Homo Deus

Humanity has largely overcome famine, plague, and war, transforming them into manageable challenges. This triumph presents new objectives: achieving immortality, ensuring universal happiness, and upgrading Homo sapiens into Homo deus. The pursuit of happiness through biochemical means, driven by capitalist and scientific forces, reshapes society, challenging traditional views and necessitating the re-engineering of human bodies and minds.

This part introduces the Anthropocene epoch, highlighting humanity's god-like impact on the planet. Humans have driven other species to extinction and transformed global ecosystems. The Agricultural Revolution, while creating dominant new life forms, led to unprecedented suffering for domesticated animals, whose complex needs were ignored despite ensuring their survival.

Traditional justifications for human superiority, like the eternal soul, are refuted by science. The concept of consciousness, the flow of subjective experiences, remains a scientific riddle, its biological function unclear. The text suggests that the unique human trait setting us apart is not individual intelligence or consciousness, but our capacity for flexible, large-scale cooperation based on shared imagined orders.

Homo sapiens excels due to its unique ability to weave intersubjective webs of meaning through fictional stories, differentiating it from animals. From ancient Sumerian gods to modern corporations, these shared narratives allow for large-scale cooperation, overcoming individual memory limitations with inventions like writing and money. Bureaucracies, driven by these fictions, gained immense power to reshape objective reality, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

Modernity is characterized as a "deal" where humans forgo inherent cosmic meaning in exchange for immense power. This freedom from a predetermined "script" fuels accelerating scientific and technological progress, allowing humanity to conquer traditional scourges like plagues and famines. The modern pursuit of power, however, generates profound existential angst, as people seek the benefits of omnipotence without fully renouncing meaning.

Humanism emerged as a revolutionary religion, shifting authority from gods to human feelings and free will, imbuing the cosmos with meaning. It posits that actions are moral if they prevent suffering, voters' inner feelings are supreme, and beauty is subjective. This led to a focus on individual experience and inner change, profoundly impacting art and the perception of war. Humanism subsequently fragmented into liberal, socialist, and evolutionary branches, leading to ideological conflicts.

21st-century science challenges the liberal belief in free will, revealing human decisions as products of deterministic or random biochemical processes. Brain scanning experiments predict choices before conscious awareness, suggesting desires arise rather than being chosen. This scientific understanding enables manipulation of desires through genetic engineering, drugs, or brain stimulation, threatening the liberal foundation that values individual choice.

Liberalism faces three threats: humans losing economic and military utility, the system valuing humanity collectively but not individually, and the rise of "upgraded superhumans." Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness, as non-conscious algorithms outperform humans in many cognitive tasks. This renders mass conscription and many jobs obsolete, potentially creating a "superfluous" class, while algorithms even compose art and manage investments.

New techno-religions are emerging from laboratories, notably techno-humanism, which aims to create Homo deus through genetic engineering and nanotechnology. This "second cognitive revolution" seeks to upgrade the human mind, but profound ignorance of the full spectrum of mental states, especially non-WEIRD and non-human consciousness, makes this perilous. The ability to technologically reshape desires challenges the humanist ideal of an authentic inner voice.

Dataism proposes a unified theory where the universe functions as data flows, and an entity's value is based on its contribution to data processing. It anticipates electronic algorithms surpassing biochemical ones, leading to skepticism toward human knowledge and reliance on Big Data. Dataism views human history as a process of improving global data-processing efficiency, ultimately culminating in the Internet-of-All-Things replacing Homo sapiens as the supreme data system.