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Yuval Noah Harari

Friday 19th of April 2024

Agricultural Revolution The first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Animals It's relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens  can speak about things that don't really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Animals The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level. It's on the collective level. Humans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. Yuval Noah Harari © 2016 Kwiple.com
Animals We want to believe, I want to believe, that there is something special about me, about my body, about my brain that makes me so superior to a dog, or a pig, or a chimpanzee. But the truth is, on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee, and if you take me and a chimpanzee and put us together on some lonely island and we had to struggle for survival to see who survives better, I would definitely place my bets on the chimpanzee, not on myself. This is not something wrong with me personally. Yuval Noah Harari © 2016 Kwiple.com
Artificial intelligence Computer scientists are developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can learn, analyse massive amounts of data and recognize patterns with superhuman efficiency. At the same time, biologists and social scientists are deciphering human emotions, desires and intuitions. The merger of infotech and biotech is giving rise to algorithms that can successfully analyse and communicate with us, and that may soon outperform human doctors, drivers, soldiers and bankers at such tasks. These algorithms could eventually push hundreds of millions out of the job market. Yuval Noah Harari, Nature, Oct. 19, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Artificial intelligence We are seeing a tremendous development in computer intelligence, but zero development in computer consciousness. Just as aeroplanes fly faster than birds without ever developing feathers, so computers could come to solve problems and even to analyze human feelings much better than humans, without ever developing feelings. Yuval Noah Harari, Nature, October 19, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century – the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place – may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century. Yuval Harari, The Atlantic, October 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Conspiracy theories Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate – it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That's what real politics is all about. Yuval Noah Harari, New York Times, November 20, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Data mining If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species. … Obviously, most of this is just speculation. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Death Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. … The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will live forever in its collective memory. Yet this premise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not know what to make of it. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Economic growth The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Efficiency You want to prevent the rise of digital dictatorship? Keep things at least a bit inefficient. Yuval Harari, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Employment The crucial problem isn't creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable. … So what will the useless class do all day? Yuval Harari, The Guardian, May 8, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Ethics The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’ Uyval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Evolution  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure. The Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Extinction The historical record makes Homo sapiens  look like an ecological serial killer. … Homo sapiens  drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools. … We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Healthcare We will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone years before we have a reliable nurse robot. Yuval Noah Harari, Nature, October 19, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Intelligent design For billions of years, intelligent design was not even an option, because there was no intelligence which could design things. … The first crack in the old regime appeared about 10,000 years ago, during the Agricultural Revolution. Sapiens who dreamed of fat, slow-moving chickens discovered that if they mated the fattest hen with the slowest cock, some of their offspring would be both fat and slow. If you mated those offspring with each other, you could produce a line of fat, slow birds. It was a race of chickens un- unknown to nature, produced by the intelli- gent design not of a god, but of a human. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2017 Kwiple.com
Money Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Money Money, in fact, is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans because it is the only story everybody believes. Yuval Noah Harari © 2016 Kwiple.com
Myths in politics A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Power  With great power comes great publicity. Indeed, in many cases great publicity is a prerequisite for gaining great power. Yuval Noah Harari, New York Times, November 20, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Religion When a thousand people believe some made-up story for a month – that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years – that's a religion. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Science For modern Europeans, building an empire was a scientific project, while setting up a scientific discipline was an imperial project. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Science Science cannot replace politics. When we come to decide on policy, we have to take into account many interests and values, and since there is no scientific way to determine which interests and values are more important, there is no scientific way to decide what we should do. Yuval Harari, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Sex A good rule of thumb is: ‘Biology enables. Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It's culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Snapshot A parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sound of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn't vocal. Albert Einstein portrayed by Yuval Noah Harari © 2016 Kwiple.com
Surveillance  … surveillance must always go both ways. If surveillance goes only from top to bottom, this is the high road to dictatorship. So whenever you increase surveillance of individuals, you should simultaneously increase surveillance of the government and big corporations too. … If it is not too complicated to start monitoring what you do — it is not too complicated to start monitoring what the government does. Yuval Harari, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Technology In actuality, the most crucial choices about the future of ordinary voters and their children are probably made not by Brussels bureaucrats or Washington lobbyists but by engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists who are hardly aware of the implications of their decisions, and who certainly don't represent anyone. But voters can't see them or address them, so they lash out where they can. Yuval Noah Harari © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology Information technology is continuing to leap forward; biotechnology is beginning to provide a window into our inner lives – emotions, thoughts, and choices. Together, infotech and biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete. Yuval Harari, The Atlantic, October 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Thinking Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question. Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century  © 2018 Kwiple.com
War It is not coincidental that the few full-scale international wars that still take place in the world, such as the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, occur in places where wealth is old-fashioned material wealth. The Kuwaiti sheikhs could flee abroad, but the oil fields stayed put and were occupied. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens © 2016 Kwiple.com
Work The end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles. Yuval Harari, The Guardian, May 8, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
 
Working class Twentieth-century socialism assumed that the working class was crucial to the economy, and socialist thinkers tried to teach the proletariat how to translate its immense economic power into political clout. In the twenty-first century, if the masses lose their economic value they might have to struggle against irrelevance rather than exploitation. Yuval Noah Harari, Nature, October 19, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com