Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Publisher: Harper

Comments:After his stunning bestseller and international phenomenon, Sapiens, which chronicled the rise of homo sapiens from primate to dominant force on the planet, Professor Harari from the University of Jerusalem does it again with a “history of tomorrow”. He claimed that after the agricultural and scientific revolutions, humankind was creating networked intelligences with a far greater capacity for reason than our own. This last book examines that scenario in more detail. Modernity is a deal, he writes: the new human powers come with a cost. What he calls “dataism”, a universal faith in the power of algorithms, will become sacrosanct. In exchange for immortality, happiness and power, humans will trade the meaning of their lives and become “biochemical subsystems”. There will be created an enormous “useless class” of redundant people without economic or military purpose. According to one review, the book leaves us with the question: “What is more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?”