Homo Deus : A Brief history of Tomorrow,Bookreader Item Preview
WebOct 26, · Download Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari in PDF EPUB format complete free. Brief Summary of Book: Homo Deus: A Brief WebDownload Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow [EPUB] Type: EPUB Size: MB Download as PDF Download Original PDF This document was uploaded by user and WebHomo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - blogger.com WebThe customary book, fiction, history, novel, scientific research, as without difficulty as various extra sorts of books are readily nearby here. As this Homo Deus A Brief History Webof tomorrow 6 50 usd isbn. homo deus on apple books apple books apple apple. homo deus a brief history of tomorrow co uk. homo deus a brief history of tomorrow. homo ... read more
In most South Koreans were poor, uneducated and tradition-bound, living under an authoritarian dictatorship. Today South Korea is a leading economic power, its citizens are among the best educated in the world, and it enjoys a stable and comparatively liberal democratic regime. Yet whereas in about nine South Koreans per , killed themselves, today the annual rate of suicide has more than tripled to thirty per , Thus the drastic decrease in child mortality has surely brought an increase in human happiness, and partially compensated people for the stress of modern life. Still, even if we are somewhat happier than our ancestors, the increase in our well-being is far less than we might have expected. In the Stone Age, the average human had at his or her disposal about 4, calories of energy per day. This included not only food, but also the energy invested in preparing tools, clothing, art and campfires.
Today Americans use on average , calories of energy per person per day, to feed not only their stomachs but also their cars, computers, refrigerators and televisions. Is the average American sixty times happier? We may well be sceptical about such rosy views. It took just a piece of bread to make a starving medieval peasant joyful. How do you bring joy to a bored, overpaid and overweight engineer? The second half of the twentieth century was a golden age for the USA. Victory in the Second World War, followed by an even more decisive victory in the Cold War, turned it into the leading global superpower. Real per capita income doubled.
The newly invented contraceptive pill made sex freer than ever. Women, gays, African Americans and other minorities finally got a bigger slice of the American pie. A flood of cheap cars, refrigerators, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, laundry machines, telephones, televisions and computers changed daily life almost beyond recognition. Yet studies have shown that American subjective well-being levels in the s remained roughly the same as they were in the s. This avalanche of wealth, coupled with myriad positive and negative changes in Japanese lifestyles and social relations, had surprisingly little impact on Japanese subjective well-being levels. The Japanese in the s were as satisfied — or dissatisfied — as they were in the s. Achieving real happiness is not going to be much easier than overcoming old age and death. The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological, the other biological.
On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. On the biological level, both our expectations and our happiness are determined by our biochemistry, rather than by our economic, social or political situation.
According to Epicurus, we are happy when we feel pleasant sensations and are free from unpleasant ones. Jeremy Bentham similarly maintained that nature gave dominion over man to two masters — pleasure and pain — and they alone determine everything we do, say and think. Anyone who tries to deduce good and evil from something else such as the word of God, or the national interest is fooling you, and perhaps fooling himself too. In the days of Bentham and Mill it was radical subversion. But in the early twenty-first century this is scientific orthodoxy. According to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations. We never react to events in the outside world, but only to sensations in our own bodies.
Nobody suffers because she lost her job, because she got divorced or because the government went to war. The only thing that makes people miserable is unpleasant sensations in their own bodies. A thousand things may make us angry, but anger is never an abstraction. It is always felt as a sensation of heat and tension in the body, which is what makes anger so infuriating. Conversely, science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only — pleasant sensations in their bodies. Imagine that you are Mario Götze, the attacking midfielder of the German football team in the World Cup Final against Argentina; minutes have already elapsed, without a goal being scored. Only seven minutes remain before the dreaded penalty shoot-out.
Some 75, excited fans fill the Maracanã stadium in Rio, with countless millions anxiously watching all over the world. You are a few yards from the Argentinian goal when André Schürrle sends a magnificent pass in your direction. You stop the ball with your chest, it drops down towards your leg, you give it a kick in mid-air, and you see it fly past the Argentinian goalkeeper and bury itself deep inside the net. The stadium erupts like a volcano. Tens of thousands of people roar like mad, your teammates are racing to hug and kiss you, millions of people back home in Berlin and Munich collapse in tears before the television screen. You are ecstatic, but not because of the ball in the Argentinian net or the celebrations going on in crammed Bavarian Biergartens.
You are actually reacting to the storm of sensations within you. Chills run up and down your spine, waves of electricity wash over your body, and it feels as if you are dissolving into millions of exploding energy balls. If you receive an unexpected promotion at work, and start jumping for joy, you are reacting to the same kind of sensations. The deeper parts of your mind know nothing about football or about jobs. They know only sensations. The opposite is also true. If you have just been fired or lost a decisive football match , but you are experiencing very pleasant sensations perhaps because you popped some pill , you might still feel on top of the world. The bad news is that pleasant sensations quickly subside and sooner or later turn into unpleasant ones. In fact, it might all be downhill from there. Similarly, if last year I received an unexpected promotion at work, I might still be occupying that new position, but the very pleasant sensations I experienced on hearing the news disappeared within hours.
If I want to feel those wonderful sensations again, I must get another promotion. And another. This is all the fault of evolution. For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness. The biochemical system rewards actions conducive to survival and reproduction with pleasant sensations. But these are only an ephemeral sales gimmick. We struggle to get food and mates in order to avoid unpleasant sensations of hunger and to enjoy pleasing tastes and blissful orgasms. What might have happened if a rare mutation had created a squirrel who, after eating a single nut, enjoys an everlasting sensation of bliss? Who knows, perhaps it really happened to some lucky squirrel millions of years ago. But if so, that squirrel enjoyed an extremely happy and extremely short life, and that was the end of the rare mutation. For the blissful squirrel would not have bothered to look for more nuts, let alone mates.
The rival squirrels, who felt hungry again five minutes after eating a nut, had much better chances of surviving and passing their genes to the next generation. For exactly the same reason, the nuts we humans seek to gather — lucrative jobs, big houses, good-looking partners — seldom satisfy us for long. Climbing Mount Everest is more satisfying than standing at the top; flirting and foreplay are more exciting than having an orgasm; and conducting groundbreaking lab experiments is more interesting than receiving praise and prizes. Yet this hardly changes the picture. It just indicates that evolution controls us with a broad range of pleasures. Sometimes it seduces us with sensations of bliss and tranquillity, while on other occasions it goads us forward with thrilling sensations of elation and excitement.
When an animal is looking for something that increases its chances of survival and reproduction e. In a famous experiment scientists connected electrodes to the brains of several rats, enabling the animals to create sensations of excitement simply by pressing a pedal. When the rats were given a choice between tasty food and pressing the pedal, they preferred the pedal much like kids preferring to play video games rather than come down to dinner. The rats pressed the pedal again and again, until they collapsed from hunger and exhaustion. Yet what makes the race so attractive is the exhilarating sensations that go along with it. Nobody would have wanted to climb mountains, play video games or go on blind dates if such activities were accompanied solely by unpleasant sensations of stress, despair or boredom.
Like the rats pressing the pedal again and again, the Don Juans, business tycoons and gamers need a new kick every day. Perhaps the key to happiness is neither the race nor the gold medal, but rather combining the right doses of excitement and tranquillity; but most of us tend to jump all the way from stress to boredom and back, remaining as discontented with one as with the other. If science is right and our happiness is determined by our biochemical system, then the only way to ensure lasting contentment is by rigging this system. Forget economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions: in order to raise global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry.
And this is exactly what we have begun doing over the last few decades. Fifty years ago psychiatric drugs carried a severe stigma. Today, that stigma has been broken. For better or worse, a growing percentage of the population is taking psychiatric medicines on a regular basis, not only to cure debilitating mental illnesses, but also to face more mundane depressions and the occasional blues. For example, increasing numbers of schoolchildren take stimulants such as Ritalin. In , 3. In the UK the number rose from 92, in to , in If pupils suffer from attention disorders, stress and low grades, perhaps we ought to blame outdated teaching methods, overcrowded classrooms and an unnaturally fast tempo of life.
Maybe we should modify the schools rather than the kids? It is interesting to see how the arguments have evolved. People have been quarrelling about education methods for thousands of years. Whether in ancient China or Victorian Britain, everybody had his or her pet method, and vehemently opposed all alternatives. Yet hitherto everybody still agreed on one thing: in order to improve education, we need to change the schools. Fear, depression and trauma are not caused by shells, booby traps or car bombs. They are caused by hormones, neurotransmitters and neural networks. Two soldiers may find themselves shoulder to shoulder in the same ambush; one will freeze in terror, lose his wits and suffer from nightmares for years after the event; the other will charge forward courageously and win a medal.
