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Monday, October 15, 2018

Homo Deus

As a historian, Harari should have known better than most people (actually I am sure he does, but he is being disingenuous because he has an axe to grind) that people have been predicting that the doom of humankind is near for several thousand years, each time more sure of themselves than the last, but that has not happened, not due to floods and earthquakes and world wars and nuclear weapons, not due to God’s wrath or Mary Shelley’s 200-year old warning (Frankenstein’s monster), not due to rapidly dwindling natural resources (despite the Club of Rome’s very gloomy prognosis which is soon going to be half a century old). Indeed, mankind has handled and emerged from every crisis stronger and better off on the whole. So his basic threat – that by 2030 or ’40 most traditional professions, including doctors and teachers, will be obsolete thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence, and within a hundred years at most humankind as we know will cease to exist, thanks to the rise of autonomous non-conscious intelligences which will be vastly superior to us (what he calls the Internet of All Things) – really need not be taken very seriously. This is what I decided after closely reading and mulling over an otherwise quite readable and (at one level, at least) deeply disturbing book. Robots will do to us what we have done to weaker animals, he writes almost gleefully, and it made me feel only that like many self-righteous vegans/vegetarians, he hates the majority of mankind because it still insists on eating meat and fish. Loving animals and hating humans – what kind of human does that make you, even though pigs and rats and roaches might love you for it?

He doesn’t start off by sounding so gloomy, of course – probably because his editor warned him that nobody would buy his book otherwise. He says that thanks to our multiplicity of special skills, we humans have within a few thousand years nearly conquered our greatest scourges, to wit famine, pestilence and war – nothing very original about that realization, though many like me are glad that it has happened – and we are on the verge of the grandest epoch in history, when  we can reach out for immortality coupled with bliss, and thus become as gods: hence the title. I turn up my eyebrows very high at this, because, and Harari himself acknowledges this quietly, right now even old age is a curse to the vast majority of people who live that long, and scientists would be (I hope they are) far better occupied in just learning how to keep people from becoming decrepit in their 80s and 90s; in any case, I don’t think immortality is either desireable or technically achieveable any time soon; and as for bliss, the vast majority of people neither know nor can agree upon what makes and keeps them happy for any length of time, so achieving bliss, however defined, without enormously changing our basic values and developing our spiritual strength would be well-nigh a pipe dream. I have written enough about this elsewhere, even if tangentially, so I shall desist for now after just suggesting that the reader look up Tennyson’s poem Tithonus.

Of course, Harari admits that our folly (allowing obesity through overeating and lack of exercise to kill off too many of us early, for example) and imminent dangers such as those born out of rapidly growing economic inequality, which, without sane, concerted global social re-engineering might soon become intolerable enough to create an explosive situation, combined with catastrophic environmental degradation stemming out of climate change, might seriously threaten even known levels of peace and prosperity soon, and need immediate attention and corrective action. Again, nothing very original here, though it is indeed sad and worrisome that too little is being done yet.

But then Harari goes off in another, wild direction, trying to terrify his readers with dire predictions that AI is developing so fast that very soon, the robots are going to take over. I shall skip over the several hundred pages that he has written about this, because I have been reading science fiction and watching sci-fi movies from the days of The Time Machine to 2001 and the Matrix series and beyond, and I am now too old to take these things seriously: Harari should have grown up too. Indeed, if you look up my old blogpost titled How my world has changed, you will find that I am actually quite disappointed that most things that the best scientists confidently predicted in 1980 were sure to happen within 25 years haven’t happened, while on the other hand a lot of things happened which virtually nobody anticipated (Keynes the great economist wrote that by the time my generation grew up the economic problem would have been solved once and for all, and mankind would at last be able to turn its full attention to things that it was really created to think about, to wit matters of the spirit, such as love and justice and art; but today billions of people are having to work harder and longer like drudges than ever before just to make a living well into old age) – but the point is, while the trajectories of individual lives always vary too greatly to be predictable (which is why people like me have to fall back upon ideas like Providence and karma to understand what is happening to us), humanity as a whole has coped pretty well enough, and barring the poorest billion, are better off and safer than ever before.

