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A review by andrewspink
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
I was not over-enthusiastic about Sapiens and this book was worse. A lot of the ideas are repeated here, and there are also a lot of factual inaccuracies. Sometimes that is because with the passing of times we now know better and sometimes it is just wrong.
For instance, he writes that we have no clue why we need to experience fear (and other emotions). That is not so, there is a multitude of data on that topic. In the whole book, he ignores neurochemistry, which is one reason that the brain is much more sophisticated than the network of electrical connections that he describes.
Likewise he only partially understands the Porsolt cylinde test. It is about learned helplessness and depression. I've never met a biologist who describes living beings as algorithms (I am a biologist), so don't know where he gets that from. Biologists do make models of various processes, but that is a simplification of reality, to test understanding, not reality itself.
Nowadays we know that Neandathals most likely had very complex language, and interbred with Homo sapiens. It is not clear that their extinction was due to 'superiour' abilities of H. sapiens and indeed, seeing we all have their DNA in our genome, it is a moot point if they are extinct.
But the worst is his exaultation of big tech IT companies. He makes the mistake, that I think noone today would make, of assuming that those companies are neutral. The idea that google processes something for the common good rather than for the profit of google now looks very naïeve. Thankfully in the EU we have privacy legislation to protect us, and even in the US, legislators are waking up. His free flow of information is further away than he thinks. And autonomous cars have also not taken over, that is turning out to be a much harder problem than everyone thought 10 years ago.
As always, predicting the future is much harder than predicting the past.
For instance, he writes that we have no clue why we need to experience fear (and other emotions). That is not so, there is a multitude of data on that topic. In the whole book, he ignores neurochemistry, which is one reason that the brain is much more sophisticated than the network of electrical connections that he describes.
Likewise he only partially understands the Porsolt cylinde test. It is about learned helplessness and depression. I've never met a biologist who describes living beings as algorithms (I am a biologist), so don't know where he gets that from. Biologists do make models of various processes, but that is a simplification of reality, to test understanding, not reality itself.
Nowadays we know that Neandathals most likely had very complex language, and interbred with Homo sapiens. It is not clear that their extinction was due to 'superiour' abilities of H. sapiens and indeed, seeing we all have their DNA in our genome, it is a moot point if they are extinct.
But the worst is his exaultation of big tech IT companies. He makes the mistake, that I think noone today would make, of assuming that those companies are neutral. The idea that google processes something for the common good rather than for the profit of google now looks very naïeve. Thankfully in the EU we have privacy legislation to protect us, and even in the US, legislators are waking up. His free flow of information is further away than he thinks. And autonomous cars have also not taken over, that is turning out to be a much harder problem than everyone thought 10 years ago.
As always, predicting the future is much harder than predicting the past.