Azeem Azhar in conversation with Yuval Harari on how the advances in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will transform humans and human society. Fascinating - and worrying - ideas include:
- Emerging - and perhaps developed - societies may see not need in future to design health systems at scale for the "useless" millions who generate no economic value - this would go even further than 20th century totalitarian systems such as Nazism and Communism which provided basic cover for all as they needed manpower for military purposes.
- These "masses" will need - pace Brave New World - to be kept docile, be it through opioids, or video games, or other forms of entertainment - Harari wonders whether religions were always serving video game-like purposes, allowing individuals to earn points to get them to the next level (afterlife).
- While concentration camp survivors have talked of our essential inner freedom being inviolate and something that even the worst tyranny and torture cannot take away from us, that may no longer be the case in a world in which while you think you're reading a Kindle, in fact the Kindle is reading you (watching when you pause, stop, annotate etc, perhaps moving soon through facial recognition software to knowing when you laugh. cry etc, and then eventually to looking biometrically inside you, to know what emotions you're feeling - from boredom to pleasure to fear...at which point it will not only be Amazon interested in accessing and using that data).