Yuval Noah Harari

thumb|Harari in 2013 Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי; born 24 February 1976) is an Israeli professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Quotes If AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection, it needs rights, just like humans and animals. "#390 - Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies" on Lex Fridman Podcast, found on DeepCast (17 July 2023) Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people, certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss. "#390 - Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies" on Lex Fridman Podcast, found on DeepCast (17 July 2023) Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history… At first sight, domesticated animals may seem much better off than their wild cousins and ancestors. Wild buffaloes spend their days searching for food, water and shelter, and are constantly threatened by lions, parasites, floods and droughts. Domesticated cattle, by contrast, enjoy care and protection from humans. People provide cows and calves with food, water and shelter, they treat their diseases, and protect them from predators and natural disasters. True, most cows and calves sooner or later find themselves in the slaughterhouse. Yet does that make their fate any worse than that of wild buffaloes? Is it better to be devoured by a lion than slaughtered by a man? Are crocodile teeth kinder than steel blades? "Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history", The Guardian (25 September 2011) Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, 2024 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) Harper, 2011. 978-0062316097 thumb|How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. Chapter 1: "An Animal of No Significance" Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother. Homo erectus, 'Upright Man,' [survived] for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever. This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species. It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league. When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force. Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erctus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. It may well be that when Sapines encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history. Chapter 2: "The Tree of Knowledge" It (Gossip) comes so naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for the very purpose. In modern society, currency notes usually display religious images, revered ancestors and corporate totems. Chapter 3: "A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve" The Stone Age should be more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by the ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution. Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago. Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domestic animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Animism is not a specific religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very different religions, cults and beliefs. What makes all of them 'animist' is this common approach to the world and man's place in it. Theism (from 'theos', 'god' in Greek) is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of of eternal entities called gods. Chapter 4: "The Flood" Planet Earth was separated into several ecosystems, each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants. Homo sapiens was about to put an end to this biological exuberance. The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus' journey to America or Apollo 11 expedition to the moon. Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago. The moment the hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that the Homo sapiens to the top rung in the food chain, and became the deadliest species ever in the 4-billion-year history of life on earth. Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago. The settlers of Australia, or more accurately, its conquerors, didn't just adapt. They transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition. Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago. It's common... to explain... everything as the result of climate change, but... earth's climate... is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of... climate change. ...[O]ur planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming. The extinction of the Australian Megafauna was probably the first significant mark Homo sapiens left on our planet. Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago. No other animal [Homo sapiens] had ever moved into such a huge variety of habitats so quickly. At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about one hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools. The elephant bird and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1.500 years ago - precisely when the first humans set foot on the island. The Galápagos Islands... remained uninhabited by humans until the nine-teenth century.., preserving a unique menagerie... Don't believe... that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record... for driving the most plant and animal species to... extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Chapter 5: "History's Biggest Fraud" [H]umans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This.., they thought, would provide... more fruit, grain and meat. It was... the Agricultural Revolution. Even today, with all our advanced technology, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants... our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC - wheat, rice, maize (called 'corn' in US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant and animal has been domesticated in the last 2000 years. The Agricultural Revolution... enlarged the... total... food.., but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. ...[I]t translated into population explosion and pampered elites. According to... evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. [T]he new agricultural tasks demanded so much time... people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat field. ...[W]heat... domesticated us. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and... enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and permanent settlements would be hotbeds of infectious disease. One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can't live without it. The structures at Göbekli Tepe are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by hunter-gatherers. In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple... But Göbekli Tepe suggests... the temple may have been built first... The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever. Chapter 6: "Building Pyramids" The agricultural revolution is one of the most controversial events in history. Some... proclaim... it set humankind on the road to prosperity and progress. Others... that it has led to perdition. From the dawn of agriculture.., billions... armed with branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays have waged... wars against diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate the human domicile. [F]ood surpluses... with... transportation technology... enabled... more people to cram together... into large villages, then... towns, and finally... cities, all... joined... by new kingdoms and commercial networks. Yugoslavia in 1991 had more than enough... to feed all... and... disintegrated into a... bloodbath. The Roman Empire... collected taxes from up to 100 million subjects. This... financed... 