Review: Homo Deus by Yunal Noah Harari

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a long time to finish reading Homo Deus. And I think the long duration was well worth it. Homo Deus is not the ordinary everyday stale non-fiction that one comes across. It is a masterpiece in its own right. But for the Sapiens, I don't recall having read any other book that stimulated thinking to the degree Homo Deus does.

The book starts off almost right away from where its predecessor, Sapiens, ended. A New Human Agenda, that of seeking eternal youth, bliss and divinity, is put forward for the 21st Century. Since the dawn of Humankind, the persistent goal of any population has been to have sufficient food to quench hunger, to have health measures to fight infections and diseases and to be at peace with neighbouring kingdoms. With the advent of the modern technology and the unprecedented progress it has made over the last few decades, the goals have changed now. Rest of the book revolves around the socio-economic and historical reasons for how this new agenda came to be and how it influences the not-so-far-future.

Homo Deus is divided into three parts. Part I, Home Sapiens Conquers the World, talks the unique Spark that Humans possess that made them the only species, out of the billion and trillions which have habituated Earth, to have impacted the planet to such a scale that it becomes imperative to designate the era as the age of Anthropocene. Often the size of the brain is taken to be proportional to the amount of intellectual ability and creativity a species has. However, whales have a brain the size of a car and yet we don't see them building rockets and flying to the moon. As Prof. Harari points out, contrary to popular beliefs it is the relative size of the brain, in proportion to the body, that counts. Evolutionary changes favouring brain development over any other thing has equipped Humans with so many extraordinary abilities that we have become the alpha species on the planet, in spite of possibly having the least amount of relative physical strength. Take for instance, the years of care and upbringing required to nurture a human child whereas a calf starts walking within a few days and lion cubs start on their own within only a few years. Is it only this intellect that separates us from other species, though? When one thinks about it, aren't Dolphins and Bats equally intelligent, if not more in certain areas. Indeed their cognitive abilities tremendously exceeds our own in sight and smell. What then is the Spark that gives us all this power to change the world unlike anything before? Is it the fact that we are Conscious and other are not?

At the end of Part I, Prof. Harari says that it is not ever Consciousness which is unique to us Humans, for who is to say whether or not the pet dog lying beside me isn't conscious about itself and what it feels, and identifies the unique Human Spark to be the ability to create shared imagined realities. He argues that it wasn't sheer intellectual prowess that led the ancient people to create money, kingdoms and religion. Rather it was the ability of humans to imagine a shared reality together and work for its causes. Thus, in Part II Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World, Prof. Harari writes that it is the strong believe of reaching the paradise after death that motivates a young Italian man to go join the third crusades when the Pope decrees it and not a biological survival need a tiger may have to hunt a prey. Even if the youth's conscience tells him that killing his fellow brothers may be wrong, his upbringing and experience reinforce make him adhere to his belief in what the Pope says.

In Part II, Prof. Harari goes on to describe how our Spark made us superb Storytellers who could ponder about the world around them as well as pass on the knowledge to the next generation. The stories we created and narrated ourselves gave rise to the odd couple of Science and Religion. Up till the Middle Ages the two were at odds with each other, fighting for prominence in the Human psyche. Religion argued that there is a God, whoever it may be, who has decided how things should be and how it should run. Religion variously asked to follow the scriptures, or the commandments, in order to do so. On the other hand, Science tried to counteract this with factual information and useful predictions. Science made a cure for Flu possible, increased the food output and gave Humans power to create new compounds altogether. Yet Science alone couldn't have accomplished all this by itself. It needed Religion's help to have an overall goal, direction and meaning. In the modern times, this covenant signed between Science and Religion has enabled unequivocal development in every sphere concerned.

This Modern Covenant brought about a Humanist Revolution with supreme importance being starting to be given to human life rather than any esoteric deity or God. As Prof. Harari points out in the concluding chapter of Part II, the Humanistic ideologies separated into three separate branches. For the orthodox branch, aka the Liberal Humanists, the voter knew the best. For the Social Humanists it was the market. Whereas for the Evolutionary Humanists, who count the Nazis among themselves, evolution supposedly created some humans more equal than others. Together these three branches of the Humanist ideology continued to give meaning to the world. They drove large-scale Scientific thought and paved way for the incredible innovations of technology. But they also caused the World Wars and now there's a time bomb in the laboratory waiting to be set off at any time!?

In the final part, Homo Deus Loses Control starts on a somewhat philosophical note of how fundamentally the upcoming technological advancements are going to change the world and us. What is the meaning of life? Is one life more precious than another? How much value does somebody's life has? According to Prof. Harari, we may soon have concrete and quantitative answers to these questions. With the pace at which the world is changing, it may be beyond recognition within a few decades. It is this technological and scientific revolution imminent in the future, where even the basic qualities we call human or the being itself may change, which is the time bomb. In a world governed by enhanced humans and algorithms, concepts like democracy will lose their meaning.

Prof. Harari continues that there's a big reason why the present anthropological evolution is different from any of the previous natural ones. Historically, intelligence has gone hand-in-hand with consciousness. There weren't any intelligent beings who weren't conscious. All our popular culture incessantly depict intelligent and conscious humanoid robots taking over the world. Which is by any stretch of imagination way too ahead in the future. However, once intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, things begin to change very quickly. We already have non-conscious but highly intelligent computers doing numerous tasks within a jiffy compared to the time required by a human for the same tasks. In fact, one of my own projects involves using intelligent Artificial Neural Network that self-learns a task. And this all just the beginning.

As intelligence successfully decouples from consciousness, the current Humanist religions will give way to new techo-religions governed by the laws of computer algorithms. With the help of powerful Gene editing tools, Homo Sapiens may soon evolve beyond recognition to Homo Deus. Focus would shift from worshipping human life to worshipping technology. All humans will not be equal, some enhanced ones will be more equal than others. This would also create unfathomable gaps between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, and this time around the disparity would not only be in the socio-economic circumstances, but in actual biology. Then imagine what happened to the Neanderthals?

A practical advantage of intelligent machines is that they produce loads and tons of data. As algorithms and machines move forward in prominence, everything will get connected to every other thing in one big Internet-of-all-Things. With the Internet-of-Things, or IoT for short, we are already seeing this in its infancy. All these interconnected machines will collect enormous amounts of data from the user, going up to the minutest details. And they would know about us far more than we know about ourselves. Whoever owns this data will then quite literally rule the world. Imagine having some nano-bots in your bloodstream which measure your haemoglobin levels in real time. They could not only measure the haemoglobin levels but possibly could even regulate it at times. However, in order to do so, you would have to be connected to the Web all the time. This new Data Religion will thus be all powerful.

Now, since we know that computer algorithms can do numerous tasks better than us, why not just let them run all the errands? Enhanced humans are good, but they do slow down the process. What if instead humans are uploaded onto the computer altogether. They have become obsolete for so many things, wouldn't this be a natural succession. And after all, it is the data that counts, what values do human experiences like love have anymore?

Homo Deus closes with three though-provoking questions and let me leave you pondering over them:

1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?