DATALAC & Harari’s View about Information
What did Yuval Noah Harari say about the future of Homo sapiens at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2018, and why is information so important according to him?
Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli scientist, spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos 2018 about who will rule life on Earth in the future and how humans will change under the conditions of the ongoing technological revolution. He said that it is highly possible that we are one of the last generations of Homo sapiens. In one or two centuries, Earth will be home to creatures very different from us, just as we are different from Neanderthals or chimpanzees. This is because in the coming generations, we will learn how to edit our bodies and minds, and this will become the main product of the 21st-century economy.
Harari believes that the owners of the future of the planet will be those who control information. Whoever controls it will have the power to control life on the planet. Information is the most important asset in the world, even more so than land in ancient times or industrial equipment in recent centuries. If too much information is concentrated in the hands of a few selected people, humanity will not be divided into classes, but into different types.
The reason why information is so important is that we have reached the point where we can “hack” not only computers but also the human body. This requires two things: large computing power and large amounts of data, especially on biometrics. So far, no one has had these components to “hack” humanity. Even the KGB or the Spanish Inquisition, which were capable of monitoring people day and night, have never been able to do so.
Currently, the situation is changing thanks to two simultaneous revolutions: the development of computer science (the proliferation of machine learning, artificial intelligence) and the development of biology, especially neuroscience. This gives us necessary insights into how the human brain works. A century and a half of biological research can be summarized in the following statement: living organisms are algorithms. And we are currently learning how to decode these algorithms.
The most important invention for both revolutions is likely to be biometric sensors that convert biochemical processes in our bodies and brains into electronic signals that computers can analyze. By analyzing these signals, computers can understand how our bodies and brains work and what we want. Whoever has access to this information will have enormous power over our lives.
