I'd heard a lot of people raving about his earlier book Sapiens, but I happened to see this when I was book shopping and grabbed it.
Homo Deus is subtitled A Brief History of Tomorrow, but it's a rich mix of history, politics and philosophy, as well as covering technology.
He talks about how humans are looking to extend lifetimes, but this may be reserved for the rich as they have little incentive to help a populace who become less relevant as warfare and production become less reliant on human labour.
A large part of the book is about how we can be reduced to algorithms, especially now that Big Data knows our habits so well. Services like Facebook know us better than we know ourselves. If we let them read all our bodily functions as well as our opinions then it could get even worse.
We do seem too willing to give all our data away and maybe it's time to get back to just experiencing life without sharing it all. We may just be wet machines, but we are very complex ones that experience a wide variety of emotions. We can let machines take care of the boring stuff, which is what they were intended for. The machines are exceeding us in many areas. They will be better drivers than us pretty soon. A lot of call centre jobs may be automated too.
As things are going we are more likely to make the planet uninhabitable before the machines decide they don't need us. I think we need to keep them under our control anyway. True artificial intelligence still seems to be a dream, but maybe it will arise spontaneously from the complex systems we are building and we need to be ready for contact with a new form of intellect. It could be very alien and it will only grow.
I saw that @cryptogee was carrying around a copy of this book at Steemfest. We did discuss it briefly.
I'd say it's worth a read if you are curious about where our path is taking us. The world is changing so quickly now and we need to keep up.
I will try read his other books some time. My reading time is limited, so I have to be selective and I have a bit of a backlog.
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A good antidote to this book is George Gilder’s new Life After Google. I liked Sapiens but thought that Homo Deus was much weaker.
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We need to avoid sleepwalking into some sort of distopia. It's very tempting to just let technology take over. Most of it is not intentionally evil as the creators just want to make money, but we risk losing touch with things that should matter more. I have my own technology addiction issues :)
Someone told me to pick this book up like a year ago, and I've just been putting it off. I guess I need to get to it!
Definitely an interesting read even if you don't agree with it all