Hackable humans and digital dictators: Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
I believe the metaphorical clouds he is talking about here will probably drift by. This is because I believe that the main reason why most people don't act like tyrants, is not that they don't have the opportunity (because most people have the opportunity to be someone's tormentor); it is that it is in their economic interest to cooperate with others, benefiting their own survival.
Conjuring up dystopian visions of the future is no challenge; I'm sure most readers could come up with ten just to argue with this comment. But society's been getting better in every aspect of living almost every decade since the enlightenment. While this is not a law of nature, it is reasonable to assume that this will continue for a little while.
The sequel Homo Deus isn't as good, and it felt like something that was written in a rush after Harari managed to break into the best-seller list.
The reason why everyone points to Western Rome as an example of fleeting success (forgetting that its eastern part survived for an additional millennium), is that it was the last empire to go out with a real boom. As a counter-example, you could point to the British empire, whose heritage is still alive and well: We are discussing using its language and it is still a part of the G7. The same goes for the Roman language, which is still one of the world's most spoken, just under another name (Spanish). And you probably have dinosaur descendants living in your city, in the form of birds. Things survive, and so will we.
Worrying about imminent ecological collapse is as old as the industrial revolution. Thomas Malthus postulated that agricultural yields would not be able to keep up with population growth. But here we are, more than two hundred years later, better equipped than ever to tackle the challenges ahead of us. I am certain that we will make it out alive, as long as we keep up our good work.
As I see it, the best thing anyone can do right now is to convince their friends and relatives that nuclear energy is safe and necessary; that will buy us a lot of time.
I can’t find it, but I read an article of some of the top climate researchers in Australia basically planning to abandon the country for themselves and their children.
Just the other day, there was an article here where the world’s leading coral expert was saying unequivocally that almost all the world’s coral will die within our lifetime (it sounds like he expected more like 10-20, though he wasn’t specific). He noted that 25-33% of ALL ocean species have part of their lifecycle in this coral.
Article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17842553
Unless we reverse this (sucking carbon from air using nuclear or solar power?), we emphatically do not have 200-300 years.
Which means that you may have the cure, but no one will be able to afford it.
The western style/modern life is not compatible with the planet, and our economy depends on massive growth being realized - if only to service our debts and loans.
Our biosphere is dying under the weight of just the past few years, with only a small fraction of the world enjoying a first world living standard.
Someone has to tell everyone that the party is over, and that they wont be getting that better life after all.
And there's not just "worry" about imminent anthropogenic ecological collapse, but growing empirical evidence for it - something that has never happened before.
Again, I do not claim that there are no ecological problems. I just think that they are solvable if we put our minds to it, because they have always proven to be so before. I may be wrong, but I don't see any better plan of action than being a rational, action-taking optimist. :-)
In essence, yes economic incentive is the basis for much of today's human corporation, but with growing AI/robotics, the same economic incentive will make much current human input unnecessary.
Then, for example, would counties see so many humans as a big cost? How do they solve that if they no longer need them to work?
Scary stuff.
And maybe we don't need as many as 6 billion people on earth, maybe one billion will do (the slow population growth in industrialized countries indicates that depopulation is possible). But the need for them won't disappear overnight; we are nowhere near artificial general intelligence, no matter what Ray Kurzweil tells you.
Slow population growth, does not lead to depopulation.
(Not that we would need depopulation anyway. More just a point that slow growth, is still growth.
He also wrote a third book, that will come out in a week, with a heavily click-bait title :-( 21 Lessons for the 21st Century—I just can't stomach the lacklustre title, and probably just stay away from it, as I'd assume it'll be a "thin wrapper" around his two other books.
Sapiens was the book I enjoyed 3 years ago, before it became popular. Reading that single book gives insight into his fresh and original perspectives.
Sapiens is about known history and analysis of the human struggle so far.
Homo Deus moves onward into unseen territory. Talking about the future always implies speculation. Even if it is just 1 minute ahead.
And people who enjoyed Sapiens should definitely give Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" a try.
My memory is fading, but I appreciate the three "key questions" he asks to think about at the end of the book (transcribing looking at the physical copy near me):
- Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
- What's more valuable—intelligence or consciousness?
- What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
I like the term: "possibilistic", which Rosling uses as a less-naive alternative to "optimistic".
The book is college-level reading, though, and not as rigorous as Steven Pinker's book. (Bill Gates was giving away a free digital copy of Factfulness to all graduates in the U.S.)
I read another book recently that was quite indirectly enlightening on the subject. Energy by Richard Rhodes
The world has never been better equipped to tackle its problems than now. Take comfort in that. And as a citizen of, probably, a democratic state and with the Internet at your fingertips, you have more power than ever, as an individual, to affect our collective destiny.
Will check out that book!
If you want to know the challenge ahead of us go visit the slums of Manila or walk on practically any beach in the world and count the pieces of plastic.
For us but certainly not for society in other parts of the world. And certainly it was not continuous uptrend.
The greatest man-made catastrophes in human history has happened since the enlightenment. Native genocides, holocaust, WW1/WW2, Taiping Rebellion, intentional famines in india killing tens of millions, etc. And we aren't even factoring climate change, environmental degradation and species extinction.
From an absolutist perspective, if you compare an african or asian today to an african and asian 400 years ago, of course they are doing "better". But if you compare the proportional difference between an asian/african-european 400 years ago and asian/african-european today, the asian or african of 400 years was doing better vis a vis the european of 400 years ago.
In an absolute sense, everyone is doing better. But comparatively, the poor south is doing far worse today than it was 400 years ago. The last 400 years has been a story of wealth and resource extraction from the rest to the west. So while we sit pretty absolutely and comparatively, the rest sit worse comparatively.
> While this is not a law of nature, it is reasonable to assume that this will continue for a little while.
It's also reasonable to assume things will change. Not just from a political or economic sense. But from an ecological sense as well. Economically and politically speaking - all empires collapse. The western empire is getting older by the minute. And not to sound like a malthusian, but from an ecological point, the population increased from 500 million to over 7 billion in less than 200 years. That's rather amazing.
News article if you can't watch: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/31/bioweapons-c...
tl;dr “The reason you haven’t heard much about bioweapons is that they’ve been held back by a pretty severe limitation, which is the potential for blowback." Unlocking the ability to target specific genes will overcome this since the same tech that allows targeting only cancer cell will allow targeting specific groups or individuals.
> What, for example, if groups spread their agenda in a very direct way, by literally rewriting DNA to make it impossible to live a life against their credo? Suppose militant vegans wanted to end meat eating: there’s a gene for that. Or imagine if radical misogynists wanted to force the veiling of all women: there’s a gene for sunlight intolerance, and the genetic functions of gender are already well-known.
> Or, he suggested, attacks could be done on an individual level: targeting public figures by stealing their genetic code, or targeting their whole family by sequencing the genes of someone who’s closely related. And the attacks could be subtler than what’s expected: Sotos cited genes for intractable diarrhea, massive weight gain, total baldness and “an intense fishy body odour”.