Evolution is a slow affair, taking some 5 million years to turn a chimpanzee-like creature into us. But what happens when we push down the accelerator and take command of our bodies and brains instead of leaving it to nature? What happens when biotechnology and artificial intelligence merge, allowing us to re-design our species to meet our whims and desires?
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Harari makes no pretense of being able to peer into the future — but the advances humans have made suggest where we may be heading. Breakthroughs in biotechnology, including gene-editing methods like
CRISPR, hint at the power we’ll soon have to change our genes, our bodies, and perhaps our brains.
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“In 2050, it is likely that your smartphone will not be separate from you at all,” Harari said by e-mail from his home in Israel. “It will be embedded in your body via biometric sensors, and it will monitor your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your brain activity 24 hours a day.” Your smartphone will constantly analyze that data, and “will, therefore, know your desires, likes, and dislikes even better than you.”
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“Humans will merge with computers and machines to form cyborgs — part-organic, part-bionic life forms,” Harari said. “You could surf the Internet with your mind; you could use bionic arms, legs, and eyes; you will augment your organic immune system with a bionic immune system, and you will delegate more and more decisions to algorithms that know you better than you know yourself.”
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Harari won’t say whether we will conquer death, but he’s confident we’ll “make a bid” for immortality this century. In fact, our attitude toward death has changed since the Scientific Revolution, he said. Science “has redefined death as a technical problem. A very complicated problem, no doubt, but still only a technical problem.”
And technical problems have technical solutions. “If traditionally death was the specialty of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over,” Harari said. That doesn’t mean we’ll be able to pull it off — but he doesn’t dismiss the idea. “My position is that humankind has the potential to overcome old age and death, but it will probably take a few centuries rather than a few decades.”
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The office isn’t the only place that may soon be redundant. Churches, Harari suggested, may fade into history along with the very idea of religion. As he points out, the things that God does in Genesis — creating plants, animals, and people — may soon be things that humans can do. We’ll see these new gods every time we look in the mirror. If making things no longer seems miraculous, what would?
As artificial intelligence progresses, and the power of algorithms and data-crunching dominates more aspects of our lives, Harari wonders whether data may come to have divine properties. In the future, “techno-religions” may conquer the world, he said, not by promising salvation in the next world, but by radically changing our lives in this world.
Harari argued that “the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley.” The technology gurus “promise all the old prizes — happiness, peace, prosperity, and even eternal life — but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.”
Investors searching for the next transformative technology destined to turn a bunch of Ivy League dropouts into billionaires, and half the market into a loose slot machine, need only look in the mirror. “The greatest industry of the 21st century will probably be to upgrade human beings,” historian Yuval Harari, author of the fascinating new book “Homo Deus,” told MarketWatch.