OMG, this book is a banquet table groaning with ideas that will make one think.
Some of my favorites:
agriculture as the "biggest fraud" in human history
toxic monotheisms
how only Europeans set out in a major way, to conquer other lands
Author also tackles suffering and happiness and what is real.
All in all, I might have to read the book itself!
OTOH, I think he talked too much about stories and not enough about mirror
neurons.
On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 9:03 AM, "blue_bungalo...@yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari--
review
A swash-buckling account that begins with the origin of the
species and ends with post-humans
by Galen Strawson
The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2014 07.30 BST
Human beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for
about 2.4m years. Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious
species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time
-- about 150,000 years. So a book whose main title is
Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled "A Brief History of
Humankind". It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes
95% of his book to us as a species: self-ignorant as we are,
we still know far more about ourselves than about other
species of human beings, including several that have become
extinct since we first walked the Earth. The fact remains
that the history of sapiens -- Harari's name for us -- is
only a very small part of the history of humankind.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
Can its full sweep be conveyed in one fell swoop – 400
pages? Not really; it's easier to write a brief history of
time -- all 14bn years -- and Harari also spends many pages
on our present and possible future rather than our past. But
the deep lines of the story of sapiens are fairly
uncontentious, and he sets them out with verve.
For the first half of our existence we potter along
unremarkably; then we undergo a series of revolutions.
First, the "cognitive" revolution: about 70,000 years ago,
we start to behave in far more ingenious ways than before,
for reasons that are still obscure, and we spread rapidly
across the planet. About 11,000 years ago we enter on the
agricultural revolution, converting in increasing numbers
from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. The
"scientific revolution" begins about 500 years ago. It
triggers the industrial revolution, about 250 years ago,
which triggers in turn the information revolution, about 50
years ago, which triggers the biotechnological revolution,
which is still wet behind the ears. Harari suspects that the
biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we
will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, "amortal"
cyborgs, capable of living forever.
This is one way to lay things out. Harari embeds many other
momentous events, most notably the development of language:
we become able to think sharply about abstract matters,
cooperate in ever larger numbers, and, perhaps most
crucially, gossip. There is the rise of religion and the
slow overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic
monotheisms. Then there is the evolution of money and, more
importantly, credit. There is, connectedly, the spread of
empires and trade as well as the rise of capitalism.
Harari swashbuckles through these vast and intricate matters
in a way that is -- at its best -- engaging and informative.
It's a neat thought that "we did not domesticate wheat. It
domesticated us." There was, Harari says, "a Faustian
bargain between humans and grains" in which our species
"cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted
towards greed and alienation". It was a bad bargain: "the
agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud". More
often than not it brought a worse diet, longer hours of
work, greater risk of starvation, crowded living conditions,
greatly increased susceptibility to disease, new forms of
insecurity and uglier forms of hierarchy. Harari thinks we
may have been better off in the stone age, and he has
powerful things to say about the wickedness of factory
farming, concluding with one of his many superlatives:
"modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest
crime in history".
He accepts the common view that the fundamental structure of
our emotions and desires hasn't been touched by any of these
revolutions: "our eating habits, our conflicts and our
sexuality are all a result of the way our hunter-gatherer
minds interact with our current post-industrial environment,
with its mega-cities, airplanes, telephones and computers …
Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with
over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are
in the savannah." He gives a familiar illustration – our
powerful desires for sugar and fat have led to the
widespread availability of foods that are primary causes of
unhealthiness and ugliness. The consumption of pornography
is another good example. It's just like overeating: if the
minds of pornography addicts could be seen as bodies, they
would look just like the grossly obese.
At one point Harari claims that "the leading project of the
scientific revolution" is the Gilgamesh Project (named after
the hero of the epic who set out to destroy death): "to give
humankind eternal life" or "amortality". He is sanguine
about its eventual success. But amortality isn't
immortality, because it will always be possible for us to
die by violence, and Harari is plausibly sceptical about how
much good it will do us. As amortals, we may become
hysterically and disablingly cautious (Larry Niven develops
the point nicely in his description of the "Puppeteers" in
the Ringworld science fiction novels). The deaths of those
we love may become far more terrible. We may grow weary of
all things under the sun -- even in heaven (see the last
chapter of Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½
Chapters). We may come to agree with JRR Tolkien's elves,
who saw mortality as a gift to human beings that they
themselves lacked. We may come to feel what Philip Larkin
felt: "Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs."
