And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus. E-Book Description. Some of the techniques listed in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. You must come NOW! Humans always die due to some technical glitch. The heart stops pumping blood. The main artery is clogged by fatty deposits. Cancerous cells spread in the liver. Germs multiply in the lungs. And what is responsible for all these technical problems?
Other technical problems. The heart stops pumping blood because not enough oxygen reaches the heart muscle. Cancerous cells spread because a chance genetic mutation rewrote their instructions. Germs settled in my lungs because somebody sneezed on the subway. Nothing metaphysical about it. It is all technical problems.
Death personified as the Grim Reaper in medieval art. And every technical problem has a technical solution. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over. We can kill the cancerous cells with chemotherapy or nanorobots. We can exterminate the germs in the lungs with antibiotics.
But this is precisely why we invest so much time and money in researching cancer, germs, genetics and nanotechnology. Even ordinary people, who are not engaged in scientific research, have become used to thinking about death as a technical problem. Even when people die in a hurricane, a car accident or a war, we tend to view it as a technical failure that could and should have been prevented.
If the government had only adopted a better policy; if the municipality had done its job properly; and if the military commander had taken a wiser decision, death would have been avoided.
Death has become an almost automatic reason for lawsuits and investigations. Somebody somewhere must have screwed up. People can go on dying from that. It says that every human has a right to life, period. An increasing minority of scientists and thinkers consequently speak more openly these days, and state that the flagship enterprise of modern science is to defeat death and grant humans eternal youth.
We are trying to win the game. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has recently confessed that he aims to live for ever. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.
Yet Thiel is somebody to be taken very seriously. The breakneck development of fields such as genetic engineering, regenerative medicine and nanotechnology fosters ever more optimistic prophecies. Some experts believe that humans will overcome death by , others say Kurzweil and de Grey are even more sanguine. They maintain that anyone possessing a healthy body and a healthy bank account in will have a serious shot at immortality by cheating death a decade at a time.
According to Kurzweil and de Grey, every ten years or so we will march into the clinic and receive a makeover treatment that will not only cure illnesses, but will also regenerate decaying tissues, and upgrade hands, eyes and brains.
Before the next treatment is due, doctors will have invented a plethora of new medicines, upgrades and gadgets. If Kurzweil and de Grey are right, there may already be some immortals walking next to you on the street — at least if you happen to be walking down Wall Street or Fifth Avenue. In truth they will actually be a-mortal, rather than immortal. Unlike God, future superhumans could still die in some war or accident, and nothing could bring them back from the netherworld.
However, unlike us mortals, their life would have no expiry date. So long as no bomb shreds them to pieces or no truck runs them over, they could go on living indefinitely. Which will probably make them the most anxious people in history. We mortals daily take chances with our lives, because we know they are going to end anyhow. So we go on treks in the Himalayas, swim in the sea, and do many other dangerous things like crossing the street or eating out.
But if you believe you can live for ever, you would be crazy to gamble on infinity like that. Perhaps, then, we had better start with more modest aims, such as doubling life expectancy? In the twentieth century we have almost doubled life expectancy from forty to seventy, so in the twenty-first century we should at least be able to double it again to Though falling far short of immortality, this would still revolutionise human society.
For starters, family structure, marriages and child—parent relationships would be transformed. Now try to imagine a person with a lifespan of years. Getting married at forty, she still has years to go. Will it be realistic to expect her marriage to last years? Even Catholic fundamentalists might baulk at that. So the current trend of serial marriages is likely to intensify. Bearing two children in her forties, she will, by the time she is , have only a distant memory of the years she spent raising them — a rather minor episode in her long life.
Or consider professional careers. Today we assume that you learn a profession in your teens and twenties, and then spend the rest of your life in that line of work. You obviously learn new things even in your forties and fifties, but life is generally divided into a learning period followed by a working period. People will have much longer careers, and will have to reinvent themselves again and again even at the age of ninety.
At the same time, people will not retire at sixty-five and will not make way for the new generation with its novel ideas and aspirations. The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time.
He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones. This is true not only of science. Think for a moment about your own workplace. No matter whether you are a scholar, journalist, cook or football player, how would you feel if your boss were , his ideas were formulated when Victoria was still queen, and he was likely to stay your boss for a couple of decades more?
In the political sphere the results might be even more sinister. Would you mind having Putin stick around for another ninety years?
On second thought, if people lived to , then in Stalin would still be ruling in Moscow, going strong at , Chairman Mao would be a middle-aged year-old, and Princess Elizabeth would be sitting on her hands waiting to inherit from the year-old George VI. Her son Charles would not get his turn until My own view is that the hopes of eternal youth in the twenty-first century are premature, and whoever takes them too seriously is in for a bitter disappointment.
