Yuval Harari (Yuval Noah Harari), born in Israel in 1976, is a doctor of history at Oxford University, a young geek and a new historian with global attention.
is currently a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
has written the best-selling books " Brief History of Humanity ", " Brief History of the Future ", " Brief History of Today ".
Review of human history
Inequality can be regarded as the norm in human society. Since the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, almost all civilizations and all societies have various hierarchies: class dimension, race dimension, and gender dimension hierarchy. Even within the family, there is a certain hierarchy between the husband and wife, and between the parents and children.
It was not until the 20th century that equality became one of the most respected values. Of course, not societies around the world have become completely equal, but looking at the history of the 20th century, we can indeed see that long-standing inequality has been greatly bridged in this historical period: on a global scale, the gap between different regions and countries has narrowed; and within a society, the gap between different classes, races, and genders has also become smaller. Equality has become the most important value concept, and narrowing inequality has become the core of the political, social and cultural processes.
Looking to the future, the trend of equalization may reverse in the 21st century, the gap that narrowed in the 20th century may expand again in the 21st century, and even the degree of inequality in the 21st century may be unprecedented in human history.
compares international inequality in the 19th and 21st centuries. During the 19th century industrial revolution , people witnessed a huge gap between different countries in the world. At that time, humans mastered new energy, steam engine , oil, electricity, and radio, which gave people new technological and industrial power, allowing people to engage in production more conveniently, richer and more efficiently. But this new power is not shared equally by all countries. In fact, there are only a very small number of countries, such as Britain, France, Germany, and then Japan and the United States, who led the wave of the industrial revolution and conquered and dominated the unindustrialized countries with new powers. Other countries in the world did not keep up with the pace of the industrial revolution in time. It took countries like China and India about a hundred years to bridge the gap that was torn in the 19th century; while other countries and regions, such as Africa, have not been able to bridge this gap to this day.
And if we look forward to the next few decades, we will find that a new industrial revolution is coming. Human beings have once again mastered a new and huge power, which is even more powerful than steam engines, oil, and electricity, that is, biotechnology and computer technology. This power is not just used to produce textiles, food, transportation, weapons, their main products will be the body, brain and mind. For thousands of years, humans have learned how to change the surrounding environment, tame animals, and cultivate plants. Humans have learned how to change the structure of economy, society, and politics. But there is one thing that has not changed, that is, humans themselves - the body, brain, and mind of humans today are no essentially different from those of ancient China and even humans in the Stone Age. The upcoming technological revolution will change human beings themselves, and people will learn how to design, process, and manufacture the body, brain and mind. Similar to the situation in the 19th century, the new forces mastered by the industrial revolution in the 21st century are likely to remain not shared equally by all countries, but by a few countries leading the trend. The resulting gap may be larger than the 19th century, and this time, countries left behind by history may never have the opportunity to catch up again.
At the same time, we are also likely to see the gap arising from within society, because of the above-mentioned scientific and technological revolution, especially the biological revolution.The past gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the king and the peasant was in the economic sense, the legal sense, and the political sense, but never in the biological sense. In history, some social cultures have indeed made people imagine that the privileged class has a superior and nobler "bloodline". ——But that is not true. According to our existing biological knowledge, the basic physiological and psychological abilities are the same between kings and farmers, and the differences between them are only social, political, and economic differences. But in the 21st century, new technologies will give people unprecedented abilities, allowing a biological gap between the rich and the poor: the rich elite will be able to design themselves or their offspring to become "superman" with higher physiological and psychological abilities, and humans will thus be divided into different biological classes, and the previous socio-economic class systems may be transformed into biological classes.
death problem
even the social position of death will change due to the biological revolution. In human history, death has always performed the great function of making everyone equal. Even the most powerful person in a society - the king, the emperor, and the pope, will eventually die. Death is regarded as the inevitable fate of mankind and as God’s command: we will die because God created us in this way, and we can’t do anything about it - this is the premise shared by most cultures and civilizations.
