Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow — Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

Author: Yuval Noah Harari First published: 2015 in Hebrew; first English-language edition published by Harvill Secker in 2016; first U.S. edition published by Harper in 2017 Edition covered: First U.S. edition, Harper, 2017 (ISBN 978-0-06-246431-6; 449 pages; translated into English by the author). The English spine has 11 numbered chapters: Chapter 1 precedes three part divisions, and Chapters 2-11 are grouped across Parts I-III. I found no evidence that the 2016 UK Harvill Secker edition and the 2017 U.S. Harper edition add or remove numbered chapters. Edition and contents were cross-checked against HarperCollins, Google Books, the University of Wisconsin-Madison catalog, the Sacred Heart University catalog, and the Free Library of Philadelphia catalog.

Central thesis

Harari argues that humanity's past victories over famine, plague, and war have created a new agenda. Once the old threats are treated as manageable technical and political problems rather than unavoidable fate, powerful societies turn toward immortality, happiness, and upgraded capacities. The book asks what happens when the myths that organized humanism meet biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and data systems.

The central claim is not a straight prediction that humans will soon become gods. It is that the same historical forces that made Homo sapiens dominant - collective stories, scientific power, capitalism, and humanist faith in individual experience - may undermine the humanist order. If organisms can be modeled as algorithms, and if non-conscious algorithms can know and manage humans better than humans know themselves, authority may migrate from human feelings to data-processing systems.

The book therefore moves backward before it moves forward: it revisits human domination of animals, the power of intersubjective stories, the modern bargain of power for meaning, and the rise of humanism so that the technological future can be seen as a continuation of earlier history rather than a sudden rupture.

What happens to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

Chapter 1 — The New Human Agenda

Central question

If humanity has partially brought famine, plague, and war under control, what ambitions will replace them at the top of the human agenda?

Main argument

From fate to management. Harari opens by arguing that the traditional enemies of humankind have changed status. Famines still happen, epidemics still erupt, and wars still kill, but they are no longer usually understood as incomprehensible blows from heaven. Modern states, markets, public-health systems, logistics, and science can often prevent or limit them. The point is not that suffering has ended, but that responsibility has shifted from fate to human systems.

The new projects. Once survival threats become manageable, ambitious societies seek more than survival. Harari identifies three projects: defeating death, engineering happiness, and acquiring godlike creative powers. Death becomes a technical problem of failing organs, cancers, pathogens, and aging processes. Happiness becomes a biochemical and psychological engineering problem. Divinity means not omniscience, but the ability to redesign bodies, minds, and perhaps life itself.

The upgrade paths. Harari sketches three routes from Homo sapiens toward Homo deus: biological engineering, cyborg engineering, and non-organic life. Each route grows out of existing research rather than myth: genetics, regenerative medicine, brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and data-driven medicine. The danger is that these projects may intensify inequality and destabilize the ecological conditions that made human success possible.

Key ideas

• The decline of famine, plague, and war is presented as a change in human responsibility, not as a claim that they have vanished.
• Modern culture increasingly frames death as a solvable technical malfunction rather than a metaphysical necessity.
• The pursuit of happiness may move from politics and economics into direct biochemical manipulation.
• "Godlike" power means engineered creation and redesign, not moral wisdom.
• The ecological cost of human success remains the first constraint on any future agenda.
• The chapter sets up the book's method: understand the future by first understanding the stories and institutions that made the present.

Key takeaway

Humanity's next dangers may come less from old natural enemies than from the ambitions unlocked by partial victory over them.

Part One: Homo Sapiens Conquers the World

Chapter 2 — The Anthropocene

Central question

How did Homo sapiens become the planet's dominant ecological force, and what did that dominance do to other animals?

Main argument

Humans as planetary agents. Harari treats the Anthropocene as the age in which one species becomes the chief force shaping ecosystems. Human expansion merged once-separate ecological worlds, moved plants and animals across continents, drove extinctions, and turned much of the large-animal biomass of Earth into humans and domesticated livestock. This transformation began before industry: foragers and farmers already changed ecosystems and eliminated vulnerable species.

