Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
By: Yuval Noah Harari
Harari’s follow-up to Sapiens is hard to put down. The future is going to be a little bit scary for us meat bags. But that’s better than boring. The last few paragraphs sum it up nicely:
“If we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
- Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing.
- Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
- Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
“These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book:
- Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
- What’s more valuable — intelligence or consciousness?
- What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?”
Overall rating: 5/5
This review also appears in Goodreads.