Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Prof. Harari has some incredible insights into the nature of human religion (humanism, dataism, abrahamic religions, the “supernatural”), intelligence, evolving beliefs (including ones which may be obsolete tomorrow such as the idea of self), consciousness, the power of machines over humans (including better understanding our preferences better than we can), transhumanism, life/death/age/disease, progress, history, bio-editing, and more. Harari is a very talented and interesting writer whom makes you think much about things you take for granted and how bizzare they actually are.
My two main complaints are
- Doesn’t go into superintelligent AI as much as he did with other topics. This is permissable though.
- Harari really strawmans socialism, describing it essentially as “a planned, centralized, and authoritarian economy and government”. Interestingly claimed that a variety of worker protections and benefits WERE adopted into capitalism. Idk but it feels like Harari never engaged with socialism in good faith.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.
Note: Listened to as audiobook. I don’t believe any quality was lost.