BOOK REVIEW: Homo
Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari (2017)
Will the great arc of human history tell us where AI will
take us? If so, Yuval Noah Harari should
be a helpful guide. He is a professor of
history, and has received adulation from many quarters, including Barack Obama
and Bill Gates, for his earlier sweeping history of mankind, Sapiens.
Harari is an unusual historian in not being abashed by the prospect of
speculating on the future, and I think this commendable because, as James
Baldwin said “History…does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past.
On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry
it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is
literally present in all that we do.” Homo Deus is beautifully written, very
informative, and entertaining. Its
speculations are thoughtful and original.
Harari’s forceful presentation will leave you wondering whether he is
prophesying rather than speculating, but the very last few pages make it clear
that he sees the possibilities he outlines as just that, possibilities. And I see them in the spirit of science
fiction, to wonder what might come from our technologies based on insight into
human nature. I question many of his
ideas, as I will outline below, but applaud the spirit in which they are
offered.
The structure of the book is important. It is in three parts. The first part, including a long introduction
and Part I: Homo Sapiens Conquers the World, is all history, and is impressive
in invoking historical information to form a perspective on how quickly, really
in “the past few decades,” humankind has almost overcome the three misfortunes
that formerly dominated the entire human agenda: war, famine and plague. Part II: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the
World, elaborates the implications of our history for the future. And Part III: Homo Sapiens Loses Control,
speculates and warns of what things may come.
The conclusion of Part I is “Sapiens rules the world because
only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces,
entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. “
Intersubjective is the key word here. It
is a concept developed by Harari, consisting of a “third level of reality”
beyond objective and subjective entities.
“Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans
rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans.” These are stories and myths that are socially
reinforced by sharing, and held to be true because of this social reinforcement
rather than corresponding to objective truths.
Religious beliefs, for example, are intersubjective realities. So are money and corporations. Humans are superior to other animals because
they are “the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large
numbers.”. Bees cooperate in large
numbers, too, but “bees did not beat us to the nuclear bomb … because their
cooperation lacks flexibility.” Note
that this idea of flexibility implies something like free will, or at least a
degree of freedom more than bees have, although later in the book Harari denies
the existence of fee will. (Or appears
to. It’s hard to tell, because so much
of the narrative seems to be in the voice of the common accepted truths, which
Harari is conveying tongue-in-cheek, rather than Harari’s own
conclusions.) Intersubjective reality
is so important to homo sapiens that the “lives of most people have meaning
only within the network of stories they tell one another.” The segue to Part
II, Humans Give Meaning to the World, is that “In the twenty-first century
fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth. Hence if we want
to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly
enough. We must also decipher the
fictions that give meaning to the world.”
So far, I’m with Harari 100%.
These are important concepts backed up by well-explained history and
science.
In Part II, Harari says a religion is “defined by its social
function rather than by the existence of deities. Religion is any all-encompassing story that
confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values.” Communism is a religion, as well as
Catholicism and Judaism. So are
liberalism, socialism, and Nazism.
There’s a lot of discussion of liberalism as a religion, throughout the
remainder of the book. Humanism is the
current reigning religion. It has
replaced gods or God with humans as the originator of its laws, norms and
values. “Modern society believes in
humanist dogmas, and uses science not in order to question these dogmas, but
rather in order to implement them.”
Humanism has three variations: communism (or socialism),
liberalism, and Nazism. According to
Harari, for “orthodox” humanism, human experience is the ultimately most
important reality. “Hence (according to humanism) we ought to give as much
freedom as possible to every individual to experience the world, follow his or
her inner voice and express his or her inner truth. Whether in politics,
economics or art, individual free will should have far more weight than state
interests or religious doctrines. … Due to this emphasis on liberty, the
orthodox branch of humanism is known as ‘liberal humanism’ or simply as
‘liberalism.’”
I demur on these descriptions of both humanism and
liberalism, which form the basis for a lot of what follows in the book.
I’m no philosopher or historian, but my
understanding of humanism is that it elevates human reason, as much as or more
than individual experience, over religious dogma.
Harari says “It is liberal politics that
believes the voter knows best. Liberal art holds that beauty is in the eye of
the beholder.
Liberal economics
maintains that the customer is always right.
Liberal ethics advises us that if it feels good, we should go ahead and
do it.”
