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A review by sergek94
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
Actual Rating: 3.5/5
Time often catches us off guard. One day, we're 8 year old little humans brimming with naive joy and excitement, and suddenly, we're fully grown adults swimming in an ocean of anxiety regarding the next bill we're overdue on paying, and our manager testing every impulse we have to not just throw all our financial stability away in an attempt to salvage our dignity. In a blink of an eye, even those days are long gone, and we're sitting in our beds, retired, old and frail, worrying about the next way our aging bodies will betray us.That's what time does, it spares no one, and it not only operates on such a micro level, but it impacts societies, nations and civilizations. What was once medieval Europe dominated by the Roman Empire on one side and barbarian tribes on the other, quickly turned into one of the modern economic centers of the world, containing several nuclear powers and the Eiffel Tower and The Big Ben and Disneyland. Humans went from riding horse carriages to getting monthly subway subscriptions, and intimate diaries hidden in battered houses were replaced with WordPress accounts. You might argue that this took centuries to happen, but what are a few centuries in the grand scheme of 200,000 years, which is the earliest known date of the existence of anatomically modern human beings. What are 200,000 years in fact, in the billions of years this planet has existed for?As far as we're concerned, humanity is just an insignificant blip in this vast ever-evolving timeline. A toxic blip, that's for sure, but a blip nonetheless.
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”
The previous book by Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind explored our past and what led us here. This book looks into the future, at the probable possibilities that await our race, if we continue on this path we're on, which we most likely will. Yuval Noah Harari touches and expands on many concepts he briefly did mention in the previous book, especially the growing importance of technology in our lives, and the inevitable turning point where most humans will likely become obsolete and irrelevant compared to the highly intelligent AI that is slowly digging its roots into most aspects of our society. This book delves into the realm of speculation, and one must keep an open mind to fully absorb what Harari is trying to say, but his logical trail of thought and the way he grounds the reader into what is already known, and slowly branches from that familiar space into the territories of what could be, is quite convincing, and he makes previously unimaginable concepts seem quite realistic. For example, it might sound quite far-fetched to think that one day, we humans will become mindless slaves to AI, blindly following their instructions because there will come a point where they understand our deepest desires better than we do.
“No clear line separates healing from upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm.”
However, a brief survey of the present, and the way we delegate most of our tasks to computer programs like Siri and Cortana, asking them to remind us of our next doctor's appointment, and find book suggestions or restaurant suggestions based on our history, shows us that we are already on our way towards that path, and that the more intelligent computers get, the more we will rely on their input. Harari even posits the theory that an AI that has been gathering all of our information from childhood, including what makes us happy and what makes our blood pressure rise from moment to moment, can be very well suited to compare our behaviour around one potential love match with another, and give us an informed advice, not biased by our momentary hormonal reactions, but on objective data, regarding who we should choose as a partner.Such AI can even help us decide what party we want to vote for during the upcoming elections, since it is very easy for us to forget the frustrations we experienced under one president's tenure when he purposely spends the last year of his candidacy adopting favourable policies and engaging in expert marketing to flood us with dopamine make us forget the initial misery we suffered during the majority of his time on that seat, in order to gain our vote, while the AI won't ever forget a thing. These are interesting concepts he covers, and he even challenges the notion of a sense of self, showing us how biology actually refutes that claim, and shows us that we don't really have a core self but fleeting tidal waves of chemical reactions that influence our behaviour. He uses real life examples of how drastically one's behaviour can be altered just by electrically triggering certain parts of the brain.
“Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”
Despite these very interesting ideas, Yuval Noah Harari spends most of this book simply rephrasing and repeating concepts from his previous one, which I did enjoy, but I was hoping to spend more time pondering the future in more depth, as opposed to having 2 sections exploring the past and the present (which were done more than enough in the last book) and having just one section exploring these ideas. I would have wished for him to go into more detail, perhaps exploring different routes certain societies can take, knowing our sociological ecology is a diverse one. I did find a lot of repetition, and a lot of abstract examples being given to illustrate the same ideas over and over again, and this slightly diminished my enjoyment of this book. That's why I prefer the previous book over this one, though I still recommend reading this, since the ideas explored are quite eye-opening.
“The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological, the other biological. On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. If we don’t do something about this, our future achievements too might leave us as dissatisfied as ever."
