The big technology news of the month was driverless cars being piloted by Uber in Pittsburgh. The key concerns were about how safe they were, whether they could be trusted to not ram into people and how they negotiated traffic jams. ‘Do we need driverless cars?’ is a question of diminishing interest just as ‘Do we need computers?’ was in the 1970s, or circa 2016, ‘Do we need to shop online?’
A world where driverless cars are inevitable and algorithms have rapidly mutated to become omniscient, is the one that Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, analyses in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow . The title’s similarity to his 2014 best-seller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind apart, Deus is a standalone work.
Apart from the traditional science-fiction fare of humanity unrecognisably altered by technology, there’s also a vibrant community of academicians who’ve thought hard and are organising conferences and scholarship around how humans must cope with sentient machines. Ray Kurzweil, futurist, inventor and a senior analyst at Google, has argued that machines with ‘human-level intelligence’ will be real by 2029. Nick Bostrom, a professor at Oxford, has written extensively of how we may all actually be living in a giant computer simulation.
Harari makes the case that, for the first time, humans are faced with evidence that ‘intelligence’ may be visibly diverging from consciousness. Inorganic elements don’t necessarily need to first become conscious entities like humans and then super-intelligent. He cites recent evidence from software such as AlphaGo that taught itself to play the board game Go by merely observing thousands of games rather than being explicitly programmed to figure out winning strategies. AlphaGo is now so proficient that it defeated the reigning human champion earlier this year. He also cites an algorithm called VITAL that has been appointed to the board of Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong venture capital firm. The software makes investment recommendations by analysing huge datasets and like the other five human members of the board, gets to vote on investment decisions of the firm. One of VITAL’s ‘vices,’ it emerges, is investing in other companies that grant more authority to algorithms.
For a book that is concerned with the future of humans, almost three-fourths is dedicated to the social history of our species: Why do we consider ourselves superior to other forms of life? Are there any traits that distinguish us from mammals and other beings? Unlike primates and most other forms of life, people can group with those unrelated to them and trust in ephemeral, abstract ideals. How else do we explain Crusaders abandoning hearth and family towards certain death in a mission to vanquish the ‘infidel’ or 20th-century denizens ready to launch nuclear weapons — and risk annihilation — in the pursuit of ideals such as Christianity or communism? However meaningful these causes may have been to participants mere decades ago, they appear meaningless in hindsight and it’s quite plausible that a century from now, a belief in ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ will appear as quaint to our descendants, Harari argues.
In the previous three centuries, concomitant with scientific and technological advancement was also the rise of humanism: the belief that our lives derive meaning and purpose, not in the pursuit of a God or an after-life but from seeking and achieving heaven on earth and within our lifetime. Nothing could be more validating to an individual’s conscience than self-derived meaning. Enabling people to decide what was right for them was the purpose of larger structures such as government, religion and community relationships. Harari adduces evidence to show that such an ideology sets the soil for a new kind of conflict within the brain: between what is called the ‘narrating self’ and the ‘experiencing self.’
The former “... takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns… it doesn’t matter that the plot is full of holes,” says Harari. The self — the entity — that people recognise as their core is a fictitious construct. Several religious movements in the past and neuroscientists today may use different terms to argue and proffer different kinds of evidence from the life-sciences to argue that the ‘self is an illusion.’ However, when we begin to increasingly trust external devices — Fitbit bands to tell us the optimal amount of exercise for the day, MoneyView to warn us of the mismatch between our monthly savings and expenditure — then it will be increasingly hard for the narrating self to keep up with data-backed oracular advice that our algorithms compute for us. Harari’s work is thus an unsettling meditation on the future. He’s opened a portal for us to contemplate on what kind of relationships we are forming with our data-crunching machines and whether ‘right’ must be determined by empirical evidence or good old ‘gut instinct.’ It does appear that Harari discusses a world that has solved hunger and religious fanaticism — facts that are at odds with our reality — but the future, as history tells us, sets in when we are least aware of it.
jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in
