than ever before, we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose.
  • Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm.

Disclaimer: The key points of the book presented here are not a substitute for reading the book. To get the entire holistic message the author has offered requires reading the book.

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