Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

I was enthralled by Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by the author Yuval Noah Harari. To say that it is my all-time favorite book would be an understatement as I felt like I identified with the author. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on his next book, “Homo Deus” and the first thing I did when I found out that a translation was in the works, was to get in “electronic line” for the book at my library.  Judging from the long list of people who had placed this book on hold, I was not the only one eager to see what Yuval had cooked up in round two.

From the very first page, you get the same engaging style that Yuval had perfected in Sapiens. He has the rare ability to dig up compelling pieces of our history, boil them down to the essentials and narrate them in a conversational style. What amazes me the most is that he can look at something we take for granted and ask why is it there. For instance, he asks “Why do we have lawns in the US ?”  While it may not be too hard to ask questions like this, Yuval’s brilliance is how he looks into history to answer this question. He goes back to see the first documented instance of people having lawns and provides an explanation. 

Unfortunately, he sometimes dwells too much on things that I didn’t care much about. He devotes many pages to the question of “Do animals have souls?”, and I really was not interested in a scholarly discussion on this topic. Regardless, I still took away a useful conclusion from this topic which is “Things that have meaning today may be irrelevant in a few thousand years”. He also offers up some bold opinions like "No other animal can stand up to us, not because they lack a soul or a mind, but because they lack the necessary imagination”, which will undoubtedly be impossible to prove or disprove.

Towards the middle of the book, he goes into a long treatise on modernity and what it means. He contrasts this with the classical theory of most religions where all things happen with a purpose that is pre-ordained by the supreme being. So in the past, if bad things were to happen humans could take comfort in the belief that this was God's will and that they would reap the benefits of their good deeds later on or in their next life. However, according to Yuval, "if modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens’".

There are some interesting anecdotes of experiments from Facebook where by analyzing likes on a Facebook page, they can better judge a human’s current disposition than their friends or partners. Similarly there are examples where Google is better at knowing what is good for you than you yourself. Scary stuff indeed, and something that will get you thinking of what the future has in store for our species. This eventually leads to some predictions of what the highest life form will evolve into.

I got the feeling that Yuval was desperately trying to create theories for new religions with names like “techno-humanism” and “data religion”. I guess when you are in the business of predicting the future you have to make stuff up, and that is precisely what Yuval is doing here. Unfortunately, it is not very compelling to read.