Time often catches us off guard. One day, we're 8 year old little humans brimming with naive joy and excitement, and suddenly, we're fully grown adults swimming in an ocean of anxiety regarding the next bill we're overdue on paying, and our manager testing every impulse we have to not just throw all our financial stability away in an attempt to salvage our dignity. In a blink of an eye, even those days are long gone, and we're sitting in our beds, retired, old and frail, worrying about the next way our aging bodies will betray us.That's what time does, it spares no one, and it not only operates on such a micro level, but it impacts societies, nations and civilizations. What was once medieval Europe dominated by the Roman Empire on one side and barbarian tribes on the other, quickly turned into one of the modern economic centers of the world, containing several nuclear powers and the Eiffel Tower and The Big Ben and Disneyland. Humans went from riding horse carriages to getting monthly subway subscriptions, and intimate diaries hidden in battered houses were replaced with WordPress accounts. You might argue that this took centuries to happen, but what are a few centuries in the grand scheme of 200,000 years, which is the earliest known date of the existence of anatomically modern human beings. What are 200,000 years in fact, in the billions of years this planet has existed for?As far as we're concerned, humanity is just an insignificant blip in this vast ever-evolving timeline. A toxic blip, that's for sure, but a blip nonetheless.
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”
The previous book by Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind explored our past and what led us here. This book looks into the future, at the probable possibilities that await our race, if we continue on this path we're on, which we most likely will. Yuval Noah Harari touches and expands on many concepts he briefly did mention in the previous book, especially the growing importance of technology in our lives, and the inevitable turning point where most humans will likely become obsolete and irrelevant compared to the highly intelligent AI that is slowly digging its roots into most aspects of our society. This book delves into the realm of speculation, and one must keep an open mind to fully absorb what Harari is trying to say, but his logical trail of thought and the way he grounds the reader into what is already known, and slowly branches from that familiar space into the territories of what could be, is quite convincing, and he makes previously unimaginable concepts seem quite realistic. For example, it might sound quite far-fetched to think that one day, we humans will become mindless slaves to AI, blindly following their instructions because there will come a point where they understand our deepest desires better than we do.
“No clear line separates healing from upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm.”
However, a brief survey of the present, and the way we delegate most of our tasks to computer programs like Siri and Cortana, asking them to remind us of our next doctor's appointment, and find book suggestions or restaurant suggestions based on our history, shows us that we are already on our way towards that path, and that the more intelligent computers get, the more we will rely on their input. Harari even posits the theory that an AI that has been gathering all of our information from childhood, including what makes us happy and what makes our blood pressure rise from moment to moment, can be very well suited to compare our behaviour around one potential love match with another, and give us an informed advice, not biased by our momentary hormonal reactions, but on objective data, regarding who we should choose as a partner.Such AI can even help us decide what party we want to vote for during the upcoming elections, since it is very easy for us to forget the frustrations we experienced under one president's tenure when he purposely spends the last year of his candidacy adopting favourable policies and engaging in expert marketing to flood us with dopamine make us forget the initial misery we suffered during the majority of his time on that seat, in order to gain our vote, while the AI won't ever forget a thing. These are interesting concepts he covers, and he even challenges the notion of a sense of self, showing us how biology actually refutes that claim, and shows us that we don't really have a core self but fleeting tidal waves of chemical reactions that influence our behaviour. He uses real life examples of how drastically one's behaviour can be altered just by electrically triggering certain parts of the brain.
“Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”
Despite these very interesting ideas, Yuval Noah Harari spends most of this book simply rephrasing and repeating concepts from his previous one, which I did enjoy, but I was hoping to spend more time pondering the future in more depth, as opposed to having 2 sections exploring the past and the present (which were done more than enough in the last book) and having just one section exploring these ideas. I would have wished for him to go into more detail, perhaps exploring different routes certain societies can take, knowing our sociological ecology is a diverse one. I did find a lot of repetition, and a lot of abstract examples being given to illustrate the same ideas over and over again, and this slightly diminished my enjoyment of this book. That's why I prefer the previous book over this one, though I still recommend reading this, since the ideas explored are quite eye-opening.
“The glass ceiling of happiness is held in place by two stout pillars, one psychological, the other biological. On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. If we don’t do something about this, our future achievements too might leave us as dissatisfied as ever."