Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; b
Single Quote Counter-Review:
Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
The audacious first act, Sapiens, ended with a wild and apocalyptic prophesy - that the Sapiens were cooking up the next epochal revolutHomo Obsoletus
The audacious first act, Sapiens, ended with a wild and apocalyptic prophesy - that the Sapiens were cooking up the next epochal revolution that will overshadow the previous three: the cognitive, agricultural and scientific/industrial revolutions. Home Deus, the second act, is the full exploration of that prophesy.
Both Sapiens and Homo Deus are compulsory reading in my book, even though the macro-history presented is plenty vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. But then, it might be better to think of these as works of philosophy and not of history. Just like Sapiens is not a History, Home Deus is not a prophesy, both are explorations.
This line can be taken as the transition line that links the first book with the second one: “Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
The old enemies of mankind— plague, famine and war—are now under control. Except for the potentially restrictive energy constraint, Sapiens has very little standing in our way now. The result is that the Sapiens are becoming more and more God-like, Harari says, and one is forced to pause and reflect: by any previous standards of our history, are we not already Gods? Have we not already exceeded most wild power fantasies? Well yes, but even more God-like attributes are coming: cheating death and creating new life being primary.
And along with this march towards the godlike we are marching towards being machine-like too, as we outsource more and more of our internal algorithms to better data-based external algorithms. And the march is relentless, Homo Deus is taking birth before our eyes. The tomorrow is already upon us, and so forth.
However, just like the previous three revolutions that infused the Sapiens with power, this revolution too will come at a price, the price of a ratcheting up of inequality. The new Gods will be the techno-super-rich. BTW, reading Harari is good motivation to work on getting rich faster: he hints at a possibility that anyone who is rich enough to afford it, some 50 years into the future, should be able to buy proxy-immortality. And it will probably be a window that closes quickly, since the super-rich would soon take over the monopoly on immortality. So if you are rich enough at the right point in time, then you can be part of Olympus too. That might not be a deal many would want to miss out on…
There is one more catch: as technology takes over most of the functions, even the godlike sapiens will find themselves stuck in a universe devoid of real meaning. Bulk of humanity will have no economic, social or cultural purpose since anything we can do our new creations would be able to do even better. “Organisms are algorithms,” and the new algorithms will be so much better than the imperfect ones we are made of. As Bill Gates asked in his article about the book, “What If People Run Out of Things to Do?” We will be stuck in an immortal meaninglessness, our own creations clearly our betters. We will need a new religion to make sense of all this, since the powerful combo of Humanism+Science will not work in world where the sanctity of being Human has lost meaning. Harari feels that “Dataism” will be the religion that will fill the avoid left by Humanism.
The whole of Humanity, the Earth, and maybe the entire Universe will become servants to data - a huge data-processing system, the eternal all-knowing Atman. And serving this goal will be the only meaningful pursuit left for us.
Immortal, All-powerful, Obsolete: this is the future of the Sapiens....more
Bostrom is here to imagine a world for us (and he has batshit crazy imagination, have to give him that). TImagine a Danger (You may say I'm a Dreamer)
Bostrom is here to imagine a world for us (and he has batshit crazy imagination, have to give him that). The world he imagines is a post-AI world or at least a very-near-to-AI world or a nascent-AI world. Don’t expect to know how we will get there - only what to do if we get there and how to skew the road to getting there to our advantage. And there are plenty of wild ideas on how things will pan out in that world-in-transition, the ‘routes’ bit - Bostrom discusses the various potential routes, but all of them start at a point where AI is already in play. Given that assumption, the “dangers” bit is automatic since the unknown and powerful has to be assumed to be dangerous. And hence strategies are required. See what he did there?
It is all a lot of fun, to be playing this thought experiment game, but it leaves me a bit confused about what to feel about the book as an intellectual piece of speculation. I was on the fence between a two-star rating or a four-star rating for much of the reading. Plenty of exciting and grand-sounding ideas are thrown at me… but, truth be told, there are too many - and hardly any are developed. The author is so caught up in his own capacity for big BIG BIIG ideas that he forgets to develop them into a realistic future or make any the real focus of ‘dangers’ or ‘strategies’. They are just all out there, hanging. As if their nebulosity and sheer abundance should do the job of scaring me enough.
