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A review by nouritaqa
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
4.0
The author's central questions are consistent over his other books:
First, since there is no such thing as free will (if you doubt this argument, I recommend Robert Sapolsky's Behave), the foundation of Liberalism-based Humanism will be further eroded with the increasing technical capability of manipulating our thoughts and emotions via directly interfering biological algorithms. What religion or social reality should we believe then?
Second, with increasing complexity and size of information, human can no longer make "right" decisions and instead rely on data-driven algorithms, or AI. With further increasing power of AI, it is likely that AI surpass humans not only in chess but also more creative and emotionally invoking works. Then, what can human do better than AI or what left for us?
No matter how much unrealistic it sounds, I think those questions are frightening but definitely worth pondering. I think we all have felt irrelevancy of us to society. Have I done anything meaningful to the world? What kind of meaning does my life have? These questions will be becoming much harder to answer in the coming decades.
Even thought the book was very compelling, I felt this book is a bit unstructured compared his other two books.
First, since there is no such thing as free will (if you doubt this argument, I recommend Robert Sapolsky's Behave), the foundation of Liberalism-based Humanism will be further eroded with the increasing technical capability of manipulating our thoughts and emotions via directly interfering biological algorithms. What religion or social reality should we believe then?
Second, with increasing complexity and size of information, human can no longer make "right" decisions and instead rely on data-driven algorithms, or AI. With further increasing power of AI, it is likely that AI surpass humans not only in chess but also more creative and emotionally invoking works. Then, what can human do better than AI or what left for us?
No matter how much unrealistic it sounds, I think those questions are frightening but definitely worth pondering. I think we all have felt irrelevancy of us to society. Have I done anything meaningful to the world? What kind of meaning does my life have? These questions will be becoming much harder to answer in the coming decades.
Even thought the book was very compelling, I felt this book is a bit unstructured compared his other two books.