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And most people accepted it because they had no other choice. Well, this was the common wisdom throughout history. You also talk a lot about Dataism in the book, and how Dataism sees humans as "merely tools." And it strikes me that while we seem to want a kind of immortality - virtual or real - because we're scared, we want to control life, or, as you put it, show we're superior to other animals, isn't it all pointless? Wouldn't we live happier lives if we got over ourselves and accepted that we're all going to die? At that point, yes, we could overcome old-age and death, but we'll also become redundant and irrelevant. But once you have the knowledge, you basically hack humanity and understand how the mechanism operates, at that point you also reach a situation in which external systems, external algorithms, artificial intelligence maybe, will understand us better than we understand ourselves, and out-perform us in almost any task and skill. To overcome old age and death you need to decipher the secrets of human biochemistry: how the body functions, how the brain functions, so that you can repair damage and fight deterioration of the system.
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The very same technology which will enable us to overcome old age and death will also make most humans irrelevant and redundant. Yes, and this is one of the main dangers. But even as we get more obsessed by the idea, immortality will not mean what it means to us today, so we're going to be disappointed, aren't we? And we'll realize we're not as important as we thought. And if we look at some of the developments you touch on in the book: eugenics, for instance, and you can see how the CRISPR-cas9 technique is making human gene editing seem more socially acceptable, or bioelectronics, and we have our brains stored in databases, immortality may seem feasible. But in the long run it is certainly feasible.Īs you say, we can't really imagine what the future will be. But my impression is that for my generation, it won't happen in the next 30, 40, 50 years. Regarding the feasibility: within a century or two, it's feasible this will be science and not science fiction. And this is something I guess most people would welcome. And what we're talking about is not a situation where you take a pill and live to be a million, but incremental, gradual advances in medicine, which, hopefully, every 10 years allow you to gain another 10 years of good health. But almost anybody would say "yes" if you ask them if they want to live another 10 years in good health. Yuval Noah Harari: Personally - and I guess anybody - if you ask them whether they would like to live to be a million, it's a nonsensical question, because we can't imagine what it means. But how do you feel about immortality? Can you see yourself living to an age of 150+ years, or even 500, as you describe may be possible in the near future? DW: I'm really taken by the idea of overcoming death in your new book, "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow." I'm not especially keen on it myself.