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adamchalmers 's review for:
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
A great sequel to Sapiens. It's another far-future forecasting book, but it tries to avoid the mistakes futurists usually make by paying careful attention to historical processes and examining which ones we can expect to continue and which to stop.
It goes over some similar ground to Sapiens, but from a different sort of perspective. Spends some time on human-animal relations to establish how humans and animals are (perceived as) different, and what ethical obligations that puts on us. Goes over the whole "social imagination" or "social existence" idea which is central to Sapiens. It's used in this book to talk about religion, how gods used to own farms/villages, and then regimes did, and now corporations do, and soon algorithms will. All of these are socially-real entities which get humans to enact their "will".
Spends a lot of this book talking about "religion", which he uses broadly to encompass not just traditional religion but any belief-system which includes ethical theories and accounts of meaning in the world. Examines the history of humanism (which Harari says is the dominant religion of the 20th century) and its alternatives.
Actual predictions about the future only account for the last quarter of the book, where (having set up all the historical background) he looks at whether humanism can survive technological tampering with human biology and society, what could replace it, and what effect that would have.
It goes over some similar ground to Sapiens, but from a different sort of perspective. Spends some time on human-animal relations to establish how humans and animals are (perceived as) different, and what ethical obligations that puts on us. Goes over the whole "social imagination" or "social existence" idea which is central to Sapiens. It's used in this book to talk about religion, how gods used to own farms/villages, and then regimes did, and now corporations do, and soon algorithms will. All of these are socially-real entities which get humans to enact their "will".
Spends a lot of this book talking about "religion", which he uses broadly to encompass not just traditional religion but any belief-system which includes ethical theories and accounts of meaning in the world. Examines the history of humanism (which Harari says is the dominant religion of the 20th century) and its alternatives.
Actual predictions about the future only account for the last quarter of the book, where (having set up all the historical background) he looks at whether humanism can survive technological tampering with human biology and society, what could replace it, and what effect that would have.