Home Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.
One liner: pushes on a great series of societal evolutionary tracts and influences to frame a cool discussion on how human/tech upgrades (leading to Homo Deus) might change human “purpose” and societal structure.
This book was great. The trails it explored were powerful (I ignored a few side bars that seemed a little shallow), it was loaded with self-deprecatory “obviously no one can predict the future” stuff and the author wasn’t overly-occupied with reminding the reader that he is smart or give context to his own theory in a tireless reference to other “great” bodies of philosophy as source, influence, analog or foil.
The setup is simple: to this point in time (until incredibly recently) mankind’s “advances” have been pre-occupied by staving off termination from disease, war and famine. As those three influences become irrelevant to increasingly close to triple-digit percentages of people on earth…what’s next.
An evolutionary premise defines man in term of hardware and software — hardware being our physical nature and software our brains. We’ve made early stage progress in human hardware evolution (contact lenses, knee replacements, synthetic organs on the horizon) and the next frontier is human software upgrades. Neural enhancement or ‘learn French is 30 seconds’.
Finally, Harari extends on his theory from his book Sapiens where he asserts that man’s ability to attach powerful meaning to his actions has been key to our rise as the dominant species.
Harari describes this future along a couple of lines:
- Man will sacrifice “meaning” for “power” as we makes jumps in lifespan and mental capabilities
- These jumps will no be distributed evenly among humans
- Tech evolution will move large groups of people into the “useless class”, i.e., not enough meaningful work needed to be done to drive society forward to keep everyone busy
- Faith is evolving into ‘humanism’ where we believe in what we think and feel in the moment (referenced by ‘the customer is always right’) and that will evolve to “dataism” as people abandon belief in a divine being for belief in the power of data and algorithms to drive society and individual choices to “right” which may also be “optimized”
- There will be a shift from prioritizing “having” experience to “sharing” experiences
- We have reached our point in history with individualism and some-degree of self-determinism as the source of power, and this will evolve into individuals giving networks their meaning which will feed back life purpose to its members