Homo deus A brief history of tomorrow

Review by Choice Review

Careful observers of current human history and keen thinkers on the human predicament have reflected on what the future holds. Michio Kaku published his ideas on how science will shape human destiny by 2100, in Visions (CH, May'98, 35-5030). Homo Deus is another fascinating projection into the future. Historian Harari (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (CH, Jul'15, 52-5967), discusses various aspects of the 21st century's dominant technologies and their potential impacts on human civilization and survival. His many conjectures include the manufacture of life and brains, the emergence of a useless class, the disappearance of democracy, and the merger of mankind with machines. However, some of Harari's comments on science and religion seem naive, if not unacceptable. For example, he asserts that science has nothing to do with secularism and tolerance because it arose in 16th-century Europe where religious persecution was widespread, and that liberalism is another religion because liberals believe in free will. He also says that religion is interested in order and science is "interested above all in power," and that technology's agenda is to control our inner voices. Nevertheless, this best seller is worth reading and discussing. The validity of its prophecies can be known only a few decades from now. Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Varadaraja V. Raman, Duke University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

"ORGANISMS ARE ALGORITHMS," Yuval Noah Harari asserts in his provocative new book, "Homo Deus." "Every animal - including Homo sapiens - is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution. . . . There is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that nonorganic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass." In Harari's telling, the human "algorithm" will soon be overrun and outpaced by other algorithms. It is not the specter of mass extinction that is hanging over us. It is the specter of mass obsolescence. To understand how Harari arrives at this conclusion, we might turn to his earlier book. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" was an attempt to write a genetic, anthropological, cultural, social and epistemological history of humans over the last 100,000-odd years. Historians, scientists and academic pedants carped about its audacity of scope - but the book, modeled after Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (a book that also received its share of carping and academic envy), presented a sweeping macrohistory, often marvelously. From the birth of a slight, sly, naked ape somewhere in the depths of Africa to the growth, spread and eventual dominance of that species over the world, "Sapiens" split the story of humankind into three broad "revolutions." The first, the "cognitive revolution," resulted in humans acquiring the capacity to think, learn and communicate information with a facility unprecedented in the animal kingdom. The second - the "agricultural revolution" - allowed humans to domesticate crops and animals, enabling us to form stable societies and intensifying the flow of information within them. The "scientific revolution" came last. Humans acquired the capacity to interrogate and manipulate the physical, chemical and biological worlds, resulting in even more potent technological advances that surround us today. "Homo Deus" takes off where "Sapiens" left off; it is a "brief history of tomorrow." What is the natural culmination of the scientific revolution, Harari asks. What will the future look like? "At the dawn of the third millennium," he writes, "humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. 'There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.' Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary, 'Let's see what's on the agenda today.'" This is the kind of breezy prose that has catapulted Harari into an international star - and it is equally evident in this book. I'll return to that brushed-off nightmare - the barbed wire and mushroom clouds - but Harari continues apace: "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." To describe this ascendancy, Harari examines the factors that made the human species so special. "Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal," he writes. So how did this animal come to claim dominion over all other beasts? The answer, he argues, lies not in the uniqueness of our emotions, sensations, morals or moods. Pigs and monkeys share many of these with us - including the capacity to feel anger, envy, pain - and even a desire for justice. Humans exceed these capacities by encoding complex algorithms - "a methodological set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions." Pigs, dogs and monkeys - indeed, all living beings - also encode algorithms, Harari tells us; the human ones happen to be particularly complicated and powerful. In the second section of the book, we witness the relentless march of Homo pre-deus toward Homo deus - from humans who worship gods into humans who become gods. Technology overtakes religion; the fear of nature transmutes into an unprecedented capacity to control nature. Harari has, for my taste, a tendency to overstate the reach of such technological "fixes." Editing every disease-linked gene in the human genome is not as easy, or as technically feasible, as Harari might wish it - in part, because many diseases, we now know, are the consequences of dozens of gene variants, and of gene-environment and gene-chance interactions. But the writing in this section is lively and enables Harari to raise the most provocative question of this book: If humans succeeded by virtue of their "algorithm," then why couldn't another such algorithm topple us in turn? What kind of "algorithms" does Harari have in mind? They happen to be written by humans themselves. The first kind - encoded within computational machines - will create new technological beings with artificial intelligence. The second - encoded in DNA - will create new biological beings with higher "natural" intelligence. Our capacity to manipulate two fundamental forms of information - the biological and the computational, the byte and the gene - will thus result in the birth of superior beings who will ultimately overrun our world. They will take over our jobs, infiltrate lives, and control our emotions and fates as easily as they control our traffic and taxis today. They will write poetry, make love, create art and look, feel and behave like us - only better. Harari is not the first to describe this progression of the human species, but his account may well be one of the most chilling to date. Yet even Harari, a master of the catchy story and historical vignette, fails to convince me entirely. First, there is that pesky matter of the barbed wire and the mushroom cloud. Although Harari is correct in noting the overall decline of violence, hideous conflagrations continue to flare around us (Harari lists a profusion of technological innovations created in the last century - antibiotics, computers, the list goes on - and then challenges the reader to come up with similarly powerful innovations in religion. I couldn't resist: contemporary versions of radical fundamentalism, the use of social media for dispersal, not a particularly pleasant list - but it, too, goes on). The "algorithms" of violence, to contort Harari's own formulation, have doubtless grown more subtle, but they persist - and Harari's vision of humans doomed by superhuman biological or computational machines might well be marred by humans doomed by subhuman biological or computational machines: a terrifying contagion, a nuclear war or, most likely, a cataclysm in climate that we will be utterly powerless to stop. Nor can I share Harari's optimism about certain medical technologies. The examples he provides - of gene sequencing to map and predict human fates, say - have crashed into inherent limits: Chance plays such a crucial role in the development of certain illnesses that genes, although important, may still be relegated to the background. Perhaps we'll learn to "hack" chance in the future too. But until then, the interventions that preoccupy Harari's fantasies will be dominated by few, highly penetrant genes that influence fates and futures in an autonomous manner. Several such genes do exist - but it would be premature to extrapolate this idea to the whole genome. Such concerns aside, Harari's book still remains essential reading for those who think about the future. The algorithms that Harari describes are not trying to imitate humans; they are trying to become human, and possibly exceed our abilities. One story in his book that captivated me was that of the musician and programmer David Cope, who wrote a program to imitate Bach's compositions. Listeners described the compositions as having touched their "innermost being" - and were furious when told the music had, in fact, been created by a device whose "innermost being" happened to be a mesh of silicon and copper. Cope later wrote another program - this time to generate haikus. He then published a book in which some poems were written by the computer while others were written by "organic poets," as Harari describes them, leaving the readers to agonize over which poem was generated by which being. This organic writer, for one, could hardly tell one from the other. SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. His latest book is "The Gene: An Intimate History." He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 19, 2017]

