Suman K Sharma
Yuval Noah Harari is a visionary. A scholar extraordinaire that he is, astonishing are his projections into the near future and pervasive his scanning of human destiny.
The year is 2100. Cancer is curable and so are the chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma. Epidemics like COVID-19, that claimed millions of lives and put the economy of the entire world in jeopardy some eighty years ago, are the lore of epidemiologists. Getting oneself purged of disease-carrying germs and cancerous cells by nano-robots has become a 24x7routine. Eternal youth is no more an idle fancy. Amazing advances are being made year after year in Bionics to replace the worn-out and deformed body parts with much more efficient and durable substitutes of inorganic origin. Men and women expect to live up to 150. ‘Eighty is the new fifty.’Researchers in Genetics hold promise of delivering ‘upgraded’ human beings. Duping death is now a technical problem – to be solved within the ensuing century.Man aspires to be ‘amortal’ – susceptible to death only by accident or by self-will, not by disease or ageing.
The potential of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – of nuclear warheads has long since obliterated the threat of major wars. If a war does break out, it would be cyber-warfare, requiring only a few professionals rather than whole armies; intended to incapacitate the economy of the adversaries rather than killing masses. Peace prevails.World is run by a knowledge-based economy. No one dies of hunger or deprivation anymore. Knowledge brings all the material humans can use, and may be some more. Poverty has been eliminated….
Harari carefully tempers his prophesies with the disclaimer: ‘The predictions that pepper this book (that is, Homo Deus) are no more than an attempt to discuss present-day dilemmas, and an invitation to change the future.’ (pp.74-75).
Even so, his cloud cuckoo land is not altogether unbelievable.Take, for instance, the field of medicine. In 1979, WHO declared complete eradication of smallpoxin the world.AIDS has turned from a ‘death sentence’ to a ‘chronic disease’ since 1990’s. In 2015, the discovery of the antibiotic Teixobactine put paid to the drug-resistant bacteria.An efficacious Corona vaccine is within the sight, as of December 2020. Average life expectancy has almost doubled across the globe during the last century – from less than thirty in 1900 to over seventy years at present. The Israeli scientists claim to have found the secret of staying young forever, as per a report published recently in The Times of Israel.'(Scientists) from Tel Aviv University and Shamir Medical Center in Israel,’ goes the news story,’placed a group of healthy 64-year-old people in hyperbaric chambers and supplied them with sessions of high levels of oxygen for three months. (They) claim that the therapy delayed the aging process, “reversed” it, and transformed those individuals’ performance to levels similar to people 25 years younger.’ If the 20th century has been devoted to the cause of healing the sick, the 21st century has its eyes set upon ‘upgrading’ the healthy.
If we were to believe Harari, man is at the brink of becoming a god-man, Homo deus.That could well be the apogee of the rise of humankind. Thanks to the ability of Homo sapiens to cooperate in large numbers and garner the strength of their imagination – the evolved man began to create stories 70,000 years ago. He became a hunter-gatherer and the poor Neanderthal man was left behind to wander among his bisons and other beasts.Rivers, fire and wind were made into gods. 12,000 years ago,we had the Agricultural Revolution. Our ancestors cultivated fields. Horses and cattle were domesticated. Gone were the days when man spoke to the beasts and birds as his equals. Now he was their lord and master and they lived to suit his pleasure.Temples were built around permanent habitations. With them came priests and the priest-kings in the name of God. 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians came upon the idea of writing. Along came the coins. Writing made it possible for humans to connect across the barriers of time and space. It also gave a much-needed fillip to man’scapacity of contemplate and think beyond the mundane world.Religions spread to proclaim God as the ultimate authority over the natural phenomena which were beyond man’s power to control. The Scientific Revolution beginning with Copernicus’ model of sun as the centre of the universe (CE 1543) and the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principiain the late seventeenth century; coupled with the Age of Enlightenment, heralded by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbs (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778),proclaimed that man did not need God anymore. Man, himself turned the master of the world.
The times are changing fast.The 20th century’s ideals of Humanism, Liberalism and Marxism are on the ebb. The twenty-first century, posits Harari, is the age of Data-ism. The fast-developing creed is set to dispense with what all of us have held dear to us all the time: consciousness, the self-ness, soul – and the host of mankind itself. We humans are just electro-biochemical algorithms like horses, cats and pigeons, Harari says. It is only our relative complexity that makes us superior to other animals.
In a couple of generations from present one, the scientists will have brought forth a much superior version of the sapiens. Applying this rationale to the difference between the ‘ordinary’ sapiens and the putative ‘upgraded’ elite, he concludes that the run-of-the-mill sapiens are going to be treated by these superiors in the same manner as the sapiens treated the Neanderthal man tens of millennia ago, or as a man in the street treats a horse today. What is more, the breath-taking advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are going to eliminate the need of multitudes of workers, farmers and soldiers to run the business of the world.
That could be a scenario out of Salvation – an American sci-fi series currently streaming on Netflix. Planet Earth is in danger of annihilation in 186 days by a collision with a massive asteroid. The wise-guysat the Pentagon come out with two solutions to the save the rich and the elite: either bombard the asteroid and let its fragments fall calamitously on the Southern Hemisphere (comprising largely of poor nations); or,fly 160 of the best of men and women (from where else, but USA!) out to the safety of another planet and leave the rest of 7 billion-strong humanity to its dire fate.
Be wary of Homo Deus!
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