Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

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  • The author asserts that humanity’s greatest challenges up until the 21st century have been famine, infectious disease, and war.
  • Famine meant that large portions of the populations did not know whether they will have access to food to sustain their lives. This meant that when people woke up, they did not know whether they will get enough food for the day to stave off their hunger. This unknowability would persist for long periods of time to the point where people would die because of hunger. And in large numbers.
  • “After famine, humanity’s second great enemy was plagues and infectious diseases. Bustling cities linked by a ceaseless stream of merchants, officials and pilgrims were both the bedrock of human civilization and an ideal breeding ground for pathogens. People consequently lived their lives in ancient Athens or medieval Florence knowing that they might fall ill and die next week, or that an epidemic might suddenly erupt and destroy their entire family in one swoop. The most famous such outbreak, the so-called Black Death, began in the 1330s, somewhere in east or central Asia, when the flea-dwelling bacterium Yersinia pestis started infecting humans bitten by the fleas. From there, riding on an army of rats and fleas, the plague quickly spread all over Asia, Europe and North Africa, taking less than twenty years to reach the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Between 75 million and 200 million people died – more than a quarter of the population of Eurasia. In England, four out of ten people died, and the population dropped from a pre-plague high of 3.7 million people to a post-plague low of 2.2 million. The city of Florence lost 50,000 of its 100,000 inhabitants”
  • “Just think what would have happened if AIDS had erupted in 1581 rather than 1981. In all likelihood, nobody back then would have figured out what caused the epidemic, how it moved from person to person, or how it could be halted (let alone cured). Under such conditions, AIDS might have killed a much larger proportion of the human race, equalling and perhaps even surpassing the Black Death.”
  • “So in the struggle against natural calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, the scales are tipping in humanity’s favour. But what about the dangers inherent in human nature itself? Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology. The era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over. But we may come to miss it.”
  • The other exciting development in human lives is that wars are becoming less frequent and result in less casualties when compared to Homo Sapiens history. In early 21st centuray, only 1% of people died as casualties of war, while that figure was 5% in the 20% century and much higher throughout history. Sapiens also accounted for the possbility of war erupting at any given moment, where one civilization would attack another, steal its resources, kill its people, etc.
    Today, that is an exception. The advent of the knowledge economy where knowledge becomes the most valuable asset in the economy has made it not worthwhile even for greedy humans to resort to war as a means of acquiring wealth.
    Exception spots exist – Mid East and Central Aftrica, where resoureces become the most valuable component of an economy.
    The war of the future could also take on a different style where Logic Bombs could have trains collide with each other, powerstations go offline, etc. This allow small states or non-state actors to inflict damage against large powers.
  • “What about terrorism, then? Even if central governments and powerful states have learned restraint, terrorists might have no such qualms about using new and destructive weapons. That is certainly a worrying possibility. However, terrorism is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real power. At least in the past, terrorism worked by spreading fear rather than by causing significant material damage. Terrorists usually don’t have the strength to defeat an army, occupy a country or destroy entire cities. Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. 25 For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda. How, then, do terrorists manage to dominate the headlines and change the political situation throughout the world? By provoking their enemies to overreact. In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves. Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade. Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9/ 11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Now they flourish in the wreckage. By themselves, terrorists are too weak to drag us back to the Middle Ages and re-establish the Jungle Law. They may provoke us, but in the end, it all depends on our reactions. If the Jungle Law comes back into force, it will not be the fault of terrorists.”
  • The author suggests that with the decline of famine, war and plague as the main threats to humans, our focus in the 21st century should shift into addressing the imbalances of explosive economic growth achieved in the 20th century. This explosive growth was partially responsible for the decline in war over resources, but it created imbalances in the planet that could result in catastrophies if remain unaddressed.
    Humans are rarely satisified when they have accomplished something. Instead, they do look for the next challenge. This is what should fuel the effort to combat imbalances on the planet that we created in the process of huge economic growth.
  • The other pursuit that humans will take on in the 21st century is prolonging life and attempting to achieve immortality. Death – in the 21st century, is viewed as a result of a technical failure in the human body – cancerous cells spread, heart failure, stroke, etc. Each one of these life-ending events are caused by yet another technical glitch – genetic, virus transmission, etc.
  • “An increasing minority of scientists and thinkers consequently speak more openly these days, and state that the flagship enterprise of modern science is to defeat death and grant humans eternal youth. Notable examples are the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and the polymath and inventor Ray Kurzweil (winner of the 1999 US National Medal of Technology and Innovation). In 2012 Kurzweil was appointed a director of engineering at Google, and a year later Google launched a sub-company called Calico whose stated mission is ‘to solve death’. 26 Google has recently appointed another immortality true-believer, Bill Maris, to preside over the Google Ventures investment fund. In a January 2015 interview, Maris said, ‘If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500, the answer is yes.’ Maris backs up his brave words with a lot of hard cash. Google Ventures is investing 36 per cent of its $ 2 billion portfolio in life sciences start-ups, including several ambitious life-extending projects. Using an American football analogy, Maris explained that in the fight against death, ‘We aren’t trying to gain a few yards. We are trying to win the game.’ Why? Because, says Maris, ‘it is better to live than to die’.”
  • Some scientists claim that if you have a healthy body by 2050, you do have a shot at living indefinitely. This means that there will be medical solutions to help replace/fix aging parts of the body, so that your body continue to be healthy. One way this could be accomplished is by having check-ups once every 10 years or so where the body is upgraded with the latest soltuions to technical problems. This gives scientists another 10 years to work on a new set of solutions for the problems that will arise in the next 10 years.
    While this could make humans a-mortal, it won’t make them immortal. A human could still die by an accident, a bomb, etc. This could make the people of the future the most risk-averse ever, for that if you know you could live forever, why should you take a gamble and swim in the sea, trek the Himalayas,etc.
  • “Coming back to the realm of reality, it is far from certain whether Kurzweil’s and de Grey’s prophecies will come true by 2050 or 2100. My own view is that the hopes of eternal youth in the twenty-first century are premature, and whoever takes them too seriously is in for a bitter disappointment. It is not easy to live knowing that you are going to die, but it is even harder to believe in immortality and be proven wrong. Although average life expectancy has doubled over the last hundred years, it is unwarranted to extrapolate and conclude that we can double it again to 150 in the coming century. In 1900 global life expectancy was no higher than forty because many people died young from malnutrition, infectious diseases and violence. Yet those who escaped famine, plague and war could live well into their seventies and eighties, which is the natural life span of Homo sapiens. Contrary to common notions, seventy-year-olds weren’t considered rare freaks of nature in previous centuries. Galileo Galilei died at seventy-seven, Isaac Newton at eighty-four, and Michelangelo lived to the ripe age of eighty-eight, without any help from antibiotics, vaccinations or organ transplants. Indeed, even chimpanzees in the jungle sometimes live into their sixties.”

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