It is not easy to live knowing that you are going to die, but it is even harder to believe in immortality and be proven wrong. Although average life expectancy has doubled over the last hundred years, it is unwarranted to extrapolate and conclude that we can double it again to in the coming century. In global life expectancy was no higher than forty because many people died young from malnutrition, infectious diseases and violence.
Yet those who escaped famine, plague and war could live well into their seventies and eighties, which is the natural life span of Homo sapiens. Galileo Galilei died at seventy-seven, Isaac Newton at eighty-four, and Michelangelo lived to the ripe age of eighty-eight, without any help from antibiotics, vaccinations or organ transplants.
Indeed, even chimpanzees in the jungle sometimes live into their sixties. Its great achievement has been to save us from premature death, and allow us to enjoy the full measure of our years. Even if we now overcome cancer, diabetes and the other major killers, it would mean only that almost everyone will get to live to ninety — but it will not be enough to reach , let alone For that, medicine will need to re-engineer the most fundamental structures and processes of the human body, and discover how to regenerate organs and tissues.
It is by no means clear that we can do that by Nevertheless, every failed attempt to overcome death will get us a step closer to the target, and that will inspire greater hopes and encourage people to make even greater efforts.
The next generation of Googlers could therefore start their attack on death from new and better positions. The scientists who cry immortality are like the boy who cried wolf: sooner or later, the wolf actually comes.
When you take into account our belief in the sanctity of human life, add the dynamics of the scientific establishment, and top it all with the needs of the capitalist economy, a relentless war against death seems to be inevitable. Our ideological commitment to human life will never allow us simply to accept human death.
As long as people die of something, we will strive to overcome it. The scientific establishment and the capitalist economy will be more than happy to underwrite this struggle. Can anyone imagine a more exciting scientific challenge than outsmarting death — or a more promising market than the market of eternal youth? If you are over forty, close your eyes for a minute and try to remember the body you had at twenty-five.
Not only how it looked, but above all how it felt. If you could have that body back, how much would you be willing to pay for it? No doubt some people would be happy to forgo the opportunity, but enough customers would pay whatever it takes, constituting a well-nigh infinite market.
If all that is not enough, the fear of death ingrained in most humans will give the war against death an irresistible momentum. As long as people assumed that death is inevitable, they trained themselves from an early age to suppress the desire to live for ever, or harnessed it in favour of substitute goals. A large part of our artistic creativity, our political commitment and our religious piety is fuelled by the fear of death. Woody Allen, who has made a fabulous career out of the fear of death, was once asked if he hoped to live on for ever on the silver screen.
I want to achieve it by not dying. Once people think with or without good reason that they have a serious chance of escaping death, the desire for life will refuse to go on pulling the rickety wagon of art, ideology and religion, and will sweep forward like an avalanche. If you think that religious fanatics with burning eyes and flowing beards are ruthless, just wait and see what elderly retail moguls and ageing Hollywood starlets will do when they think the elixir of life is within reach.
If and when science makes significant progress in the war against death, the real battle will shift from the laboratories to the parliaments, courthouses and streets. Once the scientific efforts are crowned with success, they will trigger bitter political conflicts.
All the wars and conflicts of history might turn out to be but a pale prelude for the real struggle ahead of us: the struggle for eternal youth. The Right to Happiness The second big project on the human agenda will probably be to find the key to happiness. Throughout history numerous thinkers, prophets and ordinary people defined happiness rather than life itself as the supreme good.
In ancient Greece the philosopher Epicurus explained that worshipping gods is a waste of time, that there is no existence after death, and that happiness is the sole purpose of life. Most people in ancient times rejected Epicureanism, but today it has become the default view. Scepticism about the afterlife drives humankind to seek not only immortality, but also earthly happiness.
For who would like to live for ever in eternal misery? For Epicurus the pursuit of happiness was a personal quest. Modern thinkers, in contrast, tend to see it as a collective project.
Without government planning, economic resources and scientific research, individuals will not get far in their quest for happiness. If your country is torn apart by war, if the economy is in crisis and if health care is nonexistent, you are likely to be miserable.
Politicians should make peace, business people should foster prosperity and scholars should study nature, not for the greater glory of king, country or God — but so that you and I could enjoy a happier life. Countries measured their success by the size of their territory, the increase in their population and the growth of their GDP — not by the happiness of their citizens.
