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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity's future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.
Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style--thorough, yet riveting--famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too litt≤ more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.
What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century--from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.
With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.
Author Notes
Yuval Noah Harari received a PhD in history from the University of Oxford. He lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. He has written several books including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind which became a 2016 New York Times Bestsellers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Harari (Sapiens), professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provocatively explores what the future may have in store for humans in this deeply troubling book. He makes it clear that it is impossible to predict the future, so claims to be offering "possibilities rather than prophecies"-and builds a strong case for a very specific outcome. The future to which he affords the greatest probability is, in many ways, a dystopian world in which humanism has given way to "dataism"-the belief that value is measured by its contribution to information transfer-and humans play an insignificant role in world affairs or have gone extinct. The roles humans play are diminishing, Harari argues, because increasingly our creations are able to demonstrate intelligence beyond human levels and without consciousness. Whether one accepts Harari's vision, it's a bumpy journey to that conclusion. He rousingly defends the argument that humans have made the world safer from disease and famine-though his position that warfare has decreased remains controversial and debatable. The next steps on the road to dataism, he predicts, are through three major projects: "immortality, happiness, and divinity." Harari paints with a very broad brush throughout, but he raises stimulating questions about both the past and the future. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Humanity has never been less violent, susceptible to plague, or at risk of famine than it is right now, asserts historian Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2011). So what will Homo sapiens strive toward next? According to Harari: immortality, by way of death-conquering drugs; bliss, via biochemical manipulations engineered to induce everlasting pleasure; and divinity, which we will achieve through biotechnology enhancements and the brave new religions of Silicon Valley. He also tackles the time bomb of modern humanism, which, along with the liberal package of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market, may be the seeds of humanity's undoing. Careful to classify his arguments as possibilities rather than prophesies, Harari's many predictions about the future of humanity toggle between solemn and starry-eyed, depending on the reader's perspective. It's sometimes hard to tell what kind of book it is, given the array of disciplines Harari covers in depth. But like humanity itself, it's an intelligent, panoramic, if sometimes messy assemblage of where we've been and what's to come. Best for readers who crave big ideas.--Comello, Chad Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"ORGANISMS ARE ALGORITHMS," Yuval Noah Harari asserts in his provocative new book, "Homo Deus." "Every animal - including Homo sapiens - is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution. . . . There is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that nonorganic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass." In Harari's telling, the human "algorithm" will soon be overrun and outpaced by other algorithms. It is not the specter of mass extinction that is hanging over us. It is the specter of mass obsolescence. To understand how Harari arrives at this conclusion, we might turn to his earlier book. "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" was an attempt to write a genetic, anthropological, cultural, social and epistemological history of humans over the last 100,000-odd years. Historians, scientists and academic pedants carped about its audacity of scope - but the book, modeled after Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (a book that also received its share of carping and academic envy), presented a sweeping macrohistory, often marvelously. From the birth of a slight, sly, naked ape somewhere in the depths of Africa to the growth, spread and eventual dominance of that species over the world, "Sapiens" split the story of humankind into three broad "revolutions." The first, the "cognitive revolution," resulted in humans acquiring the capacity to think, learn and communicate information with a facility unprecedented in the animal kingdom. The second - the "agricultural revolution" - allowed humans to domesticate crops and animals, enabling us to form stable societies and intensifying the flow of information within them. The "scientific revolution" came last. Humans acquired the capacity to interrogate and manipulate the physical, chemical and biological worlds, resulting in even more potent technological advances that surround us today. "Homo Deus" takes off where "Sapiens" left off; it is a "brief history of tomorrow." What is the natural culmination of the scientific revolution, Harari asks. What will the future look like? "At the dawn of the third millennium," he writes, "humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. 'There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.' Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary, 'Let's see what's on the agenda today.'" This is the kind of breezy prose that has catapulted Harari into an international star - and it is equally evident in this book. I'll return to that brushed-off nightmare - the barbed wire and mushroom clouds - but Harari continues apace: "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." To describe this ascendancy, Harari examines the factors that made the human species so special. "Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal," he writes. So how did this animal come to claim dominion over all other beasts? The answer, he argues, lies not in the uniqueness of our emotions, sensations, morals or moods. Pigs and monkeys share many of these with us - including the capacity to feel anger, envy, pain - and even a desire for justice. Humans exceed these capacities by encoding complex algorithms - "a methodological set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions." Pigs, dogs and monkeys - indeed, all living beings - also encode algorithms, Harari tells us; the human ones happen to be particularly complicated and powerful. In the second section of the book, we witness the relentless march of Homo pre-deus toward Homo deus - from humans who worship gods into humans who become gods. Technology overtakes religion; the fear of nature transmutes into an unprecedented capacity to control nature. Harari has, for my taste, a tendency to overstate the reach of such technological "fixes." Editing every disease-linked gene in the human genome is not as easy, or as technically feasible, as Harari might wish it - in part, because many diseases, we now know, are the consequences of dozens of gene variants, and of gene-environment and gene-chance interactions. But the writing in this section is lively and enables Harari to raise the most provocative question of this book: If humans succeeded by virtue of their "algorithm," then why couldn't another such algorithm topple us in turn? What kind of "algorithms" does Harari have in mind? They happen to be written by humans themselves. The first kind - encoded within computational machines - will create new technological beings with artificial intelligence. The second - encoded in DNA - will create new biological beings with higher "natural" intelligence. Our capacity to manipulate two fundamental forms of information - the biological and the computational, the byte and the gene - will thus result in the birth of superior beings who will ultimately overrun our world. They will take over our jobs, infiltrate lives, and control our emotions and fates as easily as they control our traffic and taxis today. They will write poetry, make love, create art and look, feel and behave like us - only better. Harari is not the first to describe this progression of the human species, but his account may well be one of the most chilling to date. Yet even Harari, a master of the catchy story and historical vignette, fails to convince me entirely. First, there is that pesky matter of the barbed wire and the mushroom cloud. Although Harari is correct in noting the overall decline of violence, hideous conflagrations continue to flare around us (Harari lists a profusion of technological innovations created in the last century - antibiotics, computers, the list goes on - and then challenges the reader to come up with similarly powerful innovations in religion. I couldn't resist: contemporary versions of radical fundamentalism, the use of social media for dispersal, not a particularly pleasant list - but it, too, goes on). The "algorithms" of violence, to contort Harari's own formulation, have doubtless grown more subtle, but they persist - and Harari's vision of humans doomed by superhuman biological or computational machines might well be marred by humans doomed by subhuman biological or computational machines: a terrifying contagion, a nuclear war or, most likely, a cataclysm in climate that we will be utterly powerless to stop. Nor can I share Harari's optimism about certain medical technologies. The examples he provides - of gene sequencing to map and predict human fates, say - have crashed into inherent limits: Chance plays such a crucial role in the development of certain illnesses that genes, although important, may still be relegated to the background. Perhaps we'll learn to "hack" chance in the future too. But until then, the interventions that preoccupy Harari's fantasies will be dominated by few, highly penetrant genes that influence fates and futures in an autonomous manner. Several such genes do exist - but it would be premature to extrapolate this idea to the whole genome. Such concerns aside, Harari's book still remains essential reading for those who think about the future. The algorithms that Harari describes are not trying to imitate humans; they are trying to become human, and possibly exceed our abilities. One story in his book that captivated me was that of the musician and programmer David Cope, who wrote a program to imitate Bach's compositions. Listeners described the compositions as having touched their "innermost being" - and were furious when told the music had, in fact, been created by a device whose "innermost being" happened to be a mesh of silicon and copper. Cope later wrote another program - this time to generate haikus. He then published a book in which some poems were written by the computer while others were written by "organic poets," as Harari describes them, leaving the readers to agonize over which poem was generated by which being. This organic writer, for one, could hardly tell one from the other. SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. His latest book is "The Gene: An Intimate History." He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."
Choice Review
Careful observers of current human history and keen thinkers on the human predicament have reflected on what the future holds. Michio Kaku published his ideas on how science will shape human destiny by 2100, in Visions (CH, May'98, 35-5030). Homo Deus is another fascinating projection into the future. Historian Harari (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (CH, Jul'15, 52-5967), discusses various aspects of the 21st century's dominant technologies and their potential impacts on human civilization and survival. His many conjectures include the manufacture of life and brains, the emergence of a useless class, the disappearance of democracy, and the merger of mankind with machines. However, some of Harari's comments on science and religion seem naive, if not unacceptable. For example, he asserts that science has nothing to do with secularism and tolerance because it arose in 16th-century Europe where religious persecution was widespread, and that liberalism is another religion because liberals believe in free will. He also says that religion is interested in order and science is "interested above all in power," and that technology's agenda is to control our inner voices. Nevertheless, this best seller is worth reading and discussing. The validity of its prophecies can be known only a few decades from now. Summing Up: Essential. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Varadaraja V. Raman, Duke University
Guardian Review
It's a chilling prospect, but the AI we've created could transform human nature, argues this spellbinding new book by the author of Sapiens At the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chilling idea: human nature will be transformed in the 21st century because intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness. We are not going to build machines any time soon that have feelings like we have feelings: that's consciousness. Robots won't be falling in love with each other (which doesn't mean we are incapable of falling in love with robots). But we have already built machines -- vast data-processing networks -- that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves: that's intelligence. Google -- the search engine, not the company -- doesn't have beliefs and desires of its own. It doesn't care what we search for and it won't feel hurt by our behaviour. But it can process our behaviour to know what we want before we know it ourselves. That fact has the potential to change what it means to be human. Yuval Noah Harari 's previous book, the global bestseller Sapiens, laid out the last 75,000 years of human history to remind us that there is nothing special or essential about who we are. We are an accident. Homo sapiens is just one possible way of being human, an evolutionary contingency like every other creature on the planet. That book ended with the thought that the story of homo sapiens could be coming to an end. We are at the height of our power but we may also have reached its limit. Homo Deus makes good on this thought to explain how our unparalleled ability to control the world around us is turning us into something new. The evidence of our power is everywhere: we have not simply conquered nature but have also begun to defeat humanity's own worst enemies. War is increasingly obsolete ; famine is rare; disease is on the retreat around the world. We have achieved these triumphs by building ever more complex networks that treat human beings as units of information. Evolutionary science teaches us that, in one sense, we are nothing but data-processing machines: we too are algorithms. By manipulating the data we can exercise mastery over our fate. The trouble is that other algorithms -- the ones that we have built -- can do it far more efficiently than we can. That's what Harari means by the "uncoupling" of intelligence and consciousness. The project of modernity was built on the idea that individual human beings are the source of meaning as well as power. We are meant to be the ones who decide what happens to us: as voters, as consumers, as lovers. But that's not true any more. We are what gives networks their power: they use our ideas of meaning to determine what will happen to us. Not all of this is new. The modern state, which has been around for about 400 years, is really just another data-processing machine. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, called it an "automaton" (or what we would call a robot). Its robotic quality is the source of its power and also its heartlessness: states don't have a conscience, which is what allows them sometimes to do the most fearful things. What's changed is that there are now processing machines that are far more efficient than states: as Harari points out, governments find it almost impossible to keep up with the pace of technological advance. It has also become much harder to sustain the belief -- shared by Hobbes -- that behind every state there are real flesh-and-blood human beings. The modern insistence on the autonomy of the individual goes along with a view that it should be possible to find the heart of this heartless world. Keep scratching at a faceless bureaucracy and you'll eventually uncover a civil servant with real feelings. But keep scratching at a search engine and all you'll find are data points. We are just at the start of this process of data-driven transformation and Harari says there is little we can do to stop it. Homo Deus is an "end of