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My rating: 4 out of 5

My review: While it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book much, I just couldn’t bring myself to believe in such a reality. Maybe I wasn’t completely sold on the hypnopaedic idea of teaching people to like what they do. And the idea of idealized Alfa++ humanity being possible is even more ridiculous. The story about cyprus experiment reminded me of an older idea - all jobs, no matter how physical, dirty or menial are needed for society to work. It would be great if we could replace them with robots or other form of automation (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU for a nice overview). In the meantime I would like people to appreciate their waiters, cleaning ladies and other people “serving” them.

There were a lot of passages I marked in the book since it had a certain philosophical edge to it and I liked it very much (especially last two chapters). Topics of happiness, science and knowledge amd are the most important on my list to remember and ponder on after reading this book. I expect a later update of this text :-)