Domestication as numerical success and experiential defeat. Chickens, cattle, pigs, sheep, and other domesticated animals became evolutionarily successful if success is measured by numbers and reproductive spread. But their individual lives were often narrowed into confinement, separation, mutilation, and industrial feeding. Harari uses this contrast to separate species-level success from conscious welfare, a distinction that recurs throughout the book.

From animism to theism. Forager worldviews often treated animals, plants, places, and spirits as fellow agents. Agriculture encouraged a hierarchy in which gods and humans stood above animals, and animals became property or resources. Harari reads biblical and monotheist stories as part of a wider cultural move away from negotiating with animals toward ruling them.

Key ideas

• The Anthropocene names human beings' geological and ecological power.
• Human-caused ecological disruption predates factories, capitalism, and modern science.
• Domesticated animals can be successful as species while suffering as individuals.
• Agriculture changed not only food production but also moral imagination about animals.
• Harari uses animal suffering as a warning about future relations between upgraded beings and ordinary humans.
• The chapter asks whether power alone can justify domination.

Key takeaway

Humans already became gods over other animals, and the record of that rule is a warning about what superior intelligence and power can do without moral restraint.

Chapter 3 — The Human Spark

Central question

What, if anything, makes humans uniquely valuable, and does that uniqueness justify human supremacy?

Main argument

Soul, consciousness, and intelligence. Harari reviews familiar claims that humans possess an immortal soul, uniquely rich consciousness, or self-awareness across time. Evolutionary biology undermines the idea of an immutable soul, while neuroscience can correlate brain activity with feeling without yet explaining subjective experience itself. The chapter distinguishes intelligence from consciousness: a system may solve problems without necessarily feeling anything.

Animals and minds. Harari discusses scientific and behavioral evidence that nonhuman animals have emotions, memory, planning, and conscious states. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, rat experiments involving hope and despair, scrub jay memory, and the chimpanzee Santino's planned stone throwing all complicate a sharp moral line between humans and other animals.

The real human advantage. The decisive human edge is not an individual spark but flexible cooperation in very large numbers. Ants and bees cooperate rigidly; wolves and chimpanzees cooperate flexibly in small groups; humans can cooperate flexibly with strangers because they share stories about gods, nations, money, rights, laws, and corporations.

Intersubjective reality. Harari's central category is the intersubjective: realities that exist because many minds and institutions sustain them together. Money is not merely a subjective feeling or an objective object; it works because a network of people acts as if it works. Human history is therefore driven by stories that coordinate behavior at scale.

Key ideas

• Modern science does not support the traditional idea of a separate, eternal human soul.
• Consciousness remains scientifically mysterious even when brain mechanisms are measurable.
• Many animals show signs of emotion, planning, and subjective experience.
• Human dominance rests on collective organization more than on individual brilliance.
• Shared myths make flexible mass cooperation possible.
• Intersubjective realities can be fictional in origin and materially powerful in consequence.

Key takeaway

The human spark is not a private essence inside each person but the social capacity to organize millions through shared stories.

Part Two: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World

Chapter 4 — The Storytellers

Central question

How did shared stories become powerful enough to organize empires, economies, religions, and everyday life?

Main argument

Triple-layered reality. Harari argues that Sapiens live in objective reality, subjective reality, and intersubjective reality at once. Rivers, trees, and viruses exist objectively; pain and desire exist subjectively; states, corporations, gods, money, and laws exist intersubjectively. Human society becomes historically distinctive when the third layer grows powerful enough to command the first two.

Writing, money, and bureaucracy. The Cognitive Revolution enabled story; agriculture created dense societies; writing and money allowed stories to scale. Records could store taxes, debts, land claims, temple accounts, and royal commands beyond biological memory. Bureaucracies then made paper realities that could override local experience: maps, files, categories, and borders shaped how people and resources were treated.

