Harari has been a darling of intellectual circles since his book "Homo Sapiens" came out a few years ago. In his follow up "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow", he lays out what could be the future of mankind and at times, it can be quite frightening, as according to him, that future may not be kind to humans.
While he makes some interesting points and his thinking helps to gain a deeper understanding of the future world we are laying the foundations of today, there is one thing that he doesn't really address: that humans, as long as we remain human, will still be subject to the evolutionary adaptions that make us the social animals that we have been for thousands of years.
As I mentioned yesterday in a piece about the podcast The Happiness Lab, we still long for social interactions and a sense of belonging, as that's how we've evolved to be. The great algorithm that already knows us better than we do ourselves still has no way of supplanting the intricate and infinitely complex human behaviours that we still don't quite understand ourselves.
As David Byrne suggested, if algorithms are designed by socially maladapted engineers to remove human interactions from our day to day life (e.g. replacing a bank teller by an ATM), we are engineering our way into a more miserable future, bereft of spontaneous, genuine interactions with strangers, which are necessary for us as they are encoded in our DNA.
We ought to think about the cost of removing friction from our lives by looking at the societal and mental health implications of secluding ourselves from each other a little more every day, whether it's by banking online, playing online video-games, or ordering the next meal through Doordash. That also means not taking any new tech at face value and truly asking ourselves if it's going to make ourselves better beyond the few bucks that will be saved in the short term.
Doesn't the architecture of tomorrow have a major role to play in that?
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