Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Harari's sequel to Sapiens argues that having largely contained famine, plague and war, humanity will turn to new projects: immortality, engineered happiness and the acquisition of what he calls divine powers of creation through biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

His analytical spine is a history of the belief systems that organise societies. He argues that traditional religions were displaced by humanism, which relocated authority from God to human feelings and made individual experience the source of meaning and of political legitimacy. He then argues that humanism is being undermined by the same sciences that grew under it. If the self is a set of biochemical processes with no unified author, if human choices can be predicted and influenced by external algorithms better than by the individual, and if biotechnology can alter the desires that humanism treats as authoritative, then the foundation of liberal individualism dissolves.

He proposes that what replaces it will be dataism, an emerging belief that information flow is the supreme value and that humans are algorithms whose function is to process data, and that this framework already governs how technology companies and much of science operate.

The book is a work of speculative synthesis. Historians and scientists have criticised its factual compression, its confident assertions about consciousness and free will, and its treatment of contested scientific questions as settled. It should be read as provocation. Its argument about what happens to political legitimacy when individual choice can be predicted and manipulated is worth taking seriously regardless of the rest.