Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

What if mankind could create robots so advanced, so hypersmart, that not only will they come up with their own wild definitions of intelligence and consciousness, but they actually make us humans end up feeling like we're worthless, meagre animals lacking ownership of all these updated faculties? Just, perhaps, as we view other animals now?

In this future the hierarchy of species has been shifted. Animals have been moved up to reap the benefits of humanism, whilst the humans have obtained god status. But in front of us, having skipped the evolutionary queue, loom these algorithmic entities that have now left us in dust as the Universe's new meaning-makers and trailblazers. They call the new aestheticians, the powerbrokers who define just about everything. Our historical, mythological rise to immortality has resulted in a boring, obsolete godhood.

As another reviewer has pointed out, Homo Deus is not a prophecy but an exploration. It is a cartographic meandering through the various scientific fronts that capture currently our futuristic interest, with some heady-yet-sobering potential apocalypses as their (largely) decorative outcome. It wouldn't really be fair to treat Homo Deus as a rigorous prediction of what our near or distant future will look like, and Harari even says as much. Rather, we're given a list of routes and destinations that our modern sciences can take us to, and the philosophical lemmas that march alongside them. The predictions in this book aren't always sensible, nor do they share a coherent time frame, nor do they really consider their own congruence. But, again, Harari is musing about the future, not prophetically foaming at the mouth, and that makes this book far more useful to us as the humans poised to receive our apotheosis. A rabid techno-Moses preaching the Grey Goo Gospel would have only earned him ridicule (though I guess radical students would love him).