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: 

1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms and life is data processing. 
2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. 
3. 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: 

1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing? 
2. What’s more valuable — intelligence or consciousness? 
3. 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.