编者按：7月8日，畅销书《人类简史》和《未来简史》的作者，以色列历史学家尤瓦尔·赫拉利在造就未来大会之《主动进化》发表了精彩演讲。本文为他的演讲英文全文。
Yuval:
Hello everyone.
Welcome to this evening.
If I can just have a bit of light on the audience so I’m seeing people and not to darkness.
Thanks.
What I want to talk to you today is about the next big revolution in history. A revolution which will occur during our lifetime.
Actually, it’s beginning already today or in the last few years. Now throughout history there are many different revolutions, the revolution in economics, in society, in politics, in technology. But one thing always remained constant throughout history for thousands of years and this is humanity itself.
We are still the same humans that we were in the time of Confucius or in the time of the pyramids or of the Bible or even in the time of the Stone Age. We still have the same bodies, the same brains, the same minds that we had ten or twenty or thirty thousand years ago. This has been the great constant of history.
However, as we look to the future to the next few decades, what we are likely to see is of course many more revolutions in economics, in technology, in politics, and so forth.
But above all, we are likely to seem a major revolution in humanity itself.
For the first time in history, we will change not just the world outside us but above all, we will change the world inside us.
For thousands of years, humans have learned how to control and manipulate the world outside us, but they could not control what was happening inside themselves.
We knew for example if a river was flowing, we knew how to build a dam and stop the river from flowing. But we did not know how to stop the body from ageing, the river of time of age. We did not know how to stop or reverse that.
Similarly, if you went to sleep at night and a mosquito starting buzzing in your ear and interrupting your sleep, people knew how to kill the mosquitos, how to drain the swamps and kill all the mosquitos. But if you went to sleep at night and a thought began buzzing in your mind, disturbing your sleep, We did not know what to do about that. We have no control over thoughts in the same way we have control over the mosquitos.
In the coming decades however, we will learn or try to learn how to control age and how to control thoughts, and not just rivers and mosquitos.
The most important products of the 21st century economy will not be food and vehicles and textiles. The most important products will be bodies and brains and minds.
And it is likely that within maybe a century or two, homo sapiens will disappear and will be replaced by entities which are much more different from us than we are different from chimpanzees or Neanderthals.
If this indeed happens, if we did indeed gain these abilities to control and engineer bodies and brains, it will not just be the greatest revolution ever in the history of human kind. It will actually be the greatest revolution ever in the history of life itself.
For 4 billion years of the evolution of life on Earth, the basic laws and principles of life did not change. It did not change at all.
For 4 billion years, all of the evolution of life was governed by the laws of natural selection. It doesn’t matter if you were an amoeba or a dinosaur. You evolved by natural selection.
And similarly for 4 billion years, all life was confined to the organic realm. It doesn’t matter if you were a mushroom or a tomato or a giraffe or a homo sapiens. You were made of organic compounds and therefore you were subject to the laws of organic chemistry.
This did not change for 4 billion years.
But it might change. It’s even likely to change in the next few decades, in the next century or two centuries.
With the advance of science, we are likely to replace natural selection with intelligent design as the fundamental principle of evolution.
Not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds but our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, of the Microsoft Cloud, of the Tencent Cloud, of the IBM Cloud. This will be intelligent design which will control the future evolution of life.
And similarly, life is likely to breakout of the limited organic realm and we are likely to start engineering and producing inorganic lifeforms.
Lifeforms that may go beyond our wildest dreams because our wildest dreams so far even they have been subject to the laws of organic chemistry.
Now how exactly will this great revolution occur?
How exactly will we change the basic principles and laws of life?
The three main ways which we today see opening before us to gain control of life and change life. Three ways which are not contradictory but complimentary and we are likely to march along all of these three ways simultaneously.
The first way is biological engineering.
To take the basic biological organic structures that natural selection has developed for millions of years and to start playing with them, to start changing them.
Homo sapiens itself who today controls the world, like me. Homo sapiens itself evolve by natural selection which was a very, very slow process. A hundred thousand years ago humans on Earth already looked like us. They had the same basic body. Humans had brains much like ours. Actually, their brains were even larger than the brains of humans today , but they were still insignificant animals, insignificant apes.
