This book has been on my shelf for way too long. Yuval brings insight and clarity to any discussion - whether written or verbal. His strength is to link history to current affairs, and here, to the future. While I disagree with many of his predictions, his perspective is well researched, excellently communicated, and rationalised with clear arguments. Like all of his work, well worth a look.

Harari is one of those people who writes well and convincingly and yet when you see reviews from other creditable scientists, he is easily debunked and his theories proven hyperbolic. I think, given all that is going on in the world, there was never going to be a good moment to read this book but suffice to say, I'm not converted nor convinced.

There are good books and there are great books and then there are books which have the power to make you see the world in a completely different way. This is one of those books.

I wanted to like this, I wanted to be interested in this. For me, though, it was just too much of the same, and as it is such a huge book, I felt like I could spend a very very long time reading it and what would I gain? I would be a bit better informed, perhaps, but it really reminds me of reading a long and interesting newspaper article by a clever person who has done a lot of research, but newspaper articles don't come in at 491 pages.
So, hmm. I also confess my interest waned after I read the pandemics section - this might have been thought correct when the book was published, but I am reading this in 2021 when our world is in the second year of the pandemic, and this book is not relevant anymore, excepting the sentence where he said this could only happen as an act of aggression. Interesting?
I doubt I will finish this book; if I do finish it, it will be in little chunks spread far out and it would be many more months or even years before I reviewed it. Instead, you get this.

Unfortunately I found this book a bit of a slog to get through although some of it did contain some interesting information.

Yuval Noah Harari has yet again amazed me. This book is amazing-factual yet interesting and fun to read. A fascinating look at how humans have evolved and created the world that we live in today and also explores just where we will go from here. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

Very few books these days deserve the description "thought provoking," but this one does.

An incisive and at times terrifying look at the immediate future of humanity.

Highly recommended.

What an absolute chore this turned out to be. Who knew that a book about the future of humanity could turn into such repetitive drivel? Harari is the popular author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a book I'd heard about and hadn't had the pleasure of reading yet. Now, having read Homo Deus, I'm really not sure I actually want to. Because whatever idea Harari had when he started writing this book, it mostly got lost in about 450+ pages of unedited stuff, for lack of a better word.

Harari may well be a good historian, but he is a terrible futurism. He starts with an interesting premise: how will Homo Sapiens evolve from here and what does the future hold for humankind? And you know, it's a genuinely interesting premise. Except that Harari seems to suck all the joy and interest out of it, instead delivering what can be charitably described as a one man show of solidarity with liberalism (and capitalism), including some doomsday predictions that seem to come from, 'well science would totally go this way'.

I've seen some criticism levelled at him for his similar approach to Sapiens, most notably for the contempt he has for the Agricultural Revolution (namely the move from hunter-gatherer societies to settlements and farming). That same contempt is visible in this book, with Harari spending a lot of time praising the existence and life of hunter-gatherer Homo Sapiens, almost as if this had been the peak of human achievement and ingenuity. His general approach seems to be that once humans started farming, it all went downhill, our brains got smaller, we invented currency and writing and politics; basically, we should all have just stayed in those small communities, how much better off would we be?

Except now, we are at the cusp of yet another revolution, one that would (in Harari's estimation) make us all redundant, to be replaced by robots and data algorithms and advanced superhumans. So we'd be left, in his estimation, with a world filled with an entire class of unemployable people (including lawyers and doctors of course) and some elite superhumans, created with the power of genetic engineering. So here's my main rub with this: the assumption that somehow, either through the failure of liberalism or the avarice of capitalism, once certain procedures (like genetic testing) become available to a wider population, the rich will swiftly move on to something more interesting/niche/exclusive. This is based on wild speculation and nothing more, with very little in the way of thought given to actual consequences.

Which segues nicely into my biggest problem with this book: Harari takes a million different strands and thoughts and doesn't really finish any of them. The entire chapter focused on 'Dataism' is basically one giant uninterrupted train of thought. I don't know how many times he could iterate about how we're all just algorithms, man (I swear I could feel the smugness radiating off the page) and how it's so bad that humans aren't that special, how liberalism will be completely overwhelmed by a religion driven by data (it should be said that Harari holds other systems but capitalism in quite a bit of contempt) and how supercomputers and AI will render us useless and therefore drive us to extinction. He gets this from the proliferation of Google/Facebook, the rise in driverless cars and smartwatches/wearable tech. It's a pretty big leap to make.

