The New Human Agenda

In the last two centuries that frame has been quietly inverted. None of the three has been eliminated, but each has been demoted from cosmic threat to manageable problem. Famine still kills, but more people now die from overeating than from starvation. Plague still strikes, but COVID-19 was contained in years where the Black Death required centuries. War still happens, but most countries no longer plan their economies around it. The basic agenda — survival — has been substantially achieved.

Once survival is no longer the question, Harari argues, the question becomes what humanity does with the surplus. He identifies three new agendas that have begun replacing the old three: immortality, happiness, and divinity. Immortality is not promised next year, but Silicon Valley investments in anti-aging research, Calico's launch by Google in 2013, and the broader life-extension biotech boom suggest humanity is treating death as a technical problem rather than a metaphysical given. Happiness is no longer just the absence of pain but the active engineering of well-being — through pharmaceuticals, through neuroscience, through quantified-self apps that track and optimize mood.

The third agenda, divinity, is the most provocative. Harari uses the term loosely — he does not mean humans will literally become gods of religious tradition. He means humans will increasingly take on capacities once attributed only to gods: redesigning the genome (CRISPR's Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier's 2012 paper opened that door), creating new species, fabricating non-biological intelligence. Each of these moves humanity from the role of created creature to the role of creator. The Sapiens species that once asked priests what life meant is now in a position to engineer what life is.

The chapter's strategic move is to set up the book's structure. Part I asks how the Sapiens came to conquer the world (the answer: stories, cooperation, intersubjective fictions like religion and money and corporations). Part II asks what gives Sapiens meaning today (the answer: humanism, the doctrine that human experience is the source of meaning). Part III asks what comes next when Sapiens engineers itself and creates non-Sapiens intelligence (the answer: humanism dissolves into Dataism, and Sapiens itself becomes obsolete). The new human agenda, then, contains the seeds of its own undoing — the very tools that allow humans to pursue immortality, happiness, and divinity also make the category "human" potentially temporary.