But today, people have a new understanding of death, and more and more technology and business elites are rethinking death, and they regard death as a technical problem. From this perspective, the reason why people die is not God's will or natural laws, but because of technical failure: you die because your heart stops supplying blood, because cancer cells spread into your liver, and because bacteria erode your lungs. In theory, every technical problem will have a technical solution. Maybe you don’t know what the solution is, but as long as you have enough time and money, all technical problems will be solved. It must be emphasized that this is not a naive fantasy. Some of the most powerful elites and institutions in the world are trying to deal with this issue very seriously. For example, Google recently established a new company called "Calico", whose mission is to find ways to overcome death and aging.
The transformation from human destiny to technical problems also means that death will no longer serve as the greatest "balancing device" in human society. Because the technology that top institutions are trying to develop will be extremely expensive and will not be available to seven or eight billion people around the world. What is likely to happen is that only a very small number of elites can afford this technology. In the 20th century, both billionaires and poor poor people have extended their lives due to medical advances. However, in the 21st century, the gap between the rich and the poor is breaking again, and the rich will live far more than the poor. In the coming decades, wealthy elites may not be able to be "immortal" - they may be hit by cars, or killed by terrorists - but they can continue to extend their lives by paying enough money and receiving sufficient treatment. And when death becomes only a problem for the poor, the poor will be angry like never before, because even death is no longer equal. Rich people will be anxious like never before: in the past, when you knew you could not escape death, you would be more open-minded when facing the risk of death, because that does not mean losing thousands of years of life; and if you think you have the opportunity to achieve immortality, you will carefully avoid all the risks that may lead to death, and few people will give up such opportunities.
For such a future possibility, the advancement of medicine does not bridge but creates a huge class gap. The typical response is: This will not happen because we have experience from the 20th century.In the 20th century, most medical advances were initially applied to the middle class in developed countries, but they gradually benefited all mankind. For example, antibiotics and vaccines are now popular among the poorest people in South America and Africa.
But I want to remind the audience that we cannot take it for granted that all this happened in the 20th century will repeat in the 21st century, because the purpose of medicine is undergoing critical changes: in the past hundreds or even thousands of years, the main purpose of medicine was to treat patients (Healing the sick), and now medicine is becoming increasingly related to "upgrading the health". The former means that you imagine that there is a universal standard related to the natural physiological structure of human beings. If illness is lower than this standard, medical care is to help the sick return to that standard; the latter is to pursue over this standard, in order to allow certain specific people to gain abilities that most people do not have. If a certain upgrade becomes cheap and resources are sufficient, so that everyone can achieve the upgrade, a new universal standard will be generated, and someone will also try to obtain new advantages beyond this new standard.
Another factor that needs to be considered is that the reason why medical advances in the 20th century can produce a "trickle-down" that benefits the public is because modern countries in the 20th century have generally established public-oriented medical service systems. This does not stem from the kindness of political leaders, but because the operation of modern countries requires the population of the masses. Even the Nazi Germany, which ruled by tyrants like Hitler , established universally applicable medical services for German citizens, because the Nazi political elites knew that if they wanted to win the war and have strong economic strength, they needed a healthy and large population. Because the 20th century was the century of the masses, the army needed a large number of healthy soldiers, and factories also needed a large number of healthy workers. This is the deep logic of the publicization of medical services in the 20th century.
21st century may no longer be the century of the masses
However, the 21st century may no longer be the century of the masses. In the military field, due to the rapid development of military technology, the strength of the army no longer depends on the huge soldier base, but on the smaller and smaller highly specialized soldiers and their increasingly advanced technological advantages. Professional soldiers in the future will become more and more like superheroes in science fiction movies, with super equipment and super abilities, while most ordinary people will no longer have "military value".
thus introduces a serious question: Will people lose their "economic value"? The trend we can observe is that increasingly intelligent computers and robots are crowding humans out of their jobs.
can be used as an example of the situation of drivers and doctors. Ten years ago, many experts claimed that the traffic conditions of urban roads were full of uncertainties, and vehicle driving technology to deal with such situations was too complicated for computers, and car drivers were a job that must be done by humans. But today, many experts have predicted that by 2025, autonomous vehicles will appear in some cities. In the future, some cities will even ban humans from driving because humans will violate regulations, drive drunk, and be tired; while the complete artificial intelligence does not have these defects. Artificial intelligence can also be connected to each other through the network. Humans driving on the front cannot know each other's ideas, but artificial intelligence drivers can share information to avoid car accidents. ——And today, car accidents cause more deaths than all kinds of violent killings. From this, it is speculated that thousands of taxi drivers and bus drivers will lose their jobs and people will be replaced by artificial intelligence.