In half of the inmates in US federal prisons got there because of drugs; 38 per cent of Italian prisoners were convicted of drug-related offences; 55 per cent of inmates in the UK reported that they committed their crimes in connection with either consuming or trading drugs. A report found that 62 per cent of Australian convicts were under the influence of drugs when committing the crime for which they were incarcerated. What some people hope to get by studying, working or raising a family, others try to obtain far more easily through the right dosage of molecules.
This is an existential threat to the social and economic order, which is why countries wage a stubborn, bloody and hopeless war on biochemical crime. The principle is clear: biochemical manipulations that strengthen political stability, social order and economic growth are allowed and even encouraged e. Manipulations that threaten stability and growth are banned. But each year new drugs are born in the research labs of universities, pharmaceutical companies and criminal organisations, and the needs of the state and the market also keep changing. As the biochemical pursuit of happiness accelerates, so it will reshape politics, society and economics, and it will become ever harder to bring it under control.
And drugs are just the beginning. In research labs experts are already working on more sophisticated ways of manipulating human biochemistry, such as sending direct electrical stimuli to appropriate spots in the brain, or genetically engineering the blueprints of our bodies. It is far from certain that humankind should invest so much effort in the biochemical pursuit of happiness. Others may agree that happiness is indeed the supreme good, yet would take issue with the biological definition of happiness as the experience of pleasant sensations. Some 2, years ago Epicurus warned his disciples that immoderate pursuit of pleasure is likely to make them miserable rather than happy.
A couple of centuries earlier Buddha had made an even more radical claim, teaching that the pursuit of pleasant sensations is in fact the very root of suffering. Such sensations are just ephemeral and meaningless vibrations. Hence no matter how many blissful or exciting sensations I may experience, they will never satisfy me. If I identify happiness with fleeting pleasant sensations, and crave to experience more and more of them, I have no choice but to pursue them constantly. When I finally get them, they quickly disappear, and because the mere memory of past pleasures will not satisfy me, I have to start all over again. Even if I continue this pursuit for decades, it will never bring me any lasting achievement; on the contrary, the more I crave these pleasant sensations, the more stressed and dissatisfied I will become. To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it. This Buddhist view of happiness has a lot in common with the biochemical view.
Both agree that pleasant sensations disappear as fast as they arise, and that as long as people crave pleasant sensations without actually experiencing them, they remain dissatisfied. However, this problem has two very different solutions. The biochemical solution is to develop products and treatments that will provide humans with an unending stream of pleasant sensations, so we will never be without them. According to Buddha, we can train our minds to observe carefully how all sensations constantly arise and pass. When the mind learns to see our sensations for what they are — ephemeral and meaningless vibrations — we lose interest in pursuing them. For what is the point of running after something that disappears as fast as it arises?
At present, humankind has far greater interest in the biochemical solution. No matter what monks in their Himalayan caves or philosophers in their ivory towers say, for the capitalist juggernaut, happiness is pleasure. With each passing year our tolerance for unpleasant sensations decreases, and our craving for pleasant sensations increases. Both scientific research and economic activity are geared to that end, each year producing better painkillers, new ice-cream flavours, more comfortable mattresses, and more addictive games for our smartphones, so that we will not suffer a single boring moment while waiting for the bus. All this is hardly enough, of course. Since Homo sapiens was not adapted by evolution to experience constant pleasure, if that is what humankind nevertheless wants, ice cream and smartphone games will not do.
It will be necessary to change our biochemistry and reengineer our bodies and minds. So we are working on that. You may debate whether it is good or bad, but it seems that the second great project of the twenty-first century — to ensure global happiness — will involve re-engineering Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure. The Gods of Planet Earth In seeking bliss and immortality humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods. Not just because these are divine qualities, but because in order to overcome old age and misery humans will first have to acquire godlike control of their own biological substratum.
If we ever have the power to engineer death and pain out of our system, that same power will probably be sufficient to engineer our system in almost any manner we like, and manipulate our organs, emotions and intelligence in myriad ways. You could buy for yourself the strength of Hercules, the sensuality of Aphrodite, the wisdom of Athena or the madness of Dionysus if that is what you are into. Up till now increasing human power relied mainly on upgrading our external tools. In the future it may rely more on upgrading the human body and mind, or on merging directly with our tools. The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings. Biological engineering starts with the insight that we are far from realising the full potential of organic bodies.
