Highlights from Homo Deus

Full book notes: [[Homo Deus –– Yuval Harari]]

Introduction:

• "Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes."
• "We should therefore have expected to live in an epidemiological hell, with one deadly plague after another. However, both the incidence and impact of epidemics have gone down dramatically in the last few decades."
• Harari on #covid-19 before it even happened.
  • "So while we cannot be certain that some new ebola outbreak or an unknown flu strain won't sweep across the globe and kill millions, we will not regard it as an inevitable natural calamity. Rather, we will see it as an inexcusable human failure and demand the heads of those responsible."
  • "Such criticism assumes that humankind has the knowledge and tools to prevent plagues, and if an epidemic nevertheless gets out of control, it is due to human incompetence rather than divine anger."
  • "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 ever. But we may come to miss it."
• "Sugar is now more dangerous that gunpowder"
• When the moment comes to choose between economic growth and ecological stability, politicians, CEOs and voters almost always prefer growth. In the twenty first century, we shall have to do better if we are to avoid catastrophe.
• "Nuclear weapons have turned was between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide and therefore forced the most powerful nations on earth to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Simultaneously, the global economy has been transformed from a material-based economy into a knowledge-based economy... ...Hence as knowledge became the most important resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world –– such as the Middle East and Central Africa –– where the economies are still old-fashioned and material-based."
• 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.
• We never react to events in the outside world, but only to sensations in our own bodies. #stoicism
• Healing is the initial justification for every upgrade.
• While the attempt to upgrade humans into gods takes its logical conclusion, it simultaneously exposes humanism's inherent flaws. If you start with a flawed ideal, you often appreciate it's defects only when the ideal is close to realization.

Part 1:

• It's hardly surprising, therefore, that the Bible rejects animistic beliefs and its only animistic story appears right at the beginning, as a dire warning. (Adam, Eve and the serpent)
• We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life-forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.
• Even when we are consumed by doubt and as ourselves 'Do subjective experiences really exist?', we can be certain that we are experiencing doubt.
• According to Turing, it doesn't matter who you really are, only what other people think of you. It won't matter whether computers will be conscious or not, only what people think about it.
• [[Psychiatric drugs]] are aimed to induce changes not just in human behavior but above all, in human feeling.
• Sapiens don't behave according to a cold mathematical logic, rather according to warm social logic.

Part 2:

• In literate societies people are organized into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.
• Equating religion with faith in supernatural powers implies that you can understand all known natural phenomena without religion, which is just an optional supplement.
• [[dualism]]: we must reject all material temptations and deals. Every journey on which we doubt the conventions and deals of the mundane world and walk towards an unknown destination is called a "spiritual destination".
• When we leave the ethereal sphere of philosophy and observe historical realities, we find that religious stories almost always include three parts:
  • Ethical judgements, such as 'human life is sacred'
  • Factual statements, such as 'human life begins at the moment of conception'
  • A conflation of the ethical judgements with the factual statements, resulting in practical guidelines such as 'you should never allow abortion, even a single day after conception'
• Credit is the economic manifestation of trust.
• Most natural systems exist in equilibrium, and most survival struggles are a zero-sum game in which one can prosper only at the expense of another.
• This Modi's India is home to thousands of sects, parties, movements and gurus, yet though their ultimate aims may differ, they all have to pass through the same bottleneck of economic growth, so why not pull together in the meantime?
• Too many politicians and voters believe that as long as the economy grows, scientists and engineers can save us from the doomsday. When it comes to [[climate change]], many growth true-believers do not just hope for miracles, they take it for granted that miracles will happen.
• Modernity turned the world upside down. It convinced humans collectives that equilibrium is dar more frightening that chaos, and because avarice fuels growth, it is a force for good. Modernity accordingly inspired people to want more, and dismantled the age old disciplines that curbed greed.
• For centuries, humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our [[free will]] is therefore the highest authority of them all.
• In medieval Europe, the chief formula was: Knowledge = Scriptures x Logic. The scientific revolution's formula was Knowledge = Empirical Data x Mathematics. And humanism decided that Knowledge = Experiences x Sensitivity.
  • "If we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens, and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good and who I really am."
• Liberals think that human experience is an individual one. But there are many individuals in the world, and they often feel different things and have contradictory desires. If all authority and meaning flows from individual experiences, how do you settle contradictions between different such experiences?Under liberalism, went a famous quip: everyone is free to starve. Even worse, by encouraging people to view themselves as isolated individuals, liberalism separates them from their other class members, and prevents them from uniting against the system that oppresses them. **Liberalism thereby perpetuates inequality, co
• Under liberalism, went a famous quip: everyone is free to starve. Even worse, by encouraging people to view themselves as isolated individuals, liberalism separates them from their other class members, and prevents them from uniting against the system that oppresses them. Liberalism thereby perpetuates inequality, condemning the masses to poverty and the elite to alienation.
• There is no serious alternative to the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market.
• God is dead - it just takes a while to get rid of the body. Radical #islam poses no serious threat to the liberal package, because for all their fervor, the zealots don't understand the world of the twenty-first century, snd have nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities that new technologies are generating all around us.
  • Islamic fundamentalists may repeat the mantra that 'Islam is the answer.' but religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability to even understand the questions being asked. What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty? What will happen when technology increases the wage gap between the rich and the poor?
  • You will not find any of the answers to that in the Qur'an or the Sharia law, nor in the Bible or the Confucian Analects, because nobody in the middle east or ancient China knew much about computers, nanotechnology or computers. [[Made You Think - The Qur'an]]
  • Not because socialist humanism was philosophically more advanced than Islamic and Christian theology, but rather because Marx and Lenin devoted more attention to understanding the technological and economic realities of their time, than in pursuing ancient texts and prophetic dreams.
  • When genetic engineering and AI reveal their full potential, liberalism, democracy and free markets might become as obsolete as knives, tape cassettes, Islam and communism.

