Homo Deus

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

Turns out assuming corporations will be shitty makes you look like a prophet.

I read and enjoyed Homo Sapiens at my fiance's recommendation, so was interested to see where a forward-looking version would go. Unfortunately it mostly went exactly where I expected, since unlike history I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about technology and the horrible ways corporations use it.

This was written 7 years before ChatGPT convinced the general population fancy autocomplete meant AI was finally here, so Yuval is missing an absolute goldmine of practical evidence of the changes he predicted it would bring. Despite that he was pretty spot-on in a lot of cases, and additionally made some good points about corporations essentially taking the place of/becoming religion. Outside of that there wasn't really anything you're not already familiar with if you read something like ArsTechnica regularly, which is to be expected from a 7 year old book but still disappointing.

I found the parallels he made between past and potential future revolutions interesting enough to keep reading, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone who keeps up the tech space. If you don't though, this is probably going to introduce you to some concepts you're not familiar with and give you food for thought regarding their implications. Overall I'd recommend it as an interesting read, with the caveat that if you're a techy person you're probably mostly reading for the philosophy.