For 4 billion years natural selection has been tweaking and tinkering with these bodies, so that we have gone from amoeba to reptiles to mammals to Sapiens. Yet there is no reason to think that Sapiens is the last station. Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus — who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives — into Homo sapiens, who produce spaceships and computers. Who knows what might be the outcome of a few more changes to our DNA, hormonal system or brain structure. Bioengineering is not going to wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic. Instead, bioengineers will take the old Sapiens body, and intentionally rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs.
They will thereby create new godlings, who might be as different from us Sapiens as we are different from Homo erectus. Cyborg engineering will go a step further, merging the organic body with non-organic devices such as bionic hands, artificial eyes, or millions of nano-robots that will navigate our bloodstream, diagnose problems and repair damage. Such a cyborg could enjoy abilities far beyond those of any organic body. For example, all parts of an organic body must be in direct contact with one another in order to function. A cyborg, in contrast, could exist in numerous places at the same time. A cyborg doctor could perform emergency surgeries in Tokyo, in Chicago and in a space station on Mars, without ever leaving her Stockholm office. She will need only a fast Internet connection, and a few pairs of bionic eyes and hands. On second thought, why pairs? Why not quartets? Indeed, even those are actually superfluous. Monkeys have recently learned to control bionic hands and feet disconnected from their bodies, through electrodes implanted in their brains.
Paralysed patients are able to move bionic limbs or operate computers by the power of thought alone. The helmet requires no brain implants. It functions by reading the electric signals passing through your scalp. If you want to turn on the light in the kitchen, you just wear the helmet, imagine some preprogrammed mental sign e. The chips are about the size of a grain of rice and store personalised security information that enables workers to open doors and operate photocopiers with a wave of their hand. Soon they hope to make payments in the same way. A bolder approach dispenses with organic parts altogether, and hopes to engineer completely nonorganic beings. Neural networks will be replaced by intelligent software, which could surf both the virtual and non-virtual worlds, free from the limitations of organic chemistry. After 4 billion years of wandering inside the kingdom of organic compounds, life will break out into the vastness of the inorganic realm, and will take shapes that we cannot envision even in our wildest dreams.
After all, our wildest dreams are still the product of organic chemistry. Breaking out of the organic realm could also enable life to finally break out of planet earth. For four billion years life remained confined to this tiny speck of a planet because natural selection made all organisms utterly dependent on the unique conditions of this flying rock. Not even the toughest bacteria can survive on Mars. A non-organic artificial intelligence, in contrast, will find it far easier to colonize alien planets. The replacement of organic life by inorganic beings may therefore sow the seed of a future galactic empire, ruled by the likes of Mr.
Data rather than Captain Kirk. Foretelling the future was never easy, and revolutionary biotechnologies make it even harder. For as difficult as it is to predict the impact of new technologies in fields like transportation, communication and energy, technologies for upgrading humans pose a completely different kind of challenge. Since they can be used to transform human minds and desires, people possessing present-day minds and desires by definition cannot fathom their implications. For thousands of years history was full of technological, economic, social and political upheavals. Yet one thing remained constant: humanity itself. Our tools and institutions are very different from those of biblical times, but the deep structures of the human mind remain the same.
This is why we can still find ourselves between the pages of the Bible, in the writings of Confucius or within the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. These classics were created by humans just like us, hence we feel that they talk about us. In modern theatre productions, Oedipus, Hamlet and Othello may wear jeans and T-shirts and have Facebook accounts, but their emotional conflicts are the same as in the original play. However, 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.
Many scholars try to predict how the world will look in the year or This is a waste of time. Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. 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 for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. This third project obviously subsumes the first two projects, and is fuelled 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.
If this sounds unscientific or downright eccentric, it is because people often misunderstand the meaning of divinity. When speaking of upgrading humans into gods, think more in terms of Greek gods or Hindu devas rather than the omnipotent biblical sky father. Our descendants would still have their foibles, kinks and limitations, just as Zeus and Indra had theirs. But they could love, hate, create and destroy on a much grander scale than us. Throughout history most gods were believed to enjoy not omnipotence but rather specific super-abilities such as the ability to design and create living beings; to transform their own bodies; to control the environment and the weather; to read minds and to communicate at a distance; to travel at very high speeds; and of course to escape death and live indefinitely. Humans are in the business of acquiring all these abilities, and then some. Certain traditional abilities that were considered divine for many millennia have today become so commonplace that we hardly think about them.
