Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

For most of human history, the great enemies of our species were famine, plague, and war, forces so vast and uncontrollable that they seemed to come from beyond the human world. Over the past century, something remarkable happened: we largely tamed them. More people now die from eating too much than too little. More die from old age than infectious disease. The ancient horsemen of the apocalypse have been reduced, if not to nothing, then to manageable problems. So what comes next? In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari turns his panoramic historical imagination toward the future, asking what humanity will pursue now that survival is no longer the central preoccupation. His answer is both exhilarating and unsettling: we will seek immortality, bliss, and the power of gods themselves, using biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering to upgrade the human species into something our ancestors would barely recognize. But this quest raises questions that no previous civilization has had to answer. As algorithms come to know us better than we know ourselves, what becomes of free will? As intelligence decouples from consciousness, what room remains for the human spirit? A New York Times bestseller with full-color illustrations throughout, Homo Deus is Harari at his most provocative and most necessary.