Summary

Chapter 1 provides a broad historical overview of the human race and frames the predictions that Harari makes in later chapters. The author states that throughout history, humans have been plagued by starvation epidemics, and violence. Though there are still isolated incidents, these three phenomena have been largely eliminated. Famines are caused by political rather than biological failures, epidemics can can be controlled by modern medicine, and war between countries is inconceivable in many cases. While previous generations considered them inevitable, these are viewed as problems that can be solved by serious efforts. Most importantly, we can conceive of a world where they are absent entirely. Given this, Harari argues that the human race will have two new items on its agenda. The first is achieving immortality. As with famine and epidemic, we now consider death a technical problem to which we could theoretically apply...