Afterword to the Anniversary Edition

SINCE SAPIENS WAS PUBLISHED in 2014, Homo sapiens has been quite busy. Archeologists and geneticists have continued to shed new light on our past, revealing, for example, the existence of entire human species like Homo naledi¹ and Homo luzonensis² that we didn’t know about in 2014. Meanwhile, the pace of the global ecological crisis has intensified. Over the last ten years, 495 plant and animal species have been officially declared extinct,³ and this is probably only a small fraction of the true number of species lost.⁴ Human civilization itself is increasingly at risk from climate change. Around 20 per cent of all carbon emitted by the industrial burning of fossil fuels has entered the atmosphere only after I wrote Sapiens.⁵ And if anyone had any lingering doubts that we humans are an integral part of the ecological system, the COVID-19 pandemic reminded us that we are animals, and that our species cannot isolate itself from the rest of the organic world.

Unfortunately, instead of uniting in the face of global threats like pandemics and climate change, since 2014 international tensions have increased dramatically. When I wrote in Sapiens about the relative decline in international violence, I mused that “this situation might of course change in the future and, with hindsight, the world of today [2014] might seem incredibly naïve.” I added that “It is sobering to realise how often our view of the past is distorted by events of the last few years. If this chapter had been written in 1945 or 1962, it would probably have been much more glum. Since it was written in 2014, it takes a relatively buoyant approach to modern history. To satisfy both optimists and pessimists, we may conclude by saying that we are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other. History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.”

Well, come 2024 and it is time to be glum. During the past ten years, humanity has taken an alarming number of steps towards the gates of hell. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions between the USA and China suddenly make a Third World War a realistic possibility. Of course, history will continue to surprise us in coming years, and hopefully humanity will make wiser decisions and move away from the brink. In 2014 I also noted that the future is unknown, and that “what seems to be just around the corner may never materialize” while “other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass.”

But perhaps the most important thing that has happened since 2014 is the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI). When writing Sapiens I made a few passing references to AI, but hardly considered it a subject of much interest. When in 2016 I published my next book, Homo Deus, AI suddenly took centre stage. Writing about the distant future of humanity, I worried that AI might eventually do to Homo sapiens what we have done to the other animals. Homo Deus ended by questioning, “What will happen to society, politics and daily life when nonconscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?” The book warned that as AI gains in power, we Sapiens “might be reduced from engineers to chips, then to data, and eventually we might dissolve within the torrent of data like a clump of earth within a gushing river.”

When writing Homo Deus, I thought I was issuing a warning about developments that might happen centuries from now, or at least a few decades in the future. By 2024, the future has arrived. Highly intelligent algorithms already get to know us better than we know ourselves, and we are floundering in the data torrent that threatens to dissolve our societies.

AI is still in its infancy, but even the baby AI of 2024 is fundamentally different from any previous invention in human history. Stone knives and atom bombs made humans powerful, because the power to decide how to use the knife or the bomb always remained in human hands. A flint blade couldn’t decide by itself whether it would be used to murder someone or extract a thorn, and a nuclear missile couldn’t decide by itself whom to bomb. In contrast, AI is the first tool that can make decisions by itself, and it therefore threatens to take power away from us.

AI is also the first tool that can create new ideas, and even invent entire new stories by itself. In Sapiens I emphasised the key role of stories in history. The ability to invent stories has been the superpower that has enabled large numbers of Sapiens to cooperate. Corporations like Peugeot, laws like Hammurabi’s Code, as well as human rights, money, gods and nations are all fictional stories we invented in order to enable billions of people to cooperate. It is thanks to these stories that we rule planet Earth, rather than the Neanderthals or the chimpanzees. Hitherto, nobody except us Sapiens could invent fictional stories. But now, AI can do it. Who knows what stories it will invent, and how they will change the world? Will AI create new corporations, new financial devices, new legal rights and new gods?

By mastering the art of storytelling, AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation. This may well lead to the end of human history. Not the end of history – just the end of its human-dominated part. History is the interaction between biology and culture: between our biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process through which religions and laws shape food and sex.

What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture and begins producing stories, melodies, images, laws, and religions? Within a few years AI could eat the whole of human culture – everything we have created since the Stadel lion-man and the cave art of Chauvet – digest it and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artefacts. At first, AI will probably imitate human cultural prototypes. But with each passing year, AI culture will boldly go where no human has gone before, especially because computers are free from the limitations that evolution and biochemistry impose on the human imagination. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. We have worshipped gods, pursued ideals of beauty, and dedicated our lives to causes that originated in the imagination of some prophet, poet, or politician. In the coming decades we might find ourselves trapped inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

This will take time, of course, so for a few more years we Sapiens are still in control. At present, we are the ones telling the story, and we can use this superpower to try to influence the next chapters, too. Every technology can be used for many different purposes, and we can yet shape the technology we are creating. In a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals or chimpanzees. But we Sapiens still have time to answer the question with which I ended the book in 2014: What do we want to want?