Homo Deus

Vibe: Even though I don’t agree with a lot, think everything is taken to the extreme, and don’t like the writing style and tone at times I generally liked this book. It made me think about a lot of things I wasn’t thinking about before, and offered solid counters to a lot of my beliefs. The last 50-60 pages was the only section I genuinely didn’t like, and I thought a lot of the speculation there was silly and poorly thought out.

• We’ve managed to make substantial progress over the last couple of centuries at bringing down traditional problems like famine, plague, war, etc. Harari believes that over this century our main projects will become immortality, bliss, and divinity (not in the omnipotent perfectly benign capital-g God sense but more in the enhanced superhuman lowercase-g Greek, Roman, Norse, etc gods)
• Reality
  • Types of realities:
    1. Objective reality: independent of our belief
    2. Subjective reality: purely in the belief of one person
    3. Intersubjective reality: common belief shared by more than one person (money, countries, companies, etc)
  • Intersubjective reality is incredibly important and a large part of our success.
  • Harari expands what’s commonly referred to as religion to include things like communism and Nazism
• The dominant religion of our time is liberal humanism (individual freedoms, all humans matter, humanity gives meaning to the world, etc)
  • There are strong threats to this in the future:
    • A strong argument can be made that the rise of liberal humanism was incentivized by the fact that it has been in the military and economic interests of the elites of states to support those values. Eventually, though, most or all of us will probably become economically and militarily useless.
    • Behavioral economics, biochemistry, and neuroscience show that we don’t have a coherent “self”.
• Future
  • Harari doesn’t know what will come after, and he’s visibly quite scared.
    • He’s worried about what inequality looks like in this world
      • What happens when the rich can live longer, have designer babies, etc and the vast majority of the masses aren’t economically or militarily useful?
    • He’s worried about what surveillance looks like in this world
    • He’s worried about disempowerment when algorithms can make better decisions for us (who we date, who we befriend, what we buy, etc) than we can and we slowly let them
  • My thoughts:
    • People still haven’t fully incorporated evolution into their models of the world. I think this is true even for many atheists. Even lots of ideas that contradict the view of humans as perfectly rational actors from behavioral economics aren’t well-known or absorbed outside relatively small niches of people. It will take a while for liberal humanism to fully go away. We’ll continue to believe in it for strange, fuzzy, irrational reasons for some time.
      • Contra me: It won’t matter what people believe. There’s by no means a perfect correlation between what people believe and what they actually do. It’ll just seem like the logical, reasonable thing you need to do because you can’t fall behind.
    • Devil’s advocate: assuming all else goes well, is Harari’s future really so bad? Harari himself acknowledges that the algorithms making decisions for you won’t be perfect but they’ll probably be better than you will. Does freedom, empowerment, and usefulness matter more than living a good life?
      • Devil’s advocate to the devil’s advocate: you fail at the first few words. This is the kind of thing that is just really really hard to see go well. Also, people will probably set their new living standards as the baseline and compare themselves to the top.