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3.99 AVERAGE
3.99 AVERAGE
Not as iconic as Harari's previous book, Sapiens, but still quite enjoyable and inspiring, especially as someone interested in writing futuristic science fiction.
Not all the future scenarios he theorizes are necessarily fun to think about, though. Some sound pretty dystopian. The ideas in here aren't always pleasant to think about, but they are all interesting.
I still don't agree with how he defines "religion," as he basically redefines the word for his own purposes in a way that no one else does (as far as I'm aware). But in this book I came to understand a little bit more why he defines it that way. I see where he's coming from, but I'm still not on board.
Not all the future scenarios he theorizes are necessarily fun to think about, though. Some sound pretty dystopian. The ideas in here aren't always pleasant to think about, but they are all interesting.
I still don't agree with how he defines "religion," as he basically redefines the word for his own purposes in a way that no one else does (as far as I'm aware). But in this book I came to understand a little bit more why he defines it that way. I see where he's coming from, but I'm still not on board.
Using his historical perspective on human nature and the way we operate in our own self interest, Yuval paints a potential future based on cutting edge research and technology in computer science and biotech, and examines the trajectory of the humanist revolution and where we go once its premises are rendered obsolete. Great, great, great book.
It was interesting although obviously dated now.
Previously on Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind… This is how this book should have started so not to produce disapointment. First half of the book is an actual rephrasal of the previous one. However, this one delivers even more depression and anxiety! According to the author we're no more than walking bags of meat. No soul, no mind, no free will, we're no better than other animals in any way. I guess if you would decide (no, scratch that)… I guess if your neurons would fire in the right order, so that you felt a desire to go to the author's house and kick him in the nuts, he should have no objection, since it was not your fault, just firing neurons and chemical reactions... How very convienient. Judges will soon have no job, since noone should be held accountable for anything.
There were a better humans once, however, and Harari is seriously in love with them. The hunter gatherers - they (in his opinion) had terrific lives. Obviously he hasn't played Don't Starve... If he did, he would have known better.
To be fair, the book for someone who has not yet read Sapiens would still be really interesting and thought provoking. Though in most cases those thoughts would be egzistential, depressive and anxious. :)
Next book by Yuval Noah Harari: "How to cash twice on the same material: rephrase like a pr0".
There were a better humans once, however, and Harari is seriously in love with them. The hunter gatherers - they (in his opinion) had terrific lives. Obviously he hasn't played Don't Starve... If he did, he would have known better.
To be fair, the book for someone who has not yet read Sapiens would still be really interesting and thought provoking. Though in most cases those thoughts would be egzistential, depressive and anxious. :)
Next book by Yuval Noah Harari: "How to cash twice on the same material: rephrase like a pr0".
informative
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Fascinating and challenging, but it doesn't half drone on.
I read this book's predecessor, Sapiens, a couple of years ago and, while don't remember it in detail, I found it insightful and enjoyable. This book however was somewhat disappointing in comparison, and I found myself tuning out toward the end.
As a piece of futurism this is necessarily speculative and as such lacks the authority that Sapiens' sweeping history did. But this also feels more fragmented, opinionated and finger-waggy.
This book begins with Pinkeresque summary of humanity's triumph during the last few centuries over our eternal enemies: famine, plague and war - backed up by gruesome statistics illustrating how miserable life once was, prior to the Enlightenment. Harari repeatedly points out that obesity is a bigger killer than starvation now, and that "sugar is more dangerous than gunpower". People are more likely to deliberately kill themselves than to be deliberately killed by someone else. That neatly sums up the theme of the book: progress, sure, but at what cost?
This first section introduces the idea that, having slayed our former foes, humanity will now turn to a new set of challenges: conquering death, engineering evermore happiness, and remaking ourselves as gods. This seems to imply that the books will lay out how Harari expects these three things to happen, but what follows are many chapters of what feels like moralising with a veneer of objectivity, The book ends it a somewhat more prosaic and half-baked meditation on how our new obsession with data will define our future. This doesn't seem to neatly tie up the threads started the introduction and leaves the impression that Harari's perspective on the future evolved over the course of writing the book.
Like Sapiens, this book contains a compelling and sobering case against humanity's shameful abuse of animals. I can find little to argue with here. I'm convinced this will be the most incomprehensible moral stain on ourgeneration when viewed in retrospect by members of Homo Deus a couple of hundred years hence. Our relationship to animals, particular for food, is an ethical mess.
