Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to.

than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition.

In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes.

In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.

Those arguing that the world of 2016 is as hungry, sick and violent as it was in 1916 perpetuate this age-old defeatist view.

If incidences of famine, plague and war are decreasing, something is bound to take their place on the human agenda.

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.

humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity.

categorically states that ‘the right to life’ is humanity’s most fundamental value. Since death clearly violates this right, death is a crime against humanity, and we ought to wage total war against it.

imagine Christianity, Islam or Hinduism in a world without death – which is also a world without heaven, hell or reincarnation.

Humans always die due to some technical glitch.

Aubrey de Grey and the polymath and inventor Ray Kurzweil

But if you believe you can live forever, you would be crazy to gamble on infinity like that.

The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.

In truth, so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year.

This kind of logic might drive humankind to make happiness its second main goal for the twenty-first century.

Epicurus recommended, for example, to eat and drink in moderation, and to curb one’s sexual appetites. In the long run, a deep friendship will make us more content than a frenzied orgy.

The average American thus uses sixty times more energy than the average Stone Age hunter-gatherer.

Achieving real happiness is not going to be much easier than overcoming old age and death.

we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations.

both our expectations and our happiness are determined by our biochemistry, rather than by our economic, social or political situation.

biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness.

Perhaps the key to happiness is neither the race nor the gold medal, but rather combining the right doses of excitement and tranquillity;

in order to raise global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry.

far more easily through the right dosage of molecules. This is an existential threat to the social and economic order,

teaching that the pursuit of pleasant sensations is in fact the very root of suffering.

To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.

Since Homo sapiens was not adapted by evolution to experience constant pleasure,

It will be necessary to change our biochemistry and re-engineer our bodies and minds.

Up till now increasing human power relied mainly on upgrading our external tools. In the future it may rely more on upgrading the human body and mind, or on merging directly with our tools. The upgrading of humans into gods may follow any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings.

create new godlings, who might be as different from us Sapiens as we are different from Homo erectus.

After 4 billion years of wandering inside the kingdom of organic compounds, life will break out into the vastness of the inorganic realm, and will take shapes that we cannot envision even in our wildest dreams.

future galactic empire, ruled by the likes of Mr. Data rather than Captain Kirk.

Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible.