Homo Deus

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For thousands of years, human beings lived inside a world ruled by famine, plague, and war. These were not small troubles. They were the great monsters of history. Kings prayed about them. Priests explained them. Parents buried children because of them. Most people believed such suffering was simply the human condition, something woven into the fabric of existence by angry gods, blind fate, or nature itself. Now step into the modern age and notice how strange our new position is. In much of the world, famine kills far fewer people than obesity. Plague has retreated before medicine, sanitation, and science. War, though still real and brutal, no longer feels like an unavoidable law of nature. For the first time in history, large numbers of people die not because they lack food, but because they eat too much. More people may die from old age than from epidemics. We have not created paradise, of course. Yet compared with our ancestors, we have gained astonishing control. And once human beings solve old problems, they do not retire in satisfaction. They immediately ask for more. If we are no longer mainly fighting starvation, disease, and violence, what will become our next agenda? This is the bold question at the heart of Homo Deus. Yuval Noah Harari invites you to look beyond the achievements of modern humanity and ask what we will desire next. The answer is both thrilling and unsettling. We may aim for immortality, happiness, and divinity itself. We may try to upgrade Homo sapiens into something like gods, with powers of creation and destruction once reserved for myth. But this is not a simple story of progress. Every gain opens a deeper uncertainty. The same science that can heal bodies can also redesign them. The same data systems that can improve...