The average person now moves and communicates across distances much more easily than the Greek, Hindu or African gods of old. For example, the Igbo people of Nigeria believe that the creator god Chukwu initially wanted to make people immortal. He sent a dog to tell humans that when someone dies, they should sprinkle ashes on the corpse, and the body will come back to life. Unfortunately, the dog was tired and he dallied on the way. The impatient Chukwu then sent a sheep, telling her to make haste with this important message. Alas, when the breathless sheep reached her destination, she garbled the instructions, and told the humans to bury their dead, thus making death permanent. This is why to this day we humans must die. If only Chukwu had a Twitter account instead of relying on laggard dogs and dimwitted sheep to deliver his messages! In ancient agricultural societies, many religions displayed surprisingly little interest in metaphysical questions and the afterlife.
Instead, they focused on the very mundane issue of increasing agricultural output. Thus the Old Testament God never promises any rewards or punishments after death. Be careful! Otherwise, your hearts will deceive you and you will turn away to serve other gods and worship them. Scientists today can do much better than the Old Testament God. Thanks to artificial fertilisers, industrial insecticides and genetically modified crops, agricultural production nowadays outstrips the highest expectations ancient farmers had of their gods.
And the parched state of Israel no longer fears that some angry deity will restrain the heavens and stop all rain — for the Israelis have recently built a huge desalination plant on the shores of the Mediterranean, so they can now get all their drinking water from the sea. So far we have competed with the gods of old by creating better and better tools. In the not too distant future, we might create superhumans who will outstrip the ancient gods not in their tools, but in their bodily and mental faculties. If and when we get there, however, divinity will become as mundane as cyberspace — a wonder of wonders that we just take for granted. We can be quite certain that humans will make a bid for divinity, because humans have many reasons to desire such an upgrade, and many ways to achieve it. Even if one promising path turns out to be a dead end, alternative routes will remain open. For example, we may discover that the human genome is far too complicated for serious manipulation, but this will not prevent the development of brain—computer interfaces, nano-robots or artificial intelligence.
No need to panic, though. At least not immediately. Upgrading Sapiens will be a gradual historical process rather than a Hollywood apocalypse. Homo sapiens is not going to be exterminated by a robot revolt. This will not happen in a day, or a year. Indeed, it is already happening right now, through innumerable mundane actions. Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human. Can Someone Please Hit the Brakes? Calm explanations aside, many people panic when they hear of such possibilities.
This is what we fear collectively, as a species, when we hear of superhumans. We sense that in such a world, our identity, our dreams and even our fears will be irrelevant, and we will have nothing more to contribute. Whatever you are today — be it a devout Hindu cricket player or an aspiring lesbian journalist — in an upgraded world you will feel like a Neanderthal hunter in Wall Street. Nowadays, however, our world of meaning might collapse within decades. You cannot count on death to save you from becoming completely irrelevant. Scientific research and technological developments are moving at a far faster rate than most of us can grasp.
If you speak with the experts, many of them will tell you that we are still very far away from genetically engineered babies or human-level artificial intelligence. But most experts think on a timescale of academic grants and college jobs. I still remember the day I first came across the Internet. It was back in , when I was in high school. I went with a couple of buddies to visit our friend Ido who is now a computer scientist. We wanted to play table tennis. Ido was already a huge computer fan, and before opening the ping-pong table he insisted on showing us the latest wonder. He connected the phone cable to his computer and pressed some keys. For a minute all we could hear were squeaks, shrieks and buzzes, and then silence. We mumbled and grumbled, but Ido tried again. And again. At last he gave a whoop and announced that he had managed to connect his computer to the central computer at the nearby university.
But you could put all kinds of things there. That was less than twenty-five years ago at the time of writing. Who knows what will come to pass twenty-five years from now? Insurance companies, pension funds, health systems and finance ministries are already aghast at the jump in life expectancy. People are living much longer than expected, and there is not enough money to pay for their pensions and medical treatment. As seventy threatens to become the new forty, experts are calling to raise the retirement age, and to restructure the entire job market. When people realise how fast we are rushing towards the great unknown, and that they cannot count even on death to shield them from it, their reaction is to hope that somebody will hit the brakes and slow us down.
But we cannot hit the brakes, for several reasons. Firstly, nobody knows where the brakes are. While some experts are familiar with developments in one field, such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, big data or genetics, no one is an expert on everything. No one is therefore capable of connecting all the dots and seeing the full picture. Different fields influence one another in such intricate ways that even the best minds cannot fathom how breakthroughs in artificial intelligence might impact nanotechnology, or vice versa. Nobody can absorb all the latest scientific discoveries, nobody can predict how the global economy will look in ten years, and nobody has a clue where we are heading in such a rush. Since no one understands the system any more, no one can stop it.
