CANR
WORK TITLE: Nexus
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.ynharari.com/
CITY: Jerusalem
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COUNTRY: Israel
NATIONALITY: Iranian
LAST VOLUME: CA 378
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 24, 1976, in Haifa, Israel; son of Shlomo and Pnina Harari; married Itzik Yahav.
EDUCATION:Hebrew University, B.A.; Oxford University, Ph.D., 2002.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, and academic. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, professor of history. Cofounder of Sapienship.
MEMBER:Young Israeli Academy of Sciences.
AWARDS:Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality, Hebrew University, 2009, 2012; Moncado Award, Society for Military History, 2011; Wenjin Book Award, 2015, for Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; German Economic Book Award, Handelblatt, 2017, for Homo Deus; Academic Book of the Year, UK Academic Book Trade Awards, 2019, for Sapiens: A Graphic History; CITIC Author of the Year prize, 2020, for Sapiens: A Graphic History; honorary award, US Association of Foreign Press Correspondents, 2021.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including In Laudem Hierosolymitani, Ashgate, 2007. Contributor to periodicals, including Mediterranean Historical Review, War in History, Journal of Military History, Crusades, Journal of World History, and Review of General Psychology.
SIDELIGHTS
Yuval Harari is an academic, historian, and writer who became a professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. Born in Haifa, Israel, he earned his Ph.D. from Oxford University. Harari has written chapters of books and articles in scholarly publications, including Mediterranean Historical Review, War in History, Journal of Military History, Crusades, Journal of World History, and Review of General Psychology. In both 2009 and 2012, the Hebrew University awarded him the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality. He has also received the Moncado Award from the Society for Military History. He became a member of the Young Israeli Academy of Sciences in 2012. His books have received numerous awards across his career.
Renaissance Military Memoirs
In 2004, Harari released his first book, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and Identity, 1450-1600. The volume analyzes memoirs from members of the militaries of France, England, Spain, Portugal, and Germany. He compares the memoirs by the nationality of the author and also discusses them in light of more contemporary military memoirs.
Writing in Renaissance Quarterly, Noel Fallows remarked: “Harari’s approach is ultimately successful, with the result that the reader gains a unique appreciation of these memoirs. I would go so far as to say that his approach to military memoirs works so well that this book provides us with a theoretical framework that at the very least must be taken into account by all future studies of the genre.” Fallows later suggested: “This book is written with clarity and wit.”
Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100- 1550 and The Ultimate Experience
In Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550, Harari profiles small, covert operations during the medieval period. The special operations units carried out such activities as kidnappings, assassinations, small raids, and rescues. Mark K. Vaughn offered a favorable review of Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550 in the Naval War College Review. Vaughn remarked: “The author’s writing style is captivating, and the book meets its stated aim of providing a popular history of medieval special operations. Harari, whether intentionally or not, demonstrates the importance of being able to fight hybrid wars.”
The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000 suggests that war became much more of an immersive experience around the year 1450. The invention of gunpowder made for larger armies and more formal organization structures. Additionally, romanticism and an interest in sensibilities made members of militaries more aware of their experiences. “This is a provocative book with a thesis of interest to anyone interested in individual perceptions of war,” commented P.L. de Rosa in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. De Rosa categorized the volume as “highly recommended.”
Sapiens
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is the English translation of a 2011 Hebrew book by Harari. He chronicles the genus Homo over the course of millions of years, highlighting the use of fire, the emergence of language, the development of agriculture, religion, and the evolution of commerce. The account focuses on agricultural, industrial, scientific, and cognitive achievements of humans over the years.
