Sapiens and Homo Deus: The E-Book Collection by Yuval Noah Harari
The rise of AI and biotechnology will certainly transform the world, but it does not mandate a single deterministic outcome. All the scenarios outlined in this book should be understood as possibilities rather than prophecies. If you don’t like some of these possibilities you are welcome to think and behave in new ways that will prevent these particular possibilities from materializing.
However, it is not easy to think and behave in new ways, because our thoughts and actions are usually constrained by present-day ideologies and social systems. This book traces the origins of our present-day conditioning in order to loosen its grip and enable us to think in far more imaginative ways about our future. Instead of narrowing our horizons by forecasting a single definitive scenario, the book aims to broaden our horizons and make us aware of a much wider spectrum of options. As I have repeatedly emphasised, nobody really knows what the job market, the family or the ecology will look like in 2050, or which religions, economic systems and political structures will dominate the world.
Yet broadening our horizons can backfire by making us more confused and inactive than before. With so many scenarios and possibilities, what should we pay attention to? The world is changing faster than ever before, and we are flooded by impossible amounts of data, of ideas, of promises and of threats. Humans are relinquishing authority to the free market, to crowd wisdom and to external algorithms partly because we cannot deal with the deluge of data. In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. So considering everything that is happening in our chaotic world, what should we focus on?
If we think in term of months, we had probably focus on immediate problems such as the turmoil in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe and the slowing of the Chinese economy. If we think in terms of decades, then global warming, growing inequality and the disruption of the job market loom large. Yet if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
1.Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing.
2.Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3.Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book:
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?
Notes
1 The New Human Agenda
1.Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 52.
2.Ibid., 53. See also: J. Neumann and S. Lindgrén, ‘Great Historical Events That Were Significantly Affected by the Weather: 4, The Great Famines in Finland and Estonia, 1695–97’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 60 (1979), 775–87; Andrew B. Appleby, ‘Epidemics and Famine in the Little Ice Age’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10:4 (1980), 643–63; Cormac Ó Gráda and Jean-Michel Chevet, ‘Famine and Market in Ancien Régime France’, Journal of Economic History 62:3 (2002), 706–73.
3.Nicole Darmon et al., ‘L’insécurité alimentaire pour raisons financières en France’, Observatoire National de la Pauvreté et de l’Exclusion Sociale, https://www.onpes.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/Darmon.pdf, accessed 3 March 2015; Rapport Annuel 2013, Banques Alimetaires, http://en.calameo.com/read/001358178ec47d2018425, accessed 4 March 2015.
4.Richard Dobbs et al., ‘How the World Could Better Fight Obesity’, McKinseys & Company, November 2014, accessed 11 December 2014, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/how_the_world_could_better_fight_obesity.
5.‘Global Burden of Disease, Injuries and Risk Factors Study 2013’, Lancet, 18 December 2014, accessed 18 December 2014, http://www.thelancet.com/themed/global-burden-of-disease; Stephen Adams, ‘Obesity Killing Three Times As Many As Malnutrition’, Telegraph, 13 December 2012, accessed 18 December 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9742960/Obesity-killing-three-times-as-many-asmalnutrition.html.
6.Robert S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1990), 427.
7.Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).
8.Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 443–6; Rodolfo Acuna-Soto et al., ‘Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico’, Historical Review 8:4 (2002), 360–2; Sherburne F. Cook and Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948).
9.Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), 167.
10.Jeffery K. Taubenberger and David M. Morens, ‘1918 Influenza: The Mother of All Pandemics’, Emerging Infectious Diseases 12:1 (2006), 15–22; Niall P. A. S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, ‘Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 “Spanish” Influenza Pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76:1 (2002), 105–15; Stacey L. Knobler, Alison Mack, Adel Mahmoud et al., (eds), The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready? Workshop Summary (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2005), 57–110; David van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 164; Siddharth Chandra, Goran Kuljanin and Jennifer Wray, ‘Mortality from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: The Case of India’, Demography 49:3 (2012), 857–65; George C. Kohn, Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present, 3rd edn (New York: Facts on File, 2008), 363.
11.The averages between 2005 and 2010 were 4.6 per cent globally, 7.9 per cent in Africa and 0.7 per cent in Europe and North America. See: ‘Infant Mortality Rate (Both Sexes Combined) by Major Area, Region and Country, 1950–2010 (Infant Deaths for 1000 Live Births), Estimates’, World Population Prospects: the 2010 Revision, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, April 2011, accessed 26 May 2012, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/mortality.htm. See also Alain Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins and Hector Perez-Brignoli (eds), Infant and Child Mortality in the Past (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Edward Anthony Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 295–6, 303.
12.David A. Koplow, Smallpox: The Fight to Eradicate a Global Scourge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Abdel R. Omran, ‘The Epidemiological Transition: A Theory of Population Change’, Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 83:4 (2005), 731–57; Thomas McKeown, The Modern Rise of Populations (New York: Academic Press, 1976); Simon Szreter, Health and Wealth: Studies in History and Policy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005); Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris and Sok Chul Hong, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); James C. Riley, Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13.‘Cholera’, World Health Organization, February 2014, accessed 18 December 2014, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs107/en/index.html.