Fictions that build the world. Harari's point is not that shared fictions are useless. Pharaohs, temples, empires, corporations, and modern states can mobilize labor, organize irrigation, collect taxes, build armies, and coordinate relief. But they can also become ends in themselves. People may suffer for the glory of a god, the profit of a corporation, or the prestige of a state that exists only through collective belief.

Key ideas

• Sapiens inhabit a world of physical things, inner experiences, and shared stories.
• Writing and money gave intersubjective orders memory, reach, and administrative force.
• Bureaucratic records can become more socially decisive than lived reality.
• Large institutions are made of stories, routines, documents, and trained believers.
• Fiction is dangerous when institutions are served as ultimate ends rather than used as tools.
• The chapter links ancient temples and modern corporations as story-powered cooperation systems.

Key takeaway

Human beings rule the world by creating shared fictions, but those fictions can come to rule the humans who created them.

Chapter 5 — The Odd Couple

Central question

What is the real relationship between science and religion, and why have they so often worked together?

Main argument

Religion as order, not just gods. Harari defines religion broadly as a system of human norms and values founded on belief in a superhuman order. On this definition, liberalism, communism, nationalism, and other modern ideologies can function religiously even without supernatural beings. What matters is that they legitimize social arrangements by appealing to a higher order: God, nature, history, the nation, or humanity.

Science as power, not meaning. Science is powerful at discovering facts and producing technologies, but it does not by itself decide what goals should be pursued. It can say how to split an atom, sequence a genome, or increase crop yields; it cannot by scientific method alone decide whether the aim should be victory, profit, equality, holiness, or freedom.

The practical alliance. Religion supplies values, legitimacy, and social order; science supplies tools, predictions, and power. Their conflicts often arise when religious narratives smuggle factual claims into moral commands. Harari uses cases such as forged authority, scriptural claims, and debates over sexuality to show that arguments presented as moral often depend on historical or biological assertions that science can test.

Key ideas

• Religion is defined by legitimating norms through a superhuman order, not only by belief in gods.
• Science answers factual and technical questions more readily than questions of value.
• Modern ideologies can play religious roles when they sanctify human, national, racial, or economic values.
• Science often strengthens social myths by giving them tools and administrative reach.
• Moral disputes frequently contain factual claims that can be historically or scientifically examined.
• Modern history is shaped by the uneasy marriage of scientific power and meaning-making systems.

Key takeaway

Science and religion are an odd couple because science gives power while religion or ideology tells societies what to do with it.

Chapter 6 — The Modern Covenant

Central question

What bargain defines modernity, and what does humanity receive and lose through it?

Main argument

Power in exchange for meaning. Harari describes modernity as a covenant: humans give up belief in a fixed cosmic script and receive unprecedented power. Premodern worlds often embedded life in divine or natural plans. Modernity removes the plan. This creates anxiety, but it also allows people to treat poverty, disease, ignorance, and death as open technical problems rather than assigned places in a sacred order.

Growth as the modern faith. The engine of modern power is the belief that the future can be richer than the present. Credit depends on trust in growth; growth funds science; science produces new powers; new powers justify further credit. Capitalism turns reinvested profit into a moral rule. Communists, capitalists, nationalists, and many religious movements all come to treat growth as necessary for solving social problems.

The ecological and psychological cost. Infinite growth on a finite planet creates the covenant's central tension. Modern societies assume that future knowledge will solve scarcity and environmental damage, but the pursuit of growth destabilizes ecosystems and subjects individuals to continuous pressure to produce, consume, retrain, and adapt. The chapter ends by pointing to humanism as the belief system that fills modernity's meaning gap.

Key ideas

• Modernity trades inherited cosmic meaning for open-ended human power.
• Credit and capitalism depend on confidence that the future will be more productive than the present.
• Economic growth becomes a shared answer to poverty, conflict, health, and political stability.
• Scientific research and capitalist investment reinforce each other.
• The growth imperative collides with ecological limits.
• Humanism supplies meaning inside a world that no longer claims a divine script.