If you went 100,000 years ago and visited Earth, you will see people around but they were insignificant animals with very little impact on the world. And they couldn’t produce anything more sophisticated than sticks and stone tools.
Today in contrast, we are the most important animal on the planet and we can produce atom bombs and spaceships and super computers.
What made the difference?
As far as we know the difference resulted from small changes in the human DNA which translated into small changes in the internal structure of the brain. We are not sure exactly what but the internal structure of our brain is different from that of humans 100,000 years ago. And this was enough to transform this insignificant ape into the ruler of planet Earth.
Now in the 21st century, we want to do similar things but we don’t want to wait 100,000 year or millions of years for natural selection and random mutations to do the work.
We want to split it up and we want to do it by our design. By changing intentionally, the internal structure of the brain and the DNA and the body as a whole.
Some people at least wants to enhance and upgrade human beings in the same way that we enhance and upgrade our smartphones or computers. And we are gaining the technology to do that.
For example, it’s today a common procedure to take a gene from a fluorescent jellyfish and implant it in a different animal like a rabbit and you get a rabbit that glows in a green fluorescent light. Technically this can also be done to humans.
You can take a human embryo and implant there a gene from a jellyfish and you will get a human that glows from a green fluorescent light.
This sounds more like art than something that really changes the world. But the same basic principle can be used to change many other much more important qualities of the human being or any other animal and change not just the way we look but even the way we think and the way we feel and the way we behave.
So this is the first and most conservative way to start reengineering life.
To basically maybe speed up natural selection and take the basic building blocks that biology has given us and rearrange them in new ways. There is another way more radical which says, why stay limited to the building blocks which we got from natural selections?
Which we got from biology?
Why not start combining our organic body with inorganic parts, with bionic hands and bionic legs and bionic eyes and so forth. And this may sound like science fiction but it’s already being done also.
For example here you can see a picture, a real picture of people have lost one or two arms because of an accident.
And they have been fitted with bionic arms to replace their missing limb. And the amazing thing about these arms is they can be operated by thought.
When I want to raise my arm, I don’t know how I do it. I just think about it and the arm goes up.
Similarly in the case of these people, when they want to raise their bionic arm they just think I want to raise my arm and their arm rises because the signal is coming from the brain.
A computer can read and interpret them and translate it into a movement of an arm.
Now so far, these bionic arms are a very poor replacement for the organic arms of you and me.
But this is just the beginning.
The big difference between the bionic arms and the organic arms is that the organic arms that we have are basically the same design, the same model that has been around for ten of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. You cannot upgrade them.
With bionic arms, you can upgrade them or replace them every year or two in the same way you upgrade or replace your smartphone.
In the future we could create such arms which are far more powerful, which are far more dexterous than normal organic arms.
Maybe you want more than two arms. You can have four. You can have six. With organic arms you are limited to the design of natural selection, just these two arms.
But once you switch to the engineering of cyborgs. Cyborgs are entities that combine organic with inorganic parts. Then there is no restrictions. You can have four. You can have six. You can have eight arms. Even more amazingly.
With organic bodies, all the parts of an organism needs to be in the same place, in the same time, in direct contact for the organism to function. In order to make use of my organic arms, the arm has to be directly attached to my body. It’s obvious otherwise it can’t work.
However, with bionic arms and with cyborgs this is not a necessary condition. You can detach the arms from the body, I can stand here in front of you, talking to you about cyborgs and my arms can be back at my hotel or back home in Israel washing the dishes or whatever.
Many of the basic limitations of organic entities, of organic animals, are irrelevant or less relevant to cyborgs, to entities that combine organic with inorganic parts.
But even this second way of re-engineering life, creating cyborgs, is still not so very radical, because the command and control centres of these entities remain the organic brain. It’s still a human brain, basically, operating all kinds of devices.
But with the third way, which is the most radical way of re-engineering and gaining control of life, and this is the creation of completely inorganic life forms.
The idea is – why keep even the organic command and control centres, maybe we can replace even them. Maybe we can replace the organic brain with an artificial intelligence and create completely inorganic life forms.
And we see today that artificial intelligence is developing at the tremendous speed, many things that ten or twenty years ago, it was thought that computers and AI will never be able to do, or will never be able to do better than humans, like drive a car, or defeating the world champion at go, now they are doing it.
