Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow

p.15 “Simultaneously, the global economy has been transformed from a material-based
economy into a knowledge-based economy. […] Today the main source of wealth is
knowledge.”
“What Rwanda earned from an entire year of looting Congolese coltan, the Chinese
earn in a single day of peaceful commerce.”

p.16 “… future technological developments might set the stage for new kinds of war. In
particular, cyber warfare may destabilize the world by giving even small countries and
non-state actors the ability to fight superpowers effectively.”

p.17 “ ‘logic bombs’ are malicious software codes planted in peacetime and operated at a
distance.”

p.18 “… terrorism is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real
power.”

“How, then, do terrorists manage to dominate the headlines and change the political
situation throughout the world? By provoking their enemies to overreact. In essence,
terrorism is a show.”

“Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it
cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts
buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop.”

“By themselves, terrorists are too weak to drag us back to the Middle Ages and re-
establish the Jungle Law. They may provoke us, but in the end, it all depends on our
reactions.”

p.19 “It is within our power to make things better and to reduce the incidence of
suffering even further.”

p.20 “Humans are rarely satisfied with what they already have. The most common
reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.
Humans are always on the lookout for something better, bigger, tastier. When
humankind possesses enormous new powers, and when the threat of famine, plague
and, war is finally lifted, what will we do with ourselves? What will the scientists,
investors, bankers and presidents do all day? Write poetry?
Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to
set itself even more daring goals. Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity,
health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next
targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity. Having reduced mortality
from starvation, disease and violence, we will now aim to overcome old age and even
death itself. Having saved people from abject misery, we will now aim to make them
positively happy. And having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival
struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into
Homo deus.”

p.22 “Humans always die due to some technical glitch. The heart stops pumping blood.
The main artery is clogged by fatty deposits. Cancerous cells spread in the liver. Germs
multiply in the lungs. And what is responsible for all these technical problems? Other
technical problems. […] And every technical problem has a technical solution.”

p.24 “An increasing minority of scientists and thinkers consequently speak more openly
these days, and state that the flagship enterprise of modern science is to defeat death
and grant humans eternal youth.”

p.33 “Indeed, it is an ominous sign that despite higher prosperity, comfort and security,
the rate of suicide in the developed world is also much higher than in traditional
societies.”

p.34 “It took just a piece of bread to make a starving medieval peasant joyful. How do
you bring joy to a bored, overpaid and overweight engineer?”

“It appears that our happiness bangs against some mysterious glass ceiling that does
not allow it to grow despite all our unprecedented accomplishments. Even if we provide
free food for everybody, cure all diseases and ensure world peace, it won’t necessarily
shatter that glass ceiling. Achieving real happiness is not going to be much easier than
overcoming old age and death.
The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological,
the other biological. On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations
rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and
prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our
expectations.”

“According to life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances
of bodily sensations. We never react to events in the outside world, but only to
sensations in our own bodies.”
p.37 “The biochemical system rewards actions conducive to survival and reproduction
with pleasant sensations.”

p.39 “Forget economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions: in order to raise
global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry.”

p.40 “Fear, depression and trauma are not caused by shells, booby traps or car bombs.
They are caused by hormones, neurotransmitters and neural networks.”

p.42 “If I identify happiness with fleeting pleasant sensations, and crave to experience
more and more of them, I have no choice but to pursue them constantly.”

“The Buddha’s suggestion was to reduce our craving for pleasant sensations, and not
allow them to control our lives. According to Buddha, we can train our minds to
observe carefully how all sensations constantly arise and pass. When the mind learns to
see our sensations for what they are – ephemeral and meaningless vibrations – we lose
interest in pursuing them. For what is the point of running after something that
disappears as fast as it arises?”

p.43 “… in order to overcome old age and misery humans will first have to acquire
godlike control of their own biological substratum. If we ever have the power to
engineer death and pain out of our system, that same power will probably be sufficient
to engineer our system in almost any manner we like, and manipulate our organs,
emotions and intelligence in myriad ways.”

“The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological
engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.”

p.44 “This may sound like science fiction, but it’s already a reality. Monkeys have
recently learned to control bionic hands and feet disconnected from their bodies,
through electrodes implanted in their brains. Paralyzed patients are able to move bionic
limbs or operate computers by the power of thought alone.”

“Yet even cyborg engineering is relatively conservative, inasmuch as it assumes that

organic brains will go on being the command-and-control centers of life.”