In the end I was reduced to surfing the book for ideas worth developing on my own. And what do you know, there were a few. So, not too bad a read and I will go with three.
And for future readers, the one big (not-so-new) and central idea of the book is simple enough to be expressed as a fable, here it is:
The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows
It was the nest-building season, but after days of long hard work, the sparrows sat in the evening glow, relaxing and chirping away.
“We are all so small and weak. Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help us build our nests!”
“Yes!” said another. “And we could use it to look after our elderly and our young.”
“It could give us advice and keep an eye out for the neighborhood cat,” added a third.
Then Pastus, the elder-bird, spoke: “Let us send out scouts in all directions and try to find an abandoned owlet somewhere, or maybe an egg. A crow chick might also do, or a baby weasel. This could be the best thing that ever happened to us, at least since the opening of the Pavilion of Unlimited Grain in yonder backyard.”
The flock was exhilarated, and sparrows everywhere started chirping at the top of their lungs.
Only Scronkfinkle, a one-eyed sparrow with a fretful temperament, was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavor. Quoth he: “This will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst?”
Replied Pastus: “Taming an owl sounds like an exceedingly difficult thing to do. It will be difficult enough to find an owl egg. So let us start there. After we have succeeded in raising an owl, then we can think about taking on this other challenge.”
“There is a flaw in that plan!” squeaked Scronkfinkle; but his protests were in vain as the flock had already lifted off to start implementing the directives set out by Pastus.
Just two or three sparrows remained behind. Together they began to try to work out how owls might be tamed or domesticated. They soon realized that Pastus had been right: this was an exceedingly difficult challenge, especially in the absence of an actual owl to practice on. Nevertheless they pressed on as best they could, constantly fearing that the flock might return with an owl egg before a solution to the control problem had been found.
Historians like Braudel can only dream of the kind of history that can be written now. Now that we have minute and granular data on billions of indivi Historians like Braudel can only dream of the kind of history that can be written now. Now that we have minute and granular data on billions of individuals, on how they are living, of what they like, what they search for, who they prefer to be with, what they enjoy reading and watching, where they spend their time, how they react to political events, what their fears are, etc. -- a veritable flood of data -- a dataclysm.
This book is an early, tentative, and often highly constrained attempt at creating the sort of narrative that this flood of data allows. It is restricted to the data collected from a dating site and hence comes with all the constrains and conditions that would imply (the sample would tend to be young, unmarried, middle-class and mostly male, for instance).
Event though the book does not have any revelations about who we are (when no one is looking -- or at least, when we think so!), it does attempt to corroborate some of the social research that usually reaches us as anecdotes with hard data, and that is its real value -- as a trend-setter.
If you read a lot of popular nonfiction, there are a couple things in Dataclysm that you might find unusual. The first is the color red. The second is that the book deals in aggregates and big numbers, and that makes for a curious absence in a story supposedly about people: there are very few individuals here. Graphs and charts and tables appear in abundance, but there are almost no names. It’s become a cliché of pop science to use something small and quirky as a lens for big events—to tell the history of the world via a turnip, to trace a war back to a fish, to shine a penlight through a prism just so and cast the whole pretty rainbow on your bedroom wall.
I’m going in the opposite direction. I’m taking something big—an enormous set of what people are doing and thinking and saying, terabytes of data—and filtering from it many small things: what your network of friends says about the stability of your marriage, how Asians (and whites and blacks and Latinos) are least likely to describe themselves, where and why gay people stay in the closet, how writing has changed in the last ten years, and how anger hasn’t. The idea is to move our understanding of ourselves away from narratives and toward numbers, or, rather, to think in such a way that numbers are the narrative.
That is why the author says that he likes to think of his book a sort of Anti-Outliers. The exciting stories are not limited to what a few exceptional individuals are doing, but also in the aggregated activities of millions of Joes. No anecdotes for you, but here are some fun graphs....more
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