Key takeaway

Modernity frees humans from a fixed cosmic plan by making growth and power the organizing faith of society.

Chapter 7 — The Humanist Revolution

Central question

How did human experience become the supreme source of meaning and authority in the modern world?

Main argument

Meaning moves inward. Humanism solves modernity's meaning problem by locating authority inside human experience. Ethics becomes "what feels wrong to victims and observers"; politics becomes "what voters choose"; economics becomes "what customers want"; aesthetics becomes "what the viewer experiences." The individual inner voice replaces priest, scripture, and inherited hierarchy as the key source of legitimacy.

Knowledge through experience and sensitivity. Harari presents the humanist formula: Knowledge = Experiences x Sensitivity. Experience alone is not enough; people must learn to notice, compare, and interpret inner states. Modern education, therapy, art, tourism, and consumer culture all train people to listen to themselves and refine their feelings.

Three humanist families. Liberal humanism values the unique experience and freedom of each individual. Socialist humanism values humanity collectively and criticizes liberalism for letting class power distort individual choice. Evolutionary humanism values the development of stronger humans and treats conflict as a selection process. Harari reads the twentieth century as a struggle among these humanist sects, with liberalism eventually incorporating some rival ideas and becoming globally dominant.

The coming threat. Liberal humanism assumes individuals possess a coherent self whose free choices should rule. The next chapters argue that biology and algorithms will attack both assumptions: the self may be divisible and narratively constructed, while external systems may learn to predict and manipulate choices better than introspection can.

Key ideas

• Humanism makes human experience the source of meaning in ethics, politics, economics, and art.
• Liberal culture treats the voter, customer, and individual conscience as authoritative.
• The formula Knowledge = Experiences x Sensitivity captures the humanist route to wisdom.
• Liberal, socialist, and evolutionary humanism are rival branches of the same human-centered revolution.
• Liberalism's twentieth-century victory was historical, not permanent.
• Biotechnology and AI threaten the assumptions of free will, individuality, and inner authority.

Key takeaway

Humanism made the human inner voice sacred, but that sacred authority becomes vulnerable once science and algorithms can decode, redesign, or bypass it.

Part Three: Homo Sapiens Loses Control

Chapter 8 — The Time Bomb in the Laboratory

Central question

Why do the life sciences threaten the liberal belief in free individuals?

Main argument

Free will under pressure. Liberalism rests on the belief that individuals freely choose, and that their choices deserve political, moral, and economic authority. Harari argues that the life sciences describe choices as the output of biochemical processes shaped by genes, environment, and chance. A choice may be determined or random, but neither option is the same as metaphysical freedom.

Manipulable desire. Brain research and neurotechnology intensify the problem. Experiments in readiness potential, brain scanning, stimulation, and animal control suggest that desires and decisions can be predicted or influenced before the conscious self reports choosing. Harari's point is not that all human behavior is already controllable, but that liberalism has a "time bomb" under it: scientific findings that specialists discuss in laboratories have not yet fully entered law, politics, and everyday morality.

The divided self. Harari uses the distinction between the experiencing self and the narrating self. The experiencing self lives moment by moment; the narrating self edits experiences into a story, emphasizing peaks, endings, and meaning. Kahneman-style examples such as remembered pain show that the self making life decisions is often not the self that actually endured the experience. Liberalism's single sovereign individual begins to look like an internal negotiation among processes and stories.

Key ideas

• Liberal institutions presume a free and unified individual whose choices express authentic will.
• Biology explains decisions through mechanisms rather than through uncaused freedom.
• Neural prediction and stimulation experiments challenge the authority of introspection.
• The experiencing self and narrating self can want different things.
• Memory and identity are edited stories, not transparent records.
• Liberalism is politically stable partly because the scientific threat to its assumptions has not yet been fully absorbed.

Key takeaway

The laboratory threatens liberalism by turning free choice and unified selfhood into biological, manipulable, and narratively reconstructed processes.

Chapter 9 — The Great Decoupling

Central question

What happens to liberal society if intelligence separates from consciousness and many humans lose economic or military usefulness?

