Yuval Noah Harari: "Eunuchs were already bioengineered, and it wasn't an improvement for everyone"

“Something that history teaches us is that humans are very good at acquiring new powers, but we are not very good at using them wisely,” warns Israeli thinker Yuval Noah Harari. For the author of Sapiens and Homo Deus (Debate), artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces are going to revolutionize health, the job markets and our privacy. But, he stresses, explaining the example of the emperors’ eunuchs, who were primitive biotech, it is never clear what is an upgrade and what is a downgrade. So he believes that before upgrading and modernizing human beings and creating superhumans with unknown consequences, he bets on focusing on exploring and realizing existing human potential, which he says we are still a long way from.

Harari (Kyriat Atta, 1976), who has opened a conference on the future of health organized by Sanitas at the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, has gone back to our last centuries to express his deep concerns about our use of new technologies . “Over time, we have gained control over the world around us and used it, not very wisely, to completely reshape the planet. And because we didn’t understand the complexity of the ecological system, the changes we’ve introduced have thrown it completely out of balance.”

“In the coming decades we will gain control over our inner world and probably use it to reshape our bodies, brains and minds. But because we do not understand the complexity of those bodies and minds, the changes can inadvertently throw our inner world, our internal systems out of balance “, He has launched.

“People have always dreamed of upgrading, modernizing, leveling up. Every great social and political movement has wanted to redesign humans and make them better. Christianity, Buddhism or Islam also wanted to perfect them. Socialism wanted to create a new man. Nazism wanted to create superhumans. In earlier times they tried to do it through social engineering, but biology always set a limit”, he evoked, and recalled that the ideal of the Catholic Church was to “abandon sex”, which was “what they expected of their elites of priests, monks and nuns”. “Luckily, they didn’t have bioengineering tools,” she remarked.

Although he has reasoned that bioengineering has existed for millennia: “The most striking example was carried out by the empires that emerged in China and the Middle East two thousand years ago. In them the greatest threat to the emperor did not come from a democratic revolution but from a coup by his subordinates, whether they were provincial governors, generals or ambitious viziers. Even if they did not directly threaten him, they could seek to accumulate wealth, land and power and transfer it to their sons, establishing aristocratic dynasties that challenged the supremacy of the imperial family.

The bioengineered solution was, he says, a simple surgical operation: castration. “Eunuchs couldn’t have children, no matter how much power they accumulated, they couldn’t create a competing dynasty. And for thousands of years kings and emperors trusted eunuchs to guard their palaces, administer their provinces, and even lead their armies. The most famous Chinese admiral, Zheng He, was a eunuch. Do you want a position in administration? You don’t have to send your resume, cut off your testicles and the job is yours.”

“This ancient example –Harari stressed- teaches us something crucial about bioengineering: it is never clear what is an upgrade or a downgrade. For the emperor, it was a server upgrade from him. For the eunuchs things had to have another aspect”. And he recalled that today bioengineering could soon be at the service of all kinds of regimes in the world: “Scientists who develop these technologies, even if it seems inconceivable that someone uses them for some radical ideology or fantasy, should take a few minutes to reflect and think about the politician they fear the most on the globe and think about what he could do with them.”

Because, he stresses, the ability to biologically redesign human beings changes the most basic rules of history. Nazism killed millions and left deep scars on society, but it could not change humanity. The story was like a video game where if humanity made some terrible mistake they could go back to the previous screen and try again.”

Not anymore, because “a future Hitler could redesign our bodies, brains and minds.” And in fact, to reinforce his thesis, he recalled that since the sixties prenatal tests have been used to identify diseases but also the sex of the fetuses. That in some parts of the world with “misogynistic ideas” has led to the abort of many female fetuses. In 2005, in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, among children under the age of four, there were 699 girls for every thousand boys.

“And we are a long way from understanding the ins and outs of the human genome or brain. There are few qualities controlled by a single gene or neuron. Updating intelligence can end up being done at the expense of compassion. Who judges the costs and benefits of these interventions? Do parents have the right to redesign their children however they want? Or is it up to society to decide which redesigns are mandatory? Vladimir Putin would probably prefer to have intelligent, disciplined soldiers without compassion or spiritual depth. Something like the eunuchs of the 21st century”.

And he lamented that we can “lose a lot of potential without even realizing that we have it. To avoid an unprecedented historical calamity, for every dollar and minute we spend developing artificial intelligence or genetic engineering, we should spend another dollar and minute exploring and developing our bodies and minds.”

And he has concluded that the greatest revolution of the 20th century, that of women, did not require bioengineering but rather “unleashing the unused potential of half the species.” “Feminism empowered women like Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel laureates for developing a method of gene editing. Not everyone can be a pioneer, but every human being has unknown and untapped potential, perhaps for greater creativity, greater compassion, greater joy.”