Stop the World – I want to get off

Yuval Harari famously wrote in 2016 “Homo Deus – a brief history of tomorrow” (the link gives you the full book) to which LRB devoted an extensive review 

Once upon a time, we accepted three score years and ten as our divinely allotted lifespan; we reckoned there wasn’t much we could do to prevent or counter epidemic disease; we looked on dearth and famine as bad hands dealt by fate or divine judgment; we considered war to be in the nature of things; and we believed that personal happiness was a matter of fortune.

Now, Harari says, these problems have all been reconfigured as managerial projects, subject to political will but not limited by the insufficiencies of our knowledge or technique. We have become the masters of our own fate – and ‘fate’ itself should be reconceived as an agenda for further research and intervention. That is what it means to refer to the world era in which we live as the Anthropocene: one biological species, Homo sapiens, has become a major agent in shaping the natural circumstances of its own existence. The gods once made sport of us; the future will ‘upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus’…… 

The current version of Homo sapiens will become surplus to economic and military requirements. War will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots: ‘Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be completely useless.’ Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, which, Harari reminds us, is what biology and computer science tell us is all we really are anyway….. 

Wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the ‘tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms’. Some of us will then be as gods: members of a new species, Homo deus, ‘a new elite of upgraded superhumans’ clever enough, and rich enough, to control for a time the knowledge that controls the rest of humankind, and to command the resources needed to transform themselves through intellectual tools and biologic prostheses. ‘In the long run, we are all dead,’ Keynes said. If some of the wilder ambitions of anti-ageing prophets are realised, the dictum will need to be reformulated: ‘In the long run, most of us will be dead.’… 

I remember reading the first 50 pages of “Homo Deus” and feeling that this and a couple of other reviews had told me all I needed to know about the book. I was eager to see what his ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018) held for me….Once I realised that it consists of a lot of op-eds and answers to his fan-club mail, I decided against reading it. A contrarian article and a "digested read" tend to confirm my prejudice....  

If you can’t be bothered to read these two books of his or a post of mine from last year which tried to give a sense of the basic argument, then you will perhaps find more exciting this hour-long discussion between Harari and Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose “The Righteous Mind” I enthused over a couple of years ago.

Haidt start the discussion by articulating a concern he feels about trends in social media, AI and the incredible rate at which the world is changing. It’s a really great discussion and I thoroughly recommend it. It certainly made me realise that I had been a bit unfair to Harari and should certainly persevere with his ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” One of the reasons the video gripped me is because of the obvious respect the two men have for one another. It’s so great to see a serious discussion of ideas 

And if that does in fact grab you, then I would suggest you view a discussion between Harari and the author of another book I enthused about recently – Rutger Bregman’s Humankind – an optimistic history. Indeed I was so impressed with Bregman’s book that I did one of my famous tables summarising the various myths he exposed.

Other Assessments of Harari

A profile of Harari in The New Yorker revealed that a team of eight people supports him in his various speaking and writing endeavours. Doesn’t that risk “groupthink”???

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review from the ever-thoughtful and challenging David Runciman..

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/a-big-history-of-the-future/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/15/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-review

https://quillette.com/2018/10/26/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-a-review/

on Gods, Robots and the rest of us Superfluous People

The next two books in my current reading list are bestsellers – by Yuval Harari

- ”Homo Deus – a brief history of tomorrow” (2016) and ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018).

A dislike of marketing hype makes me suspicious of best-sellers such as his earlier Sapiens – a brief history of mankind (2014) but “she who must be obeyed” persuaded me to persevere - and I must confess that “Homo Deus” is very well written.. 

LRB had a very useful summary of it a few years ago

Once upon a time, we accepted three score years and ten as our divinely allotted lifespan; we reckoned there wasn’t much we could do to prevent or counter epidemic disease; we looked on dearth and famine as bad hands dealt by fate or divine judgment; we considered war to be in the nature of things; and we believed that personal happiness was a matter of fortune. Now, Harari says, these problems have all been reconfigured as managerial projects, subject to political will but not limited by the insufficiencies of our knowledge or technique. We have become the masters of our own fate – and ‘fate’ itself should be reconceived as an agenda for further research and intervention. That is what it means to refer to the world era in which we live as the Anthropocene: one biological species, Homo sapiens, has become a major agent in shaping the natural circumstances of its own existence. The gods once made sport of us; the future will ‘upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus’.