So, it is likely that within the next century or two, we will be able to create completely independent life forms, controlled by artificial intelligence, and after 4 billion years of evolution of organic life, this will be something really new.
Inorganic life forms, not subject to the laws of organic chemistry. It should be emphasized, however, that even though this will be life, it will not necessarily be conscious life.
In science fiction, usually, there is a big confusion between intelligence and consciousness, and in most science fiction movies, and science fiction books, it is assumed that once computers and robots gain enough intelligence, they will also gain consciousness, and be in this way also like human beings.
But, the truth is that intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, consciousness is the ability to feel things, to have subjective experiences, to feel pain, and pleasure, and love, and hate, and anger and fear.
Now, humans, and all other mammals, in their case, consciousness and intelligence go together. We solve problems by having feelings. And this creates a confusion, because we think that once computers, or AI will be as intelligent as us, they will also gain consciousness.
And in the typical science fiction movie, the computer of the robot, they gain consciousness, they have feelings, they have emotions, and either the scientist falls in love with the robot, or the robot becomes angry and tries to kill all the humans, this is science fiction, this isn’t science.
As far as we know today, in 2017, when we speak about non-organic life forms, and when we speak about artificial intelligence, there is no evidence, there is no reason to assume that it will necessarily be conscious life forms.
We know all kinds of non-conscious life forms even today, trees for example, are non-conscious life forms, mushrooms as far as we know have no consciousness. Mushrooms have great intelligence, at least some kinds of mushrooms are able to solve all kinds of problems in a very sophisticated way.
AI is likely to be more like a mushroom, than like a human being in this respect. It might be incredibly intelligent, far more intelligent than human beings, but it doesn’t mean it will have any consciousness.
At least as far as we know in 2017, whereas there has been immense development of computer intelligence over the last 60 or 70 years, there has been exactly no development of computer consciousness and there is no reason to assume we are approaching that point.
Maybe, or not just maybe, very likely, computers are just developing intelligence in a very different way than mammals and humans.
Now, whether conscious or not, once we develop inorganic life forms, once inorganic life forms begin to spread, we might see another very big revolution, unprecedented revolution in the history of life, which is breaking out of planet Earth.
For 4 billion years, another permanent fixture of life, was that all of life, as far as we know, was confined to planet Earth. No living organism was able to leave this planet, travel in outer space and colonize other planets or other solar systems or other galaxies.
And this is because natural selection has adapted us to the very unique conditions of this planet, and it is extremely difficult to maintain organic life forms on the moon, or on Mars or in outer space.
But once you switch to inorganic life forms, it becomes far easier.
It is far easier to maintain an intelligent robot in outer space or on another planet, than to maintain a human being.
So again, all these science fiction movies, which show people like us travelling in space ships throughout the universe and colonizing and exploring other planets, this is just fantasy.
We might indeed see expeditions leaving planet Earth within the next centuries, to explore and colonize outer space and other planets, but these expeditions will be manned, or not so much manned, but yes, manned by non-humans, by AI and robots, not by organic life forms.
And finally, one other big revolution which we might see is not the extinction of death, but a fundamental change in the nature of death.
Throughout history humans regarded death as the inevitable fate of all humans. Different mythologies explained that humans die and all animals die because God said so, or because the laws of the universe say so, and we must obey them, there is no way to escape death.
But in the coming century, it is quite likely that science will redefine death not as a metaphysical destiny of human kind, but rather as just another technical problem. Humans don’t die because God said so, or because nature said so, humans always die because of some technical problem.
The heart stops pumping blood, or dangerous germs are spreading in the stomach or in the liver, it’s all technical problems, and science usually says that every technical problem has a technical solution.
Maybe we don’t know the technical solution yet, but if we invest enough time and energy and money,
we can find solutions to all these technical problems.
So one of the most important scientific projects of the 21st century is likely to be to use all the new technologies of bio-engineering and AI and so forth, to overcome old age and death, and this is no longer the realm of science fiction.
Even some very serious people, for example Google corporation, one of the most powerful and ambitious corporations in the world, has lately established a sub-company, called Calico, whose stated aim is to overcome old age and death.
