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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the potential of bioengineering and AI to enhance human capabilities and the unpredictability of such changes in desires and intentions.
Yuval Noah Harari discusses the concept of superhumans who harness advancements in bioengineering and artificial intelligence to augment their abilities. However, he warns that if individuals modify not only their physical capabilities but also their very thoughts and desires through these technologies, it leads to an unknown future where their goals and intentions could deviate significantly from what we currently understand. This raises important ethical and philosophical questions about the trajectory of human evolution and autonomy.
In practice
This quote can be used in a technology conference to spark discussion about the future of AI.
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.
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.
You go to a Japanese restaurant and have a wonderful dish, and the thing to do is take a picture with your phone, put it on Facebook, and see how many likes you get. If you don't share your experiences, they don't become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning.
Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.
No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it.
The first possibility of rural cleanliness lies in water supply.
Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers.
This field is not necessarily glamorous, nor does it often produce immediate results, but it seeks to increase our basic understanding of living processes.
When a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment. ... Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain.
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