Reading Order
SapiensHomo Deus Reading Order
Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015, English translation 2016) is the sequel to Sapiens, projecting the human future — arguing that having conquered the ancient scourges of famine, plague, and war, humanity's next agenda will be to upgrade itself toward divinity: immortality, bliss, and god-like creative power — through biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and the engineering of life itself.
Where to start
Sapiens
Complete Sapiens Book List
- 1Buy
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari·2011·The essential foundation. Read this first before Homo Deus. - 2Buy
Homo Deus
Yuval Noah Harari·2015·The account of humanity's future agenda — immortality, bliss, and divinity. Read second. - 3Buy
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari·2018·The present-focused volume. Read third for the complete trilogy.
Sapiens — Frequently Asked Questions
What is 'Dataism' in Homo Deus?
Dataism is Harari's term for the emerging worldview — which he sees as the successor to both humanism and traditional religion — that treats the universe as a flow of data, organisms as data-processing algorithms, and the creation of ever more comprehensive data-processing networks as the supreme value. Under Dataism, human experience is valuable only insofar as it produces data, and algorithms — eventually AI systems — that can process data better than humans will render humans economically and politically obsolete. Harari presents Dataism both as a description of an emerging ideology in Silicon Valley and as a hypothesis about where technological development is heading.
What is the difference between Sapiens and Homo Deus?
Sapiens is a retrospective — a history of how Homo sapiens rose from an unremarkable African ape to the dominant force on Earth, using the human capacity for shared fictions to build religions, nations, and market economies. Homo Deus is prospective — a projection of where the human species is headed next, arguing that the same drives that powered human history (the desire to escape suffering, to have more power, to live forever) are now being expressed through biotechnology and artificial intelligence in ways that may ultimately transform or transcend the species. Homo Deus is more speculative and more unsettling than Sapiens.
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