If Foucault's "death of man" is merely the philosophical extinction of man's significance as a subjectivity, as he puts it, "man will be erased, like a face on the beach by the sea." The "death of man" predicted by Yuval in A Brief History of the Future, however, is not only the death of superiority in the sense of man's biological nature, but also the "death of man" in the sense of man's nature as a human being.
The word "prediction" is a word that the author has repeatedly objected to, and he has taken great pains to tell us that he is only analyzing, not predicting, but we all know that there is no substantial difference between analysis and prediction.
First of all, the death of the biological significance of man is to say that man is not special. Man was called by man as the spirit of all living things to show that man is different from all living things other than man. However, since the beginning of Darwin's theory of evolution, modern scientific theories and experiments have not yet completely overturned this perception, but they are very skeptical of this point. First, from the composition of matter, not to mention living things, or man and stone are not different, will be composed of stone basic particles and the composition of the basic particles of human interchange, man will not become stone. Secondly, from the theory of the origin of species, the modern mainstream view is that human beings and all organisms come from the primordial soup of chaos at the beginning of the earth. Third, species that seem to be vastly different are actually quite similar, for example, man is certainly so different from the pig that no one would want to be compared to it, but man shares nearly 95% of its genes. Fourthly, the subjective experiences labeled by humans, such as emotions and feelings, are not unique, and biological experiments have shown that other animals may have them as well. And the purpose of all living things seems to be the same, that is, instincts, impulses, emotions are for survival and reproduction. Lastly, human beings feel that they are completely different from animals in that they have a free will and a soul, but the pessimistic thing is that this special soul and consciousness exists in human beings, and how it operates has not yet been found and understood, and psychoanalysis concludes that human beings are situated in the dimension of the unconscious mind. Fifthly, the inner nature of the human "ego" is not eternal and has a fixed meaning, but is a stream of consciousness in which desires and instincts ebb and flow and cannot be stopped at all, so there is no such thing as an eternal and unchanging ego. Imagine, for example, why I had the idea of wanting to drink, did I just decide to think that idea and then think it? Or was it that I didn't instruct or give permission to myself, and this thought of drinking just came up on its own? If I really am the master of my own thoughts and decisions, then try not thinking about anything for the next minute? Obviously we can't. Even as the authors analyze, these consciousnesses and souls may simply be biological algorithms, like the seed program for artificial intelligence, which will evolve on their own as soon as the on/off button is pressed. Indeed, at this point, man is also losing his proud intellectual superiority. Google's Alphavium didn't need to learn from human experience to play against human players, it learned on its own and swept them away with moves they would never have expected. This is just a small prelude to the age of artificial intelligence. The book tells us that in the medical field computer algorithms are able to correctly diagnose 90% of lung cancer cases, far higher than the 50% of human doctors. Computerized pharmacists in San Francisco wrote 2 million prescriptions in a year without making a single mistake, far less than the 1.7% error rate of human pharmacists. Judging from the current rate of technological development, in the foreseeable decades, or even decades, most existing human occupations will be replaced by artificial intelligence in the future without exception. Many people believe that arts and culture workers will be the future direction of training, because of the uniqueness and creativity of the arts, and the content they create is inspired by human beings, which cannot be created by artificial intelligence. However, the author believes that the "so-called arts and culture" will eventually become a bunch of algorithms. Beethoven's symphonies, Monet's paintings, Tolstoy's novels, all of these can actually be obtained by algorithms. The book also introduces an experiment, two highly skilled musicians and artificial intelligence EMI together to play Bach works, the audience in the case of uninformed voting results show that the most Bach feeling of the performance is the AI playing works, followed by a further step, the artificial intelligence EMI has learned to imitate the composition, not surprisingly, people feel that the EMI composition of the song is considered to be more Bach than Bach. So, according to the authors, humans will eventually lose out to AI and Big Data in all areas, in all fields, and the rest is just a matter of time.