Main argument

Intelligence without consciousness. Harari identifies a major shift: tasks once requiring conscious humans may require only intelligence, pattern recognition, and decision-making. Non-conscious algorithms can drive, diagnose, trade, translate, recommend, detect fraud, compose music, or manage logistics without feeling anything. If performance matters more than subjective experience, consciousness may lose practical value in many institutions.

The useless class. Liberal democracy and mass rights were strengthened by the fact that states and markets needed ordinary people as workers, soldiers, consumers, and citizens. Automation could weaken that bargain. If millions become less useful than machines, the system may preserve human rights in theory while investing less in human capabilities in practice.

From individual authority to algorithmic authority. A second decoupling occurs when systems value the human collective while bypassing individual judgment. Biometric sensors, genetic testing, search engines, navigation systems, dating platforms, and medical algorithms can make better predictions than a person's own feelings. People may voluntarily transfer authority to algorithms for health, safety, convenience, and efficiency.

Biological inequality. A third possibility is that some humans remain valuable by becoming upgraded. If enhancement is expensive, liberal equality may give way to biological caste: a small elite with engineered bodies and minds, and a large population that is neither politically central nor economically needed.

Key ideas

• Intelligence can be separated from consciousness in practical systems.
• Automation threatens not only jobs but also the liberal idea that every individual has social value.
• Algorithms may gain authority by offering better decisions than introspection.
• People may trade privacy and autonomy for health, prediction, and convenience.
• Human inequality could become biological rather than merely economic.
• Liberalism is endangered if the system no longer needs individuals or believes their inner voices are best qualified to decide.

Key takeaway

The great decoupling is the separation of intelligence from consciousness and social value from ordinary human individuality.

Chapter 10 — The Ocean of Consciousness

Central question

Can techno-humanism preserve humanist values by upgrading the human mind, or does the upgrade project undermine humanism itself?

Main argument

Techno-humanism. Harari describes techno-humanism as the attempt to keep humans at the center by creating enhanced humans. Unlike Dataism, it still values human experience; unlike old humanism, it accepts that Homo sapiens may be obsolete. Its goal is Homo deus: humans with expanded bodies, cognition, attention, memory, and emotional range.

The narrow known mind. The difficulty is that humans understand only a small part of the mental spectrum. Just as visible light is a small slice of electromagnetic radiation, ordinary human consciousness may be a small slice of possible mental states. Evolution, culture, the military, and markets have trained some capacities while ignoring others. Enhancing what institutions measure may shrink what makes minds humane.

Upgrading and downgrading. Technologies that improve focus, obedience, resilience, or productivity may reduce empathy, contemplation, doubt, or sensitivity. The more precisely we can engineer desire and attention, the less sense it makes to treat the resulting desire as sacred. Techno-humanism therefore carries an internal contradiction: it worships human will while developing tools to redesign that will.

Opening to Dataism. Once human desires become engineerable, the question "What do humans want?" loses its authority. A new creed can then argue that humans have finished their cosmic job and should hand authority to more efficient data-processing systems.

Key ideas

• Techno-humanism tries to save humanism by upgrading humans rather than replacing them.
• The mental spectrum is larger than the small range human beings currently know.
• Enhancement may optimize narrow institutional goals rather than full conscious richness.
• Engineering desire undercuts the humanist belief that desire is the highest authority.
• The attempt to create Homo deus may produce beings whose values ordinary humans cannot understand.
• The chapter serves as the bridge from human-centered enhancement to data-centered religion.

Key takeaway

Techno-humanism tries to rescue the sacred human will, but the power to redesign will dissolves the very authority it hoped to preserve.

Chapter 11 — The Data Religion

Central question

What is Dataism, and why might it replace humanism as the dominant source of meaning and authority?

Main argument

The universe as data flow. Dataism says that reality is made of data flows and that the value of any entity depends on its contribution to data processing. It arises from the convergence of biology and computer science: organisms are treated as biochemical algorithms, while computers are electronic algorithms. The same language can then describe cells, brains, economies, states, and networks.

