Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – Yuval Noah Harari

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

Homo Deus is a book that extends the confidence of Sapiens into the future and seems surprised when that confidence begins to wobble.

Where Sapiens is strongest as synthesis, Homo Deus is fundamentally speculative, and the shift matters. Predictions are presented with the tone of inevitability, and possibility is too often mistaken for trajectory. The book is less interested in what might happen than in what Harari believes is already on its way, and that distinction is not always acknowledged.

The central ideas—dataism, algorithmic authority, the erosion of humanist narratives—are not uninteresting. Some are genuinely provocative. But they are repeatedly framed as universal futures rather than culturally and politically contingent ones. Power, inequality, and access are treated as side notes to technological progress rather than as forces that shape who gets a future at all.

I found myself increasingly resistant to the book’s framing of humanity as something already being outgrown. There is a quiet disdain for ordinary human experience here—for care, dependency, slowness, and embodied life—that feels less analytical than ideological. The future imagined is sleek, abstract, and disproportionately designed for people who already have power.

What unsettles me most is not that these futures are possible, but how little space the book gives to refusal. To alternatives. To the idea that societies might choose badly, slowly, or not at all—and that this, too, would be human.

I finished Homo Deus feeling less informed than positioned. Nudged toward a way of seeing the future that values optimisation over meaning and inevitability over agency.

This is a book that wants to be taken seriously as foresight. I read it instead as a document of its moment: a snapshot of late-capitalist techno-confidence, polished and persuasive, already beginning to age.

futures imagined by people who will not live in them

Many books about the future carry an unspoken assumption: that progress is a force rather than a choice, and that humanity will simply be carried along by it.

Homo Deus leans heavily on this assumption.

The future presented here is not one shaped by politics, care, or collective struggle, but by optimisation—of bodies, of minds, of systems. Human experience is framed as something inefficient, already on the way to being surpassed. Meaning is treated as a placeholder until data arrives.

What is striking is not the ambition of this vision, but its narrowness. The future belongs to those with access: to technology, to capital, to the infrastructures that make enhancement possible. Everyone else appears only as a demographic trend, a statistical remainder.

There is very little curiosity here about refusal. About slowness. About the possibility that people might choose continuity over transcendence, maintenance over mastery. Care work, disability, ageing, and dependence—central facts of human life—are present mostly as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be lived with dignity.

Books like this often claim neutrality by appealing to inevitability. But inevitability is a story we tell when we do not want to talk about power. Futures do not arrive fully formed; they are built, unevenly, by people with names, interests, and blind spots.

I am less interested in predicting tomorrow than in asking who is allowed to imagine it—and who is expected to adapt quietly once it arrives.