Homo Deus

Solving Famine, Plague, and War

For thousands of years, the human agenda was dominated by three persistent enemies: famine, plague, and war. These calamities were seen as inevitable forces of nature or the will of angry gods. In 1694, a French official described a district filled with starving souls eating cats and grass while the king lived in luxury. Today, such a scene is almost unthinkable because we have built a robust global safety net. While poverty still exists, mass starvation is now usually the result of human politics rather than natural catastrophes.

We have also transformed our relationship with disease. In the past, invisible armadas of germs could wipe out entire civilizations, such as when smallpox decimated the Aztecs after a single infected person landed in Mexico. Today, we have eradicated smallpox and can identify new viruses within days. We no longer blame demons for illness; we look for technical glitches in our biology. Medicine has turned the terror of the plague into a manageable challenge that we expect our doctors to solve.

War, too, is becoming a historical relic rather than a constant 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 soldiers and criminals combined. In a knowledge-based economy, the profitability of war has declined because you cannot loot knowledge as you can loot a gold mine. Peace is no longer just the absence of war; it has become the implausibility of war.

Since we are successfully managing our old enemies, we are turning our attention to a new agenda: immortality, happiness, and divinity. We no longer view death as a metaphysical mystery but as a technical problem. If a heart stops or cells mutate, we see it as a failure that can be fixed with better technology. Scientists and tech giants are now investing billions to treat aging as a disease, aiming to give humans an indefinite lifespan and turn us into beings without an expiry date.

The second goal 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. A player scoring a winning goal in the World Cup feels a rush of ecstasy, but they are reacting to a storm of sensations triggered by hormones and neurons. To achieve permanent bliss, we are moving toward manipulating our own chemistry through drugs and genetic engineering.

The ultimate aim of these pursuits is to upgrade humans into gods. This does not mean becoming omnipotent, but gaining powers once reserved for deities, such as designing life and living indefinitely. We are exploring biological engineering, merging with machines, and creating non-organic intelligence. This process happens in small, mundane steps, like using a smartphone to manage our lives or taking a pill to focus. Eventually, these small upgrades will accumulate until we are no longer the same species.

Our current choices are often dictated by historical accidents we no longer remember. Consider the modern lawn, which produces nothing of value but requires immense labor and water. It originated as a way for European aristocrats to flaunt their wealth by wasting land that could have grown food. Today, people across the globe maintain lawns simply because they have inherited a cultural symbol of prestige. Studying history helps us realize that our current reality is not inevitable and gives us the freedom to imagine different futures.

Predicting the future is difficult because knowledge changes how we act. When Karl Marx predicted a communist revolution, capitalists read his work and improved workers' conditions to prevent it. Our current rush toward immortality and divinity may create upheaval that makes our present values irrelevant. We are moving toward a world where the very definition of being human may disappear, so we must decide what to do with our godlike powers before they redefine what it means to be alive.