Yuval Noah Harari’s definition of extinction and how scientific and technological advances could change the concept of the human species

Yuval Noah Harari argues that scientific and technological advances could lead to the extinction of the human species. He believes that the concept of biological species is inadequate for scientific and technological advances and proposes a new concept of species centered on the mental component of humanity.

 

In the movie The Matrix (1999), the human race of the future is cultivated like a commercial crop by machines and artificial intelligence. As soon as they are born, they are placed in small tanks, fed directly by machines, and their brain cells are implanted with a virtual reality program called The Matrix. However, future humanity is completely unaware of this disastrous external situation and lives in the virtual reality created by The Matrix, leading the same lifestyle as humanity in 1999, the year of the movie’s release. Can we say that the humanity of the future is a different species from Homo sapiens, the species of the present?
Since the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, science and technology have been advancing exponentially. Many commentators and futurists are concerned about this development. They believe that the advancement of science and technology could lead to the extinction of the living human race, just like in the movie The Matrix. The argument of Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, is no different. He argues that advances in applied science and technology, such as biotechnology and cyborg engineering, could lead to the “extinction” of the living human race.
Yuval Noah Harari uses two definitions of “extinction” in Homo sapiens. In the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), biotechnology is utilized to develop a new drug, but the drug’s deadly side effects cause many people to die. This is how science and technology can have unintended consequences. The first definition of extinction is when the population shrinks so much that it no longer maintains the minimum number of individuals needed to form a species.
The second definition of extinction, used by Eugenie Noah Harari, is similar to eugenics. This is because eugenics aims to increase the number of people with superior traits through genetic improvement, and like eugenics, the second definition of extinction assumes the strengthening of the human race. Eugene Noah Harari used the second definition of extinction to mean the enhancement of the human race through scientific and technological advances, resulting in a different species from Homo sapiens. However, unlike eugenics, he cites not only the genetic improvement of human beings through the development of biotechnology, but also the replacement of human bodies with mechanical parts through the use of cyborg engineering as examples of enhancement.
I believe that the first definition of “extinction” used by Yuval Noah Harari is force majeure, because I believe that science and technology will develop even faster in the future. In other words, with the rapid development of science and technology, various human mistakes may occur, and the accumulation of these mistakes may lead to a catastrophic problem that threatens the very existence of humanity. And humanity will not have enough time to properly deal with this catastrophic problem and, just like the movie Planet of the Apes, the population will rapidly decline and the species will not survive.
I want to focus more on the second definition of extinction. This is because, when using the second definition of extinction, Yuval Noah Harari was not thinking about the concept of species.
Noah Harari based his definition of extinction on the concept of biological species, which is widely used in the modern scientific community. This concept of biological species was advocated by Ernst Mayr, an evolutionary biologist active in the 20th century. According to Mayr’s book Phylogeny and the Origin of Species, a biological species is a natural group of organisms that are capable of practical or functional interbreeding and must be reproductively isolated from other groups. Ernst Meyer’s argument was revolutionary in its time and has been widely accepted to this day, so it may seem like a common sense move for Yuval Noah Harari to base his book on this concept of species. However, I believe that this is wrong, because I believe that the concept of species as it applies to humanity today is conceptually insufficient in comparison to the rapidly advancing science and technology.
Before I get into the specifics of my argument, it’s important to note that concepts created by humans are subject to change over time. Humanity has a high level of intellectual capacity that is unparalleled by other life forms on Earth. This intellectual capacity has allowed us to build civilizations, explore nature, and accumulate knowledge. However, we know from history that this knowledge and information is not absolute. For example, in medieval Europe, it was believed that mankind was created by an absolute god and that the sun revolved around the earth. To them, this information was absolute truth. However, few modern people accept the same absolutes as the medievalists. We accept as fact that humanity has come a long way in its evolutionary development, and that the universe is not as simple as the medievalists believed.
Like our worldview, the concept of species has changed. For example, Aristoteles, the ancient Greek philosopher and father of biology, built on his mentor Plato’s theory of the Ideas and argued that species are the Ideas that make up living things, and that individuals are the materialization of these Ideas into concrete entities. In the modern era, the concept of species has been rapidly transformed by biologists such as Linnaeus and Lamarck, culminating in the aforementioned Meyer’s concept of species.
It has been less than a century since the application of biology to science and technology, such as the biotechnology and cyborg engineering mentioned by Yuval Noah Harari, was born and developed. Ernst Meyer’s concept of biological species was developed in the 20th century and could not have anticipated these advances in science and technology, meaning that our current concept of species does not fully reflect the rapid advances in science and technology.
An example of this is the movie The Matrix. In The Matrix, humans don’t live in a normal ecosystem, but are grown by machines. A future humanity in this situation cannot be represented as a biological species. However, common sense would lead us to expect that humanity will form a species as a living organism.
I believe that the mental component is suitable to fill the gap that exists between the modern concept of species and science and technology. In other words, unlike biology, which has been concerned only with the physical components of life, the future concept of species should be defined around the mental and intellectual components. In Homo sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari cites the development of cyborg engineering as one of the scenarios for the extinction of the human race. With the development of cyborg engineering and related disciplines, humanity will soon be able to transcend its current biological body, and only the mental component will remain. These mental elements will be stored in computers or other media that will exist in the future. The current concept of species would view this as the extinction of the human race and would be concerned. However, if we include mental and intellectual components in our concept of species, we can think about it in a different way. If future humans, regardless of their physical structure, are similar to current humans in terms of their mental makeup, then future humans and current humans can be considered the same species.
This change in the concept of species would allow humanity to benefit from science and technology from a new perspective. This is because I believe that the current concept of species is limiting the progress of science and technology, preventing innovative technologies from being realized. For example, stem cell technology is a revolutionary technology that has the potential to extend life and improve quality of life. However, stem cell research requires the use of women’s eggs and fertilized eggs, which some people have raised ethical concerns about. They argue that the fertilized eggs used in research have the potential to become life, and that using them for research violates the dignity of life. If the concept of species is more focused on the mental and intellectual components, we can have a different perspective on fertilized eggs, which means that ethical issues will no longer hold back scientific and technological progress. This concept of species would make humanity freer and more convenient.