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A review by ninjalawyer
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
4.0
This one's tough, and I really struggled with whether it was a 3 or 4 star book for me. Harari's previous book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, is easily one of my favourite books. This one, while entertaining, just didn't manage to captivate to the same extent.
Reading this book, I found myself vacillating between interested and annoyed. The problem is two-fold: (i) while the discussion of the rise of Humanism is very interesting and takes up much of the book, it's also somewhat repetitive of the previous book; and (ii) I trust Harari far more with history than prognostication, and it's clear that he shares that distrust.
It's telling that while the book styles itself as "A Brief History of Tomorrow", relatively few pages are devoted to the future, and the author makes the following statement near the end:
While the above-quoted text is no doubt true, it does make me question the overall value of this book, particularly as I'm not confident that Harari has even presented the most likely scenarios for the future. Harari, while an excellent historian, doesn't seem to have the same level of knowledge when it comes to new areas of technology, and it seemed as though most of the citations for new technology came from popular media rather than scientific papers.
Despite the above reservations, the book is still interesting in that it does make the convincing case that Humanism has become a dominant theme in human civilization because of its organizing power as a story, not because it's any more "natural" or "correct" than communism or belief in God. In addition, the rise of Humanism and the reasons it dominated can provide incites into what the next story will be that will dominate humanity's future.
Reading this book, I found myself vacillating between interested and annoyed. The problem is two-fold: (i) while the discussion of the rise of Humanism is very interesting and takes up much of the book, it's also somewhat repetitive of the previous book; and (ii) I trust Harari far more with history than prognostication, and it's clear that he shares that distrust.
It's telling that while the book styles itself as "A Brief History of Tomorrow", relatively few pages are devoted to the future, and the author makes the following statement near the end:
"We cannot really predict the future. All the scenarios outlined in this book should be understood as possibilities rather than prophecies. When we think about the futur, our horizons are usually constrained by present-day ideologies and social systems."
While the above-quoted text is no doubt true, it does make me question the overall value of this book, particularly as I'm not confident that Harari has even presented the most likely scenarios for the future. Harari, while an excellent historian, doesn't seem to have the same level of knowledge when it comes to new areas of technology, and it seemed as though most of the citations for new technology came from popular media rather than scientific papers.
Despite the above reservations, the book is still interesting in that it does make the convincing case that Humanism has become a dominant theme in human civilization because of its organizing power as a story, not because it's any more "natural" or "correct" than communism or belief in God. In addition, the rise of Humanism and the reasons it dominated can provide incites into what the next story will be that will dominate humanity's future.