You don’t need to wait for God, you don’t need to wait for the priests to do something, now death is becoming the province of engineers. They can allegedly, maybe, solve death for us.
And if this happens, then death will no longer be the great equalizer, it may become a great divider of human kind.
Throughout history, the one thing that was equal to all humans was death.
The poor people throughout history always took pleasure in thinking that – OK, now in this life all these rich people they have a much better life than I do, but in the end, we will all die, they will also die, even the Emperor, the most powerful and richest person in the country, he will also die.
But just try to imagine how the world looks like in 50 or in 100 years when we have better and better treatments for old age and related problems, but they are very expensive, and as a result most people continue to grow old and to die, but the rich people, they get to live on, rich and beautiful and young forever, or at least, for a very long time.
The amount of anger of social and political may be immense.
And it is so far I’ve been talking about all these technological miracles, from a cosmic perspective of what it will do to life, and I now want to dedicate the last part of the talk to discussing some social and political and cultural implications of these technologies.
One danger that the new technologies pose is that while some people will be upgraded to being super humans, other people, maybe even the majority of the people in the world will become part of the new useless class.
In the same way that the industrial revolution of the 19th century created a new class, the urban proletariat, and much of the political and social history of the 19th and 20th century revolved around the problems and fears and hopes of the new urban working class, in a similar way, the revolutions of the 21st century might create a new useless class, millions, even billions of people with no economic value, and no political power, because they can’t do anything better than computers and robots and AI.
Taxi drivers and truck drivers will be replaced by self-driving cars, human doctors will be replaced by AI doctors, even most teachers might be replaced by AI teachers, much better than human teachers.
So what to do with billions of useless people?
This may be the biggest social and political and economic question of the 21st century. And it is a question we need to start addressing today, not in 30 or 40 years, because we need to ask ourselves, what should we teach our kids today, so they would still have a job, or they would still have relevant skills in 30 or 40 years.
And the problem is that nobody knows what the job market will look like in 30 years, the only thing we know for certain about the job market of the year 2050 is that it will be completely different from the job market of today.
That’s it, that’s what we know for sure. Everything else is speculation.
So, for the first time in history, we don’t really know what kind of skills we need to give our children.
Most likely the safest bet is not coding computer or anything else, the safest bet is to teach children how to continue learning and continue changing throughout their lives.
If they focus on one skill, on a particular set of information, they’re doomed because the world will keep changing again and again.
They need, above all the skill, the mental flexibility to keep changing and learning and reinventing themselves again and again throughout their lives. If not, they will become obsolete very quickly.
Another thing, another danger that may happen in human society is that we will see authority shifting away from human beings to the AI, to the algorithms, to the big data systems.
For thousands of years, humans have been accumulating more and more power and authority in their own hands. But in the coming decades, power is likely to shift away for the first time from us to something else, to somebody else, to the AI, to the algorithms.
It will start with very simple things like you want to find your way around the city, so like to come here, so 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, you rely on your own knowledge and experience and instincts. You reach a junction and you know whether to turn right or to turn left.
Now people increasingly give this authority to choose the route to their smart phone or to the computer or to the GPS system. You reach a junction, your feeling, your gut instinct tells you turn right, but the smart phone says, no, no, turn left, that’s better, and you learn to listen to the smart phone. And very soon, you lose the ability to find your own way around space, because most of these abilities, if you don't use them, you lose them.
And we are losing many of these abilities.
So, today we allow the computer, the AI, to choose our way for us on the road.
But in 20 or 30 years, it is quite likely that they will choose the way for us in life in general, and not just on the road.
Whenever people will face a big question in life, what to study in school, where to work, whom to marry, they will increasingly turn to the big data algorithms that follow them around all the time, and they will ask Vincent of Baidu or Amazon or Facebook what to do with my life, whom to marry, what to study.
Another danger which we cannot ignore, which is again, the result of all these technological powers that we are gaining is the destruction of the ecological system, climate change, and global warming. Climate change and global warming, I mean, there have been many incidents in the past of the climate of the planet changing, but in all previous occasions this was the result of natural forces.
Now it is a result, to a large extent, of human action and human technology and human industry. And it is progressing or deteriorating in a very rapid pace.
If humankind doesn’t find a way to slow down or stop climate change, then it won’t necessarily stop all the technological developments I have described.
