Released: 8th September 2016
Genre: Non-Fiction, Analytical, Society
Number of Pages: 462
Over an extended career in history and university lecturing, Yuval Noah Harari has shared many intriguing questions Following on from his already successful Home Sapiens, which chartered mankind’s rise to dominance, Homo Deus now looks to the future and what may befall humanity in the years to come.
Split across three main sections, Homo Deus lays out where humans stand in the 21st Century, closely dissecting the inner workings of our individual consciousness before speculating on upcoming changes. There’s a wide array of topics on display here including politics, psychology, economics and of course technology that all coalesce to form the backbone of the author’s ideas. At first, the tone is more reflective as the differences between plagues and famines in centuries past are compared with modern life, thus forming a base for deeper deconstruction. The notion of progress is a heavy theme throughout the book with the newer challenges posed by climate change and automation often taking centre stage; Yuval refers to several critical events that give further evidence to his points, such as the supercomputer Watson beating Jeopardy contestants in 2011. With a very direct frame of writing, it’s hard not to be swayed by some of the author’s predictions and vision of our progression.
The future Harari implies is one fundamentally by data and sets of super-intelligent algorithms that dictate not only our own personal lives but the impact on our entire species. New technologies brought on by science and its continued march will only form a small portion of our new goals and ambitions; society itself is said to change and diverge massively over the course of the next century. Yet across all 462 pages, he does so bluntly from an unfiltered, ambiguous perspective. There’s no badmouthing of society, politics or whatever the future holds; instead the author encourages us to be just as curious about where humans are going. He presents the onward march of technology and the endless consumption of data as an inevitable challenge that we will all have to grapple with at some point; considering how big a role technology corporations already play in our lives, the third and final section of Homo Deus held the biggest resonance for me personally.
Recommended?
YES: It’s deeply intellectual and requires quite a bit of thought to go through, but Homo Deus is easily the most comprehensive and fascinating look at the future of humanity on a collective level. Anyone with the remotest interest in where we’re going as a species will be firmly engrossed from beginning to end, although I also recommend reading “Home Sapiens” first to get the full impact of both books.
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