As we remake ourselves with advanced biotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence, we are in danger of losing our identity as Homo sapiens. This book is a warning about whether the technologies we create will propel us forward or redefine our existence and lead to our demise.
How long can we, humans, live? Death is always around the corner in our lives. We can die for a variety of reasons, from tripping over our own feet, to driving a car the wrong way, to contracting cancer. But beyond individual deaths, the threats facing humanity as a whole are more varied and more profound. What are some of the global risks? Solar flares, meteorite strikes, natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, rising sea levels due to global warming, world wars due to oil shortages, nuclear bombs, and many others come to mind. Scientists also warn that the “sixth great extinction” may have already begun. This means that a mass extinction event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago is currently underway due to human influence. Can we avoid such a global catastrophe?
Movies and novels often feature these natural disasters or wars as one of the scenarios of humanity’s demise, but the author points out that we are not only facing movie disasters, but also the seeds of our own destruction, originating from within humanity itself. This book presents the possibility that the species, Homo sapiens, could come to an end for reasons you may not have considered, and not in the way I’ve outlined.
Author Yuval Harari argues that humanity’s overdevelopment and misuse of technology, rather than an external disaster, could hasten our demise. In the past, there was no intelligent designer. An intelligent designer literally means that some intelligent being planned and organized the ecosystem, and is often invoked in creationism. However, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, or natural selection, changes in life have occurred naturally over time, rather than being planned by a designer. For example, a giraffe’s neck got longer because individuals that could more easily get food reproduced, not because the giraffe decided, “I need a longer neck.” For billions of years, intelligent life has evolved by the laws of nature, not by a designer.
But now we live in a different era. As “intelligent designers,” humans are gaining the ability to directly manipulate organisms and their environments. Modern biotechnology allows us to design mice that glow with fluorescence or plants that are resistant to disease. These technologies allow us to reshape the form and characteristics of living things in ways that would not have been possible through natural evolution. Self-engineering through biotechnology is the first possibility for the demise of Homo sapiens that Harari identifies. By artificially enhancing many aspects of our physiology, immune system, longevity, intellectual and emotional abilities, and manipulating our genes, we are pushing the limits of what it means to be “Homo sapiens” as a species. If these changes are repeated, the homo sapiens of the future will be so different from the homo sapiens of today that the identity of “homo sapiens” may cease to exist at that moment.
The second direction of destruction Harari mentions is robotics and cyborgization. We’re already at the point where we’re fusing ourselves with machines to enhance our abilities – not just with prosthetic limbs, but with the development of technologies to connect our brains to computers. As these technologies advance, we may be able to freely download and share our emotions, memories, and abilities on the internet. If we can simply download our piano playing skills, for example, or learn a new language in an instant, people will be able to ‘insert’ knowledge through data rather than gaining it through experience. The boundaries between self and other, between people and data, will blur, and human identity is likely to be profoundly transformed: where is the ‘I’ in such a world, and will we retain our identity as human beings?
The third possibility is the creation of completely inanimate entities, including human-created artificial intelligence, computer programs that evolve independently, and digital viruses that can multiply infinitely. Technologies like AlphaGo, the artificially intelligent Go program that made headlines recently, have opened the door for AI to learn and evolve on its own. If these programs were to self-evolve and escape human control, this would pose an unprecedented threat to humanity. Furthermore, if computer viruses and self-replicating digital beings were to expand their reach, we could see a day when non-living digital life forms could infiltrate and control real-world resources.
The history of humanity has been one of conquering nature, transforming the environment, and expanding the human realm, but Harari warns that in the future, this overdevelopment could paradoxically lead to our destruction. The author suggests that the loss of the original concept of “human” as we remodel ourselves in endless competition and desire could lead to the end of the human race: the demise of Homo sapiens occurs when we reach a point where we can no longer be Homo sapiens.
The human race of the future may have morphed into something we can’t even imagine today. Advances in science and technology have given us incredible potential, but is the end result of those advances anything but hopeful?
