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Why did I read this? Harari’s kind of all the rage these days, and has been (as I perceive it anyway) since his career-launching “Sapiens” came out back in 2015. “Sapiens” is a very accessible yet detailed and entertaining version of the whole “the history of the world up ’til now!” theme that a lot of historians have taken a crack at. I have a list of authors where I’ll happily read anything they write, and because I really enjoyed “Sapiens,” I added Harari to that list. His books are long, but take your time, and you’ll be rewarded.
In “Homo Deus,” Harari, having covered the past in “Sapiens,” moves on to conquer the future. Where do we go from here? If that sounds open-ended, it is, but to bring it just a tiny bit into focus, he contemplates famine, plague, war (on the glass half-empty side) and things like pursuing happiness, immortality, and our increasing power over the world around us.
An interesting idea: Harari thinks that our future of algorithms understanding us better than we understand ourselves (that part is already here — check your IG and YT feeds) may lead to us worshipping neither gods (religion) or people (humanism), but data itself. I have my doubts — good luck changing what people worship, regardless of what data you discover — but it’s an interesting idea.
Harari will impress you at least a couple of times by the way he’s able to weave together current science and historical patterns to make plausible-sounding predictions about the future. However, Harari really does love the sound of his own voice, and he often presents speculative scenarios as if they’re inevitable. I don’t know if he’s as certain as he sounds about his conclusions, but either way, they’re fun to contemplate.
“Homo Deus,” like most of what Harari writes, prods us to think about stuff we probably haven’t thought of before, because no one’s laid out for us all the intersecting disciplines the way he does. He can’t provide definitive answers, of course, but by posing questions about humanity’s direction, he challenges readers to consider what we might become when our ancient battle against human misery gives way to the pursuit of improvement.