I don’t take this ‘prediction’ (or, as Harari says almost towards the end of the book, possibility) seriously for numerous reasons. Firstly, Tim Berners Lee is already building Solid to protect data privacy, so Google, or some latter-day clone of it, will not be able to watch us like Big Brother and learn more about us than we ourselves do for much longer. Second, contrary to all dire predictions from two decades ago, more people are writing more good books and more people are reading them than ever before, both in print and on electronic readers; all those writers and readers do not seem to be seriously frightened that they will become outdated within a decade or two: ask J.K. Rowling or Amitav Ghosh. Third, the techno-billionaires are sending their kids to virtually gizmo-free schools and strictly limiting their screen time; they know what is good for their children’s future, and very soon millions of people are going to learn the same (I just heard of a very successful coaching class in Mumbai run by father and sons who openly say that they do not believe in ‘smart classes’: like me, they find chalk, blackboard, brain and speech quite enough, thank you very much). Fourth, despite all the hoopla about going all-out digital in monetary transactions, most POS machines in millions of small shops all around India are gathering dust unused, and cash shows no signs of ‘vanishing’ by 2021 anywhere in the world, as some geek predicted in 2016. Fifth, despite all the talk about robots taking over, I don’t think that anywhere except Japan have robots become visible in households or offices, and when it comes to human teachers being replaced soon, my own experience and that of vast organisations like FIIT-JEE tell a very different story still. Fifth, statements like ‘for the first time in history our schools have no idea what to teach’ make the whole book begin to sound silly, because what is far closer to the truth is that millions of schools around the world are happily stuck with almost-ancient curricula which could greatly benefit from some serious updating. Sixthly, I really do think that environmental disaster triggered by drastic climate change is a far more immediate and serious concern. Seventhly, despite all the talk of vanishing jobs, there are lots of places I see every day, my banks, for example, or the hospitals or the police force, where there is an acute shortage of competent staff, and no, robots powered by AI are not showing signs of rapidly filling up those spaces. I could write eighthly, ninethly, tenthly, but I already think I have been taking Harari far more seriously than he deserves.

What is really galling about the book is that Harari says so confidently till almost the end that scientists (who he believes have the last word on everything) are all agreed at last that all organisms are nothing but algorithms, and life is nothing but data processing, and we humans, though far better at that than all other life forms seen so far (I don’t know – bacteria and ants might strongly disagree, and they rather than robots might eventually inherit the earth!), are sure to be superseded soon by superior intelligences which were originally developed by ourselves, to wit, computer programs.  I shall not deign to waste time, energy and words refuting this puerile absurdity because I have seen and read and thought too much of this sort of stuff already. Far too many ‘wise’ men for too long have claimed to have discovered once and for all, many with far more messianic confidence, that man is ‘nothing but-’, life is nothing but-, history is nothing but this or that simple idea. Man is nothing but a reproducing machine, for example, history is nothing but the story of endless (and very boring-) class struggles. The individual is nothing but an insignificant, ineffectual and evanescent blip in the cosmos. You get the idea. Yeah, sure: if you know nothing, respect nothing, believe nothing, create nothing. You are simply stupid, or sick. A team of monkeys on a set of typewriters, given sufficient time, will come out with all the plays of Shakespeare, certainly. The Buddha didn’t matter, nor Newton, nor Michelangelo or Mozart or Gandhi or Tagore. Sure, Richard Dawkins doesn’t matter, and Harari doesn’t either. Let’s leave it at that.