Second, there is the disappearance of the essence of what it means to be human. Nietzsche said that when God died, he was saying that after man created God, man and God are interdependent contractual relations, and can not be isolated from each other. After God created for man the meaning of life, life, ethics, morality and civilization, man could only prostrate himself at God's feet. In this relationship, modern Enlightenment thought and humanism use human reason and freedom to make God lose his meaning, and then man will also fall into meaninglessness. The book uses the "web of meaning" to explain how man uses a fictional, imaginary order to provide mankind with meaning, including God. He says, "In fact, the meaning of most people's lives exists only in the stories they tell each other. Meaning is created the moment we all come together to weave the web of the **** same story." The author goes on to give examples such as, "Why are the acts of getting married in a church and voting on Election Day meaningful? The reason is that my parents thought it was meaningful, as did my siblings, neighbors and friends, as well as residents of nearby cities and even people in distant foreign countries. Why do all these people think this makes sense? Because their friends and neighbors see it the same way, and the way people keep recycling themselves continues to reinforce each other's beliefs, and each confirmation of each other ties this web of meaning tighter until there is no choice but to believe what everyone else believes." But what's sadder is that this meaning, however, is not static either, and is often here and there. Second, the meaning of life is a fictional story. In reality we often see that many solutions to problems create problems that are worse than the problems themselves, but the problems they create constitute meaning. So much so that Hegel lamented, "The only lesson mankind has learned from history is that it has learned nothing from history." The book gives the example of "Our children must not die in vain," to the effect that in 1915 Italy vowed to right the wrongs of history in order to reclaim land that had been usurped by ancient Rome, and politicians vowed to right the wrongs of history. Then the Italian **** launched 11 bloody battles, taking at most a few kilometers and never really breaking through. They lost 15,000 in the first battle, 40,000 in the second, 60,000 in the third, until finally 700,000 dead and over a million wounded. The reason why there were repeated defeats with the other side when there was nothing wrong with them for nearly hundreds of years was not noble, it was simply because of how the Italian politicians began to be able to face the parents, wives, and children of the 15,000 Italian soldiers and tell them, "I'm sorry, there was a mistake, and your family's Joe White is dead, so I hope you won't be too upset." At this point all the politicians could say was, "Joe was a hero, their blood will not be shed in vain, we will continue to fight until we win!" Examples like this abound in life, such as why there are no winners in gambling and why the stock market is crazy. In order to make people believe in something fictional, they must be made to sacrifice something valuable, and the more excruciating the sacrifice is, the more they will believe that the object of sacrificial devotion is more real, if a poor farmer sacrifices his precious cow to God, he begins to be convinced of God's existence, otherwise how else would he have to explain that he was so stupid as to be so stupid? This farmer would offer more cattle before he would admit that all the previous cattle had been wasted. So the author concludes that living in fantasy is a much easier option, the only way to make sense of all the suffering.
So what would the world be like after God is dead and man is dead? Let's take a look at one of the author's descriptions: "Twenty years ago, Japanese tourists used to be laughed at all over the world because they were always taking pictures with their cameras, but now everyone is doing the same. If you went to India and saw an elephant, you wouldn't look at the elephant and ask yourself how you felt, you'd pull out your smartphone, take a picture, upload it to Facebook, and check every two minutes to see how many likes you've collected. In previous generations, it was a common humanist habit to keep a diary just for yourself, but nowadays many young people would find this completely unreasonable. If no one else reads it, wouldn't it be a waste of time to write it? The new modern motto is: "If you experience something, record it. If you record something, upload it. If you upload something, share it." Isn't that an interesting passage, it feels like you're talking about yourself, doesn't it? Nowadays, human beings seem to suffer from a kind of "Fear of Missing Out Syndrome", and if we don't look at the information for a while, we will be lost, worrying that there is something unknown that we have missed. Therefore, data as information has a meaning, and human beings are better than other animals precisely because they are able to turn all kinds of experiences into poems, write posts and publish them on the circle of friends and the Internet, so that the global data processing system has become richer, which other animals can not do, and the author believes that this is not a question of catching up with the trend, but rather a question of survival, and that we have to prove to ourselves and to the system that we are still valuable, and that value does not lie in simply having experiences. And the value is not in simply having an experience, but in being able to turn that experience into free-flowing data. Then the algorithms will know you better than you know yourself, just like those websites or shopping platforms you frequent that push you exactly what you want as soon as you open them, and then the whole system will become more human than human, and will be able to make better choices to serve humans, and in the end you'll feel that this is pretty much the happy and blissful life that you're hoping for. That's the way it is, often it doesn't start out that way, for example, if a drug is developed to treat a child with inattention, and then it turns out that healthy children take it to improve their grades, then the drug's subsequent development gets further and further away from what it was intended to do. Intelligent algorithms are the same, the earliest seed algorithms may have been developed by humans, but with the rapid growth of data, the algorithm will increasingly to meet the humanistic desire, and also become more and more complex beyond the capacity of the human brain, the algorithm seems to be only on its own, then the algorithm gradually evolved to the point that human beings are difficult to understand the situation, and finally, the algorithm will go out of its own way to go to a place where human beings have not stepped, and human beings are also unable to understand it, and the algorithm will not be able to understand it.
If you pay attention to technology news, you will find that the development of AI and biotechnology is accelerating, with new results appearing almost every six months. And the combination of artificial intelligence and biotechnology is also more certain to change the world, perhaps the probability of there will be a homo sapiens into a super-powerful homo sapiens, by that time, human beings are still not human beings, this is difficult to predict, but from the history of the people if you are sure that people are evolved from monkeys, then we are not now for their own no longer be the original monkey and sad, there is no reason to be the next days to worry about anything for the future.