14.‘Experimental Therapies: Growing Interest in the Use of Whole Blood or Plasma from Recovered Ebola Patients’, World Health Organization, 26 September 2014, accessed 23 April 2015, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/ebola/26-september-2014/en/.
15.Hung Y. Fan, Ross F. Conner and Luis P. Vill
16.Peter Piot and Thomas C. Quinn, ‘Response to the AIDS Pandemic – A Global Health Model’, New England Journal of Medicine 368:23 (2013), 2210–18.
17.‘Old age’ is never listed as a cause of death in official statistics. Instead, when a frail old woman eventually succumbs to this or that infection, the particular infection will be listed as the cause of death. Hence, officially, infectious diseases still account for more than 20 per cent of deaths. But this is a fundamentally different situation than in past centuries, when large numbers of children and fit adults died from infectious diseases.
18.David M. Livermore, ‘Bacterial Resistance: Origins, Epidemiology, and Impact’, Clinical Infectious Diseases 36:s1 (2005), s11–23; Richards G. Wax et al. (eds), Bacterial Resistance to Antimicrobials, 2nd edn (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2008); Maja Babic and Robert A. Bonomo, ‘Mutations as a Basis of Antimicrobial Resistance’, in Antimicrobial Drug Resistance: Mechanisms of Drug Resistance, ed. Douglas Mayers, vol. 1 (New York: Humana Press, 2009), 65–74; Julian Davies and Dorothy Davies, ‘Origins and Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance’, Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 74:3 (2010), 417–33; Richard J. Fair and Yitzhak Tor, ‘Antibiotics and Bacterial Resistance in the 21st Century’, Perspectives in Medicinal Chemistry 6 (2014), 25–64.
19.Alfonso J. Alanis, ‘Resistance to Antibiotics: Are We in the Post-Antibiotic Era?’, Archives of Medical Research 36:6 (2005), 697–705; Stephan Harbarth and Matthew H. Samore, ‘Antimicrobial Resistance Determinants and Future Control’, Emerging Infectious Diseases 11:6 (2005), 794–801; Hiroshi Yoneyama and Ryoichi Katsumata, ‘Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria and Its Future for Novel Antibiotic Development’, Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry 70:5 (2006), 1060–75; Cesar A. Arias and Barbara E. Murray, ‘Antibiotic-Resistant Bugs in the 21st Century – A Clinical Super-Challenge’, New England Journal of Medicine 360 (2009), 439–43; Brad Spellberg, John G. Bartlett and David N. Gilbert, ‘The Future of Antibiotics and Resistance’, New England Journal of Medicine 368 (2013), 299–302.
20.Losee L. Ling et al., ‘A New Antibiotic Kills Pathogens without Detectable Resistance’, Nature 517 (2015), 455–9; Gerard Wright, ‘Antibiotics: An Irresistible Newcomer’, Nature 517 (2015), 442–4.
21.Roey Tzezana, The Guide to the Future [in Hebrew] (Haifa: Roey Tzezana, 2013), 209–33.
22.Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 130–1; Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011); Joshua S. Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide (New York: Dutton, 2011); Robert S. Walker and Drew H. Bailey, ‘Body Counts in Lowland South American Violence’, Evolution and Human Behavior 34:1 (2013), 29–34; I. J. N. Thorpe, ‘Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare’, World Archaeology 35:1 (2003), 145–65; Raymond C. Kelly, Warless Societies and the Origin of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Slavomil Vencl, ‘Stone Age Warfare’, in Ancient Warfare: Archaeological Perspectives, ed. John Carman and Anthony Harding (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 57–73.
23.‘Global Health Observatory Data Repository, 2012’, World Health Organization, accessed 16 August 2015, http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.RCODWORLD?lang=en; ‘Global Study on Homicide, 2013’, UNDOC, accessed 16 August 2015, http://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs/2014_GLOBAL_HOMICIDE_BOOK_web.pdf; http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates/en/index1.html.
24.Van Reybrouck, Congo, 456–7.
25.Deaths from obesity: ‘Global Burden of Disease, Injuries and Risk Factors Study 2013’, Lancet, 18 December 2014, accessed 18 December 2014, http://www.thelancet.com/themed/global-burden-of-disease; Stephen Adams, ‘Obesity Killing Three Times as Many as Malnutrition’, Telegraph, 13 December 2012, accessed 18 December 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9742960/Obesity-killing-three-times-as-manyas-malnutrition.html. Deaths from terrorism: Global Terrorism Database, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/, accessed 16 January 2016.
26.Arion McNicoll, ‘How Google’s Calico Aims to Fight Aging and “Solve Death”’, CNN, 3 October 2013, accessed 19 December 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/03/tech/innovation/google-calicoaging-death/.
27.Katrina Brooker, ‘Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality’, Bloomberg, 9 March 2015, accessed 15 April 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/googleventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500.
28.Mick Brown, ‘Peter Thiel: The Billionaire Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission to Cheat Death’, Telegraph, 19 September 2014, accessed 19 December 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11098971/Peter-Thiel-the-billionaire-tech-entrepreneur-on-a-mission-to-cheatdeath.html.
