A review by allison_reader
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

4.0

Thought-provoking, frightening, at times repetitive, and slightly missing something. It’s speculative and focuses less on the future of humanity and more on a future where humanity is superseded/controlled by all-knowing algorithms. It does seem to ignore the fact that the non-biological algorithms owe their existence to humanity, and if there are no longer humans to gather information about, or if humanity is just so much less advanced than the algorithms (and therefore obsolete) what information are the algorithms going to be gathering & why? I kept waiting for speculation on whether the algorithms would be able to discover the meaning of life/existence but that never came. I guess that would not be a goal unless humans programmed that into early algorithms. Also, today, information gathering is closely tied to capitalism, but the book says capitalism will one day cease to be important, so what again is the end goal of the information gathering? Algorithms are going to ceaselessly analyze and gather information, just for the sake of doing so, and then what? I can’t imagine humans would program themselves into insignificance. This book seemed more an effort to get humans to realize that they won’t be the top of the food chain forever and to contemplate that reality. Still, I think definitely worth a read.