Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
By Yuval Noah Harari (2015)
For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
My Notes
Coca-Cola kills, there are too many dogs, and religion… 🤔
Total number of deaths worldwide:
| Obesity and related illnesses | Terrorism |
|---|---|
| 3,000,000 | 7,697 |
☝️ 2010 figures.
For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda.
| War | Crime | Suicide | Diabetes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 120,000 | 500,000 | 800,000 | 1,500,000 |
☝️ 2012 figures.
Total number of animals worldwide:
| Wild Wolves | Domesticated Dogs (2,000×) |
|---|---|
| 200,000 | 400,000,000 |
| Lions | House Cats (15,000×) |
|---|---|
| 40,000 | 600,000,000 |
| African Buffalo | Domesticated Cows (16,667×) |
|---|---|
| 900,000 | 1,500,000,000 |
| Penguins | Chickens (400×) |
|---|---|
| 50,000,000 | 20,000,000,000 |
At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world (i.e. those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals.
Religion:
Throughout history prophets and philosophers have argued that if humans stopped believing in a great cosmic plan, all law and order would vanish. Yet today, those who pose the greatest threat to global law and order are precisely those people who continue to believe in God and His all-encompassing plans.
Knowledge economy:
… it would have made no sense for China to invade California and seize Silicon Valley, for even if the Chinese could somehow prevail on the battlefield, there were no silicon mines to loot in Silicon Valley. Instead, the Chinese have earned billions of dollars from cooperating with hi-tech giants such as Apple and Microsoft, buying their software and manufacturing their products. What Rwanda earned from an entire year of looting Congolese coltan, the Chinese earn in a single day of peaceful commerce.
Economic growth:
At the end of the nineteenth century countries such as France, Germany and Japan began providing free health care for the masses. They financed vaccinations for infants, balanced diets for children and physical education for teenagers. They drained festering swamps, exterminated mosquitoes and built centralised sewage systems. The aim wasn’t to make people happy, but to make the nation stronger. The country needed sturdy soldiers and workers, healthy women who would give birth to more soldiers and workers, and bureaucrats who came to the office punctually at 8 a.m. instead of lying sick at home.
Happiness:
What might have happened if a rare mutation had created a squirrel who, after eating a single nut, enjoys an everlasting sensation of bliss? Technically, this could actually be done by rewiring the squirrel’s brain. Who knows, perhaps it really happened to some lucky squirrel millions of years ago. But if so, that squirrel enjoyed an extremely happy and extremely short life, and that was the end of the rare mutation.
Information overload:
In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.
Intelligence or consciousness?
… what should we focus on? If we think in term of months, we had probably focus on immediate problems such as the turmoil in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe and the slowing of the Chinese economy. If we think in terms of decades, then global warming, growing inequality and the disruption of the job market loom large. Yet if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
- Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing.
- Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
- Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book:
- Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
- What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
- What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?