He has the decency (or sanity) to say nearly at the end of the book that perhaps he and his ilk have got it all wrong, and perhaps the rest of the story of Man will be different after all. My point is (and I have told hundreds of people to read the notes at the end of another such utterly sensational but pointless book, The Selfish Gene, which has mercifully been all but forgotten now, to find out how the author himself has virtually cancelled out all the tall claims he has made throughout the book with a long litany of ifs and buts and thoughs and howevers in the Index), why write such a book at all, then? He also takes some pains to insist that he has not tried to make prophecies, but only give indications and warnings about the shape of things to come. Which would always be welcome from any informed thinker around the globe, provided they didn’t make their books sound like The Day After Tomorrow. Protesting too much only weakens your case, whatever you are trying to do. Otherwise I should have said I am glad that he has written a warning like this. Mankind keeps writing and rewriting its own history because it keeps heeding warnings like this. Which is precisely why it is impossible to predict the twists and turns that history is going to take. I can guarantee that the world of 2030 will be far from ‘unrecognizable’. As for what it is going to be like a hundred years later, Harari knows as little as I do. And anyway, I don’t care what it is going to be like by the time my great-granddaughter is an old woman. Her generation can take care of itself.

Didn’t I like anything about Harari’s book? Of course I did. The very best thing that he has said is that mankind lives on ‘stories’ it creates for itself. Religions, nations, corporations, money, these are at bottom only stories we have convinced ourselves to believe in. When some stories don’t work any more, we start doubting them, then rejecting them, then replacing them. I am betting that that will go on indefinitely. Alas, even this is not really an original thought – as Muriel Rukeyser wrote, ‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms’.

Here are one or two other reviews of the book you might be interested in reading: this and this and this.

[Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Youval Noah Harari, Penguin/Vintage 2017, ISBN 9781784703936, pp. 499, Rs. 499]

12 comments:

Joydeep said...

Hello Sir,

As someone who has a bit of knowledge in the world of computer science, I can say that Tim Berners Lee's 'Solid' project may not be the answer to the problem of data privacy anytime soon. Firstly, the project is more of an abstract idea at this point rather than a concrete platform. I took a look at the code repository for this project and it is basically non-existent. Secondly, even if this materializes to a working platform in future, I am skeptical of giant corporations such as Facebook, Google and Twitter to host their applications on a platform which has been specifically designed to weaken their revenue stream. It seems like we have created these Frankenstein monsters where we want to use their services for free but do not want them to profile users and invade our privacy. Since targeted advertisement based on profiling subscribers is their primary business model, I am not sure how this dichotomy can be resolved. Finally, these technology giants now exercise too much control and influence in a way such that coercing them to take into consideration the end users' interests is getting impossible even for the government: remember how Mark Zuckerberg got off with only a mild rap on his knuckles for the hugely upsetting Cambridge Analytica deal?

Also, while you see an acute shortage of competent staff at banks and hospitals, the important thing to note is that these positions are not getting filled with human resources for a long period of time. This is not due to some kind of insidious move by our government to push AI to replace human workforce, but simply due to the fact that the government is always looking for ways to delegate hiring people for as long as they can without causing a serious disruption of services, inconvenience of common public be damned. When AI eventually gets to the point where it can effectively replace human beings (as it surely will for automated tasks very soon), it will have a significant degradation on the human employability factor. In my eight years of staying abroad, I have seen fast food joints replacing human workers with automated kiosks, and banks have considerably reduced their workforce in a similar manner.

I agree that climate change is a far more concerning issue that requires immediate attention and priority, but some of the issues that I mentioned bothers me deeply as well.

Thanks,
Joydeep

Suvro Chatterjee said...

Dear Joydeep,

Thank you for commenting. I wish you'd do so a little more often! And I am sorry to be a little late in responding.

