Something happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear...

"Aside from their unpredictability and their susceptibility to fear, hunger and disease, flesh-and-blood soldiers think and move on an unceasingly irrelevant timescale.  From the days of Nebuchadnezzar to those of Saddam Hussein, despite myriad technological improvements, war was waged on an organic timetable. Discussions lasted for hours, battles took days, and wars dragged on for years.  Cyber-wars, however, may last just a few minutes.  When a lieutenant on shift at cyber-command notices something odd is going on, she picks up the phone to call her superior, who immediately alerts the White House.  Alas, by the time the president reaches for the red handset, the war has already been lost. Within seconds a sufficiently sophisticated cyber strike might shut down the US power grid, wreck US flight control centres, cause numerous industrial accidents in nuclear plants and chemical installations, disrupt the police, army and intelligence communication networks -- and wipe out financial records so that trillions of dollars simply vanish without a trace and nobody knows who owns what.  The only thing curbing public hysteria is that, with the Internet, television and radio down, people will not be aware of the full magnitude of the disaster."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

We'll meet again/don't know where/don't know when...

"How rational is it to risk the future of humankind on the assumption that future scientists will make some unknown planetary discoveries?  Most of the presidents, ministers, and CEOs who run the world are very rational people. Why are they willing to take such a gamble?  Maybe because they don't think they are gambling on their own personal future. Even if bad comes to worse and science cannot hold off the deluge, engineers could still build a high tech Noah's Ark for the upper caste, while leaving billions of others to drown.  The belief in this high-tech Ark is currently one of the biggest threats to the future of humankind and of the entire ecosystem.  People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

Dorothy: How can you talk, if you haven't got a brain? The Scarecrow: I don't know. But, some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?

"According to the Turning Test, in order to determine whether a computer has a mind, you should communicate simultaneously with a computer and with a real person, without knowing which is which.  You can ask whatever questions you want, you can play games, argue, and even flirt with them.  Take as much time as you like.  Then you need to decide which is the computer and which is the human.  If you cannot make up your mind, or if you make a mistake, the computer has passed the Turing Test, and we should treat it as if it really has a mind.  However, that won't really be a proof, of course. Acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a social and legal convention.


The Turing Test was invented in 1950 by the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the computer age.  Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.  In 1952 he was convicted of committing homosexual acts and forced to undergo chemical castration.  Two years later he committed suicide.  The Turing Test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950s Britain: can you pass for a straight man?  Turing knew from personal experience that it didn't matter who you were really -- it mattered only what others thought about you.  According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay men in the 1950s.  It won't matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not.  It will only matter what people think about it."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

“All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.” Neil Gaiman, American Gods

"...for thousands of years humans used God to explain numerous natural phenomenon.  What causes lightning to strike?  God.  What makes the rain fall?  God. How did life on earth begin?  God did it.  Over the last few centuries scientists have not discovered any empirical evidence for God's existence, while they did find much more detailed explanations for lightning strikes, rain and  the origins of life.  Consequently, with the exception of a few sub-fields of philosophy, no article in any peer-review scientific journal takes God's existence seriously.  Historians don't argue that the Allies won the Second World War because God was on their side; economists don't blame God for the 1929 economic crisis; and geologists don't invoke His will to explain tectonic plate movements."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

The Anthropocene

"How many wolves live today in Germany, the land of the Grimm brothers, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf?  Less than a hundred.  (And even these are mostly Polish wolves that stole over the border in recent years.)  In contrast, Germany is home to 5 million domesticated dogs. Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam over the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs.  The world contains 40,000 lions compared with 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 million domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens.  Since 1970, despite growing ecological awareness, wildlife populations have halved (not that they were prospering in 1970).  In 1980 there were 2 billion wild birds in Europe.  In 2009 only 1.6 billion were left.  In the same year, Europeans raised 1.9 billion chickens for meat and eggs.  At present, more than 90 percent of the large animals of the world (i.e., those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

Good doggie

"In my view, you cannot have a serious discussion about the nature and future of humankind without beginning with our fellow animals.  Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.  And it is doubly important to remember our origins at a time when we seek to turn ourselves into gods.  No investigation of our divine future can ignore our own animal past, or our relations with other animals -- because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans.  You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans?  Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

"Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.  Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights  -- the first step is to retell their history.  The new history will explain that 'our present situation is neither natural or eternal.  Things were different once.  Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today.  If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.'  This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade.  They aim to to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari

The past isn't dead...

"If history doesn't follow any stable rules, and if we cannot predict its future course, why study it?  It often seems that the chief aim of science is to predict the future -- meteorologists are expected to forecast whether tomorrow will bring rain or sunshine; economists should know whether devaluing the currency will avert or precipitate an economic crisis; good doctors foresee whether chemotherapy or radiation therapy will be more successful in curing lung cancer.  Similarly, historians are asked to examine the actions of our ancestors so that we can repeat their wise decisions and avoid their mistakes.  But it almost never works like that because the present is just too different from the past.  It is a waste of time to study Hannibal's tactics in the Second Punic Wars so as to copy them in the Third World War. What worked well in cavalry battles will not necessarily be of much benefit to cyber warfare. 

Science is not just about predicting the future, though. Scholars in all fields often seek to broaden our horizons, thereby opening before us new and unknown futures.  This is especially true of history.  Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don't normally consider.  Historians study the past not in order to repeat it; but in order to be liberated from it. 

...

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past.  It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and to begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine.  By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape -- and we can begin to think and dream differently.  Studying history will not tell us what to chose, but it at least gives us more options."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tommorow
Yuval Noah Harari