The review then usefully puts the book in context by looking at how histories have generally been written…

Providential history – invoking God’s plans for human affairs – had lost its academic authority in the 18th century, displaced in the 19th and early 20^th centuries by secular schemas: progressivist Whig interpretations of history; Auguste Comte’s law of three successive stages in human history (the ‘theological’ giving way to the ‘metaphysical’ and then to the ‘positive’ or ‘scientific’ stage); the narratives of the march of civilisation from myth to science offered by such anthropologists as E.B. Tylor, L.H. Morgan and J.G. Frazer; the determining force of class conflict in Marxism; the environmental ‘challenge and response’ theories of writers from Montesquieu and Malthus to Arnold Toynbee; the selection pressures identified by Social Darwinisms.

The title of Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is today commonly used as shorthand to warn against histories that presume inevitable progress, but the book was, fundamentally, a freewheeling condemnation of what Butterfield called ‘general history’ – any attempt to reduce change to the workings of a definable ‘historical process’.

It is different nowadays when science and technology – innovations emerging from the minds of a visionary technical elite – write the script. No social history ‘from below’ for him: ‘History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.’

The revolutions of the last two hundred years in the treatment of pathogenic bacteria and the production of antiviral vaccines have made death from infectious disease far less common, and Harari assures us that ‘medicine in 2050 will likely be able to deal with’ new bugs ‘more efficiently’ than it does today.

If we fail to cope with new strains of flu or with multiply resistant microbes, it won’t be because the threat is insurmountable or our science inadequate but because of a failure of political will or the proper mobilisation of resources. We can look forward with confidence to continued increases in human longevity: ‘In the 20th century we have almost doubled life expectancy from 40 to 70, so in the 21st century we should at least be able to double it again to 150.’….

Climate change, environmental collapse and the renewed threat of nuclear war do get a mention – on global warming, ‘we shall have to do better’; on ecological disaster, ‘we could lessen the danger by slowing the pace of progress and growth’; nuclear weapons have compelled the superpowers ‘to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts’ – but Harari focuses fears for the future not so much on species annihilation as on species transformation.

Here too science and technology drive the future. Homo sapiens may cease to be, not because Earth will become uninhabitable or because Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un will push the button, but because we will become new kinds of beings: our bodies, minds and relationships with the environment and with mechanical devices will be altered in fundamental ways…..

Harari here enthusiastically repeats the lessons taught by Victorian scientific materialism. Religious legend notwithstanding, we are nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human ‘self’; our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modelled by the formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms; our bodily frames and mental capacities have evolved over time and there is nothing fixed in our ‘nature’. The only thing that can be predicted with certainty about human nature is that it will change. Harari’s prediction is that we will become more god-like as we become more machine-like and as machines’ capacities become more god-like. Humanity’s future is in the hands of technical experts – in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, cognitive and computer science…..

The current version of Homo sapiens will become surplus to economic and military requirements. War will be waged by drones and work will be done by robots: ‘Some economists predict that sooner or later, unenhanced humans will be completely useless.’ Algorithms embedded in silicon and metal will replace algorithms embedded in flesh, which, Harari reminds us, is what biology and computer science tell us is all we really are anyway…..

We will no longer be able to sustain belief in the unique, free-acting, free-judging individual as the basis of liberal social order: ‘We – or our heirs – will probably require a brand-new package of religious beliefs and political institutions.’

The new religion will be called Dataism. The boundaries between animals, machines and social systems will dissolve: all these will come to be seen as algorithmic information-processing systems. The notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be superseded by the unchallenged virtue of the flow of information….

Wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the ‘tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms’. Some of us will then be as gods: members of a new species, Homo deus, ‘a new elite of upgraded superhumans’ clever enough, and rich enough, to control for a time the knowledge that controls the rest of humankind, and to command the resources needed to transform themselves through intellectual tools and biologic prostheses. ‘In the long run, we are all dead,’ Keynes said. If some of the wilder ambitions of anti-ageing prophets are realised, the dictum will need to be reformulated: ‘In the long run, most of us will be dead.’…

I had read the first 50 pages of “Homo Deus” but, by this stage, I reckoned that this and a couple of other reviews had told me all I needed to know about the book. I was eager to see what his ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018) held for me….

From the realisation that it consist of a lot of op-eds and answers to his fan-club mail, I’m not holding my breath! A contrarian article and a "digested read" tend to confirm my prejudice.... 

Other Assessments of Harari

A recent profile of Harari in The New Yorker revealed that a team of eight people supports him in his various   speaking and writing endeavours. Doesn’t that risk “groupthink”???

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review from the David Runciman whose book my last post lavished praise on…..

https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/a-big-history-of-the-future/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/15/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-review

https://quillette.com/2018/10/26/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-a-review/