“Throughout history most gods were believed to enjoy not omnipotence but rather
specific super-abilities such as the ability to design and create living beings; to
transform their own bodies; to control the environment and the weather; to read minds
and to communicate at a distance; to travel at very high speeds; and of course to escape
death and live indefinitely. Humans are in the business of acquiring all these abilities,
and then some.”

p.49 “In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one
of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”

p.51 “… the modern economy needs constant and indefinite growth in order to survive.
If growth ever stops, the economy won’t settle down to some cozy equilibrium; it will
fall to pieces.”

“An economy built on everlasting growth needs endless projects – just like the quests
for immortality, bliss and divinity.”

p.58 “Centuries ago human knowledge increased slowly, so politics and economics
changed at a leisurely pace too. Today our knowledge is increasing at breakneck speed,
and theoretically, we should understand the world better and better. But the very
opposite is happening. Our newfound knowledge leads to faster economic, social and
political changes; in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the
accumulation of knowledge, which leads only to faster and greater upheavals.
Consequently we are less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the
future. […] in 2016 we have no idea how Europe will look in 2050. We cannot say what
kind of political system it will have, how its job market will be structured, or even what
kind of bodies its inhabitants will possess.”

p.65 “The same technologies that can upgrade humans into gods might also make
humans irrelevant. For example, computers powerful enough to understand and
overcome the mechanisms of ageing and death will probably also be powerful enough
to replace humans in any and all tasks.”

p.66 “… the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for
future relations between superhumans and humans.”

p.67 “People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single
greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”

p.72 “Officially, we live in the Holocene epoch. Yet it may be better to call the last
70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity. For during these
millennia Homo sapiens became the single most important agent of change in the
global ecology.”

p.73 “Instead of fearing asteroids, we should fear ourselves.”

“Now humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design, and to
extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic.”

p.79 “What makes the fate of domesticated farm animals particularly harsh is not just
the way they die, but above all the way they live.”

p.83 “For emotions are not a uniquely human quality – they are common to all
mammals (as well as to all birds and probably to some reptiles and even fish).”
“Rather, emotions are biochemical algorithms that are vital for the survival and
reproduction of all mammals.”
“An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve
problems and reach decisions.”

p.85 “The algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions and
thoughts.”

p.86 “What we call sensations and emotions are in fact algorithms.”

p.87 “… 99 per cent of our decisions – including the most important life choices
concerning spouses, careers and habitats – are made by the highly refined algorithms
we call sensations, emotions and desires.”

p.89 “… mammals can’t live on food alone. They need emotional bonds too.”

p.99 “We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower
life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one. […] Would it be okay, for
example, for an artificial intelligence to exploit humans and even kill them to further its
own needs and desires?”

p.101 “The belief that humans have eternal souls whereas animals are just evanescent
bodies is a central pillar of our legal, political and economic system. […] There is zero
scientific evidence that in contrast to pigs, Sapiens have souls.”

p.105 “Hence the existence of souls cannot be squared with the theory of evolution.
Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities.”
p.106 “Unlike the everlasting soul, the mind has many parts, it constantly changes, and
there is no reason to think it is eternal.”
“What exactly are the conscious experiences that constitute the flow of the mind? Every
subjective experience has two fundamental characteristics: sensation and desire.
Robots and computers have no consciousness because despite their myriad abilities
they feel nothing and crave nothing.”
“However, the most up-to-date theories also maintain that sensations and emotions are
biochemical data-processing algorithms.”

p.107 “Current orthodoxy holds that consciousness is created by electrochemical

reactions in the brain, and that mental experiences fulfil some essential data-processing
function. However, nobody has any idea how a congeries of biochemical reactions and
electrical currents in the brain creates the subjective experience of pain, anger or love.
Perhaps we will have a solid explanation in ten or fifty years. But as of 2016, we have no
such explanation, and we had better be clear about that.”

p.111 “You might argue that we need a mind because the mind stores memories, makes
plans and autonomously sparks completely new images and ideas. It doesn’t just
respond to stimuli.”
“But wait a moment. What are all these memories, imaginations and thoughts? Where
do they exist? According to current biological theories, our memories, imaginations and
thoughts don’t exist in some higher immaterial field. Rather, they too are avalanches of
electric signals fired by millions of neurons.”

p.113 “Despite the vast knowledge we have gained in the fields of mathematics and
computer science, none of the data-processing systems we have created needs
subjective experiences in order to function, and none feels pain, pleasure, anger or
love.”

