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Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow By Yuval Noah Harari

Oct 30, 20209 min read

“In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.” ~ Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow 1

Homo Deus - Is Man’s reach exceeding his grasp?

Thoughts

As with Sapiens, Harari’s narrative is compelling. The book has a ton of facts and well researched material that he weaves into the story as a master folktale teller unraveling secrets one by one. There is so much packed into the book, it is mind boggling. The same was the case with Sapiens2. Also with 21 lessons3. This book provides a worldview by taking oneself totally out of it and looking at it as an objective observer, of the past and the future, something Harari asserts that only Homo Sapiens can do. It has a progressive outlook towards the endless possibilities of a brighter future but also has an ominous overtone.

TLDR;

The book starts off by saying that humanity has all but solved the problems that killed people en masse in the past - disease, famine, and violence. The new agenda of the future would be to raise the stakes much higher and aim for - happiness, immortality, and divinity. Well, it is not too far away, the transformation of humans into gods is within reach. It is exciting as well as scary to think of the unimaginable world that humans are entering into.

Provocative Statements

The strength of the book is in the way Harari constructs words to convey meaning. Some of them are so intense that they give you a jolt. There are many unbelievably provocative yet deeply true statements.

Take for instance something that he says when he describes human relationship with animals in the past. “We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.” Oops!! Harari says that throughout our history, most humans never gave much consideration about other animals. They were there to serve mankind, as food or labor. Many religions went to great lengths to assert the dominance of humans over other creatures justifying mindless killing for sacrifice or sport. The realization that Artificial Intelligence or Superhumans of the future might treat normal humans as lower life forms, was profound!

Another instance is when he compares the Theory of Relativity which is tough to understand vs the Theory of Evolution which is much easier to grasp. “The Theory of Relativity makes nobody angry because it doesn’t contradict any of our cherished beliefs”. But the Theory of Evolution makes a lot of people angry because it contradicts the long cherished belief of existence of soul and all the creation myths. The concept of soul and all the theology around it in different religions is so difficult to understand but people defend it with their lives in opposition to Evolution.

Or consider this statement - “People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.” Wow! Was reminded of this scene in Westworld Season 2 finale (The Passenger). The hosts see an open gateway at the edge of a cliff and they run to it. The moment they jump in, their consciousness is uploaded into a virtual world and they are very happy but in reality, they are jumping off the cliff edge to their demise! People who have their lives locked into a strong belief in afterlife could blow up everyone and there could just be a void after that! Of course, suicide bombers are scary, but scarier are the people who believe that whatever ecological catastrophe happens, they have an ark or an underground bunker or a colony in Mars to escape into!

New Religion

What Harari says about Dataism as the new religion is something that we can identify with. We’re seeing it all around. Everything is just a huge data processing system.

I was taken aback by his theory around consciousness though. Is it just mental pollution? Here is a quote from the book -

“Consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes. Jet engines roar loudly, but the noise doesn’t propel the aeroplane forward. Humans don’t need carbon dioxide, but each and every breath fills the air with more of the stuff. Similarly, consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn’t do anything. It is just there.”

I don’t quite agree. But it is something to think about for sure.

Overall, it is an engaging read. You might agree or disagree with a lot of points in the book but it does make you look at things from a different point of view and force an internal dialogue.

Afterthoughts

The title of this post references a famous quote from Robert Browning -

“Ah, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” from Andrea del Sarto 4 By Robert Browning.

The quote implies that we should try to achieve things beyond what we can hold on to, but we might not be able to reach heaven. I think the book points to the the possibility that in future, humans might go beyond what even the wildest notions of heaven that we have currently.

Though I agree with many points in the book, I can’t agree with everything. Though Harari is a great scholar, some things seem to be subjective opinions.

Rather than believing that the world is an empty void of eternity, I’d like to believe that we catapult ourselves towards being spacefaring beings that can travel anywhere in this vast Universe, like in the TV series The Expanse5. I’d like to believe that we’d find out more about telepathy, astral projection and other non-understood phenomena, like when Murph discovers that the Ghost in the bookshelf that she was interacting with, was Cooper from future (sorry for the spoiler alert from Interstellar6).