history" book, but not in the crude sense that he believes things have come to a stop. Rather the opposite: things are moving so fast that it's impossible to imagine what the future might hold. In 1800 it was possible to think meaningfully about what the world of 1900 would be like and how we might fit in. That's history: a sequence of events in which human beings play the leading part. But the world of 2100 is at present almost unimaginable. We have no idea where we'll fit in, if at all. We may have built a world that has no place for us. Given what an alarming thought this is, and since we aren't there yet, why can't we do more to stop it from happening? Harari thinks the modern belief that individuals are in charge of their fate was never much more than a leap of faith. Real power always resided with networks. Individual human beings are relatively powerless creatures, no match for lions or bears. It's what they can do as groups that has enabled them to take over the planet. These groupings -- corporations, religions, states -- are now part of a vast network of interconnected information flows. Finding points of resistance, where smaller units can stand up to the waves of information washing around the globe, is becoming harder all the time. Some people have given up the fight. In place of the founding tenets of modernity -- liberalism, democracy and personal autonomy -- there is a new religion: Dataism. Its followers -- many of whom reside in the Bay Area of California -- put their faith in information by encouraging us to see it as the only true source of value. We are what we contribute to data processing. There is potentially a huge upside to this: it means we will face fewer and fewer obstacles to getting what we want, because the information needed to supply us will be instantly accessible. Our likes and our experiences will merge. Our lifespans could also be hugely extended: Dataists believe that immortality is the next frontier to be crossed. But the downside is obvious, too. Who will "we" be any more? Nothing more than an accumulation of information points. Twentieth-century political dystopias sought to stamp on individuals with the power of the state. That won't be necessary in the coming century. As Harari says: "The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within." Corporations and governments will continue to pay homage to our individuality and unique needs, but in order to service them they will need to "break us up into biochemical subsystems", all of them permanently monitored by powerful algorithms. There is a dystopian political aspect to this, too: the early adopters -- the individuals who sign up first to the Dataist project -- will be the only ones with any real power left and it will be relatively unchallenged. Gaining entry into this new super-elite will be incredibly hard. You'll need heroic levels of education plus zero squeamishness about marrying your personal identity with intelligent machines. Then you can become one of the new "gods". It's a grim prospect: a small priestly caste of seers with access to the ultimate source of knowledge, and the rest of humanity simply tools in their vast schemes. The future could be a digitally supercharged version of the distant past: ancient Egypt multiplied by the power of Facebook. Harari is careful not to predict that these outlandish visions will come to pass. The future is unknowable, after all. He reserves his strongest opinions for what all this should mean for the current state of relations between humans and animals. If intelligence and consciousness are coming apart then this puts most human beings in the same situation as other animals: capable of suffering at the hands of the possessors of superior intelligence. Harari does not seem too worried about the prospect of robots treating us like we treat flies, with violent indifference. Rather, he wants us to think about how we are treating animals in our vast industrialised farming systems. Pigs unquestionably suffer when living in cramped conditions or forcibly separated from their young. If we think this suffering doesn't count because it is not allied to a higher intelligence, then we are building a rod for our own backs. Soon the same will be true of us. And what price our suffering then? This is a very intelligent book, full of sharp insights and mordant wit. But as Harari would probably be the first to admit, it's only intelligent by human standards, which are nothing special. By the standards of the smartest machines it's woolly and speculative. The datasets are pretty limited. Its real power comes from the sense of a distinctive consciousness behind it. It is a quirky and cool book, with a sliver of ice at its heart. Harari cares about the fate of animals in a human world but he writes about the prospects for homo sapiens in a data-driven world with a lofty insouciance. I have to admit I found this deeply appealing, but that may be because of who I am (apart from anything else, a man). Not everyone will find it so. But it is hard to imagine anyone could read this book without getting an occasional, vertiginous thrill. Nietzsche once wrote that humanity is about to set sail on an open sea, now that we have finally left Christian morality behind. Homo Deus makes it feel as if we are standing at the edge of a cliff after a long and arduous journey. The journey doesn't seem so important any more. We are about to step into thin air. - David Runciman.
