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A Brief History of Tomorrow —Welcome to Luna Pan's Neverland— It took me around 4 months to finish Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. Sapiens | A Brief History of Humankind
Largely owing to the local lockdown, and my growing interest in reading Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow took only a week. Nailed it! Again, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow broadens my vision a great deal. I can even call it a mind blow. Here comes the masterpiece in a nutshell. 1. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder. 2. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves. 3. This is all the fault of evolution. For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness. 4. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. 5. This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom—we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none. 6. People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes. 7. Anthropological and archaeological evidence indicates that archaic hunter-gatherers were probably animists: they believed that there were no essential gap separating humans from other animals. 8. The relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans. 9. The literal meaning of the word “individual” is “something that cannot be divided”. 10. In essence, we humans are not that different from rats, dogs, dolphins or chimpanzees. Like them, we too have no soul. Like us, they too have consciousness and a complex world of sensations and emotions. 11. This hilarious experiment, along with the Ultimatum Game, had led many to believe that primates have a natural morality, and that equality is a universal and timeless value. 12. Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories. 13. To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realize that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants. 14. Such self-absorption characterises all humans in childhood. Children of all religions and cultures think they are the centre of the world, and therefore show little genuine interest in the conditions and feelings of other people. That’s why divorce is so traumatic for children. 15. We are not actors in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director, no producer—and no meaning ... There won’t be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any engding at all. Things just happen, one after the other. A Brief History of Tomorrow 16. Most natural systems exist in equilibrium, and most survival struggles are a zero-sum game in which one can prosper only at the expense of another. 17. Modernity has turned “more stuff” into a panacea applicable to almost all public and private problems, from religious fundamentalism, through Third World authoritarianism, down to a failed marriage. 18. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress. 19. Humankind finds itself locked into a double race. 20. Protecting the environment is a very nice idea, but those who cannot pay their rent are worried about their overdraft far more than about melting ice caps. 21. Yesterday’s luxuries become today’s necessities. 22. This is the primary commandment humanism has given us: create meaning for a meaningless world. 23. Reality will be a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs. 24. However, most relevant researches have been conducted on people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, who do not constitute a representative sample of humanity. 25. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. 26. Modern humanity is sick with FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out—and though we have more choice than ever before, we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose. 27. Freedom of information, in contrast, in not given to humans. It is given to information. 28. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: “Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is just the product of biochemical algorithms.” 29. Looking back, humanity will turn out to have been just a ripple within the cosmic dataflow.
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