
Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari – How data will destroy human freedom - jordn
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/24/homo-deus-by-yuval-noah-harari-review
======
itaifrenkel
I might be wrong,but as someone that read the original Hebrew book, I feel
there is missing context for the English readers. The biggest struggle in
Israel is between religion and liberalism. The Arab states around us are
falling (or in high risk of falling) into Muslim paradigms, and Israel is in
the midst of a similar process where Jewish rules is considered superior to
democratic/liberal rules by larger part of the population. This book comes as
fresh air showing the strength of science, over the laws of God - given a wide
enough time perspective. It's the secular Bible if you wish, something to hang
on to while more people around you believe in hatered disguised as faith.

~~~
golergka
> Jewish rules is considered superior to democratic/liberal rules by larger
> part of the population

I don't think it's a larger part of population, just much better organized.

Also, you're forgetting that a lot of "right" is pretty secular and is driven
not by religion, but by the nature of conflict itself — it's much harder to
cling to democratic and liberal values for all when you're afraid for your
life every day. (I'm not expressing my personal opinion on the issue here,
just describing different political forces and motivations behind other people
as I see them).

~~~
Karnickel
> I don't think it's a larger part of population, just much better organized.

Point accepted, but those are the ones driving much of society, when the
others are just watching on the sidelines. In such diverse things as elections
to getting a beating, the passive bystanders don't matter.

------
martythemaniak
Sapiens was a good book overall - it put together the high-level facts fairly
well into a coherent and entertaining story. However, that story was also very
zeitgeist-y and ideologically skewed, he really tried hard to work the "Out of
Eden" story whereby the human race has fallen from our great past into our
miserable modern life.

In fact, he had to contradict himself to push that story. In one case, he
describes how agriculture is worse for the farmer, because he was sedentary
and if the crops failed, he could not move and faced a famine, whereas hunter-
gatherers could move. In an earlier part of the book, he describes how hunter-
gathers moved over a relatively small area (20x30km IIRC?). But of course, if
there was a drought in a world of hunter-gathers and they had to move, they
would just move where there is another tribe already, so the drought would
cause war, rather than famine. That was never mentioned, it's just assumed
there was random free land everywhere.

But the biggest weakness of the book seemed to be his very weak appreciation
of the physical sciences, ie he tried to tell the 75,000 year history of
humanity, without bothering to spend any time on the context. Much of history
is tightly coupled to ecology, advances in tech, demographics etc and his just
glides over that. In one particularly idiotic part, he seems to imply that one
day, someone just randomly invented math for no particular reason. Hard to
tell if he was being glib or actually believes it.

I'll probably give his one a go as well, even though it'll probably suffer
from the same issues. For example, it's very in-vogue to view the development
of intelligent systems as inventions of capitalist who seek power over the
people, rather than the discoveries about the nature of reality. I find the
latter much more interesting.

~~~
qrendel
It's not a bad book, but imo it starts off very strong and then quickly goes
downhill throughout. This was the general (and unsolicited) criticism from
most everyone I've shared it with. The stuff from prehistory, up to the
agricultural revolution, seems to cover a lot of recent discoveries and is
both fascinating and informative. The rest is, as the parent comment states, a
very simplified summary of the author's favorite topics, a few paragraphs
spent on each one, and clearly showing certain cultural biases (it honestly
felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience). A good assigned read for early
high schoolers, less useful to many beyond that point.

By the time you're at part four, on the current era and emerging technologies,
it literally reads like a bunch of newspaper clippings from the Science
section of the NYT. While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived)
problems, it seems unlikely to contain better or more profound commentary
regarding trends in changing humanity and emerging technology than books like
_Superintelligence_ , _Age of Em_ , etc. At best perhaps a "lite" version of
the same concepts sanitized for a broader audience. Of course I look forward
to, upon publication, hopefully having been mistaken about it.

~~~
nahumfarchi
>(it honestly felt optimized for appeal to a TED audience)

Funny that you should say that because TED is extremely popular here in Israel
(the book was originally published in Hebrew a couple of years before the
English translation).

>While I'm hoping his new book will fix those (perceived) problems...

Don't get your hope up. It's basically:

\- the singularity is near and that's not necessarily a good thing

\- free will does not exist

\- reiterating stuff from the previous book

That being said, it's a fun pop science read.

------
manish_gill
Discounting the fact that the author's previous foray into writing was one of
those "grand" books that everyone loves to read to make themselves feel
they're smart, and which was actually laughed out the door by real historians
(just look up /r/askhistorians), lets take the argument that the author makes
on its own merit.

The argument goes something like this: Because we'll be able to deconstruct
the human body/mind via Scientific Insights provided by Big Data, it will pose
an "existential challenge" to our freedoms. The author uses the word
"algorithm" liberally to describe any biochemical process that occur in the
human body and thinks that that automatically means that human beings are
somehow devoid of free will. [0]

What the author has forgotten about is that data has nothing to do with the
fundamental of the problem at all. We have known for centuries that human
biology is a thing and every decade has brought more insights about how it
works. The fact that we fundamentally understand the composition of DNA didn't
pose some big 'existential threat' to free will. Neither will Big Data.

