Homo Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow

On almost every page of Sapiens, a bible of mankind’s cultural and economic and philosophical evolution, our millennial battles with plague and war and famine, Harari announced himself a Zen-like student of historical paradox: “We did not domesticate wheat,” he wrote, “wheat domesticated us”; or “How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.” The most intriguing section of a wildly intriguing book was the last. Harari’s history of our 75,000 years wound up, as all bibles are apt to do, with apocalyptic prophesy, a sense of an ending.

The book sets out to examine possibilities of the future of Homo sapiens. The premise outlines that during the 21st Century, humanity is likely to make a significant attempt to gain happiness, immortality and God-like powers. Throughout the book, Harari openly speculates various ways that this ambition might be realised in the future based on the past and present.

Homo sapiens conquers the world

The first part of the book explores the relationship between humans and other animals, exploring what led to the former's dominance.

Homo sapiens gives meaning to the world

Since the verbal/language revolution some 70,000 years ago, humans live within an "intersubjective reality", such as countries, borders, religion, money and companies, all created to enable large-scale, flexible cooperation between different individual human beings. Humanity is separated from animals by humans' ability to believe in these intersubjective constructs that exist only in the human mind and are given force through collective belief.

Humankind's immense ability to give meaning to its actions and thoughts is what has enabled its many achievements.

Harari argues that humanism is a form of religion that worships humankind instead of a god. It puts humankind and its desires as a top priority in the world, in which humans themselves are framed as the dominant beings. Humanists believe that ethics and values are derived internally within each individual, rather than from an external source. During the 21st century, Harari believes that humanism may push humans to search for immortality, happiness, and power.

Homo sapiens loses control

Technological developments have threatened the continued ability of humans to give meaning to their lives; Harari suggests the possilibity of the replacement of humankind with a super-man, or "homo deus" (human god) endowed with abilities such as eternal life.

The last chapter suggests the possibility that humans are algorithms, and as such Homo sapiens may not be dominant in a universe where big data becomes a paradigm.

The book closes with the following question addressed to the reader:

"What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?"