Homo Deus

My second book of Yuval and I am still in love with his writing logic and sharp insights. The book deals with topics of multiple-facets, yet is moderated to be readily comprehensible to average readers. Comparing to authors of the same genre, Harari took a very different approach in predicting mankind future: the parallel pattern between current humans-animals and upcoming super humans-normal humans.

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Future is unforeseeable than ever since we are at the peak of our history where humans conquer natures: war and conflict are pushed to isolation, famine becomes scarce, diseases are detected, traced and eliminated at its birth, human rights are guaranteed than any previous periods in our history. Harari does not pose devastating visions even though he suggests the same pattern of humans-animals applied to the future social classification. Rather than a vision of AI treating us like slavery, what Harari envisions is an industrialized treatment such as the way we put pigs in cramped cages, limit their freedom of running in nature and separate them from their young. Harari’s analysis provides sufficient information and leaves enough space for me to think about this matter on my own.

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Another major vision suggested by Harari I found reasoning is the emergence of a new religion: Dataism besides liberalism, democracy, Islamism, Buddism, etc.; its believers will be handing their faith to the perfect calculation of computer power. Its logic is simple: human has defeated many of its worst enemies naming war, famine, once-deadly diseases, slavery and find immortality as its next threshold to cross. In order to reach such a dream, we regard computer power as the only source of truth. Drawbacks are seeable in a way that we are not “we” of today, we will be moving towards Homo Deus.

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If his previous book talks about Homo Sapiens as a form of ordinary existence so as other creatures on the Earth, Homo Deus talks more about changes and the dominance of human species with the inventory of AI over others.

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A great book for those with a critical looking to the future of themselves.