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Review by Booklist Review

Humanity has never been less violent, susceptible to plague, or at risk of famine than it is right now, asserts historian Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2011). So what will Homo sapiens strive toward next? According to Harari: immortality, by way of death-conquering drugs; bliss, via biochemical manipulations engineered to induce everlasting pleasure; and divinity, which we will achieve through biotechnology enhancements and the brave new religions of Silicon Valley. He also tackles the time bomb of modern humanism, which, along with the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market, may be the seeds of humanity's undoing. Careful to classify his arguments as possibilities rather than prophesies, Harari's many predictions about the future of humanity toggle between solemn and starry-eyed, depending on the reader's perspective. It's sometimes hard to tell what kind of book it is, given the array of disciplines Harari covers in depth. But like humanity itself, it's an intelligent, panoramic, if sometimes messy assemblage of where we've been and what's to come. Best for readers who crave big ideas.--Comello, Chad Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Harari (Sapiens), professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provocatively explores what the future may have in store for humans in this deeply troubling book. He makes it clear that it is impossible to predict the future, so claims to be offering "possibilities rather than prophecies"-and builds a strong case for a very specific outcome. The future to which he affords the greatest probability is, in many ways, a dystopian world in which humanism has given way to "dataism"-the belief that value is measured by its contribution to information transfer-and humans play an insignificant role in world affairs or have gone extinct. The roles humans play are diminishing, Harari argues, because increasingly our creations are able to demonstrate intelligence beyond human levels and without consciousness. Whether one accepts Harari's vision, it's a bumpy journey to that conclusion. He rousingly defends the argument that humans have made the world safer from disease and famine-though his position that warfare has decreased remains controversial and debatable. The next steps on the road to dataism, he predicts, are through three major projects: "immortality, happiness, and divinity." Harari paints with a very broad brush throughout, but he raises stimulating questions about both the past and the future. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Harari (history, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) recaps the cognitive, agricultural, industrial, and scientific revolutions from Sapiens, his previous best seller, to highlight a shift in the locus of divinity, from shared beliefs about nature to gods to social systems and, ultimately, to humankind itself. He posits that current efforts to cure disease, disability, and death will result in biological augmentation that creates a human species beyond Homo sapiens and that this will necessarily happen along socioeconomic lines. Humanistic systems currently holding sway, such as capitalism or socialism, will disappear if humans no longer are subject to scarcity or disease. Accepting the current idea that all change is controlled by deterministic algorithms (social, biological, or computational), Harari foresees a future of data-driven -technological utilitarianism if we continue to off-load decision-making responsibility to artificial intelligence. This work is speculative, obviously, and posits that if something is technologically -possible, we will try it, not that we will succeed. It leaves readers with questions about consciousness and conscience and whether unrestricted data flow will necessarily lead to wisdom. VERDICT While still appealing to those of a political, historical, or anthropological bent who enjoyed Sapiens, this title will be equally thought provoking to biologists and technological futurists. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]-Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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The Last Days of Death In the twenty-first century humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality. Struggling against old age and death will merely carry on the time-honoured fight against famine and disease, and manifest the supreme value of contemporary culture: the worth of human life. We are constantly reminded that human life is the most sacred thing in the universe. Everybody says this: teachers in schools, politicians in parliaments, lawyers in courts and actors on theatre stages. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN after the Second World War - which is perhaps the closest thing we have to a global constitution - categorically states that 'the right to life' is humanity's most fundamental value. Since death clearly violates this right, death is a crime against humanity, and we ought to wage total war against it. Throughout history, religions and ideologies did not sanctify life itself. They always sanctified something above or beyond earthly existence, and were consequently quite tolerant of death. Indeed, some of them have been downright fond of the Grim Reaper. Because Christianity, Islam and Hinduism insisted that the meaning of our existence depended on our fate in the afterlife, they viewed death as a vital and positive part of the world. Humans died because God decreed it, and their moment of death was a sacred metaphysical experience exploding with meaning. When a human was about to breathe his last, this was the time to call priests, rabbis and shamans, to draw out the balance of life, and to embrace one's true role in the universe. Just try to imagine Christianity, Islam or Hinduism