Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
I have just finished reading this book. I would strongly recommend to read it to everyone interested in possible development in the future – it also looks that me and some guy named Bill Gates have same opinion. After reading this book, you start to think a little bit differently about your future. I don’t want to go much into details of the book. There is so much information and opinions that I would need to rewrite the whole book again to catch them all. I would just like to point out several ideas and questions, which do not have one right answer, but I think it is worth to take a while and think about them.
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Are the scientific theories new kind of myth – something like in ancient Greece or Egypt? If we focus on that deeply, there are not so many differences. For example Egyptians’ god Sobek “helped” people to build dams and canals to prevent floods and droughts. People observed them indirectly – through stars, rain … Kind of similar like looking for new particles which can’t be observed directly.
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Every society (communism, christianity, capitalism …) tells its memebers that they must obey some superhuman moral law, and that breaking this law will result in a catastrophe. Religions only add some stories to that but the base is the same.
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It is interesting to realize that if you are a child, you are kind of self-focused. You think that all things happen only because of you. That is also the reason why is it so hard for a child to be in a divorced household – he/she thinks that divorce has happened because of him/her and does not get the idea that his/her parents are also independent creatures. Most people grow out of this infantile delusion. But for example the basic idea of monoteishm is similar to that. People are convinced that everything is happening because of God.
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What is the consciousness? Is it real? How to define it? Maybe it is only useless biological by-product of certain brain processes. Try to imagine that consciousness is only “mental polution”, something like carbon dioxide is “pollution” in our breath.
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If our mood depends on our food, are we still responsibile for action which we do when we are sad because of food? Is the human behavior only a product of biological reactions, which are occuring in your brain?
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You see elephant dancing on the road, what is the first thing you would think of? Most people say – where is my smartphone? I need to take a video of that and post it on social network. But don’t you think it would be better to think about the reason why the elephant is dacing on the road?
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Do you know that there is a customer-service system which will ask you for a reason of your call and after that analyze your voice (speed of speaking, intonation…) to match you with right people based on your personality?
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If a lot of people would search for “flu cure” in one time from one location, does it start caranteen of that certain area? Google can maybe already do that. Maybe even with your emails… Do you think it would be correct to stop spreading that disease? Even with some data company analysing your emails?
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Are we losing our senses? Do you even pay attention when you eat something? Usually watching TV or browsing on your mobile – it is the reason why the food producers try to invent so many new flavors… trying to get your attention. Is it the same with your holidays? Maybe you are not focusing on stuff going on around you so the travel agencies has to invent new cool attractions… Maybe.
- Is it better to listen to your “gut feeling” which was improved by milions of generations of your ancestors or algorithm which was improved by milions of people in the current generation?
- Do we even need to attend democratic elections? Maybe algorithms would do it better…
- What if happiness of children was guaranteed by some new kind of technology? Does it change a role of the parents? Would they lose “the purpose of life”?
And the last one rewritten from the book (related to other questions above):
“What would happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms knew us better than we know ourselves?”