In all likelihood, it will only accelerate them, because as conditions deteriorate, as the crisis deepens, humans will turn to technology as the potential savior and will invest more and more effort in developing new technologies that can save us from the result of the old technologies of climate change.
So, climate change, in the 21st Century may serve the same purpose, they may act in the same way as the big wars in the 20th Century, to accelerate and not to slow down technological progress.
But we have to find some way to slow down the process of climate change and global warming.
And the difficulty here is that with present day technology, the only realistic way to stop global warming with present day technology is to stop economic growth.
And no government on earth is able or willing to do it, because economic growth is the most important promise or the most important goal of all governments today in the world.
It doesn’t matter what is the religion of the country, it doesn’t matter what is the regime of the country, all over the world economic growth is the most important aim. And a government that slows down intentionally economic growth is very likely to lose power.
So, how to find a way to keep both economic growth and to slow down climate change, this is going to be one of the big challenges of the 21st Century.
And, again, humans will turn to new technologies in the hope of finding a solution there.
Finally, I’ve been talking a lot about the new technologies, the new abilities, the new powers of humankind, and I want to say a few words about a related subject, the subject of happiness and misery, because there is a complex relationship between power and happiness.
Humans often have the impression that power is the key to happiness.
And as we gain more and more power, we will be able to solve our different problems, we will be able to realize our dreams, and then we’ll be happy. And this is why humans have been searching and gaining more and more power for thousands of years.
But when we look at the development of history, we see a very troubling phenomenon that humans are indeed very good in acquiring and accumulating more and more power but humans are very bad in translating power into happiness.
We are today thousands of times more powerful than in the Stone Age, but we are not thousands of times happier than in the Stone Age. We don’t really know how to make this conversion.
This is largely because of two problems – first of all, human happiness depends on expectations, not on conditions. You are happy when your expectations are answered. And the problem is that as conditions improve, the expectations increase.
So, people may come to enjoy much better conditions than in the past, and still be very disappointed and very dissatisfied because their new expectations aren’t met.
On an even deeper level, the most basic reaction of the human mind to achievement and to pleasure is not satisfaction, it’s craving for more.
No matter what humans achieve, and what pleasant experiences they have, they tend to react to it just with craving for more.
And as long as this continues, no matter what amazing things and amazing powers we might achieve in the 21st Century, it will not make us happier and more satisfied.
Yes, it will make us more powerful, but we still don’t know how to translate all this power into satisfaction, into happiness.
So, we might end up being gods, having divine powers of creation and destruction, but we will be very dissatisfied gods, very miserable gods. It can happen. Being a god doesn’t mean that you cannot be dissatisfied and miserable.
So, I’ve outlined several possible developments and several dangers that await us in the coming century.
What I want to emphasize, however, is that none of this is really deterministic.
Technology is never deterministic.
You cannot just stop the march of technological development and progress.
If somebody’s frightened by the idea of developing artificial intelligence, more intelligence, more powerful than human beings, you cannot just stop all research in AI or computers, it’s not going to happen.
Even if one country stops all research in AI because it thinks it is dangerous, other countries will continue to do it. So, you cannot just stop the progress, the development of technology.
But just because we develop a particular technology, doesn’t determine what will be the uses of this technology.
We can use the same technology for very different purposes. We have seen it previously in history, for example in the 20th Century, you could use the technology of trains and electricity and radio and cars, you could use it to build a communist society or a capitalist society, or a fascist society, they all use trains, they all used electricity, they just use them in different ways.
In the same way, in the 21st Century, we are bound to continue developing AI and biotechnology and bioengineering. But we could use these tools to create very different kinds of societies.
If earlier I talked about the danger of the useless class, of humankind splitting into a tiny elite that enjoys all the benefit and power and wealth generated by AI and bioengineering, and a vast number of useless people without economic value and without political power, this is not inevitable, we can try and build a different society in which the benefits of the new technologies are shared equally, or as equally as possible, between all the humans, and don’t empower just a small elite.
So, my concluding message, perhaps, is that if you don’t like some of the possibilities that I’ve outlined, if you are afraid of some of the possibilities that I outlined, you can still do something about it.
Thank you.
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