Even if we put all these points aside, there's no guarantee
that amortality will bring greater happiness. Harari draws
on well-known research that shows that a person's happiness
from day to day has remarkably little to do with their
material circumstances. Certainly money can make a
difference --- but only when it lifts us out of poverty.
After that, more money changes little or nothing. Certainly
a lottery winner is lifted by her luck, but after about 18
months her average everyday happiness reverts to its old
level. If we had an infallible "happyometer", and toured
Orange County and the streets of Kolkata, it's not clear
that we would get consistently higher readings in the first
place than in the second.
This point about happiness is a persistent theme in Sapiens.
When Arthur Brooks (head of the conservative American
Enterprise Institute) made a related point in the New York
Times in July, he was criticised for trying to favour the
rich and justify income inequality. The criticism was
confused, for although current inequalities of income are
repellent, and harmful to all, the happiness research is
well confirmed. This doesn't, however, prevent Harari from
suggesting that the lives lived by sapiens today may be
worse overall than the lives they lived 15,000 years ago.
Much of Sapiens is extremely interesting, and it is often
well expressed. As one reads on, however, the attractive
features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness,
exaggeration and sensationalism. Never mind his standard and
repeated misuse of the saying "the exception proves the
rule" (it means that exceptional or rare cases test and
confirm the rule, because the rule turns out to apply even
in those cases). There's a kind of vandalism in Harari's
sweeping judgments, his recklessness about causal
connections, his hyper-Procrustean stretchings and loppings
of the data. Take his account of the battle of Navarino.
Starting from the fact that British investors stood to lose
money if the Greeks lost their war of independence, Harari
moves fast: "the bond holders' interest was the national
interest, so the British organised an international fleet
that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the battle
of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was
finally free." This is wildly distorted -- and Greece was
not then free. To see how bad it is, it's enough to look at
the wikipedia entry on Navarino.
Harari hates "modern liberal culture", but his attack is a
caricature and it boomerangs back at him. Liberal humanism,
he says, "is a religion". It "does not deny the existence of
God"; "all humanists worship humanity"; "a huge gulf is
opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the
latest findings of the life sciences". This is silly. It's
also sad to see the great Adam Smith drafted in once again
as the apostle of greed. Still, Harari is probably right
that "only a criminal buys a house … by handing over a
suitcase of banknotes" -- a point that acquires piquancy
when one considers that about 35% of all purchases at the
high end of the London housing market are currently being
paid in cash.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-
history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review
Illusions of Sapiens
by Tomichan Matheikal
How did man come to dominate the earth though there were
many other more powerful animals on the earth? As I gather
from an article which introduced me to Harari's book, man
created stories which in turn created an immense sense of
cooperation among people.
Let us understand that better. The other animals don't
create stories. Man creates stories about many things like
gods, nations, money, human rights, etc. These are all
imaginary entities given reality to by man's stories. What
does the thousand rupee note actually mean without the
support of the story created by people about it -- stories
about the equivalent gold in the Reserve Bank and so on.
What do human rights mean, for example? One group's rights
are another group's nuisance. Who decides the veracity of
any of these?
The stories we create attract followers. People love
stories. Stories unite people. Stories are imaginative and
emotive. Soon the stories create their own rules. Those
who believe any story follow the rules dictated by the
story. Gods begin to dictate their own rules now. Money
dictates its rules. A group of people begin to draw a line
somewhere and call it the national boundary. Nationalism is
as very charming a story as religious beliefs.
The other animals who don't create stories don’t also
cooperate the way humans do to get followers for the story
and to impose the story on others as the ultimate truth(s).
Moreover, the human brain is far more complex than the
brains of the other animals and hence can make the
cooperation to seem more necessary, meaningful and
purposeful.
Illusions become absolute truths. We live for them, fight
for them, and may die for them. That is the human being, a
unique animal that sent thousands and thousands of other
animals, animals without illusions, into extinction.
http://matheikal.blogspot.in/2014/09/illusions-of-sapiens.
html
Here, Srinath Perur interviews Harari over email on a range
of preoccupations and ideas, including the problem of
individual happiness, the future of humanity and, of course,
in which historical period would Harari like to be born
again.
Your earlier work was on military history, but you've since
shifted your attention to a much broader arena. What are a
few 'big questions' of history that caught your curiosity
and made you change? Were there other historians who
inspired you in this regard?
The main question that interests me is the relation between
power and happiness through history. Humankind has been very
good at obtaining more power, so that today we are a
thousand times more powerful than our ancestors. But are we
also happier? That’s far less clear. It seems that humans
are not very good at utilizing power to overcome suffering
and to increase happiness. Why?
This relates to other big questions that I explore in the
book, such as why men have dominated women in most human
societies, for example. How did people come to believe in
gods, in individualism, and in human rights? How did we all
come to live in nation-states? How did capitalism become the
dominant religion of the whole world? How is it, for
example, that all the people in the world -- despite
disagreeing about gods and political leaders – nevertheless
believe in the same money? How come even Osama bin Laden,
who hated American religion, American culture and the
American political system, was quite fond of American
dollars?
When I began studying at university, I thought this would be
the ideal place to try and answer such big questions. But I
was disappointed. The academic world encouraged me to focus
on narrower and narrower questions, and gave me the
impression that one could not approach the big questions in
a scientific way. And then I read Jared Diamond’s book,
Guns, Germs and Steel, and it was a revelation. It showed me
that it is possible to tackle the biggest questions of
history and of human existence in a scientific way.
A central idea of your book is that it is homo sapiens'
ability to cooperate on a large scale and in a variety of
ways that has made the species dominant. You attribute this
to our ability to imagine, to create and come under the
umbrella of powerful shared myths such as laws, religions,
money, country, etc. This is very plausible, but is there
any way this can be shown conclusively?
There is ample evidence humans rule the world thanks to our
ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. On the
individual level, humans are not superior to other animals.
If you put me and a chimpanzee together on a lone island and
we had to struggle for survival, I would place my bets on
the chimp. However, if you place 1,000 humans and 1,000
chimps on a lone island, the humans will easily win, because
1,000 chimps can never cooperate effectively. Almost all the
achievements of humankind -- from building pyramids to
flying to the Moon -- were the result of large-scale
cooperation rather than individual abilities.
When we come to the question of what enables humans to
cooperate flexibly in large numbers, things are a bit more
complicated. The glue that connects many people together is
made not from genes, but from stories. People don’t have
innate instincts for mass-cooperation with strangers. But as
long as many people believe in the same stories about gods,
nations, money or human rights – they follow the same laws
and rules. If you examine any large-scale human cooperation,
you will always find some imaginary story at its base. Two
chimps from different groups who meet in the middle of the
forest cannot start trading, because they don’t trust each
other. If I offer you a coconut in exchange for a banana,
how can I be certain that you will not cheat me? Humans
solved this problem by inventing money. Money is just a
fictional story. You take a piece of worthless paper, and
you tell everyone that it is worth a banana. As long as
everyone believes this story, complete strangers can easily
trust one another and trade with one another.
Are humans really the only ones who can create and spread
such stories? It seems so. We have no evidence for money or
gods among chimpanzees or wolves or elephants. You can never
convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him
that after he dies, he will go to Chimpanzee Heaven and
there receive limitless bananas for his good deeds. Only
humans can believe such stories. This is why we rule the
world, and chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research
laboratories. But who knows. Perhaps further research will
discover that chimps too have gods and money.
One of the striking things about your book is your
willingness to see outside conventional boundaries of
historical narrative. For instance, you've distinguished the
condition of individual humans from that of humankind – one
can thrive while the other suffers. History has
conventionally been about kings, presidents, wars. You argue
that not recognizing individual happiness is "the biggest
lacuna in our understanding of history". How can this be
rectified? What sources would we tap? Could you give
examples where this has been achieved and changed our
understanding of history?
There are ample sources for the study of individual
well-being, and in some cases this approach has already
changed our understanding of history. The most notable
example is the Agricultural Revolution. It is often said
that the Agricultural Revolution was a great leap forward
for humanity. And it is certainly true that the collective
power of humans greatly increased thanks to agriculture. But
recent studies have shown that the life of the average
person actually became much harder.
