Homo Deus by Yuval Harari

This book was tough, I was angry a lot.

Yuval Noah Harari starts by explaining how humanity has solved famine, plague and war and will therefore focus on advancing humans themselves (even if you ignore COVID-19 and the Ukraine invasion, what about the climate crisis?). God is dead and the new religion, Humanism, has the goal to create super-humans, therefore creating the next evolutionary stage after Homo Sapiens: Homo Deus.

He’s talking about consciousness, how it will be decoupled from intelligence and how every living being, including humans, is just a complex algorithm that we’ll just reverse-engineer and recreate in the future (“there is no human touch”).

Harari makes it hard to distinguish between fact and opinion because everything is presented as a fact. Even if there are references that are supposed to back it up, they often only cover a very small part of the statement. And the statements are wild. At one point he’s saying that national socialism is just a variant of humanism (see this statement by Humanists UK: Yuval Noah Harari and ‘humanism’ ).

I would’ve given this book a two-star rating but I’ve read this in a book club and what this book actually does well is sparking discussions and making you think about these topics.