Secondly, if we somehow succeed in hitting the brakes, our economy will collapse, along with our society. As explained in a later chapter, the modern economy needs constant and indefinite growth in order to survive. An economy built on everlasting growth needs endless projects — just like the quests for immortality, bliss and divinity. Well, if we need endless projects, why not settle for bliss and immortality, and at least put aside the frightening quest for superhuman powers? Because it is inextricable from the other two. When you develop bionic legs that enable paraplegics to walk again, you can also use the same technology to upgrade healthy people. When you discover how to stop memory loss among older people, the same treatments might enhance the memory of the young. No clear line separates healing from upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm.
Viagra began life as a treatment for blood-pressure problems. To the surprise and delight of Pfizer, it transpired that Viagra can also overcome impotence. It enabled millions of men to regain normal sexual abilities; but soon enough men who had no impotence problems in the first place began using the same pill to surpass the norm, and acquire sexual powers they never had before. Modern plastic surgery was born in the First World War, when Harold Gillies began treating facial injuries in the Aldershot military hospital. Though plastic surgery continued to help the sick and wounded, it devoted increasing attention to upgrading the healthy. Nowadays plastic surgeons make millions in private clinics whose explicit and sole aim is to upgrade the healthy and beautify the wealthy. If a billionaire openly stated that he intended to engineer super-smart offspring, imagine the public outcry.
We are more likely to slide down a slippery slope. It begins with parents whose genetic profile puts their children at high risk of deadly genetic diseases. So they perform in vitro fertilisation, and test the DNA of the fertilised egg. If everything is in order, all well and good. But if the DNA test discovers the dreaded mutations — the embryo is destroyed. Yet why take a chance by fertilising just one egg? Better fertilise several, so that even if three or four are defective there is at least one good embryo. When this in vitro selection procedure becomes acceptable and cheap enough, its usage may spread. Mutations are a ubiquitous risk. All people carry in their DNA some harmful mutations and less-thanoptimal alleles.
Sexual reproduction is a lottery. A famous — and probably apocryphal — anecdote tells of a meeting in between Nobel Prize laureate Anatole France and the beautiful and talented dancer Isadora Duncan. Fertilise several eggs, and choose the one with the best combination. Once stem-cell research enables us to create an unlimited supply of human embryos on the cheap, you can select your optimal baby from among hundreds of candidates, all carrying your DNA, all perfectly natural, and none requiring any futuristic genetic engineering. Iterate this procedure for a few generations, and you could easily end up with superhumans or a creepy dystopia. But what if after fertilising even numerous eggs, you find that all of them contain some deadly mutations? Should you destroy all the embryos?
Instead of doing that, why not replace the problematic genes? A breakthrough case involves mitochondrial DNA. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Internet Archive Audio Live Music Archive Librivox Free Audio. Featured All Audio This Just In Grateful Dead Netlabels Old Time Radio 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Featured All Images This Just In Flickr Commons Occupy Wall Street Flickr Cover Art USGS Maps. Top NASA Images Solar System Collection Ames Research Center. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Featured All Software This Just In Old School Emulation MS-DOS Games Historical Software Classic PC Games Software Library. Top Kodi Archive and Support File Vintage Software APK MS-DOS CD-ROM Software CD-ROM Software Library Software Sites Tucows Software Library Shareware CD-ROMs Software Capsules Compilation CD-ROM Images ZX Spectrum DOOM Level CD.
Books to Borrow Open Library. Featured All Books All Texts This Just In Smithsonian Libraries FEDLINK US Genealogy Lincoln Collection. Top American Libraries Canadian Libraries Universal Library Project Gutenberg Children's Library Biodiversity Heritage Library Books by Language Additional Collections. Featured All Video This Just In Prelinger Archives Democracy Now! Occupy Wall Street TV NSA Clip Library. Humans today enjoy unprecedented levels of power and an increasingly god-like status. The great epidemics of the past — famine, plague and war — no longer control our lives. We are the only species in history that has single-handedly changed the entire planet, and we can no longer blame a higher being for our fate.
But as our gods take a back seat, and Homo Sapiens becomes Homo Deus, what are we going to do with ourselves? How do we set the agenda for our own future without pushing our species — and the rest of the world — beyond its limits?
