I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.
Interpretation
The future of medicine may shift from treating illnesses to enhancing human abilities.
Yuval Noah Harari suggests that in the 21st century, the focus of medicine might transition from simply healing those who are ill to enhancing the health and capabilities of individuals who are already well. He illustrates this by highlighting advancements in memory repair, indicating that the same techniques developed to treat conditions like Alzheimer's could also be applied to enhance the cognitive functions of healthy individuals, reflecting a significant evolution in medical practice and human enhancement.
In practice
In a health seminar discussing the future of technology in medicine.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'
The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for free and independent life: the mechanism that makes it possible is that which assured the maintenance, with the internal environment, of all the conditions necessary for the life of the elements.
After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.
We know that efficiency and effectiveness are increased when you're getting sufficient sleep, and it will take you longer to do the same thing on an underslept brain, which means you end up having to stay awake longer. So goes the vicious cycle.
There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me, it'd be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why.
...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases.
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