The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has, for the last few years, acquired a star status in the academic world. The celebrated author of the bestselling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind followed by its sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, warns us that equality is about to take a very serious turn for the worse.

He says that “humans basically have just two types of skills — physical and cognitive — and if computers outperform us in both, they might outperform us in the new jobs just as in the old ones. Consequently, billions of humans might become unemployable, and we will see the emergence of a huge new class: the useless.”

This is one reason why human societies in the 21st Century might be the most unequal in history. And there are other reasons to fear such a future.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading his books primarily because he has told the story in a very interesting manner. More so, the conclusions that he has drawn have a novel ring to them. A sort of smugness had completely overtaken me perhaps I was very sure that such a circumstance was peculiar to the Western world and Pakistan may not be affected by a complete sway of computers.

Harari, exposed only to the West and obviously his own country, appeared to have just a tangential concern with the under-developed world of which Pakistan is a part. But after a while my perception underwent a change. In the current scenario of a globalised world, the under-developed countries will be more vulnerable.

Multi-national corporations and local entrepreneurs will find a useful resource in computerised robots that will displace humans as a work force. If that comes to a pass, the social divide will go berserk. Regarding globalisation, Harari is positively poised. However, he paints a pessimistic picture with regard to the pace of technological progress.

According to his insight about future, “instead of globalisation resulting in prosperity and freedom for all, it might result in speciation: the divergence of humankind into different biological castes or even different species. Globalisation will unite the world on a vertical axis and abolish national differences, but it will simultaneously divide humanity on a horizontal axis.”

Thus, the technological advancement is not presenting us with a scenario that can be cherished. Harari also underlines serendipitous progress in infotech and biotech fields. The amalgamation of these two branches of technology will enable computers to know you better than you know your own self.

Thus, in a couple of decades, human agency will become a thing of the past. Harari in a piece that he contributed for the Guardian illustrates his point. “The best armies no longer rely on millions of ordinary recruits, but rather on a relatively small number of highly professional soldiers using very high-tech kit and autonomous drones, robots, and cyber-worms. Already today, most people are militarily useless.”

The same pattern might soon be replicated in the civilian economy, too. Artificial intelligence (AI) may outperform humans in more and more skills. It is likely “to replace humans in more and more jobs”. Undoubtedly, many new jobs might appear, but that won’t necessarily solve the problem.

With rapid improvements in biotechnology and bioengineering, we may witness, for the first time in history, economic inequality is translated into biological inequality. Biotechnology will in not-so-distant a future make it possible to engineer bodies and brains, and “to upgrade our physical and cognitive abilities”.

However, such treatments are likely to be expensive, and available only to the upper echelon of the society. Humankind might consequently get divided into biological castes. “There is one more possible step on the road to previously unimaginable inequality.” In the short-term, authority might shift from the masses to a small elite who own and control the master algorithms and the data that feed them. However, in the longer term, authority could completely pass from humans to algorithms.

Once artificial intelligence is smarter even than the human elite, all humanity could become redundant. That indeed is a grotesque scenario. It also challenges the long-held belief that technological advancement brings freedom.

Quite conversely, particularly if Harari is to be believed, technology is an instrument of enslavement. First, a select section of the elite will hold sway over a vast majority of people. The latter will not only be disenfranchised and unemployed, they will also be rendered irrelevant, which is far worse an outcome. It will happen when big data algorithms might create digital dictatorships.

Having summarised Harari’s projection of human future, the question that seems quite bothersome to me as a Pakistani is about the state of such technologies in my country. Are we (Pakistani state and society) ready for challenges that future is about to expose us to? If the state continues to be so sensitive about sovereignty, ideological frontiers and the like, the agency of the individual citizen will be redundant.

New challenges will be mounted to the religious scholars when genetic engineering decisively intervenes into what is considered the domain of Almighty. Besides, the developed world, through infotech, biotech and artificial intelligence, will be able to peddle its agenda in utter disregard to the aspirations of the underdeveloped countries.

How much are we spending on the development of such technologies? The prevailing trend does not augur well for countries like Pakistan where education experts are still wrestling with the questions pertinent only to the pre-modern times.

The recent waves of corona-virus have enabled even an ineffective state like Pakistan to gather a huge corpus of data about the individuals during the vaccination process. It may end up accentuating the state control over the citizenry, jeopardising the private space of the individual.

Thus, freedom might be confined to the history books. Concentration of that data around a single locus is particularly ominous. At least our literati should start giving a serious thought to the factors likely to shape up things in the days to come.

The author is a professor of history and a writer. He can be reached at tahir.kamran@bnu.edu.pk