p.114 “The autonomous car successfully stops at red lights, bypasses obstacles and
keeps a safe distance from other vehicles – without feeling any fear.”

p.115 “Whereas the existence of eternal souls is pure conjecture, the experience of pain
is a direct and very tangible reality.”

p.119 “According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of

electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be theoretically feasible to
simulate an entire virtual world that I could not possibly distinguish from the ‘real’
world. […] Once you acknowledge the mere feasibility of this scenario, mathematics
leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the
number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit
the sole real world is almost zero.”
p.120 “According to the Turing Test, in order to determine whether a computer has a
mind, you should communicate simultaneously both with that computer and with a real
person, without knowing which is which.”

p.124 “Psychiatric drugs are aimed to induce changes not just in human behavior, but
above all in human feeling. When customers go to a psychiatrist and say, ‘Doctor, give
me something that will lift me out of this depression,’ they don’t want a mechanical
stimulant that will cause them to flail about while still feeling blue. They want to feel
cheerful.”

p.131 “Instead, the crucial factor in our conquest of the world was our ability to connect
many humans to one another. Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not
because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the
individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth
capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers.”

p.132 “To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways
with countless numbers of strangers.”

“History provides ample evidence for the crucial importance of large-scale

cooperation.”
“Why are revolutions so rare? Why do the masses sometimes clap and cheer for
centuries on end, doing everything the man on the balcony commands them, even
though they could in theory charge forward at any moment and tear him to pieces?
Ceausescu and his cronies dominated 20 million Romanians for four decades because
they ensured three vital conditions. First, they placed loyal communist apparatchiks in
control of all networks of cooperation, such as the army, trade unions and even sports
associations. Second, they prevented the creation of any rival organizations – whether
political, economic or social – which might serve as a basis for anti-communist
cooperation. Third, they relied on the support of sister communist parties in the Soviet
Union and eastern Europe.
Ceausescu fell from power only once all three conditions no longer held.
Yet when power slipped from the hands of the clumsy organizer on the balcony, it did
not pass to the masses in the square. Though numerous and enthusiastic, the crowds
did not know how to organize themselves. Hence just as in Russia in 1917, power
passed to a small group of political players whose only asset was good organization. The
Romanian Revolution was hijacked by the self-proclaimed Nation Salvation Front,
which was in fact a smokescreen for the moderate wing of the Communist Party.
The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of
former communists and their families.”
p.140 “The Ultimatum Game made a significant contribution to undermining classical
economic theories and to establishing the most important economic discovery of the
last few decades: Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but
rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.”

p.143 “As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the same stories,
they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behavior of strangers and to
organize mass-cooperation networks.”

p.144 “However, there is a third level of reality: the intersubjective level. Intersubjective
entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and
feelings of individual humans.”

p.146 “Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of
stories.”
“People constantly reinforce each other’s beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop.”

p.149 “That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all
their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot
understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.”
“A hundred years hence, our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally
incomprehensible to our descendants.”

p.155 “Since new twenty-first-century technologies are likely to make such fictions only
more potent, understanding our future requires understanding how stories about
Christ, France and Apple have gained so much power. Humans think they make
history, but history actually revolves around the web of stories.”

p.160 “Prior to the invention of writing, stories were confined by the limited capacity of
human brains.”
“Writing has thus enabled humans to organize entire societies in an algorithmic
fashion.”

p.163 “Writing thus facilitated the appearance of powerful fictional entities that
organized millions of people and reshaped the reality of rivers, swamps and crocodiles.
Simultaneously, writing also made it easier for humans to believe in the existence of
such fictional entities, because it habituated people to experiencing reality through the
mediation of abstract symbols.”

p.174 “Fictions enable us to cooperate better.”

p.177 “Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital.”
“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?”

p.178 “Stories serve as the foundations and pillars of human societies.”

“Unfortunately, blind faith in these stories meant that human efforts frequently focused
on increasing the glory of fictional entities such as gods and nations, instead of
bettering the lives of real sentient beings.”

p.179 “As technology allows us to upgrade humans, overcome old age and find the key
to happiness, so people would care less about fictional gods, nations and corporations,
and focus instead on deciphering the physical and biological reality.”
“Myths continue to dominate humankind. Science only makes these myths stronger.”
“Thanks to computers and bioengineering, the difference between fiction and reality
will blur…”