Now, he does have a point that perhaps we are surrendering too much of our personal information to corporations that then essentially own it. And yes, there is definitely something to be said about how this information is kept, sold or used, how much of yourself you truly reveal online and how others can use your digital footprint to manipulate you (or indeed, to provide you with the kind of propaganda you are most likely to respond to. But Harari doesn't really go beyond superficial thoughts and musings. There's no real exploration of how humans might react to this, how to push for accountability from these big, faceless corporations and perhaps even how to band together to demand better ethics and transparency. Instead, Harari rails against anything too centralised, praises the invisible free hand of the market and ends up writing a book that reads a lot like the posts on r/iamverysmart.

I struggled a lot reading this, because the repetition is, at times, nigh unbearable. It feels like someone's university essay, where they need another couple of hundred words to make the minimum word count, so they rehash the same argument a few times; except in Homo Deus, this is spread across several chapters, with the final one being the real nail in the coffin. I was relieved to turn the last page, finally, though not because I was leaving with some great insight into humanity or our potential evolutionary path, but because I was relieved that it was finally over. Has this put me off reading Sapiens? A little bit, actually. Instead, I may look towards Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and similar books for insights into human nature and draw my own conclusions about whether Homo Deus will really be the next logical evolutionary step.

This book works well as a companion to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Homo Deus takes what is learnt from Sapiens and projects the development of the human race into the future, describing how we might change not only socially but as a species. This is an extremely thought provoking book, even if you disagree with some of Harari's views, and I highly recommend it.

It's not that I disagreed a lot with Harari or that he offered nothing new but I barely made it through this book. The disorganization of this book was a serious problem-he'd jump around, leave arguments trailing, and generally made this book frustrating rather than thought-provoking. I couldn't figure out if he addressed the problems of the inequality in his future world or whether I just passed it by somehow.

This has been an amazing read. Like its predecessor, it has not disappointed in the slightest and I am eager to read more on this author's books. I'd highly recommend it to everyone!

I tried, I tried...........
But i could not get into this book. Maybe it was to 'high brow' for me. But just had to give up and get on with my life!!!!!!

Terrific and essential follow up to Sapiens. A stimulating if slightly bleak prognosis for the human race! Challenging analysis but essential reading - and hugely enjoyable.

I started this but found the language impenetrable and a little preposterous. It did not grab my attention so I did not finish it.

Bold predictions for the future

In Yuval Noah Harari’s previous book, Sapiens, he considered how humanity got to where we are today from a hunter-gatherer culture to a modern industrial farming systems that can support millions. In this latest volume, Home Deus, he contemplates the future; our future, and the events that will shape us in the twenty-first century.

We have reached the apex of our abilities with current technology. Going back only a hundred years our lives were frequently cut short by famine, war and illness. Today, in the Western world at least, we have mostly conquered disease and extended our lifespan, but now we are as likely to suffer from obesity or contemplate suicide, total different challenges for the coming decades. He suggests that these will be met as we embrace the modern age of data, pervasive networks and genetic modification. That is assuming that we have a place to live as our world too is under threat because of our relentless pursuit of extracting the maximum resources for the cheapest price.

So, what does the future hold for humanity?

Harari ponders the possibilities and pitfalls of our future self. He asks and goes some way to answer the questions that we will have to address in the coming years. He proposes that our obsession with information flow may almost become a religion, dataism. How will we deal with the dilemma of choosing between intelligence and consciousness and what is the possibility that we might become part of a wider algorithm or part of the internet of things? These are all interesting questions and whilst he goes some way to answering them, there is a fair amount that is pure speculation and conjecture, but that is what makes this actually quite an interesting book.

Half Man, Half Book

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

Absolutely loved this book - I appear to be in a minority but I enjoyed this more than Sapiens. As someone who specialised in biophysics the whole concept of bio-engineering and bio-technology is something that really interests me, and the speculation of where it can go in this book was something which really appealed to me!

A difficult book to pigeonhole as the author is quite the polymath and brings into his work elements of philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, politics, organisational dynamics... well you get the idea. But this is no dry academic tome. This is a well written, well researched, engaging story of the future of mankind. It does not suggest Harari has all the answers and instead gives you ideas, tools, and examples to let you form your own opinions. I found it hugely enlightening and also very entertaining. Ideal for a difficult to buy for relative who likes educating themselves about current issues or a long journey when you want to lose yourself in something that requires you to fire up the brain cells. I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.