Homo Deus
By Yuval Noah Harari
Nonfiction, Science, History
Buy on Amazon
Did you realize that the future was now?
It sounds like a cheesy catchphrase, but it’s true. We’re at the point where the world has changed to the point of being unrecognizable. Or, as Yuval Noah Harari puts it in Homo Deus: “War is obsolete.”
We’re living in a world where it changes every day, where the greatest danger isn’t war or famine, nor is it terrorism. It’s our own modern world. It’s suicide and heart disease and obesity. We’re killing ourselves to chase happiness, but we’re more miserable than ever. So where do we go? How does this work?
That’s what we’re looking to solve in this month’s book club.
At DAC (the ol’ day job), we’ve been doing some reading. The first month, we read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and for this second month, we decided to try reading something a little less fictional.
Homo Deus was the perfect choice for those of us who were worn out by fiction and it ties into so many things that I’m interested. Science, history, religion… what else could you want all in one book? From the very little bit that I’ve read, humanity is basically a nascent superhero. We’re trying to explore our powers, to push ourselves to our limits, but there’s a chance that we’re going to screw up. In fact, it’s almost inevitable.
Our own power makes us reckless and that means that we’re probably going to get someone killed because that’s what people do when they’re given power.
Purposely or not, we tend to kill people when we’re stronger than them.
So will we master our powers or will we kill ourselves with them?
Will we chase our heroes? All we want to be is them, after all, but to quote Tony Stark: