On the surface, Harari’s three demands are quite reasonable. Because artificial intelligence systems gain their power through data extraction-from Silicon Valley to China-that concentration of power must be controlled. Instead of trying to stop these silicon gods from emerging under the direction of predetermined bio-machines (aka, human beings), Harari only offers ways to mitigate the damage. Instead, they yammered on as if the future is in our hands.
#YUVAL NOAH HARARI RELIGION FREE#
Watching the ever-credulous Anderson Cooper nod along with Harari on 60 Minutes, pretending to have read his books carefully, one wonders why Cooper never confronted Harari about the uncomfortable topic of free will. It’s as if rare earth minerals are emerging from the bedrock of their own accord and shaping themselves into silicon gods before our eyes. In his view, the development of bionics, neuro-enhancing technology, and artificial superintelligence are simply forces of Nature. It’s no wonder, then, that Harari doesn’t take seriously the notion that our decisions, as average citizens, might avert a techno-dystopia.
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… The sacred word ‘freedom’ turns out to be, just like ‘soul,’ a hollow term empty of any discernible meaning.” “The electrochemical brain processes that result in murder are either deterministic or random or a combination of both-but they are never free. It also means no person is responsible for the nightmarish futures we may create: Philosophically and morally, that means we’re not capable of making real choices-we’re just along for the ride. … Over the last century, as scientists opened up the Sapiens black box, they discovered there neither soul, nor free will, nor ‘self’-but only genes, hormones, and neurons that obey the same physical and chemical laws governing the rest of reality.” “The contradiction between free will and contemporary science is the elephant in the laboratory, whom many prefer not to see as they peer into their microscopes and fMRI scanners. What we perceive as choice is mere epiphenomena produced by subconscious decision-making processes in our brains. In his 2017 best-seller Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harari argues that human beings have no free will. “To hack a human being is to get to know that person better than they know themselves-and based on that, to increasingly manipulate you.”įor whatever reason, the historian omitted the darkest element of his futuristic vision. That is, until the rise of the machines.Īs the American public listened in horror, Harari repeated the core religious principle behind what he’s long called “Dataism”: By synthesizing all of this information, corporations and governments will be able to predict our behavior precisely-and direct our souls at will. Our tastes, our habits, even our innermost thoughts are siphoned up through apps and algorithms, creating detailed dossiers and maps of our social networks.Īs the future bears down on us, genetic sequencing and biometric sensors are extending that surveillance to our biological states. Our personal data is being mined relentlessly in order to train these machine learning systems. But computers, or artificial intelligence, they don’t have consciousness, they just have intelligence.”īecause of AI’s superior problem-solving abilities, Harari predicts, this soulless alien intelligence could soon rule over all of us-cyborgs included. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things, like pain and pleasure and love and hate. “Maybe the biggest thing we are facing is really a kind of evolutionary divergence. Simultaneously, tech innovators are on their way to creating artificial intelligence systems that will surpass human reason. But because bionics aren’t cheap, this could be a hereditary fork in the road, where GMO cyborgs become an elite caste that rules over flesh-and-blood holdovers.
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Human beings are rapidly gaining the ability to alter their bodies and brains through technology, he said, through gene-editing, designer babies, and neuroenhancement devices. In his 60 Minutessegment last night, the Hebrew University professor scared America half to death with his dire predictions.
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The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wants you to be terrified of the future.