Homo deus

a brief history of tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

449 pages

English language

Published July 29, 2017 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

ISBN:: 978-0-06-246431-6
OCLC Number:: 951507538

(15 reviews)

"Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style--thorough, yet riveting--famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda. What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo …

27 editions

Yuri Krupenin reviewed Homo deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Review of 'Homo deus' on 'GoodReads'

2 stars

Какое-то дикое поппури. Ладно набор тем, даже векторы атаки скачут между пинкеровщиной и андерсеновщиной, с щепоткой Бострома (цитируется напрямую), и чёрт разберёт, кого ещё. Достаточно спорных/ничем не подтвержденных заявлений; атаки на либеральный гуманизм (или что-то, что Харари под этим определением понимает) как стержень книги... обложка зазывала, прямо скажем, исследовать совсем не это, но:

Кто знает, соответствуй книга обложке, может, было б и ещё хуже.
Я читал достаточно авторов, те же наборы исходных позиций куда более убедительно применявших не для атаки, а для защиты.

В целом не очень понимаю, кому и зачем это надо.

Kevin B. O'Brien reviewed Homo deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Review of 'Homo deus' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Harari is an historian, which is the lens he uses here to think about the future. What he attempts to do is to use the trajectory of human development in the past as a guide to how the future will go. For example, how people have related to animals in the past is taken as a forecast of how future "super-humans" will relate to us. On this point he is fairly comfortable that we have nothing to worry about. But this is a book that is great at stimulating thought and throwing out questions, but not in providing answers. Whether that is a good or a bad thing you would have to decide, but in the course of reading I often stopped to just think about what he said, and about related ideas that came to mind because of what he said.

In the last chapter he goes in a direction somewhat similar to Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants when Harari discusses what he calls "The Data Religion", and this quote can give you an idea of what he is thinking here:

"1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing.
2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves."

This is definitely thought-provoking stuff, but I found this last chapter the least convincing part of the book.