Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari – How data will destroy human freedom

I might be wrong,but as someone that read the original Hebrew book, I feel there is missing context for the English readers. The biggest struggle in Israel is between religion and liberalism. The Arab states around us are falling (or in high risk of falling) into Muslim paradigms, and Israel is in the midst of a similar process where Jewish rules is considered superior to democratic/liberal rules by larger part of the population. This book comes as fresh air showing the strength of science, over the laws of God - given a wide enough time perspective. It's the secular Bible if you wish, something to hang on to while more people around you believe in hatered disguised as faith.

Sapiens was a good book overall - it put together the high-level facts fairly well into a coherent and entertaining story. However, that story was also very zeitgeist-y and ideologically skewed, he really tried hard to work the "Out of Eden" story whereby the human race has fallen from our great past into our miserable modern life.

In fact, he had to contradict himself to push that story. In one case, he describes how agriculture is worse for the farmer, because he was sedentary and if the crops failed, he could not move and faced a famine, whereas hunter-gatherers could move. In an earlier part of the book, he describes how hunter-gathers moved over a relatively small area (20x30km IIRC?). But of course, if there was a drought in a world of hunter-gathers and they had to move, they would just move where there is another tribe already, so the drought would cause war, rather than famine. That was never mentioned, it's just assumed there was random free land everywhere.

But the biggest weakness of the book seemed to be his very weak appreciation of the physical sciences, ie he tried to tell the 75,000 year history of humanity, without bothering to spend any time on the context. Much of history is tightly coupled to ecology, advances in tech, demographics etc and his just glides over that. In one particularly idiotic part, he seems to imply that one day, someone just randomly invented math for no particular reason. Hard to tell if he was being glib or actually believes it.

I'll probably give his one a go as well, even though it'll probably suffer from the same issues. For example, it's very in-vogue to view the development of intelligent systems as inventions of capitalist who seek power over the people, rather than the discoveries about the nature of reality. I find the latter much more interesting.

Discounting the fact that the author's previous foray into writing was one of those "grand" books that everyone loves to read to make themselves feel they're smart, and which was actually laughed out the door by real historians (just look up /r/askhistorians), lets take the argument that the author makes on its own merit.

The argument goes something like this: Because we'll be able to deconstruct the human body/mind via Scientific Insights provided by Big Data, it will pose an "existential challenge" to our freedoms. The author uses the word "algorithm" liberally to describe any biochemical process that occur in the human body and thinks that that automatically means that human beings are somehow devoid of free will. [0]

What the author has forgotten about is that data has nothing to do with the fundamental of the problem at all. We have known for centuries that human biology is a thing and every decade has brought more insights about how it works. The fact that we fundamentally understand the composition of DNA didn't pose some big 'existential threat' to free will. Neither will Big Data.

It's the age old question about Consciousness in new dressing.

Frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of all these doomsday prophets, first the author who wrote the Singularity book and now this. I read the FT article based on this. It almost feels like a self-promotion. Say something controversial about a trendy topic (Big Data), make an ominous prediction, write blogs, get enough of a following, write a book, then write another one. Watch the $$ roll in.

Nothing to see here, move on.

[0] http://www.ft.com/content/50bb4830-6a4c-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a2...

I am currently reading Sapiens and for me the takeaway thought from this book is that large scale social transformations (like agricultural or industrial revolutions) immeasurably increase the power of humanity as a whole while bringing hitherto unknown woes for the individuals.

I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different then? Interesting and not quite pleasant times lie ahead.

Related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12376695

There are two types of people on this Earth: Those whom have read Sapiens and those whom have not.

Harari is required reading, especially if you're reading this comment.

I don't know if this is a quote from the book being reviewed, but this line leapt out at me: "famine is rare". I find it hard to reconcile this statement with information like this statistic from a UNICEF web site: "Every 3.6 seconds one person dies of starvation. Usually it is a child under the age of 5."

http://www.unicef.org/mdg/poverty.html