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below! Home Add Document Sign In Register. Homo Deus : A Brief history of Tomorrow Home Homo Deus : A Brief history of Tomorrow. Dedication To my teacher, S. Goenka — , who lovingly taught me important things. Contents Cover Title Pag Author: Yuval Noah Harari. DOWNLOAD PDF. Contents Cover Title Page Dedication 1 The New Human Agenda PART I Homo Sapiens Conquers the World 2 The Anthropocene 3 The Human Spark PART II Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World 4 The Storytellers 5 The Odd Couple 6 The Modern Covenant 7 The Humanist Revolution PART III Homo Sapiens Loses Control 8 The Time Bomb in the Laboratory 9 The Great Decoupling 10 The Ocean of Consciousness 11 The Data Religion Notes Acknowledgments Index About the Author Also by Yuval Noah Harari Credits Copyright About the Publisher 1.
In vitro fertilisation: mastering creation. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. Oh well, it was just a bad dream. The same three problems preoccupied the people of twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt. Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list. For generation after generation humans have prayed to every god, angel and saint, and have invented countless tools, institutions and social systems — but they continued to die in their millions from starvation, epidemics and violence.
Yet at the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up to an amazing realisation. Most people rarely think about it, but in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war. Of course, these problems have not been completely solved, but they have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. We know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war — and we usually succeed in doing it. And it actually works. Such calamities indeed happen less and less often. For the first time in history, more people die today 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. 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? Before answering this question, we need to say a few more words about famine, plague and war. The claim that we are bringing them under control may strike many as outrageous, extremely naïve, or perhaps callous. What about the ongoing AIDS crisis in Africa, or the wars raging in Syria and Iraq? To address these concerns, let us take a closer look at the world of the early twenty-first century, before exploring the human agenda for the coming decades.
Until recently most humans lived on the very edge of the biological poverty line, below which people succumb to malnutrition and hunger. A small mistake or a bit of bad luck could easily be a death sentence for an entire family or village. If heavy rains destroyed your wheat crop, or robbers carried off your goat herd, you and your loved ones may well have starved to death. Misfortune or stupidity on the collective level resulted in mass famines. When severe drought hit ancient Egypt or medieval India, it was not uncommon that 5 or 10 per cent of the population perished. Provisions became scarce; transport was too slow and expensive to import sufficient food; and governments were far too weak to save the day. Open any history book and you are likely to come across horrific accounts of famished populations, driven mad by hunger.
Seeking to prolong their lives a little and somewhat to appease their hunger, these poor folk eat such unclean things as cats and the flesh of horses flayed and cast onto dung heaps. Other poor wretches eat nettles and weeds, or roots and herbs which they boil in water. Bad weather had ruined the harvests throughout the kingdom in the previous two years, so that by the spring of the granaries were completely empty. The rich charged exorbitant prices for whatever food they managed to hoard, and the poor died in droves. About 2. The following year, , famine struck Estonia, killing a fifth of the population. In it was the turn of Finland, where a quarter to a third of people died. Scotland suffered from severe famine between and , some districts losing up to 20 per cent of their inhabitants.
Most people today have never experienced this excruciating torment. Our ancestors, alas, knew it only too well. During the last hundred years, technological, economic and political developments have created an increasingly robust safety net separating humankind from the biological poverty line. Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes. There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines.
If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to. In most parts of the planet, even if a person has lost his job and all of his possessions, he is unlikely to die from hunger. Private insurance schemes, government agencies and international NGOs may not rescue him from poverty, but they will provide him with enough daily calories to survive. On the collective level, the global trade network turns droughts and floods into business opportunities, and makes it possible to overcome food shortages quickly and cheaply. Even when wars, earthquakes or tsunamis devastate entire countries, international efforts usually succeed in preventing famine.
Though hundreds of millions still go hungry almost every day, in most countries very few people actually starve to death. Poverty certainly causes many other health problems, and malnutrition shortens life expectancy even in the richest countries on earth. In France, for example, 6 million people about 10 per cent of the population suffer from nutritional insecurity. They wake up in the morning not knowing whether they will have anything to eat for lunch; they often go to sleep hungry; and the nutrition they do obtain is unbalanced and unhealthy — lots of starch, sugar and salt, and not enough protein and vitamins. The same transformation has occurred in numerous other countries, most notably China.
