Homo Deus

‘Nobody is in charge of supplying bread to London.’ That’s the capitalist secret of success. No central processing unit monopolises all the data on the London bread supply.

Provided, of course, I renounce my privacy and allow the algorithms to always know where I am and where I want to go.

People consequently lived their lives in ancient Athens or medieval Florence knowing that they might fall ill and die next week, or that an epidemic might suddenly erupt and destroy their entire family in one swoop.

Why does the theory of evolution provoke such objections,

No one is therefore capable of connecting all the dots and seeing the full picture.

Secondly, the gods had to mediate between humans and the ecosystem.

Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are likely to be immortality, happiness and divinity.

In the twentieth century we have almost doubled life expectancy from forty to seventy, so in the twenty-first century we should at least be able to double it again to 150.

For thousands of years, the scientific road to growth was blocked because people believed that holy scriptures and ancient traditions already contained all the important knowledge the world had to offer.