Part 3:

• To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for "freedom". The sacred word freedom turns out to be just like "soul"; an empty term that carries no discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories humans have invented.
  • The last nail in freedom's coffin is provided by the theory of evolution. Just as evolution cannot be squared with eternal souls, neither can it swallow the idea of [[free will]]. For if humans are free, how could natural selection have shaped them?
• If you look really deep within yourself, the seeming unity that we take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none if which is a 'true self'. Humans aren't individuals, they're 'dividuals'.
• [[confabulation]], the left hemisphere of our brain is not only the seat of our verbal abilities, but also of an internal interpreter that constantly tries to make sense of our life, using partial clues in order to concoct plausible stories. There is no single self making any of these decisions, rather, they result from a tug of war between different often conflicting entities.
• Reference to [[Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman]]
• We are about to face a flood of extremely useful devices, tools and structures that make no allowance for the free will of an individual humans. Can democracy, the free market and human rights survive this flood?
• As time goes on, it becomes easier to replace humans with machines and algorithms, not simply because algorithms are getting smarter, but also because humans are specializing. People specialize in a much narrower niche than a hunter gatherer, which makes it much easier to replace them with AI
• According to the life sciences, art is not the product of some enchanted spirit or metaphysical soul, but rather of organic [[Algorithms]] recognizing mathematical patterns. If so, there is no reason why non-organic algorithms couldn't master it.
  • The crucial problem isn't creating jobs, but creating jobs that humans can perform better than algorithms.
• [[The Quantified Self]] argues that [[The Self]] is nothing but mathematical patterns. These patterns are so complex that the human mind has no change of understanding them. So if you wish to obey the old adage and know thyself, you should not waste your time on philosophy, meditation or psychoanalysis. But rather, collect systematic data, and allow algorithms to analyze them for you and tell you who you are and what you should do. 'Self knowledge through numbers.'
  • Thanks to our growing understanding of human biology, medicine keeps us alive long enough for our minds and our 'authentic selves' to disintegrate and dissolve. All too often, what's left is a collection of dysfunctional biological systems kept going by a collection of monitors, computers and pumps.
• Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.
• Despite all the talk of radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is the Silicon Valley. That's where the high-tech gurus are brewing for us new [[religion]]s that have little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes - happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life - but here on earth with the help of tech, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.
• However, most scientific research about the human mind and the human experience has been conducted by/on people from Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic societies, who do not constitute a representative sample of humanity.
• Reference to: [[What Is It Like to Be a Bat? - Thomas Nagel]]
• With the rise of cities, kingdoms and empires, the system cultivated capacities required for large-scale cooperation while disregarding other skills and talent. [[Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Daniel Dennett]]
• Apps that decide for us like Uber and Diet apps. Letting machines monitor health parameters and suggesting habits. If we rely too much on others to make decisions for us, we lose that "muscle".
  • In the short run, it's very valuable. But the dark side is the data side. If the data is being used to manipulate people, or do anything malicious, then it's a problem. The darker side is that the "attention helmet" makes people less patient to confusion, doubts or contradictions. [[The Attention Deficit Trait]]
  • "The system may push us in that direction, because it usually rewards us for the decisions we make rather than for our doubts. Yet a life of resolute decisions and quick fixes may be poorer and shallower than one of doubts and contradictions."
    • Once people can design and redesign their will, we can no longer see it as an ultimate source of #meaning and authority. For no matter what our will sats, we can always make it say something else.
• [[Dataism]] says that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.
• Decisions made by web designers far from the public limelight mean that today the Internet is a free and lawless zone that erodes state sovereignty, ignores borders, abolishes privacy and poses perhaps the most formidable global security risk.
• The NSA may be spying on your every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows that to do with all the data. Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world, yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary US. It's like a poker player who knows his opponent's cards, and still manages to lose the round.
• Love? And not even some platonic cosmic love, but the carnal attraction between two mammals? Do you really think that an all-knowing supercomputer of aliens who managed to conquer the entire galaxy would be dumbfounded by a hormonal rush?
• Scholars in the life sciences should ask themselves if we miss anything by equating everything to data-processing and decision making. Is there perhaps something in the universe that cannot be reduced to data? Suppose non-conscious algorithms could eventually outperform conscious intelligence in all known data processing tasks? What, if anything, would be lost by replacing conscious intelligence with superior non-conscious [[Algorithms]]?
• #comment The book really reminds me of some concepts described in [[Sum]]