Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow

Where "Sapiens" explores trends and tendensies of humanity throughout history. This book tries to go a step further and asks the question where the course of said human history will lead us in the coming decades and centuries. It's an easy read while still trying to be a scientificly based work. Of course the topics in this book are not as in depth as they can or should be as this would probably make it less readable. In all it's a great read for people who like to think about philisophocall themes but generally don't enjoy meaty nonfiction works.

This book was marketed badly.
On the surface you would expect it to talk about humanities future, and only about it. (If you are only interested in that, just read this book's prologue).
If you are intrested in what this book is actually about, it is split into three parts:

The first part is just a summary of Sapiens,
The second part discusses the power of sapiens to coordinate using religeon (and ideologies),
and the final part is just the author ranting about how AI and data will replace humanity.

Harari says the problems of famine, war and pestilence have been largely solved. How can he not be bothered by climate change and the threat of nuclear war? He deftly taxonomises reality into three forms - objective, subjective and inter-subjective, then fails to apply his specious system to his own dogma. He declares the ideas of techno-fascist Peter Thiel to be worthwhile simply because Thiel is rich. He equates emotions to algorithms, as if a parent's love for their child could be reproduced as a slider in a character creation page in The Sims video game.

These are the ideas of delusional trans-humanists who think they will be able to use their money to turn science fiction ideas into reality and buy immortality.

I give him one star for two reasons: his ideas on inter-subjective reality are actually quite powerful if applied judiciously. Also, there's a killer sentence: the line about god being dead but believers are having trouble trying to hide the body is an atheistic sick burn. But he then goes on to praise his own religion, Vipassana meditation, which looks suspiciously like an abusive new age cult where I'm from. I might have given him two stars if it weren't for that supreme silliness.

Harari should be wearing the same hair shirt as Francis Fukuyama.

It's hard to know how to rate this. In this book, Harari starts off with some predictions that humans will try to achieve God status through several God-like powers that are being developed as we speak. Then he goes all the way back in time to the dawn of man and essentially summarizes history through a particular lense: that is, of world religions. These religions include not only conventional religions, but also includes socialism, capitalism, and three types of humanism: socialism, evolutionary humanism (eugenics), and liberalism. He then tries to predict the future religion, which he calls big-dataism. That is the book.

I'm a sucker for grand themes and pulling many disparate studies together into grand theories and predictions. So I enjoyed the structure of the book. I like that he tries to predict the future through first understanding history as well as he can. Predictions based on data are not always necessarily right--no prediction necessarily is--but they're a lot better than people just shooting their mouth off based on their limited worldview. We have a much better perspective from trying to understand all of humanity in all time periods and places--that is, to get outside of ourselves. I'm a huge proponent of studying history to understand today.

When it comes to all of his conclusions and lenses, it's hard to generalize. Some I thought were insightful and accurate, and others I thought were entirely misguided. And many were in the middle: they seemed accurate but didn't necessarily provide fresh insight.

I would recommend this book, for there were multiple insightful ideas here for me and I would guess there would be multiple for most other people as well, although not necessarily the same ones.

Many of my disagreements with him, as you will see below, were around religion. He is an atheist and I am not. However, my disagreements with him did not ruin any usefulness of the book. It was still insightful from understanding history and predicting the future, for as he says, in the 21st century, where do you expect most of the world-changing advancements to come from? The religions of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism? Or from science and engineering? In the past they came from the former but in the 20th century they all came from the later, and we can expect that to continue. Hence we need to understand the underlying philosophies/religions of science in order to predict the future with any relevancy at all. It's my goal to understand these and he has helped me do so. I don't hold it against him personally that he disagrees with me about the existence of God, nor does that disagreement in-and-of-itself make this a bad book, although it's certainly tangled up in some reasons that I think the book could be better.

So with all of that aside, now, in no particular order, here were some of my observations:

His argument that the Theory of Evolution disproves the existence of a soul is a flawed straw-man argument based on his definition of a soul as the root of the word "individual." While that origin is interesting, there is no reason that souls need be discrete and not a gradient thing, same as intelligence or creativity, and in fact this explanation would explain the relation of humans to animals anyways.

He never addresses the fact that science hasn't disproven the existence of the soul/spirit. He acts as if we haven't found it yet, therefore, it doesn't exist.

He doesn't discuss scientific bias, and in fact, completely whiffs on the fact that science is, itself, a religion (under his definition of religion used in this book, that classifies capitalism and liberalism and eugenics and big data-ism as religions). He briefly mentions that one could argue that science is a religion, and then says...nothing else about it at all. He just says essentially "no it isn't" and moves on. This was a huge wasted opportunity. It would have completely gone along with his theme to explore that dimension.

