Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

My rating: ★★★☆☆

After having laid out our history and the revolutions that rocked humanity in Homo Sapiens, Harari set himself the ambitious goal of predicting what tomorrow has in store for humankind, and what the next revolution might look like.

Homo Deus covers interesting topics like whether animals have feelings, the existence of the soul, the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness, the weaning role of religions and the emergence of new ones like communism, and liberal humanism. That in itself is a provocative stance Harari had already taken in Sapiens, and largely details here.

Harari argues we are in a world where the dark forces of yesteryear have taken on different forms – take for instance eugenics in the capitalist world: the richer you are the more likely you are to be able to afford life-enhancing, and even life-saving, treatment. Even if some countries seem impermeable to individualistic creeds, they are also contributing to the emergence of a future where humans will devalue, their freedom of choice (which Harari argues is illusional) replaced by cyber helpers capable of digesting gigantic data flows, making far better decisions than our brains ever could.

After having killed God, are we on the verge of killing Life? Will human brains adapt as they did during the first cognitive revolution? Will we let data-ism rule us without complaint because it brings us closer to happiness? Will we volunteer to become cyborgs with eternal existences and submit to our very own powerful creations?


Homo Deus made for an interesting read. I loved the provocation, and thoughtful insights on how to interpret history differently. Harari’s prophecies weren’t as well rounded as his recounting of the past however and I must have lost the thread at some point because the book sometimes felt a little disjointed - a patchwork of miscellany and concepts, some of which had already been explained in Harari’s earlier work. Other parts were very driven and I could sense what the author was getting at.

I would recommend Homo Deus for its provocativeness and the kind of thinking it encourages, even if I personally enjoyed it less than Homo Sapiens, despite the promise of a healthier, potentially eternal life.

Who wants to live forever?

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