by Bryn Haworth*
In his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari is concerned with a human future that is no longer strictly human at all. It is a future that finally belongs to the geeks and to their ultimate creation: artificial intelligence.
Whether these geeks are entirely human has always been a matter of some doubt. In the future, Harari is not even sure there will be any humans, but if there are, they will be very inferior beings. They will err just as they do now. They may even die after lives of minimal usefulness. Meanwhile, the creations of the geeks – the robots, the Internet-of-Things, algorithms – will gleefully supersede these underlings and render them obsolete. Only the very rich will be able to afford immortality, whether by constantly upgrading their bodies or by merging with the machine. There may be a cast system more brutal than any yet invented which preserves the lives of the rich into eternity and scraps the bodies of the poor altogether. They will still spend their wretched lives denying death, frantically, but the mega-rich will no longer have to waste any of their time doing that. The mega-rich will be indifferent to the forms of denial we have come to know: nation states, glory, progress, virtue. They are well on the way to transcending such nonsense. Already they have advanced far beyond the nation state, for instance. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.
Homo Deus is a remarkably entertaining harbinger of doom. In its long yet often pithy, quite often funny and always sceptical five hundred pages, Harari comes up with a treasury of stories and examples, from vampire bat blood banks to nappies which can assess your baby’s health, from helmets that can focus the mind to algorithms, always the dreaded algorithms, that can read your book over your shoulder and recall your experiences with a the kind of fidelity that would blow Proust’s mind.
In surveying the whole of this confused digital landscape he demonstrates that it is not only the mega-rich who can see into the future, though it may only be the mega-rich who can do so with enthusiasm. Harari is very concerned about what we are doing to the environment. He doesn’t like the abominable way we treat domesticated animals. But above and beyond these concerns, he is convinced that the biological and computer sciences combined are bringing to an end the complacent illusions of liberalism.
Liberalism is obviously a product of Enlightenment, but this does not mean it has always resulted in enlightened societies. Harari counts capitalism, communism and even Nazism among its products. All are based, in one way or another, on the assumption that the human being is the measure of all things. Harari does not question the mortal blow technology has dealt to this traditional liberal worldview. He embraces the fact. Only his pessimism continues to sound liberal, as if pessimism were the last remnant of liberal superstition.
The soul, the ‘narrating self’ and free will are all exploded myths. Even the mechanics of desire are reduced, through what biology has achieved, to algorithms, and these algorithms already rule the world, while we humans are losing the ability to smell, to pay attention or to dream. It’s as if we are being prepared for obsolescence. We suffer from Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and yet we miss out on so much. Soon we ourselves will be passed over, our skills will be made redundant by machines and the vast bulk of humanity will end up part of ‘the useless class,’ not simply unemployed but unemployable. Or else we could be about to become robots, the effect will be the same. Already there are those who are less inclined to resist this extinction, the kind of people who most enjoy the innocent pleasures of social media. As Harari says:
‘In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.’
The future is definitely here, even if we do not care to inhabit it. The true believers in the future are already scrolling and swiping amongst us. They are not geeks. They are the addicts of tech, the willing, passive consumers of the Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. That is to say, every one of us who is not some old Luddite, or bag lady, or old man who hoards worthless stuff, last keepers of the flame of human obsolescence:
‘Most people like this [data] very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the dataflow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information? ... The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.’
These imperatives are already here. Through likes and posting updates on their lives, people are already surrendering themselves to the public domain, and as they do, just like the movie and pop stars of old, they lose their privacy, over and over again. But also, like those stars, they secretly want to lose it.
Technology allows us to live life through a kind of democratic celebrity where everything we do can be watched and appraised by everyone else. The gadgets can salve the anguish of our anonymity; we only have to surrender to the algorithm. It’s for the best. In the near future we will cease to take decisions as we will be unable to know ourselves as well as the algorithms know us. If you happen to have clicked three hundred likes on your Facebook account, the Facebook algorithm can ‘predict your opinions and desires better than your husband or wife’. From here it is a short step to abandoning any pretence to self-knowledge. In fact:
‘People might abandon their own psychological judgement and rely on computers when making important life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners.’