For millennia, famine stalked every Chinese regime from the Yellow Emperor to the Red communists. A few decades ago China was a byword for food shortages. Tens of millions of Chinese starved to death during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and experts routinely predicted that the problem would only get worse. In the first World Food Conference was convened in Rome, and delegates were treated to apocalyptic scenarios. In fact, it was heading towards the greatest economic miracle in history. Since hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted out of poverty, and though hundreds of millions more still suffer greatly from privation and malnutrition, for the first time in its recorded history China is now free from famine. Indeed, in most countries today overeating has become a far worse problem than famine.
In the eighteenth century Marie Antoinette allegedly advised the starving masses that if they ran out of bread, they should just eat cake instead. Today, the poor are following this advice to the letter. Whereas the rich residents of Beverly Hills eat lettuce salad and steamed tofu with quinoa, in the slums and ghettos the poor gorge on Twinkie cakes, Cheetos, hamburgers and pizza. In more than 2. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by Bustling cities linked by a ceaseless stream of merchants, officials and pilgrims were both the bedrock of human civilisation and an ideal breeding ground for pathogens. People consequently lived their lives in ancient Athens or medieval Florence knowing that they might fall ill and die next week, or that an epidemic might suddenly erupt and destroy their entire family in one swoop. Medieval people personified the Black Death as a horrific demonic force beyond human control or comprehension. The Triumph of Death, c. The most famous such outbreak, the so-called Black Death, began in the s, somewhere in east or central Asia, when the flea-dwelling bacterium Yersinia pestis started infecting humans bitten by the fleas.
From there, riding on an army of rats and fleas, the plague quickly spread all over Asia, Europe and North Africa, taking less than twenty years to reach the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Between 75 million and million people died — more than a quarter of the population of Eurasia. In England, four out of ten people died, and the population dropped from a pre-plague high of 3. The city of Florence lost 50, of its , inhabitants. Except for organising mass prayers and processions, they had no idea how to stop the spread of the epidemic — let alone cure it. Until the modern era, humans blamed diseases on bad air, malicious demons and angry gods, and did not suspect the existence of bacteria and viruses. People readily believed in angels and fairies, but they could not imagine that a tiny flea or a single drop of water might contain an entire armada of deadly predators.
The real culprit was the minuscule Yersinia pestis bacterium. The Black Death was not a singular event, nor even the worst plague in history. More disastrous epidemics struck America, Australia and the Pacific Islands following the arrival of the first Europeans. Unbeknown to the explorers and settlers, they brought with them new infectious diseases against which the natives had no immunity. Up to 90 per cent of the local populations died as a result. The ships carried Spanish soldiers along with horses, firearms and a few African slaves. One of the slaves, Francisco de Eguía, carried on his person a far deadlier cargo. After Francisco landed in Mexico the virus began to multiply exponentially within his body, eventually bursting out all over his skin in a terrible rash. The feverish Francisco was taken to bed in the house of a Native American family in the town of Cempoallan. He infected the family members, who infected the neighbours.
Within ten days Cempoallan became a graveyard.
Homo Deus A Brief History Of Tomorrow ( PDFDrive.com ),
Webof tomorrow 6 50 usd isbn. homo deus on apple books apple books apple apple. homo deus a brief history of tomorrow co uk. homo deus a brief history of tomorrow. homo WebThe customary book, fiction, history, novel, scientific research, as without difficulty as various extra sorts of books are readily nearby here. As this Homo Deus A Brief History WebDownload Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow [EPUB] Type: EPUB Size: MB Download as PDF Download Original PDF This document was uploaded by user and WebPdf Download Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari is a great book to read and that's why I recommend reading or downloading ebook Homo Deus: A WebHomo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - blogger.com WebOct 26, · Download Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari in PDF EPUB format complete free. Brief Summary of Book: Homo Deus: A Brief ... read more
To the surprise and delight of Pfizer, it transpired that Viagra can also overcome impotence. If you came to visit a duke and saw that his lawn was in bad shape, you knew he was in trouble. Alas, once people change the way they behave, the economic theories become obsolete. We forget that our world was created by an accidental chain of events, and that history shaped not only our technology, politics and society, but also our thoughts, fears and dreams. The rich charged exorbitant prices for whatever food they managed to hoard, and the poor died in droves. We mortals daily take chances with our lives, because we know they are going to end anyhow. remove-circle Share or Embed This Item.
Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. The country needed sturdy soldiers and workers, healthy women who would give birth to more soldiers and workers, and bureaucrats who came to the office punctually at 8 a. Without government planning, economic resources and scientific research, individuals will not get far in their quest for happiness, a brief history of tomorrow pdf download free. The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings. Yet what makes the race so attractive is the exhilarating sensations that go along with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment