The Israelian historian Yuval Noah Harari has achieved international fame for having written a history of Homo Sapiens (humankind), a prophetic prediction of its end, and the beginning of new species called Homo Deus: an immortal cyborg with divine powers. The book that started it all is called: Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind. In her article, Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known, Carole Cadwalladr asks Harari: In some ways, I say, it struck me that Sapiens isn't actually a history book – it's a philosophy book that asks the big, philosophical questions and attempts to answer them through history. I think that I see history as a philosophy laboratory. Philosophers come up with all these very interesting questions about the human condition, but the way that most of them – though not all – go about answering them is through thought experiments. When I discovered Harari, I came to think about Stephen Hawking s book: A Brief History of Time. In the book Hawking seems to want to surpass Nietzsche s declaration: God is Dead! In the introduction he presents a variety of philosophical questions, whereafter he says: Traditionally these are questions for philosophy; but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern development in science, particular physics…[See my article: A Critique of Stephen Hawking].

Perhaps you already read about the Technological Singularity, since it is one of the hottest predictions for the future (there is even a university with that name), especially after the past years' development of AI, more precisely, after recent Deep Learning advancements that attracted a lot of attention (and bad journalism too). In his The Singularity is near (2005) book, Ray Kurzweil predicts that humans will transcend the "limitations of our biological bodies and brain", stating also that "future machines will be human, even if they are not biological". In other books, like The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), he also predicts a new world government, computers passing Turing tests, exponential laws everywhere, and so on (not that hard to have a good recall rate with that amount of predictions right?). As science fiction, these predictions are pretty amazing, and many of them were very close to what happened in our "modern days" (and I also really love the works made by Arthur C. Clarke), however, there are a lot of people that are putting science clothes on what is called "futurism", sometimes also called "future studies" or "futurology", although as you can imagine, the last term is usually avoided due to some obvious reasons (sounds like astrology, and you don't want to be linked to pseudo-science right?). In this post, I would like to talk not about the predictions.