Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

intricate

sporting

Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.2

The local officials, afraid of voicing any criticism and wishing to curry favour with their superiors, concocted imaginary reports of dramatic increases in agricultural output.

The government takes worthless pieces of paper, declares them to be valuable and then uses them to compute the value of everything else.

Coveted positions are manned by people with

about me and my doings. If something good happens, it must be a reward for my good deeds. Any catastrophe must

five-year-old cannot understand that something important is happening for reasons unrelated to him.

Fictions enable us to cooperate better. The price we pay is that the same fictions also determine the goals of our cooperation.

History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives.

As history unfolded, stories about gods, nations and corporations grew so powerful that they began to dominate objective reality.

Sobek

However, religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities.

Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.

‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ Which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalised Buddhism, you must free yourself from them too.

Religions have the nagging tendency to turn factual statements into ethical judgements, thereby creating terrible confusion and obfuscating what should have been relatively simple debates.

Religion provides the ethical justification for scientific research, and in exchange gets to influence the scientific agenda and the uses of scientific discoveries.

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The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

If modernity has a motto, it is ‘shit happens’.

If we invest money in research, then scientific breakthroughs will accelerate technological progress. New technologies will fuel economic growth, and a growing economy could dedicate even more money to research.

dysentery.

Credit is the economic manifestation of trust.

‘If you have a problem, you probably need more stuff, and in order to have more stuff, you must produce more of it.’

Firstly, when we produce more, we can consume more, raise our standard of living and allegedly enjoy a happier life.

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revivalists,

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Free-market capitalism has a firm answer. If economic growth demands that we loosen family bonds, encourage people to live away from their parents, and import carers from the other side of the world – so be it. This answer, however, involves an ethical judgement rather than a factual statement.

By daring to make such ethical judgements, free-market capitalism has crossed the border from the land of science to that of religion.

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The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.

very good reason to seek new knowledge,

We trust nanotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to revolutionise production yet again, and to open whole new sections in our ever-expanding supermarkets. — We

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cunning

create meaning for a meaningless world.

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Only God could create and define goodness, righteousness and beauty.

Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.

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zealots

muses,

vogue.

‘Art is anything people think is art, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’

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teach the kids history, or quantum physics, or art – but above all I try to teach them to think for themselves.’ It may not always succeed, but that is what humanist education seeks to do.

Today, in contrast, it is very easy not to believe in God, because I pay no price for my unbelief.

Either way, the real source of authority is my own feelings.

Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics.