Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

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 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which says that ‘Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.’9 This declaration stops short of saying that other animals are conscious, because we still lack the smoking gun. But it does shift the burden of proof to those who think otherwise.

A more sophisticated version of the argument says that there are different levels of self-consciousness. Only humans understand themselves as an enduring self that has a past and a future, perhaps because only humans can use language in order to contemplate their past experiences and future actions.

Indeed, humans themselves are often aware of past and future events without verbalising them. Especially in dream states, we can be aware of entire non-verbal narratives – which upon waking we struggle to describe in words.

Twenty thousand years ago, the average Sapiens probably had higher intelligence and better toolmaking skills than the average Sapiens of today. Modern schools and employers may test our aptitudes from time to time but, no matter how badly we do, the welfare state always guarantees our basic needs. In the Stone Age natural selection tested you every single moment of every single day, and if you flunked any of its numerous tests you were pushing up the daisies in no time. Yet despite the superior toolmaking abilities of our Stone Age ancestors, and despite their sharper minds and far more acute senses, 20,000 years ago humankind was much weaker than it is today.

The Ultimatum Game made a significant contribution to undermining classical economic theories and to establishing the most important economic discovery of the last few decades: Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions. These emotions, as we saw earlier, are in fact sophisticated algorithms that reflect the social mechanisms of ancient hunter-gatherer bands.

the Ultimatum Game, has led many to believe that primates have a natural morality, and that equality is a universal and timeless value. People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction.

Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality. When official reports collided with objective reality, it was often reality that had to give way. Anyone who has ever dealt with the tax authorities, the educational system or any other complex bureaucracy knows that the truth hardly matters. What’s written on your form is far more important.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so.

Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough schools soon began focusing on achieving high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

Despite all the immense achievements of the Chinese dynasties, the Muslim empires and the European kingdoms, even in ad 1850 the life of the average person was not better – and might actually have been worse – than the lives of archaic hunter-gatherers. In 1850 a Chinese peasant or a Manchester factory hand worked longer hours than their hunter-gatherer ancestors; their jobs were physically harder and mentally less fulfilling; their diet was less balanced; hygiene conditions were incomparably worse; and infectious diseases were far more common.

Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. Through research, it aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wars and produce food. As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth. They therefore make good bedfellows.

It would accordingly be far more accurate to view modern history as the process of formulating a deal between science and one particular religion – namely, humanism. Modern society believes in humanist dogmas, and uses science not in order to question these dogmas, but rather in order to implement them. In the twenty-first century the humanist dogmas are unlikely to be replaced by pure scientific theories. However, the covenant linking science and humanism may well crumble and give way to a very different kind of deal, between science and some new post-humanist religion.

Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet. The Soviet Union, with its megalomaniacal Five Year Plans, was as obsessed with growth as the most cut-throat American robber baron. Just as Christians and Muslims all believe in heaven, and disagree only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method.

Meanwhile in neighbouring China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do whatever it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it.

When some people specialise in software engineering while others devote their time to care of the elderly, we can no doubt produce more software and give old people more professional care. Yet is economic growth more important than family bonds? By presuming to make such ethical judgements, free-market capitalism has crossed the border from the land of science into that of religion.

capitalism did make an important contribution to global harmony by encouraging people to stop viewing the economy as a zero-sum game, in which your profit is my loss, and instead see it as a win–win situation, in which your profit is also my profit. This mutual-benefit approach has probably helped global harmony far more than centuries of Christian preaching about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek.

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.

People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don’t understand my feelings and don’t care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs or national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements among people who already agree on the basics.

A liberal may counter that by exploring her own inner world she develops her compassion and her understanding of others. But such reasoning would have cut little ice with Lenin or Mao. They would have explained that individual self-exploration is an indulgent bourgeois vice, and that when I try to get in touch with my inner self, I am more than likely to fall into one or another capitalist trap.

And yet the most successful, self-indulgent capitalist societies are also those who engage in the most charitable giving

As of 2016 there is no serious alternative to the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and a free market. The social protests that swept the Western world in 2011 – such as Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish 15-M movement – have absolutely nothing against democracy, individualism and human rights, or even against the basic principles of free-market economics. Just the opposite – they take governments to task for not living up to these liberal ideals. They demand that the market be really free, instead of being controlled and manipulated by corporations and banks ‘too big to fail’. They call for truly representative democratic institutions that will serve the interests of ordinary citizens rather than of moneyed lobbyists and powerful interest groups. Even those blasting stock exchanges and parliaments with the harshest criticism don’t have a viable alternative model for running the world. While it is a favourite pastime of Western academics and activists to find fault with the liberal package, they have so far failed to come up with anything better.

New technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods. That’s why agricultural deities were different from hunter-gatherer spirits, why factory hands fantasised about different paradises than peasants and why the revolutionary technologies of the twenty-first century are far more likely to spawn unprecedented religious movements than to revive medieval creeds. Islamic fundamentalists may repeat the mantra that ‘Islam is the answer’, but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day forfeit their ability even to understand the questions being asked.

In 1850 more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants, and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or telegraph lines. Yet the fate of those peasants had already been sealed in Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railroads and telegraphs transformed the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons, giving industrial powers a decisive edge over traditional agricultural societies.

The history of religion (including secular) and culture is the decade by decade, century by century and even millennial-long response to new technologies - language and pigments gave us the Cognitive Revolution and spirituality, domestication the Agricultural and a host of Gods, literacy and the printing press were the vanguard of the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation, the Industrial Revolution engendered humanism and liberalism, and the 20th century's communications innovations the Age of Information... so where is the new cultural paradigm to upend the Liberal world order?

