Yuval Harari’s Homo sapiens explains the extinction of the human race not as a catastrophe, but as the result of a quantum leap in technological progress. He warns that advances in biotechnology, cyborg engineering, and non-organic engineering will transform humans and eventually lead to the end of homo sapiens by causing us to evolve into something different from what we are today.
The final part of the book, Sapiens, suggests that Homo sapiens, or modern humans, will eventually come to an end. Most people who haven’t read the book probably think of a meteorite strike that wiped out the dinosaurs, a catastrophe like the Ice Age, or a major war like World War III as the cause of our extinction. Yuval Harari’s Homo sapiens, however, takes a different approach to explaining human extinction. Why and how would the top predator, humanity, be wiped out? The answer, he argues, is that it would be due to rapid technological advancement. Most people would scoff at the idea that technological advancement would not advance humanity, but rather cause its decline and extinction. But this book warns that technology will evolve us into something so different from what we are today that we will eventually cease to be a species called homo sapiens.
So what technological advances will trigger such a radical evolution? The answer is the amazing advances in biotechnology. We’re not talking about science fiction here, we’re talking about the fourth industrial revolution. We can all see that the fourth industrial revolution is here and now. The technologies that are developing in this era are IT (information technology), BT (biotechnology), and NT (nanotechnology), and they are characterized by the fact that each field is not developing independently but is organically connected. For example, IT, BT, and NT technologies have been combined to create miniaturized therapeutic drugs that can travel freely through capillaries, or health care systems that allow people to receive health checkups without going to a hospital. Many other next-generation convergence technologies are in development, such as artificial organs that are immune to immune rejection, denser bodies, and brains with computer-like processing speeds. What will happen if humanity perfects these technologies? People will want to change and improve their bodies. But can a being with such a modified body remain a sapiens, or human being?
This is the end of humanity as described in Sapiens. The book predicts that humanity will become extinct in three main ways. The first is biotechnology, the second is cyborg engineering, and the third is non-organic engineering. Collectively, these three can be called biotechnology. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a convergence of several disciplines, so there’s no need to break it down.
First of all, biotechnology is, in a nutshell, the pursuit of a better life by changing our characteristics through genes. For example, we wear green scrubs during surgery to prevent blood loss and eye strain, or someone who is not a good swimmer is injected with a gene that makes them a better swimmer. In other words, we manipulate our genes to do things that are not humanly possible. It’s similar to the movie Captain America: The First Avenger, where the main character gets an injection that transforms him into Captain America. Can we really consider such a person to be human?
Second, cyborg engineering is the mechanization of the body. This is a similar concept to biotechnology, but it involves replacing the body with machines to achieve a number of synergistic effects. For example, replacing a limb with a machine could allow you to jump 300 meters in the air and not get hurt, or lift several tons of objects with ease. It could also provide new bodies for people who have lost a part of their body in an accident. Is a cyborg, or a human being in a machine body, really a human being?
Finally, there’s non-organic engineering. This concept is the easiest to explain: it’s the process of transferring the human mind to a computer. In other words, the mind is taken out of the organic human body and transferred to something non-organic, like a computer or computing device. While this may negate human consciousness altogether, it also raises the possibility of being able to create an exact replica of a human brain, put it in a computer, and talk to it. In that case, how would we answer the question: am I talking to a human or a computer?
Sapiens warns that these technological advances will eventually transform humans into non-humans. The book then begins to take on a dystopian outlook, but ironically, in his follow-up, Homo Deus, he discusses the possibility of humans transforming into divine beings like Deus, the supreme god of Greek mythology. Rather than predetermining our future, these books present a range of possibilities. Which one will we choose from the many possibilities is a question we’ll have to keep an eye on in the future.
