Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari - Review

 

In the course of our evolution from being microbes, to amoebae, chimpanzee and finally Homo Sapiens, is it really our last station? Yuval tries to trace the evolution of mankind and projects what’s the likely course of direction that humans would eventually take.

He also tries to distinguish humans from animals from a varied standpoints to figure out what really made the difference. In terms of pure individual ability most of the dangerous animals or snakes would beat us down to death in no time. However, in terms of our collective ability, the animals just don’t stand a chance.

Let’s first assess the similarities of human and animals from a couple of perspectives which is the objective and subjective reality that are inherent in both. Let me throw some light on the above-mentioned factors, objective reality is the same for all species like gravity, wind, fire, water and similar entities. But animals also experience subjective realities like anger, pain, lust and love. However, humans possessed the unique ability to create intersubjective realities like nation, law, society and corporations which clearly transformed us to a completely different league.

Though humans could create intersubjective realities and evolve using myriad mental formations, three main factors like famine, epidemic diseases and war kept us in check for at least couple of millenniums of recorded history. Stepping into the third decade of the third millennium, we are fairly guaranteed of nutritious food on the table every day, tons of medicines to cure diseases or keep them in check and finally all countries have realized that a full-fledged war can just trash their respective economy. One of the key reasons why the world has not seen a repetition of world war 2, keeping every major nation in check for the past 75 years.

About a couple of centuries back, peace was seen a temporary absence of war. However, in the current era, peace is fairly guaranteed despite all the nuclear weapons possessed by sizeable nations.

Yuval projects life sciences as an area that’s likely to explode in terms of possibilities. With regenerative medicines already making a lot of headway, nano-robots being used to surgically kill only the cancer cells and a plethora of other path breaking discoveries, we are likely to see the average age of humans go well past 100 years. In fact, he even states that Pay Pal founder has made serious plans to live an eternal life. So, will it be commonplace for humans to integrate organic forms of their body with inorganic entity like a machine?

What about pre-empting diseases?, In 2013, Angelina Jolie has undergone preventive double mastectomy to decrease breast cancer risk. In another 4 to 5 decades, pre-emptive surgeries may very much become a norm.

We now come to the larger question, can highly evolved algorithm replace humans in decision making? In 2014, Hong Kong based VC has appointed VITAL which is basically a machine learning algorithm as one amongst the five board of directors. So, VITAL can vote in the decision making process.

There are more attributes that Yuval discusses in detail while even touching upon the different forms of government, the reasons of failure and which one is likely to sustain and evolve.

Overall, I would say a really good read.