Humans - at least the wealthy ones - will merge with technology and become part-man, part-machine, a historian claims. Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has written a book charting the history of humanity, said humans would become God-like cyborgs", according to The Telegraph.
"We are programmed to be dissatisfied," Harari told The Telegraph. "Even when humans gain pleasure and achievements it is not enough. They want more and more.
"I think it is likely in the next 200 years or so homo sapiens will upgrade themselves into some idea of a divine being, either through biological manipulation or genetic engineering of by the creation of cyborgs, part organic part non-organic.
"It will be the greatest evolution in biology since the appearance of life. Nothing really has changed in four billion years biologically speaking. But we will be as different from today's humans as chimps are now from us."
The cyborg technology would be available only to the richest members of society, Harari warned. In the future, the "1 percenters" would live forever while the poor would die out. But it is religion, Harari maintains, that has gotten us to this place of technological take-over. "God is extremely important because without religious myth you can't create society," he said. "Religion is the most important invention of humans. As long as humans believed they relied more and more on these gods they were controllable.
"But what we see in the last few centuries is humans becoming more powerful and they no longer need the crutches of the Gods. Now we are saying we do not need God just technology.
"The most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Middle East; it's Silicon Valley where they are developing a techno-religion. They believe even death is just a technological problem to be solved.
"What enables humans to cooperate flexibly, and exist in large societies is our imagination. With religion it's easy to understand. You can't convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana with the promise it will get 20 more bananas in chimpanzee heaven. It won't do it. But humans will.
"Most legal systems are based on human rights but it is all in our imagination. Money is the most successful story ever. You have the master storytellers, the bankers, the finance ministers telling you that money is worth something. It isn't. Try giving money to a chimp. It's worthless."
Harari's most recent book is "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," which was originally published in Hebrew under the title, "A Brief History of Mankind." The book has been translated into more than 30 languages.