The socialists created a brave new religion for a brave new world. They promised salvation through technology and economics, thus establishing the first techno-religion in history, and changing the foundations of ideological discourse.

In the mid-nineteenth century few people were as perceptive as Marx, hence only a few countries underwent rapid industrialisation. These few countries conquered the world. Most societies failed to understand what was happening, and therefore missed the train of progress.

If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

That’s why traditional religions offer no real alternative to liberalism. Their scriptures don’t have anything to say about genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, and most priests, rabbis and muftis don’t understand the latest breakthroughs in biology and computer science. For if you want to understand these breakthroughs, you don’t have much choice – you need to spend time reading scientific articles and conducting lab experiments instead of memorising and debating ancient texts.

The author, over the course of two books now, is failing to recognize something very important - for instance, the Sermon on the Mount is itself responsible for liberalism, humanism, and even women leaders in the early Christian churches. The core tenets of the Axial Age have in fact given us the inspiration to seek equality and justice for two millennia. That journey has taken place through multiple technological and cultural revolutions - the core ethic of the Sermon sustains and even grows well outside the bounds of the Church. This has given us strength and community even when nations fall, and perhaps the resilience to experience the incredible, rapid technological and cultural changes of the past two hundred years. It is in fact in the 21st century, when participation in traditional faith communities has suddenly plummeted in the West, that we see a notable internal unraveling of our social fabric and day to day happiness - we haven't seen the social fabric tear this way since the Great Depression, and yet today is an age of abundance. Perhaps humanism, liberalism and individualism need the weaver of traditional faith systems to prevent tears in the social fabric? Never before have we had more intimate communications technology, and yet never before have we been more isolated from one another.

When genetic engineering and artificial intelligence reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as flint knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.

Or - traditional faith systems, and their ethics, will pull us back from the brink...

Not only governments fall into this trap. Business corporations often sink millions into failed enterprises, while private individuals cling to dysfunctional marriages and dead-end jobs. Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning. Eventually, if we want to come clean about past mistakes, our narrating self must invent some twist in the plot that will infuse these mistakes with meaning.

Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning; modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.

The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam and electricity, so in the coming decades new techno-religions may conquer the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes.

This outlook is highly dubious - the religions of both the axial age and those of secularism, the past 2,000 years of strife, were born out of the disenfranchised and losers, they prevailed against the powers that be and their outlook. Why should the new faiths of the 21st century not do the same, as a counter to the author's thesis? How do we know that the new faiths won't be successful because of their opposition to trans-humanism, big data, techno-faiths? The past 2,000 years of cultural and technological revolutions have done nothing to fundamentally erode the major faiths - there's no evidence of such - it's only in the past few decades that our faith communities are notably shrinking. Outside of a couple notable exceptions, the phased rollout of the Industrial Revolution, and all the philosophy that came with it, simply did not erode our participation in traditional faith systems - so why now? We are killing god, tearing apart the family, but the blame doesn't appear to fall on tech, or as a cultural response to such - so what's causing the disintegration? The newest communications tools can just as easily be leveraged to strengthen faith.

As far as we know, this earth-shattering revolution resulted from a few small changes in the Sapiens DNA and a slight rewiring of the Sapiens brain.

We don't know this - some speculate that language itself is responsible, others that hallucinagens played a significant role, thus triggsering latent genes.

Moreover, many premodern cultures believed in the existence of superior states of consciousness that people might access through meditation, drugs or rituals. Shamans, monks and ascetics systematically explored the mysterious lands of mind, and returned laden with breathtaking stories. They told of unfamiliar states of supreme tranquillity, extreme sharpness and matchless sensitivity. They told of the mind expanding to infinity or dissolving into emptiness.

Modern science has and continues to study the same - there's empirical evidence. The author is either ignorant of decades of research, or is purposely not giving such any weight.

Hence people actively developed their ability to dream, to remember dreams and even to control their actions in the dream world, which is known as ‘lucid dreaming’. Experts in lucid dreaming could move about the dream world at will, and claimed they could even travel to higher planes of existence or meet visitors from other worlds.

Why is this framed in the past tense? This is a reality today, and there's literature to back it up.

But if there is no authentic self, how do I decide which voices to silence and which to amplify?

Or the authentic self is the chorus of them all.

Dataism is the first movement since 1789 that created a genuinely novel value: freedom of information.

The author appears to be unaware of the significance of America's First Amendment to the Constitution.

But maybe you don’t need convincing, especially if you are under the age of twenty.

Author should check the rates and nuances of social media usage for Gen Z vs Millennials - he's projecting his and his cohorts' own behavior onto the new generation, when in fact their relationship with social media is far more healthy than our own.

Ideas change the world only when they change our behaviour.

By watching the stars the Babylonians decided whether to get married, plough the fields and go to war. Their philosophical beliefs were translated into very practical procedures.

The author appears to have a rudimentary understanding of ancient pantheons, their myths and what they actually signify, how they functioned - while it's well established that religions will manifest themselves in relation to the practical and social concerns of a culture (IE - agriculture, seasons, etc), this is not their sole role. The archaic myths we know of, those written down leading up to the Classical era as well as the Norse, Saxon, Hindu and so on, are sophisticated symbolic explorations of the human psyche. In examining them we plumb the depths of their souls, we are told of their struggles and tragedies, as well as their triumphs. Without examining myth, as well as today's world faiths, through this lens we cannot know a people, whether historical or of today. Without truly valuing their irrational beliefs and symbolism we cannot achieve understanding. This is what the author lacks, and it biases his entire work.