Similarly, human doctors may also disappear. Human doctors can only make diagnosis based on several quick questions and tests. They cannot grasp all similar cases around the world, nor do they know the complete disease history of the patients and their relatives and DNA. Human doctors will also be tired, sick and angry; compared with humans, artificial intelligence can do better. IBM is developing Watson project, which can collect cases around the world and continuously update its huge database. It can obtain disease history and DNA data of users and their relatives and friends, and make diagnostic and treatment plans through sophisticated data analysis. Users can answer Watson's questions at their homes and conduct various tests without limit; Watson can also accompany users anytime and anywhere through smartphone apps or wearable devices, pay attention to their health, monitor their blood pressure and heartbeat, and give timely health advice. Of course, such artificial intelligence doctors still have some technical and legal problems to be solved, so they will not replace human doctors tomorrow. However, the advantage of the Watson project is that it takes 10 years to train a human doctor, and only one can be trained at a time; for artificial intelligence, as long as one is concentrated on overcoming a technical difficulty, its results can be copied to countless terminals once and for all, thus creating unlimited value.
Common questions about this are: artificial intelligence may be competent for intellectual labor, but can it be competent for emotional labor? If you suffer from a terrible disease like cancer, do you want treatment from a cold machine or from a warm-hearted human doctor? But I think there is actually a third option on this superficial second-choice topic: heartwarming artificial intelligence. For artificial intelligence, human emotions are nothing more than a biological-chemical process that can recognize and respond to emotional changes in your heart through expressions and sounds. Now, some marketing companies are already using similar technical means to judge the caller's psychological state. Computer programs can receive your voice, analyze your tone and wording, judge your current emotional status and personality type based on a huge database, and then combine these two analysis results to match you with appropriate services. In this regard, artificial intelligence also seems to do better than humans, they have no feelings themselves, but they can recognize and respond to your feelings.
A thrilling question
I would like to ask the audience a slightly thrilling question: Will humans become useless? The optimistic argument believes that even if machines replace humans in many positions, new jobs will still emerge, and humans will transfer to new positions, especially in the service industry, and therefore are unlikely to be completely driven out of the labor market. However, the two basic abilities of human beings are physiological ability and cognitive-psychological ability. From the 19th to the 20th century, machines took on large-scale jobs that required physiological ability, such as agriculture, and human beings moved to positions that required cognitive ability; and now, machines have also begun to have cognitive ability and replaced human beings in related positions. We do not know whether humans still have the third ability - capabilities that machines do not have, so we cannot take it for granted that the 21st century will simply repeat the history of the 20th century.
finally compares the 19th and 21st centuries again. The industrial revolution in the 19th century produced the working class, and the social problems and social hopes at that time were concentrated in this new class; and the new industrial revolution in the 21st century may also produce a new mass class - the unemployed class. The new problem and challenge may be where these unemployed people who have no jobs, these useless people in the economic sense, will they go? I paint a picture of the future with an evil topographical color: new inequality may divide society into two completely opposite parts: one side is a new "upgraded elite" and the other side is a new "useless proletariat".
Scholars review
commentator Cui Zhiyuan pointed out that the English title of Harari's book "A Brief History of Humanity" is "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", and in the Chinese translation, "sapiens" (Homoto Sapiens) is replaced by the subtitle "From Animals to God". This statement implies that this book is not science fiction, but a deep philosophical reflection presented in humorous and sensible language.The human, who claims to be the "primaries of all things", has been confirmed by disciplines such as biology, anthropology, archaeology, , and archaeology, which is only one of the six human animals. In the last chapter of the book, Harari suggests that in the future, a small part of this "animal" will become "God", and the rest of the masses will become useless Homo sapiens, and biological class struggles will follow.