Large section are attack on religion while pretending to be something else. He classes branding, nationalism, and religions as "fictions" or "intersubjective realities" for they become real by humans believing collectively in them. He ignores that scientific theories are also fictions by this definition.

His definition of reality is humanist: whatever can cause people suffering. If we were being generous and assume by his examples that his real definition of reality is what can be experienced through human senses, then that's a little better, but not much. Many things have scientific evidence and can't be experienced. He also ignores any real investigation of evidence of the spiritual/supernatural.

He defines monotheists as those who believe that everything that happens to them is for spiritual reasons and claims that therefore all monotheists are childish. In fact he uses scripture as a source for this argument but never mentions that the entire book of Job is dedicated to debunking that every bad thing that happens to us is understandable and because we did something bad. This is a pattern I noticed throughout the book: he doesn't know his Old Testament as well as he thinks he does. Either that or he's cherry-picking intentionally, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt.

His explanation of the three camps of humanism and how they played out in 20th century history was useful. This feels like something I should have already known. Liberalism was challenged by two other humanisms: on the right, fascism (evolutionary humanism) and on the left, socialism (Marxist humanism). The great wars of the 1900s were actually religious wars between these three factions of the new world religion.

He's insightful that the masses (lower class) won't be necessary to leaders in the future as they were in the past, where leaders were incentivized to care for the source of their labor and armies.

Also, good insight that when algorithms understand individuals better than they do themselves, there's a natural step from recommending to you, to deciding for you: agency.

The last 5% or so of the book is his prediction of big data-ism: the worship of data. Yet he really only stubs out this idea. He presents what big data is doing to us and the philosophy (religion) that is emerging around it. But he doesn't take the time to ask: what does all of the data lead unto? Just more big data? This is circular thinking so there has to something more. Also, he claims that there is no other contender for the new world religion...really? Seems he could have explored other alternatives or at least attempted to show why big data is superior to others.

I don't disagree though that the big data religion is looming and in fact, some of the current events that he's mentioning can be expanded on greatly if you want to read [b:AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order|38242135|AI Superpowers China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order|Kai-Fu Lee|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521228712l/38242135.SX50.jpg|59924665]. I highly recommend that for understanding the coming shift in the global economy (no it's not going to be like the automation shifts in the past), the advent of machine learning, what AI really is in different forms, and why it's going to be the US and China who will duke it out for supremacy of the new world battlefield: data.

How do I summarize Homo Deus? It seems impossible. I will only say that if you want to understand the present and future better, this is certainly worth reading, and as with anything should be examined and inspected and serve as a springboard to more reading. I appreciate the tremendous work that Harari has put into this and I hope that if he finds the time, he will expand on this even more in future editions.

With so many assertations, this would be an interesting book to fact check page by page. As an analysis of human culture, it's enjoyable and digestible. As I read, I found that all around me related back to something or another covered in the book. Am I ready to say that this is an airtight treatise that we should all use to reshape our lives? No way. It is, however, though-provoking and bold and interesting. Often I found passages that seemed to stretch credulity that, nonetheless, rang true upon reflection.

"Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" by Yuval Noah Harari is a good companion to Harari's "Sapiens" in that takes some of the seeds sown in that book and allows them to grow up into a tangled jungle. In fact, feels like a continuation or variation on a theme from the first book. You do not need to read "Sapiens" but it is interesting to see an author take larger idea and repackage them for different arguments. And this is not a pretty package. "Homo Deus" is the kind of book that can keep you up at night with existential dread. Once you read it, you cannot unlearn it and you begin to see Harari's analysis everywhere.

Like its predecessor, this is a macro-history that weaves together big ideas over thousands of years. But "Homo Deus" is more focused on a singular premise. His basic argument is that the three big ideas that will define the 21st Century are 1) a world without suffering, 2) a world without death, and 3) a world where human have modified their bodies through technology. He proceeds to unpack these ideas to show how we have gotten to this point. Many of his larger themes are present here - the idea of inter-subjective realities, the importance of history, how things change, etc.... By the end of the book, the author concludes that the liberal world order we've inherited is also fading, just at the time that advances in technology, biology, and psychology are bringing us to a tipping point when differences between humans could become permanent realities.This book does not end happily and for many, the two possible futures that Harari presents (a techno-utopia and the data religion) are equally scary. But the point is not to keep us scared but to help us see that if we understand where something comes from, we might be able to channel our futures towards a better outcome.

My main critique of the book remains the same as my critique of Sapiens. Harari presents a far too simplistic reading of religion as a language to speak to the changes around us. I am not convinced that religion is obsolete and I think that religion can a means to understand and resist the changes that Harari so starkly describes. I would add that some might find the ideas repetitive if they have read "Sapiens" first but truthfully speaking, the ideas and concepts that Harari describes are important and worth repeating.