Next up: A new species!

Homo Deus makes the provocative argument that technological progress has Homo Sapiens on the path to becoming a new species. My recommendation: read this book, now!

Already, technology-led progress is helping us to “reign in” grand challenges of famine, plague and war. And we are moving on to tackle longevity and even happiness. Our growing capabilities in the biology and robotics are essentially enabling the “the upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.  At the point when technology enables us to re-engineer our minds, we effectively become a new species, and “Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end.”

This transformative vision fits with Tech-Driven Abundance in our After Capitalism framework.  It fits alongside the ideas Transhumanists, who suggest humans and technology should integrate. This merger of man and machine is also part of Kurzweil’s Singularity vision.

We are somewhat blindly moving in this direction. We use “healing” as the initial justification for every tech upgrade, sliding down a slippery slope, where we invite in technology-driven upgrades and in effective replace our Sapien-ness (my word). As time goes by it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms. Indeed, we will often be happy to transfer much of our decision-making processes into the hands of such a system, or at least consult with it whenever we face important choices. We will gladly hand over our files, data, etc. so that our virtual assistants can assist us better. Rely on the almighty Google!

The author suggests that humanism has been a dominant “religion” for the last 300 years. We’ve worshiped human ingenuity, particularly as embodied in science and technology.  But emerging technologies are replacing this humanist religion, “stripping humans of their authority, and empowering non-human algorithms instead.”  An emerging “data religion” suggests that humans have completed their cosmic task and should now pass the torch on to entirely new kinds of entities – Homo Deus. The rub, there are likely to be lots of Homo Sapiens still hanging around.

Dataism, and Homo Deus, thereby threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo Sapiens has done to all other animals. If “relationships between humans and animals the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans,” then…. Yikes, humanity has not been very kind wielding its power at the top of the food chain. Let’s hopes that Homo Deus uses that power more benevolently than Homo Sapiens have.    – Andy Hines