Homo Deus

Interview with author on Intelligence Squared - [1]

TED - [2]

Book Notes

Summary - life is Getting much better as civilization approaches Kardashev Scale 1.

• Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or

corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars ‘to make a lot of money for the corporation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; how come we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?

• Yet even though Herodotus and Thucydides understood reality much better than the authors of the

Bible, when the two world views collided, the Bible won by a knockout. The Greeks adopted the Jewish view of history, rather than vice versa. A thousand years after Thucydides, the Greeks became convinced that if some barbarian horde invaded, surely it was divine punishment for their sins. No matter how mistaken the biblical world view was, it provided a better basis for large-scale human cooperation.

• If you distort reality too much, it will weaken you, and you

will not be able to compete against more clear-sighted rivals. On the other hand, you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths. So if you stick to pure reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people would follow you.

• If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself,

‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?

• "In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million."
• "Whereas in ancient agricultural societies

human violence caused about 15 per cent of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence caused only 5 per cent of deaths, and in the early twenty-first century it is responsible for about 1 per cent of global mortality. In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. 23 Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder."

• . Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million

people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. 25 For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al- Qaeda

• diseases. It is technically feasible with current in vitro technology

to overcome mitochondrial genetic diseases by creating a ‘three-parent baby’. The baby’s nuclear DNA comes from two parents, while the mitochondrial DNA comes from a third person. In 2000 Sharon Saarinen from West Bloomfield, Michigan, gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Alana. Alana’s nuclear DNA came from her mother, Sharon, and her father, Paul, but her mitochondrial DNA came from another woman. From a purely technical perspective, Alana has three biological parents. A year later, in 2001, the US government banned this treatment, due to safety and ethical concerns.

• Even if famine, plague and war become less prevalent, billions of humans in developing

countries and seedy neighbourhoods will continue to deal with poverty, illness and violence even as the elites are already reaching for eternal youth and godlike powers. This seems patently unjust. One could argue that as long as there is a single child dying from malnutrition or a single adult killed in drug-lord warfare, humankind should focus all its efforts on combating these woes. Only once the last sword is beaten into a ploughshare should we turn our minds to the next big thing. But history doesn’t work like that. Those living in palaces have always had different agendas to those living in shacks, and that is unlikely to change in the twenty-first century.. critique - if humans upgrade their capacity for empathy and open source, this assumption may be invalidatedreaching out is not the same as obtaining. History is often shaped by exaggerated hopes. Twentieth-century Russian history was largely shaped by the communist attempt to overcome inequality, but it didn’t succeed - critique - was that really its aim or was that just false advertising?

• According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 per cent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved

through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention; 32 per cent maintain that humans may have evolved from earlier life forms in a process lasting millions of years, but God orchestrated this entire show; 46 per cent believe that God created humans in their current form sometime during the last 10,000 years, just as the Bible says