Attempts to define intelligence and consciousness have driven philosophers and neuroscientists to despair for millennia. Intelligence can perhaps be described in functional terms, as the ability to learn new skills and solve various types of problems. But consciousness leads into recursive territory, and its definitions involve terms like “self-awareness”, which leads back to consciousness.
In this book, historian-turned-futurist, Yuval Noah Harari asserts that the understanding of intelligence and consciousness and the links between them are no longer just an abstract exercise. Computers are already matching, or exceeding, human beings in many domains of functional intelligence. Rapid advances in hardware and in new technologies of artificial intelligence (like deep learning) have even opened up “creative” fields. Computers compose excellent music; they can paint abstracts and analyse, translate and parse natural language with higher levels of competence than the average graduate.
Importantly, once a machine achieves superhuman competence in any given domain, that competence can be rapidly replicated multiple times. A cyber organism may also be simultaneously present in many locations, and multi-task in ways impossible for biological entities.
Many, if not most, experts believe computers will soon be more functionally intelligent than homo sapiens. That yet-to-be-realised moment is sometimes referred to as “singularity”. Now, if that higher artificial intelligence is divorced from consciousness and not self-aware, it would be an absolutely new paradigm. On the other hand, if that higher artificial intelligence is conscious and self-aware, homo sapiens will have created a new species that exceeds it in sapience. That new species will also be immortal since every entity will be able to record multiple copies of itself, with total fidelity of memory and intelligence.
Either way, the consequences of this singularity are unpredictable and maybe disastrous. There is no apparent reason a higher intelligence will treat us any better than we treat animals bred for meat, fur and milk. There is certainly no reason the aims and ambitions of this new, super-intelligent species would be consistent with its creators. In fact, we cannot guess what its priorities would be, or assume we will understand the thought processes, any more than, say, chimpanzees understand their human cousins.
This is only one of several questions about the near future discussed in this thought-provoking book. Mr Harari has a gift for seeing the world from radically different perspectives. Another central question he brings up involves the human race’s aspiring to a new, higher “normal”. How will individual and race priorities change, as this happens?
It is Mr Harari’s contention that sapiens will turn itself into a new species as it learns to manipulate its own DNA and extends the life spans of individuals by large degrees. (“Singularity” is also used, somewhat confusingly, to refer to the possibility of vastly extended human life spans.)
Mankind has already mitigated evils such as famine, war, disease, even if it seems ironic to say this in the era of Islamic State and Zika. Antibiotics, DNA manipulation, combinatorial computational techniques in drug research, and so on have been powerful tools in combating disease and genetic conditions. Famine, when it happens in the modern context, is due to the failure of social mechanisms, rather than being due to shortages in food production. Famines are usually swiftly mitigated. Even 21st century wars are smaller in scale and less destructive in overall impact than Vietnam, Bangladesh, or the World Wars.
Humans live longer, and stay healthy and active for much longer due to better nutrition and the ability to combat disease. But there seems to be a natural limit to lifespan. However even now, babies are being genetically tweaked to remove susceptibility to certain conditions; soon they may be engineered to be smarter, stronger, healthier and longer-lived as well. As genetic understanding advances, sapiens could transform itself into homo deus (“Man-god”) inside a couple of generations.
Deus’s priorities will inevitably be different, at individual and collective level. Even as high-IQ individuals receive the gift of extra decades of high-quality life, they will also receive more leisure time since artificial intelligence (conscious or not) will take over an increasing array of tasks.
Homo deus will, Mr Harari speculates, focus on the pursuit of happiness. Who knows how? Ultimately humans are happy when “happy-making” chemicals are pumped into their systems. Some seek happiness directly by developing and ingesting chemical cocktails. Others focus on doing stuff that triggers the production of such chemicals within them.
Conventional religions cannot cope with such possibilities: Nothing in scripture or dogma even considers the possibility of sapiens being superseded by its own creations. Hence, the author believes that the covenant between science and humanism will deepen and change, on the journey to singularity (both types).
The speculations are open-ended and designed more to provoke thought than as an assertion of dogma. The only criticism I would make is that the stream of radical but logically ideas are generated in somewhat scattershot fashion. However, instead of looking for overarching coherence, this book should be read as a series of connected essays wherein each essay contains some startling ideas.
HOMO DEUS
A brief history of tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari
Penguin (paperback)
440 pages; ~799
