Book Review: What's around the corner?

Looking out onto the Arabian Sea in Goa

I was in Goa a couple of years back on vacation.  A lovely state in western India, just south of Mumbai.  Tropical, well kept and full of Portuguese influence in architecture, language and cuisine.  One idyllic morning at the resort we were staying at, I was sitting and looking over the Arabian Sea thinking to a time a few hundred years ago.  Fisherman had been harvesting these waters for thousands of years.

Suddenly from around the corner would have come a couple of Portuguese ships; .... and before they could fathom it, Goa was ruled by the Portuguese for over six generations.

What is around the corner for humanity?  Like the fisherman of Goa, all of humanity has been "harvesting its crop" for millennia.  We are instilled with the progress that science has delivered,  enamored by the creature comforts that technology has provided, proud of the one-person-one vote approach to self-government as the beacon of social arrangement, thrilled that we are able to cooperate (more or less) as a global network to combat war, pestilence and famine.

Hooray ...... ?

I highly recommend Yuval Noah Harari's book, "Homo Deus" where, in a sweeping narrative, he vigorously tests the assumptions on which we have built our current outlook and lives.  By current outlook, I mean how we have ordered our expectations of everything from capital markets, politics, culture, religion, technology to individual rights and freedoms.  Harari is a historian at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He brings his full skill-set as a historian to bear on this sweeping work.

Culture:  One of the striking themes of Harari's earlier best-selling work, "Sapiens," was that humans have come to dominate life on earth because of our quantum jump in cognitive skills, and as a result the stories we tell ourselves about how our world works.  One only needs to think of the old Greek or Roman myths to bring this point into sharp relief.  Daniel Kahneman in his global best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow shows us how actually the human mind constructs these stories.  As an example Kahneman directs us to this 1944 minute-and-half video by Heider-Zimmer which shows we are capable of taking the most mundane of illustrations and constructing a story out of it from whole cloth!  Stories are not facts, and Harari tests our belief as to whether the current narrative we have on what makes human civilization work, will sustain itself deep into the 21st century.

Artificial Intelligence:  Everyone from Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates to Elon Musk have been ringing the alarm bell quite loudly on the implications of AI.  These are important voices.  But with the iPhone and other handy gadgets making our lives easy, convenient and more interesting, it is difficult to really appreciate what they are saying.  If there is one clear, ringing alarm that Harari sounds in the book from cover to cover, it is this.  He does not just cover the ground that is well trodden, such as entire classes of jobs disappearing (truck drivers to self-driving vehicles for example).  Rather, Harari sets his sights on a higher order problem.  Decision-making itself. 

Today, we assume, we make decisions as individuals.  But as we know from the early advances in recommendation engines at Wayz, Amazon and Netflix - we are quite susceptible to acting along the lines of, "people like us."  Fast forward that capability to highly advanced algorithms, and public policy recommendations and ask the question, how much of the individual actions which we cherish would we give up to the almighty and all knowing algorithms?  Harari's description of such a world hits hardest at our current assumptions on individual liberties and freedoms.

Information:  The terrific author James Gleick, published a book titled, "The Information," in 2011.  In it he traces the evolution of information technology and makes the case that reality is information.  With Moore's law, the processing power doubles every eighteen months, we have arrived at three more doublings since Gleick's book!  Thus Harari's examples and insights on what a world awash in data are even more startling.  Indeed, he argues that the new religion (story we tell ourselves) that is forming will be based in Silicon Valley or Bangalore and will be some form of "data-ism."

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the eastern philosophy of Vedanta, knows about this terse statement, Tat Tvam Asi (Thou Art That) - a loose translation implying that the individual human and the cosmos are the same. 

Harari's book tests the assumptions behind all three words of this great saying.  He asks, do we really know what Tat (that) is?  Do we really know what Tvam (Self) is?  And do we really know was Asi (is/are/exist) means?

Indeed, the three new words that underlie Data-ism's outlook might well be what the great Physicist John Archibald Wheeler stated.  Wheeler was a contemporary of Neils Bohr and was the teacher of Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne.  Wheeler famously said: "It from bit."  And explained it thus:

"It from bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe."

In this book, Homo Deus, Harari touches many, many more topics including genetic engineering, human longevity, state of education and so on.  Much like the 1970 sensation Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, Harari's book 50+ years later, at the advent of the 21st century takes a sweeping yet clear-eyed look at what lies in front of us.

Harari writes in a breezy, provocative engaging style.  Every author has a decision to make when writing a book such as this.  Is it depth or is it breadth?  There are too many dots to connect and too many developments taking place around the world to explore just one or two facets in-depth.  Thus Harari makes the right choice, in my opinion, to go for breadth - both in time and in scope to connect the dots.

The book is an exhilarating read.  Of course, none of us knows the future. None of us can predict it. 

The Goan fisherman I referred to at the beginning of this write-up, could have perhaps posted a sentry to look around the corner.  But they did not know that there was a Portugal, or that the Portuguese had ships and that they could come bearing arms and ammunition. 

Harari has asked us to post such a sentry to look for what is around the corner.  We should heed the call!