Book Review – Sapiens (The End of the Human Race as Technological Evolution Brings)

This book explores the possibility that rapid advances in science and technology will transform humanity, and that we will no longer be sapiens. Author Yuval Noah Harari warns that advances in biotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence could lead to the end of the human race.

 

How long will we, humans, live? Death is always around the corner as we live our lives. We can die for a variety of reasons, including tripping over our own feet, driving a car wrong, or getting cancer. But what about risks that are global, rather than personal? Solar flares, meteorite strikes, natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, rising sea levels due to global warming, world wars due to oil shortages, nuclear bombs, and many others come to mind. Any one of these could cause the sudden end of the human species, which is why movies often depict the end of the human race. This book argues that the end of the species, Homo sapiens, will come for reasons you might not have thought of, and for reasons other than the ones I’ve just listed.
The author, Yuval Noah Harari, says that our demise is not due to external dangers, but to our own overdevelopment. There was no intelligent designer in the past (depending on which theory you believe in, but I’m writing from the theory of natural selection, or Darwin’s theory of evolution). An intelligent designer literally means that some intelligent being calculated and designed the ecosystem, which is a common phrase in creationism. The absence of an intelligent designer means that the reason giraffes got longer necks is because longer-necked giraffes were easier to forage for food, so only increasingly longer-necked giraffes survived, not because some smart giraffe thought, “Hey, a longer neck will give me an advantage in survival, so I’m going to lengthen my neck.” For billions of years, intelligent design wasn’t possible because no intelligent life existed, but that’s changing. Humans are becoming intelligent designers, and if they wanted to, they could make mice that fluoresce and rabbits that glow, and that’s a clear product of intelligent design. The reason I bring this up is because one of the three directions that the authors talk about for the demise of Homo sapiens is related to biotechnology: if we evolve, and our physiology, our immune system, our longevity, our intellectual and emotional capacities, and our genes continue to evolve, we may not go extinct as a species, but it’s very likely that we will become something that is no longer Homo sapiens.
The second direction the authors suggest is similar. It is the use of robotics instead of biotechnology: cyborgs. The authors argue that we are already teetering on the edge of becoming true cyborgs because we are using tools to enhance our abilities, but once we cross the line, we will have inorganic properties that will change our abilities, desires, personality, and identity. Currently, research is being done to connect our brains directly to computers. What if our brains went on the internet and everyone could download our brain memories and apply them to themselves – if you want to eat a delicious meal, you can download the memories of eating an expensive meal, if you want to play the piano well, you can download the brain information of someone who plays the piano well, and if you want to do anything, you can do it all with a simple download. What will be the boundaries between people and data, and what will be the boundaries between yourself and others when this happens?
The third is the creation of completely inanimate beings. Examples include computer programs and computer viruses that evolve independently. If you create an artificial intelligence program, like AlphaGo, which has been in the news recently, and it’s designed to evolve, it will evolve on its own. The same is true of viruses. The prototype is designed by a programmer, but if computerized mutations occur due to mistakes or errors in the replication process, new viruses will fill the data space. Are they living things? If you don’t think they are, if you put your brain on a USB and ran that USB through a laptop, would the laptop have sapiens thoughts? If so, does the laptop become you, or is it something new? None of these things are realized right now, but we’re approaching a point where we’re going to have to redefine personhood. Will homo sapiens continue to be homo sapiens when mixed in with these beings?
The demise of homo sapiens that I talk about in the book is an internal demise, not the kind of demise that we usually think of, which is that we think of homo sapiens as being destroyed when it’s no longer homo sapiens, but as science advances, it’s going to be something that’s unimaginable right now, where we’re no longer homo sapiens because we’ve gone too far.