Cui Zhiyuan agreed that the equal progress in the 20th century would not be taken for granted to be reproduced in the 21st century, but he also pointed out based on the logic in the book that the struggle of biological class does not necessarily become the dominant force in the new century. Harari has argued that compared to other animals, the greatest advantage of Homo sapiens in history is cooperation, and there are a series of institutional inventions around cooperation, such as "law fiction" - treating group legal persons as individual individuals. Cui Zhiyuan is optimistic that the advantageous ability of cooperation will not end in the 21st century. What is more optimistic is that everyone shares certain aspects of "God" rather than a few people becoming the almighty "God". Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century philosopher, proposed that God wants his people to share his attributes; American thinker Emerson also said that everyone is God under the roof. Inequality and limitations make it impossible for people who are "god-like" to fully realize their potential. But even in the United States, biological improvements such as organ transplantation, which are scarce in resources, have formed random object selection through legislation rather than being monopolized by the rich. Cui Zhiyuan imagined that human imagination of a "good society" may continue to determine the direction of the world under new technological conditions.
Another commentator Wang Hui Recalling that philosopher Amartya Sen had already discussed "what equality" in the 1980s, and today Harari discussed "what inequality": inequality in technology, biotechnology and other aspects. Wang Hui's comments are based on the comparison of these two types of vision . He pointed out that in the laboratory in New Jersey, large-scale replication and simulated pregnancy in humans are no longer technically problematic, but the constraints of legal and ethical traditions have prevented these technologies from becoming a reality. Social and political forces can change the direction of technological development to a certain extent. As the most important ideological tradition formed in the 19th century, the basic concept of Marxism, "social relations", can still be transformed into the interweaving of "what equality" and "what inequality". In recent decades, the concept of equality has undergone changes and progress, but people still need a political entity to help people change social relations. The New Jersey Laboratory example suggests that perhaps social justice, legal frameworks still have the ability to step in on new issues of equality.
Amatia Sen used "equality of agency" to refute the lack of vitality in "equality of redistribution". Appropriate social and political arrangements should enable people to have the ability to develop and improve, and even enjoy their personal abilities. In the sense of "activity", Wang Hui believes that Harari's discussion on inequality actually provides new possibilities for equality dialectically. He gave an example to illustrate that in more traditional values, improving ability does not point to the difference between power and hierarchy: Although the goal of popularizing Western medicine is to treat patients, the goal of traditional Chinese medicine has always been to improve physical fitness, which has not affected the popularization and fairness of traditional Chinese medicine. Perhaps it can make the development of medicine in the 21st century follow a logic similar to that of traditional Chinese medicine, except that it is not only the body, but also the mind as its area of improvement.
Wang Hui added that in addition to the usual intersubjective level, more systematic considerations must include at least three dimensions: first, the relationship between man and nature - no matter how intelligence evolves, as long as nature is still regarded as an object that can be developed indiscriminately, human beings will still face disasters; second, our relationship with future human beings, current legal and social moral construction should take into account the situation of future human beings; third, our connection with past cultural memory, technology can be combined with the preservation of cultural spiritual heritage.In short, the challenges facing mankind are diverse and the possibilities are diverse.
As a response to the two commenters, Harari clarified the ideological background of his views. In the long discussion on the issue of equality, people are accustomed to taking the premises such as "humans are the most intelligent creatures" and "human bodies and intelligence are unchanged" as the basis for granted, so no other animals are introduced. When these premises present a relative appearance, human beings need to rethink questions such as "what is human" and "what is human wisdom" and take into account equality among species. Currently, programmatic documents on equality, such as the "Man is born equal" in the US " Declaration of Independence ", all take equality at the biological level as the core argument, and under new conditions, equality will require a new support system.
Herali emphasized that he is not a technical determinist. The same technological foundation may lead to completely different social consequences, just as capitalism , socialism, and fascism are both products of the industrial revolution in the 19th century; and the appearance of the technologically developed future world will largely be the result of conscious discussions on ethics , law, and philosophy. He painted the most "sensational" prospects, more in the hope of attracting the attention of the humanities - after all, if only the task of designing futures was left to biological scientists and engineers, humanity would be truly in danger.
This article is reprinted from The Paper .
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