Tech summary provides view missing from many texts

Victor Billot finds Yuval Noah Harari's latest work, Homo Deus, a provoking and challenging read.

HOMO DEUS
Yuval Noah Harari
Penguin Random House 

By VICTOR BILLOT

This book is the follow-up volume to the Israeli historian's bestselling Sapiens, first published in English in 2016.

It is a frustrating book to review. Foremost, it's a quality summation of technological trends that are changing society in profound ways. It provides a historical and social perspective missing from many texts in this field.

Harari seeks to investigate a future trajectory through examination of where we have come from as a species, global dominant and emerging ideologies, and contemporary advances in knowledge. Because of the compounding effect of this progression, the outcome of these changes is unpredictable, but probably of great magnitude.

Homo Deus considers previous paradigm shifts of human social and cultural organisation, starting with the"cognitive revolution'' of prehistoric human evolution, and moving through stages of agriculture and industrialism to our modern condition.

Then from the range of new technologies glimmering on the horizon, Harari identifies what he considers the central aspects of the near future of humanity: an extended lifespan, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the emergence of ubiquitous automation.

He looks at the potential downsides: the capture of enhancement and longevity technologies by an economic elite, the possibility of advanced AI developing its own agenda, and the mass disruption of employment through automation, resulting in the decoupling of work and income as we know it.

At the same time, research in human consciousness is undermining our concept of individual autonomy and free will by revealing a kaleidoscope of identities swirling about in the biochemical processor inside our skulls.

Taken together, these developments may undermine the whole cultural and social framework of Western society, and the moral norms that bind it.

It's provoking, challenging reading, but at the same time, I found myself grinding my teeth at some of the confident assertions that stray into sweeping generalisations on several occasions.

The author's conflation of religion and ideology is an error in my view. An attempt to jam in liberalism, socialism and fascism as related strands of"humanist'' thought seems like trying to drive a bus through a drainpipe. Two's company and three's a crowd, and the anti-rational power worship of fascism is on the outside here.

In the final chapters, Harari gets back on track as he looks forward at two emerging ideologies.

Techno-utopianism sees technology as a good in itself, solving age-old human problems with engineering fixes. It's an outlook favoured by some of the more upbeat Silicon Valley execs.

But a less comfortable future is conceived where a view of life and reality as interrelated sets of data becomes prevalent;"dataism'' is his impressively ugly neologism. The convergence of information technology and life sciences is well under way and Harari suggests a technocratic ideology that may grow out of this.

Will powerful AI machines achieve some form of consciousness or simply remain high-spec calculators? Will such entities assert their own interests and agendas, however inconceivable to their creators, as futurist Nick Bostrom has warned?

As much of the world's population today struggles to find clean drinking water or basic sanitation, these considerations may seem idle speculation.

But over the past few years, I have detected an upsurge in publications on and analysis of the accelerating pace of social and technological change, for good or for ill.

Whether we as a species are opening a Pandora's box, or a carton of permanent good times is the million-dollar question. Either way, there may not be much time left to prepare. This seems to be the somewhat chilly conclusion of Homo Deus.

Victor Billot is editor of The Maritimes, the magazine of the Maritime Union, and a Dunedin poet.

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