Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

Sally Adee, a journalist for the New Scientist, was allowed to visit a training facility for snipers and test the effects herself. At first she entered a battlefield simulator without wearing the transcranial helmet. Sally describes how fear swept over her as twenty masked men, strapped with suicide bombs and armed with rifles, charge straight towards her. ‘For every one I manage to shoot dead,’ writes Sally, ‘three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I’m clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle.’ Luckily for her, the assailants were just video images projected on huge screens all around her. Still, she was so disappointed with her poor performance that she felt like ditching the rifle and leaving the simulator. Then they wired her up to the helmet. She reports feeling nothing unusual, except a slight tingle and a strange metallic taste in her mouth. Yet she began picking off the virtual terrorists one by one, as coolly and methodically as if she were Rambo or Clint Eastwood. ‘As twenty of them run at me brandishing their guns, I calmly line up my rifle, take a moment to breathe deeply, and pick off the closest one, before tranquilly assessing my next target. In what seems like next to no time, I hear a voice call out, “Okay, that’s it.” The lights come up in the simulation room . . . In the sudden quiet amid the bodies around me, I was really expecting more assailants, and I’m a bit disappointed when the team begi...