From the Last Man to Homo Deus: Hardcore Scientists and the Search for a Technicolor Future
Graphics / Margrét Aðalheiður Önnu Þorgeirsdóttir
In trumpeting the death of God, Zarathustra, the protagonist of Friederich Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, asserts that mankind is something to overcome and prophesizes one of the misfortunes of our current society, the advent of the last man.
“I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.
Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man.
‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.”
Friederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
While Nietzsche’s contemporaries lacked the perception to infer the corollary of a godless world, Nietzsche himself understood that the death of God is a cosmic event that could potentially devastate humankind by plunging the world into a state of nihilism. For many centuries, people found motivation by deriving values and goals from the presence of a divine entity. We have to be powerful enough to kill a God, otherwise, will we be able to go ahead alone?
"The universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage. To paraphrase Descartes, cogito ergo mundus talis est."
Strong anthropic principle (SAP) (Brandon Carter)
To quote Erich Fromm, “In the nineteenth century, the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century, the problem is that man is dead.” The last man is a nihilist anthropological category. Cognizant of the death of God, they surmise that there are no values, aspirations, or goals to pursue any more and want only happiness and health. For many centuries, the promise of eternal life after death has brought comfort to humanity. However, people have also been looking for elixirs to prolong life. Twenty-two hundred years ago, the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered people to search for a potion that would grant him eternal life [1]. A great amount of money is currently being invested in immortality research. The idea of immortality reverberates around Silicon Valley, where researchers are working on several techniques to try to defeat death. Will science be the new religion that will lead humanity with the promise of eternal life?
In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari shocks readers by predicting that emboldened by scientific progress, humanity will probably try to reach immortality, happiness, and divinity, and the next step will be the evolution from “Homo Sapiens” to “Homo Deus.” Harari envisions that during this century, humanity will attempt to gain godlike powers. Thanks to biometric sensors and brain-computer interfaces, biotechnology and artificial intelligence will converge and we will become even more deeply interconnected with machines.
One miracle already happened at the opening ceremony of the 2014 World Cup, when a young paraplegic Brazilian performed the kick-off using a mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton [2].
It was the product of years of collaboration between Gordon Cheng’s team at the Technical University of Munich and Miguel Nicolelis’s team at Duke University’s Center for Neuroengineering. The scientists are members of a consortium called the Walk Again Project.
For the vast majority of scientists and doctors, death is just a system failure due to glitches, and they are confident that there is a technical solution to this technical problem. For example, Google’s Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, believes that humanity will begin the process toward achieving immortality by 2029 [3]. After that year, medical technologies will add one additional year to our life expectancy every year. The crucial step will be the invention of nanobots that can be placed into our bodies to fight disease. Another important step will be the connection of our brains to a cloud network. According to Kurzweil, this will be the biggest step in evolution since our ancestors developed the frontal cortex two million years ago.
In the last sections of his book, Harari, like Nietzsche, seems to have prophetic powers.
He is concerned about the risk that artificial intelligence will pose to humanity. It will make humans more useless. When algorithms are able to perform even service-sector jobs better than humans, what will we do? It will not be enough to say that humans have unique abilities beyond the capability of algorithms. There will also be increasing inequality, for not all humans will be upgraded to Homo Deus but only a small, privileged elite. However, even the new self-made gods will not be free from the severe threat of nihilism. Martin Heidegger wrote that “Nietzsche referred to nihilism as the most uncanny of all the guests, because it wills homelessness and it has long since been roaming around invisibly inside the house.”
Harari states that our liberal system is based on the assumption that we have free will, but then makes the flabbergasting claim that “free will” is only a myth inherited from Christian theology; it’s not a scientific reality. He argues that our thoughts are just the result of biochemical algorithms. According to Harari, there will come a time when humanity will be fully aware that there is no free will and someone will also perfectly succeed in manipulating our thoughts. What will be the point of politics? The threat to liberalism will not come from authoritarian regimes but from scientific progress and from the upgrade to Homo Deus. Where will humans find value and purpose? If individuals with godlike powers achieve immortality and everything has already been discovered, what will they do for all those endless years of life?
Harari concludes his book with three questions:
Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
What will happen to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
References:
Megan Gannon. (27. December 2017) „China’s First Emperor Ordered Official Search for Immortality Elixir.“ LiveScience.
Alejandra Martins and Paul Rincon. (12. June 2014) „Paraplegic in robotic suit kicks off World Cup.“ BBC
Sean Martin. (20. March 2017) „Secret of ETERNAL LIFE? We will know what it is by 2029, says Google chief.“ Express.