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Interesting and illuminating, yet oversimplifying and blatantly self-serving, in the sense that it panders to the Silicon Valley elite who are likely to embrace this book as an excuse to shed any sense of social responsibility still remaining in the tech scene. Humanism (inluding democracy, human rights and the underlying notion of free will) is apparently yesterday's news, as humans are outdated algorithms that are being superseded by 'the internet of all things'.

The author unreservedly advocates surrendering our privacy and autonomy to 'algorithms', as Google and Facebook already supposedly know us better than we know ourselves.

Allowing Google to read our emails is a recurring example, although Google actually recently stopped doing just that. It is one of many signs Harari is oversimplifying history (for instance, idealizing capitalism and neoliberalism, which conveniently allows him to refrain from mentioning criticism of Google and Facebook who only harvest our data for the financial gain of themselves and their shareholders, instead of improving mankind; or his statement that all life forms are merely data processing systems and that all of science agrees with that view) and the current state of affairs, in order to present a narrowminded, dystopian view of the future of mankind that is likely to earn him many additional invitations to TED Talks and other well-paid speaking gigs.

The last pages are puzzling: it's where Harari unexpectedly backtracks and states we are perhaps not just algorithms after all; it's where he states he really wanted to broaden our horizon instead of presenting an inescapable view of the future - although that is exactly what he has done. It reads as a hastily added disclaimer that is written as a defense to all the valid criticism I envisage proofreaders may have presented to him - which is more convenient than rewriting the entire book, but it does seem that that is exactly what he should have done. This the type of book that distinguishes shortcut-seeking 'thought leaders' from bona fide public intellectuals, and Harari, regrettably and unexpectedly, seems to want to set up shop in the former camp.