Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

and a year later Google launched a sub-company called Calico whose stated mission is ‘to solve death’.

Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.

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.

But 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?

Indeed, the blind pursuit of money, fame and pleasure will only make us miserable.

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?

For exactly the same reason, the nuts we humans seek to gather – lucrative jobs, big houses, good-looking partners – seldom satisfy us for long.

Some may say that this is not so bad, because it isn’t the goal that makes us happy – it’s the journey. Climbing Mount Everest is more satisfying than standing at the top; flirting and foreplay are more exciting than having an orgasm;

Buddha had made an even more radical claim, teaching that the pursuit of pleasant sensations is in fact the very root of suffering.

To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it. This

Grass is nowadays the most widespread crop in the USA after maize and wheat, and the lawn industry (plants, manure, mowers, sprinklers, gardeners) accounts for billions of dollars every year.51

Lawn indicates wealth

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.

The following chapters discuss how humanism – the worship of humankind – has conquered the world. Yet the rise of humanism also contains the seeds of its downfall.

Instead of allowing Adam to keep gathering wild fruits, an angry God condemns him ‘to eat bread by the sweat of your brow’.

The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant on human farms.

Why do modern humans love sweets so much? Not because in the early twenty-first century we must gorge on ice cream and chocolate in order to survive. Rather, it is because when our Stone Age ancestors came across sweet fruit or honey, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as much of it as quickly as possible.

In the Nayaka language a living being possessing a unique personality is called mansan. When probed by the anthropologist Danny Naveh, the Nayaka explained that all elephants are mansan.

Wayanad nayikkas?

Philosophers have encapsulated this riddle in a trick question: what happens in the mind that doesn’t happen in the brain?

since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.

Hypothesis!

Turing knew from personal experience that it didn’t matter who you really were – it mattered only what others thought about you.

Turing test

Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic.

Money, for example, has no objective value. You cannot eat, drink or wear a dollar bill. Yet as long as billions of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages and clothing.

Currency belief

At 2 p.m. on 8 December 1991, in a state dacha near Viskuli, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords, which stated that ‘We, the Republic of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, as founding states of the USSR that signed the union treaty of 1922, hereby establish that the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases its existence.’

Dissolution of USSR

During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history.

Fiction and history

In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection.

Fiction can shape 21st century

The basic abilities of individual humans have not changed much since the Stone Age. But the web of stories has grown from strength to strength, thereby pushing history from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age.

Basic abilities

According to the algorithmic ideal, your fate is in the hands of ‘the system’, and not in the hands of the flesh-and-blood mortals who happen to occupy this or that post.

Protocols defined

When official reports collided with objective reality, it was often reality that had to give way.

PAaperwork versus relity

Even when scriptures mislead people about the true nature of reality, they can nevertheless retain their authority for thousands of years.

Flawed scriptures

witnesses in courts put their hand on a bible when swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s ironic that they swear to tell the truth on a book brimming with so many fictions, myths and errors.

Swear Upon god

Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?

It is often said that God helps those who help themselves. This is a roundabout way of saying that God doesn’t exist,

the most vexing questions of all: how does modern science relate to religion?

To cut a long story short, most peer-reviewed scientific studies agree that the Bible is a collection of numerous different texts composed by different human authors centuries after the events they purport to describe, and that these texts were not assembled into a single holy book until long after biblical times.

Bible is a colection of stories

How many units of happiness are generated when a billion Chinese enjoy cheaper electricity? How many units of misery are produced when an entire dolphin species becomes extinct?

Units of happiness

Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

To the best of our scientific understanding, the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.

Universe and purpose

‘If you have a problem, you probably need more stuff; and in order to have more stuff, you must produce more of it.’

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.

The truth is very different. Despite all our achievements, we feel a constant pressure to do and produce even more.

Yesterday’s luxuries become today’s necessities. If once you could live well in a three-bedroom apartment with one car and a single desktop computer, today you need a five-bedroom house with two cars and a host of iPods, tablets and smartphones.

If everything is for sale, including the courts and the police, trust evaporates, credit vanishes and business withers.6

Hence, if the very same feelings that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that?

Rather, an experience is a subjective phenomenon made up of three main ingredients: sensations, emotions and thoughts.

Define an experience

Soon I find myself experimenting with different teas, black and green, comparing their exquisite tangs and delicate bouquets.

The rich are taught to disregard the poor, while the poor are taught to disregard their true interests. No amount of self-reflection or psychotherapy will help, because the psychotherapists are also working for the capitalist system.

‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’.

What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty? What will happen to human society when biotechnology enables us to have designer babies, and to open unprecedented gaps between rich and poor?

Pertinent questions

Attributing free will to humans is not an ethical judgement – it purports to be a factual description of the world.

I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly.

Choices are biochemical reactions