For millions of year, humans have been adapted to hunting
and gathering. Our bodies and minds were adapted to running
after gazelles, climbing trees to pick apples, and sniffing
around forests in search of mushrooms. Peasant life, in
contrast, included long hours of plowing fields, sowing
seeds, carrying water-buckets from the river, and harvesting
cornstalks under a blazing sun. Such a lifestyle was harmful
to human backs, knees and joints, and numbing to the human
mind. In return for all this hard work, peasants usually
received a worse diet than hunter-gatherers. Humans are
omnivores, adapted to feeding themselves from dozens of
species of fruit, nuts, tubers, herbs, mushrooms, mammals,
fish, birds, reptiles, insects and worms. Peasants often
kept themselves alive by relying almost exclusively on a
single source of food, such as rice. They were consequently
far more exposed than foragers to malnutrition and possibly
even to starvation.
In addition to malnutrition, peasants were also far more
exposed to infectious diseases. Most human infectious
diseases originated in animals such as cows and pigs, and
began to plague people only after these animals were
domesticated. In addition, whereas foragers lived in small
mobile bands and enjoyed ideal hygienic conditions, peasants
and townspeople lived in crowded permanent settlements,
which were parasite hotbeds.
The agricultural list of wows did not end there.
Archaeological and anthropological evidence indicates that
forager bands were more egalitarian, and offered fewer
opportunities for one group of people to lord it over
others. Agriculture opened the way for social
stratification, exploitation, and possibly patriarchy. The
bottom line is that even though the Indus Valley
Civilization or the Mughal Empire were far more powerful
than the ancient hunter-gatherer bands, the average peasant
woman in Mughal India probably had a harder and less
satisfying life than her ancient ancestor who lived in the
Ganges Valley 20,000 years previously.
Indeed, even today there are hundreds of millions of people
who live harder and less satisfying lives than ancient
hunter-gatherers. What would you rather do: work for 12
hours a day, 7 days a week, in a noisy, polluted and crowded
factory, operating a machine that produces toys for European
children -- or to go out to the forest to look for
mushrooms?
You've presented very convincing arguments for the overall
well-being of foragers compared to peasants. Elsewhere,
you’ve talked about our expectations always increasing, and
thus it being possible that we're not any happier now than
at other points in history. Would you prefer to have been
born 20,000 years ago to live the intense, relatively
uncomplicated life of an ancient forager? If you had the
choice to be born again in any historical period, which
would you pick?
As I am now 38 years old, I think it is too late for me to
learn how to be a hunter-gatherer. I would probably die
within a week from eating a poisonous mushroom or falling
off a tree. I am a product of 21st-century civilization, and
I would not feel at home anywhere else. But if I were to be
born again in any historical period, without being able to
choose my social status in advance, the age of the
hunter-gatherers sounds like a good time to be born. Though
being reborn in the 21st-century in a well-to-do family in
the affluent West is perhaps a safer option, being reborn in
a poor working-class family in Bangladesh or Brazil sounds
far less attractive.
Another chance I would have liked to take was to be reborn
in India of the 5th century BC, the era of Buddha. Of all
the people in history, he strikes me as the one person who
might really have understood what life is all about. I would
really have liked the opportunity to meet him.
While many of us may lead rushed, unfulfilled, isolated
lives thanks to the march of our species, we also have the
means to question it. For instance, here you are pointing
out that some of our most cherished institutions and beliefs
are imagined. You also say that "true believers" are
necessary for such ideas to retain their power. Here's a
thought experiment: your book becomes so popular that a
significant number of people question their true beliefs and
weaken them. Nationalism is diluted; religion ceases to be a
matter of life and death and no one is really afraid of god
or hell; people come to see laws and money as mere
conventions; and so on. Does this result in chaos, societal
collapse and widespread uncertainty and unhappiness? Or
would it be a John Lennon utopia? (Sorry if this is a silly
question, but imagination is one of our species' strong
points…)
Some conventional beliefs can be abandoned without
descending into chaos. For example, for centuries many
thinkers warned that if people stop believing in God and
Hell, the result will be unbridled chaos, crime and
violence. Yet contemporary Europe has largely abandoned
these beliefs, and it is the most peaceful and orderly place
in human history. Far more peaceful and orderly than the
God-fearing and Hell-fearing Middle East.