Harari uses this to lead into what I found to a surprising main point of the book: a critique of the doctrine of humanism. I must admit, despite being in the habit of trying to challenge my own beliefs, if only to better understand them, it has never occurred to me that humanism was one of those beliefs worthy of harsh testing. Well, Harari has a go at it.
He tries to make the case that humanism is just another "religion" and that it's various flavours are "sects". At first I was willing to grant him this cheeky use of those word, since he makes the effort to carefully define religion as a set of beliefs based on principles taken on faith, or at least for non-scientific / evidence-based reasons. He distinguishes this from superstition or myth so he can justify using the term that way. But the more he does it, the more it seems like a cheap rhetorical trick. There are perfectly good words which better match this definition in more common use, like "ideology" or "world view". I eventually found this attempt to blur the line between humanism and traditional religions annoying and misleading.
His taxonomy holds that humanism, a product of the enlightenment, split into three main sects: liberalism, socialism and evolutionary humanism. These map to the liberal western countries, the communist experiments, and the Nazi/facist countries respectively. As such he's able to describe WWII as a "religious war" and you can just tell that he relishes doing that.
Throughout the book, Harari uses a tone of absolute objectivity, as if he were a Martian come to earth to write a report on the state of humanity, and to speculate on our fate. I found this objective tone reassuring to begin with, but as the book goes on and his agenda becomes more obvious, the pretense of detachment becomes grating. He has a habit of adopting particular viewpoints and speaking for several paragraphs in the voice of someone with that perspective: Nazis, Silicon Valley utopians, medieval monks etc. This could be his way of walking in other person's shoes, and helping deepen understanding of the lives of others, and it does serve this purpose. But it also a way to try to hide the book's moral message behind a veil of objectivity.
Anyway, liberalism won and rules the world for now. Even most movements challenging the world order want to honor the liberal principles of freedom, democracy and the dignity of the individual. Radical Islam and other theocratic ideologies can't succeed because they can't possible compete economically. While China, an economic powerhouse for the next century, "casts no ideological shadow" that could compete the established and successful system of liberal principles. China hasn't been able to articulate a clear alternative. I found this an interesting point.
But, argues Harari, liberalism can't last because science and technology are undermining its core articles of faith. Neuroscience has shown conclusively, he seems to claim, that free will obviously doesn't exist. So much for human agency. Similarly, psychology shows that we are in fact "dividuals", not individuals. There is no consistent unit of identity within us. I'll allow the book to elaborate on this. But while this might make for interesting philosophical discussion, it's not at all clear to me that these insights from science are having any significant effect on how people see themselves, individually or as a society.
As mentioned earlier, the book ends with a discussion of what is apparently a fact: that humanism is giving way at least to the new religion of "dataism". This is when I really started to disengage. Perhaps I've become jaded listening to endless tech nerds (like myself) wax prophetic about the world to come, but this section really felt like drawing a long bow. Yes, data is big business now. Yes, the most significant change in our lifestyles recently has been ubiquity of data streaming in and out. Yes, some people share too much on social media. Others live a quantified life, recording everything. But to extrapolate this to the end of liberalism, individual identity, democracy etc, seems like a stretch. It might be true, but its by no means a foregone conclusion. Harari does qualify everything with a "this is not a prediction" caveat at the end of the book. But I'm not even sure it's a terribly insightful guess.
At any rate, Harari is an excellent writer and thinker both wide and deep, so I don't regret reading the book. I might wait another couple of years until I pick up the next one though.
As a piece of futurism this is necessarily speculative and as such lacks the authority that Sapiens' sweeping history did. But this also feels more fragmented, opinionated and finger-waggy.
This book begins with Pinkeresque summary of humanity's triumph during the last few centuries over our eternal enemies: famine, plague and war - backed up by gruesome statistics illustrating how miserable life once was, prior to the Enlightenment. Harari repeatedly points out that obesity is a bigger killer than starvation now, and that "sugar is more dangerous than gunpower". People are more likely to deliberately kill themselves than to be deliberately killed by someone else. That neatly sums up the theme of the book: progress, sure, but at what cost?