Harari's book, as I have indicated in the review, affected me very seriously, almost plunging me into depression, and that is why I made a very strong mental effort to find arguments against the things he has suggested. In many ways, of course, I am doubtful myself still - I certainly do not believe that this or that particular project, such as Solid, is going to stop the tech-juggernaut from overwhelming us sooner rather than later - but it is wiser to be optimistic, don't you think? Especially when Harari himself has admitted he is only talking about possibilities, not certainties, and when all history is a record of how mankind has always prevailed, and when I can see that a lot of people, from the likes of you and me to people far more in the know, and far more influential, are already sitting up, taking notice, being alarmed, and calling for changes.

But, to repeat, I am still filled with a lot of disquiet, just as you are. Which is why I keep urging the new generation to take heed of all the dire warnings that the best sci-fi writers of the 20th century have left behind, and take remedial measures, before it is too late.

Would some other informed readers like to join the discussion?

Sir

Joydeep said...

Thank you for your reply, Sir.

As you mentioned, all of history bears testimony to mankind's extraordinary survival skills in myriad ways, so there is certainly a good chance that issues like data privacy will be taken care of before they morph into a Big Brother type situation. I only hope it does not take too long before we understand that this needs to be done, and that it does not leave behind too much of an aftermath. You'd think that decades of formal education and better quality of life have made our generation smarter and more enlightened, but alas, that does not seem to be the case, at least not from what I see all around myself. I am genuinely sorry to be cynical and I apologize if this adds, in any tiny way, to the feeling of despair in addition to what Harari has already portrayed in his book.

You have rightly pointed out that some very influential and knowledgeable people have taken notice and started to turn the tide. Bernie Sanders talks about the benefits of socialism and yet manages to get overwhelming support from a lot of US citizens, something unthinkable a few years ago. Largely due to his initiative, Jeff Bezos has given in and agreed to raise the minimum hourly wage of his employees, so more power to Sanders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, won the democratic primary a few months ago: again, a truly remarkable achievement considering how averse the average Americans are to anything even remotely associated with socialism. Even though I acknowledge such people and admire what they are trying to do, I still think it is not enough and have my reservations about their overall impact in the long run. Sanders is too old, for example, and Ocasio-Cortez, although she means well, is too naïve in my opinion. Also, when I shift my focus from North America to India, I fail to see similar people in the public eye. May be it is my inherent negativity that blinds me to do so, but I will like to hear more about this from you. Do you think there are some prominent, influential and knowledgeable people in India who can genuinely bring around much needed changes to address some of the concerns Harari has mentioned in his book?

My comment is getting lengthy at this point, so I will stop here. I will be happy to reply and discuss more on this topic later.

Thanks,
Joydeep

Rajdeep said...

Very interesting discussion Sir, between Joydeep and you. I haven't read Homo Deus yet although I read Sapiens. I agree that the parts about money and stories were very absorbing indeed. The stories we tell each other are vital. If you remember, you sounded skeptical when I sent you the TED talk by Hans Rosling about the state of the world today. Your comment led me to read other books that tell a very different story about the world. The Billionaire Raj by James Crabtree that talks about the income inequality in India, and more recently, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquests to Free Markets, a riveting account of global inequality by Jason Hickel who is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Here's a short article by him.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-develop-rich-countries

Lant Pritchett, the Harvard economist, has shown how the poverty line is grossly outdated. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/extreme-poverty-too-extreme

Even at five dollars, says Hickel, global poverty has increased, and more than 60% i.e. more than 4 billion are poor. Poverty has been reduced mainly in China, and if one does not count China, then it has increased all the more. He goes on to show how our current economic model leads to environmental disaster and unless we change the system, nothing really will change. No less a person than Kate Raworth, the Oxford economist who wrote Doughnut Economics has recommended Hickel's book.

So, the story that even the UN and WB are painting is not true and technology will not solve the problem. As you have pointed out several times before, technology cannot bring about good governance or leadership. Siva Vaidhyanathan has already written about the ways in which facebook, in its present form, has harmed democracy. And David Pilling, in his book, The Growth Delusion, has shown how high growth will not solve our problems. Your disquiet is something genuine that we should all share. Rather, it is absurd that many people think that the party will go on forever.