Marlene Zuk and Michael L. Wilson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, stated: “Reading Sapiens is like looking at one of those pictures that, when viewed from a distance, is clearly a portrait of, say, Lincoln, but when viewed closer turns out to be a mosaic of thousands of other tiny images. But look closely at the tiny images and many of them are just a bit off.” Zuk and Wilson concluded: “Harari cherry-picks examples, and he is distressingly miserly about giving researchers credit for their ideas. Still, in espousing his particular Theory of Everything, his style is breezy and engaging. Reading it is like joining a wide-ranging and provocative dinner table conversation. You may not agree with it all, but it makes for a memorable meal.” Ilene Cooper, a contributor to Booklist, asserted: “Readers of every stripe should put this at the top of their reading lists. Thinking has never been so enjoyable.”
Homo Deus
(open new)Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow builds on the success of Sapiens by considering the development of human concepts of divinity and social structures. Harari speculates that efforts to prolong life will lead to the augmentation of humans beyond pure biological beings. He also posits that data-driven technological utilitarianism will become the norm.
Writing in BookPage, Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., declared: “Thought-provoking and enlightening, Harari’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of our species.” A Publishers Weekly contributor reasoned that “Harari paints with a very broad brush throughout, but he raises stimulating questions about both the past and the future.” In a review in Library Journal, Wade M. Lee insisted that “this title will be equally thought provoking to biologists and technological futurists” as it would be to those with “a political, historical, or anthropological bent.”
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari considers some of the world’s most pressing issues, ranging from computer hacking as a tool of war to uncontrollable technology. He points out the existential, political, social, and technological aspects of each issue in individual chapters. Among the topics are Big Data and freedom of choice; the decline of liberal democracies; and adjusting to the likely future of workforces.
In a review in the Humanist, Howard Schneider remarked that “the seemingly hopeless prognosis for a hellish new world in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is no reason not to read it…. Harari’s ultimate goal, I believe, is polemical: he wants to encourage discussion and argument, and I don’t doubt that he hopes readers form opinions opposed to his own. Whatever terrors the future holds, it is safe to say that engaging right now with a splendid mind like Harari’s is an eminently civilized endeavor.” In a review in the New York Times Book Review, Bill Gates stated: “As much as I admire Harari and enjoyed ‘21 Lessons,’ I didn’t agree with everything in the book. I was glad to see the chapter on inequality, but I’m skeptical about his prediction that in the 21st century ”data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset” separating rich people from everyone else…. Similarly, I wanted to see more nuance in Harari’s discussion of data and privacy.” Nevertheless, Gates concluded that “Harari is such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking.”
Unstoppable Us
Unstoppable Us is a planned four-volume series aimed at middle grade readers to introduce them to grand concepts of human civilization and progress without oversimplifying the material. In the first volume, Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World, Harari considers how humans were able to thrive on Earth despite competition from other animals. With the second volume, Unstoppable Us: Why the World Isn’t Fair, he shows how social structures were formed, including the invention of laws, monarchical systems, and the move from nomadic to sedentary lifestyles.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “an enticingly depicted intro to human history and archaeology, simply expressed but extensive and engaging.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, John Schwartz admitted that “if Harari were selling ketchup or soda, this would be called ‘brand extension.’ But he’s selling ideas, so let’s call it genius. And not just marketing genius. Harari has succeeded because his ideas are gripping and thought-provoking. In a neat trick, he has simplified the presentation for this younger audience without dumbing it down.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found the second volume to be “an engaging, informative work of history sure to draw in readers even as it serves up harsh truths.”
Nexus
With Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Harari points to the abundance of misinformation, impending ecological collapse of the planet, and the rush to develop AI as a global concern. The book examines the ways that the flow of information has molded humans and the planet since the Stone Age. He also ponders the possibilities of AI destroying human existence.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Dennis Duncan commented that “parts of Nexus are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves. That may just sound like common sense, but it is valuable when said by a global intellectual with Harari’s reach. It is only frustrating that he could not have done so more concisely.” In a review in Spectator, James Ball mentioned that “the expected success of this book perhaps itself serves to reassure against the dangers of AI…. If nothing else, Nexus shows us that AI has some way to go before it can match human ingenuity on that particular front.”
