Historian Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book shows an odd congruence with Stephen Hawking’s last book, in that both these narratives are concerned with the future of humanity, writes Utpal Kumar.
How would you react when you are told to read historian Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book alongside Stephen Hawking’s last work, published soon after the scientist’s death in March this year? You would be astonished. Or bewildered. Or even run the risk of being taken flippantly. For, what’s common between a leading historian and a legendary scientist?
Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century delves into what the Israeli historian calls “the here and now”. The book is lucidly written and well-argued, but it may not seem as original and pathbreaking as Sapiens, which looked back at the human past, and Homo Deus, an equally absorbing but a little less authoritative exploration into humanity’s future. Like American futurist Alvin Toffler, who suggested way back in 1970 how “change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it”, Harari reminds us of similar disruptive, destabilising and stressful changes unleashed upon humans at an unprecedentedly rapid rate.
The author writes in a “Tofflerian” manner, “The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market, and create a massive new useless class, leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle.” Despite the crisis of this gigantic scale, he bemoans, the political establishments worldwide seem indifferent, insipid and inapt in handling the “disruptive technology”. What’s more worrisome is that the job crisis might only worsen over the decades, with technological innovations taking a firmer grip over humanity and “a useless class of millions of workers” becoming a permanent feature. So much so that Harari wants Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews, who solely survive on state support, as “the model of the future rather than a fossil from the past”.
Sadly, job losses represent just a minuscule fraction of the problem. The real issue is the pervading disillusionment worldwide with the liberal story. Humans, as Harari puts it succinctly, think in terms of stories rather than facts, numbers or equations. During the early 20th century, the global elites of New York, London, Berlin and Moscow formulated “three grand stories”—the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. While World War II knocked fascism out, communism collapsed with the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Since the global financial crisis of 2008 people across the world have become increasingly disillusioned with the liberal story. Walls and firewalls are back. Writes Harari, “To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Everything is perfectly clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying.”
Harari comes to his brilliant self while analysing the decline of liberalism. He believes the liberal story is faltering because it does not have the answers to the questions posed by AI and bio-engineering. For, liberalism places free will at the highest pedestal, but where is the scope for “free will” when such disruptive technologies are threatening to hack human minds? “In the past, we have gained the power to manipulate the world around us and to reshape the entire planet… In the coming century biotech and infotech will give us the power to manipulate the world inside us and reshape ourselves,” Harari writes. And when the world inside us is hacked, the very idea of “free will” becomes redundant.
So, is it all over for the liberal story? Harari doesn’t think so. “At the end of the day, humankind won’t abandon the liberal story, because it doesn’t have any alternative… having nowhere to go, they will eventually come back,” he writes. The alternative scenario, for him, is people completely giving up on having a global story of any kind, and “instead seek shelter with local nationalist and religious tales”.
But for any story—liberal or otherwise—to survive, it has to effectively deal with the disruptive technologies. “If liberalism, nationalism, Islam or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms and bioengineering—it will also need to incorporate them into a new meaningful narrative.”
For all his brilliance, Harari’s approach to technology seems pessimistic in the same way we were made to believe, when computers first came into the scene, that the latter would usurp all employments. Instead, these new technologies created more jobs, many of them unheard of till then and even unthought of.
Here Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions comes to the rescue and provides a more dispassionate view. For, where historians stop, scientists normally take over—and where scientists give up, philosophers come to the act.
Hawking tells how computers are likely to overtake humans in intelligence at some point in the next 100 years, if Murphy’s Law is to be believed. When that happens, he reminds, we will need to ensure that the computers have goals aligned with ours. “As an optimist, I believe that AI can work in harmony with us. We simply need to be aware of the dangers, identify them, employ the best possible practice and management and prepare for its consequences well in advance.”
Unlike Harari, who advises people to take the meditation route—the Israeli historian is a Vipassana practitioner—Hawking believes going outward is the way out. He fears the human race is not going to have a future “if we don’t go into space”. “In a way the situation is like that in Europe before 1492. People might have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet, the discovery of the ‘New World’ made a profound difference to the Old,” Hawking writes.
The late scientist’s support for a wild space goose chase would not just make economic sense in the world where humans face a scenario where jobs are rapidly shrinking, but also an existential one. “One way or another, I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years which, as geological time goes, is the mere blink of an eye,” he writes, advising that the human race “shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or one planet”.
Hawking answers other “Big Questions”, explaining why God doesn’t exist, how it all began with the Big Bang, why intelligent life should exist in planets other than the Earth, and how time travel can be a reality in the future.
Anyone who has already read Harari and Hawking won’t have many surprises in the two books. Yet, their latest offerings appeal for their lucidity, simplicity and sheer brilliance in observations, both scientific and historical. (Harari’s statement claiming there’s nothing new in fake news—“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion”—is a case in point.) And when the two books are read together, they complement to tell one, organic story. Where Harari stops, Hawking steps in.
The message is loud and clear, and Hawking puts it more pertinently: “Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let’s make sure that wisdom wins.”