Lol, this book. If I was teaching a class about logical fallacies and needed some fodder, I'd include this on the syllabus.

Harari deliver yet another powerful book about mankind. Brilliantly crafted.

Un libro que te hace pensar bastante . Tiene muchas ideas interesantes que son para darles vueltas:
- Que pasara a los humanos cuando las inteligencias artificiales nos haga prescindibles economicamente.
- Que pasara a los humanos cuando drogas nos puedan mantener siempre contentos y sin ganas de cambiar.

Etc. Hay muchas preguntas interesantes.
Por supuesto el autor tiene algunas ideas y algunas respuestas. Pueden gustar mas o menos o pensar que son mas o menos adecaudas pero yo creo que el simple hecho de ponerlas ahi fuera y hacer esas preguntas es muy interesante y una gran lectura.

This book terrified me. Who needs Black Mirror when you have this book? This book revealed to me that I am so entrenched in humanism, that any move away from it scares the crap out of me. A few take-aways: that at this moment there is no way to understand how other beings see the universe, like bats painting in sound. That up until now, trusting our feelings was trusting millions of years of evolution, but that might not be good enough anymore. That technology is already moving faster than anyone can control. Read this is you want to start breaking down our movement away from a traditional god, to humans, to a pure stream of data.

Absolutely fascinating. Follows the first book (Sapiens) really well. Covers some of the same ideas, but in different ways. Looking forward to reading the new book.

3.5

It's definitely not bad, it's just overwritten. Harari manages to make me smile with his metaphor and strange trivia, but this book could have been half the size and been just as effective. Maybe the problem is that I've already read "Sapiens" and much of this feels borrowed from there.

I really wanted to like this. I mean, there's all kinds of pithy insight that makes you look at the world in a different way, and even though the book didn't go quite where I thought it would, it did explore a lot of dimensions of human society (ps. bring on the data revolution).

What broke down for me is that all those pithy, unique insights don't hold up to a lot of scrutiny. You can't really credit someone for coming up with a brilliant sounding idea if it doesn't survive hypothesis testing from the outset - and I did try to make sure I was limiting myself to examples from before the book was published. And yeah, adding the caveats would make the insights less pithy, but here's the thing: accuracy comes first. If you can't say it both briefly and correctly, it's the brevity that has to go.

I wouldn't say that you should skip this book over, but I certainly recommend reading it with a grain or two of salt.