Industrialised nations such as Germany, France and Japan established gigantic systems of education, health and welfare, yet these systems were aimed to strengthen the nation rather than ensure individual well-being. Schools were founded to produce skilful and obedient citizens who would serve the nation loyally. They needed a reasonable command of electrics, mechanics and medicine in order to operate wireless sets, drive tanks and take care of wounded comrades.
When they left the army they were expected to serve the nation as clerks, teachers and engineers, building a modern economy and paying lots of taxes.
The same went for the health system. At the end of the nineteenth century countries such as France, Germany and Japan began providing free health care for the masses.
They financed vaccinations for infants, balanced diets for children and physical education for teenagers. They drained festering swamps, exterminated mosquitoes and built centralised sewage systems. The country needed sturdy soldiers and workers, healthy women who would give birth to more soldiers and workers, and bureaucrats who came to the office punctually at 8 a.
Even the welfare system was originally planned in the interest of the nation rather than of needy individuals. When Otto von Bismarck pioneered state pensions and social security in late nineteenth-century Germany, his chief aim was to ensure the loyalty of the citizens rather than to increase their well-being.
You fought for your country when you were eighteen, and paid your taxes when you were forty, because you counted on the state to take care of you when you were seventy. Rather, he sought only to limit the power of the state. The idea was to reserve for individuals a private sphere of choice, free from state supervision. People increasingly believe that the immense systems established more than a century ago to strengthen the nation should actually serve the happiness and well-being of individual citizens.
We are not here to serve the state — it is here to serve us. The right to the pursuit of happiness, originally envisaged as a restraint on state power, has imperceptibly morphed into the right to happiness — as if human beings have a natural right to be happy, and anything which makes us dissatisfied is a violation of our basic human rights, so the state should do something about it.
In the twentieth century per capita GDP was perhaps the supreme yardstick for evaluating national success. But nowadays thinkers, politicians and even economists are calling to supplement or even replace GDP with GDH — gross domestic happiness. After all, what do people want? They want to be happy. Production is important because it provides the material basis for happiness.
But it is only the means, not the end. In one survey after another Costa Ricans report far higher levels of life satisfaction than Singaporeans. Would you rather be a highly productive but dissatisfied Singaporean, or a less productive but satisfied Costa Rican? This kind of logic might drive humankind to make happiness its second main goal for the twenty-first century. At first glance this might seem a relatively easy project. If famine, plague and war are disappearing, if humankind experiences unprecedented peace and prosperity, and if life expectancy increases dramatically, surely all that will make humans happy, right?
When Epicurus defined happiness as the supreme good, he warned his disciples that it is hard work to be happy. Material achievements alone will not satisfy us for long. Indeed, the blind pursuit of money, fame and pleasure will only make us miserable. In the long run, a deep friendship will make us more content than a frenzied orgy.
Epicurus was apparently on to something. Despite our unprecedented achievements in the last few decades, it is far from obvious that contemporary people are significantly more satisfied than their ancestors in bygone years.
Indeed, it is an ominous sign that despite higher prosperity, comfort and security, the rate of suicide in the developed world is also much higher than in traditional societies. In Peru, Guatemala, the Philippines and Albania — developing countries suffering from poverty and political instability — about one person in , commits suicide each year.
In rich and peaceful countries such as Switzerland, France, Japan and New Zealand, twenty-five people per , take their own lives annually. In most South Koreans were poor, uneducated and tradition-bound, living under an authoritarian dictatorship. Today South Korea is a leading economic power, its citizens are among the best educated in the world, and it enjoys a stable and comparatively liberal democratic regime.
Yet whereas in about nine South Koreans per , killed themselves, today the annual rate of suicide has more than tripled to thirty per , Thus the drastic decrease in child mortality has surely brought an increase in human happiness, and partially compensated people for the stress of modern life. Still, even if we are somewhat happier than our ancestors, the increase in our well-being is far less than we might have expected. In the Stone Age, the average human had at his or her disposal about 4, calories of energy per day.
This included not only food, but also the energy invested in preparing tools, clothing, art and campfires. Today Americans use on average , calories of energy per person per day, to feed not only their stomachs but also their cars, computers, refrigerators and televisions.
Is the average American sixty times happier? We may well be sceptical about such rosy views. It took just a piece of bread to make a starving medieval peasant joyful. How do you bring joy to a bored, overpaid and overweight engineer? The second half of the twentieth century was a golden age for the USA.
Victory in the Second World War, followed by an even more decisive victory in the Cold War, turned it into the leading global superpower. Real per capita income doubled. The newly invented contraceptive pill made sex freer than ever. Women, gays, African Americans and other minorities finally got a bigger slice of the American pie.
