This might sound like good news, but the author has a dystopian vision. People, increasingly, will cede jobs and decisions to machines and algorithms. The “useless masses” cast aside by this development will pursue the mirage of happiness with drugs and virtual reality. Only the super-rich will reap the true rewards of the new technologies, commandeering evolution with intelligent design, editing their genomes and eventually merging with machines. Mr Harari envisages an elite caste ofHomo sapiens evolving into something unrecognisable: Homo deus. In this brave new world, the rest of mankind will be left feeling like “a Neanderthal hunter in Wall Street”.

Mr Harari’s prophecy is bleak, but it is far from new. More interesting is the way he roots his speculation about technology in the context of how liberal democracy has evolved. For most of human history, Mr Harari says, humans believed in gods. This lent their world a cosmic order. But then, at least in some parts of the world, science began simultaneously to give mankind power and to strip it of meaning by relegating religion to the sidelines. This existential hole was filled by a new religion, humanism, that “sanctifies the life, happiness and power of Homo sapiens”, he writes. The covenant between humanism and science has defined modern society: the latter helps people achieve the goals set by the former.

But the life sciences are now undermining free will and individualism, which are the foundations of humanism. Mr Harari describes scientific research that, in his eyes, proves that the “free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms”. As it dawns on mankind that free will is an illusion and external algorithms can predict people’s behaviour, Mr Harari believes liberal democracy will collapse. What will replace it? Perhaps a techno-religion such as “Dataism” that treats everything in terms of data processing and whose supreme value is the flow of information. In this context, Homo sapiens is a rather unimpressive algorithm, destined for obsolescence—or an upgrade.

Although there is plenty to admire in the ambitious scope of this book, ultimately it is a glib work, full of corner-cutting sleights of hand and unsatisfactory generalisations. Mr Harari has a tendency towards scientific name-dropping—words like biotech, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence abound—but he rarely engages with these topics in any serious way. Instead, he races along in a slick flow of TED-talk prose. Holes in his arguments blur like the spokes of a spinning wheel, giving an illusion of solidity but no more. When the reader stops to think, “Homo Deus” is suddenly less convincing, its air of super-confidence seductive but misleading.