Scan barcode
A review by schinko94
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
2.0
(Really 2.5 stars)
People either seem to really like this book or think that it's disappointing, and unfortunately I fall into the latter camp. I haven't read Sapiens, but now I'm not sure if I want to.
One of the major failings of this book is that Harari tries to turn a behemoth of individual (and seemingly unrelated) historical facts into a cohesive vision of the future of humanity. I'm not even sure that the best of historians could accomplish this, let alone an author who has some grandiose ideas of how humans will interact with technology in the future. I just think that the extremely "macro" view of history that Harari attempts to present in this book is too much to chew on, and he would be better off refining this book into a narrower selection of historical subject matter.
The "bureaucratic narratives vs. reality" argument that he presents is also interesting, but I don't know if I buy it. Harari tries to say that human reality ultimately bends to the will of fictional stories told by bureaucrats, which is true, but only to a point. He then presents the division of Africa as evidence of this argument, but I don't think he does it well enough. Did Africa really bend to the fictional borders of the Berlin Conference, or did reality continue to fester while Europeans told themselves that everything would be okay and that Africa would be better off because of them? I believe the latter happened, not the former.
This sort of shaky philosophical reasoning is part of the reason that I'm skeptical of the rest of the book. While I respect Harari's attempt to think things through, I don't think his version of the future will ultimately come to fruition, because there are just too many moving parts that he didn't take into account.
People either seem to really like this book or think that it's disappointing, and unfortunately I fall into the latter camp. I haven't read Sapiens, but now I'm not sure if I want to.
One of the major failings of this book is that Harari tries to turn a behemoth of individual (and seemingly unrelated) historical facts into a cohesive vision of the future of humanity. I'm not even sure that the best of historians could accomplish this, let alone an author who has some grandiose ideas of how humans will interact with technology in the future. I just think that the extremely "macro" view of history that Harari attempts to present in this book is too much to chew on, and he would be better off refining this book into a narrower selection of historical subject matter.
The "bureaucratic narratives vs. reality" argument that he presents is also interesting, but I don't know if I buy it. Harari tries to say that human reality ultimately bends to the will of fictional stories told by bureaucrats, which is true, but only to a point. He then presents the division of Africa as evidence of this argument, but I don't think he does it well enough. Did Africa really bend to the fictional borders of the Berlin Conference, or did reality continue to fester while Europeans told themselves that everything would be okay and that Africa would be better off because of them? I believe the latter happened, not the former.
This sort of shaky philosophical reasoning is part of the reason that I'm skeptical of the rest of the book. While I respect Harari's attempt to think things through, I don't think his version of the future will ultimately come to fruition, because there are just too many moving parts that he didn't take into account.