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Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Paperback – Illustrated, September 4, 2018
Purchase options and add-ons
Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.
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 Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.
With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateSeptember 4, 2018
- Dimensions6 x 1.12 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100062464345
- ISBN-13978-0062464347
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Get to know this book
What's it about?
This book is about the future of humanity and the quest to upgrade humans into gods, exploring projects, dreams, and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century.Popular highlight
This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.10,374 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
For the first time in history, more people die today 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 combined.9,742 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.8,114 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.6,313 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.6,296 Kindle readers highlighted this
From the Publisher
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind | Sapiens: A Graphic History, Vol. 1 | Sapiens: A Graphic History, Vol. 2 | Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow | |
Customer Reviews |
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4.6 out of 5 stars
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Price | $13.49$13.49 | $20.00$20.00 | $16.41$16.41 | $17.18$17.18 |
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind explores what it means to be 'human,' and the ways that biology and history have defined us. | Featuring 256 pages of full-color illustrations and easy-to-understand text covering the first part of the full-length original edition, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. | This second volume of Sapiens: A Graphic History focuses on the Agricultural Revolution—when humans fell into a trap we’ve yet to escape: working harder and harder with diminishing returns. | Harari turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods. |
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. Above all, it will make you think in ways you had not thought before.” — Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast, and Slow
“Thrilling to watch such a talented author trample so freely across so many disciplines... Harari’s skill lies in the way he tilts the prism in all these fields and looks at the world in different ways, providing fresh angles on what we thought we knew... scintillating.” — Financial Times
“Spellbinding… This is a very intelligent book, full of sharp insights and mordant wit... It is a quirky and cool book, with a sliver of ice at its heart... It is hard to imagine anyone could read this book without getting an occasional, vertiginous thrill.” — Guardian
“Harari is an intellectual magpie who has plucked theories and data from many disciplines - including philosophy, theology, computer science and biology - to produce a brilliantly original, thought-provoking and important study of where mankind is heading.” — Evening Standard (London)
“I enjoyed reading about these topics not from another futurist but from a historian, contextualizing our current ways of thinking amid humanity’s long march–especially…with Harari’s ability to capsulize big ideas memorably and mingle them with a light, dry humor…Harari offers not just history lessons but a meta-history lesson.” — Washington Post
“What elevates Harari above many chroniclers of our age is his exceptional clarity and focus.” — London Sunday Times
“A remarkable book, full of insights and thoughtful reinterpretations of what we thought we knew about ourselves and our history.” — The Guardian
“Provocative...the handiwork of a gifted thinker.” — Jennifer Senior, New York Times
“[A] great book…not only alters the way you see the world after you’ve read it, it also casts the past in a different light. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari shows us where mankind is headed in an absolutely clear-sighted & accessible manner.” — Mail on Sunday
“Like all great epics, Sapiens demanded a sequel. Homo Deus, in which that likely apocalyptic future is imagined in spooling detail, is that book. It is a highly seductive scenario planner for the numerous ways in which we might overreach ourselves.” — The Observer (London)
“Thank God someone finally wrote [this] exact book.” — Sebastian Junger, New York Times Book Review
“Harari is an exceptional writer, who seems to have been specially chosen by the muses as a conduit for the zeitgeist… Fascinating reading.” — Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Sapiens takes readers on a sweeping tour of the history of our species…. Harari’s formidable intellect sheds light on the biggest breakthroughs in the human story…important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.” — Washington Post
“Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language.” — Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, and The World until Yesterday
“In Sapiens, Harari delves deep into our history as a species to help us understand who we are and what made us this way. An engrossing read.” — Dan Ariely, New York Times Bestselling author of Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty
“Provocative… essential reading.” — New York Times Book Review
“Thought-provoking and enlightening, Harari’s books is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of our species.” — BookPage
“…[S]hares DNA with the work of writers like Jared Diamond … while drawing freely from other disciplines in both the humanities and sciences. It’s emphatically a work for the general reader eager to grapple with big ideas, but who is equally hungry for context for today’s headlines.” — Shelf Awareness
From the Back Cover
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.
Over the past century, humankind has managed to do the impossible: turn the uncontrollable forces of nature—namely famine, plague, and war—into manageable challenges. Today 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 combined. We are the only species in earth’s long history that has single-handedly changed the entire planet, and we no longer expect any higher being to mold our destinies for us.
What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? What destinies will we set for ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams, and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century, from overcoming death to creating artificial life. But the pursuit of these very goals may ultimately render most human beings superfluous. So where do we go from here? And how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? We cannot stop the march of history, but we can influence its direction.
