How do you want to design your own future? Say you have given the power to design your future, you have enough planning to design it? I am not sure if you can do it or not, but it’s being taken care of by human beings. Yes, this is what Harari said in his book “Homo Deus”! From homo sapiens to homo deus. This will be the journey towards our next step. Deus is a latin word. It means God. From a simple animal to the master of the world, this is the new agenda of humans!
Harari said new human agendas are basically three. Immortality gain, ensuring a blissful life and upgrading themselves to God level. Whatever humans are doing today is mainly linked with these 3 agendas. Until now humans came here as per the natural selection. So, basically till here, humans didn’t have their own choice to follow. But now humans are designing their own future. It’s deciding in which direction evolution should follow humans.
Few centuries back, people had an average life expectancy of 35-40 years. But today it’s increasing day by day with a lower limit of 65 years! What played an important role in this increase? Previously humans were endangered by 3 issues. These are War, Famine and plague. Without some recent issues, war almost disappeared. One of the reasons is the change of assets. Previously the assets were human, land, gold etc. But now the main asset in the 21st century is knowledge. Once upon a time 2 things were necessary for economic growth. Energy and raw materials. But now, 3 things are needed for economic growth. With the previous two the new addition is Knowledge. Even energy and raw materials can be finished with repetitive use. But knowledge? There is no finishing line of knowledge. The sense of asset has been changed, now nations think that war is a mutual commitment of disaster and economic losses.
Throughout history humans had to fight against famine very often. So, famine was one of the killers of humans in the past. With the development of modern science and agricultural technology, famine just disappeared. Ridiculously now people don’t die from famine or shortage of food. They die from overeating or obesity. Harari said, in 2010 1 million people died from natural calamities, accidents and other violence. But 3 million people died from obesity!
The same is for Plague. Though in 2020 we faced covid 19. But Harari’s book was published before that and he claimed these kinds of epidemics are reduced nowadays compared to previous times.
With a lot of amazing articles, Harari finished this book with a chapter named Data Religion. Data is really going to be the future of humans. Those who won the data, won the future. Data, AI, and Algorithms are going to be the masters of the world! It’s a very predictable future I also believe. With the merger of information technology and Biotechnology, data has the key of mastery for sure. I really loved reading this book as it was something linked with the future of homo sapiens. How amazing the journey will be. I am waiting for this.