Half-finished

I was reading Homo Deus, when I had to pack and leave for Vietnam. Luggage too full for the half-finished book. Last Sunday, I ended up buying another copy of the same. Hate half-read books, hate half-baked ideas, and for that matter, hate lukewarm lives.

Harari was getting to Humanism (leaving behind the Middle Ages and its Top-Down answers to all spheres of life). If God and Kings are answers to all life problems, sounded to me, they were partly blamed for also “causing” them. What have God wrought!!! From A-Bombs to AI, God made human, let’s say. Human cause problems (sin or suffering). So God in His infinite wisdom, should have foreseen (or back-seen) those indirect and unintended consequences.

I respected philosophers and men/women of wisdom in the past: they had to master inter-disciplinary subjects: “Absolute powers corrupt absolutely”. “All men are mortal”.

How did they come up with so simple but ageless a principle!

Not to mention the Golden Rule….love your “neighbor”. The age of humanism robbed us of our sacred music and sacred mountains (the latter is now viewed as rare Earth to be extracted and exploited to make I phones and all things electronics and entertaining). Amuse ourselves to death, as Neil Postman once titled his Television Social History book.

Humanism breaks the human body down to its nano particles (cubism and cupboard – full of Campbell Soup cans in the eyes of Andy Warhol) and pushes the boundaries of meaning and aspiration. If we can achieve whatever technological feats – last frontier- then we shall become gods (singularity).

Science shoots for the Moon. Technology sells soup cans and assembly line.

Science takes us to far-away galaxy, in the realm of speculation, while technology is useful enough for society and scale.

I might finish the book wondering what lessons I shall draw from. Shall I stop believing, or should I believe more. Putting my faith in what, who and how much longer.

The unseen is more real than the seen. One day, I shall see “face to face”.

Meanwhile, who is going to wipe away those tears in the children’s eyes? Monte Cristo? Robin Hood? or Boyz-in-the-hood (who push drug and lately get taxed).

The book I am reading shouldn’t be giving me easy answers, half-finished or half-baked. Because the story of human kind and associated kindness has only been written for some years, compared to our infinite universe. The middle and the ending have yet been fully experienced – very much like a Disney feature.

I know there is no rush when it comes to the Internet and machine-learning. I just am fear that I don’t live long enough to see human folly force-taken-over (or over-ridden) by machine (the way they drive/ride these days in Vietnam). One thing for sure, the smarter the machine the more broad-based human knowledge , the fewer Renaissance-men/women of wisdom we will find. When life span is longer and attention span shorter, our Warhol’s “in the future, everyone will get his/her 15 minutes of fame “- like a Campbell can – might be so miniaturized and infinitesimal- like a cosmic zoom-out to tell the stories of billions of unfinished lives.

Gotta get back to finishing the said book.