Dr. Yuval Noah Harari wrote a sequel to his book Sapiens, which--just on the conceptual level--is kind of impressive. After all, Sapiens is a record of human kind, with a broad view of the entirety of the evolution and history of the species. And though he deliberately (and necessarily) has to abridge that history over the course of a single volume, that book is really thought provoking and detailed nonetheless. If you haven't picked it up, I'd recommend it (though realize that the guy's a bit of a polemicist, even if he wouldn't consider himself one, and he relies heavily on scientific processes and explanations) as it makes for some interesting reading and might adjust the way you view the world.
Homo Deus, then, is the sequel. And if you're writing a sequel to a history book that is supposed to cover the history of humanity on the planet, there isn't a lot of room to grow, is there? And, yet, here we are. Sapiens' subtitle is A Brief History of Humankind. For Homo Deus, Dr. Harari picked A Brief History of Tomorrow. That really sums up the thesis of the book: Where do we go from here? Harari starts off by talking about the three largest problems that humanity has had to deal with since its inception: War, plague, and famine. Most of human history involves looking at the struggle against these three things. Our current society is an outgrowth of those priorities…yet they are, according to Dr. Harari, conquered. Though war still happens, we don't see it on the same scale we did in the past--particularly a century ago. Diseases can threaten small sections of humanity, but modern medicine has made significant inroads--so significant that massive epidemics appear to be a thing of the past. And, as he points out early on, for the first time in human history, more people are dying because of overeating than undereating. The argument of the rest of the book is one of potential futures of mankind. He isn't looking closely at the ecological future (that's The Sixth Extinction), so there's an assumption in his arguments that we'll either fix the problem or invent a solution to massive ecological loss. In that sense, he's pretty cheery about the future prospects, which include self-driving cars, automated everything, and an eventual disappearance of humankind into a mass of information according to dataism (belief in the supremacy of data) and current trends. Harari attacks all sorts of closely-held beliefs, including liberalism, humanism, socialism, capitalism (though he gives it a utilitarian pass by avoiding the quickly admitted shortcomings), free will, and the reality of gods or God. This iconoclasm isn't particularly shocking, as he'd made similar claims in Sapiens. But he is more thorough in this book, taking time to address the strangeness of consciousness--which he admits science can't explain--and then pushes the argument further to dismiss the unique status of humanity as anything other than the current winner for survival. On the one hand, I can see where he's coming from: We exceptional humans have decided that we're exceptional, and since there's nothing else who lives up to the criteria we set out to justify our exceptionality, we must, therefore, be exceptional. It's a bit like arguing that the hare is better than the fish at running a race, therefore the hare is better. And there's a humbling allure to this. What makes us special? Almost every tick-box on our list can be found in another species of animal, including language, social behaviors, and a host of other human traits. Is it that all of these things together, rather than any one thing, makes us special? For humans, we often say that we have a soul, yet Dr. Harari dismisses this as being unprovable. Consciousness, of course, is inexplicable, but we see the effects. The assumption, then, that there's a point at which the intelligence gathered inside of a system switches over to consciousness is his reason for arguing that robots--in the near future--will have to be granted human rights on the same grounds. All of these ideas are interesting and any one of them is worth interrogating at length. But the one question that really got me thinking was (and I'm paraphrasing, since I listened to the book and don't have the text in front of me), the one about religion. It should be fairly clear that, if Dr. Harari believes what he's writing, he himself is an atheist. I'm not, so there's definitely a difference in opinion, as it were, on that front. However, what I can't argue is Harari's point about how religion used to be on the forefront of creating humanity. Looking specifically at the radical changes that grew out of the Protestant Reformation, Harari notes that religion used to be the hotbed of new thinking. Changes of behavior and society came because of religious impetus, with religious justifications. Now, however, he argues that religions are all reactionary. They aren't making any claims about the future, but rather cling more pointedly to the past. And while there may be more nuance than he's finding, he has a point with this one: Religions aren't equipped to answer the larger questions that scientific breakthroughs are creating on an almost daily basis. While the Bible may have some pretty solid answers for things like how to treat other people and how to behave around a neighbor's ass, there's nothing in there that answers the questions about robot consciousness. Transhumanism (which Harari alludes to but never calls out precisely) makes the argument that human experience, being exclusively mental, can be downloaded out of the human body, digitized, then put back into a new body--mechanical or organic, it varies on the transhumanist. What does the Bible say about that? To be more specific, Harari claims that death is a matter of a technical glitch in the human system. Once we figure out the technical problem, scientifically-generated immortality will be possible. How does one stand before the Judgment Seat of God if one never dies? What happens when 80 becomes the new 50? How does one go about "honoring thy father and thy mother" when there are multiple generations, each going in separate directions? Say that death isn't completely defeated, but is instead delayed (as every medical intervention is designed to do)? How does one plan a family in that instance? Is having children and a family a transient thing, like public schooling? The idea that Homo sapiens can be so modified means, for Dr. Harari, that we will step out of this species designation and become Homo deus…god-like Man. And that's enough to put religious readers on edge. Of course, the religious answers to the earlier questions are likely to be reactionary. "Oh, well, it's blasphemous to say we can live forever" (though that's the point of the resurrection). Or, perhaps, "we can live forever, but only through God's plan". In other words, it's not an approach to the changes, nor are there predictions for this sort of thing within religions themselves; instead, it's a denial of them, a push away, a rejection. Even on something that isn't so eschatologically fraught (though what isn't eschatologically fraught when it comes to religion?), such as human rights for sentient and conscious robots, I don't think religion is equipped to talk about it. I mean, I can see myself raising the question in Sunday School and being dismissed with a thoughtless snort. (Okay, I'd never mention the idea in Sunday School. I'm silently iconoclastic.) What frustrates me about this concept, though, is that, based upon the truth claims of Mormonism, we shouldn't be afraid of talking about these questions. That's the whole point of the religion: To seek out truth. And there are undiscovered truths, which Mormonism is supposed to accept. But can it? As I said before, the book is immensely thought-provoking, as well as replete with thoughts that ought to be grappled with. I don't know how many of his predictions (or, as he prefers to think of them, "possibilities") will--or even can--come true. Still, the book is worth reading, thinking about, rejecting or accepting. Unlike some of the other books that I've read lately, it's one that I feel like needs time to ponder and, perhaps, even a reread. |
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