As an aside, while we’re talking about Interstellar, here is a thrilling scene from the movie. {{< youtube a3lcGnMhvsA >}} Seeing the scene or just listening to the soundtrack or live performance is simply inspiring. Napoleon famously said “The word impossible is not in my dictionary”, but Cooper’s “No, It’s necessary” in answer to CASE’s “It’s not possible” could go down as one of the greatest dialogues in movie history.

Notes

Listing down the TOC and the headings of different sections to jog the memory for myself or anyone who wants to recollect the concepts in the book.

Introduction

1 The New Human Agenda

  • The Biological Poverty Line
  • Invisible Armadas
  • Breaking the Law of the Jungle
  • The Last Days of Death
  • The Right to Happiness
  • The Gods of Planet Earth
  • Can Someone Please Hit the Breaks?
  • The Paradox of Knowledge
  • A Brief History of Lawns
  • A Gun in Act I

PART I Homo Sapiens Conquers the World

Questions - What is the difference between humans and all other animals? How did our species conquer the world? Is Homo sapiens a superior life form, or just the local bully?

2 The Anthropocene

  • The Serpent’s Children (Reminded of the sci-fi series Raised By Wolves)
  • Ancestral Needs
  • Organisms are Algorithms
  • The Agricultural Deal
  • Five Hundred Years of Solitude

3 The Human Spark

  • Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin?
  • Why the Stock Exchange Has No Consciousness
  • The Equation of Life
  • The Depressing Lives of Laboratory Rats
  • The Self-Conscious Chimpanzee
  • The Clever Horse
  • Long Live the Revolution!
  • Beyond Sex and Violence
  • The Web of Meaning
  • Dreamtime

PART II Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World

Questions - What kind of world did humans create? How did humans become convinced that they not only control the world, but also give it meaning? How did humanism – the worship of humankind – become the most important religion of all?

4 The Storytellers

  • Living on Paper
  • Holy Scriptures
  • But it Works!

5 The Odd Couple

  • Germs and Demons
  • If You Meet the Buddha
  • Counterfeiting God
  • Holy Dogma
  • The Witch Hunt

6 The Modern Covenant

  • Why Bankers are Different from Vampires
  • The Miracle Pie
  • The Ark Syndrome
  • The Rat Race

7 The Humanist Revolution

  • Look Inside
  • Humanism in Five Images
    • Politics - The voter knows best, Economics - The customer is always right, Aesthetics - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Ethics - If it feels good, do it, Education - Think for yourself.
  • Follow the Yellow Brick Road
  • The Humanist Schism
  • Is Beethoven Better than Chuck Berry?
  • The Humanist Wars of Religion
  • Electricity, Genetics and Radical Islam

PART III Homo Sapiens Loses Control

Questions - Can humans go on running the world and giving it meaning? How do biotechnology and artificial intelligence threaten humanism? Who might inherit humankind, and what new religion might replace humanism?

8 The Time Bomb in the Laboratory

  • Who are I?
  • The Meaning of Life

9 The Great Decoupling

  • The Useless Class
  • A Probability of 87 Per Cent
  • From Oracle to Sovereign
  • Upgrading Inequality

10 The Ocean of Consciousness

  • Gap the Mind
  • I Smell Fear
  • The Nail on Which the Universe Hangs

11 The Data Religion

  • Where Has All the Power Gone?
  • History in a Nutshell
  • Information Wants to Be Free
  • Record, Upload, Share!
  • Know Thyself
  • A Ripple in the Data Flow

Book cover Image Credit: https://www.ynharari.com/book/homo-deus/

Footnotes

  1. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. United States: Harper, 2016. ↩

  2. Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. United States: HarperCollins, 2015. ↩

  3. Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. United States: Spiegel & Grau, 2019. ↩

  4. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43745/andrea-del-sarto ↩

  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) ↩

  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film) ↩

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