Theo Todman's Book Collection (Book-Paper Abstracts)

Amazon Customer Review

• This has to be one of the most important books of our time. Harari has to be right when he says that we are 'potentially [at] the end of human history'. History will go on but if the big decisions are made by AI then we are at the end of human history when humans called the shots. A medievalist who studied the causes of wars, Harari lays out his analysis of how society works — with a pendulum swaying between the two great forces of order and truth. Having just written a book myself on how Ireland away from rigid Church and State control through a liberalised education to being able to accept more truth, I had a strong example on which to test this theory, and the theory worked from all the angles I could examine it from. We are at a potential turning point now in which we could hand over too much power to AI without even realising it, he suggests. There are preventative solutions — including setting up mechanisms to retain control of complex algorithms — but we need to wake up to these dangers now.
• Prof. Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is a historian, philosopher and the global bestselling author of "Harari (Yuval Noah) - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" (2014), "Harari (Yuval Noah) - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), the graphic adaptation series Sapiens: A Graphic History (launched in 2020);, and Unstoppable Us (launched in 2022), his first series of books for children. His books have sold over 45 million copies in 65 languages, with Sapiens alone selling 25 million copies since it was first published in 2013. A New York Times and Sunday Times #1 bestseller, Sapiens spent an incredible 96 consecutive weeks in the top 3 of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, is a Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's History department, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Together with his husband, Itzik Yahav, Yuval Noah Harari is the co-founder of Sapienship: a social impact company that advocates for global collaboration, with projects in the realm of education and storytelling. Harari is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today.