Overthinking the future
In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari sets out to present a sweeping history of the human race, explaining our rise and pondering our future. An odd decision, perhaps, because he’s already written one. Homo Deus takes ideas from its bestselling predecessor, Sapiens, and works them out at greater length.
Harari argues that mankind’s three great scourges – hunger, disease and war – have been ‘‘transformed from incomprehensible forces of nature into manageable challenges’’.
Our next project will be to conquer death, achieve bliss and ascend to godhead, riding a wave of advances in biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
We believe we can take on these challenges because humanism is the dominant ideology of the modern age but, he warns, humanism carries the seeds of its own destruction.
His book is less a prophecy, he says, than a prompt to consider the kind of future we want. If, for instance, the super-rich upgrade themselves into ageless superhumans tended by, or blended with, intelligent machines, what becomes of you and me?
And what happens next? We may understand the technologies, but will we understand the world these new humans create?
With source material spanning dozens of disciplines, the book is often interesting and occasionally fascinating.
Translated from the original Hebrew by the author, it’s also punchy and peppered with oneliners like ‘‘the greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance’’ and ‘‘God is dead, it just takes a while to get rid of the body’’.
But it’s not always convincing. Too many arguments are based on unsupported assertions and dodgy logic to give you the confidence to follow Harari to his destination.
And if you do ride along, he sometimes drops you off just when you think you’re getting somewhere. In an extended attack on factory farming, for example, he takes issue with the selfcentredness of humanism, pointing out that some scientists (and in a world-first, New Zealand’s animal welfare laws) argue that animals are sentient.
Should we replace humanism with sentientism? He doesn’t say. But if you’re going to try to tear down an entire system of belief, I reckon it’s only polite to offer an alternative.
I’m not sure who Harari is writing for either. A fellow historian might appreciate his lengthy dissertation on Humanism Then and Now, but it seems too abstract and academic to be of wider interest.
His transhumanist musings might appeal to technophiles, but I imagine most of them would prefer the true-believer visions of boffin prophets like Ray Kurzweil to Harari’s once-over-lightly survey.
He risks losing the secular by branding humanism a religion, and the religious when he calls their beliefs ‘‘infantile delusion’’. Not much of an audience left after that.