I’ve been reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In the first chapter The new human agenda, the author gives his interpretation of history and how humanity has ended up as it is today due to scientific and technological development – roughly as follows: humans seeking comfort and happiness developed technology to try to eradicate or at least mitigate ills such as famines and plagues. I find this view to be a bit naive, and I would at least add “seeking better ways of killing each other” to the list of factors encouraging technological development; but I can also see the argument that developing weapons is also ultimately about comfort and happiness, via the morally-perhaps-questionable route of, well, acquiring an abundance of resources and then protecting it.
Nonetheless, he then continues on to assert that this same drive will keep on transforming our world with unforeseeable consequences. I found this part to be a good reality check:
When people realize just how fast we are rushing towards the unknown, and that they cannot count even on death to shield them from it, their reaction is to hope that somebody will hit the brakes and slow us down. But we cannot hit the breaks, for several reasons.
Firstly, nobody knows where the brakes are. While some experts are familiar with developments in one field, such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, big data or genetics, no one is an expert on everything. No one is therefore capable of connecting all the dots and seeing the full picture. Different fields influence one another in such intricate ways that even the best minds cannot fathom how breakthroughs in artificial intelligence might impact nanotechnology or vice versa. Nobody can absorb all the latest scientific discoveries, nobody can predict how the global economy will look in ten years, and nobody has a clue where we are heading in such a rush. Since no one understands the system anymore, no one can stop it.
Secondly, if we somehow succeed in hitting the brakes, our economy will collapse, along with our society. As explained in a later chapter, modern economy needs constant and indefinite growth in order to survive. If growth ever stops, the economy won’t settle down to some cozy equilibrium; it will fall to pieces. […]
(Page 58-59, “Can Someone Please Hit the Breaks?")
The book is definitely growing on me: it is not the one-sided, ever-optimistic rosy vision of a utopistic future built by Us Enlightened Humans (tm) that I expected, but rather a fairly nuanced analysis of the fundamental forces that motivate humans and got us to where we are and will continue to drive us – for good or ill.