By the way, robots have not penetrated the ordinary Japanese homes. It's a myth. It is true that robots are very developed in Japan and are extensively used in factories etc. And, I don't think the ordinary people are anywhere close to being able to afford robots that will take care of them when they are old. That is a pipe dream. We are just living on hope that it will happen, probably because we do not want to accept a more dire fate.

Subhasis said...

Dear Sir,

I have been thinking about your blog post since you uploaded it, and realize that a few things about this book and society, in general, seem to be related to one another. So here is my long-winded take on things, despite having not read the book.

Firstly, gloom and doom seem to sell better than happy and nice. This has always been a part of western publishing history. Society taking a dim view of itself seems to be a widely popular thing in present times. It seems like talking about ‘the end of times’ and things like that have become a pervasive part of the current zeitgeist. I do not know if it is because of the nature of market economy or the current leader of the free world who is loud and boisterous and keeps infecting the world with his continuous and childish end-is-nigh commentary.
Secondly, about the whole AI thing. Here is my two-pence. As a scientist myself, I view the entire area of AI, Deep-Learning, String Theory, Internet of All Things or Neural Networks, as little more than a bunch of fancy marketing words. There has been no invention or discovery in the last three decades that merits its own place in the whole realm of scientific discovery. Technology is and always has been capitalism driven and all of the above-mentioned things are just a bunch of unproven, untested hypotheses that make for fancy reading material and create jobs (What kind of jobs they are, is yet another question) but in reality is only designed to lead the average consumer to buy the next product from Cupertino or Seoul.
One example off the top of my head–Bixby(Samsung) has image recognition software (WOW !!) to tell you that a cell phone is being waved at a bowl of milk and then gives you market information, trends and all kinds of places you can buy milk.
Almost all of it is redundant information, but when these product executives announce these things (throwing in some buzzwords from the list above), all the journalists and You-Tubers(a profession that defines capitalism like nothing else) clap like chimpanzees as if it is the next best thing since sliced bread. We are facing a vacuum of real discovery and that means every next thing is being touted as the next best thing ever in hope rather than with concrete proof, till it turns out to be….nothing. Everything will be almost the same in my lifetime as it is now, just a tad more convenient, perhaps (or rather hopefully). That is my prediction.
Lastly, Harari's argument that all organisms are nothing but…. is so puerile that it does not even merit countering. Scientists can never agree on anything. That is the whole basis of science. At best, we can say with a degree of confidence that something is based on well-made experiments and proven evidence. Suffice it to say that, deep self-loathing is prevalent in many people and now that many of these people have money in this world, it leads to people giving them far more attention than they deserve. Since the founder of a certain electric car company has these atrocious beliefs people line up like sheep to bray in unison, in order to sell themselves ( or their books).
So to sum it up, too much fiction, too less fact!

Subhasis Chakraborty

Joydeep said...

Hello Sir,

I feel obligated to respond to the earlier comment made by Subhasis. I do not intend to cause any offence but the assertion made in the comment which states "..all of the above-mentioned things are just a bunch of unproven, untested hypotheses that make for fancy reading material and create jobs" is categorically untrue. The commenter is referring to the relatively new but immensely popular disciplines in Computer Science such as AI, Deep-Learning, String Theory, Internet of Things (IoT) and Neural Networks. As a researcher who actively works in all of these areas except String Theory, I think it will send the wrong message to young minds (those who might want to get into Computer Science later) if we say that these disciplines are not based on proven scientific theory. Take AI, for example. All machine learning algorithms (machine learning is a subset of AI) are based on statistical techniques and mathematical optimization algorithms. In short, there is no magic to AI or machine learning- the reason why Facebook recognizes your face in a group photo is because the mathematics behind the machine learning technique employed by Facebook works! Of course, there are cases where machine learning fails, and that failure can also be scientifically explained by statistics (in most cases, it is due to improper training of the machine learning algorithm or noise in the data). The same goes for other disciplines such as IoT, which if applied properly, has the potential to radically change important public sector services such as transportation. I do agree that many companies use these disciplines for selling redundant and petty utilities, which is certainly unfortunate, but let's not knock the fundamentals of these disciplines for no faults of their own.

