Publisher’s write-up:
‘Sapiens shows us where we
came from. Homo Deus shows us where we’re going.
Yuval Noah Harari envisions a
near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the
projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and
beyond – from overcoming death to creating artificial life.
It asks the fundamental
questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive
power? And what does our future hold?’
Homo Deus is the sequel to Sapiens:A Brief History of Humankind (click for reading the review of Sapiens) from Professor Yuval Noah Harari. While
Sapiens explains the events in human history up to the 21st century,
the author presents his prognosis on the future of the species – how are we
going to deal with changing technology and artificial intelligence? Would we
remain the same or would there be a fundamental change – the principal case the
author built in the previous book was how our species managed to overcome
several constraints without a fundamental change in the structure of our DNA. The
author answers these questions in his book Homo Deus.
His coining of the term Homo
Deus represents the species that would replace Homo Sapiens and the
impact that genetic engineering and artificial intelligence is going to have.
The author starts very well, explaining how we are living in the best time humanity
has ever witnessed, that for the first time more people die of obesity related
diseases than malnutrition, more people die of suicides than war and plague,
inter alia. The book is split into three parts – the first explaining how homo
sapiens conquered the world, moving on to explain how homo sapiens gave meaning
to ‘their world’, and the final part explaining how we are losing
control and the author’s prognosis on the future.
As mentioned earlier, the book
started very well, giving out interesting facts and explaining how every human emotion
is mere biochemical reactions; what if they could be recreated? That was a very
good way to start the book which got us immediately into the book. Like his
previous book, it dealt with a scientific topic and the author used layman’s
language throughout the book. Owing to the similarity of the topic, this did
not feel like a book different from Sapiens and in fact, in a lot of
cases, it felt like the author was repeating the same contents as his previous
book – during the second part, as to how humans rely on myth, how we need them
for cooperation, etc. It seemed to me as a means to write a book very similar
to the previous book including the size, whereas what the author wished to convey
could have been done so in half the number of pages if we remove the
redundancies.
I also observed the same flaws that
I noticed in Sapiens, where the author seems to
misunderstand the word 'religion' – going on to explain how ‘humanism’ and ‘liberalism’
are religions and what would be the religion of the future. Sure, there are
some similarities between religion and the above-mentioned ideologies; to start
with, they are ideologies, and both are myths that a lot of humans believe in,
to create a stable society. But the similarities end there – religion is associated
with the divine and there is usually a creator (which is the reason why theologians
debate whether Buddhism could be considered a religion) and pretends to hold
answers for every question and surely, the above mentioned laws do not (nobody
would ask a humanist philosopher to explain how the universe came into being). This logic is the same as 'My dog has a tail. A cat also has a tail. Therefore, my dog is a cat'. These aspects of the book made me cringe.
It also needs to be mentioned as
to how the author mentioned certain obvious facts as findings; to quote an
example, tried to prove how human beings are not different from any other
animals and there is no proof over existence of a soul. I have never
come across even the staunchest users and believers in the concept argue that
it is a scientific / medical concept. There was a similar argument over mind.
Much as it was surprising and thus interesting to note that scientists conducted
experiments to confirm the lack of it, it did not add any value to the book,
nor add any knowledge to the reader.
To conclude, I would say that
this book may be read for the sake of continuity and it has its high points and
some interesting facts, but certainly not as informative as Sapiens. A relatively
minor issue that kept bothering me is that the very title ‘history of
tomorrow’ is a contradiction in terms. This book is a classic case of ruining
a good start – the book dealt very little with the author’s prognosis. However,
I would admit that if I evaluate the content ignoring all the redundant parts
of the book, I would say it was fairly informative. That saves the author’s
reputation in my books to read his next work, but not the rating of this book,
I award the book a rating of four on ten.
Rating – 4/10
Have a nice day,
Andy
Andy
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