My understanding of the reason
that the voter knows best is that we are “created equal,” and have equal rights
deriving from this fundamental equality, which gives my vote as much importance
as anyone else’s.
I find Matthew
Stewart’s discussion of how Enlightenment philosophy influenced the liberal
political movements of the eighteenth century in
Nature’s God
1 more convincing than Harari’s. Stewart’s contention is that it is
belief in human reason vs. religious dogma that is the chief characteristic of
these historical liberal movements, and specifically the founding concepts of
American independence and law.
Harari
says that “feelings,” not reasoning, are paramount for liberals. Curiously,
Harari doesn’t discuss equality at all in describing humanism and liberalism in
his chapter, The Humanist Revolution, except to mention that the socialist
branch of humanism values equality above freedom.
He describes Nazism as “evolutionary
humanism,” which celebrates the survival of the fittest but ultimately believes
in human experience as paramount in accordance with its humanist origins.
The fundamental weakness of humanism due to
its focus on subjective experience makes it vulnerable to displacement by the
new data worshipping religion that Harari describes later in the book.
In part III we get to the future.
The central question posed at the beginning
of Part III is “How do biotechnology and artificial intelligence threaten
humanism?”
Harari says “Liberals value
individual liberty so much because they believe that humans have free
will.”
Then he goes to great lengths to
show that science has established that free will cannot exist, so there is a
contradiction with this foundation of humanism. He maintains that the concept
of free will was tenable in the 18
th century before fMRI, but not
with today’s understanding of brain mechanics.
He claims brain science undermines the concept of intention, and that
science, especially the life sciences, “is converging on an all-encompassing
dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing” as
a major conclusion.
This is presented as
“the elephant in the laboratory,” creating a “contradiction between free will
and contemporary science.”
He gives a
brief mention of the potential for random events at the subatomic level, but
says “when random accidents combine with deterministic processes, we get
probabilistic outcomes, but this too doesn’t amount to freedom.”
He repeats this assertion that the life
sciences in particular have determined that organisms are just algorithms many
times.
It is not well supported.
It is a major theme of the final chapter, The
Data Religion, but the references in this chapter do not include any from the
biological sciences. They are almost all from economists.
The closest thing to life science references
are a book by a publicist called Global Brain
2,
and some criticisms of Lysenko.
Harari introduces the idea that a “Cognitive Revolution
transformed the sapiens mind, giving it access to the vast intersubjective
realm,” which allowed it to “create gods and corporations, to build cities and
empires, to invent writing and money, and eventually to split atoms and reach
for the moon.” “As far as we know, this earth-shattering revolution resulted
from a few small changes in the Sapiens DNA and a slight rewiring of the
Sapiens brain.” This has led to
aspirations that further manipulations of the brain can lead to greater
expansions of human consciousness. At the same time, the conflict between
science, which purportedly shows that freedom is mythical, and humanism’s
fundamental belief in freedom has led to “the great decoupling” between
consciousness and intelligence. The
intelligence of algorithms overwhelms the experience of consciousness. A new religion has arisen, the religion of
Dataism, which Harari believes has replaced traditional religions. “As algorithms push humans out of the job
market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny
elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms.” “Liberal habits such as democratic elections
will become obsolete, because Google will be able to represent even my own
political opinions better than I can.”
“Techno-humanism faces an impossible dilemma here. It considers human will to be the most
important thing in the universe, hence it pushes humankind to develop
technologies that can control and redesign the will.” But “We can never deal with such technologies
as long as we believe that the human will and the human experience are the
supreme source of authority and meaning.
Hence a bolder techno-religion seeks to sever the humanist umbilical
cord altogether. “ This is Dataism: we, and all organisms, are all just
algorithms and the machines we make will do and decide everything for us,
making all but the elite redundant. This
is the resolution of the conflict in favor of modern science and at the expense
of liberal freedom. Information processing has become superior to mind in our
society. Information itself demands to
be free. The elites in control think this is all fine. Authority will shift from
humans to algorithms (controlled by the elites). The world will become
post-liberal, and “might be an Orwellian police state that constantly monitors
and controls not only all our actions, but even what happens inside our bodies
and our brains.” The controlling elite
will be augmented, “upgraded.” This is
the Homo Deus of the book’s title. In
the final few pages, Harari holds out some hope: “Maybe we’ll discover that
organisms aren’t algorithms after all.” but it seems a thin, unsupported
hope.