It's the age old question about Consciousness in new dressing.

Frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of all these doomsday prophets, first the
author who wrote the Singularity book and now this. I read the FT article
based on this. It almost feels like a self-promotion. Say something
controversial about a trendy topic (Big Data), make an ominous prediction,
write blogs, get enough of a following, write a book, then write another one.
Watch the $$ roll in.

Nothing to see here, move on.

[0]
[http://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a2...](http://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c)

~~~
qrendel
Which r/askhistorians thread are you referring to? A quick search and only
found one, not exactly a fisking of his work:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w7ur9/is_sa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w7ur9/is_sapiens_a_brief_history_of_humankind_by_yuval/)

~~~
manish_gill
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fby47/reali...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fby47/realities_of_the_stone_age_what_are/d27klbm)
is one I recall. But really if you want a good proper book review, go here:

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-
brief-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-
history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review)

------
dunkelheit
I am currently reading _Sapiens_ and for me the takeaway thought from this
book is that large scale social transformations (like agricultural or
industrial revolutions) immeasurably increase the power of humanity as a whole
while bringing hitherto unknown woes for the individuals.

I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the
beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different
then? Interesting and not quite pleasant times lie ahead.

~~~
coldtea
> _I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the
> beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different
> then?_

 _However, a criticism of induction is that the past cannot always help
predict the future. We were given an example of the turkey that learns if he
sticks his neck out the farmer will feed him. He keeps sticking his neck out
and being fed every day, until one day he sticks his neck out, and where the
past has told him to expect food, the farmer instead chops his head off and
before he knows it he’s on the Christmas table._

From here: [https://benwebb94.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/empiricism-
locke-...](https://benwebb94.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/empiricism-locke-to-
hume/) but I just searched for "empiricist turkey", which is an often repeated
example for over a century.

~~~
jbob2000
The turkey metaphor rests on the premise that there is an end goal with the
turkey; the farmer wants to eat it. Even before the story is fully told, we
already know what's going to happen to the turkey.

Since we don't know the end goal for humanity, we don't know if "reaching our
head out" is bad or not.

~~~
trhway
>we don't know if "reaching our head out" is bad or not.

as long as we're staying inside the cage, we're slaves to that guessing game.
This is why breaking out of whatever cage we're in - and as we don't know what
nested, probably infinite, "russian doll" style set of cages we're in - that
means the continuous expansion and envelope pushing in all directions is the
key for continuing species existence.

------
irickt
Related discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376695)

------
joe-mccann
There are two types of people on this Earth: Those whom have read Sapiens and
those whom have not.

Harari is required reading, especially if you're reading this comment.

------
inetsee
I don't know if this is a quote from the book being reviewed, but this line
leapt out at me: "famine is rare". I find it hard to reconcile this statement
with information like this statistic from a UNICEF web site: "Every 3.6
seconds one person dies of starvation. Usually it is a child under the age of
5."

[http://www.unicef.org/mdg/poverty.html](http://www.unicef.org/mdg/poverty.html)

~~~
thanatropism
Wait, that works out to 8.6 million people a year.

~~~
zzalpha
Yeah. Statistics like that are designed to alarm rather than educate.

The reality is that world hunger has been on a steep decline over the last two
decades:

[http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/288229/icode/](http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/288229/icode/)

 _In the developing regions, the prevalence of undernourishment - which
measures the proportion of people who are unable to consume enough food for an
active and healthy life – has declined to 12.9 percent of the population, down
from 23.3 percent a quarter of a century ago_

Obviously it's far from eradicated, but amazing progress has been made.

Now, that said, I still wouldn't characterize 800M people with chronic
undernourishment as "rare", but... it's not as common as you'd think, either,
based on a statistic like that cited by UNICEF.

~~~
eropple
Between seven and nine million people dying of starvation every year is still
a _pretty big deal_ The rate stat is a slap to the face, sure--but it _should_
be, yeah? Progress being made doesn't mean there isn't a lot further to go,
and this sort of middlebrow dismissal doesn't help.

~~~
dogma1138
But it's not the same progress.

The technology we have today can feed 7bln people, it can feed even more.

Distribution is another issue, there isn't famine today that we cannot deal
with.

There are cases that we choose not to, there is a huge difference between
famine that is induced or maintained due to political instability than due to
"natural" causes.

If you want to see famine you don't need to go back more than 150 years to the
great potatoe famine, events like this simply cannot happen today.

If you take the 7bln people of today and try to feed them even with circa 1900
agro tech then you will see what famine is. Within a century we have solved
famine and we can now feed 10-15 times the population we had 100 years ago.

If you look at the explosion of the population of the planet in the 20th
century you can see how much of a revolution we have underwent.

This is why you don't see or hear about wide spread famine today. Sure there
are still pockets in developing nations and even cases of malnutrition in the
developed world.

But that isn't famine, it's not a natural disaster, it doesn't decimate whole
countries and if we had the political will to go and fix it there would be
almost no major pockets since we can resolve the few remaining parts. Food is
hard to distribute when you are being shot at.

