Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari, following his other master work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/sapiens-brief-history-of-humankind-by.html?q=yuval+harari 10 out of 10

  

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari, following his other master work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/02/sapiens-brief-history-of-humankind-by.html?q=yuval+harari

10 out of 10

 

 

Like Sapiens before it, Homo Deus proves a challenging, stupendous, intelligent, prophetic, scientific, well explained, magnificent book that confirms the status of this luminary as one of the most important thinkers of the age – you find videos with him talking with Natalie Portman, Mark Zuckerberg, well the latter may actually detract from the glory of Harari, with the toxic image he now has, and surely plenty of other major caliber personalities – who proposes some daring, part euphoric, part tragic scenarios from the world, some of them confirmed by the years following the publishing of the chef d’oeuvre…

 

There is a tendency to find a fault and say this is a brilliant proposition, but look what I found, and the passage talking about man conquering diseases could be the segment we might feel tempted to call the author on, because he talks about that calamity of the Spanish flu and the millions it killed, important percentages – 10, 15 - in parts of the world, the wiping out of almost half the native population when the Spanish conquistadors arrived with their virus and the glory of the modern medicine…only we have been through a devastating pandemic in the meantime and we could say that proves Harari wrong, only the development of the vaccines in record time confirms his theory and many have died just because of their medieval conceptions and their refusal to live in this age, not because medicine is still backward…in fact, they have transplanted the heart of a genetically modified pig into a human body just a couple of days ago…

On another chapter, we can also express some doubts, for the mesmerizing historian mentions the Chekhov rule “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired…’to say that humanity has abolished it, since there are wars, but limited, small ones…except, there is an increasing probability – some say it is already near certain – that Russia will invade the Ukraine, after it had taken Crimea, and the 100k troops, the maneuvers we see at the news, with tanks and heavy material coming from far away in the region can only have one purpose, and we have their past habits and the statements of the tyrant in the Kremlin to make it clear that if not now, then soon…

 

However, the first part of Home Deus is more than optimistic, it offers plenty of reasons for exuberance, catharsis and the Best Possible future exercises recommended by positive psychology – the author enters the subject, talking of the discipline, the use of various drugs that can regulate our internal wellbeing – because the analysis of death as a ‘technical problem’ leads to the conclusion that Man will become God aka Homo Deus, since the advances of technology and medicine will arrive at that, after all, there is already so much that has been conquered (the transplant of a pig’s heart that was mentioned is just one more example in a series of developments) from the chemotherapy that kills cells of cancer tumor to a wide range of treatments, including the vaccine rejected by fools like Djokovich and others like him…

 

One information that comes to mind regards…the lawn and the important lesson that we get from here, learning that lawns have been introduced by aristocrats in England, where they were an indication of important wealth, seeing as only the very rich could afford to allow this empty land to serve no purpose and to keep it in order would require huge resources – in opposition, a lawn that was not well kept would indicate the challenges the owner faced – and today they have these spaces in the emirates of the gulf, places where vast amounts of water would be wasted on them (the same is true everywhere…as for the under signed, he had long abandoned the lawn, small as it was in favor of flowers, albeit the spouse thinks differently, by definition – however, the more important lesson is again connected with the welfare of animals, which are tortured, abused and massacred by humans, something emphasized in Sapiens too…

Algorithms have reached a paramount importance, from Amazon and the other titans, which know what we buy and how to suggest further consumerism, to the ones that operate in gadgets we wear – nonetheless, I am doubtful regarding the Samsung watch that I wear, which for the same distance and almost identical conditions gives very different parameters, often absurd, when it says that the speed is low and the heart rate is high, what could it mean, for I am not climbing a mountain here and going down a slope there, it is the same goddamn route I jog on – and we reach the religion of Dataism…

 

Without being a fatalist or pessimist, after all, Yuval Harari has named his book Human God, there are reasons to be concerned with a future where the algorithms know us better – indeed, Know Thyself was written in antiquity on the frontispiece of the Temple of Delphi and it is a most important precept – and may reach the point where Cortana, and other assistants will just have an interview with the Cortana of the person wishing to learn more and together they just bypass the humans…the amazing historian even mentions the possibility where voting could be made by this AI, which will be better equipped, for on the day of the elections, we may be suffering from some health problem, being humans we tend to forget what the politician had done over the past few years and be more influenced by recent events (he mentions the experiments conducted by Daniel Kahneman, which show how subjective we are in our recollections) and decide to give the failed leader another chance, which Cortana would not do, knowing us better than ourselves…

The problem with this would be that the rich people will have access to better AI, which will leave the rest of the world behind…there is also the issue of genetic engineering and the idea that future babies will benefit (if that is the word) from interventions that will allow them to avoid genetic tendency to be affected by certain diseases (Angelina Jolie is within these pages, with her decision to have a mastectomy, to avoid the fate of her mother and grandmother) but while they do that, parents will be tempted to work more on the future of their baby and give him some, why not all the advantages that would be possible…

There are clearly huge changes that we see around today, we know that millions of drivers will be replaced by AI (which is so much better, it will not make sense to expose humans to accidents and the important human loss and damages) and then many other professions, not all doctors, but as Harari explains, there is no doctor that has the capacity to think of all the possible diagnosis, diseases, while an AI (especially once Singularity Will have arrived) is able to know exactly all the possibilities that surpass the limits of the human mind…