- Bill Gates: "Yuval Noah Harari has written another thought-provoking book." source ↗
Yuval Noah Harari's third book, published in 2018 by Spiegel & Grau, follows Sapiens and Homo Deus. It collects 21 essays examining present-day challenges across five parts: technological disruption, political upheaval, despair and hope, truth, and resilience. Harari applies his long-view historical lens to automation, AI, nationalism, immigration, misinformation, and meditation — not predicting the future but diagnosing the current moment.
Gates calls the book "fascinating" and calls Harari "such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking." Gates reviewed it in The New York Times, noting that Harari "has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century."
For a founder, the value is not in Harari's predictions — several are deliberately open-ended — but in the framework he supplies for scanning the external environment. The book forces a reader to think about which forces are structural and which are temporary, which problems require collective action rather than company-level solutions, and what a technology founder is actually responsible for. The chapter on "Liberty" (surveillance capitalism and data as control) and "Work" (AI displacement) are the ones most directly relevant to someone building a technology business.