It is true, however, that without retaining some
conventional beliefs -- such as money -- it is hard to see
how large-scale human societies can function. So I think the
aim should not be to completely abandon all our fictions.
Rather, we should retain our more useful fictions, but at
the same time be able to separate fiction from reality, and
see reality very clearly. We should ask ourselves, "What is
really real?" For most of history, people have been so
obsessed with fictions such as nations, gods and money, that
they lost touch with reality. A good way to separate fiction
from reality is to ask, "Can it suffer?" A nation cannot
suffer, even if it loses a war. A bank cannot suffer, even
if it crashes. Humans, however, can suffer. Animals can
suffer. The suffering may be caused by the belief in some
fiction, but the suffering itself is real. I hope that we
can retain the most useful fictions of humanity, but at the
same time be in touch with reality, and thereby know how to
make use of our power not to inflate some fictional entity
like a nation, but in order to reduce real suffering in the
world.
I thought some ideas in the book had parallels with aspects
of Hindu/Jain/Buddhist philosophy. The sense of compassion
you show for animals being one, which makes some of your
perspectives delightfully non-anthropocentric. The idea of
shared myths being another. (I believe the word 'myth' has
the same root as the Sanskrit ‘mithya’ or falsity,
transcending which is the aim of many Eastern systems.) I
later read an interview of yours in which you say you visit
India every year for a Vipassana course. Could you say
something about your connection to India and what meditation
or Buddhism means to you? Are you conscious of how this part
of your life may contribute to your work?
My view of history has indeed been influenced by Hindu, Jain
and Buddhist thinking, and by practicing Vipassana
meditation. One of the central ideas of Hinduism, Jainism
and Buddhism is that "the world is an illusion". This
strikes many people as an absurd proposition. In the book I
strive to show that this is in fact a very accurate
description of the world most humans inhabit. Most of us
live in a world of nations, gods, business corporations,
human rights and money, without noticing that all these
things are in fact just imaginary stories that exist only in
our own minds.
At home I practice meditation for two hours every day, and I
come to India every year to take a long Vipassana course of
30, 45 or 60 days in the Dhamma Giri meditation center [in
Maharashtra]. For me, a crucial question is "What is
reality? What is really real, rather just fictions in our
own mind?" The best scientific method I have found to answer
this question is Vipassana meditation. So far Western
science has had great difficulty in researching the mind,
because it has no method for direct observation of the mind.
You can study the brain by using microscopes and fMRI
scanners, but the brain is not the mind. The problem is that
the only mind accessible to you is your own mind. You can
never observe directly the mind of another person. And when
you try to observe your own mind, it is extremely difficult
to do so in a systematic and objective manner. Anyone who
ever tried to do so knows how difficult it is to observe
even the simplest mental processes for more than a few
seconds without becoming distracted or overwhelmed.
Vipassana is a method for observing the mind in a systematic
and objective manner. Without the clarity I gained from
practicing this meditation, I would not have been able to
write this book.
There's evidence to show that for most of the last two
millennia Indian kingdoms were prosperous, had skilled
sailors and navigators, and had advanced metallurgy
(Damascus steel, for instance). Yet, with the exception of
small parts of South East Asia, Indian rulers didn’t attempt
conquest. Would you say this was due to a lack of curiosity?
This is not unique to Indian rulers. It is true of many of
the Chinese dynasties, of the Japanese shoguns, and of most
other kingdoms and states in history. Although they might
have had the ability, the Romans never attempted to conquer
Scandinavia, the Persians never attempted to conquer
Madagascar, and the Chinese never attempted to conquer
Indonesia. Most Chinese rulers -- with the exception of
Kublai Khan -- left even nearby Japan to its own devices.
The real question is why modern Europeans caught a fever
that drove them to sail to distant and completely unknown
lands full of alien cultures, take one step onto their
beaches, and immediately declare "I claim all these
territories for my king!" These European expeditions are so
familiar to us that we tend to overlook just how
extraordinary they were.