For a person as naturally allergic to taking decisions as I am, this almost sounds like the right idea. Into the great skip of obsolete psychology would go difficult dilemmas, decisions, feelings and even the injunction to “know thyself” since this famous ‘self’ of mine would no longer be my specialist subject:
‘…twenty-first century technology may enable external algorithms to “hack humanity” and know me far better than I know myself. Once this happens the belief in individualism will collapse and authority will shift from individual humans to networked algorithms.’
For Harari, this will mark the end of liberalism: not the moment when the algorithms know everything about us, but simply the moment when they know us better than we know ourselves. The algorithms will decide what is best for our health, who is best for our love life, and the entirety of our lives will be regulated and maintained by ‘a host of biometric devices, bionic organs and nano-robots’, which will also make us vulnerable in ways we can hardly imagine now:
‘If I don’t update my body’s anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.’
Maybe that sounds about as bad as things could get. Certainly, if the Federal Reserve or Sony Pictures disliked the experience, my immortal, partially robotic and tranquilly submissive algorithmic self is likely to feel violated by the Rocket Man or one of his agents hacking into my peace of mind. This is the danger that John Gray alluded to, after all, the lingering spectre of death in cyberspace.
DATA RELIGION
But Harari’s pessimism is not finished with us yet. He reserves his real dread for something far more peculiar than half human, half robot. It is the dawning of data religion. In the final decoupling of intelligence from consciousness, something new will transpire to which humans will seem like a rude interruption. Dataism. The singularity is near, as Ray Kurzweil said. This new religion will bring immortality at the price of identity. Dataism introduces a new value entirely: information flow.
‘According to Dataism, human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn’t the apex of creation or a precursor of some future Homo deus. Humans are merely tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to pervade the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.’
The second commandment of this new religion is quite chilling: it is ‘to link everything to the system, including heretics who don’t want to be plugged in.’
The great decoupling of intelligence from consciousness will not be so painful for those of us who have already begun the process. Nor will it be at all difficult for those without liberal hang-ups in the first place: ‘The system will continue to find value in humans collectively, but not in unique individuals.’ With the decline of liberalism and its myth of free will and choice, a new age will be ushered in. Could it be the same age as President Xi has been describing at some length to the Communist Party Congress? Could it be, quite simply, the Chinese Age? For example, the possibility of predicting your health through your DNA is based entirely on statistics. The more numbers are available, the more accuracy can be achieved:
‘US biotech companies are increasingly worried that strict privacy laws in the USA combined with Chinese disregard for individual privacy may hand China the genetic market on a plate.’
This triumph of Chinese medicine would be just one aspect of freed information. But while the information will be free, expression is unlikely to follow. No one in Xi’s ideal future will be permitted to call him Winnie the Pooh as some subversives do now, implying he is a Bear of Very Little Brain. Instead, Xi’s thoughts will be engraved on the Communist Party’s digital tablets and disseminated to the entire population as the ultimate truth.
Harari’s prophecy of this coming religion of data concludes a huge, thought-provoking book, but there is one more thing to add. Perhaps this update on the strange death of liberalism has a hidden warning for us. In the future, it says, freedom of information will flourish, as there will be no privacy such as we presently cling to. Only by abolishing privacy can the algorithms truly get to know me. This, paradoxically, will also be the death of me. Immortality and death are strangely complicit.
ANCIENT HISTORY
It’s quite possible that anyone reading this has grown a little weary of the future before it’s even got started. Picture, therefore, a tranquil scene in ancient Rome...