This first section introduces the idea that, having slayed our former foes, humanity will now turn to a new set of challenges: conquering death, engineering evermore happiness, and remaking ourselves as gods. This seems to imply that the books will lay out how Harari expects these three things to happen, but what follows are many chapters of what feels like moralising with a veneer of objectivity, The book ends it a somewhat more prosaic and half-baked meditation on how our new obsession with data will define our future. This doesn't seem to neatly tie up the threads started the introduction and leaves the impression that Harari's perspective on the future evolved over the course of writing the book.
Like Sapiens, this book contains a compelling and sobering case against humanity's shameful abuse of animals. I can find little to argue with here. I'm convinced this will be the most incomprehensible moral stain on ourgeneration when viewed in retrospect by members of Homo Deus a couple of hundred years hence. Our relationship to animals, particular for food, is an ethical mess.
Harari uses this to lead into what I found to a surprising main point of the book: a critique of the doctrine of humanism. I must admit, despite being in the habit of trying to challenge my own beliefs, if only to better understand them, it has never occurred to me that humanism was one of those beliefs worthy of harsh testing. Well, Harari has a go at it.
He tries to make the case that humanism is just another "religion" and that it's various flavours are "sects". At first I was willing to grant him this cheeky use of those word, since he makes the effort to carefully define religion as a set of beliefs based on principles taken on faith, or at least for non-scientific / evidence-based reasons. He distinguishes this from superstition or myth so he can justify using the term that way. But the more he does it, the more it seems like a cheap rhetorical trick. There are perfectly good words which better match this definition in more common use, like "ideology" or "world view". I eventually found this attempt to blur the line between humanism and traditional religions annoying and misleading.
His taxonomy holds that humanism, a product of the enlightenment, split into three main sects: liberalism, socialism and evolutionary humanism. These map to the liberal western countries, the communist experiments, and the Nazi/facist countries respectively. As such he's able to describe WWII as a "religious war" and you can just tell that he relishes doing that.
Throughout the book, Harari uses a tone of absolute objectivity, as if he were a Martian come to earth to write a report on the state of humanity, and to speculate on our fate. I found this objective tone reassuring to begin with, but as the book goes on and his agenda becomes more obvious, the pretense of detachment becomes grating. He has a habit of adopting particular viewpoints and speaking for several paragraphs in the voice of someone with that perspective: Nazis, Silicon Valley utopians, medieval monks etc. This could be his way of walking in other person's shoes, and helping deepen understanding of the lives of others, and it does serve this purpose. But it also a way to try to hide the book's moral message behind a veil of objectivity.
Anyway, liberalism won and rules the world for now. Even most movements challenging the world order want to honor the liberal principles of freedom, democracy and the dignity of the individual. Radical Islam and other theocratic ideologies can't succeed because they can't possible compete economically. While China, an economic powerhouse for the next century, "casts no ideological shadow" that could compete the established and successful system of liberal principles. China hasn't been able to articulate a clear alternative. I found this an interesting point.
But, argues Harari, liberalism can't last because science and technology are undermining its core articles of faith. Neuroscience has shown conclusively, he seems to claim, that free will obviously doesn't exist. So much for human agency. Similarly, psychology shows that we are in fact "dividuals", not individuals. There is no consistent unit of identity within us. I'll allow the book to elaborate on this. But while this might make for interesting philosophical discussion, it's not at all clear to me that these insights from science are having any significant effect on how people see themselves, individually or as a society.
As mentioned earlier, the book ends with a discussion of what is apparently a fact: that humanism is giving way at least to the new religion of "dataism". This is when I really started to disengage. Perhaps I've become jaded listening to endless tech nerds (like myself) wax prophetic about the world to come, but this section really felt like drawing a long bow. Yes, data is big business now. Yes, the most significant change in our lifestyles recently has been ubiquity of data streaming in and out. Yes, some people share too much on social media. Others live a quantified life, recording everything. But to extrapolate this to the end of liberalism, individual identity, democracy etc, seems like a stretch. It might be true, but its by no means a foregone conclusion. Harari does qualify everything with a "this is not a prediction" caveat at the end of the book. But I'm not even sure it's a terribly insightful guess.
At any rate, Harari is an excellent writer and thinker both wide and deep, so I don't regret reading the book. I might wait another couple of years until I pick up the next one though.