Tag Archives: Yuval Noah Harari

“So what next?”

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“The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clearsighted. Do you feel like running down the street crying “The apocalypse is upon us”? Try tellng yourself, “No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.”

— 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari)

Yuval Noah Harari: COVID-19’s Impact on Humankind

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I’ve read all three of Yuval Noah Harari’s books and found them… interesting, to say the least. I’ve been eager to hear his take on COVID-19 and was a little surprised to get it from an interview by James Corden, who I think of as a late-late-night comedian. But his questions were brief and to the point and he allowed his guest to answer the questions without interrupting.

Hacking the genome

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“He Jiankui, a genome-editing researcher from the Southern University of Science and Technology of China in Shenzhen, says that he implanted into a woman an embryo that had been edited to disable the genetic pathway that allows a cell to be infected with HIV.” (Nature)

Claim hasn’t been verified but this is exactly what Yuval Noah Harari talks about in Homo Deus (and 21Lessons). The rest of the world might freak out over the ethics of this kind of research but when on country has this tech, they won’t be able to stop it. Do you think some billionaire will care about ethics if she can protect her offspring from some dreaded disease. And how long before someone hacks the genome to make a human smarter/stronger/faster/whatever?

 

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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I’m not up to reviewing Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book (21 Lessons for the 21st Century) but I liked this one by The Guardian. I really liked his two previous books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, and you can read some of my favorite excerpts in previous posts. I’m doing the same below but first I’ll say this book made me questions some of my long held beliefs. Nationalism, Religion and Immigration, just to name a few. This is a good example of what I mean when I suggest you ditch Facebook and TV news and read a book.

“The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body.”

“If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then again, if somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false.”

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion.” 

“As a species, humans prefer power to truth.”

“Trust in the dollar and in the wisdom of the Federal Reserve is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords, and North Korean tyrants.”

“A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed.”

“In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine, and several other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, car accidents, or suicide.”

““Once AI makes better decisions than we do about careers and perhaps even relationships, our concept of humanity and of life will have to change.“”

““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.””

“In the twenty-first century data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.”

“So in the twenty-first century religions don’t bring rain, they don’t cure illnesses, they don’t build bombs—but they do get to determine who are “us” and who are “them,” whom we should cure and whom we should bomb.”

“We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”

“If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.”

Sam Harris “conversation” with Yuval Noah Harari