It is midday at the height of the Roman summer. In a dimly-lit room with all the shutters closed, an old man is dying on his bed. As the mind’s eye, like a time-travelling drone, approaches his pillow we see the tired, raddled features of the emperor Vespasian. He has reached the end of an incredibly successful career. The scenes of his triumphs have stretched from Judaea in the east to the Home Counties of Britannia in the west. He is the man who came up with the idea of taxing public urinals in Rome and who, when someone sneered, famously commented that money did not smell. He is also the man who founded the Flavian dynasty and began building the Roman Colosseum. So it’s hardly surprising, given the self-belief of emperors, that with his last breath we hear him remark “I think I am becoming a god.”
Except, what if Vespasian is having a little joke? If so, that’s quite a scandal. It’s one thing for the common people to be sceptical about their ruler’s divinity. It’s quite another for their actual ruler to express doubts about it. At the very last moment, Vespasian is owning up to being Winnie the Pooh – before ascending to the heavens with the aid of a balloon.
We will never know what Vespasian really expected to happen, since he had the decorum to pass away with a sally of playful irony. In fact, we can never really know about the distant past and the people who inhabit it, what their expectations were, or how much they believed the unlikely fictions of their day concerning death and the afterlife. They are as inscrutable as any sphinx.
THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF MR BRIN
In contrast, we can be very confident when it comes to the future as that, in our excitable times, is something we are told about ad nauseam. Indeed, according to Francis O’Gorman in his book ‘Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia,’ we are trying to live in it already and to escape the past. ‘In the future-oriented way of life that O’Gorman describes,’ says Simon Gray in his review, ‘we are all in the position of Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, who, when asked if he believes in the life to come, replies, “Mine was always that.” ’
Now we would expect Beckett, the poet of interminable waiting, to know about such things, but not all of us are prepared to wait for the life to come. Some have jumped the queue and are in the future already. They are the pioneers and they have long left the rest of us eating their dust, though the dust we are left eating is actually our own. These pioneers have no intention of being reduced to dust, ashes, coffins and the like. They haven’t simply seen the future, they are already busy colonising it.
Seeing this future is not difficult. It doesn’t require a physical journey to a very innovative corner of California. The people whose motto is “Don’t be evil” have already girdled the world like Mephistopheles a million times since you began reading this article. They are free to go everywhere and do as they please, so long as they don’t do it in China. They are used to getting around quickly and without obstructions, and they have no desire to walk out of Silicon Valley one fateful day and straight into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. They emphatically do not consider this life to be a vale of tears. On the contrary, the Valley’s richest citizens want to ‘solve death’ once and for all. They will achieve this through upgrades or some kind of “digital ascension” depending on the latest jargon. These men are rich enough to succeed if anyone can. In fact, they have a lot in common with Vespasian, apart from his gift for playful irony.
This is why when Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, first stumbled upon a reference to himself in a book entitled Homo Deus he was rather indignant. He had not expected to read his name in the context of a derisive passage on the topic of would-be immortals, yet here the author was, openly expressing doubts that he, Brin, could live forever. The man from Google felt unpleasantly queasy. It was as if the skeletal hand of Death had reached out of the page and pointed a bony finger in his face. He called his girlfriend, Nicole Shanahan, to tell her. “I’m reading this book, Homo Deus,” he said, “and it says on page twenty eight that I’m going to die.” Nicole was sceptical, but she could tell Brin was upset. “You mean, it says you personally?” she asked, never having heard of a book that addressed its own reader. “Yes,” Brin replied. Turning to page thirty two of the British edition we do indeed find these macabre words:
‘Though Google’s Calico probably won’t solve death in time to make Google’s co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page immortal…’
I shall not shock the reader any further. After all, ask not for whom the bell tolls etc. The bony finger is pointing at you and me as well as the indignant Sergey. But, as Tad Friend of The New Yorker explains, when appearing on stage and hearing this anecdote again, Brin reacted with ‘a briskly ambiguous nod: Yes, I was singled out for death; no, I’m not actually planning to die.’ He really does take it personally. Why was the seemingly invulnerable confidence of one of the planet’s richest and most successful men so badly dented by half a sentence?
