Homo Deus
The million-copy bestseller from the author of Nexus
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4.4 • 204 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER**
Sapiens showed us where we came from. In our increasingly uncertain times, Homo Deus shows us where we're going.
'Spellbinding' Guardian
The world-renowned historian and intellectual Yuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond - from overcoming death to creating artificial life.
It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold?
'Even more readable, even more important, than his excellent Sapiens' Kazuo Ishiguro
'Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. It will make you think in ways you had not thought before' Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harari (Sapiens), professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provocatively explores what the future may have in store for humans in this deeply troubling book. He makes it clear that it is impossible to predict the future, so claims to be offering "possibilities rather than prophecies" and builds a strong case for a very specific outcome. The future to which he affords the greatest probability is, in many ways, a dystopian world in which humanism has given way to "dataism" the belief that value is measured by its contribution to information transfer and humans play an insignificant role in world affairs or have gone extinct. The roles humans play are diminishing, Harari argues, because increasingly our creations are able to demonstrate intelligence beyond human levels and without consciousness. Whether one accepts Harari's vision, it's a bumpy journey to that conclusion. He rousingly defends the argument that humans have made the world safer from disease and famine though his position that warfare has decreased remains controversial and debatable. The next steps on the road to dataism, he predicts, are through three major projects: "immortality, happiness, and divinity." Harari paints with a very broad brush throughout, but he raises stimulating questions about both the past and the future.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating read
Well researched and an easy read.
Boy did this book not age well
It is really interesting to read Yuval's infantile ideas about the future from 2016 and confront them with the reality of 2022.
As impactful as Sapiens
This is a great take on the very foundations of humanistic philosophies such as liberalism, socialism, capitalism and what the future of technology means for these.