It would be extremely arrogant on my part to criticize any book by Yuval Noah Harari. But it would be almost as arrogant to claim that I understand everything he has written in this and his two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus. He is a brilliant Israeli historian, thinker and philosopher with encyclopedic knowledge, an ability to look beyond facts and see connections in disparate trends, and a skeptical frame of mind.
Sapiens, his first book is an expansive history of Homo sapiens from the Big Bang to the present, with detailed discussion of major developments along the way. As such, it is an expanded and updated version of Jacob Bronowski’s 13 part, 1973 BBC series The Ascent Of Man, which was made into a book by the same name. There is little speculation but a ton of interesting facts about our common ancestors in that book. Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by contrast, although equally scholarly, are chuck full of predictions and speculations about our collective future.
The best way to give you a sense of the breadth of the topics discussed in relation to what may happen in this century, is to list some chapter headings- Work, Liberty, Civilization, Religion, Immigration, War, God, Justice, Post-Truth, Secularism, Education, and Science Fiction. In the long penultimate chapter, Meaning, Harari gets wound up like a watch spring into a pressured-speech rant about the meaninglessness of life and a host of current ‘stories’ that we invent to give it meaning.
In some detailed discussions about machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, algorithms and brain-computer interactions and connections, the philosopher Harari comes close to espousing a hard determinism and a denial of free will. “Feelings are not some uniquely human quality and they do not reflect any kind of free will. Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms.” This reflects the monist theory in philosophy that the mind and soul do not exist except as neuronal firing patterns determined by genetics and random environmental influences. However, in the last chapter Meditation, which reads like an advertisement for a particular brand of meditation, Vipassana, he seems to conclude that the human mind exists entirely separate from the human body. And in the chapter on Liberty, he suggests that we may finally have found a practical use for philosophers, in programming self-driving cars to follow either the deontological ‘categorical imperatives’ ethics of Emmanuel Kant or the consequentialist ethics of John Stuart Mills. Will you choose the egoist Tesla that will kill the child running into the street or the altruist model that will kill you by veering into the oncoming transport? But that question implies the existence of your free will.
Harari is very concerned about the development of intelligent beings from artificial intelligence, computer- based decision-making and bioengineering that may outperform and override our unassisted brains. However, the term AI is undefined and used loosely in current parlance-any computer program that has a four- node decision tree can be called artificial intelligence-and most human brains are capable of taking more than four sequential decision points into account in deciding on the best possibility of achieving a goal. Some of the concerns about the effects of AI seem unlikely to me. How likely is it that Homo sapiens will split into two different species by the end of this century? If Darwin was right, that split may eventually happen, but in the next eighty years? And the assertion that “consciousness might even be severed completely from any organic structure and surf through cyberspace free of all biological and physical constraints” seems farfetched to this Luddite.
Niels Bohr is credited with the witticism popularized by Yogi Berra: “Predictions are hard-especially about the future.” The truth of this is amply demonstrated by the poor track record of past predictions throughout history as documented by David A Wilson in his 2000 book The History of the Future. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers and Nicholas Taub in The Black Swan,
both show that completely unforeseeable one-off events can derail all predictions, a possibility that Harari would readily acknowledge, although like all futurists, he argues that this time will be different and his predictions will be accurate.
This triad of books by perhaps the most scholarly erudite original thinker of our time make for great reading. If you only have the time for one of them, I recommend Sapiens, but all three are educational and thought-provoking. And in spite of the serious topics, the writing is generally very easy to follow with mostly pithy short sentences, and startling turns of phrases. My favourite quote, from the latest book, in the chapter on secularism: “Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”
The Passionate Reader 