Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari is a brilliant historian and thinker. He has a PhD in history from Oxford and is a tenured professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After finishing my Note on his first bestselling book Sapiens I immediately picked up this one. While Sapiens features a “A Brief History of Humankind,” Homo Deus gives us “A Brief History of Tomorrow.” Wonder what the future might look like and how artificial intelligence and biotechnology will fundamentally change the world and our species? Well, this is the book for you. It’s incredibly well-written and thoughtful and thought provoking. I HIGHLY recommend it. Big Ideas we explore include how Harari developed such an extraordinary mind (hint: 10,000+ hours of meditation and no smartphone), why we should study history (hint: to reimagine a better future), the 21st century's Big 3: Immortality + Happiness + Divinity (which results in an upgrade from Homo sapiens to Homo deus!), and algorithms--"arguably the single most important concept of the 21st century.
Big Ideas
- 10,000+ hours of training = an incredibly lucid MindMeditation: 10,000+; Smartphone: 0.
- Q: Why study history? A: Create an Optimized FutureA: Create an Optimized future.
- The Big 3: Immortality + Happiness + DivinityImmortality + Happiness + Divinity.
- AlgorithmsThe single most important concept.
“For the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In the early twenty-first century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack.
Hence even though presidents, CEOs and generals still have their daily schedules full of economic crises and military conflicts, on the cosmic scale of history humankind can lift its eyes up and start looking towards new horizons. If we are indeed bringing famine, plague and war under control, what will replace them at the top of the human agenda? Like firefighters in a world without fire, so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?
… Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to set itself even more daring goals. Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity. Having reduced mortality from starvation, disease and violence, we will now aim to overcome old age and even death itself. Having saved people from abject misery, we will now aim to make them positively happy. And having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”
~ Yuval Noah Harari from Homo Deus
Yuval Noah Harari is a brilliant historian and thinker. He has a PhD in history from Oxford and is a tenured professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
After finishing my Note on his first bestselling book Sapiens I immediately picked up this one. While Sapiens features a “A Brief History of Humankind,” Homo Deus gives us “A Brief History of Tomorrow.” <- “A brief history of TOMORROW” -> coolest sub-title ever?
Wonder what the future might look like and how artificial intelligence and biotechnology will fundamentally change the world and our species? Well, this is the book for you. It’s incredibly well-written and thoughtful and thought provoking. I HIGHLY recommend it. (Get a copy here.)
Of course, this kind of book is a little different than the types of books we typically discuss, but if we (and our kids, colleagues, communities, etc.) are going to be the best (aka most Optimized!) versions of ourselves today and tomorrow, it helps to know what tomorrow might look like, eh?
Of course, we’ll barely scratch of this great book but I’m excited to share a few of my favorite Big Ideas and see how we can integrate the wisdom into our lives TODAY, so let’s jump straight in!
Download MP3
Download PDFPeople are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.
Often enough, one of the most important obligations of spiritual wanderers is to challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions. In Zen Buddhism it is said that ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ Which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalized Buddhism, you must free yourself from them too.
Get the Book10,000+ hours of training = an incredibly lucid Mind
“To my teacher, S. N. Goenka (1924-2013), who lovingly taught me important things.”
<- That’s the book’s dedication. Although I always enjoy reading the author’s dedication, this is the first time I’ve ever used one as a Big Idea. Why would I do that? Well, a couple things.
First, at this stage of my life, I’ve read a few books. (This is Note #507.)I can get a pretty good sense of the power of someone’s mind via the clarity of their thinking as expressed in the logical coherence of their arguments, the overall flow of the book, etc.
And, I’ve NEVER (!) read books that are more lucid than Professor Harari’s two books. (The only other person I can think of who elicited the same response is Seneca in On the Shortness of Life where you can *feel* the clarity of his mind as well.)
Second, that dedication accounts for a big reason WHY Harari writes with such clarity.
As you may know, S. N. Goenka was a renowned Vipassana meditation teacher. We talked about him and some ideas I gleaned from a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat I did with him in this series of +1s. What’s funny is that, as I read Harari’s books, I could almost feel how his mind works on what appears to be a very consistent basis. At the end of my 10-day meditation retreat in which I was in complete silence (not even making eye contact with anyone and not speaking with anyone other than a teacher a couple times), I experienced a level of mental clarity that was astonishing.
You know those movies about the future where the good guys have a huge wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling computer screen in front of them where they swipe different images in and out with a flick of their fingers? THAT’s how my mind was operating as I imagined my life on the tenth of day of meditation. And, THAT’s how I think Harari’s mind operates on a considerably more consistent basis than the average Homo sapien. (Laughing.)
All that to say that I got online this AM (which I never do on writing day) to do a little research to confirm my intuition that Harari follows Goenka’s advice to meditate for two hours a day.
