Sapiens

Summary

Sapiens is a book about how humanity became what it is today. It's a book about history, about the big picture view of how we got here. In answering this question, it shows four major revolutions that shaped our history: the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Unification of Humankind, and the Scientific Revolution.

The Cognitive Revolution is the beginning of humankind as we know it. Harari argues that cognitive abilities—the ability to think abstractly, to communicate complex ideas, and cooperate flexibly in large groups—gave Homo sapiens a decisive edge over all the other species on this planet. Much of humans success can be traced back to our ability to share fictions. We can believe in the same stories, the same abstract concepts and use ideas to unite our behavior and cooperate at vast scales. Money is a shared fiction, so is the idea of a nation state, of property, all the religions, all political ideologies, and of course scientific knowledge. They are all stories that we tell ourselves and that we believe in collectively, that help us to navigate and act in the world. To do this we needed language, David Deutsch would argue that this was the Beginning of Infinity.

The Agricultural Revolution didn't really improve the lives of the individuals partaking in it, it actually made their lives worse. The main thing agriculture enabled was growth. Sustaining a bigger population by creating surplus food and therefore enabling specialization, the creation of armies and ruling classes and enabling farmers to dominate and outcompete neighbouring tribes and proto-empires. The life of a typical hunter gatherer was more rich, but also less predictable, whereas early farmers had long work days every day, but a more reliable source of food leading eventually to more power and influence and a competitive edge. Having surplus of food also meant walls, permanent settlements, governments, and many other things that we now think of as part of normal daily life.

The Unification of Humankind is about three main themes: money, empires and religion. Often these went hand in hand together–the spreading of an empire also propagating its money and religion. But overall, these forces shaped humanity, bringing huge swaths of land and very diverse people closer together and increasing the complexity and sheer size of civilizations, while also enabling more trade and dissemination of knowledge.

Lastly the Scientific revolution, the Enlightnement movement, that directly lead to the Industrial revolution shortly after. People realized that they could reason about the world and figure out how it works instead of relying on the stories told by their priests and religions. The Scientific Revolution introduced the idea that we could acquire new knowledge by observation, experimentation, and questioning. Essentially, humans found out that they can figure out how the world works through the scientific method and the applications of their minds to a problem in a systematic way. This revolution enabled humanity to change vastly in a very short amount of time. Almost all the marvelous technology that we take for granted today can be traced back to it. And it catapulted humans into a position of power that is both frightening and exhilirating, into a time where we have nuclear bombs, computers, smartphones and space flight.

This also co-sided with the rise of capitalism-an economic system based on private ownership and free markets. Which has been one of the most powerful forces in shaping the modern world. Harari explores how capitalism enabled unprecedented economic growth and innovation by encouraging individuals and businesses to seek profit, driving technological advances and the accumulation of wealth.

Looking forward, Harari thinks that the scientific progress we are making at an ever increasing speed will challenge the fundamental notion of what it means to be human. Because eventually our tools and technology will be so powerful and life-altering that the core ideas that we take for what it takes to be "human" are going to change fundamentally, much like they did in the past, with the agricultural or the industrial revolutions. Day to day life in the future might be very different from day to day life now. To a point where our descendants might be unrecognizable as humans to us now.