Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens explores how future technological advances will affect human happiness, and considers the potential for bionics, cyborgs, and non-organic engineering to improve our lives, as well as the potential dangers.
Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens discusses what the end of Homo sapiens will look like, but people have been imagining and predicting the future for a long time, and we shouldn’t just imagine what the future will look like, we should consider whether it will lead to greater happiness for humanity as a whole. Humanity has progressed from the past to the present, but few can say for sure whether that progress has made people happier. Now that every human being is valued and their well-being is a primary consideration, we need to think about how the direction and pace of human progress will affect people’s happiness in the future. In this blog post, we’ll consider Yuval Noah Harari’s post-apocalyptic vision of Homo sapiens in Sapiens and whether or not we’ll be happier than we are now.
When we think about whether or not a person is happy, we usually think of “subjective well-being” first. This means that what matters is how a person perceives and feels about the things they experience. Therefore, it is difficult to determine whether a person is happy or unhappy, even if they are going through the same things, because there are many individual differences. Of course, there are differences between what happens in the past, present, and future, but this is also not an easy measure of happiness, because subjective well-being is heavily influenced by a person’s expectations. What we find unpleasant today may have been accepted as normal in the past. Thus, it is difficult, but not impossible, to compare the level of human happiness between generations. There are certain things that bring happiness and unhappiness that are universal to all human beings, regardless of age.
Take death, for example. Death has always been considered the most terrible thing that can happen to a human being, causing deep unhappiness not only to the person waiting to die, but also to those around them. Of course, there are cases in which death is desired, such as euthanasia or death with dignity, but these are situations in which death is unavoidable. The mortality rate has decreased significantly compared to the past, wars that once killed many people are now limited to certain regions, modern medicine has improved the chances of getting cured, and epidemics are well controlled by cooperation between countries, so epidemics rarely kill as many people as in the past. This decrease in the probability of death, the most terrifying thing that can happen to a human being, has increased the happiness of humanity as a whole.
Now, let’s consider how people’s subjective well-being might change by looking at three possible futures that Yuval Noah Harari envisions: First, bionics will be so advanced that few people will suffer from illness. Even if a body is no longer usable due to illness, a new body can be created and implanted in its place. If the transition from the past to the present has increased the happiness of humanity as a whole due to less disease-related harm, the same will be true for the transition from the present to the future. In fact, there could be even more happiness. Advances in bionics may even eliminate disabilities. While we can only imagine it now, advances in bionics may be able to reverse brain damage and restore normal brain function. On the other hand, we should also consider the possibility that bionics could bring misery. As mentioned in Sapiens, the development of technologies that can enhance the body could lead to fundamental inequalities among humans. Currently, inequality is created by capital, but in the future, if the haves are able to enhance their bodies and the have-nots are unable to do so, the inherent differences in human capabilities could create a different kind of unequal society. However, this problem may remain the same as that of modern firearms. Guns are a tool that makes it easier for anyone to kill people than it was in the past, but they are under strong control. Gun accidents still happen, but humans believe they can control the problem. The same will be true for body hardening. As technology slowly evolves, with proper regulation, it can be prevented from wreaking havoc on society.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s second future, cyborgs won’t be much different from bionics when it comes to happiness. If properly regulated, cyborgs will not cause unhappiness, and like bionics, they will be able to solve modern problems and improve the well-being of humanity as a whole.
Non-organic engineering, the last of the technologies presented in Sapiens, is more unpredictable than the first two. The end goal of non-organic engineering would be humans without human bodies. This could be considered life, but it’s hard to think of it as human. Even if a digital mind created by computer programmers could have self-awareness, consciousness, memory, and other functions, it would not have the mechanisms of organic matter that humans have. In other words, when humanity and nonorganic engineering begin to combine, a new species will emerge that is different from us. As with cyborg technology, we can use non-organic engineering to combine with something that is not human. Initially, we will attach computers inside the body to take over simple computations that the brain should perform. However, the more complex computations a person needs to perform, the more advanced the computer becomes, and the more it becomes a part of them. This is because humans will have to compete for jobs with rapidly improving robots and young people who are learning new skills. It will be faster to turn humans into robots than to give robots the flexibility inherent in humans. In this case, it’s hard to predict what will happen to human happiness. Will humans become more relaxed because they have less work to do? In a bleak future, even the human emotional sphere could be handled by computers, as poor workers cater to the needs of their employers in order to support their families. In this case, there will be no point in discussing happiness and unhappiness because it will be impossible to feel happiness. If technology advances to this point, tragic things like this will happen all over the world, invisibly to us. To prevent this from happening, we need to keep a close eye on the development of non-organic engineering, just as we do with bionics and cyborgs.
The conditions for happiness can be found not only in subjective well-being, but also in biochemical systems. Advances in biology lead to the conclusion that human happiness is ultimately determined by the biochemical system inside us. We can ask ourselves, then, whether a human being can be happy if his or her body continues to produce happiness-inducing substances, regardless of subjective well-being. We don’t know at this point, but when we think of drugs that make people happy, the only ones that come to mind are narcotics or antidepressants. However, these are only temporarily pleasurable or uplifting, and do not make people truly happy. Consider Soma from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is also mentioned in Sapiens, which provides a lasting sense of well-being without compromising a person’s productivity or efficiency. If you were to rate your happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, Soma would keep it at a constant 10. Soma’s presence is scary to people who read Brave New World. Perhaps it’s the feeling that the drug is controlling us.
Advances in bionics will allow us to manipulate our biochemical systems to our liking. While Soma is a drug set up to manipulate people, future bionics may be able to make us happy while still allowing us to be human. Some people are normally happy between 3 and 6, while others are happier between 5 and 8. The same event can make the latter person happier, but not the former. Future bionics may be able to reconcile this difference. It’s no different when something bad happens to make us feel bad, and when something good happens to make us feel happy. However, when nothing bad happens, we will be more satisfied with our lives in general. It’s not like you’re experiencing a happy accident, but rather you’re becoming more like the people around you who are living a higher tempo life. Of course, some people will resist the idea of adjusting their biochemical system, but many people who feel unhappy will choose to become happier through this method. A person with an adjusted biochemical system not only lives a happier life, but also feels more fulfilled and satisfied with life. This, in turn, means that they will be more productive, and their increased productivity will contribute to the happiness of many people, including you and me. Therefore, if bionic technology is used to improve human happiness on a global scale, it will lead to an increase in the happiness of humanity as a whole.
Based on the above considerations, it seems that human happiness will increase in any direction that Yuval Noah Harari suggests in Sapiens. The process is similar to how human technological advances have made life better for humans from the past to the present. Just as regulations were created to prevent things invented for human convenience, such as guns and vehicles, from endangering human life, so too will the technologies of the future come with new regulations to ensure that they do not endanger human life. This will solve modern problems and make human life more peaceful and prosperous.
