Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The exponential increase in the pace of evolution is not really anything new. It has been at an amazing pace that evolutionary change has been increasing practically since the beginning of time. Scientists believe that the process known as evolution started some four billion years ago. At that time, the process of change was so slow that it took about two billion of those years for unicellular organisms to become multicellular organisms. But once that first step was taken, it only took about another 200 million years—a relative blink of an eye—from the birth of the first mammal until the birth of our first ancestor, the first Homo sapiens. Yuval Noah Harari is a scholar who has delved deeply into the possible future that awaits human beings in the technological era. According to his vision, humans are on the verge of seeking to become gods. He refers to this process—as the title of his book indicates—as homo deus . What he means is that as of the 21 st century, the human race ...

I recently read, with enthusiasm and fascination, the latest book by MIT Professor Max Tegmark, entitled Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Knopf, New York, 2017, available on Amazon). While the book has proven controversial—and rightly so—I have to admit that much of my interest in it stems from my own tendency to see the world from a positive viewpoint, and in terms of solutions rather than prophesies of doom, despite current events that make it less than easy to maintain a sunny frame of mind. Tegmark’s is not only a global but also a cosmic view into a future of millions of years hence. In other words, I found myself attracted to this work because of the way in which it looks beyond our fragile and ephemeral present toward a possible future of Humankind in which the seemingly insoluble problems of our current world will have found an intelligent fix that only advanced science can foresee today, but that may end up being calculated into a bright...