A Kirkus Reviews contributor stated: “Confronting the avalanche of books on the prospects of AI, readers would do well to begin with this one.” A contributor to the Economist concluded that “Harari’s narrative is engaging, and his framing is strikingly original. He is, by his own admission, an outsider when it comes to writing about computing and AI, which grants him a refreshingly different perspective. Tech enthusiasts will find themselves reading about unexpected aspects of history, while history buffs will gain an understanding of the AI debate. Using storytelling to connect groups of people? That sounds familiar. Mr Harari’s book is an embodiment of the very theory it expounds.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2015, Ilene Cooper, review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, p. 16; September 1, 2018, Bryce Christensen, review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, p. 30.
BookPage, March 1, 2017, Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., review of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, p. 26; September 1, 2018, Harvey Freedenberg, review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, p. 23.
Choice, May 1, 2009, P.L. de Rosa, review of The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000, p. 1762.
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 10, 2015, Marlene Zuk and Michael L. Wilson, review of Sapiens.
Economist, September 1, 2018, review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century; September 6, 2024, review of Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.
Humanist, March 1, 2019, Howard Schneider, review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, p. 42.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2016, review of Homo Deus; July 15, 2018, review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century; December 15, 2022, review of Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World; April 15, 2024, review of Unstoppable Us: Why the World Isn’t Fair; August 15, 2024, review of Nexus.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Wade M. Lee, review of Homo Deus, p. 121.
Naval War College Review, September 22, 2010, Mark K. Vaughn, review of Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550, p. 159.
New Statesman, August 24, 2018, Gavin Jacobson, review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, p. 40.
New Yorker, February 17, 2020, Ian Parker, “The Really Big Picture.”
New York Times Book Review, September 9, 2018, Bill Gates, review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, p. 1L; November 13, 2022, John Schwartz, “Roots and Revolutions,” p. 20; October 27, 2024, Dennis Duncan, review of Nexus, p. 21.
Publishers Weekly, January 9, 2017, review of Homo Deus, p. 57.
Renaissance Quarterly, June 22, 2005, Noel Fallows, review of Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and Identity, 1450-1600, p. 666.
Spectator, September 28, 2024, James Ball, review of Nexus, p. 39.
ONLINE
Deborah Harris Agency website, http://www.thedeborahharrisagency.com/ (August 2, 2015), synopsis of Sapiens.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, History Department website, https://en.history.huji.ac.il/ (December 30, 2024), author profile.
Yuval Harari website, https://www.ynharari.com (December 30, 2024).
Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us, and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. His books have sold over 45 Million copies in 65 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today.
Frequently Asked Questions - answered by Yuval Noah Harari
On this page, Yuval Noah Harari answers some of the questions he gets asked frequently – explaining his position on topics like fiction vs. reality, technological determinism, post-humanism, religion, and more.
Do you think that everything is just fictional stories? Is nothing real?
I don’t think everything is a fictional story. Yes, money is a fictional story, corporations are fictions, and so are nations, gods and the laws of football. All of these things were invented by humans, and exist only in our own shared imagination. However, there is still a reality, too. The most real thing in the world is suffering. If we hear a story, and we want to know whether the hero of the story is a real entity or a fiction, we need to ask one very simple question: “Can this hero suffer?”.
When people burn down the temple of Zeus, Zeus doesn’t suffer. When the dollar loses its value, the dollar doesn’t suffer. When a bank goes bankrupt, the bank doesn’t suffer. When a country suffers a defeat in war, the country doesn’t really suffer. It’s just a metaphor. Zeus, the dollar, banks and countries don’t have a nervous system, a brain, or a mind. They cannot feel pain or sadness. They cannot suffer.
