A Brief Book Review of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
It is not until the end of this supremely ambitious, engaging, dense, and ultimately successful book that Yuval Noah Harari comes clean: He is not in the business of making predictions; rather, he is in the business of discussing possibilities. I say this upfront because if you read this book with the perspective of it being a window into how the world could develop rather into how it will, it reads as less frightening and immediate and as more stimulating and useful.
In the course of 400 thick pages (figuratively and literally; the publisher seems to be buying premium wood for printing this best seller), Harari touches upon seemingly every aspect of human history. At one point, he brilliantly and seamlessly employs the Romanian Revolution, Egyptian pharaohs, and the corporation commonly known as Google to urge forward his thesis. That thesis begins with the idea that what has differentiated humans from every other organism on the planet was how we developed the propensity for storytelling.
Unlike other species on this blue-green ball, we learned how to use narratives to flexibly organize large and disparate groups of humans in pursuit of collective goals that otherwise might make little sense to each of us as individuals. Most notably, it has allowed us to create “intersubjective” entities like gods, nations, and money, which became the basis of our “religions”. Because of the technological changes enabled by the scientific and industrial revolutions, we then found a new global religion in Humanism, which combined new technologies with our old skill for spinning yarns to place humans at the center of the universe. Humanism, like other religions, has sects; it has liberal humanism (e.g., capitalism), socialist humanism (e.g., communism), and evolutionary humanism (e.g., fascism), and these sometimes clash. (See World War II and the Cold War.)
What is most intriguing about our transition from believing in a god-centric view of the universe to a human-centric view is how technology made this possible both economically and politically and how the three principal sects of humanism borrowed from what came before them and from each other. Indeed, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin claimed that communism couldn’t have come to be were it not for capitalist inventions like electrification, radio, and the railroad, which allowed the centralization of decision-making around resources. Harari claims new technology is again making possible the next sea-change in religion, taking ideas from preceding religions, and in the process, changing economics, politics, and society at large.
As we moved from animism to theism and from theism to humanism, we are now moving from humanism to a data-centric view of the universe; our new Internet-enabled world and the mountains of data it produces are rewiring how we organize our societies to be geared more toward decentralization and the freedom of information rather than the freedom of human expression. Important to this development are three key assumptions: Everything, including us, is an algorithm (a conclusion the life sciences are leading us toward), intelligence has been uncoupled from consciousness, and non-conscious algorithms can know us better than we know ourselves.
Whether the powers-that-be in this new religion, Dataism, will eventually need humans as a whole, as individuals, or as represented by some super-human elite among us, and whether our hitherto social institutions will survive, is not a mere parlor room discussion. When the investor and philanthropist George Soros claims Facebook is ruining democracy, he might actually be on to something, but not because of any nefarious ideas in the minds of Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al., but because in the networked, algorithmic relationships that companies like the FAANG are heralding, democracy’s place in the world seems increasingly tenuous.
To be clear, each of these three assumptions hinges on recent hypotheses in the life sciences that may prove to be wrong. And Harari is not saying they are what should happen but is simply saying what the consequences of them could be. While the ramifications of each assumption for society as a whole and for each of us is unclear, Harari is happy to discuss the possibilities. And I am happy to listen.