Finished Home Deus, a brief history of tomorrow

I just finished reading “Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow” today, oh, sorry, it’s not reading, it’s listening. I listened through the whole book. This is the first time I listen through a complete English book, and I feel really great! The voice of the audio book is quite comfortable, and the book is full of interesting and intelligent thoughts. Although I need to mention that reading and listening are two kinds of behaviors. When you encounter something you don’t understand or some word/phrase you don’t know the meaning of in the process of listening, you don’t get the chance to stop(unless you really want to break the sound flow). Also, sometimes I just zoned out while listening. Yes, I bet that it could happen to everyone. And after you get back from your imaginary world, you lose the contents in between. That said, listening to an audio book is still full of fun. You can listen to an audio book any time you want. Sometimes I just put on my earphones while going out for a walk, I got to enjoy the environment around me while immersed in the book, that’s really something worthy of trying!

Let’s get back to the book itself. This is an excellent book. It details various possible futures of the mankind, wherein the most prominent one is dataism. After two revolutionary ideas, religion(which dictates an all-mighty God) and humanism(which discards the God and put more emphasis on human feelings and thoughts), we are going to embrace dataism in the 21st century. Dataism means the free flow of the information that is collected everywhere from every person, which not only includes something easier to get, like your job, your posts, your resources and property, but also something hard to get, like your genes, your health conditions, etc. Those data will be sent to one or several processing units and get fully analyzed. All things considered, these processing units will tell you which person you should marry, which job you should take, which life path you should follow. Listening to the AI’s suggestions is important, because it knows much more than you do. Soon, the ordinary human beings are no longer useful. They will be replaced by the unconscious AI, who will be the next leader of the world.

What strikes me most is not dataism, it’s the idea of fixing our minds through bio-engineering. For example, it’s hard for you to study for 2 straight hours, right? No problem, let’s just put on a special device on your head, which sends an electrical current every few minutes to certain areas of your brain, after that, you will forget your surroundings and focus on your job. You will hardly notice the time passing in this case. Actually this is not the future, it has already happened. This technology is used on the miliary field so that soldiers can focus on the target without any distraction. Not only about that, you can re-engineer your brain to cure depression, neuroticism and various other mental diseases. This has happened, too. Researchers implanted a tiny device in the patients body to suppress the activity the “depression area” of the brain. After switching on the device, the patients reported that they had returned to a normal person, they no longer felt sad and hopeless anymore. I think this technology is really promising. I’m also a neurotic person, I think neuroticism has almost destroyed my life, and it continues to do so. With this technology, I can re-engineer my brain and may have a chance to live a happy life. I suspect that this technology is still immature, but it will become mature and get widely used in the near future.

OK, that’s all I want to say. My mental condition is still unstable for now, and I doubt it will ever become stable. But I have to live anyway. I have no other choices. If there’s anything I want to do, I want change the structure of my brain so that I could have a chance to live a happy life.