One last thing: although I work in AI and machine learning, it does not mean that I am completely sold on these disciplines. As a researcher, I try to understand the problems that can be solved efficiently using AI, and I also try to keep an open mind in order to recognize its shortcomings. I am a little alarmed by the increasing propensity in computer science research to apply AI to everything, as if it can magically solve all existing woes in the world. I was listening to a keynote speech from Professor John Tsotsos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tsotsos) last week on the application of AI to self-driving vehicles and it would be fair to say that anyone who listens to that talk (it should be available online on the IBM CASCON 2018 site in a few days) will not rush to buy these self-driving cars if they come out. Just like any singular drug does not miraculously cure all forms of cancer, any singular discipline is insufficient to address all research problems in the world.

Regards,
Joydeep

Subhasis said...

Dear Sir,

Since Joydeep has referred to my comment and me directly, I feel it is necessary to make some things clear.
I will try to be as precise as possible.
1. AI, Deep-Learning, String Theory, Internet of Things (IoT) and Neural Networks are pseudoscience at worst and technology at best.
I stand by my assertion and will try to explain why.
None of these offers any testable predictions. This is my opinion despite having worked in String Theory and Neural Networks. 'Science' should be able to make testable predictions and experiments that verify the hypotheses. No matter how many jobs it creates, or how much money is poured into them, all of these things are yet to make a single testable prediction and therefore not science. That is why recognizing a face in a bunch of faces on Facebook is not science.
The program has been specifically told that if X happens then Y should be the realization. As he himself has said, there is no magic.

2. He has referred to the popularity of the above-mentioned fields as some sort of evidence that these areas are science. This methodology is flawed on multiple levels. I will give an example: - If popularity indices were the measure of quality then Kim Kardashian is a better person than Henry Dunant.
I rest my case.

3. He has specifically talked about students not wanting to enter computer science. I think there will be no dearth of that any time soon. As I have already hinted in my comment, enough money is being poured in by companies and their 'Product executives' so jobs and hence students should be aplenty in the near future.

With Kind Regards,
Subhasis Chakraborty

Suvro Chatterjee said...

I am happy to see that a sort of debate seems to be developing between two grown-up and well-educated old boys (girls are usually conspicuous by absence from such serious discussions, despite all their claims to having brains!) over a very interesting subject. I shall be glad to see it continue for a while, so long as it remains a measured, reasoned, informed argument between gentlemen. And I shall be even more pleased if other readers, equally sensible and knowledgeable, care to join in.

Joydeep said...

Dear Subhasis,

I am addressing this comment directly to you. Kindly note my replies-

1. You are right in saying that AI techniques are non-testable (IoT should not be included in that list, by the way). Pseudoscience is not just a buzzword but a serious accusation of intellectual dishonesty and hence it should be used with caution. You are elevating science to a higher pedestal by essentially degrading technology, but you seem to forget that AI has never claimed itself as a natural science. The goal of AI is to design intelligent systems, not in describing them. No one mistakes AI as some deep representation of reality, but instead treats it as a mathematical tool that has been shown to give empirically good results. I have lumped mathematics and science together in my previous comment as broad strokes, which I should not have, but my only purpose for doing that was to communicate that AI algorithms are essentially a bunch of mathematical techniques that are proven and tested to work as intended. If your primary objection to this is that this does not qualify AI as science, we both are in agreement.

2. "He has referred to the popularity of the above-mentioned fields as some sort of evidence that these areas are science." Read my previous comment again carefully- nowhere have I made this claim. I know better than to equate popularity with quality.

