Book Review: HOMO DEUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW

Homo Deus is great, accessible science writing… This is a super fun read.”  “Thought-provoking and enlightening, Harari's books is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of our species.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 -New York times

                                          ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

                                                       

GENRE Non-Fiction

AUTHOR   Yuval Noah Harari

PAGES      450

YEAR OF PUBLISH  2015

OTHER BOOKS FROM AUTHOR 

 

 

The best reason to learn history: not to predict the future but to free yourself from past and imagine an alternate destinies.

SUMMARY OF HOMOGENEOUS A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW

Deus is a Latin word that means divine. Homo Deus is the second book in the series of Yuval's story of humankind. It discusses how humans will evolve from Homo Sapiens to Homo Deus. 

In his first edition author discusses the reason & origin of religion. Now the story resumes to the next stage where ideologies will replace religion. Man and animals were equal in the eyes of nature. With the advent of the agriculture revolution, god came into the picture and humans started dominating all other life forms. It was believed that God has the answers to all the unexplained questions. All the major catastrophe such as plague, floods, storms, wars and so on are happening because of the will of the Gods. With the advent of the scientific revolution, most of our unexplained doubts have got resolved. Since 1945 the world hasn't seen any massive healthcare or collective masses outbreak. The reason being-  we have developed a better social order in which most of the countries run parallel. 

Ideologies like Liberalism, Capitalism, Humanism helped us in creating mankind's best era. 

History is never created by masses but by the people who think about the future and can influence the majority. With the increasing influence of technology in our day to day life, future rulers will be the ones who will control data. 

 

Every single country on the globe is in the race to become prosperous. There are just three constraints- raw material, energy & knowledge. The first two are limited but the knowledge is infinite. So people will keep on finding new sources of energy and raw materials there will never have any shortage of this. 

The ultimate problem of economic prosperity is that it hampers the environment. Corporations want to keep generating profit, the government wants to make people happy by providing jobs and luxuries. This will take us to a point where the earth will become inhospitable. 

Today's world favors-every individual who has its own will to make the decision for his life. But do we really have free will? The human mind is influenced by his surroundings, genes, life events, and availability biases. These factors can be easily manipulated by genetic engineering, brain, drugs. 

The 20th century was dominated by the people who were involved in the military or mass production systems. These professions will dilute as it will be replaced by robots. 

Human has two part of brain one is conscious other is intelligence. Conscious includes experience, emotions, thoughts & Intelligence has part of the ability to perform the task. We have decoded the intelligence part and deployed it in computers. Conscious is still a puzzle to be solved. 

 

With increasing internet consumption, we are generating enormous data-that is getting decoded & analyzed. The information is coming back to us as the best suggestion. In the future, we will become so dependent on these suggestions that we will start believing it blindly. This will lead to the creation of a new world order where all humans will just be data point nodes. People who will control these orders will modify themselves with nanorobots, inorganic bio parts to control aging and diseases & will become  Homo Deus.

 

BOOK REVIEW HOMO DEUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW

It is always great to read about the future. Some of my earlier reads- like Future Shock & the Third Wave by Alvin Toffler also so had a good perspective about the future. 

I enjoyed reading Homeo Duos as it was clearly linked with his previous book Sapiens. The content was highly engaging as step by step author took readers to the journey of how humans conquered the world, gave meaning to the world and how we will lose control. 

 

After you complete this read you will understand where we came from, where we are and where we are heading. Here the future perspective is individualistic. To be honest reading on the same track becomes monotonous and you just want to complete things as fast as possible. But never felt like I should quit in the middle. You will always feel to read more and more so that you don't miss out on anything. As I've already told in my Sapiens Review that the author who is a historian has written in the simplest way possible to make readers connect, it follows the same trend in this book as well. 

 

 

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