A flood of cheap cars, refrigerators, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, laundry machines, telephones, televisions and computers changed daily life almost beyond recognition. Yet studies have shown that American subjective well-being levels in the s remained roughly the same as they were in the s.
This avalanche of wealth, coupled with myriad positive and negative changes in Japanese lifestyles and social relations, had surprisingly little impact on Japanese subjective well-being levels. The Japanese in the s were as satisfied — or dissatisfied — as they were in the s. Achieving real happiness is not going to be much easier than overcoming old age and death. The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological, the other biological.
On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. On the biological level, both our expectations and our happiness are determined by our biochemistry, rather than by our economic, social or political situation.
According to Epicurus, we are happy when we feel pleasant sensations and are free from unpleasant ones. Jeremy Bentham similarly maintained that nature gave dominion over man to two masters — pleasure and pain — and they alone determine everything we do, say and think.
Anyone who tries to deduce good and evil from something else such as the word of God, or the national interest is fooling you, and perhaps fooling himself too. In the days of Bentham and Mill it was radical subversion. But in the early twenty-first century this is scientific orthodoxy. According to the life sciences, happiness and suffering are nothing but different balances of bodily sensations.
We never react to events in the outside world, but only to sensations in our own bodies. Nobody suffers because she lost her job, because she got divorced or because the government went to war. The only thing that makes people miserable is unpleasant sensations in their own bodies.
A thousand things may make us angry, but anger is never an abstraction. It is always felt as a sensation of heat and tension in the body, which is what makes anger so infuriating. Conversely, science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery or even finding true love.
People are made happy by one thing and one thing only — pleasant sensations in their bodies. Only seven minutes remain before the dreaded penalty shoot-out. You stop the ball with your chest, it drops down towards your leg, you give it a kick in mid-air, and you see it fly past the Argentinian goalkeeper and bury itself deep inside the net. The stadium erupts like a volcano. Tens of thousands of people roar like mad, your teammates are racing to hug and kiss you, millions of people back home in Berlin and Munich collapse in tears before the television screen.
You are ecstatic, but not because of the ball in the Argentinian net or the celebrations going on in crammed Bavarian Biergartens. You are actually reacting to the storm of sensations within you. Chills run up and down your spine, waves of electricity wash over your body, and it feels as if you are dissolving into millions of exploding energy balls. If you receive an unexpected promotion at work, and start jumping for joy, you are reacting to the same kind of sensations.
The deeper parts of your mind know nothing about football or about jobs. They know only sensations. The opposite is also true. If you have just been fired or lost a decisive football match , but you are experiencing very pleasant sensations perhaps because you popped some pill , you might still feel on top of the world.
The bad news is that pleasant sensations quickly subside and sooner or later turn into unpleasant ones. In fact, it might all be downhill from there. Similarly, if last year I received an unexpected promotion at work, I might still be occupying that new position, but the very pleasant sensations I experienced on hearing the news disappeared within hours. If I want to feel those wonderful sensations again, I must get another promotion.
And another. This is all the fault of evolution. For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness. The biochemical system rewards actions conducive to survival and reproduction with pleasant sensations. But these are only an ephemeral sales gimmick.
We struggle to get food and mates in order to avoid unpleasant sensations of hunger and to enjoy pleasing tastes and blissful orgasms. What might have happened if a rare mutation had created a squirrel who, after eating a single nut, enjoys an everlasting sensation of bliss? Who knows, perhaps it really happened to some lucky squirrel millions of years ago.
But if so, that squirrel enjoyed an extremely happy and extremely short life, and that was the end of the rare mutation. For the blissful squirrel would not have bothered to look for more nuts, let alone mates.
The rival squirrels, who felt hungry again five minutes after eating a nut, had much better chances of surviving and passing their genes to the next generation. For exactly the same reason, the nuts we humans seek to gather — lucrative jobs, big houses, good-looking partners — seldom satisfy us for long. Climbing Mount Everest is more satisfying than standing at the top; flirting and foreplay are more exciting than having an orgasm; and conducting groundbreaking lab experiments is more interesting than receiving praise and prizes.
Yet this hardly changes the picture. It just indicates that evolution controls us with a broad range of pleasures. Sometimes it seduces us with sensations of bliss and tranquillity, while on other occasions it goads us forward with thrilling sensations of elation and excitement. When an animal is looking for something that increases its chances of survival and reproduction e.
In a famous experiment scientists connected electrodes to the brains of several rats, enabling the animals to create sensations of excitement simply by pressing a pedal. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals put together.
The average American is 1, times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda. What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet Earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams, and nightmares that will shape the 21st century - from overcoming death to creating artificial life.
It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers?
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