‘Homo sapiens are in the process of becoming gods’

NATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY ARE LIKE SMALL TRIBES ALONG A SINGLE GLOBAL RIVER OF INFORMATION, SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES AND TECHNOLOGICAL INVENTIONS

NATIONALISM IS MAKING A COMEBACK. Not just in some remote corners of the world but also in the hegemonic powers of Western Europe, North America, Russia, China and India. What does the revival of nationalism signify? Does nationalism offer real solutions to the unprecedented problems of the 21st century? Or is it an escapist indulgence that might doom humankind and the entire ecosystem to disaster? Contrary to what many people think, nationalism is actually a very recent evolutionary development. Yes, man

is a social animal by nature, but for millions of years, humans lived in small intimate communities. Only in the last 5,000 years or so, the small clans and tribes united to form larger and larger groups until they formed nations, comprising millions of strangers. Nations appeared because they can solve large-scale problems that small tribes cannot, nations can provide people with many essential services with a greater degree of security and prosperity.

The key question to ask is whether nations are still the right framework to address our main problems and opportunities,

to ensure security and prosperity? The answer is no. Nations in the 21st century are like the small independent tribes that lived along the Indus Valley 5,000 years ago. All humans now live along a single global river, a river of information, of scientific discoveries and technological inventions. This river is the source of our prosperity but it is also a great threat to human civilisation. No nation can hope to regulate this river of information and inventions by itself. All the big challenges we now face are global in nature and, therefore, demand global solutions: nuclear challenge, the ecological

For the first time in history, you have a greater chance of killing yourself than of being killed by a soldier, a terrorist or a criminal”

challenge and the challenge of disruptive technologies.

Since the 1950s, it has become very clear that no single nation can protect itself or the world against the nuclear danger. Many thought that the Cold War would turn into a very hot nuclear war, destroying human civilisation. This did not happen, not due to the actions of a single nation, but because of human wisdom. But there is no guarantee that we will continue to make wise decisions. Zealous nationalists who cry, “my country first, my country is the most important,” should ask themselves: how can your country without the help of a robust system of international cooperation protect itself and the world from nuclear war? It cannot.

The second big global challenge is the ecological challenge. We are destabilising the ecological system to such a degree that we now face the danger of climate change and of ecological collapse. If things continue in the present course, in 50 years it might be impossible to live in Mumbai. Either because the Indian Ocean will rise and swallow up much of the city or because it will be so hot that nobody could live here. And this is something that no single nation can prevent by itself, however powerful, because nations are not ecologically sovereign.

The biggest challenge of all is probably of technological disruption. In the coming decades artificial intelligence (AI) and bio-engineering are going to create enormous new opportunities as well as enormous new problems. One prominent example is that the rise of AI, computers and robots might push billions of people out of the job market. We might have hundreds of millions of people with no economic value and, therefore, no political power.

Another global problem created by the new technologies might be the development of autonomous weapon systems, killer robots. This is one of the most dangerous technological developments but again no nation can prevent this from happening by itself, because no nation has a monopoly over science and technology.

For four billion years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of life. It didn’t matter if you were an amoeba or a dinosaur, a banana plant or Homo sapiens, you were made of organic compounds and you evolved by natural selection. In the coming decades, this is going to change. Science is about to replace natural selection with intelligent design as the chief mortar of evolution. Not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds, but the intelligent design of our clouds—the IBM cloud, the Google cloud.

We are about to create the first inorganic life forms after four billion years of evolution. In the process, Homo sapiens are likely to disappear. Not because we will destroy ourselves, but because we will change and upgrade ourselves into something very different. The combination of AI and bioengineering will create completely new bodily and physical and mental traits. Consciousness itself might be disconnected from any organic structure; or alternatively, we might see the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness. And earth will be dominated by entities that are super intelligent but completely non-conscious: computer programmes that have no minds, no feelings, and no emotions.

So we are in the process of becoming gods and the big question that faces us is what to do with our new god-like powers. We need ethical guidelines and goals and nationalism cannot provide us with the necessary guidelines and goals. Nationalism thinks on the level of territorial conflicts.

In order to survive and flourish in the 21st century, humankind must complement national loyalties with a loyalty towards a global community. We are already living in a global world, we have a global ecology, we have a global economy and we have global science, but we still have only nationalist politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from countering our main problems. To have effective politics, we need to do either of two things: either we de-globalise the ecology, the economy, the science and make them local; or we globalise our politics. Now it is obviously impossible to de-globalise ecology and the march of science and it will be extremely costly to de-globalise the economy. Therefore, the only real solution is to globalise our politics.

There are two kinds of gods in the world and people tend to mix them up. There is one god, mystery god, about whom we know nothing. All the things that science doesn’t know, people say this is the god. And I am perfectly happy with this god. Then there is a completely opposite kind of concrete law-giver god. About this god, we know far too much: what this god thinks about female fashion, about human sexuality, about who you should vote for, everything. This is the god I don’t believe in. If there is a force responsible for the great mystery of life in the universe, in the black holes and the galaxies, I don’t think he or she really cares about female dress code.”