Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering.

Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning.

On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humanki

To understand all this we need to go back and investigate who Homo sapiens really is, how humanism became the dominant world religion and why attempting to fulfil the humanist dream is likely to cause its disintegration. This is the basic plan of the book.

We see then that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money.

Technological revolutions now outpace political processes, causing MPs and voters alike to lose control.

The electrochemical brain processes that result in murder are either deterministic or random or a combination of both – but they are never free. For example, when a neuron fires an electric charge, this may be either a deterministic reaction to external stimuli, or perhaps the outcome of a random event such as the spontaneous decomposition of a rad

Throughout history most gods were believed to enjoy not omnipotence but rather specific super-abilities such as the ability to design and create living beings; to transform their own bodies; to control the environment and the weather; to read minds and to communicate at a distance; to travel at very high speeds; and of course to escape death and li

In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.