Homo Deus: The million-copy bestseller from the author of Nexus
Last read April 8, 2019
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Highlights
40 highlights.
humans have prayed to every god, angel and saint, and have invented countless tools, institutions and social systems – but they continued to die in their millions from starvation, epidemics and violence.
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but in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war.
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But how does it feel when you haven’t eaten for days on end and you have no clue where to get the next morsel of food? Most people today have never experienced this excruciating torment.
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During the last hundred years, technological, economic and political developments have created an increasingly robust safety net separating humankind from the biological poverty line.
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Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes.
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Indeed, in most countries today overeating has become a far worse problem than famine.
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After famine, humanity’s second great enemy was plagues and infectious diseases.
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Consequently, though in 2050 we will undoubtedly face much more resilient germs, medicine in 2050 will likely be able to deal with them more efficiently than today.
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Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat.
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Throughout history most humans took war for granted, whereas peace was a temporary and precarious state.
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Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.
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Today the main source of wealth is knowledge.
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Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.
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Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to set itself even more daring goals.
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for modern people death is a technical problem that we can and should solve.
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so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year.
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Our ideological commitment to human life will never allow us simply to accept human death. As long as people die of something, we will strive to overcome it.
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Politicians should make peace, business people should foster prosperity and scholars should study nature, not for the greater glory of king, country or God – but so that you and I could enjoy a happier life.
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Even the welfare system was originally planned in the interest of the nation rather than of needy individuals.
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You fought for your country when you were eighteen, and paid your taxes when you were forty, because you counted on the state to take care of you when you were
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People increasingly believe that the immense systems established more than a century ago to strengthen the nation should actually serve the happiness and well-being of individual citizens.
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Indeed, it is an ominous sign that despite higher prosperity, comfort and security, the rate of suicide in the developed world is also much higher than in traditional societies.
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On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions.
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Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – into Homo sapiens, who produces spaceships and computers.
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we had better understand what is happening and make up our minds about it before it makes up our minds for us.
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this is not what most individuals will actually do in the twenty-first century. It is what humankind as a collective will do.
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Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history.
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But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.
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With regard to other animals, humans have long since become gods.
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we have not been particularly just or merciful gods.
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it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity.
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never has a single species changed the global ecology all by itself.
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when our Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled.
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archaic hunter-gatherers were probably animists: they believed that there was no essential gap separating humans from other animals.
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People talked with animals, trees and stones, as well as with fairies, demons and ghosts.
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Most of us automatically see animals as essentially different and inferior.
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The expulsion from Eden bears a striking resemblance to the Agricultural Revolution. Instead of allowing Adam to keep gathering wild fruits, an angry God condemns him ‘to eat bread by the sweat of your brow’. It might be no coincidence, then, that biblical animals spoke with humans only in the pre-agricultural era of Eden.
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While animists saw humans as just another kind of animal, the Bible argues that humans are a unique creation, and any attempt to acknowledge the animal within us denies God’s power and authority.
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The Bible, along with its belief in human distinctiveness, was one of the by-products of the Agricultural Revolution, which initiated a new phase in human–animal relations.
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farming produced new waves of mass extinctions, but more importantly, it created a completely new life form on earth: domesticated animals.
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