Library Journal Review
Harari (history, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) recaps the cognitive, agricultural, industrial, and scientific revolutions from Sapiens, his previous best seller, to highlight a shift in the locus of divinity, from shared beliefs about nature to gods to social systems and, ultimately, to humankind itself. He posits that current efforts to cure disease, disability, and death will result in biological augmentation that creates a human species beyond Homo sapiens and that this will necessarily happen along socioeconomic lines. Humanistic systems currently holding sway, such as capitalism or socialism, will disappear if humans no longer are subject to scarcity or disease. Accepting the current idea that all change is controlled by deterministic algorithms (social, biological, or computational), Harari foresees a future of data-driven -technological utilitarianism if we continue to off-load decision-making responsibility to artificial intelligence. This work is speculative, obviously, and posits that if something is technologically -possible, we will try it, not that we will succeed. It leaves readers with questions about consciousness and conscience and whether unrestricted data flow will necessarily lead to wisdom. VERDICT While still appealing to those of a political, historical, or anthropological bent who enjoyed Sapiens, this title will be equally thought provoking to biologists and technological futurists. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]-Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Last Days of Death In the twenty-first century humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality. Struggling against old age and death will merely carry on the time-honoured fight against famine and disease, and manifest the supreme value of contemporary culture: the worth of human life. We are constantly reminded that human life is the most sacred thing in the universe. Everybody says this: teachers in schools, politicians in parliaments, lawyers in courts and actors on theatre stages. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN after the Second World War - which is perhaps the closest thing we have to a global constitution - categorically states that 'the right to life' is humanity's most fundamental value. Since death clearly violates this right, death is a crime against humanity, and we ought to wage total war against it. Throughout history, religions and ideologies did not sanctify life itself. They always sanctified something above or beyond earthly existence, and were consequently quite tolerant of death. Indeed, some of them have been downright fond of the Grim Reaper. Because Christianity, Islam and Hinduism insisted that the meaning of our existence depended on our fate in the afterlife, they viewed death as a vital and positive part of the world. Humans died because God decreed it, and their moment of death was a sacred metaphysical experience exploding with meaning. When a human was about to breathe his last, this was the time to call priests, rabbis and shamans, to draw out the balance of life, and to embrace one's true role in the universe. Just try to imagine Christianity, Islam or Hinduism in a world without death - which is also a world without heaven, hell or reincarnation. Modern science and modern culture have an entirely different take on life and death. They don't think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and they certainly don't view death as the source of life's meaning. Rather, for modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve. How exactly do humans die? Medieval fairy tales depicted Death as a figure in a hooded black cloak, his hand gripping a large scythe. A man lives his life, worrying about this and that, running here and there, when suddenly the Grim Reaper appears before him, taps him on the shoulder with a bony finger and says, 'Come!' And the man implores: 'No, please! Wait just a year, a month, a day!' But the hooded figure hisses: 'No! You must come NOW!' And this is how we die. In reality, however, humans don't die because a figure in a black cloak taps them on the shoulder, or because God decreed it, or because mortality is an essential part of some great cosmic plan. Humans always die due to some technical glitch. The heart stops pumping blood. The main artery is clogged by fatty deposits. Cancerous cells spread in the liver. Germs multiply in the lungs. And what is responsible for all these technical problems? Other technical problems. The heart stops pumping blood because not enough oxygen reaches the heart muscle. Cancerous cells spread because a chance genetic mutation rewrote their instructions. Germs settled in my lungs because somebody sneezed on the subway. Nothing metaphysical about it. They are all technical