Homo Deus

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Yuval Noah Harari

What it’s about

Following up on his study of 70,000 years of human development, in this follow-up book, Harari considers and provides his predictions about the future of humankind as technology allows us to overcome famine, plague, and war, shifting our focus toward attaining divinity, immortality, and happiness. The book argues that humans will evolve into "Homo Deus" (god-humans) through biotechnology and artificial intelligence, potentially replacing humanism with "Dataism," where algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, and we become little more than nodes in a global network of data processing units in which we are joined with all other processing units to create a global consciousness and global computing entity in which individuals and individual free will disappear.

Why I like it

I don’t like this book as much as Sapiens, mainly because predicting the future is fraught and anyone who tries to be too precise and doesn’t continuously repeat ‘I don’t know, it depends’ while they try to predict what is coming will lose me quickly. That said, this book is extremely well-written and builds on the remarkable insights and perspectives developed in Sapiens to generate some excellent ‘food for thought’ about how humans will jointly evolve with technology to become something remarkable. He does some ‘fear mongering’ (in my view) and reveals some rather pessimistic views, including the takeover of the individual as it is replaced with the combination of humans and machines as one global entity. I don’t find this pessimistic because I think it is simply a description of current reality.