I don’t believe there is a scientific consensus that
organisms are just algorithms. Harari doesn’t quote any scientists who say
that. Many scientists are religious and
believe there are things at work in the universe far beyond what can be
described by a simple deterministic algorithm.
They do believe in physical laws that govern all matter and energy
including matter and energy in living things, but there are still many
mysteries in physical matter and energy, especially at the quantum level that
governs the interactions of atoms, molecules and energy, including those in
organisms. That’s not the same as reducing an organism to a simple algorithm
like a computer program.
It’s unclear whether Harari himself accepts that science has
put the final nail in the concept of free will. He relates details of brain
function experiments that show action potentials occurring before subjects
declare their intentions, which have been interpreted as proving that
intentions are illusory.
He presents
these and other information such as fMRI studies showing mechanisms associated
with conscious thought as demonstrating that free will is an illusion. Harari
concludes that our actions are either pre-determined or random, but never
free.
But it is unclear whether he is
presenting this as the voice of the current consensus shaped by the Dataist
religion, or whether he is buying into it himself.
In any case, I don’t believe that the
possibility of free will has been disproven.
The studies cited by Harari and others are never quite clear regarding
when an intention is formed vs when it is reported.
Studies of brain function by fMRI and other
sensing technologies are very crude.
None of them have yet shown the precise mechanisms by which even
straightforward actions such as visual image processing work, much less explain
the neuronal mechanism for processing a specific thought.
3 Merely showing that some actions, like
reflexes, are unintentional doesn’t prove that others can’t be initiated by
free will.
It only shows there are
constraints on free will, and that some actions are reflexive or driven by
unconscious processes, while others may be free.
And randomness, even if constrained by probabilities,
does imply freedom.
Statisticians refer to “degrees of freedom”
in random processes. Randomness doesn’t just represent uncertainties caused by
lack of knowledge.
Quantum mechanics has
demonstrated that there is a fundamental uncertainty in physical interactions.
4
Things don’t happen until they happen, and there is some freedom in how they
will happen until they do.
Scientists
and philosophers continue to debate the question of determinism in physical
processes.
5
Determinism and free will are not closed issues in science or philosophy.
Is it possible that consciousness is closely related to free
will?
That the conscious mind is
necessarily a mind that freely chooses, rather than just reacting
deterministically, and this is the essential quality of consciousness?
Could it be that the probabilities of quantum
events override deterministic events in some cognitive brain functions? Roger
Penrose speculated on the possibility of quantum state superposition playing a
role in brain processes over twenty years ago
6 Harari points out that consciousness is not
only poorly understood, but that we “don’t have a clue” how it is produced in
the brain.
But there has been informed
speculation on the subject.
Terrence
Deacon’s fascinating book
Incomplete
Nature – How Mind Emerged from Matter (2012) goes into great detail
regarding how organic substances may have assembled themselves into replicating
organized cells encapsulating recursive information processes that enhanced
their survival.
Could it be that these
recursive processes at some point developed the ability to invoke quantum
processes, getting a step ahead of determinism and thus stealing a march on
more limited organisms?
Could it be that
there are degrees of free will, and degrees of consciousness?
We don’t know, and that’s just the
point.
We can’t say free will is dead,
and it’s valid territory for speculation.
I think Harari is overstating the case with regard to the
forces lining up to worship a data god, with a priesthood that will use
algorithms to make everyone redundant except the controlling elite. There are real dangers of something like this
happening, and Harari is right to warn of the trend, which is real. We need to explore the social power of
algorithms and other ways the trend can shake out, good and bad. But the trend
is not as simple and clear cut as he makes it seem, and it doesn’t amount to a
religion.
What’s most disappointing about Homo Deus is, because of Harari’s
focus on proving that Dataism and its worship of soulless algorithms is the
great threat today, he doesn’t consider the possibility of consciousness or
free will arising in artificial intelligence, as it has in the brain. We really
don’t know whether this can happen, and whether, if it does, it might produce a
different kind of consciousness than we know.
Homo Deus is a worthwhile and rewarding book to read, and
Harari’s warning of a potential dystopia of a small elite armed with powerful
algorithms is valid. But he seems to
have closed off some other possibilities prematurely, and some of them may be
just as dangerous, and some may be beautiful and exciting.
