How upgrading humans will become the next billion-dollar industry
How upgrading humans will become the next billion-dollar
industry
Published: Apr 3, 2017 1:08 p.m. ET
Fifty years from now, today’s humans will be obsolete,
historian Yuval Harari says
By JEREMY OLSHAN Published: Apr 3, 2017 1:08 p.m. ET
Investors searching for the next transformative
technology destined to turn a bunch of Ivy League dropouts into billionaires,
and half the market into a loose slot machine, need only look in the mirror.
“The greatest industry of the 21st century will probably
be to upgrade human beings,” historian Yuval Harari, author of the fascinating
new book “Homo Deus,” told MarketWatch.
‘For the first
time in history it will be possible to translate economic inequality into
biological inequality.’
Yuval Harari
For all of humanity’s scientific, economic and artistic
achievements, we have neglected this ultimate self-improvement project, Harari
said. Our bodies and brains, after all, still run on the same hardware and
software that evolved some 200,000 years ago.
Alphabet’s Google already has a unit devoted to
overcoming death, Harari noted. And who can doubt that Apple will want to pick
from this new tree of knowledge, as well, or that after conquering self-driving
cars Uber, in spite of the antics of its CEO, will want to build an Übermensch?
As new technologies yield humans with much longer battery
lives, killer apps and godlike superpowers, within the next six decades, if
Harari is right, even the finest human specimens of 2017 will in hindsight seem
like flip phones.
There is, of course, a catch. Many of us will remain flip
phones, as the technology to upgrade humans to iPhones is likely to be costly,
and regulated differently around the world. These advances will likely “lead to
greater income inequality than ever before,” Harari said. “For the first time
in history it will be possible to translate economic inequality into biological
inequality.”
Such a divide could give rise to a new version of “old
racist ideologies that some races are naturally superior to others,” Harari
said. “Except this time the biological differences will be real, something that
is engineered and manufactured.”
At the same time, these superhumans will have less and
less to do, Harari, said, because robots and artificial intelligence will
perform more and more of the jobs with which obsolete humans used to be tasked.
So what will these future humans do all day? Will we sail
aboard an intergalactic cruise ship sitting on our butts while sucking down
junk food like the future humans in Pixar’s feel-good dystopian movie “Wall-E”?
Almost, Harari said.
“The only serious answer I can give is they will play
computer games,” Harari said.
“Immersive, 3D virtual-reality games that will be far
more fun and more exciting than anything in real life.”
If that sounds straight out of an episode of “Black
Mirror,” Harari noted that we have been playing variants on such games for
thousands of years. “This is actually not completely new — religion is in a
sense a virtual-reality game. There are a set of quite arbitrary laws, you have
to gain points, and if you gain enough points in this life you get to go on to
the next level.”
Given that choice, it may be preferable to remain a flip
phone in a dad bod case.
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