250,000 - 500,000 soldiers, a road network still in use.., and theatres and amphitheatres that host spectacles to this day. This (Code of Hammurabi) was a collection of laws and judicial decisions whose aim was to present Hammurabi as a role model of a just king, serve as a basis for a more uniform legal system across the Babylonian Empire, and teach future generations what justice is and how a just king acts. According to the science of biology, people were not 'created'. They... evolved. And... not... to be 'equal'. ...Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this... Their response is likely.., ‘...if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’ I have no argument with that. ...[B]elieving in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Chapter 7: "Memory Overloaded" [W]hen... complex societies began to appear.., a... new type of information became vital ― numbers. [T]he first text of history contains no philosophical insight, no poetry, legends, laws, or... royal triumphs. They were humdrum economic documents, recording... taxes.., debts and... ownership of property. The earliest Sumerian writing was a partial... script. Full script is a system of material signs that can represent spoken language... everything people... say, including poetry. Partial script... can represent only particular... information... [in] a limited field of activity. Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues, dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied the internalised technique of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very different from those used by the brain. A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 - 9. Confusingly, these signs were known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus. Writing is born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. Chapter 8: "There Is No Justice in History" According to a famous Hindu creation myth, the gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval being, the Purusa. The sun was created from Purusa's eyes, the moon from Purusa's brain, the Brahmins (priests) from the mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from its arms, the Vaishyas (peasants and merchants) from its thighs, and Shudras (servants) from its legs. The ancient Chinese believed that the goddess Nü wa created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil, whereas commoners were formed from brown mud. American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plunged by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans! [T]he burgeoning new society of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a subjected class of black Africans. [E]ven though the slaves were freed, the racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Separation of race was maintained by racist legislation and social customs. People everywhere have divided themselves into men and women. And almost everywhere men have got the better deal, at least since the Agricultural Revolution. In many societies women were simply the property... Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property violation... [i.e.,] the victim is not the woman... but the male who owns her. The Bible decrees... 'If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes... and lies with her, and they are found... the man... shall give... the father... fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife'... Deuteronomy 22:28-9... Raping a woman who did not belong to any man was not considered a crime... To say that a husband 'raped' his wife was... illogical... As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife... in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997... [T]he meaning of 'manhood' and 'womanhood' have varied... from one society to another... scholars usually distinguish... 'sex'... [as] biological... and 'gender'... cultural... Sex is divided between males and females, and the qualities... are objective and... constant... Gender is divided between... (...some cultures recognise other categories). ...'masculine' and 'feminine' qualities [which] are inter-subjective and undergo ...changes. Throughout history, males have been willing to risk and even sacrifice their lives, just so that people will say, 'He is a real man!' At least since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchal societies that valued men more highly than women. ... Fewer resources are invested in the health and education of women; they have fewer economic opportunities, less political power, and less freedom of movement. Wars are not a pub brawl. ...[A]n aggressive brute is often the worst choice to run a war. Much better is a cooperative person who knows how to appease... and... see things from different perspectives. ...The militarily incompetent Augustus ...succeeded in ...achieving something that eluded ...Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great ...[H]istorians often attribute this ...to his ...clementia—mildness and clemency. Chapter 9: "The Arrow of History" Myths and fictions accustom... people... to think in certain ways, to believe in... certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. ...[T]hereby ...artificial instincts ...enable millions of strangers to cooperate ...This network of artificial instinct is ...'Culture'. Unlike the laws of physics... every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this... fuels change. Anyone who has read... Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of life. Osama bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture.., religion, and... politics, was... fond of American dollars. How did money succeed where gods and kings failed? Chapter 10: "The Scent of Money" The followers of Christ and... Allah killed each other by the thousands, devastated fields and orchards, and turned prosperous cities into smouldering ruins... Money is not coins and bank notes. Money is anything that people... use... to represent... value... for... exchanging goods and services. The... money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet... coins and bank notes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90% percent of all money... [>]$50 trillion... in our accounts... exists only on computer servers. Money... is most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. Money is more open-minded than language, state law, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money... can bridge almost any cultural gap, and does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Chapter 11: "Imperial Visions" Most past cultures have... fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which... consigned them to oblivion. Empires... ultimately fall, but... tend to leave behind rich.., enduring legacies. In our time, 'imperialist' ranks second only to 'fascist' in the lexicon of political swear words. [E]mpire has been the world’s most common form of political organisation for... 2,500 years. Imperial elites used... profits of conquest to finance... armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity. Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify... with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed... repeated revolts... The first empire... was the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great... [M]ost imperial elites... believed that they were working for the general welfare of... inhabitants. China's ruling class treated... neighbours and... foreign subjects as... barbarians to whom the empire must bring... culture. The mandate of Heaven was bestowed upon the emperor not... to exploit... but... to educate humanity. Muslim caliphs received a divine mandate to spread the Prophet's revelation, peacefully if possible... by the sword if necessary. Many Americans... maintain... a moral imperative to bring the Third World countries... benefits of democracy and human rights, even if... by cruise missiles and F-16s. [T]he modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire. The British killed, injured and persecuted... but... also united... warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a... national consciousness and a country that functioned... as a single political unit. Chapter 12: "The Law of Religion" [R]eligion has been the third great unifier... alongside money and empire. Religion can... be defined..