Homo Deus promises to illuminate the future, and to show us how humanity will grow and change in the next hundred-some years. But right from the get-go the Harari undercuts the premise dramatically: he’s not going to show us what the future holds exactly, but he will suggest a number of developments which might come to pass. Talk about a weak claim! Most cable news pundits are capable of profounder insights.

When I reviewed Sapiens it occurred to me that Harari mistakenly considers himself an expert in the sciences, which he glibly subsumes under the broad umbrella of history. When I read this book I got that same feeling, but magnified considerably. It would be going too far to call this book a compendium of Silicon Valley press releases. But too far by only a little bit! It seems that some of the most audacious findings are repeated breathlessly and uncritically, with the standing assumption being that any technology can be readily scaled-up and scaled out without the slightest complication or limitation. And so we have a future in which everyone will live to 150, the whole of the human populace will be drugged out of its collective mind, but it won’t matter much because robots will run everything anyway.

This writing is all fascinating science fiction in its own way, except it’s so insistently illiberal and reactionary. Odd mix of ideologies for a futurist book, but I guess everyone’s entitled to an opinion.