Here’s what Wikipedia says: “Harari says Vipassana meditation, which he began whilst in Oxford in 2000, has ‘transformed my life’. He practises for two hours every day (one hour at the start and end of his work day), every year undertakes a meditation retreat of 30 days or longer, in silence and with no books or social media, and is an assistant meditation teacher. He dedicated Homo Deus to ‘my teacher, S. N. Goenka, who lovingly taught me important things,’ and said ‘I could not have written this book without the focus, peace and insight gained from practising Vipassana for fifteen years.’ He also regards meditation as a way to research.”
And, get this: “As of September 2017, he does not have a smartphone.”
Yep. THAT’s how you get to look into a crystal ball and see the future. All of which begs the question: How’s YOUR mind? You cultivating it? (I’m officially re-committing to my PM meditation (again) and have even more confidence in my decision to not use my smartphone (again) and to stay out of email (again) while reducing online time even more (again). You?)
P.S. I just did the math. 15 years of 2 hours of meditation per day (not counting bonus hours for the 30-day retreats in which he’s meditating 10 hours a day) comes out to 10,000 (!) hours of meditation. Yep. THIS is the most important Idea of the whole book. Let’s train our minds!!!)
Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality.
Q: Why study history? A: Create an Optimized Future
“If history doesn’t follow any stable rules, and if we cannot predict its future course, why study it?
… Scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures. This is especially true of history. Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don’t normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it but in order to be liberated from it.
Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future. We have felt that grip from the moment we were born, so we assume that it is a natural and inescapable part of who we are. Therefore we seldom try to shake ourselves free, and envision alternative futures.
Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape — and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.
Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.”
That’s from a section in the first chapter called “A Brief History of Lawns.”
Pop quiz: Do you know the history of lawns? Get this: Back in the medieval day, peasant-people didn’t have the spare land and water and labor to create a completely useless piece of green turf.
But, you know who did? King Francois I! Enter: The first “lawn” in history in front of his epic chateau in the Loire Valley. Then, enter: Dukes trying to show that THEY too had a ton of extra cash to blow on a piece of green turf in front of THEIR chateaus. Fast-forward to modern times and you see a lawn in front of the White House and, if you’re a well-adjusted middle-class American, we’ll probably see a well-manicured lawn in front of YOUR house.
So… What’s that have to do with Optimizing your life? Well, we want to realize that living in a culture that prizes things like “lawns” is not “natural, inevitable and immutable.”
With that super-simple insight, we can step back and see just how much of our current culture is ALSO not “natural, inevitable and immutable.”
And, of course, the only reason THAT’s relevant is that having that spacious perspective allows us to more consciously CHOOSE the life we want to create. We’ll ALWAYS have the constraints of our culture to deal with but we can expand our horizon of possibilities—looking this way and that as we explore more options and strive to create a life of deeper personal meaning.
In Sapiens, Harari touches on a similar theme re: creating freedom within cultural constraints. He tells us: “There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.” But… As he says in this book: “Some freedom is better than none.”
Now, back to you and your life and using history to make wiser choices.
There’s our cultural history AND there’s your “personal” history—your family of origin and your upbringing and all your successes and failures, etc., etc., etc.
We want to study THAT history as well so we can loosen the grip of our ancestors and our own prior-selves so we can look this way and that. We want to clearly see the patterns of behavior that worked and those that didn’t so we can CHOOSE a better future among a range of options.
So… What can YOU learn from studying history? And, most importantly, what choices can you make TODAY to become more liberated from any unhelpful stories?
This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom — we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.
To study history means to watch the spinning and unraveling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendents.
The Big 3: Immortality + Happiness + Divinity
“Though the details are therefore obscure, we can nevertheless be sure about the general direction of history. In the twenty-first century, the third big project of humankind will be to acquire divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. This third project obviously subsumes the first two projects, and is fueled by them. We want the ability to re-engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but once we have it, who knows what else we might do with such ability? So we may well think of the new human agenda as consisting really of only one project (with many branches): attaining divinity.”
That’s from the first chapter on the “The New Human Agenda” in which Harari brilliantly walks us through the stats on how we’ve, essentially, conquered famine, infectious disease and war.
Quick stats to bring one facet of his points home: “In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder? Yah. (And, btw: Longer chat, but if you connect CANCER to its dysfunctional mitochondrial metabolic roots, you can throw in another 8.2 MILLION victims of sugar. See our Conquering Cancer series for more on that along with The Case Against Sugar for all the OTHER people sugar is killing.)
So… We’ve done a pretty good job of reducing famine, infectious diseases and war. Now what? <- THAT’s the central question of the book.
The answer Harari proposes? Three things. We will take our enormous ambition as humans and strive to create 1. Immortality + 2. Happiness + 3. Divinity.
The Immortality discussion is enough to blow your mind and make you want to be alive in 2050 with enough “health” and “wealth” to, effectively, become “a-mortal”/live forever.