29.Kim Hill et al., ‘Mortality Rates Among Wild Chimpanzees’, Journal of Human Evolution 40:5 (2001), 437–50; James G. Herndon, ‘Brain Weight Throughout the Life Span of the Chimpanzee’, Journal of Comparative Neurology 409 (1999), 567–72.
30.Beatrice Scheubel, Bismarck’s Institutions: A Historical Perspective on the Social Security Hypothesis (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013); E. P. Hannock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
31.‘Mental Health: Age Standardized Suicide Rates (per 100,000 population), 2012’, World Health Organization, accessed 28 December 2014, http://gamapserver.who.int/gho/interactive_charts/mental_health/suicide_rates/atlas.html.
32.Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 626–9.
33.David G. Myers, ‘The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People’, American Psychologist 55:1 (2000), 61; Ronald Inglehart et al., ‘Development, Freedom, and Rising Happiness: A Global Perspective (1981–2007)’, Perspectives on Psychological Science 3:4 (2008), 264–85. See also Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘If We Are So Rich, Why Aren’t We Happy?’, American Psychologist 54:10 (1999), 821–7; Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2003).
34.Kenji Suzuki, ‘Are They Frigid to the Economic Development? Reconsideration of the Economic Effect on Subjective Well-being in Japan’, Social Indicators Research 92:1 (2009), 81–9; Richard A. Easterlin, ‘Will Raising the Incomes of all Increase the Happiness of All?’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 27:1 (1995), 35–47; Richard A. Easterlin, ‘Diminishing Marginal Utility of Income? Caveat Emptor’, Social Indicators Research 70:3 (2005), 243–55.
35.Linda C. Raeder, John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
36.Oliver Turnbull and Mark Solms, The Brain and the Inner World [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005), 92–6; Kent C. Berridge and Morten L. Kringelbach, ‘Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure: Reward in Humans and Animals’, Psychopharmacology 199 (2008), 457–80; Morten L. Kringelbach, The Pleasure Center: Trust Your Animal Instincts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
37.M. Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
38.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html, accessed 4 January 2016; Sarah Harris, ‘Number of Children Given Drugs for ADHD Up Ninefold with Patients As Young As Three Being Prescribed Ritalin’, Daily Mail, 28 June 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2351427/Number-children-given-drugs-ADHD-ninefoldpatients-young-THREE-prescribed-Ritalin.html, accessed 4 January 2016; International Narcotics Control Board (UN), Psychotropic Substances, Statistics for 2013, Assessments of Annual Medical and Scientific Requirements 2014, 39–40.
39.There is insufficient evidence regarding the abuse of such stimulants by schoolchildren, but a 2013 study has found that between 5 and 15
40.Bradley J. Partridge, ‘Smart Drugs “As Common as Coffee”: Media Hype about Neuroenhancement’, PLoS One 6:11 (2011), e28416.
41.Office of the Chief of Public Affairs Press Release, ‘Army, Health Promotion Risk Reduction Suicide Prevention Report, 2010’, accessed 23 December 2014, http://csf2.army.mil/downloads/HP-RR-SPReport2010. pdf; Mark Thompson, ‘America’s Medicated Army’, Time, 5 June 2008, accessed 19 December 2014, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812055,00.html; Office of the Surgeon Multi-National Force–Iraq and Office of the Command Surgeon, ‘Mental Health Advisory Team (MHAT) V Operation Iraqi Freedom 06–08: Iraq Operation Enduring Freedom 8: Afghanistan’, 14 February 2008, accessed 23 December 2014, http://www.careforthetroops.org/reports/Report-MHATV-4-FEB-2008-Overview.pdf.
42.Tina L. Dorsey, ‘Drugs and Crime Facts’, US Department of Justice, accessed 20 February 2015, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dcf.pdf; H. C. West, W. J. Sabol and S. J. Greenman, ‘Prisoners in 2009’, US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin (December 2010), 1–38; ‘Drugs and Crime Facts: Drug Use and Crime’, US Department of Justice, accessed 19 December 2014, http://www.bjs.gov/content/dcf/duc.cfm; ‘Offender Management Statistics Bulletin, July to September 2014’, UK Ministry of Justice, 29 January 2015, accessed 20 February 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterlyjuly-to-september-2014.; Mirian Lights et al., ‘Gender Differences in Substance Misuse and Mental Health amongst Prisoners’, UK Ministry of Justice, 2013, accessed 20 February 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/220060/gender-substance-misuse-mental-health-prisoners.pdf; Jason Payne and Antonette Gaffney, ‘How Much Crime is Drug or Alcohol Related? Self-Reported Attributions of Police Detainees’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 439 (2012), http://www.aic.gov.au/media_library/publications/tandi_pdf/tandi439.pdf, accessed 11 March 2015; Philippe Robert, ‘The French Criminal Justice System’, in Punishment in Europe: A Critical Anatomy of Penal Systems, ed. Vincenzo Ruggiero and Mick Ryan (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 116.