in a world without death - which is also a world without heaven, hell or reincarnation. Modern science and modern culture have an entirely different take on life and death. They don't think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and they certainly don't view death as the source of life's meaning. Rather, for modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve. How exactly do humans die? Medieval fairy tales depicted Death as a figure in a hooded black cloak, his hand gripping a large scythe. A man lives his life, worrying about this and that, running here and there, when suddenly the Grim Reaper appears before him, taps him on the shoulder with a bony finger and says, 'Come!' And the man implores: 'No, please! Wait just a year, a month, a day!' But the hooded figure hisses: 'No! You must come NOW!' And this is how we die. In reality, however, humans don't die because a figure in a black cloak taps them on the shoulder, or because God decreed it, or because mortality is an essential part of some great cosmic plan. Humans always die due to some technical glitch. The heart stops pumping blood. The main artery is clogged by fatty deposits. Cancerous cells spread in the liver. Germs multiply in the lungs. And what is responsible for all these technical problems? Other technical problems. The heart stops pumping blood because not enough oxygen reaches the heart muscle. Cancerous cells spread because a chance genetic mutation rewrote their instructions. Germs settled in my lungs because somebody sneezed on the subway. Nothing metaphysical about it. They are all technical problems. And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don't need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over. We can kill the cancerous cells with chemotherapy or nano-robots. We can exterminate the germs in the lungs with antibiotics. If the heart stops pumping, we can reinvigorate it with medicines and electric shocks - and if that doesn't work, we can implant a new heart. True, at present we don't have solutions to all technical problems. But this is precisely why we invest so much time and money in researching cancer, germs, genetics and nanotechnology. Even ordinary people, who are not engaged in scientific research, have become used to thinking about death as a technical problem. When a woman goes to her physician and asks, 'Doctor, what's wrong with me?' the doctor is likely to say, 'Well, you have the flu,' or 'You have tuberculosis,' or 'You have cancer.' But the doctor will never say, 'You have death.' And we are all under the impression that flu, tuberculosis and cancer are technical problems, to which we might someday find a technical solution. Even when people die in a hurricane, a car accident or a war, we tend to view it as a technical failure that could and should have been prevented. If the government had only adopted a better policy; if the municipality had done its job properly; and if the military commander had taken a wiser decision, death would have been avoided. Death has become an almost automatic reason for lawsuits and investigations. 'How could they have died? Somebody somewhere must have screwed up.' The vast majority of scientists, doctors and scholars still distance themselves from outright dreams of immortality, claiming that they are trying to overcome only this or that particular problem. Yet because old age and death are the outcome of nothing but particular problems, there is no point at which doctors and scientists are going to stop and declare: 'Thus far, and not another step. We have overcome tuberculosis and cancer, but we won't lift a finger to fight Alzheimer's. People can go on dying from that.' The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not say that humans have 'the right to life until the age of ninety'. It says that every human has a right to life, period. That right isn't limited by any expiry date. An increasing minority of scientists and thinkers consequently speak more openly these days, and state that the flagship enterprise of modern science is to defeat death and grant humans eternal youth. Notable examples are the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and the polymath and inventor Ray Kurzweil (winner of the 1999 US National Medal of Technology and Innovation). In 2012 Kurzweil was appointed a director of engineering at Google, and a year later Google launched a sub-company called Calico whose stated mission is 'to solve death'. In 2009 Google appointed another immortality true-believer, Bill Maris, to preside over the Google Ventures investment fund. In a January 2015 interview, Maris said, 'If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500, the answer is yes.' Maris backs up his brave words with a lot of hard cash. Google Ventures is investing 36 per cent of its $2 billion portfolio in life sciences start-ups, including several ambitious life-extending projects. Using an American football analogy, Maris explained that in the fight against death, 'We aren't trying to gain a few yards. We are trying to win the game.' Why? Because, says Maris, 'it is better to live than to die'. Such dreams are shared by other Silicon Valley luminaries. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has recently confessed that he aims to live for ever. 'I think there are probably three main modes of approaching [death],' he explained. 'You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.' Many people are likely to dismiss such statements as teenage fantasies. Yet Thiel is somebody to be taken very seriously. He is one of the most successful and influential entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley with a private fortune estimated at $2.2 billion. The writing is on the wall: equality is out - immortality is in. Excerpted from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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