Homo Deus

Harari's starting point is that the old scourges of hunger, infectious disease and violence are largely under control, so humanity's new agenda will be to defeat death, engineer happiness and acquire powers once reserved for gods. The question that follows is what happens when intelligence decouples from consciousness, when algorithms know us better than we know ourselves and many people lose their economic and military value. His answer is Dataism, a worldview that treats the universe as a flow of data.

Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote this after the global success of Sapiens. Time put it among the top ten nonfiction books of 2017. Reviews were mixed. David Runciman in The Guardian praised its originality and style but found it short on empathy for Homo sapiens, and The Economist called it glib, with too many sleights of hand. Shelf Awareness compared its sweep to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel but felt it lingers on arcane questions such as animal consciousness.

There is no finance here in the narrow sense, but readers get a sweeping argument about automation, data as power and the future of work, best read as a set of possibilities, which is how Harari himself frames it, rather than as forecasts.

1. Success changes the agenda. Harari's starting point is that the old killers have been tamed, so investment, politics and science will increasingly chase longevity, health and enhancement.
2. Money is a shared story. Like nations and corporations, money works only because millions of people believe in it, an idea that explains both its power and its fragility.
3. Intelligence is separating from consciousness. Algorithms do not need to feel anything to outperform humans at specific tasks, which is why Harari expects automation to reach cognitive and professional work.
4. A useless class is a political risk. If large numbers of people lose economic and military value, he argues, the bargaining power that underpinned mass politics and welfare states weakens.
5. Data is becoming the source of authority. Dataism treats decisions as information processing, so whoever holds the most data and the best algorithms gains power, a frame worth testing against today's platform companies.

After an opening chapter on the new human agenda, the book is organized in three parts.

1. The new human agenda. Harari argues that famine, plague and war have been brought largely under control and that the next goals will be immortality, bliss and divinity, while warning that these are possibilities rather than prophecies.
2. Homo sapiens conquers the world. He asks what sets humans apart from other animals, examining animal minds, the idea of the soul, and the human ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers through shared stories.
3. Homo sapiens gives meaning to the world. He explains how intersubjective realities such as gods, money, corporations and nations shape history, how science and religion coexist, and how humanism in its liberal, socialist and evolutionary forms became the modern creed, with liberalism prevailing in the twentieth century.
4. Homo sapiens loses control. He argues that the life sciences undermine the liberal idea of a free individual self, that intelligence is decoupling from consciousness, that a large class of people may lose economic and military relevance, and that Dataism could replace humanism as the ruling worldview.

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.