Narrator: For the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little. More people die from old age than from infectious diseases. And more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined. For millennia, humanity has been locked in a desperate struggle against three great enemies: famine, plague, and war. For most people, they were an inescapable part of existence. But in the 21st century, we have managed to transform them from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges.

This unprecedented success raises a profound question: what comes next? What will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? In his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that humanity’s new ambitions will be immortality, happiness, and divinity. Having risen from humble apes to the rulers of the planet, Homo sapiens is now poised to upgrade itself into Homo deus—a being with godlike abilities. But as Harari reveals, this quest may be the very thing that renders humanity obsolete.

Narrator: Harari begins by establishing the monumental shift in the human condition. For thousands of years, the human story was defined by vulnerability. Consider the French famine of the 1690s, where crop failures led to the starvation of 2.8 million people—15% of the population—who were reduced to eating weeds and flesh from dung heaps. Or the smallpox epidemic that arrived in Mexico in 1520 with a single infected slave, wiping out nearly half the Aztec population in less than a year. These were not seen as solvable problems, but as inevitable tragedies.

Today, such events are viewed as preventable failures. Famine is now almost exclusively a political problem, not a natural one; global food networks can prevent mass starvation if political will allows. Plagues, while still a threat, are met with rapid scientific mobilization, a stark contrast to the helplessness of the past. And while war still exists, for many nations it has become almost inconceivable, as knowledge-based economies have made conquest far less profitable than trade and innovation.

With these ancient enemies largely subdued, humanity is setting its sights on a new trinity of goals. The first is overcoming death itself. Modern science no longer sees death as a metaphysical fate but as a technical problem with a technical solution. The second goal is to find the key to happiness, not as a personal spiritual quest, but as a collective project of the state, market, and scientific community, increasingly pursued through biochemical manipulation. The final and most ambitious goal is to upgrade humans into gods, acquiring divine powers of creation and destruction.

Narrator: If humans are not fundamentally different from other animals in our basic biology, what explains our planetary dominance? Harari argues that the crucial factor is our unique ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. While bees can cooperate in large numbers and chimpanzees can cooperate flexibly, only Homo sapiens can do both. This is possible because we live in a triple-layered reality. Animals perceive objective reality (rivers, trees) and subjective experiences (fear, desire). Humans, however, also live in a third layer: the world of shared fictions.

These fictions—stories about gods, nations, money, and corporations—are intersubjective realities that exist only in our collective imagination. Yet they have become the most powerful forces in the world. In ancient Sumer, gods like Enki and Inanna functioned as the world’s first corporations. They were legal entities that owned land, employed people, and gave loans, all managed by temple priests. This system became so complex that it spurred the invention of writing and money to overcome the data-processing limitations of the human brain. These fictions allow millions of strangers to cooperate towards a common goal, whether it’s building a pyramid for a pharaoh—a living brand—or fighting for a nation-state.

Narrator: For most of history, these shared stories placed humanity within a grand cosmic plan, giving life meaning but also limiting human power. People were actors in a divine drama, their roles already scripted. Modernity, Harari explains, is a deal—a covenant that we all implicitly sign. The deal is simple: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

The modern world rejects the idea of a cosmic plan. The universe is seen as a blind, purposeless process. There is no script, no divine purpose, no fate. This can be terrifying, but it is also liberating. If there is no preordained plan, then humans are free to create their own. We are no longer actors on a stage; we are the writers, directors, and producers. This rejection of meaning unlocked unprecedented power. Instead of praying for rain, we study meteorology and build dams. Instead of accepting plagues as God's will, we develop vaccines and antibiotics. The modern world is built on the relentless pursuit of power, fueled by the belief that economic growth and scientific progress can solve any problem.

Narrator: The dominant ideology of the modern world is liberalism, which sanctifies the individual. It champions human rights, democracy, and the free market based on two core beliefs: that individuals have free will, and that each person has a single, indivisible self. Science, however, is now dismantling both of these pillars.

The belief in free will is challenged by neuroscience. Experiments show that brain activity can predict a person’s decision seconds before they are consciously aware of making it. Our feeling of "choosing" is just a fleeting sensation, while the decision itself is the result of a deterministic or random chain of biochemical events. We act on our desires, but we do not choose our desires.

Similarly, the idea of a single, unified self is being exposed as a myth. Studies of split-brain patients, whose brain hemispheres have been disconnected, reveal two separate consciousnesses within one skull. One patient, when asked what he wanted to be, verbally replied "a draughtsman" (a left-brain response), while his left hand spelled out "automobile race" with Scrabble tiles (a right-brain response). Behavioral economics further reveals a conflict between our "experiencing self," which lives in the moment, and our "narrating self," which constructs stories about our lives and makes our decisions. This narrating self is a flawed storyteller, often ignoring duration and focusing only on the peak and end moments of an experience.

Narrator: As science undermines the philosophical foundations of liberalism, technology poses a direct economic threat. For centuries, automation replaced manual labor, but humans could always shift to cognitive tasks. Now, artificial intelligence is beginning to outperform humans in those areas as well. The key insight of 21st-century science is that intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.

Algorithms can now diagnose diseases, drive cars, and compose music better than humans, all without any subjective experience. A robotic pharmacist in San Francisco filled two million prescriptions in its first year without a single error, a feat no human pharmacist could match. IBM's Watson can diagnose lung cancer with 90% accuracy, compared to 50% for human doctors. As non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms take over more jobs, a large portion of humanity may become economically superfluous—a new "useless class." This poses the most critical question for 21st-century economics: what do we do with all the superfluous people?

Narrator: If liberalism is becoming obsolete, what might replace it? Harari suggests two new "techno-religions" are emerging from the laboratories of Silicon Valley. The first is Techno-Humanism, which seeks to use technology to upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. It accepts the humanist goal of creating superhumans but recognizes that the traditional "self" is an illusion. The danger is that in our ignorance of the mind's full potential, we will upgrade humans according to the narrow needs of the current system, creating highly efficient but emotionally and spiritually downgraded beings—more like oversized ants than gods.

The second, and more radical, new religion is Dataism. Dataism sees the entire universe as a flow of data. Organisms are simply algorithms, and the value of any entity is its contribution to data processing. From this perspective, human history is the process of creating an ever-more-efficient data-processing system. Its supreme value is "information flow," and its ultimate goal is to create an all-encompassing Internet-of-All-Things. In this view, human experiences are valuable only if they can be converted into data and shared. The final destiny of humanity, according to Dataism, is to merge completely into this cosmic data flow.

Narrator: The central, disquieting message of Homo Deus is that the very success of humanism may be the cause of its demise. The humanist creed, which worships human feelings and choices, has pushed us to develop technologies that can manipulate feelings and make choices for us. As we pursue immortality, bliss, and divinity, we are creating systems that understand us better than we understand ourselves, and these systems may ultimately render our own consciousness irrelevant.

Harari leaves us with a stark and urgent question. For centuries, we have believed that intelligence and consciousness go hand in hand. But as we build a world that values non-conscious, superior intelligence, we must ask ourselves: What is more valuable? The algorithm that can solve climate change but feels nothing, or the human who can experience the beauty of a sunset but is increasingly powerless? The answer to that question will shape the future of life itself.