Book Club Friday's (#4) - Homo-Deus, Yuval Noah Harari

eldergill (52)in #bookclub • 7 years ago

Homo-Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow comes as a sequel to Yuval’s widely popular book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Both books are really compelling to read, presenting complex issues and ideology in a simple easy to read format. Homo-Deus gets you thinking about who you are, where you came from, and where you are headed.

A little bit about the author:

Yuval Noah Harari is a 41-year-old Israeli author whose work is primarily concerned with concepts of free will, consciousness, and definitions of intelligence. He is currently a professor of history at the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and can be considered one of the most futuristic thinkers alive today.

A bit about the book without spoiling it

Harari’s previous book Sapiens looks at how our species homo-sapiens came to be the most dominant species on planet earth today. The ‘sequel’ we are looking at ‘Homo Deus’ looks at where we are headed, and what the fate of our species may eventually be. His outlook on the whole of things, for the fate of humanity, is optimistic and bears an essence of we are entering an era of radical importance in the history of humanity. He primarily argues that our goals as a humanity in the 21st century are naturally slowly becoming altered, from the pursuit of ending global famine, disease and war to the pursuit of more intrinsic things like control over immortality, happiness and divinity.

This is because we have reached a point due to scientific innovation, where we can safely say that we can all live in a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world. The primary purpose of the book is to explain what happens next? What is the purpose of our lives once we have achieved the attainment of these feats? And how can we reach a point where we have achieved immortality, happiness and divinity.

Harari goes on to explain that AI will become more and more prevalent in our lives, it is going to create its own niche industry and is going to disrupt many others. Many argue that with further development of robotics and AI if we are able to get it to work for humanity and for the machines to serve humanity that they will end up taking our jobs. Harari explains that although this is a possibility, it is a very small probability because as history has told us, we will always create new jobs. A great example is the surge of the integration of the internet and how many new jobs, and new opportunities that offered us as humanity such as jobs on Youtube, or blogging or even online social media marketing workshops. With disruption comes an innovative approach to creating new opportunities and sources of income. Thus, it is likely that we will simply work alongside the artificial intelligence we create.

Summing up

In essence, what I loved about this book is how Yuval played to the advantages of the impossibility to predict where the world will be in 15 years time that we currently face in the 21st Century. It is admirable that he has attempted to come up with a thesis for the future and in addition to this, the ideas he has presented can be taken into serious consideration, and begin to make a lot of sense to us as the reader. We begin to see the world through the words of the book, how it is likely to strive away from Homo-centric to being Data-centric. It proves to be a really compelling read, filled with sheer genius and comical ideology.

However, there are some controversial viewpoints in the book that I just cannot fathom. At one point through the book, he attempts to tackle the question of what would humans do once they have achieved what we set out to do and to reach a point where we overcome the ‘technical difficulties’ such as death, unhappiness and deterioration of our bodies. He argues that we can live in paradise on earth once we have solved these issues, I believe that this is unjust, because most of the human purpose is derived from innovation and hard work. We love to create, we love to promote, we love to appreciate life through the different phases of our life so I don’t see why this world we are currently living in can be the source of our paradise. If we create the perfect world, wouldn’t we get bored? Perfect is boring to homo-sapiens, we were born to gossip, the rise in the social hierarchy which is what makes this world exciting to live in right now. Conversely, Harari may argue that until we can understand our true purpose on earth, which can only be attained by further development and the solving of issues that have plagued humans since the beginning of time, we are practically living in a purposeless universe, because until we reach this point;