Krishna
As usual, the arguments are astounding. He talks about history and how people are infinitely better off, having vanquished the main perils of old times, famine, disease and poverty. He qualifies it by saying that individual sections of people and countries still suffer from it but on the aggregate, nowhere even close to the levels suffered in medieval times for example.
He also talks about how war, famine and disease have largely been conquered in modern times. This was written before the pandemic of 2020 so there is no reference to Covid 19. It would not have changed the argument much, given the response of the world, but leaves out the most virulent pandemic to strike the globe.
The arguments are all there, in the style we have come to see in both Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21 Century. Powerful, supported by facts - look up all those footnotes for reference if you really want to check up - and cogent. It is a pleasure to read.
Here let us digress a moment : When I looked at the three books (the two mentioned above plus this one), I expected this to be least interesting because, in my mind, this was pure speculation about the far future. However, it turns out that to me as a reader, it did not prove itself that way.
Sapiens, of course, is still the masterpiece. I would rank this one as the second best because of the subject matter and how he analyzes human progress up to now. The 21 Lessons for the 21 Century brings up the rear. To see why, read those other reviews presented earlier.
He talks about minds being improved by genetic engineering, or through bionics. Fascinating possibilities are trotted out for you to view and savour. Makes you think in directions you had not imagined so far. This seems to be his speciality in all three books.
He talks about happiness and how it is fleeting. Every win creates happiness but it palls quickly. So he speculates about inducing continuous happiness through drugs or alterations that do not exist yet.
He talks about how laws, once learned cease to be effective. When communism started to spread in the west, the elites borrowed ideas from it (employment security, welfare) to ensure that the labourers enjoyed benefits so as not to rebel, even giving rise to labour parties which captured power.
He then goes back to the past, a period he calls anthropocene, and repeats one idea from his earlier Sapiens. How mankind made several animals, including other erect ape species like Homo Erectus and Neanderthals, extinct.
He also talks about how humans feel they are superior to the animals and how monotheist religions explicitly give man dominion over animals. He then piles evidence after evidence that animals are sentient.
Why are religious people so against Darwin’s Evolution but not, say, against the Quantum Theory or The Theory of Relativity which is even more bizarre in their explanations than the simplistic Darwin’s theory of evolution? Because if they are to buy into it, and if man evolved from animals (lesser beings) then they have to admit that humans do not have a soul, and this goes against all of their beliefs in the hereafter, reincarnation and much else. Whereas the theory of relativity simply says that, for example, ‘you can bend space and time’. They nod and say ‘Be my guest, bend away!’
Also amazing is his description of the fictions that are necessary for organized life - he means money, laws, nationality, religion and almost everything else! This idea is repeated in his later book 21 Lessons for the 21 Century which we read and reviewed in reverse order, but still impressive to read again. Also his distinction about what is religious and spiritual is fascinating. (One quote from Zen Buddhism : ‘If you are travelling and meet Buddha in your travels, kill him!’. Why, you ask? Read the book to find out.)
He goes into more amazing revelations about free will and how it can be induced in mice using electrodes. When he argues that the individual is not ‘in-dividual’ but is an amalgamation of multiple selves in one (at least two - a right brain self and a left brain self) the arguments, even supported by the strong evidence he musters, sound a bit bizarre. But still interesting.
He goes into some of the arguments that are expanded in his later book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - the fact that almost all jobs could be automated away by AI technology etc.
This book goes into speculative future scenarios. The title Homo Deus is a deceptive one, reminiscent of the click baits of the internet algorithms. Rather than speculating about a future, as the title would have us surmise, he talks about a future where humans become obsolete.
Some of the attributes he gives the future (expected to be ubiquitous) Internet Of Things stretches the realm of possibility. But, I admit that it only does so based on the current level of technology and what the network and algorithms embedded in are capable of, as well as to what purposes they are intended for. However, future technology can have its own momentum and in a sufficiently far future, the speculative predictions of the author could indeed come true.
It makes us think in a different dimension, and plants ideas in our minds that were never there before. In that alone, this book is immensely interesting.
8/10
== Krishna