Homo deus-History of future_Harari
As with its predecessor, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari recounts the course of history while describing events and the individual human experience, along with ethical issues in relation to his historical survey. Homo Deus, as opposed to the previous book, deals more with the abilities acquired by humans (Homo sapiens) throughout its existence, and its evolution as the dominant species in the world; the book attempts to paint an image of the future. Many philosophical issues are discussed, such as the human experience, individualism, human emotion and consciousness. The book describes the current abilities and achievements of mankind.
Central thesis
- Organisms are algorithms, and as such homo sapiens may not be dominant in a universe where dataism becomes the paradigm.
- Since the verbal/language revolution some 70,000 years ago, humans live within an “intersubjective reality”, such as countries, borders, religion, and money, all created to enable large-scale, flexible cooperation between different individual human beings.
- Humankind’s immense ability to give meaning to its actions and thoughts is what has enabled its many achievements.
- Humanism is a form of religion that worships humankind instead of God. It puts humankind and its desires as a top priority in the world in which humans themselves are framed as the dominant beings. During the 21st century, Harari believes that humanism may push humans to search for immortality, happiness, and power.
- Technological developments have threatened the continued ability of humans to give meaning to their lives; Harari prophesies the replacement of humankind with a super-man, or “homo deus” (human god) endowed with supernatural abilities such as eternal life.
At the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chilling idea: human nature will be transformed in the 21st century because intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness. We are not going to build machines any time soon that have feelings like we have feelings: that’s consciousness. Robots won’t be falling in love with each other (which doesn’t mean we are incapable of falling in love with robots). But we have already built machines – vast data-processing networks – that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves: that’s intelligence. Google – the search engine, not the company – doesn’t have beliefs and desires of its own. It doesn’t care what we search for and it won’t feel hurt by our behaviour. But it can process our behaviour to know what we want before we know it ourselves. That fact has the potential to change what it means to be human.Ref:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review