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“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”
After reading « Sapiens » by Yuval Noah Harari, which was one of my favourite reads (I did a review about it, you’ll find it on our blog), I was so excited to discover « Homodeus », a provocative and compelling book about the future of humankind. Sapiens was all about human’s past, revolution … it’s a historical book. Well this one is definitely a philosophical work.
Dr Yuval begins the books by talking about 3 main problems before the 21st century, or old enemies of the humankind : plague, famine and war, and how normally they’re under control now, and if any of those come up again, it’s humans fault. But the thing that humans try to achieve, to conquer, is immortality, divinity, being gods, but also to increase happiness. The author writes about our potential future in terms of our recent and ancient past.
During a big part of the book, Harari examines our current practices regarding technology, agriculture and animals. He underlines how we didn’t learn from our mistakes in the past and keep making them . It’s a sensitive yet an important subject. Animals are not so different from us, yet we treat them deplorably, especially in experiments. Harari is disgusted by current practices, and doesn’t give an idealistic view of the future, but a critical one. Humans think they dominate over all animals, and that to justify their domestication superiority, and the terrible suffering humans cause,for animals. There are also societies that started treating some classes of people as property. We can talk about slavery ; so the agricultural revolution was not just beneficial for humankind !
He also discussed how homosapiens want to become Homodeus, and that by escaping diseases, old age, misery and death ; basically reaching divinity. He gives a lot of examples, mainly how technology developed science, prosthetics, bionics, plastic surgery, genetic engineering…
Harari then talked about science being a new religion, where gods will be replaced by humans, and that science and religion can coexist, since religion is mostly interested in social order, and science in power, and that over truths. Well I was a little bothered by this idea, about immortality and divinity. Being a muslim girl, I believe in one god, who created this world. I believe that humans can achieve anything with science, that we can reach the impossible, but immortality is not one of them, not in this world.
The last chapter suggests the possibility that humans are algorithms, and maybe in the near future, a lot of human jobs will be replaced by robots, with our algorithms. The whole humanity, the earth and maybe the entire universe will become servants to data, a huge one. This part was a little bit scary because yes technology and algorithms are amazing, they simplify our daily routine, help us develop different fields, but just imagining a world where I will lose my job to a robot was frightening. This is where you start to recognize the scale of technology, whether it’s a good or bad one.
The book closes with the following question :
« What will happen society, politics and daily life when non conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves ? »
It’s a profoundly shocking piece of writing, where Harari discusses a lot of sensitive subjects, and how our habits, our revolution may affect our future, in a good or a bad way. An easy, beautiful read, even with some ideas that I’m not totally comfortable with. A masterpiece !
Well, no need to tell that I’m definitely going to read his third book « 21 lessons for the 21st century »
And you ? what do you think of this book ?
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