I’ve finished reading “Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind” by Yuval Harari, which concludes that money, religion and empire have been the primary issues which have most influenced the growth and development of humanity. Identified as one of the 100 best books of the 21st Century by the New York Times, the Guardian’s comment was “It altered how I view our species and our world.” It did exactly that for me and is definitely not a feel-good read.
Harari goes through the historical beginnings of money, empire and religion and identifies periods of time when humans, often with a large number of options, made decisions that, once broadly accepted, become difficult to impossible to change.
Beginning 70,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens, (that’s us and referred to as humans from now on) spread out of Africa and, from then until now, made choices which, once established, became permanent reality in behavior that clearly altered our species and the world. From then until now, Harari shows, there were other options which, if selected, may have changed history.
The agricultural revolution began twelve thousand years ago when humans ended their hunter-gatherer life style, domesticated food animals (sheep and goats), and grew wheat. The first farmers declared ownership of their land and animals, which resulted in the development of money as the medium to determine value of property owned or exchanged. They gathered into small communities and, within a few thousand years, those small communities grew into empires and dynasties like Egypt, Rome and, more recently, the United States of America.
Polytheism gave birth to monotheist religions, with the first of many one-God efforts occurring in Egypt more than a thousand years before Christianity and Islam. Those two, each with very small and local beginnings, won the contest of monotheistic religions and currently with hundreds of millions of followers, played a key role in the development of humanity. For more than 1500 years those two one-God religions were willing to fight and kill those that didn’t share their belief or their way of expressing their belief. Catholics and Protestants, Christians all, fought with each other for hundreds of years. There is also ongoing conflict between Muslims of different sects, most commonly Shias and Sunnis. The question of whether religion has been good or bad for humanity will likely be debated forever.
The industrial revolution, occuring about 200 years ago, resulted in family and community being replaced by government and markets, leading to the present time when humans have transcended planet earth and are now considering replacing natural selection with intelligent design.
Harari’s 2014 edition of Sapiens closes with “The Animal that became God”. First, reminding the reader that “Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime has so far produced little we can be proud of;” he then suggests that humans are “on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction”. He did not indicate concern for artificial intelligence.
In the 2024 edition, recalling the events of the last 10 years, his concerns include the increased pace of global extinctions, increasing risk from climate change, the increase of global tensions, and “perhaps the most important thing that has happened since 2014 is the evolution of artificial intelligence”. “I thought I was warning about developments that might happen centuries from now, or at least a few decades in the future. By 2024 the future had arrived. Highly intelligent algorithms already get to know us better than we know ourselves, and we are floundering in a data torrent that threatens to dissolve our societies.”
Local government officials are being offered truck-loads of tax cash and other benefits to support construction of a network of data centers which will enable the billion and trillionaires eager to get even richer by designing artificial Intelligence which they may or may not be able to control. Opposition to data centers is frequently based on concern for environmental issues. While those issues are worth defending, the possibility that the data centers have the potential and capacity to result in non-human, godlike, management by other than human intelligence is an even greater concern.
We, all of us, need to think long and hard about what we really want. It may be our last chance.
10/25/26
Submitted to DNT as opinion on10/29
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