Humans fuck up - book review

After the Israeli historian Harari educated us about our species and its origins in easy to read manner earlier this decade, a Brit followed up with a hilarious portrait of our uncanny ability to cock things up.

Humans - brief history of how we fucked it all up - is a 2019 attempt by British journalist and storyteller Tom Phillips to lay bare the truth that we are not all that smart as cracked up to be.

Starting with a condensed table of contents that describes an ape falling off a tree 3.2 M years ago after probably jerking off and dying, the species went on to get to present state aka Wise Man (leaving that moniker in doubt) or Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Contrast Yuval Harari's detailed investigations of historic records and some eye opening data points to Phillips' easy going hilarity, the latter was quite an entertaining read.

Indeed we as a species still deal with the consequences of what we now see in the rearview mirror of history. Discovering agriculture, gasoline engines, smartphones et al to ultimately dying into extinction with artificially intelligent machines taking over natural stupidity.

Recommend this book for any transoceanic flight as it may help you ponder why you are on the plane seat in the first place.

Comments

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Brown Motion

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