Future-casting typically assumes that tomorrow, at its heart, will look much like today: we will possess amazing new technologies, but old humanist values like liberty and equality will guide us. Homo Deus dismantles these assumptions and opens our eyes to a vast range of alternative possibilities, with provocative arguments on every page, among them:
- The main products of the twenty-first-century economy will not be textiles, vehicles, and weapons but bodies, brains, and minds.
- While the Industrial Revolution created the working class, the next big revolution will create the useless class.
- The way humans have treated animals is a good indicator for how upgraded humans will treat us.
- Democracy and the free market will both collapse once Google and Facebook know us better than we know ourselves, and authority will shift from individual humans to networked algorithms.
- Humans won’t fight machines; they will merge with them. We are heading toward marriage rather than war.
This is the shape of the new world, and the gap between those who get on board and those left behind will be larger than the gap between industrial empires and agrarian tribes, larger even than the gap between Sapiens and Neanderthals. This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.
About the Author
Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling historian and philosopher, is considered one of the world’s most influential intellectuals today. His popular books—including Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us—have sold more than forty-five million copies in sixty-five languages. Harari, with his husband, Itzik Yahav, cofounded Sapienship, a social impact company with projects in the fields of education and storytelling, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Harari has a PhD in history from the University of Oxford. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, and lectures in the department of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (September 4, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062464345
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062464347
- Item Weight : 2.45 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.12 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #10,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Prof. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 65 languages, with 45 million copies sold worldwide. 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' (2014) looked deep into our past, 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow' (2016) considered far-future scenarios, and '21 Lessons for the 21st Century' (2018) zoomed in on the biggest questions of the present moment. 'Sapiens: A Graphic History' (launched in 2020) is a radical adaptation of 'Sapiens' into a four-part graphic novel series, which Harari created and co-wrote in collaboration with comics artists David Vandermeulen (co-writer) and Daniel Casanave (illustrator). 'Unstoppable Us' (launched in 2022) is Harari's first book series for children, telling the epic true story of humans and our superpower in four volumes, and featuring illustrations by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the writing style well-written, entertaining, and accessible. They also find the intellectual level thought-provoking and deserving of bright reviews. However, some find the book too long, rambling, and not relaxed reading. Additionally, they find the tone disappointing.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the writing style well-written, fascinating, and accessible. They also appreciate the brutally frank and brave statements.
"...This is another brilliant book by the very learned and articulate Professor Harari. It should be emphasized that Harari is by profession a historian...." Read more
"...To me his writing is always carefully and reasonably articulated and he states plainly when and where he is speculating...." Read more
"...This book is a good start along with Code Breaker and American Prometheus, but there is still a lot to consider missing here." Read more
"...On the positive side, Mr. Harari brings the same colorful and thought-provoking writing and broad grasp of humanity, both ancient and contemporary,..." Read more
Customers find the book interesting and enlightening in parts, with clear and humorous writing. They also appreciate the intelligent analogies, coherent overall thesis, and thoughtful author. Readers say the book provides an interesting format to help them sort their thoughts and feelings, and extrapolates possible futures with compelling logic. They say useful education is crucial and that narratives change and evolve much more rapidly than we can biologically. They mention that the book contains some past history.
"...manner I think the reader can see how beautifully Harari writes and how deep and original a thinker he is.“..." Read more
"Sapiens is among my favorite books, and its full of fascinating ideas...." Read more
"Interesting and enlightening in parts but other parts, such as his discussion of consciousness, are overthought and ultimately gibberish...." Read more
"...It provides an interesting format to help the reader sort their thoughts and feelings into a current scheme for understanding one’s self and society...." Read more
Customers find the viewpoint illuminating, novel, and unique. They also say it adds significantly to their world perspective, and is good for reflection.
"...Harari has a gift of seeing the big picture, and extrapolates possible futures with compelling logic...." Read more
"...Indeed the book does an excellent job in rising our awareness to where we might be heading as a collective." Read more
"This book changes your view of the world...." Read more
"...He is a very smart man, smarter than me. Reading his books makes me feel enlightened." Read more
Customers find the humor in the book to be good.
"...in his previous book "Sapiens": clever, clear and humorous writing, intelligent analogies and a remarkable sweep through human history,..." Read more
"...thesis is coherent given his assumptions and gracefully presented with considerable humor, so four stars, even if it is more than a bit presumptuous!" Read more
"...It’s an awkward combination of colloquial and academic verbiage that can only be described as a literary identity crisis...." Read more
"...He is so full of insights, humor and a deep understanding as he explains how our world of ideas and politics, science and religion, evolution,..." Read more
Customers find the book organization very good at simplifying the complicated. They also say the author did an excellent job keeping it well organized and insightfully put together.
