Interesting and enlightening in parts but other parts, such as his discussion of consciousness, are overthought and ultimately gibberish. The first part does a good job of describing how humans before the Enlightenment spent most of their lives dealing with disease, famine and conflict, but today those are relatively controlled. More people die now from obesity than hunger. The rest of the book discusses where the technologies and knowledge making that possible are heading. He essentially describes a journey from hunter gatherers that were just part of an ecosystem to masters of the planet on track to become gods but at the risk of being conquered by our own technologies. He builds this theme around algorithms. Algorithms are the formulas for processes and that makes them not just computer codes but the essence of life itself. People are ultimately a collection of algorithms. Build better algorithms and people become superfluous unless they enhance people. That is where our technologies are heading. The book does a good job of making that point. The book bogs down in discussing things like the algorighms for consciousness. Science hasn't been able to fully determine how consciousness and many other brain processes work. The middle of the book frequently goes off on tangents that add nothing. One ends by asking if consciousness is even needed. It gets lost in looking for algorithms when analyzing functions is the key point. Those parts are overthought on steroids. But it eventually gets to discussing how feelings govern actions and feelings are not chosen, they are simply felt, and that is why free will doesn't exist. That part is excellent. I think the book is underthought in important ways. One is not discussing how controlling disease, famine and conflict has allowed humans to multiply out of control. There is no technology that will allow that to continue indefinitely. It is virtually certain that disease, famine and conflict will return as the climate and civilizations collapse. Our inability to stop that is the lethal flaw in the whole journey to becoming gods. Perhaps a few homo deus supermen will survive but that is pure speculation. The apocalypse is certain and the book only mentions it as an issue in passing on one sentence that I saw. No discussion of the future is complete without at least acknowledging that problem. Another oversight is the potential chaos resulting from the growth of misinformation. AI is facilitating a growng trend creating rather than merely measuring reality. One casualty of AI may be truth. If AI takes over and humans can no longer know what is real, algorithms assessing what is important can't work. What will stop AI from destroying reality itself? It would potentially be a good strategy to eliminate humans. Another big issue not addressed is our inability to control the power of developing technologies in other ways. This theme is arising in many areas. The dismay of the scientists that developed the atomic bomb is a good example. One of the greatest intellectual achievements in history turned out to be a bomb that can destroy everything on earth. Once it was made the scientists turned their attention to controlling its use only to have the political and military leaders take over and start a new arms race. Similarly, gene editing technology will soon enable the creation of life itself. There is no way to ensure that bad people will not use this technology to create very dangerous master races to conquer the world. I think anyone would be challenged to tie all of this together. This book is a good start along with Code Breaker and American Prometheus, but there is still a lot to consider missing here.

This was a really interesting read. I read his other book, Homo Sapiens, and it was great too. I am about to start reading his other book. He is very thorough in his presentations.

Most of this is not about “tomorrow” but about yesterday and today. Most of the material that pertains most directly to the future begins with Chapter 8 which is two-thirds of the way into the book. But no matter. This is another brilliant book by the very learned and articulate Professor Harari. It should be emphasized that Harari is by profession a historian. It is remarkable that he can also be not only a futurist but a pre-historian as well as evidenced by his previous book, “Sapiens.” 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”