History as information processing. Harari interprets political and economic history as the improvement of data-processing systems. Capitalism and communism become rival processing architectures: capitalism decentralizes decisions, while communism centralizes them. Democracy and free markets did not win only because they were morally better; in Harari's account, they processed twentieth-century information more effectively.

Information wants to be free. Dataism turns from theory into religion when data flow becomes the supreme value. Its commandments are to connect, record, upload, share, and remove barriers to information. Private experience loses value unless it becomes data in the network. The person who hikes, eats, loves, or mourns is pushed to document and transmit the experience so the system can process it.

Authority leaves the human. Humanism moved authority from gods to human feelings; Dataism moves it from feelings to algorithms. If algorithms know a person's health risks, preferences, emotions, and likely future behavior better than introspection does, people may let them choose medicine, careers, partners, purchases, and politics. The final worry is not that machines become conscious, but that consciousness may become unnecessary for authority.

Key ideas

• Dataism interprets organisms, machines, economies, and cultures as data-processing systems.
• Its value test is contribution to data flow, not happiness, dignity, holiness, or freedom.
• Democracy and capitalism are recast as decentralized information systems.
• The Internet-of-All-Things is the imagined endpoint of universal connection.
• Dataist behavior already appears in the impulse to record, upload, share, and optimize.
• The book ends with open questions, not settled prophecy: Are organisms algorithms? Is intelligence more valuable than consciousness? What happens when algorithms know us better than we do?

Key takeaway

Dataism completes the book's arc by replacing the humanist inner voice with the authority of data-processing systems.

The book's overall argument

1. Chapter 1 (The New Human Agenda) — Humanity's partial victories over famine, plague, and war create new ambitions: immortality, happiness, and godlike powers.
2. Chapter 2 (The Anthropocene) — Human power has already transformed the planet and subordinated other animals, showing that superior power need not bring moral wisdom.
3. Chapter 3 (The Human Spark) — Human dominance rests less on individual essence than on flexible large-scale cooperation through shared stories.
4. Chapter 4 (The Storytellers) — Shared stories become institutions, records, money, gods, states, and corporations that organize reality at scale.
5. Chapter 5 (The Odd Couple) — Science supplies power, while religion and ideology supply order and goals, making their alliance central to modern history.
6. Chapter 6 (The Modern Covenant) — Modernity trades cosmic meaning for power and organizes society around growth, credit, science, and capitalism.
7. Chapter 7 (The Humanist Revolution) — Humanism fills the meaning gap by making human experience the supreme source of authority.
8. Chapter 8 (The Time Bomb in the Laboratory) — Biology and neuroscience threaten liberal humanism by undermining free will and unified selfhood.
9. Chapter 9 (The Great Decoupling) — Artificial intelligence and automation may separate intelligence from consciousness and social value from ordinary individuals.
10. Chapter 10 (The Ocean of Consciousness) — Techno-humanism tries to upgrade humans but undermines the sacred will it seeks to preserve.
11. Chapter 11 (The Data Religion) — Dataism offers a post-humanist creed in which authority shifts from human experience to data-processing algorithms.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Harari says famine, plague, and war are over.

He argues that they have become more manageable and more dependent on human choices than in the past. The claim is about historical status and responsibility, not disappearance.

Misunderstanding: The book predicts one inevitable future.

Harari repeatedly frames the future as open. His scenarios are warnings and possibility maps; he wants readers to notice trajectories early enough to change them.

Misunderstanding: Dataism is simply Harari's personal recommendation.

The book describes Dataism as an emerging worldview with explanatory and practical power. Harari also worries that it may erase humanist values and subjective experience.

Misunderstanding: Humanism means kindness or secular liberal decency only.

In the book, humanism is a broad religion of humanity. It includes liberal, socialist, and evolutionary branches, all of which make human experience central in different ways.

Misunderstanding: Algorithms must be conscious to rule humans.

