Future shock: scary predictions
An Israeli historian predicts human beings will soon be biogenetically engineered – and that billions of people will serve no purpose
IMAGINE a world where biogenetically engineered cyborgs capable of growing new limbs rule. A world where data is worshipped and artificial intelligence has taken over everyday tasks, leaving people with nothing to do but immerse themselves in virtual reality and take drugs. Sounds like something from a sci-fi horror flick, right? Totally – except this nightmare scenario is well on its way to becoming reality, if Israeli historian and author Yuval Noah Harari is to be believed. And his disturbing vision of the future of humankind is enough to send chills down your spine.
“I think that Homo sapiens as we know them will probably disappear within a century or so, not destroyed by killer robots or things like that but changed and upgraded with biotechnology and artificial intelligence into something else – into something different,” the 41-year-old says.
Harari’s 2014 bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind, earned him the kind of awe global icons such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg enjoy. Now his recently released sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow, delves even deeper into questions of identity and consciousness.
Harari grew up in a Jewish family in Haifa, Israel, and studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before completing his doctorate at Oxford University in the UK.
He lives with his husband, Itzik Yahav, a former theatre producer who’s now his full-time manager, on an agricultural cooperative – where dwellers pool their resources – outside Jerusalem.
Being gay, he says, has helped him to question opinions and beliefs. “Nothing should be taken for granted,” he’s said, “even if everybody believes it.”
A vegan, he meditates for two hours a day and often goes on two-month retreats. Through meditation, Harari says he gains insight into what’s really important.
He believes the biggest misconception we have about ourselves is that technology will make us happier. “Looking again from a perspective of thousands of years, we’ve gained enormous power over the world and it doesn’t seem to make people significantly more satisfied than in the Stone Age,” he told The Guardian.
“For the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little,” he writes. “More people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
“In the early 21st century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an Al Qaeda attack.”
Harari says we’re moving into a future where billions of people will serve no economic or military purpose and the ultra-rich will strive for immortality and divinity. Here are some of his radical ideas.
THE HUMAN GOD
Harari believes that in 200 or 300 years from now the beings dominating Earth will differ far more greatly from us than we differ from Neanderthals or chimpanzees.
The wealthy will be transformed into a new type of divine, immortal human with complete power over life and death – godlike cyborgs in what could be the “biggest evolution in biology” since life emerged.
“The agricultural and industrial revolutions were about changing the world outside us,” he says. “This century [2100] will be about changing the world inside us – making new entities with new kinds of brains. We’re quickly acquiring powers that were always thought to be divine,” Harari says, explaining the premise of his book – the “deus” in the title of his latest book is Latin for “god”.
He predicts intelligence will uncouple from consciousness and algorithms created with all-round data will know
people better than they know themselves, and change what it means to be human.
Minuscule changes in the genes, hormones and neurons of Homo erectus transformed it from an insipid caveman to the Homo sapiens of today who engineered spaceships and super-computers, he says.
With a few small evolutionary adjustments sapiens will again evolve into a far superior being – Homo deus.
“Humans will acquire abilities that in the past were considered divine, such as eternal youth, mind reading and the ability to engineer life.”
A WORLD WITHOUT PURPOSE
Harari also believes these advanced humans will find themselves with less to do as most tasks will be done by robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Humankind will become “eternally useless” in the face of AI advances. The resulting shift could leave humans both jobless and aimless.
“Children alive today will face the consequences,” Harari told The Guardian. “Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they’re 40 or 50.
“If they want to continue to have a job and to understand the world and be relevant to what’s happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.”
As humans lose their usefulness they’ll become devalued in terms of political and economic systems, which in turn could result in people losing their sense of purpose. In a post-work world, human emotions might be controlled by drugs and virtual reality rather than real-life experiences.
THE STORIES THAT CONTROL US
At the centre of Harari’s new book is the idea that what has made Homo sapiens such a successful being is our ability to believe in shared fictions. Religion, nations and money, Harari says, are all stories we tell ourselves, enabling us to organise ourselves on a massive scale and to keep us taking part in the rat race. “Money is probably the most successful story ever told,” he says. “It has no objective value. It’s not like a banana or a coconut. If you take a dollar bill and look at it, you can’t eat it. You can’t drink it. You can’t wear it. “It’s absolutely worthless. We think it’s worth something, because we believe a story. “If I believe it and everybody believes it, it works. I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to a complete stranger whom I’ve never met before, give him this piece of paper, and he in exchange will give me a real banana I can eat. This is really amazing and no other animal can do it.”
The ability to buy into the stories we’ve created makes us more flexible and dynamic than societies in the animal kingdom, but it also renders us more fragile. Bees in a beehive, for example, can’t wake up one morning, execute the queen bee and establish a new social order – but in human societies these revolutions do take place.
“This is why every society invests so much effort in propaganda and brainwashing people from a very early age to believe in the dominant story of the society – because if they don’t believe, everything collapses,” Harari says.
THE QUESTION OF ETHICS
With technology marching ahead Harari is worried about our ability to keep up with the ethical dilemmas this creates. “Morality is more important than ever before. As we gain more power, the question of what we do with it becomes more and more crucial. The future of the entire ecological system and the future of the whole of life is really now in our hands.
“So to give just a simple example: what happens if several pedestrians jump in front of a self-driving car and it has to choose between killing, say, five pedestrians or swerving to the side and killing its owner? Now you have engineers producing these self-driving cars and they need to get an answer to this question.”
Fascinating – and disturbing – stuff.
‘We’re acquiring powers always thought to be divine’