After taming famine and war, humanity aims to become gods

By Books (/journals/books)

In 60 seconds Humanity has largely tamed famine, plague, and war, so ambition now turns toward immortality, engineered happiness, and godlike power over biology. Large-scale cooperation runs on shared fictions such as money, nations, and human rights that exist only because people believe them together. Humanism moved sacred authority from God to individual feeling, and that faith still powers liberal democracy, human rights, and free markets. Neuroscience and behavioral research cast free will and the unified self as biochemical algorithms rather than a sovereign chooser. AI risks producing a useless class with no economic role, while biotechnology could split humanity into an upgraded elite and an unenhanced majority. Dataism may rise as a successor creed that prizes information flow over human experience, leaving three open questions about algorithms, consciousness, and prediction.

The big idea

Big idea — Harari argues that once survival stops organizing human life, the real project becomes defeating death, manufacturing bliss, and upgrading people into gods. Pursuing that project treats humans as engineerable algorithms, which quietly dissolves the humanist belief in free, sacred individuals that still holds up liberal politics and rights.

The book in brief

Harari starts from a blunt claim about the ancient agenda. Famine, plague, and war once set the terms of every life. He says those three killers now sit under unprecedented control. In 2012 obesity and related diseases killed more people worldwide than starvation, and suicide killed more than soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined. Catastrophe still happens, yet societies now treat it as a solvable problem or a political failure rather than normal fate. With survival no longer the default anxiety, ambition has room to climb.

The new targets form what he calls the Gilgamesh Project: immortality, engineered happiness, and divinity. Death becomes a technical problem of aging cells and failing organs. Happiness becomes a product of drugs, brain stimulation, or genetic tuning. Divinity means designing new life and rewriting bodies and minds by plan. Real investment already flows into anti-aging work, genetic engineering, cyborg technology, and brain-computer interfaces. The direction of travel matters more than any promised arrival date.

Before tracing belief systems, Harari restates how humans cooperate at scale. We dominate through flexible mass coordination, and that coordination runs on intersubjective fictions—money, corporations, nations, human rights—that exist only because many minds share the story. When traditional religion lost its grip in the West, people did not drop sacred thinking. They moved ultimate authority from God’s word to human feeling and experience. Humanism functions like a religion: the customer is always right, follow your heart, voter will replaces divine right, markets price whatever individuals prefer, and art elevates inner experience.

That humanist story was never single. Liberal humanism located value in the free individual; socialist humanism located it in the collective; evolutionary humanism, in its Nazi form, located it in the fittest groups. Liberal humanism won the twentieth-century contests partly because industrial technology and mass warfare rewarded decentralized individual judgment. Harari treats the victory as contingent on that technological era, not a permanent verdict on truth.

The foundation then comes under direct pressure. Split-brain experiments and Kahneman’s distinction between the experiencing self and the narrating self suggest free will and the unified self are better read as competing biochemical processes than as a sovereign author. Extend the same logic into economics and AI systems that already out-diagnose radiologists or out-trade humans, and large populations risk becoming a useless class with no economically necessary role. Biotechnology adds a deeper fracture: expensive upgrades in cognition, healthspan, or engineered offspring could end the shared biological baseline that once made equal rights plausible, producing an enhanced elite and an unenhanced majority.

Harari names the emerging successor worldview Dataism. It scores organisms and societies by how well they process and share information, and at the extreme imagines an Internet-of-All-Things in which individual humans matter as little as one neuron to a brain. He refuses a forecast. He leaves three open questions: whether organisms are only algorithms, whether intelligence matters more than consciousness, and what happens when external systems know our desires better than we do. The book’s force is the reframe—AI and biotech are fights over which belief system organizes meaning and power next.

Context

Context — Homo Deus is Harari’s 2015 follow-up to Sapiens. It mattered because it pushed pop-science readers to treat artificial intelligence and biotechnology as civilizational questions, not merely economic ones.

The key ideas

1

Old killers brought to heel

Harari claims famine, plague, and war have been brought under unprecedented control for the first time, closing the ancient survival agenda.

Historic default Famine, plague, and war treated as normal fate

Present default Catastrophe treated as fixable policy failure

Harari opens by clearing ground. For most of history those three forces set the terms of human life. He says they now sit under a level of control no earlier age managed.

Plain comparisons carry the point. In 2012 obesity and related diseases killed more people worldwide than starvation. Suicide killed more than soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined. Famine still appears, yet as political failure rather than unavoidable natural disaster. New pandemics still threaten, yet modern medicine and epidemiology have shrunk their power beside the Black Death or the 1918 flu. Interstate war between major powers has grown rare under nuclear-backed peace and the falling profitability of conquest.