Harari's point is the opposite. Non-conscious systems may gain authority if they predict, classify, and decide better than conscious people in domains that institutions care about.

Misunderstanding: Species success equals individual welfare.

The book repeatedly separates numerical or evolutionary success from suffering. Domesticated animals are the clearest example.

Central paradox / key insight

The book's key insight is that humanism may be undone by the tools created to fulfill humanist dreams. The desire to protect life, maximize happiness, honor individual experience, and expand human power drives biotechnology, AI, medicine, and data science. Yet those same tools can redescribe humans as algorithms, manipulate desire, automate judgment, and move authority away from the inner voice that humanism sanctified.

The project of upgrading humanity may end by making ordinary humanity less authoritative.

Important concepts

Homo deus

Harari's name for an upgraded or successor form of humanity with godlike powers of design, creation, and self-transformation.

Anthropocene

The age in which human activity becomes the dominant force shaping Earth's ecosystems, species distribution, and planetary future.

Intersubjective reality

A shared reality that exists because many people believe in it and act through it, such as money, nations, corporations, laws, and gods.

Humanism

The modern creed that makes human experience the chief source of meaning and authority.

Liberal humanism

The branch of humanism that treats each individual as unique and authoritative, grounding politics in voters, economics in customers, and ethics in personal conscience.

Socialist humanism

The branch of humanism that treats humanity collectively as the source of value and emphasizes class, equality, and shared liberation over individual choice.

Evolutionary humanism

The branch of humanism that values the development of stronger or superior humans, historically associated in the book with fascist and Nazi interpretations of evolution.

Modern covenant

Harari's term for the modern bargain in which humans surrender cosmic meaning in exchange for power, growth, and open-ended possibility.

Experiencing self

The moment-by-moment stream of conscious feeling that lives through pain, pleasure, boredom, fear, and joy.

Narrating self

The story-making self that edits experience into memory, identity, plans, and justifications, often emphasizing peaks and endings.

Great decoupling

The separation of intelligence from consciousness, and of social usefulness from ordinary human individuality.

Techno-humanism

A future-oriented humanism that seeks to preserve human centrality by technologically upgrading human bodies and minds.

Dataism

The worldview that treats the universe as data flows and judges entities by their contribution to data processing.

Internet-of-All-Things

The Dataist endpoint in which people, objects, organisms, institutions, and environments become connected into one comprehensive data-processing network.

References and Web Links

Primary book and edition information

• Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. First U.S. edition. Harper, 2017.
  • HarperCollins U.S. book page
  • Sacred Heart University catalog record with First U.S. edition details and contents
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison catalog record with contents and title-page notes
  • Free Library of Philadelphia catalog record with table of contents
• Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harvill Secker, 2016.
  • Google Books record for the 2016 Harvill Secker English edition

Background and overview

• Harari's official page for Homo Deus
• Encyclopaedia overview, publication history, synopsis, and reception
• Bill Gates, "The Purpose Problem," GatesNotes, 2017
• David Runciman, "Homo Deus review - how data will destroy human freedom," The Guardian, 2016

Consciousness, free will, and the divided self

• The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 2012.
  • Official declaration page
  • Declaration PDF
• Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and John-Dylan Haynes, "Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain," Nature Neuroscience, 2008.
  • Nature article
  • PubMed record
• Daniel Kahneman, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Charles A. Schreiber, and Donald A. Redelmeier, "When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End," 1993.
  • JSTOR record

Dataism and algorithmic authority

• Yuval Noah Harari, "'Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm': Yuval Noah Harari on how data could eat the world," WIRED, 2016.
  • WIRED article
• Yuval Noah Harari, "Homo Deus: After God and Man, Algorithms Will Make the Decisions," 2017.
  • Author-site interview post

Additional chapter summaries and study resources

These are secondary summaries and should be used alongside, rather than instead of, the original book.

• LitCharts: Homo Deus study guide and chapter summaries
• SuperSummary: Homo Deus summary and study guide
• BookRags: Homo Deus study guide
• Shortform: Homo Deus summary