Homo Deus

Introduction: The New Human Goals

Famine, plague, and war were humanity's persistent enemies for thousands of years. These calamities were once seen as inevitable forces of nature or the direct will of angry gods. Today, we have built a robust global safety net that makes mass starvation and widespread disease manageable challenges rather than inevitable catastrophes. We have eradicated smallpox, can identify new viruses within days, and generally view medical issues as technical glitches in our biology rather than divine punishments.

War is also becoming a historical relic rather than a constant daily threat. For the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little, and more people commit suicide than are killed by human violence. In a modern knowledge-based economy, the profitability of war has declined because knowledge cannot be looted like physical resources. Peace has become so common that war is now highly implausible in many parts of the developed world.

Since we are successfully managing our old enemies, we are turning our attention to a new agenda of immortality, happiness, and godlike power. We no longer view death as a metaphysical mystery, but as a technical problem that can be fixed with better technology. Scientists and technology companies are now investing billions to treat aging as a curable disease. They aim to give humans an indefinite lifespan and turn us into beings without a natural expiry date.

The second major goal of the future is the pursuit of lasting happiness. We have realized that material wealth and political freedom do not automatically make us satisfied. Happiness is essentially a biochemical reaction within our bodies, triggered by hormones and firing neurons. To achieve permanent bliss, humanity is moving toward manipulating our own chemistry through targeted drugs and advanced genetic engineering.

The ultimate aim of these pursuits is to upgrade humans into beings with powers once reserved for gods. This means gaining the ability to design life, merge our bodies with machines, and create non-organic intelligence. Predicting the future is difficult because our current rush toward immortality and divinity may create upheavals that make our present values entirely irrelevant. We are moving toward a world where the very definition of being human may disappear.