Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Thanks. I kind of suspected as much -- organizing the past into a coherent framework is in his wheelhouse, but predicting the future really is not. And its really an impossible task anyway.

So what's his take? Are we going to merge with computers like Kurzweil says, just bio-hack ourselves, do a Pinker thing where we become more "culturally evolved" and less violent in some kind of linear manner, or follow some kind of new atheist track to perfect scientism and then everything will become wine and roses?

More specific to Sapiens, does he return to his thesis about the three types of humanism he identified -- liberal, social and evolutionary -- which I thought was one of his best historical insights, but he didn't really follow up on when it came to the future.

I still want to read it. A mediocre book from Harari is probably better than a lot of the stuff I read.

So maybe its going to be like that original Star Trek episode where the ruling class lived in a floating cloud city?

I finally read Homo Deus. It's ... indulgent. I suppose it's not unusual for a publisher to reward an author after a book like Sapiens with an indulgence like this. I didn't really enjoy except for a few interesting anecdotes. I don't normally mind ardent antitheism, but he lost me when he insisted on directly comparing nazis and religious folks. He's also obviously a vegan.

So if that's your thing (Ego?), you might like it.

Which kind of makes me laugh, because he fore-tends a future of essentially evolutionary humanism involving technology, yet seemingly "forgets" that he said in the first book that the original evolutionary humanists were the social Darwinists, which thought later became part of the nazi orthodoxy on racial purification.

I think English philosopher John Gray has it right that the critical distinction should not be over theism or atheism, but over whether the belief or ideology is primarily focused upon and engages its followers in bringing about a utopian teleological future or not, whether that be racial purity, technologically perfected humans, a workers paradise, the Second Coming or a Zombie Apocalypse. There are versions of virtually every religion and ideology that both stress the teleology/utopia and ones that just don't. E.g., Christians that are actively predicting and preparing for the Second Coming (MIllenarians), and ones that heed the admonition that nobody knows, so don't fixate on it. Thus, the distinction between theism or atheism misses the point and the distinction between what beliefs or ideologies are utopian and which ones are not.

I stopped a quarter of the way through. Not nearly as good as Sapiens.

Every morning when I start firefox, my homepage is the harari search at my library. They still haven't gotten the book, though it is on order. I am determined to be the first to reserve it. Hah.

I listed to Harari talk about Homo Deus on Ezra Klein's podcast. He is an interesting character. Every year he spends two months in a silent meditation retreat.

https://soundcloud.com/panoply/yuval-ha ... ts/s-sHwK3

ETA: In the talk they mention the William Gibson quote, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." Harari seems to be saying that the gap will widen.

He touches on the future of jobs here.

https://youtu.be/Lt7votAzI78?t=15m12s

I like the fact that he frequently says we don't (can't) know. He talks about the useful skills for an unpredictable future, at about 18:15.