This is the sequel to HomoSapiens by the same author. This is also a continuation of Harari’s train
of thought from what is happening in the present, to what will happen in the
future. He opens the book saying that in the past, man’s goal has been to
eradicate famine, disease, and poverty. Well most of the world is free from
this now. So man’s goals are changing, and instead we are focusing on achieving
immortality and becoming godlike. Not in the sense that we are omniscient, but
in the sense that we have immense power and control over everything surrounding
us.
Of course this all builds directly off of his previous work.
As a result, to me it felt like there was a lot of recapping in the first half
of the book. He went through some concepts that he already covered, but that
continue to be relevant, for those that needed a refresher of his previous book
or those that didn’t read it. Which is good, but my mind was less blown the
second time around.
The really interesting part is when he gets to his
discussion of humanism. That is, the idea that humans are individuals with a
unique inner voice, and that there is no God, only us and what we choose to do
with ourselves. That there is something special about humans and consciousness
that nothing else has. However, this view is brought into conflict by the
expansion of science and technology. Increasingly, we are not organisms but
rather algorithms that take in sensory information and put out specific
reactions to them. Consciousness is also proven to be accessory as more and
more intelligent machines do everything that we can, just without
consciousness.
Harari being himself, he takes this idea and pushes it to
the limit. The world he describes is one ruled by data and numbers, where we
are not making any decisions for ourselves, but instead letting machines who
know all of our feelings make choices for us. It sounds far-fetched, but Harari
constantly uses examples from the present day to demonstrate that we are indeed
already on the path to this. Facebook records our likes, machines can write
beautiful symphonies, armbands track our heart rate and blood pressure already,
it is not such a big leap to imagine this happening.
Throughout this whole book Harari refrains from discussing
whether these changes are good or bad. He ignores that question entirely and
leaves that up to the reader. However at the end, he leaves us with three
questions regarding the future of society. Are all organisms merely algorithms,
and as a result is life data? Is intelligence or consciousness more valuable?
Finally, what will happen when algorithms know us better than we know
ourselves? At the very end of the novel, Harari leaves it up to us to decide
how we feel about this as a future.
One interesting aspect that he does not discuss though is
determinism. Sure he discusses free will and how as algorithms we have a
distinct lack of it, but he does not go into manifestations of a society based
on determinism. To be fair, there are limited practical aspects of determinism,
but it would have been interesting to see it mentioned.
Like Homo Sapiens
this is a mind-blowing mammoth of a novel. Harari masterfully explains just
where life is headed, and then leaves it up to us to determine how we feel
about it. Part philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and biology it combines
several disciplines to portray his ideas about the world and life. As a result,
nearly anyone can pick it up and follow what he is discussing, and see just how
data proposes to overtake our lives.
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