Contents
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (approximately 450 pages) is one of the best-seller and prominent books written by Yuval Noah Harari. As you have already known, Harari is an important contemporary Israeli historian, philosopher and thinker. He is also the author of the best seller the book Sapiens. After discussing a brief history of human beings with his first book Sapiens, Harari shares his views on humanity’s future. So, Harari summarizes all these information about future briefly in his work titled Homo Deus. “History is the science of also change, not only of the past.” as he briefly summarizes with his words, Yuval Harari considers and underlines the change as a new phenomenon rather than history and the future concepts.
While you may sometimes think that the author is exaggerating while reading such books, you should not forget that perhaps you will give more credit to the author in 20 years when you consider the Generative Open AI revolution in today’s world.
The Author basically emphasizes the facts in below:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very important and will be more important in the near future!
- Human beings should be ready for the change in every term and their age.
- Data and big data concepts will be more crucial in the next years.
- We have to adapt technology and AI as soon as possible from now on.
Humanity in Homo Deus
Harari underlines how humans and our planet are transforming with new change phenomenon. Additionally, he also surprises the reader by drawing them to different horizons of thought in his book Homo Deus. Moreover, his views about future of humanity is based on the information and data we have today are very different than other historians or thinkers.
According to Harari, it is inevitable for us, to transform into Homo Deus who is described as deified human. This will occur with the development of biochemistry, algorithm/data science and artificial intelligence within a century at most. He says that Homo deus who will be the future human species, will be different from us. They will become different types of human with the effect of technological developments and transformations. Harari says that this will be happen just as how we are different from our ancestors. (Neanderthals or Homo erectus) Noah Harari states that the power and authority that humanity has held for centuries is gradually passing into AI or Dataism religion shaped by algorithms.
Humanism vs Dataism?
He also says that the human-oriented worldview of Humanism, which people have believed for centuries, emphasizing that authority comes from within humanity, believing that the answers to all the questions people seek are within themselves, in the human spirit, is also losing its fashion. Just as humanity believed that all economic, political and moral authority came from the heavens, gods, holy books and messengers/prophets before the humanist revolution, after the Dataism revolution and worldview based on data and artificial intelligence, algorithms will be dominant power and authority for the humankind.
Humanism believes that human beings have free will that people make free choices and shapes their world views according to this free will. In this context, people’s feelings and emotions are the supreme authority in terms of humanist worldview. However, according to some scientists who have made statements recently, there is no free will and what we think of as free will is only our feelings consisting of biochemical algorithms. In other words, our feelings are composed of biochemical algorithms and those who solve these algorithms could also manipulate our feelings. According to Harari, if we have enough data and powerful processors to process this data in a short future, it is possible to develop algorithms that will understand people’s feelings better than they do.
When algorithms are developed that will better understand people and their emotions than themselves, the power and authority will have passed from humanity to algorithms.
Organisms Algorithms?
This perspective, which briefly summarized as “feelings and organisms are algorithms.” implies that emotions is vulnerable to hacking and manipulation. Particularly, the concept of big data (click for meaning pls) combined with powerful processors has been effective in strengthening this point of view. According to this view, feelings are biochemical processes that have been shaped over millions of years by natural selection.
Harari states that the authority has been passing to artificial intelligence in answering the questions about the preferences and choices that human beings have faced throughout history. In this concept, he underlines that the algorithm-based artificial intelligence which reaches almost unlimited information thanks to big data, will give the answers in the future the questions like “Which person should we marry, which book to read or what drugs should we use for the diseases”. Maybe when you decide to get married in the near future, your artificial intelligence-based life coach will tell you: “According to the possible scenario that I have created about you and the data I have about the person you want to marry, great unhappiness awaits you in the future and you should definitely not get married wtih her/him!” It will may be given that warning and save your life 😊
Generative AI is Evil ?
Yuval Harari in his book Homodeus says that humanity will be faced with a new problem that he named “irrelevance”. Moreover, Irrelevance problem will be wide-spread among humankind in this new revolution based on algorithms and artificial intelligence. For that, it is for people who are unemployed that a world average level of unemployment benefits will be required. In the labour market, which will be shaped by the needs of the new era, there would be no need for truck drivers, executive assistants and perhaps even doctors in some branches. So, people with these professions might have to change themselves constantly.
Stating that technology is not yet decision-making and perhaps never will be, Harari also stated that the same technology was used for different purposes. For example humanity has used technology both in industrial revolution and in the production of atomic bombs for killing people. Our author, who stated that he made an effort to make people think and contemplate on these issues, stated that the human brain and mentality still have not been completely resolved and perhaps never will be. According to him, humanity has won its struggle against famine, epidemic diseases and wars, which are the three biggest problems in its history, in the 21st century.
Main Message of Homo Deus
At this point, Harari stated that with developing technology, the problem of famine has been solved compared to the past. Moreover, it is obvious that the number of people who died from obesity-related diseases in the world exceeded the number of people who died of starvation. Considering that even the Covid-19 pandemic ended in 2 years, considering the number of people who died from diseases in the past such as plague, tuberculosis and Spanish flu, it can be stated that humanity has won this struggle towards to pandemics and big diseases thanks to the drugs and vaccines. Finally, with the presence of international organizations established especially after the Second World War, major wars were prevented and the number of people who died in the conflicts, except for regional conflicts, was prevented.
Finally, in his book Homo Deus, Harari states that at this point, humanity, which has won the war with these three problems that it has been struggling with throughout history, has the goal of immortality for the future. The ultimate goal of humankind now is transforming humans into Homo Deus, a god-man model. Stating that the next aim of humanity is to overcome the problem of irrelevance by constantly learning and transforming, and finally to turn into Homo Deus, this magnificent book of Harari, which smells lightly of science fiction and light history, is a must-read for every book lover.
