Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow

Kongbrailatpam Rajeshwar Sharma *

Since May this year, Manipur has been witnessing an unprecedented scale of violence that threatens the unity and the territorial integrity of the State. It is so distressing that one cannot help but ask why it happened. In order to answer this question, one has to know more about the past than the immediate causes of the present imbroglio.

The search for relevant history books and articles that might put it in the right perspective began with the browsing on the Internet where I came across Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow among hundreds of books Google had suggested. As soon as I saw it, a freak of an idea crossed my mind that prompted me to write a review of it.

Fortunately I have a copy of Homo Deus which is one of the million copies that had been sold all over the world. Moreover Yuval Noah Harari happens to be the author whose books 'have become international phenomenon.' History is more than a study of what happened in the past. It is also a study of the present trends in science and technology that enables the people to see what the shapes of things could be in the next twenty or thirty years.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow is a crystal ball to future but it is not a book of prophecies. It is a critical study of the achievements in the fields of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Biotechnology and their impacts on Governments, the lives of the people and their societies. As for instance, self-driving cars, which Google and Tesla have developed, could reduce the number of road accidents which are due to human carelessness.

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari writes, 'give computer algorithms a monopoly over traffic, we can then connect all vehicles to a single network, thereby rendering car accidents far less likely.' And of course corruptions too could be reduced if algorithms were given a chance to run the Government machinery. Not only is Homo Deus a study of the impact of AI and Biotechnology in the future but it also predicts the rise of 'Homo Deus – a much superior human model'.

As a sequel to his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow was written by Yuval Noah Harari and it was first published by Vintage in 2017. Prior to that, it was first published with the title The History of Tomorrow in Hebrew in 2015.

Yuval Noah Harari, who has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, is a Professor of history and teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. The black paperback edition is printed Homo Deus in red with an impression of an electronic circuit in the shape and size of a thumb just above the title. What is most apprehensive is the prediction of the emergence of 'The Useless Class' as the result of advancements in the fields of AI, Biotechnology and Machine learning.

The time is not far away when banks, hospitals, factories, shopping malls and even educational institutes will be run and managed by intelligent robots thereby rendering thousands jobless. Teachers and doctors might soon be replaced by 'highly intelligent algorithms' that can learn and perform better than human teachers or human doctors do. With AI or Artificial Intelligence, robots have outperformed humans.

In 2011, IBM's famous 'artificial intelligence system' named Watson won 'Jeopardy!' a television game show beating its two former human champions. In 2015 Google's DeepMind, a self learning robot, learned by itself how to play 'forty-nine classic Atari games.'

AlphaGo, a software developed by Google, taught itself how to play Go, a Chinese board game which is considered to be more complex than chess. Twenty years after Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue, in March 2016 AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go champion.

It trounced Lee 4-1 by employing 'unorthodox moves' that stunned the experts. Not only do computer algorithms become champions in strategic board games, but they also emerge as champions in ball games. With its 'algorithmic team', Oakland Athletics 'became the first team in American League history ever to win twenty consecutive games.'

Moreover Watson is being groomed to diagnose diseases. It is believed that an AI robot like Watson has more potential advantages over human doctors. An artificial intelligence system can store and update information about every known illness and medicine in its databanks. Unlike human doctors, Watson and its ilk could be available throughout the day to help you.

A computer algorithm was found in a recent experiment to be able to diagnose correctly 90 per cent of the lung cancer cases presented to it while human doctors could diagnose successfully only 50 per cent of the cases. More often than not, CT scans can detect tumours that human doctors have failed to detect.

Although there are technical problems that prevent computer algorithms from displacing human doctors, there is the possibility of solving them in the near future. In twenty or thirty years from now, AI doctors might soon be a preferred choice of the people. Yuval writes, 'In fact, as time goes by it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms.'

EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), a computer program written by David Cope, could imitate the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, the German composer and musician. David Cope is a Professor of musicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. At a music festival in Santa Cruz, he is said to have arranged for a performance of 'a few select chorales' created by EMI rather than Bach.

Some members of the audience praised the performance, for 'the music had touched their innermost being' but they were not aware of whose music it was. At another occasion, three professional pianists were made to play, one after the other, three pieces of music created by Bach, EMI and Professor Steve Larson from the University of Oregon. The result was that 'The audience thought that EMI's piece was genuine Bach, that Bach's piece was composed by Larsen, and that Larsen's piece was composed by a computer.'

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow not only takes you to a world where computer programs reign supreme but it also makes its readers think what kind of skills or knowledge will be good for their children to survive in an environment where few jobs are left for humans.

Carl Benedict Frey and Michael A Osborne, two research fellows from the University of Oxford, published in 2013 "The Future of Employment" in which they made a survey of several professions which are likely to be taken over by 'computer algorithms within the next twenty years.'

According to them forty seven percent of jobs in the United States are at 'high risk' of being taken over. Expressing his apprehension, Yuval Noah Harari writes, 'As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality.'