Harari points out that that target is a stretch but the advances we’ve made in biotechnology are MINDBOGGLING. I no longer think Dave Asprey’s desire to live to 180 is (quite as) crazy. (Hah.) And, did you know billionaire PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel has publicly stated his desire to live forever? Yep. He says there are three ways to approach death. Deny it. Accept it. And fight it. He’s going for the latter. I’ve had “101” written on my mirror to remind me of my longevity aspiration and focus me on optimal micro-behaviors. I might have written an arrow from “101” to an ∞ symbol. Who knows what will be possible in 2075? :)
Then we have Happiness. It pains me to even type this but it’s a stunning reality that we currently have more people KILLING THEMSELVES than *getting killed* in the world.
Think about that for a moment.
Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to live in our modern world WITHOUT a certain level of unhappiness and stress, and for most of us, without at least dipping our toe in to the burn out/super-stressed/depression zone at some point in our lives.
Enter: Common humanity. And, enter: Our mission together: To Optimize our lives so we and our families and friends and colleagues and communities can live with more happiness and meaning and mojo such that, together, we can change the world.
That’s why I do what I do. There’s never been a greater need for Happiness than right now. Let’s do our part to lead the movement.
All of which leads us to Divinity.
Enter: The ultimate upgrade:Homo sapiens (“wise humans”) to Homo deus (“human gods”).
Check out the book for more on that as you wrap your brain around this: “Once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend.”
Once more: Professor Harari’s 21st century Big 3: Immortality + Happiness + Divinity.
P.S. The ONE aspect of the book that I *didn’t* think logically cohered was Harari’s acceptance of the “scientific dogma” that basically says we have no free will. Part of a much longer chat, but see our Notes on William Damon’s The Power of Ideals for a longer discussion about the importance of moral agency vis-a-vis moral determinism. :)
P.P.S. Regarding happiness, Harari says: “Perhaps the key to happiness is neither the race nor the gold medal but rather combining the right doses of excitement and tranquility; but most of us tend to jump all the way from stress to boredom and back, remaining as disconnected with one as with the other.”
a) Amen. Here’s to energized tranquility and the ability to flip the switch at will as we step off the digital addiction treadmill. (Recall: 10,000 hours + no smartphone!)
b) See our Notes on Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar for another Israeli-genius’s thoughts on happiness. (And, check out this +1 on his happiness archetypes.)
In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.
To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability — rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness — explains our mastery of planet Earth.
The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.
Algorithms
“‘Algorithm’ is arguably the single most important concept in our world. If we want to understand our life and our future, we should make every effort to understand what an algorithm is, and how algorithms are connected with emotions.
An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. An algorithm isn’t a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation. For example, if you want to calculate the average between two numbers, you can use a simple algorithm. The algorithm says: ‘First step: add the two number together. Second step: divide the sum by two.’ When you enter the numbers 4 and 8, you get 6. When you enter 117 and 231, you get 174.
A more complex example is a cooking recipe. An algorithm for preparing vegetable soup may tell us: 1. Heat half a cup of oil in a pot. 2. Finely chop four onions. 3. Fry the onion until golden. 4. Cut three potatoes into chunks and add to the pot. 5. Slice a cabbage into strips and add to the pot. And so forth. You can follow the same algorithms dozens of times, each time using slightly different vegetables, and therefore getting a slightly different soup. But the algorithm remains the same.”
“Algorithm.” <- It’s “arguably the single most important concept in our world.”
Why? Well, in short, if you want to get a glimpse into the future the fastest way to do it is via the lens of algorithms. For example, how does a Tesla drive itself on the freeway?
Algorithms. Millions of “if this, then that” algorithms equals the car driving itself more safely than I can. Which is why, according to researchers, there’s an 89% chance that, for example, bus drivers will be out of work in 2033. Insurance underwriters? 98% chance. Cashiers? 97% chance.
Any job that can be boiled down to set of algorithms will almost CERTAINLY be done by a “robot” with artificial intelligence. Which leads to the alarming prospect of an emerging “useless class” that, literally, is unemployable. Again, see the book for more on THAT possibility.
For our purposes today: Please see our discussion on algorithms in our Notes on Ray Dalio’s Principlesalong with this +1 on the 2 AI’s in which I talk about how YOU (and your family, colleagues, etc.) can program YOUR supercomputers with an infinite array of “if then” algorithms such that you can lead yourself and the world most effectively.
And, get this: “Since we do not know how the job market would look in 2030 or 2040, already today we have no idea what to teach our kids. Most of what they currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are forty. Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans will be unable to do so.”
So… What should we teach ourselves and our kids to best prepare for the future? How to keep learning throughout our lives while reinventing ourselves repeatedly.
<- Which sounds a lot like constant and never-ending Optimizing, eh?
Here’s to integrating all of our (historical) yesterdays while showing up powerfully TODAY so we can create an Optimized future together.
P.S. Do you want to know one of the biggest threats to your (and our) future? Information. This is from the final page of the book: “In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times, having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”
Note: That’s wisdom from a guy who doesn’t use a smartphone and meditates two hours a day. Want power? Figure out what you need to ignore then focus on what matters.
And, btw: Know that this is precisely why I created Conquering Digital Addiction 101.)
The most important question in twenty-first century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better?
In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station -- and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it you need to understand twenty-first century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.
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