"Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari

This was the second Harari's novel I read, "Sapiens" being the first one. I read, or rather, listened to it, for quite a long time, largely due to the fact that I usually listen to audio books in transport, and since the pandemic started, I stopped using public transport almost entirely, so the listening lasted for many months. Because of this, it is likely that some of the moments that I have been listening to a long time ago could have been forgotten, but the essence of the book is clear - the author discusses what the future holds for humanity based on its history.

I would first note that I liked the "Sapiens: a brief history of humankind" book better. Harari is a historian and he knows how to make a story exciting and intriguing. In "Homo Deus", there are also references to historical events which were really interesting to read: for example, the rice crisis in China or how refugees got their visas during World War II in Portugal (incidentally, I have just recently read "The Night in Lisbon" by E.M. Remarque - and the book touches on this topic exactly), and these stories really kept me going, as I knew very little, if not nothing at all, about these events in human history. In addition to historical events, a lot of things were described in the book, and this is the main problem of this bestseller, as I see it: the book seems to be about everything and about nothing at the same time. While reading / listening, it seems: "Yes, it is a very interesting and important thought, I need to think about it later". But after a few days, when trying to remember what the thought was, you can't remember it, not because of a bad memory (hopefully!), but because, in my opinion, the author wanted to tell too much and got carried away a little. And here's another proof of this thought. It turns out that my mp3 player (yeah, people still have them!) had the "Repeat one track" mode on, and without noticing that the book was over, I started listening to it again - and only after two hours of listening, I realized that I had already heard it. Funny, right?!

Although, I will not deny that there were also quite captivating chapters that I do remember: for example, about the development of technology and the fact that, in fact, humanity has three paths: first, technology will completely replace humanity; second, only elites will have access to technologies, the rest they will be used as a labor force or something like that; third, the development of technologies at some stage will be suspended so that it does not go as far as mentioned in the first path (the last path may sound different in the book, again I listened to it a long time ago, so my memory can play tricks). Another example of a chapter that I listened to in one breath is the development of medicine and the desire for immortality. Here the author mentions such famous in this field people as Aubrey de Gray, Ray Kurzweil, the founder of PayPal (I think Peter Thiel was it, but I may be mistaken), and Google as a company, who are either themselves dealing with the problem of aging and how to delay it and completely eradicate it, or invest a lot of their funds to study this problem. If you believe the people mentioned above, in 2050 people will be able to roll back their age by 10 years, and this will continue to be so: every few years, you will need to come to the clinic, undergo some therapy and voila, you are younger by a number of years. Harari himself, however, is skeptical of such statements, saying that "although over the past decades, humanity has almost doubled their life expectancy, over the past few years, almost nothing has been done in this direction." Well, we keep our fists for Aubrey and Co. to prove Harari and other skeptics wrong, and, of course, we try to lead a healthy lifestyle as much as possible, and increase our capital, since most likely such "anti-aging therapy" will cost a lot, at least at the very beginning.

Returning to the book "Homo Deus", unfortunately, I can rate it only 3 out of 5 - for the reasons I described above. Although, I suppose that many may disagree with me, well, that's why we "readers" exist - to evaluate what they "writers" write. :) By the way, although I do not give a very high rating to the novel, nevertheless, I think that I did not waste my time reading it, and I think that it is worth reading - everyone will find something interesting and useful there.

P.S. Things to think about, the ones I remembered.

- Algorithms, if allowed, will monitor all spheres of a person's life in order to determine in the future what it is better for them to do, what diseases to fear, whom to date, whom to marry, etc. Do we really want that?

- Big data is our everything. Predicting epidemics, preventing diseases, diagnosing and treating them on the one hand, but also a complete lack of personal space, on the other. The question is - where is the limit?