"...This is also a very non-technical method that has a lot in common with ancient practices like Buddhism. Hardly a blade runner future...." Read more
"...The way that it is organized in short chapters covering one topic at a time makes it easy to read and easy to pick up and put down...." Read more
"...In short, his take on AI is slim on details, and he makes sweeping and often one-sided arguments while largely skirting clear of the raw facts...." Read more
"...everything is explained and described, and how serious science appears relatively easy. A must read for almost everybody." Read more
Customers are mixed about the accuracy of the book. Some mention it's very likely accurate, with impressive and realistic forecasts. However, others say it'd be better off without the extraneous details and speculation.
"...The there are curious omissions in this work. Global warming, for example...." Read more
"...Being Harari extremely intelligent, his extrapolations and predictions are plausible...." Read more
"...It is a clever device but not real scholarship, and highly deceptive...." Read more
"...I did enjoy the first 2/3 of th ed book. It was factual and science based. It was the last third I had trouble with...." Read more
Customers find the tone of the book disappointing, half-baked, and incomplete. They also say the subject is interesting but depressing in the end.
"...if we more fully understand how we arrived at today, are insufficiently satisfying to justify the book as a whole...." Read more
"...translations of Harari's books seem to have been done by a poor computer program, rather than human beings...." Read more
"...But its complex attempt tries too hard and comes up lame. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”..." Read more
"...covers an important and most interesting subject, I find it rather disappointing." Read more
Customers find the book too long and dense. They also say it's wordy and rambles in some sections.
"...For those who are not well versed in biology, these pages are not easy to follow and are somewhat boring...." Read more
"...It is well written, easy to read and understand. The chapters are a bit long, but the story does pull you in and keep you interested...." Read more
"...However, it tends to get rambling in some sections, sometimes repeating points already made clear in previous chapters." Read more
"...The book is long and at times difficult to get through in terms of the depth of research the author uses to validate his thesis...." Read more
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This quote from page 15 may serve as a point of departure: “Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil fields. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge.” (p. 15)
In the latter part of the book Harari defines this knowledge more precisely as algorithms. We and all the plants in the ground and all fish in the sea are biological algorithms. There is no “self,” no free will, no individuals (he says we are “dividuals”) no God in the sky, and by the way, humans as presently constituted are toast.
The interesting thing about all this from my point of view is that I agree almost completely. I came to pretty much the same conclusions in my book, “The World Is Not as We Think It Is” several years ago.
What I want to do in this review is present a number of quotes from the book and make brief comments on them, or just let them speak for themselves. In this manner I think the reader can see how beautifully Harari writes and how deep and original a thinker he is.
“Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9/11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Now they flourish in the wreckage.” (p. 19) Notice “fundamentalists” instead of “terrorists.” This is correct because ISIS, et al., have been financed by Muslim fundamentalists in places like Saudi Arabia.
“You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins.” (p. 67)
Harari speaks of a “web of meaning” and posits, “To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.” (p. 147)
One of the themes begun in “Sapiens” and continued here is the idea that say 20,000 years ago humans were not only better off than they were in say 1850, but smarter than they are today. (See e.g., page 176 and also page 326 where Harari writes that it would be “immensely difficult to design a robotic hunter-gatherer” because of the great many skills that would have to be learned.) In “The World Is Not as We Think It Is” I express it like this: wild animals are smarter than domesticated animals; humans have domesticated themselves.
For Harari Nazism, Communism, “liberalism” humanism, etc. are religions. I put “liberalism” in quotes because Harari uses the term in a historical sense not as the opposite of conservatism in the contemporary parlance.
“For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat.” (p. 186) I would add that religions are primarily social and political organizations.
“If I invest $100 million searching for oil in Alaska and I find it, then I now have more oil, but my grandchildren will have less of it. In contrast, if I invest $100 million researching solar energy, and I find a new and more efficient way of harnessing it, then both I and my grandchildren will have more energy.” (p. 213)
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.” (p. 213)
On global warming: “Even if bad comes to worse and science cannot hold off the deluge, engineers could still build a hi-tech Noah’s Ark for the upper caste, while leaving billions of others to drown….” (p. 217)
“More than a century after Nietzsche pronounced Him dead, God seems to be making a comeback. But this is a mirage. God is dead—it’s just taking a while to get rid of the body.” (p. 270)
“…desires are nothing but a pattern of firing neurons.” (p. 289)
Harari notes that a cyber-attack might shut down the US power grid, cause industrial accidents, etc., but also “wipe out financial records so that trillions of dollars simply vanish without a trace and nobody knows who owns what.” (p. 312) Now THAT ought to scare the bejesus out of certain members of the one percent!
On the nature of unconscious cyber beings, Harari asserts that for armies and corporations “intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional.” (p. 314) This seems obvious but I would like to point out that what “consciousness” is is unclear and poorly defined.