Shortly after Columbus landed in America, news of his
discovery reached the great empires of Asia -- the Ottoman,
the Safavid, the Mughal and the Chinese empires. Yet they
displayed little interest in this discovery. None of them
made any attempt to compete with the Europeans for control
of America or of the new ocean lanes in the Atlantic and the
Pacific. Even puny European kingdoms such as Scotland and
Denmark sent a few expeditions to America, but not a single
expedition was ever sent to America from the Islamic world,
India, or China. The first non-European power that tried to
send a military expedition to America was Japan. That
happened in June 1942, when a Japanese expedition conquered
Kiska and Attu, two small islands off the Alaskan coast,
capturing in the process ten US soldiers and a dog. The
Japanese never got any closer to the mainland.
So the real mystery is not why Indian rulers supposedly
lacked curiosity, but rather what drove the modern Europeans
to such strange and unprecedented expeditions.
You live in the Middle East, where a lot of human history
has played out. How does your geography affect your view of
the world and the past?
My home country of Israel is on the one hand a
technologically-advanced Western democracy, and on the other
hand it is torn by religious and ethnic conflicts and
surrounded by the greater chaos engulfing the entire Middle
East. This gives me a double perspective on history. On the
one hand, I have an insider's view of the Western world and
of the current technological revolutions. On the other hand
I am also highly conscious of the darker side of modernity,
and of the powerful forces of traditional religions and
national emotions.
Will humanity exist a thousand years from now?
That's a very easy question. A thousand years from now,
humankind will not exist. This is very obvious. The more
interesting and difficult question is whether humankind will
exist 100 or 200 years from now. Given the pace of
technological development, this too seems quite unlikely. In
the next 200 years humankind will probably gain so much
power, that if we do not destroy ourselves, then we will
certainly have more than enough power to upgrade ourselves
into completely different kinds of beings, which resemble
gods more than humans. This is not science fiction. Most
science fiction plots describe a world in which humans just
like us enjoy superior technology such as light-speed
spaceships and laser guns. The ethical and political
dilemmas central to these plots are taken from our own
world, and they merely recreate our emotional and social
tensions against a futuristic backdrop. Yet the real
potential of future technologies is to change humans
themselves, including our emotional and cognitive abilities,
and not merely our vehicles and weapons.
You probably know that the first demo of human brain to
brain communication through the Internet was announced last
week. This is along the lines of your predication for our
species’ future. How do you feel about this trajectory of
humans becoming gods/super-men? What could happen to make
your prediction not come true?
The future is of course unknown, and it would be surprising
if all the predictions made today are realized in full in
the coming decades. History teaches us that what seems to be
just around the corner may never materialize due to
unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios
will in fact come to pass. When the nuclear age erupted in
the 1940s, many forecasts were made about the future nuclear
world of the year 2000. When Sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the
imagination of the world, everyone began predicting that by
the end of the century people would be living in space
colonies on Mars and Pluto. Few of these forecasts came
true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet. So all
these predictions about the future should been seen not as
accurate prophesies, but rather as stimulants for our
imagination. What we should take very seriously is the idea
that the next stage of history will include not only
technological and organizational transformations, but also
fundamental transformations in human consciousness and
identity. And these could be transformations so fundamental
that they will call the very term "human" into question. How
long do we have? No one really knows. Some say that by 2050
there will already be superhumans possessing divines
abilities. Less radical forecasts speak of 2100 or 2200.
But given current technological advances, it seems
unavoidable that in the not-too-distant future, humans will
become gods. That is, humans will acquire abilities that
were traditionally thought to be divine abilities. Humans
will probably be able to live indefinitely, to design and
create living beings at will, to re-design their own bodies
and minds, and to link their minds directly to virtual
worlds on the Internet. This will result in enormous new
opportunities, as well as frightful new dangers. There is no
point being optimistic or pessimistic about it. We need to
be realists. We need to understand that this is really
happening -- it is science rather than science fiction – and
it is high time we start thinking about this very seriously.
Most of the problems that worry governments and private
citizens alike are insignificant by comparison. The global
economic crisis, the Islamic State, the situation in the
Ukraine -- these are all important problems, no doubt. But
they are completely overshadowed by the question of
upgrading humans into gods.