problems. And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don't need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over. We can kill the cancerous cells with chemotherapy or nano-robots. We can exterminate the germs in the lungs with antibiotics. If the heart stops pumping, we can reinvigorate it with medicines and electric shocks - and if that doesn't work, we can implant a new heart. True, at present we don't have solutions to all technical problems. But this is precisely why we invest so much time and money in researching cancer, germs, genetics and nanotechnology. Even ordinary people, who are not engaged in scientific research, have become used to thinking about death as a technical problem. When a woman goes to her physician and asks, 'Doctor, what's wrong with me?' the doctor is likely to say, 'Well, you have the flu,' or 'You have tuberculosis,' or 'You have cancer.' But the doctor will never say, 'You have death.' And we are all under the impression that flu, tuberculosis and cancer are technical problems, to which we might someday find a technical solution. Even when people die in a hurricane, a car accident or a war, we tend to view it as a technical failure that could and should have been prevented. If the government had only adopted a better policy; if the municipality had done its job properly; and if the military commander had taken a wiser decision, death would have been avoided. Death has become an almost automatic reason for lawsuits and investigations. 'How could they have died? Somebody somewhere must have screwed up.' The vast majority of scientists, doctors and scholars still distance themselves from outright dreams of immortality, claiming that they are trying to overcome only this or that particular problem. Yet because old age and death are the outcome of nothing but particular problems, there is no point at which doctors and scientists are going to stop and declare: 'Thus far, and not another step. We have overcome tuberculosis and cancer, but we won't lift a finger to fight Alzheimer's. People can go on dying from that.' The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not say that humans have 'the right to life until the age of ninety'. It says that every human has a right to life, period. That right isn't limited by any expiry date. An increasing minority of scientists and thinkers consequently speak more openly these days, and state that the flagship enterprise of modern science is to defeat death and grant humans eternal youth. Notable examples are the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and the polymath and inventor Ray Kurzweil (winner of the 1999 US National Medal of Technology and Innovation). In 2012 Kurzweil was appointed a director of engineering at Google, and a year later Google launched a sub-company called Calico whose stated mission is 'to solve death'. In 2009 Google appointed another immortality true-believer, Bill Maris, to preside over the Google Ventures investment fund. In a January 2015 interview, Maris said, 'If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500, the answer is yes.' Maris backs up his brave words with a lot of hard cash. Google Ventures is investing 36 per cent of its $2 billion portfolio in life sciences start-ups, including several ambitious life-extending projects. Using an American football analogy, Maris explained that in the fight against death, 'We aren't trying to gain a few yards. We are trying to win the game.' Why? Because, says Maris, 'it is better to live than to die'. Such dreams are shared by other Silicon Valley luminaries. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has recently confessed that he aims to live for ever. 'I think there are probably three main modes of approaching [death],' he explained. 'You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.' Many people are likely to dismiss such statements as teenage fantasies. Yet Thiel is somebody to be taken very seriously. He is one of the most successful and influential entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley with a private fortune estimated at $2.2 billion. The writing is on the wall: equality is out - immortality is in. Excerpted from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
1 The New Human Agenda | p. 1 |
Part I Homo Sapiens Conquers the World | |
2 The Anthropocene | p. 71 |
3 The Human Spark | p. 101 |
Part II Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World | |
4 The Storytellers | p. 155 |
5 The Odd Couple | p. 179 |
6 The Modern Covenant | p. 200 |
7 The Humanist Revolution | p. 222 |
Part III Homo Sapiens Loses Control | |
8 The Time Bomb in the Laboratory | p. 283 |
9 The Great Decoupling | p. 309 |
10 The Ocean of Consciousness | p. 356 |
11 The Data Religion | p. 372 |
Notes | p. 403 |
Acknowledgements | p. 431 |
Image credits | p. 433 |
Index | p. 437 |