3. "He has specifically talked about students not wanting to enter computer science." Again, I suggest you read my previous comment carefully. I am not concerned about the volume of students taking up Computer Science. However, I am concerned that those who might choose to pursue this discipline may have an incorrect idea about AI and IoT.

Thanks,
Joydeep

Subhasis said...

Dear Sir,

In the first parts of my comment, I will refer to what Joydeep has written

1. IoT is unbounded and non-testable. The Internet is only boundable for mere instants in time, therefore no real testing is possible.
Pseudoscience is not an 'accusation of intellectual dishonesty' but only a term used to describe fields of knowledge that have a system of theories and methods that are not scientifically testable.
Moreover, I repeat what I said is that this is a worst-case analogy. As for the matter of promoting science by degrading technology, there is incontrovertible evidence that technology is derived from subsets of science.
For e.g. - The World Wide Web from CERN scientists. There is no hierarchy here, but one is a subset of the other.
Mathematics is only the language that science uses to describe the reality of the physical world. This is a factual statement about mathematics and not a slight on mathematicians or their work. Almost everyone in the scientific community acknowledges the role of mathematicians in modern science.

2. I retract my comment if you did not mean it in that way.

3. AI and IoT students will be aplenty and for good reason, so what I write here shall make nary an impression on anyone anywhere. I have already written on my previous posts about why that is going to be so.

And now back to Harari's book,

When he writes about 'scientists' who are all agreed on 'life being nothing but data processing’. He is wrong on multiple levels. In addition, the point about AI developing so fast that soon robots will replace us all is blatantly laughable. Such scaremongering under the guise of knowing ‘science’ is a pathetic attempt to popularize one’s own book.

Regards,
Subhasis Chakraborty



Suvro Chatterjee said...

I do personally think so, too, Subhasis (referring to your last paragraph), and certainly hope so. I also look forward to less gloomy prognostications about an AI-dominated world, a world where AI will allow humans to flourish, prosper, progress and enjoy life as never before, rather than threatening them or disposing of them altogether. I trust that is the direction in which all our fine brains working on developing AI will aim at: surely they cannot want the worst things to happen, and surely they will be forewarned by books like Harari's? (as I keep saying, I still believe very strongly that all such technicians should mandatorily read the hundreds of robot-related sci-fi stories, some cheerful, some most disturbing, that the likes of Isaac Asimov wrote more than half a century ago).

Meanwhile, hasn't anyone else read the book and been strongly-enough affected to want to comment about it here? What a world it is when all my readers are highly 'educated', yet either cannot or don't want to join in on such a very interesting discussion!

Rajdeep said...

Sir,
I read Sapiens more than a couple of years ago when a lot of people were raving about the book. But I have not read Homo Deus. Since then, I have read other books that have made Sapiens an eminently forgettable book. It is a book that may be read once but not twice. Here too, a lot of people think that AI will take over humans, etc. I believe that is a passing fad and fear that comes out of ignorance or lack of self confidence. Another one is about to begin next year. 5G is touted to "revolutionize" our lives because it will have at least ten times the speed of 4G. In the future, we may be wearing a lot of gadgets that may enhance our capabilities. But, personally, I am not too excited. Right now we do have many advanced medical treatments available. However, if I were to need them now, I would not be able to afford most of them. So why even bother? And, as you rightly mentioned, only scientists and engineers with twisted minds are likely to make AI that would be harmful for humanity. Sane scientists and engineers will try to make beneficial ones, I hope. But, there is a problem. Modern science does not really understand how the human brain works. So, it would be very difficult indeed to design an AI that would work like the human brain because we mostly don't know how it works. That is why, I wish more money would be used to conduct research on how the human body works, just like more research should be done to explore the depths of our oceans and the environment rather than trying to set up a colony on Mars. That is my personal opinion so please treat it lightly.