Review: Homo Deus

Vinay Sridhar
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

First off, I liked Homo Deus a lot less than I liked Sapiens. The narrative wasn’t super clear, the ideas weren’t as compelling (or new — the first quarter is a summary of Sapiens and the rest is an interesting take of stuff everyone’s talking about these days), and I couldn’t see why Harari spent so much space writing about some aspects (like the part on consciousness). Anyway some of the ideas I thought were interesting:

1 . I’m always fascinated by how different people defend the necessity to study history. I like Harari’s version: “[you study history] not to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies”. For ex, I think strategy consulting works because you’re able to study patterns across industries, geography and time — history is that, but on a much grander scale. That’s my understanding of it anyway.

2. Harari drove home again his thesis of how the ability to create ‘myths’ (or intersubjective realities, if we’re being proper) is how humans managed to cooperate on such a large scale. Intersubjectivity is interesting — it only works if everyone around you believes the same thing you do. Democratic elections work because everyone believes in a common set of myths (“We’re all Indian, we believe in XX”), but how will elections work when countries start having more diverse sets of people — across class, religions etc. — without common binding myths?

3 . The single-biggest idea that made the book worth reading for me is that liberalism will be put under tremendous stress with the advent of better science (biology mainly) and technology (AI/ML and biotechnology). Couple of issues:

  • What happens to our notion of free will now that Google, Facebook and every other tech company is now in the business of telling us what we want (Ken Liu’s short story ‘The Perfect Match’ is a FANTASTIC story of this)? Instagram tells us where to vacation, Facebook tells us what to read, Google tells us where to eat — tech companies aren’t fighting for eyeballs, they’re fighting to control free will.
  • I like Harari’s idea that what automation is doing is decoupling intelligence from consciousness — what happens when non-conscious-intelligence becomes more effective than conscious-intelligence? What we need aren’t just new jobs, what we need are jobs that humans can perform better than algorithms.
  • As genetic technology becomes more pervasive, inequality will be compounded — what will happen when the rich and poor are separated by not just wealth, but by biological gaps? If those with access to resources can “upgrade” themselves, what happens to the rest of the world? How will liberal beliefs sustain the appearance of humans with enhanced physical and cognitive beliefs?

4. Dataism is an interesting way to look at the world, but I don’t think I fully appreciate how it will become the prevailing ideology.

Harari’s final question is worth thinking about — what will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious, intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves? What is the value of consciousness?

Vinay Sridhar

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