Why the future may not need us

Credit: BBC Future
RISE OF SENTIENT ROBOTS

Attempting to predict the future is always a roll of the dice. No one can see around corners, but that has not stopped think-tanks and other forecasters from trying to gaze a few years down the road. Every other week, another report or book is released telling us how tomorrow is going to unfold.

Yet the future has too many variables for anyone to say with certainty what will happen. Long-promised gizmos like flying cars, robot maids and personal jetpacks have failed to materialise for the masses. Similarly, bringing cryogenically frozen corpses back to life remains firmly in the realm of science fiction.

History shows that some innovations turn the world upside down while others flop spectacularly. Determining which discoveries will disrupt the status quo is fraught with danger. This is particularly the case with digital technologies which are taking us into uncharted waters.

I’m not a seer when it comes to the future, nor is Yuval Noah Harari. Professor Harari does not claim to know for certain what’s in store for humanity. Nonetheless, his book – Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – provides a provocative and fascinating insight into what might lie ahead.

Harari is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His preceding book, the global bestseller – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankindlaid out the last 70,000 years of human history. It examined how humanity managed to rein in famine, plague and war.

While Sapiens showed us where we have been, Homo Deus points to where we are going. Harari openly admits that predicting the future isn’t as easy as deconstructing the past. Even so, his future orientated sequel provides a glimpse of the forces that will shape the 21st century.

Harari’s central claim is that Homo sapiens (Latin for wise man) will become Homo deus (Latin for god man). We are on the cusp of an evolutionary transition in history that may witness the creation of a new species of superhumans – the man-gods of Harari’s title.

Harari is an atheist, so when he uses the word “god”, he is not referring to a supreme deity who is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient) and all-present (omnipresent). Rather, he means humans with life spans greatly extended by science and intelligence vastly enhanced by technology.

Harari believes that humans will increasingly focus on god-like pursuits such as chasing enduring happiness (wellbeing) and everlasting life (wellness). “In seeking bliss and immortality,” he writes, “humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods”.

Achieving this upgrade will take “divine powers” and will happen through new “techno-humanism” technologies such as genetic modification, artificial intelligence and cyborg engineering. We are approaching a crossroads in evolution where machines will become more human-like and humans will allegedly become more machine-like.

Biology and computing are coming together and could theoretically result in a human brain being directly connected to a computer. That “distant possibility”, says Harari, will be reserved for a tiny number of elites – a superclass of humans – given the significant cost of biotechnology.

There will also be a massive “useless class” who will be pushed to one side by intelligent machines which will do jobs better than people can. The list of occupations where people will be “unemployable” include bus drivers, bartenders, construction labourers, veterinary assistants and telemarketers.

One of the divides between the superclass and useless class will be biological, with the former having superior physical and cognitive capacity and living much longer. A second dividing line between the classes will be artificial intelligence which will give unprecedented power to the few who control the algorithms which run our lives.

To illustrate, at some stage in the future, all vehicles are predicted to be self-driving and one corporation may well control the algorithm that runs the entire transport market. In that scenario, all the economic power previously shared by thousands will be in the hands of a single corporation.

A second example can be found in the operation of the military. Armies – which once consisted of millions of men – are increasingly being dominated by small groups of super-warriors who control technologies like drones and fight cyber wars. The best armies today require a small number of highly professional soldiers using very high-tech equipment.

Across the board, human authority is shifting to algorithms and external data processing systems which, according to Harari, may “know us better than we know ourselves”. Harari envisages that “Dataism” – a universal faith in the power of algorithms – will become sacrosanct.

Our lives will be dominated by non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms as we are sucked deeper into the online world and turned into faceless data. In this brave new digital world, Dataism will purportedly become our 21st century religion, replacing a homo-centric world with a data-centric world.

Billions of people around the world are regular users of social media and share intimate details of their lives on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Twitter. But all that free browsing and connecting comes at a price – your entire life (which is why I’m not a user, albeit I do utilise Google).

Harari warns that when you get something for free, you are the product. He points out that “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 dehumanisation of decision-making is being facilitated by everyday citizens. The algorithms that nowadays make automated decisions – which were formerly the exclusive remit of humans – are being fed a diet of data supplied by us. As noted in an online article by two mathematicians:

An algorithm is a digital recipe: a list of rules for achieving an outcome, using a set of ingredients. Usually, for tech companies, that outcome is to make money by convincing us to buy something or keeping us scrolling in order to show us more advertisements. The ingredients used are the data we provide through our actions online – knowingly or otherwise.

Harari believes that “humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design, and to extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic”. Still, he is not asserting that the future has to unfold this way. Harari is a great writer and thinker and his book maps the different possibilities that humankind is facing. Nonetheless, he states that our species:

… is likely to upgrade itself step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process, until our descendants will look back and realise that they are no longer the kind of animal that wrote the Bible, built the Great Wall of China and laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s antics.

Frankly, I find Harari’s predictions chilling and hope that they do not come to pass. I don’t want my great-grandchildren to be bio-engineered. I don’t want humans to be turned into flesh and silicon cyborgs. And I don’t want the techno super-rich to live forever by implanting their brains into robots.

My attitude to immortality was outlined in a recent post, The quest for healthy aging and longevity. Assuming I’m right and immortality is never achieved, the unequal availability of life extending procedures will nonetheless take a toll on society. For Harari this means that:

… we might see the emergence of the most unequal societies that ever existed … economic inequality will be translated into biological inequality.

I hope that the world is not spinning too fast to avoid this grim future.

Before you go…

Last year, I read a book by Roger McNamee called Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. McNamee was an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and a Facebook investor. Nowadays, he spends his time warning people of the dangers of social media platforms. In an article he wrote, McNamee warns that it’s time to wake up to the dark side of Internet technology if we are to avoid a dystopian nightmare. Well worth a read.

One last thing…

I have long believed that the discourse in the mainstream media about artificial intelligence (AI) is grossly exaggerated. This misrepresentation is reinforced by Hollywood which continues to feed the paranoia about AI with a diet of movies portraying robots as evil machines. Filmmakers, along with the media, know that people are predisposed to fear what they do not understand. I do not believe that robots will become human facsimiles and this article does a good job in explaining why our fears of AI are overblown. Also, well worth a read.

Regards

Paul J. Thomas
Chief Executive Officer
Ductus Consulting

3 Replies to “Why the future may not need us”

  1. Love the lens you put on this. My view also is that humans will always carry the power to disconnect from the technology that we ‘defer to’ for way too much of our lives. We just need to make the choice.

  2. Great read, thank you Paul.
    1. Predictions need credibility eg, a five-day weather forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90% of the time.
    2. The price of peace is constant vigilance that is keeping one eye on our robots.
    3. If immortality is achieved how will we fund it?

  3. Hello Paul,

    I enjoyed the fruits of your research into this vexed topic. It is really quite scary from an economic point of view.

    I can now see the economic and technological patterns that will ultimately shape future polarised societies as a result of reading both your research blogs which covered this topic.

    Shortly before his passing, Stephen Hawking stated that we should urgently stop all research into AI.

    On the subject of Zuckerberg, the movie ‘The Social Contract’ showed through his character which, as with any CEO, casts a long shadow over the organisation.

    Many thanks,

    Des

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