TN Note: While TN is not a fan of Harari in general, he makes an astute observation. In the past, it was the “haves” vs. the “have nots”. With the progress of Technocracy, this gap will be closed and the new meme will be the “useful” vs. the “useless”. You might be useful one day, only to find out that you are useless the next day. Technocracy provides no mercy or compassion to the human condition.
It is hard to miss the warnings. In the race to make computers more intelligent than us, humanity will summon a demon, bring forth the end of days, and code itself into oblivion. Instead of silicon assistants we’ll build silicon assassins.
The doomsday story of an evil AI has been told a thousand times. But our fate at the hand of clever cloggs robots may in fact be worse – to summon a class of eternally useless human beings.
At least that is the future predicted by Yuval Noah Harari, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, whose new book says more of us will be pushed out of employment by intelligent robots and on to the economic scrap heap.
Harari rose to prominence when his 2014 book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, became an international bestseller. Two years on, the book is still being talked about. Bill Gates asked Melinda to read it on holiday. It would spark great conversations around the dinner table, he told her. We know because he said so on his blog this week.
When a book is a hit, the publisher wants more. And so Harari has been busy. His next title, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is not out until September but early copies have begun to circulate. Its cover states simply: “What made us sapiens will make us gods”. It follows on from where Sapiens ends, in a provocative, and certainly speculative, gallop through the hopes and dreams that will shape the future of the species.
And the nightmares. Because even as the book has humans gaining godlike powers, that is only one eventuality Harari explores. It might all go pear-shaped, of course: we sapiens have a knack for hashing things up. Instead of morphing into omnipotent, all-knowing masters of the universe, the human mob might end up jobless and aimless, whiling away our days off our nuts on drugs, with VR headsets strapped to our faces. Welcome to the next revolution.
Harari calls it “the rise of the useless class” and ranks it as one of the most dire threats of the 21st century. In a nutshell, as artificial intelligence gets smarter, more humans are pushed out of the job market. No one knows what to study at college, because no one knows what skills learned at 20 will be relevant at 40. Before you know it, billions of people are useless, not through chance but by definition.
We have to suspect best selling books, especially international, because it means “The World Order” is supporting the promotion. Bill Gates is total puppet, son of a Planned Parenthood head, so if Gates says anything, it is a planned psy-op. I very much doubt he writes his own blog. He is too important an asset to have any volition of his own. It is also suspicious that author is Israeli, which is the Rothschild Bankster playground. So the first book got this review from Guardian “the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism”. This verifies… Read more »
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We have to suspect best selling books, especially international, because it means “The World Order” is supporting the promotion. Bill Gates is total puppet, son of a Planned Parenthood head, so if Gates says anything, it is a planned psy-op. I very much doubt he writes his own blog. He is too important an asset to have any volition of his own. It is also suspicious that author is Israeli, which is the Rothschild Bankster playground. So the first book got this review from Guardian “the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism”. This verifies… Read more »