He is explicit that suffering has not ended. Plenty of people still starve, sicken, and die violently. The claim is about trend and default expectation. Earlier generations assumed catastrophe was normal. We treat it as a solvable problem or a policy mistake.

Once survival stops organizing anxiety, a civilization needs a new project. That opening move lets Harari turn the rest of the book toward godlike ambitions.

In practice: In 2012 obesity outkilled starvation while suicide outkilled soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined.

2

The Gilgamesh Project

The twenty-first century’s implicit project is to defeat death, engineer permanent happiness, and upgrade humans into a more powerful species.

With survival no longer the organizing fear, Harari says ambition redirects. He names the new cluster the Gilgamesh Project, after the Mesopotamian hero who sought and failed to find eternal life.

Modern science treats death as a technical problem—a set of malfunctioning systems such as cellular aging, organ failure, and disease that could in principle be fixed. Real research lines already run in that direction: anti-aging science, genetic engineering, cyborg technology, and brain-computer interfaces, all pushing against biological limits.

Alongside physical immortality sits engineered happiness. The goal is not only relief from suffering but the chemical and technological production of sustained well-being through drugs, direct brain stimulation, or genetic tuning of the reward system. The third and most radical aim is divinity: godlike powers of creation and destruction, from designing new life forms through synthetic biology to reshaping bodies and minds by design rather than accident.

Harari frames these as historical projects already drawing billions in investment, not as science-fiction daydreams. He never claims they will succeed soon or at all. The argument is about direction of travel. Treating body and mind as engineerable systems quietly weakens the older idea of a sacred, unified human self.

In practice: Labs pour money into anti-aging work, genetic engineering, cyborg parts, and brain-computer interfaces as technical attacks on death.

3

Cooperation runs on fictions

All large-scale human cooperation depends on collectively believed stories that have no objective existence.

Harari returns to a claim that underpins the whole argument. Humans dominate the planet not through lone intelligence but through a unique ability to cooperate flexibly in huge numbers. That cooperation runs on intersubjective realities—things that exist only because many people believe them together.

Money is the cleanest illustration. A dollar bill holds no inherent value, only the worth granted by mutual trust in a system. Corporations, nations, and human rights work the same way. A corporation such as Peugeot exists as a legal fiction that survives the death of any founder or employee. Human rights exist as a powerful shared story rather than a physical fact discoverable in DNA or neurons.

He draws a three-way split. Objective reality exists regardless of belief, like gravity. Subjective reality exists in one mind, like personal pain. Intersubjective reality exists in the shared belief of a network of minds, like law or money. Religions, ideologies, and value systems all belong to the third category.

Belief systems are therefore tools that enable coordination at scale. They can be replaced when a more useful or more technologically compatible story appears. The setup prepares readers to see humanism itself as one more powerful intersubjective story with a history and, eventually, a possible expiration date.

In practice: Peugeot continues as a legal fiction long after any single founder or worker is gone.

4

Humanism crowns feeling

When traditional religion lost its grip, humans redirected ultimate authority from God to human feelings and experience.

Old authority God’s word, scripture, kings, cosmic order

Humanist authority Voter will, market preference, inner experience

Harari holds that the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment did not simply swap religion for pure rationality. They replaced one source of ultimate authority—God’s word—with another: human experience and feeling. He calls the new value system humanism and treats it as religion in the structural sense. It tells people what is sacred, what has value, and how to settle moral disputes.

Under humanism, everyday sayings harden into the deepest available compass. The customer is always right. Follow your heart. If it feels good, do it. No higher external authority—a scripture, a king, a cosmic order—remains to consult.

Institutions record the shift. Political legitimacy moves from divine right to the will of the voters. Economic value moves from fixed just prices to whatever the free market of individual preferences determines. Art moves from depicting religious or aristocratic ideals to expressing the artist’s inner experience, as the Romantic elevation of personal feeling over external convention shows.

Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, on this reading, are not neutral rational machines. They are institutional expressions of the faith that individual human feeling is the highest source of meaning and authority. That reframing sets the book’s central tension: what happens to a civilization built on the sanctity of human feeling once science can explain, predict, and manipulate those feelings better than the humans having them?

In practice: Romantic artists made personal feeling, not external convention, the measure of artistic worth.

5

Three humanisms at war

Liberal democracy triumphed over socialist and evolutionary humanism largely because it fit industrial-era technology and warfare best.

