A very interesting read which got me hooked from the very first chapter (just like the previous book Sapiens). Harari has divided the book into 3 parts and talks about the future only in the third part, but the previous two, which discuss the past as to how our societies became what they are, are equally informative, witty and fun in themselves.
As part of the book, the author asks the important question of the worth of human life and intelligence in the grand scheme of things. Are we really better than the other species, if yes, how? Given the fact that a lot of other species have their own way of doing things, and some of them are better than us, then what gives us the right to kill them indiscriminately and let us live on? And this is not limited to just animals, as we hand out the same treatment to our own species: treating fellow, poorer human beings as essentially unworthy. If things do go on like this, then isn’t the society going to become a lot worse in terms of differences between the haves and have-nots? Only the elite will have access to life changing and body/mind altering medicines and treatments. We are moving towards a rather grim state of things, especially the old schools of thoughts like democracy, liberalism, human-worth were just rungs of ladder used while climbing the ladders of the industrial revolution – these can go as quickly as they came into being.
This book surely forces the readers to think in a rather different picture as the technology giants would want us to believe.