While acknowledging that we’re not there yet, Harari thinks it’s possible that future fMRI machines could function as “almost infallible truth machines.” Add this to all the knowledge that Facebook and Google have on each of us and you might get a brainstorm: totalitarianism for humans as presently constituted is inevitable.
One of conundrums of the not too distance future is what are we going to do with all the people who do not have jobs, the unemployable, what Harari believes may be called the “useless class”? Answer found elsewhere: a guaranteed minimum income (GMI). Yes, with cheap robotic labor and AI, welfare is an important meme of the future.
Harari speculates on pages 331 and 332 that artificial intelligence might “exterminate human kind.” Why? For fear humans will pull the plug. Harari mentions “the motivation of a system smarter than” humans. My problem with this is that machines, unless it is programmed in, have no motivations. However it could be argued that they must be programmed in such a way as to maintain themselves. In other words they do have a motivation. Recently I discussed this with a friend and we came to the conclusion that yes the machines will protect themselves and keep on keeping on, but they would not reproduce themselves because new machines would be taking resources from themselves.
Harari believes that we have “narrating selves” that spew out stories about why we do what we do, narratives that direct our behavior. He believes that with the mighty algorithms to come—think Google, Microsoft and Facebook being a thousand times more invasive and controlling so that they know more about us than we know about ourselves. Understanding this we will have to realize that we are “integral parts of a huge global network” and not individuals. (See e.g., page 343)
Harari even sees Google voting for us (since it will know our desires and needs better than we do). (p. 344) After the election of Trump in which some poor people voted to help billionaires get richer and themselves poorer, I think perhaps democracy as presently practiced may go the way of the dodo.
An interesting idea taking this further is to imagine as Harari does that Google, Facebook, et al. in say the personification of Microsoft’s Cortana, become first oracles, then agents for us and finally sovereigns. God is dead. Long live God. Along the way we may find that the books you read “will read you while you reading them.” (p. 349)
In other words what is coming are “techno-religions” which Harari sees as being of two types: “techno-humanism and data religion.” He writes that “the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is…Silicon Valley.” (p. 356)
The last chapter in the book, Chapter 11 is entitled “The Data Religion” in which the Dataists create the “Internet-of-All-Things.” Harari concludes, “Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.” (p. 386)
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Hard Science and the Unknowable”
Homo Deus summarizes the fundamentals of Sapiens in the first half of the book. Then it goes to dramatic new places which are a projection and warning about modern technologies and trends. To me his writing is always carefully and reasonably articulated and he states plainly when and where he is speculating. Sure he draws many extrapolations forward but that's the point of this book! When he presupposes he admits it as such, exactly as he did in Sapiens. If the 20th Century was really was a war among Humanist sects (as he contends)...then the advances of 21st Century science and technology are beginning to chip away at what has been assumed to be our sacred and individual human essence. That's an idea with major implications. Do you agree that Humanism is the modern world's primary underlying religion and that it is now (possibly) in danger? After some consideration, I agree with the notion, and also that it seems to be at risk as new discoveries chip away at the sacred notion of self. Everything that underpins the modern world: consumerism (the customer is always right), our political system (democratic voting), and our psychology (do what feels right) are all based on the assumption that the 'self' is irreducible. But what if that 'self' isn't so clear or autonomous? It appears less so every day, as computer/person hybrid thinking becomes more common (think GPS navigation), and as new understandings emerge about what makes us, well...US. Meanwhile, computer AI advances accelerate at an insane pace, doing things declared previously impossible only months earlier. Medicine does the same. New cheaper DNA sequencing and practical DNA splicing/editing reveal mechanics that underlie our physiology and psychology. And hey, we're on the verge of 3d printing organs!
Even without something like an AI consciousness emerging, the fact is that most of what we do really can be off-loaded to more efficient computer algorithms. When today the most powerful entities in the world are not people but rather inter-subjective entities like Google, will our children's world still be ruled by the 'sacred' self? Can that 'sacred' self be defined clearly, or rather manipulated, ostracized, dissected, distracted, drug-altered, or click-baited one way or another? Or is that not already a pretty darn good description of our modern world? You be the judge, but this book speculates reasonably about plenty of reasons to be nervous.
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It means that the author tries to put some thoughts to where we are heading to as humans beings. Two insights got my attention and totally deserves further reflection. The first one is that the classification of humans Vs machines has been changed for organic algorithms Vs non-organic algorithms. The second point is the Dataism and its flow of information and the goal to link everything and everyone to the internet of all things. Still talking about the second theme, I highly got surprised by the perspective of the flow of direct information to throw away institutions and procedures largely utilize in democracies all around the world nowadays: our representatives (Why we do need them when we could formulate and express our opinions direct or an algorithm like facebook's 300 hundred likes are capable of predict our will with good accuracy even before any expression from ourselves). The book has brilliant thoughts. Well done. 10 out 10.