LLiberal humanismSacred value sits in the individual’s free choices SSocialist humanismSacred value sits in the collective good EEvolutionary humanismSacred value sits in advancing the fittest groups

Harari complicates the story by showing humanism was never a single creed. Three versions battled for dominance in the twentieth century. Liberal humanism locates ultimate value in the individual and free choices. Socialist humanism locates it in the collective—class, community, or humanity as a whole—and treats individual feeling as a distraction from the common good. Evolutionary humanism, most brutally embodied by Nazism, holds that some human groups are more evolved or valuable and that history should help the fittest advance, if necessary at the expense of the rest.

World War II and the Cold War become, in this framing, wars between rival religions about where sacred value resides. Liberal humanism won partly through moral appeal and significantly through practical fit. Mass mobilization of citizen-soldiers, industrial economies that rewarded individual initiative and information flow, and the technologies of the century favored societies that trusted individual judgment and decentralized decision-making over rigid hierarchy or racial hierarchy.

The defeated versions did not simply vanish. Echoes of evolutionary humanism persist in talk of genetic improvement. Socialist humanism still shapes political movements even after the Soviet collapse discredited central planning. Liberal humanism’s victory rested on a particular technological and economic era. A new era built on AI and biotechnology could unsettle that victory as thoroughly as earlier shifts unsettled divine-right order.

In practice: Industrial mass mobilization and information flow rewarded societies that trusted decentralized individual judgment over rigid hierarchy.

6

You are an algorithm

Neuroscience and behavioral psychology show free will and the unified self are better described as competing biochemical processes than as a sovereign decision-maker.

Humanist self A free, unified agent authors its choices

Algorithmic self Competing biochemical processes plus a storytelling interpreter

Liberal humanism depends on an autonomous individual whose free choices and feelings deserve ultimate respect. Harari attacks that foundation with findings from neuroscience and behavioral psychology.

Split-brain experiments supply one wedge. Patients whose hemispheres have been surgically separated can produce confident verbal explanations for actions actually initiated by the non-verbal hemisphere. The brain’s interpreter invents a story after the fact rather than reporting real deliberation.

He draws heavily on Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between the experiencing self, which lives moment to moment, and the narrating self, which retrospectively builds a coherent story and over-weights endings. The same logic appears in colonoscopy studies: patients rated a painful procedure as less unpleasant overall when a milder pain was added at the very end. The story, not the raw sum of sensation, drove the judgment.

From these and similar findings Harari concludes that what we call free will and the self look more like a large collection of competing biochemical processes and algorithms, none of which constitutes a single sovereign decision-maker. If science increasingly treats humans as predictable biochemical algorithms, the humanist basis for individual rights, democracy, and free-market choice starts to look scientifically shaky rather than self-evident.

In practice: Split-brain patients invent confident reasons for actions their other hemisphere began without their awareness.

7

Rise of the useless class

As AI outperforms humans across more cognitive and physical tasks, large portions of humanity risk becoming economically irrelevant, not merely temporarily unemployed.

Old automation cycle Machines take old jobs; humans retrain into new ones

AI-era risk Algorithms claim the new jobs too, leaving no necessary human role

Harari extends the algorithm argument straight into economics. Historically, industrialization destroyed old jobs but created new ones because humans kept comparative advantages in cognitive and manual flexibility that machines lacked. He argues that pattern may break.

AI and robotics increasingly match or exceed human performance across a widening range—not only manual labor but pattern recognition, diagnosis, translation, and even aspects of creative and emotional work. Early signals already exist: AI systems diagnose certain cancers from medical scans more accurately than human radiologists, and algorithmic trading systems outperform human traders.

When the traditional path—automation destroys old jobs, human ingenuity finds new ones—no longer holds because the new jobs themselves may be done more efficiently by algorithms, the result is not simple mass unemployment. It is what Harari bluntly calls a useless class: people who lack any economically necessary role at all, unlike earlier displaced workers who could retrain into new industries.

The political stakes cut deep. Liberal humanism’s claim that every individual has irreplaceable value was historically reinforced by every individual’s economic and military usefulness to state and market. If large populations lose that usefulness, the material foundation under ideals of equality and rights may erode even while the ideals persist as rhetoric.

In practice: AI systems already read certain cancers from scans more accurately than human radiologists.

8

Upgrades end shared equality

Biotechnology could fracture humanity into an upgraded elite and an unenhanced majority, ending the assumption of fundamental human equality.

If algorithms threaten economic value, biotechnology threatens biological uniformity. Harari describes techno-humanism as an attempt to preserve humanist values while using technology to upgrade the human mind and body—enhancing memory, mood, intelligence, or physical capability through genetic engineering, pharmaceuticals, or brain-computer interfaces rather than replacing humans with pure algorithms.

