Yuval Noah Harari, who is still in his early forties has taken the world by storm by his three wonderful books- ‘Sapiens-A Brief History of Mankind’, ‘Homo Dues- A Brief History of Tomorrow’ and ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’. He is an insightful historian. The way he has analysed and thrown lights on the facts from the beginning of the homo sapiens till today and the things to shape in the future is amazing, to say the least. But there is a section which denigrates him as a writer of ‘liberal elites’ because he has established with his unique logic that religion, socialism and many other forms of social structures and governments will be the things of the past.
The Communist Manifesto proclaims that: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. But when the Artificial Intelligence and Algorithm will replace the workers and managers nobody will exploit anybody. So where is the question of two hostile camps? Even today the communism has largely been rejected across the globe because now it no longer appeals to reason and imagination of the people.
The inexorable march of science will assert the supremacy of the Silicon Valley (Silicon Valley is a symbol), which will force the countries to give up the war and hostility. Artificial Intelligence will help produce the children, who will have immunity from the diseases. Death will be just a technical problem. There will be gadgets, which will forewarn about all the ills and ailments that may inflict any human being but the flip side of it will be that man/ women will always be haunted by some or other illnesses, which may lead to the incurable depression. Thus, the man can either evolve into a superman or will degenerate into subhuman. However, a question always lingers in mind that one can have all the paraphernalia, but can you write about love without human feelings? Terrorism, which has scared the whole world will be defeated only by the technology, which has partially been seen in the recent precision strike by the Indian Airforce in Balakot or the killing of Osama Bin Laden earlier in the Pakistani military haven,
In the days to come the agriculture, which used to provide jobs and foods to almost hundred per cent people at the beginning of the Homo Sapiens will not be pursued even by one per cent population because of the liberal use of the robotic technology developed by Artificial Intelligence. Most of the jobs will become redundant thanks to technology. The so-called debate and passionate discussion on the protection of individual privacy are meaningless because Artificial Intelligence will debunk them. Wars will be the things of the past, however, if it is ever fought, it will reduce the role of the humans to the minimum. He (Harari) has opined that ‘you are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in a conflict’. There will be no famine in the future but’ you are more at risk of dying due to obesity than starvation’.
Yuval Noah Harari is a Jew, but he regularly practices Vipassana and the Yoga for two hours every day, which gives him enough energy to cope with the challenges for another twenty-two hours. Written in simple and elegant language and in an engaging style, all three parts are unputdownable.