[:] a system of human laws... founded on a belief in superhuman laws. [T]he majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive.., believed in local deties and spirits, and had no interest in converting the... human race. [U]niversal and missionary religions began to appear... in the first millennium BC.., one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind, much like... universal empires and... money. For thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution... liturgy consisted mainly of... sacrificing lambs, wine and cakes to divine powers... [for] promised abundant harvest and fecund flocks. These [polytheistic] religions understood the world to be controlled by... powerful gods... Humans could appeal to these... to bring rain, victory... health. [M]onotheistic brainwashing... caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry. In Hindu polytheism, a single principle, Atman, controls the myriad gods and spirits, humankind, and the biological and physical world. Atman is the central essence or soul of the... universe.., of every individual and every phenomenon. The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic... evangelising god of the Christians. Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are... notorious. ...[T]hey disagreed about the nature of... [Christ's] love. The first monotheist religion known... appeared in Egypt, c.1350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared... one of the minor deties... Aten... supreme power ruling the universe. Judaism had little to offer other nations, and throughout most of its existence... [was] not... a missionary religion.., [but] a 'local monotheism". Christians began... widespread missionary activities... In one of history's strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the... Roman Empire. Christian success served as a model for... seventh century... Islam. Dualistic religions espouse... opposing powers: good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes... evil is an independent power, neither created by... nor subordinate to...[God].., that the... universe is a battleground.., that everything... is part of the struggle. Dualistic religions flourished for more than a thousand years. ...[B]etween 1500 BC and 1000 BC ...Zoroaster ...was active ...in Central Asia. His creed... became the most important of dualistic religions ...Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good... Ahura Mazda and the evil... Angra Mainyu. Gnostics and Manichaeans argued... the good god created the spirit and soul.., matter and bodies are... of the evil god. Man... serves as a battleground... Gautama... attained nirvana... fully liberated from suffering. Henceforth... as 'Buddha'.., 'The Enlightened One'.., spent... his life explaining his discoveries... in a single law: ...to be ...liberated from suffering is to be ...liberated from craving; and the only way ...is to train the mind to experience reality as it is. The modern age has witnessed the rise of... new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. Like Buddhism, Communists believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions. Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that 'humanity' is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct. the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal or eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or can degenerate into subhuman. Nazis said that the Aryan race, the most advanced form of humanity, had to be protected and fostered, while degenerate kinds of Homo sapiens like Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated. According to Nazis, Homo sapiens had already divided into several races, the Aryan race, had the finest qualities ― rationalism, beauty, integrity, diligence... [and] the potential to turn... into superman. Other races... possessing inferior qualities... [i]f allowed to breed... with Aryans... would adulterate... and doom Homo sapiens to extinction. Biologists have... debunked Nazi racial theory. ...[G]enetic research... has demonstrated that... differences between... human lineages are far smaller... Scientists... have found no soul... They... argue... human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than free will ― the... forces that determine... [animal] behaviour... Chapter 13: "The Secret of Success" When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect. Revolutions are, by definition unpredictable. [W]hy study history? ...[It] is not a means of making accurate predictions. We study history... to widen... horizons, to understand that our present... is... [not] inevitable, and that we... have many more possibilities before us... [P]ostmodernist thinkers describe nationalism as a deadly plague that spread... in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, causing wars, oppression, hate and genocide. Chapter 14: "The Discovery of Ignorance" For most of history, humans knew nothing about 99.99 per cent of the organisms on the planet... the microorganisms. ...Each of us bears billions... They are our best friends, and deadliest enemies. Some... digest our food and clean our guts.., others cause illness and epidemics. The Scientific Revolution... has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery... was... that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. [T]he prophet Muhammad began... by condemning... fellow Arabs for living in ignorance of the divine truth. Yet Muhammad... argue[d] that he knew the full truth, and... followers began calling him 'the Seal of the Prophets'. [W]illingness to admit ignorance... made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than... previous tradition[s]. Mere observations... are not knowledge. ...[T]o understand the universe, we need ...theories. Earlier traditions usually formulated... theories... [as] stories. Modern science uses mathematics. The greatness of Newton's theory was its ability to explain and predict the movement of all bodies... from falling apples to shooting stars, using three simple mathematical laws. Only around the end of the nineteenth century did scientists come across a few observations that did not fit... with Newton's laws, and these led to the next revolution... the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Throughout most of history, mathematics was an esoteric field that even educated people rarely studied seriously. In medieval Europe, logic, grammar and rhetoric formed the educational core... [M]athematics seldom went beyond simple arithmetic and geometry. ...The undisputed monarch of all science was theology. Today... there is an irresistible urge to study the exact sciences - defined... 'exact' by their... mathematical tools. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if... told... that... to understand the... mind and cure its illness you must... study statistics. The most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder... invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life. Only in the fifteenth century - almost 600 years after the invention of the gunpowder - did cannons become a decisive factor... Until the Scentific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress... the golden age was... past,... the world... stagnant, if not deteriorating. Throughout history, societies have suffered from two kinds of poverty: social poverty... withholds from some... the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty... puts... life... at risk due to lack of food and shelter. Perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated, but in many countries... biological poverty is a thing of the past. Scientists... are not always aware of the political, economic and religious interests that control... money; many... act out of purely intellectual curiosity. ...[O]nly rarely do scientists dictate the scientific agenda. Chapter 15: "The Marriage of Science and Empire" Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, scurvy... claimed the lives of... [~]2 million sailors. No one knew what caused it... For the aborigines of Australia, and to a lesser extent for the Maori of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never fully recovered. The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable. In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf. The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans... in a series of wars... conquered large parts of Asia. Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way... before they enjoyed... technological advantage. The Far East and the Islamic world... between 1500 and 1950... did not produce anything... close to Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost every important military expedition that left Europe... had on board scientists who set out... to... make scientific discoveries. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he took 165 scholars.... Among other things, they founded... Egyptology, and made... contributions to the study of religion, linguistics and botany. The European imperial expeditions transformed... history... from... isolated peoples and cultures... [to] the history of a single integrated human society. Columbus's fleet... of three small ships manned by 120 sailors... was like a trio of mosquitoes compared to Zheng He's drove of dragons. For modern Europeans, building an empire was a scientific project... [T]he Great Survey of India... lasted sixty years. ...[T]he British ...mapped the whole of India, marking borders... and calculating... the... height of Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks. Chapter 16: "The Capitalist Creed" Money has been essential both for building empires and for promoting science. Neither modern armies nor university laboratories can be sustained without banks. [T]o understand modern economic history, you need to understand... a single word... growth. Smith's claim that the selfish human urge... is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary.., not just from an economic... but... more so from a moral and political perspective. ...Smith says.., greed is good, and... by becoming richer I benefit everybody... Egoism is altruism. Capitalism distinguishes 'capital' from mere 'wealth'. Capital consists of... resources... invested in production. Wealth... is buried... or wasted on unproductive activities. Napoleon... [called the British] a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon... and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen. In the late nineteenth century... [~]40 million Chinese, a tenth of the... population, were opium addicts. In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly... The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eight kilograms in the early nineteenth century. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.., [~]10 million African slaves were imported to America. ...[~]70 per cent... worked on the sugar plantations. Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed. Chapter 17: "The Wheels of Industry" For decades aluminium was much more expensive than gold. ...Napoleon III... commissioned aluminium cutlery... for... distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold... Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more... as a... positive... It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves.., even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Religious holidays... have become shopping festivals. Obesity is a double victory... [E]ating little... will lead to economic contraction... [E]at too much and... buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over. The capitalist and consumerist ethics are... a merger of commandments. The... rich... 'Invest!' The... rest... 'Buy!' Chapter 18: "The Permanent Revolution" Our... green and blue planet is becoming... concrete and plastic... The Industrial Revolution turned the time table and the assembly line into a template... [S]chools... adopted... timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores. ...[I]n places devoid of assembly lines and machines, the timetable became king. The first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time. rather than the local times of Liverpool. Manchester and Glasgow. Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying ecconimic and legal rights independently of their family and community. Consumerism and nationalism... make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community.., that we... have a common past.., interest and... future. This isn't a lie. It's imagination. As long as millions of Germans believe in... a German nation, get excited at... national symbols, retell... national myths, and... sacrifice money, time and limbs for the... nation, Germany will remain one of the strongest powers... California['s] wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is... silicon and celluloid ― Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood. Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite - politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable. Chapter 19: "And they lived happily Ever After" International wars became rare only after 1945, largely thanks to the new threat of nuclear annihilation. For 2500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and cause of happiness. which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices. Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods. Chapter 20: "The end of Homo Sapiens" In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism's original characteristics. [I]f humankind doesn’t annihilate itself... the Scientific Revolution... may turn out to be the most important bological revolution... There is nothing new about biological engineering per se. People have been using it for millennia... Scientists believe that we will soon have bionic arms that will... be able to transmit signals back to the brain... enabling... the sense of touch. The era of personalised medicine... that matches treatment to DNA... has begun. [T]he Frankenstein story appears to warn... that if we try to... engineer life we will be punished... When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination... everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people will be living... on Mars and Pluto. ...[N]obody foresaw the Internet. Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal... in... Africa. ...[I]t transformed... into the master of the... planet and... terror of the ecosystem.., on the verge of... eternal youth... [with] divine abilities of creation and destruction. [H]ow did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts..? ...[H]umans created imagined orders and devised scripts... The imagined orders sustaining... networks... divided people into [a] make-believe hierarchy. Superiors got... the good things... Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained. [F]or the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the... life of most humans ran... within three ancient frames: the nuclear family.., extended family and... local intimate community. ...The family was... the welfare.., health.., education system.., construction industry.., pension fund.., insurance company.., radio.., television.., newspapers.., bank and... police. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop... the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings. How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? ...[N]ever admit that the order is imagined. [F]rom a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has... no meaning... the outcome of blind evolutionary processes... without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of... divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up... the universe would... keep going... business as usual. ...[H]uman subjectivity would not be missed. ...[M]eaning ...people ascribe to their lives is... delusion. [P]erhaps happiness is synchronising... personal delusions.. with... prevailing collective delusions. Dualism... has a... simple answer to the... Problem of Evil... Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain... suffering... One... explanation.., [w]ere there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil.., hence... no free will. Dualisim... is unnerved by the Problem of Order. ...[I]f Good and Evil battle for control... who enforces the laws. [M]onotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. ...[S]olving the riddle: ...there is a single omnipotent God... and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such... [T]he modern world fails to square liberty with equality. [C]ontradictions are culture’s engines, responsible for... creativity and dynamism... Just as... clashing musical notes... force... music forward.., discord in... thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds. We have... increased food production, built cities, established empires and created... trade networks. But did we decrease... suffering..? ...[M]assive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals. [W]e have... made... progress... with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating... and the improvement in... humanity is... fragile... thumb|As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Introduction to Animal Liberation (2015) Introduction to Peter Singer's Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, Random House, 2015. 9781473524422 Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. Today more than ninety per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Consider the chicken, for example. Ten thousand years ago it was a rare bird confined to small niches of South Asia. Today billions of chickens live on almost every continent and island, bar Antarctica. The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering. The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities. The fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue. It concerns the majority of Earth's large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but who live and die as cogs in an industrial production line. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Random House, 2016. 978-1-910-70187-4 As human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm. The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support these useless masses even without any effort from their side. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D-virtual-reality worlds, that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What's so sacred about useless bums who pass their time devouring artificial experiences in Los Angeles La-La Land? In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction. In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens. Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals. In the past there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness and start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. Of course, by 2033 many new professions are likely to appear, for example, virtual-world designers. But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than current run-of-the-mill jobs, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if they do so, the pace of progress is such that within another decade they might have to reinvent themselves yet again. After all, algorithms might well outperform humans in designing virtual worlds too. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. ...Suppose you have two free hours a week, and are uncertain whether to use them playing chess or tennis. A good friend might ask: 'What does your heart tell you?' 'Well,' you answer, 'as far as my heart is concerned, it’s obvious tennis is better. It’s also better for my cholesterol level and blood pressure. But my fMRI scans indicate I should strengthen my left pre-frontal cortex. In my family dementia is quite common, and my uncle had it at a very early age. The latest studies indicate that a weekly game of chess can help delay its onset.' Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia. ...Meanwhile in the USA paranoid Republicans have accused Barack Obama of being a ruthless despot hatching conspiracies to destroy the foundations of American society – yet in eight years of his presidency he barely managed to pass a minor health-care reform. From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system through four basic methods: 1: Increasing the number of processors. 2: Increasing the variety of processors. 3: Increasing the number of connections between processors. 4: Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) thumb|Monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief. Spiegel & Grau, 2018. 978-0525512172, Jonathan Cape, 2018. 978-1787330672 Without criticising the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or go beyond it. But please note that this book could have been written only when people are still relatively free to think what they like and to express themselves as they wish. If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression. In the beginning, the liberal story cared mainly about the liberties and privileges of middle-class European men, and seemed blind to the plight of working-class people, women, minorities and non-Westerners. When in 1918 victorious Britain and France talked excitedly about liberty, they were not thinking about the subjects of their worldwide empires. But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts. The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures. As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel – it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’. But in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way. The race to obtain the data is already on, headed by data-giants such as Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of ‘attention merchants’. They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers. Yet the data-giants probably aim far higher than any previous attention merchant. Their true business isn’t to sell advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers – we are their product. What will happen once we can ask Google, ‘Hi Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for me?’ If Google can give us a good answer to that, and if we learn by experience to trust Google’s wisdom instead of our own easily manipulated feelings, what could possibly be the use of car advertisements? The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas. In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel? I cannot name the 8 million people who share my Israeli citizenship, I have never met most of them, and I am very unlikely ever to meet them in the future. My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history. If Greeks and Germans cannot agree on a common destiny, and if 500 million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chances do humans have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that beset our global civilisation? Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of chronic air pollution? In the 1930s Japanese generals, admirals, economists and journalists concurred that without control of Korea, Manchuria and the Chinese coast, Japan was doomed to economic stagnation. They were all wrong. In fact, the famed Japanese economic miracle began only after Japan lost all its mainland conquests. When I think of the mystery of existence, I prefer to use other words, so as to avoid confusion. And unlike the God of the Islamic State and the Crusades – who cares a lot about names and above all about His most holy name – the mystery of existence doesn’t care an iota what names we apes give it. Not visiting any temples and not believing in any god is also a viable option. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need. The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Seculars strive not to confuse truth with belief. thumb|Any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion. I have participated in numerous private and public debates about gay marriage, and all too often some wise guy asks ‘If marriage between two men is OK, why not allow marriage between a man and a goat?’ From a secular perspective the answer is obvious. Healthy relationships require emotional, intellectual and even spiritual depth. A marriage lacking such depth will make you frustrated, lonely and psychologically stunted. Whereas two men can certainly satisfy the emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs of one another, a relationship with a goat cannot. Hence if you see marriage as an institution aimed at promoting human well-being – as secular people do – you would not dream of even raising such a bizarre question. Only people who see marriage as some kind of miraculous ritual might do so. One would have thought that conservatives would care far more about the conservation of the old ecological order, and about protecting their ancestral lands, forests and rivers. In contrast, progressives could be expected to be far more open to radical changes to the countryside, especially if the aim is to speed up progress and increase the human standard of living. However, once the party line has been set on these issues by various historical quirks, it has become second nature for conservatives to dismiss concerns about polluted rivers and disappearing birds, while left-wing progressives tend to fear any disruption to the old ecological order. Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they stay in the centre of power, they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. And the problem will only get worse. In the coming decades, the world will become even more complex than it is today. Individual humans – whether pawns or kings – will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic currents, and the political dynamics that shape the world. As Socrates observed more than 2,000 years ago, the best we can do under such conditions is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance. Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic – rather, it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports – and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage. In the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction. Very few people read the latest articles in the fields of machine learning or genetic engineering. Instead, movies such as The Matrix and Her and TV series such as Westworld and Black Mirror shape how people understand the most important technological, social and economic developments of our time. In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world. Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.3 More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. So at twenty-five you introduce yourself on a dating site as ‘a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a gender-non-specific person undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before’. For years I lived under the impression that I was the master of my life, and the CEO of my own personal brand. But a few hours of meditation were enough to show me that I hardly had any control of myself. I was not the CEO – I was barely the gatekeeper. I was asked to stand at the gateway of my body – the nostrils – and just observe whatever comes in or goes out. Yet after a few moments I lost my focus and abandoned my post. The typical scientist doesn’t actually practise meditation herself. Rather, she invites experienced meditators to her laboratory, covers their heads with electrodes, asks them to meditate, and observes the resulting brain activities. That can teach us many interesting things about the brain, but if the aim is to understand the mind, we are missing some of the most important insights. If we are willing to make such efforts in order to understand foreign cultures, unknown species and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us. Can you name a great work of art inspired by the Old Testament? Oh, that's easy: Michelangelo's David, Verdi's Nabucco, Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. Do you know of any famous work inspired by the New Testament? Piece of cake: Leonardo's Last Supper, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Monty Python's Life of Brian. Now for the real test: can you list a few masterpieces inspired by the Talmud?Though Jewish communities that studied the Talmud spread over large parts of the world, they did not play an important role in the building of the Chinese empires, in the European voyages of discovery, in the establishment of the democratic system, or in the Industrial Revolution. The coin, the university, parliament, the bank, the compass, the printing press, and the steam engine were all invented by Gentiles. The TED Interview with Chris Anderson (2022) A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories—the liberal, the fascist, the communist—is that the big heroes of the story were the common people. Not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim. But when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future. Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of, you know, these big ideas and big words about "machine learning" and "genetic engineering" and "blockchain" and "globalization", and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future. And I think that—again, this is a hypothesis—if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people in many places around the world, part of what might be going on there is people realize—and they're correct in thinking that—that, "The future doesn't need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and global connectivity and whatnot, and they don't need me. So maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way, like universal basic income." But it's much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited. "Yuval Noah Harari Reveals the Real Dangers Ahead" (13:59). The TED Audio Collective, 2022. Yuval Noah Harari: If you go back to the middle of the 20th century—and it doesn't matter if you're in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you're in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin—and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers. You need them. You don't have any kind of future without them. And now, fast forward to the early 21st century, when we just don't need the vast majority of the population. Chris Anderson: Because? Yuval Noah Harari: Because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like, again, artificial intelligence, bioengineering. Most people don't contribute anything to that, except perhaps their data. And whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant, and will make it possible to replace the people. "Yuval Noah Harari Reveals the Real Dangers Ahead" (16:32). The TED Audio Collective, 2022. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024) Harari Yuval Noah Nexus: a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI Random House New York 2024 978-0-593-73681-4 Humans are organic beings who live by cyclical biological time. ... Even the money market respects these biological cycles. The New York Stock Exchange is open Monday to Friday, from 9:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon, and is closed on holidays like Independence Day and New Year’s Day. If a war erupts at 4:01 p.m. on a Friday, the market won’t react to it until Monday morning.In contrast, a network of computers can always be on. Computers are consequently pushing humans toward a new kind of existence in which we are always connected and always monitored. In some contexts, like health care, this could be a boon. In other contexts, like for citizens of totalitarian states, this could be a disaster. Even if the network is potentially benign, the very fact that it is always on might be damaging to organic entities like humans, because it will take away our opportunities to disconnect and relax. If an organism never has a chance to rest, it eventually collapses and dies. But how will we get a relentless network to slow down and allow us some breaks? Imagine a situation—in twenty years, say—when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel, and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony? What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control?Such a situation can lead to a new kind of data colonialism in which control of data is used to dominate faraway colonies. Mastery of AI and data could also give the new empires control of people’s attention. As we have already discussed, in the 2010s American social media giants like Facebook and YouTube upended the politics of distant countries like Myanmar and Brazil in pursuit of profit. Future digital empires may do something similar for political interests. During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was in many places literally made of metal: barbed wire separated one country from another. Now the world is increasingly divided by the Silicon Curtain. The Silicon Curtain is made of code, and it passes through every smartphone, computer, and server in the world. The code on your smartphone determines on which side of the Silicon Curtain you live, which algorithms run your life, who controls your attention, and where your data flows.It is becoming difficult to access information across the Silicon Curtain, say between China and the United States, or between Russia and the EU. Moreover, the two sides are increasingly run on different digital networks, using different computer codes. Each sphere obeys different regulations and serves different purposes. The Collapse of Truth (Dec 11, 2025) "Yuval Noah Harari: Why advanced societies fall for mass delusion" A Youtube video collaboration from Yuval Noah Harari & Big Think channels. Also see Big Think full interview. [I]f humans are so smart, why are we so stupid? The problem is in our information. ...Why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years..? Why is it that... societies ...have been as susceptible as Stone Age tribes to mass delusion.., psychosis, and the rise of destructive ideologies like Stalinism and Nazism? [A] dollar bill... has no objective value. ...[T]hey ...have value because the greatest storytellers.., the finance ministers, ...bankers, ...investors ...tell us a story ...As long as millions ...believe, they are willing to work ... [F]or the first time in history... there is another agent... that can create stories, economic theories, new... currencies, music, poems, images, videos, and this... is AI... an alien intelligence. [I]n the United States there is a legal path open for AIs to become legal persons, because.., unlike other countries.., corporations are... legal persons that... have rights like freedom of speech. ...[Y]ou incorporate an AI. ....[I]t can open a bank account.., go online and offer its services.., and earn money, and... invest it, and... earns billions... We could be in a situation when the richest person... is not a human being. [T]he richest person in the US is giving billions... to candidates in exchange for... broadening the rights of AIs. ...This is no longer a science fiction scenario. [T]he... solution.., good institutions... characterized by... strong self-correcting mechanisms... that allow... an entity, a human.., an animal or an institution, to identify and correct its own mistakes. [T]he heart of democratic systems is this self-correcting. ...Elections are a self-correcting mechanism. In dictatorships there is no... self-correcting mechanism. Traditional religions... were characterized by claiming to be infallible, that their holy book, their sacred tradition never makes any mistake.., therefore there is no mechanism... to identify and correct mistakes...factual, also moral mistakes. The tenth commandment says that you should not covet your neighbor's field.., ox, or... slaves. According to the 10th commandment, God has no problem with people owning slaves, just... with coveting the slaves of somebody else. [T]here is no mechanism to correct the text of the Bible. The U.S. constitution originally... enabled slavery, but... had an amendment.., a self-correcting mechanism... to forbid slavery. The whole of science... is a self-correcting mechanism. ...[S]cientific journals publish ...corrections to previous publications.., to past mistakes or past lacuna. Every large scale human system is based on... mythology and bureaucracy. ...Every country, to convince its ...citizens why it should exist, tells ...national or religious mythology .., gives the motivation.., inspiration.., reason... You... need to build roads.., hospitals.., armies and sewage systems... to avoid epidemics ...so you need to collect taxes. ...[M]ythology encourages ...or explains ...why ...So ...citizens will enjoy good healthcare ...and ...sewage system that protects ...from cholera .., dysentery... [etc.] [T]here is nothing wrong about it. Nationalism and patriotism have been one of the... best inventions ...All other social animals ...care only about a small [intimate] circle ...This was ...true of our ancestors ...The miracle of nationalism and patriotism ...makes us care about millions of strangers ... Nationalism is not about hating foreigners and wanting to kill the others. It's about loving our compatriots... and... paying taxes honestly... [I]nformation isn't truth. Most information is not truth. [I]f we... flood the world with information and expect the truth to float up, it will not. It will sink. Unless we... construct institutions that invest in truth, we'll be flooded by fiction.., illusion.., delusion and junk information. If you want millions... cooperating.., create some... mythology or ideology and convince... people... [B]ombard then with... stories and images.., and this is how you gain power. ...