The appeal is plain: augmented humans instead of obsolete ones. Yet the path carries a distinct danger. Historically, even the most unequal societies rested on a shared assumption that all humans possessed roughly the same basic biological and cognitive equipment. That assumption underwrote arguments for equal rights regardless of class or wealth.

Biotechnology could break the assumption for the first time if enhancements are expensive and unevenly distributed. A wealthy minority able to purchase superior cognitive ability, extended healthspan, or engineered offspring would not just be richer. They could become biologically different in ways that compound across generations.

Harari traces a plausible trajectory already visible in early forms: reproductive technologies, cognitive-enhancing drugs used unevenly across economic classes, and genetic screening available mainly to those who can pay. The historical arc toward greater legal and social equality, often treated as permanent, could reverse under biotechnological pressure that no political ideology has fully reckoned with.

In practice: Cognitive-enhancing drugs and paid genetic screening already sort access by who can afford them.

9

Dataism and open questions

A new worldview called Dataism is emerging that treats the free flow of information, rather than human experience, as the highest value, while the future stays genuinely undetermined.

Harari names the philosophical successor he sees forming behind both AI and biotechnology. Where humanism placed ultimate value in human feeling and experience, Dataism reframes organisms, economies, and societies as data-processing systems and judges them by how efficiently they process and share information.

Under that view a human being is not sacred in itself but one more algorithm among many. Cultural signals already lean this way: step counters, genetic sequencing, recommendation algorithms, and the growing willingness to trust systems such as Google Maps or Amazon over personal intuition—the same abdication of authority once given to priests.

Taken to its extreme, Dataism suggests civilization’s goal is a single all-encompassing data-processing system Harari calls the Internet-of-All-Things, which could treat individual humans as irrelevant the way a brain treats any single neuron. He presents Dataism as a plausible emerging ideology and a thought experiment, not a movement people consciously join by name.

He refuses to end with a forecast. Three questions stay open. Are organisms really just algorithms and life just data processing? What is more valuable, intelligence or consciousness, when AI races ahead on the first and shows no sign of the second? What happens to society and self-understanding once external systems can know and predict our desires better than we can ourselves? The historian’s task, he says, is to map the possibility space and expose hidden assumptions, not to prophesy.

In practice: People already let recommendation engines choose what to watch, whom to date, and which route to drive.

Key terms Gilgamesh Project The modern drive to defeat death, engineer lasting happiness, and gain godlike powers over biology Intersubjective reality Something that exists only because many people share the belief, such as money, nations, or human rights Humanism The value system that treats individual human feeling and experience as the highest source of authority and meaning Liberal humanism The version that locates sacred value in the free choices of the individual Useless class People who are not just unemployed but lack any economically necessary role once algorithms outperform them Techno-humanism The attempt to keep humanist values while upgrading minds and bodies with biotech instead of replacing humans outright Dataism An emerging worldview that treats free information flow, not human experience, as the highest value Internet-of-All-Things Harari’s name for a possible all-encompassing data-processing system in which individual humans become irrelevant Experiencing self vs narrating self The moment-to-moment self versus the retrospective storyteller that over-weights endings and invents coherence

What to do

Audit every recommendation engine, map app, or health tracker you trusted this week and name the value assumption inside its suggestion. Hold one concrete conversation this month about who captures AI productivity gains at your workplace and whether displaced skills have a real next step. Treat “what happens to people whose skills lose economic value” as a near-term planning question if you work in policy, education, or management. When you catch yourself preferring a system’s recommendation over your own judgment, pause and ask whose values that system was built to optimize.

Questions to think with If free will is mostly a story the brain tells after the fact, what remains of the case for one-person-one-vote? Would you accept a large cognitive or health upgrade knowing it might place your children in a different biological class from most humans? When an algorithm already predicts your preferences better than you do, whose authority should settle the choice? Is raw intelligence without consciousness valuable enough to hold decision-making power over conscious but less capable people? What shared fiction could replace humanism if Dataism becomes the default operating system of institutions?

The other side

The 2012 mortality comparison works as a framing device rather than rigorous epidemiology. The leap from unconscious brain processes to free will as pure illusion runs past what many neuroscientists and philosophers accept. The useless class and the biotech caste split are speculative trajectories, not demonstrated outcomes, and Dataism is offered as a thought experiment rather than a named movement already in power.

Who it's for

Readers who finished Sapiens and want Harari’s next chapter on the human story, along with technologists and policymakers who need a sweeping frame for AI, biotech, and inequality. Anyone already wondering whether liberal ideas of individual worth can survive automation will get the most from the full book.

Read the full summary in Library →