The answer might have something to do with the money that Sergey Brin has invested in his project of immortality, some $1.5 billion. In September 2013, Google founded its own research and development biotech company dedicated to the prolongation of life. Known as Calico, its efforts are focused on “health, well-being, and longevity”. Immortality is not explicitly mentioned and not much more is known about it. No investigative journalist has yet penetrated to its inner sanctum. I did try, but I admit that part of me was doubtful from the start about the efficacy of entering the word ‘Calico’ in Google’s own search engine. Sure enough, I am none the wiser.
Homo Deus, as the title suggests, is concerned with the potential of technological advances to deify humankind. It points out early on that medical science has begun to move away from preserving health to upgrading the organism:
‘Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy… upgrading the healthy is an elitist project, because it rejects the idea of a universal standard applicable to all and seeks to give some individuals an edge over others.’
Much the same effect is achieved by the English public school system. But the products of this elite school will be a little more powerful than today’s cabinet ministers or top barristers. When Harari says ‘humanity’s next targets’ will be ‘immortality, happiness, divinity’ he means the targets of the chosen few.
Harari calls the religion underpinning this vision of a radically unequal future “techno-humanism” and one might ask why one of its supposed beneficiaries, Mr Brin – aside from a reluctance to die – would be at all perturbed by a book that saw this coming: ‘These superhumans will enjoy unheard-of abilities and unprecedented creativity, which will allow them to go on making many of the most important decisions in the world.’
So far, so Vespasian, you might think. It would all sound as optimistic (or insane) as any other Silicon Valley fantasist if only Harari had some confidence that any of this will actually happen. In fact, he seems to have very little. And that, in turn, wouldn’t be a problem if he was just another jaded cynic or slow-witted technophobe, but Harari is as brainy as any of the geeks he is taking on. He doesn’t challenge the science they espouse. He attacks what he sees as the religion they have signed up to, something he considers an elitist project of upgrading the healthy to create a superhuman elite, and if the rampant inequalities that have made people like Sergey Brin possible continue into the post-human future, then we, the non-billionaires, are liable to be treated in a similar way by the deified superhumans as animals are presently treated by us. Ordinary humans are destined to become lower life forms, useless and short-lived.
And yet Harari doesn’t expect the techno-humanist future to happen. His vision is far more pessimistic. If the future is a place in which no one knows themselves anymore, and in which the algorithms makes all my decisions for me, how meaningful would the emperor’s power be? In this vision, eternal life is the great leveller.
What might actually transpire, as we have seen, is a rival religion of the future – based on data – which has scary implications for the notion of personal identity: ‘Data religion argues that humans have completed their cosmic task and should now pass the torch on to entirely new kinds of entities.’ Already the sciences, notably biology and computing, have reduced us to algorithms. They have even reduced Mr Brin to algorithms. Mr Brin is no longer the proud possessor of a soul. He has no free will. He has nothing that the religion of liberalism endowed him with, apart perhaps from his money. What right has he got to seek the perpetuation of Mr Brin, if that same Mr Brin is a lie which his narrating self has been telling him for as long as he can remember?
We plebs, useless and short-lived, would certainly be dispensable in a future that permitted emperors, or ‘the lords of technology’ as Steve Bannon has called them, to domineer over us. We would resemble the gladiators in Vespasian’s Colosseum. Looking up towards the balcony we would cry “Those who are about to die salute you!” Then imperial thumbs would be lifted or dipped in a kind of Facebook frenzy of likes or dislikes, deciding our sorry fates.
But maybe that was just the guilty daydream of Mr Brin and his co-religionists. Maybe it was this very daydream that Homo Deus came along to disturb.
*Bryn Haworth is an English writer living in Kent. He has previously worked in many diverse fields, including as an academic in Prague, where he set up an MA programme in literature at Charles University. He has also lived in Greece, Ecuador and Saudi Arabia, and has recently started work on a comic novel.