[I]n this balance, how much truth ...and how much fiction and delusions do you need ...to construct the Soviet Union? ...a little truth and a lot of fiction. ...[T]his is true of most of the large scale political systems... throughout... history. [T]otalitarianism and democracy... are different information networks. Democracy is a conversation. ...Imagine a large group of people... and... a group of robots... start talking... loudly.., emotionally and persuasively, and you can't tell who is a human... That is... what we are now living through. [T]he democratic conversation is breaking down all over the world because the algorithms are hijacking it. ...We are losing the ability to hold a reasoned conversation... [W]e need to ban bots [fake humans] from the conversation. AIs should be welcome... only if they identify as AIs. [M]y... recommendation is to go on an information diet... Information is the food of the mind. ...[I]t is not good for the body to eat too much food or... junk food. ...More information isn't always good for you. ...[T]ake time for information fasts. ...[W]atch the quality of the information we feed our mind. "Next Phase of Intelligence" (Jan 21, 2026) "| World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026" A Creative Commons Youtube video from the World Economic Forum channel. [I]t's completely different from the human mind. The whole question of "when will AI reach the same level... as human intelligence?" This is ridiculous. It's like asking, "When will airplanes finally be like birds?" They will never, ever be like birds.., and they can do many... things that birds can't. ...AIs and humans ...are not on the same trajectory behind us. They are on a completely different trajectory, for better or for worse. [T]he fact that AIs... cannot cooperate so far... is wonderful news. I hope it's true. I hope it will remain like that, otherwise we are in very... deep trouble. [T]he lesson from the history about intelligence: You don't need a lot of intelligence to change the world and potentially to cause havoc. You can change the world with relatively little intelligence. ...I'm not referring to anybody in particular. The other thing we've learned about intelligence is that the most intelligent entities on the planet can also be the most deluded. Human beings are by far, so far, the most intelligent beings on the planet and the most deluded. We believe ridiculous things that no chimpanzee or dog or pig would ever dream of believing.., that if you... kill other people.., after you die, you go to heaven... because of the wonderful thing you did: you killed... these other members of your species. When I say that you can change the world with relatively little intelligence: Humans have already done much of the hard work for the AIs. ...[I]f you drop an AI in the middle of the African savanna and tell it, "Take over the world!" It can't. ...But, if first you have these apes who build all these bureaucratic systems, like the financial system, and then... drop the AI into the existing financial system.., that's... much easier. ...You don't need motor skills. You don't need even to understand the world. ...The financial system is the ideal playground for AI. It's... purely informational. [T]o train AIs to make a million dollars, create a million AIs. Give them some seed money. ...[I]f ...a few AIs succeeded.., replicate them. What happens to the world if more and more of the financial system is shaped by AIs..? Even though they can't walk down the street, they know how to invest money better than humans. It's a... very limited intelligence... Social media is run to some extent by very primitive AIs, these algorithms that control our news feed... [etc.] Look what they did in 10 years. We created a human system, media, and then we introduced the AIs into our system... [I]t's an informational system, and they took it over, and... to a large extent, wrecked the world. They are not the only reason... for the mess now in the world, but if you think about what extremely primitive AIs did within the human created system... of media, then... We are at a point when we are conducting this huge historical experiment, and we just don't know... how do we build a self-correcting mechanism into it? How do we make sure that if we get the answer wrong, we'll have a second chance? The model... is the last big technological revolution, which is the Industrial Revolution. When the Industrial Revolution begins in the early 19th century, nobody has an idea how to build a benign, good industrial society. This immense new power: steam engines, railroads, steam ships. How do you use them for good? ...[D]ifferent people have different ideas, and they experiment... European imperialism was one experiment. Some people say, "The only way to build an industrial society is to build an empire. You cannot build an industrial society on the level of one country because you must control the raw material and the markets. You must have an empire!" Then you have people who say, "It must be a totalitarian society. Only a totalitarian system like Bolshevism or... Nazism. The immense powers of industry can only be controlled by a totalitarian society." [L]ooking back from the early 21st century... we can say, "Oh, we know what the answer was. We think we know." It took 200 years of terrible wars, and hundreds of millions... of casualties, and injuries that are not even healed today, to find out how to build a benign industrial society. And this was just steam engines! Now we are dealing with potentially superintelligent agents. Nobody has any experience with building a hybrid human AI society. We should be a lot more humble... We think we know how to build it! No we don't! [H]ow do we build a self-correcting mechanism so if we make the wrong bet, this is not the end? [W]e are thinking on different time scales. ...A lot of the conversations here in Davos.., when they say "long term" they mean like 2 years. When I say long term I mean like 200 years. It's like, it's the Industrial Revolution. The first commercial railway has been opened between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830. This is now... 1835, and we are having this discussion. People are saying, "The Industrial Revolution is moving so slowly. They told us that railways and steam engines will change the world. So what? So a few people are going between Manchester and Liverpool. It didn't change anything. This is all science fiction. Because of the time scale, we have no idea. Even if... all progress in AI stops today, the stone has been thrown into the pool, but it just hit the water. We have no idea what are the waves, even by the AIs that already have been deployed, say a year or two ago. Social consequences are a completely different thing. You cannot run history in a laboratory and see... the social consequences of invent[ion]. ...You create the first steam engine, you can test for accidents. You cannot test what will be the geopolitical... or cultural implications of a steam engine in a laboratory. It's the same with AI. So it's... far too soon to know. I'm mainly concerned about the lack of concern that... we are creating, we are deploying.., maybe the most powerful technology in human history, and a lot of very smart and powerful people are worried about.., "What will the investors say in the next quarterly report?" They think in terms of a few months, or a year or two. External links Yuval Noah Harari Official Site Category:1976 births Category:Living people Category:Academics from Israel Category:Historians from Israel Category:Philosophers from Israel Category:Jews from Israel Category:Atheists Category:LGBT people Category:Vegetarians Category:Transhumanists