In contrast, when a soldier is wounded in battle, he really does suffer. When a famished child has nothing to eat, she suffers. When a cow is separated from her newborn calf, she suffers. This is reality. Of course, suffering might well be caused by our belief in fictions. Take for example the numerous wars fought for the city of Jerusalem. I lived much of my life in Jerusalem, so I know it well. Physically, it is an ordinary place. There are stones, trees, buildings, people, dogs, cats. But then people imagine that it is a very special place, full of gods and angels and holy stones. They then start fighting over this place – not over the real stones and trees, but over the fictional stories in their minds. The cause of the war is fictional, but the resulting suffering is 100 per cent real. The blood is real, the pain is real, the grief is real. This is exactly why we should strive to distinguish fiction from reality.
I don’t want to imply that all fiction is bad. It isn’t. Fiction is vital for our survival. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states, corporations and laws, no complex human society can function. For example, in order to play football you must first get 22 people to believe in the same rules, despite the fact that these rules exist solely in our imagination. Playing football is great fun, but if some hooligan starts beating up fans of the opposite team, he is taking the story a bit too seriously. Similarly, to have a functioning country we must get millions of people to believe in the nation, its flag, its currency etc., despite the fact that all of these exist only in our imagination. Nations are a wonderful invention. They enable people to care about millions of strangers, and provide for their health, safety and education. But if we forget that nations are fictions that we created to help people, we might begin killing millions of people for an imaginary thing like “the honor of the nation”.
So in brief, suffering is the real yardstick that people should use to evaluate whether the stories we invent are beneficial or harmful. If belief in a story reduces suffering, that’s a good story. If belief in a story causes suffering, it is harmful. Better change that story.
Do you believe in technological determinism?
Technology is never deterministic. In the twentieth century, some societies used the powers of electricity, trains and radio to create totalitarian dictatorships, while other societies used exactly the same powers to create liberal democracies. Just think of North Korea and South Korea – they have had access to exactly the same technology, but chose to build very different societies. The new technologies of the twenty-first century can also be used to create either Heaven or Hell – it depends on the choices we make.
The worst-case scenario is that AI will push hundreds of millions of people out of the job market and into a new “useless class”. People will lose their economic worth and their political power. At the same time, bioengineering will make it possible to upgrade a small elite into super-humans. Resistance to this superhuman elite will be almost impossible due to a total surveillance regime that constantly monitors not just what every individual does and says, but even what every individual feels and thinks.
A related danger is that governments and corporations might acquire the ability to hack human beings. To hack human beings means to understand humans better than we understand ourselves. In order to do that, a government or corporation needs a lot of biological knowledge, a lot of data, and a lot of computing power. Until today, nobody could do it. Even in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Union the government could not know what every person was doing, thinking and feeling. But soon, some governments and corporations might have enough biological knowledge, enough data and enough computing power to monitor all the people all the time, and know what each of us is doing, thinking and feeling. Once a government or a corporation understands us better than we understand ourselves, it can predict our feelings and decisions, manipulate our feelings and decisions, and create the worst totalitarian regimes in history.
So that’s the worst-case scenario. But it isn’t a prophecy. It is just a possibility. And there are alternatives. The best-case scenario is that the new technologies will liberate all humans from the burden of disease and hard labor, and enable everyone to explore and develop their true potential. Bioengineering will focus on curing everyone and not on upgrading a small elite. Artificial intelligence will indeed eliminate many jobs, but the resulting profits will be used to provide everyone with better services and better education, and to allow everyone the opportunity to pursue their dreams, whether in the field of art, sports, spirituality or community-building. State-of-the-art surveillance will be used to spy not on the citizens, but on the government, to make sure there is no corruption.
Which of these scenarios will come true? That depends on us.
Are you a post-humanist? Do you encourage people to start using bioengineering and AI to create super-humans?
I am definitely not a post-humanist, and I think using bioengineering and AI to change humans is an extremely dangerous idea. Humans have always suffered from a big gap between our power and our wisdom. The gap between our power to manipulate systems, and the wisdom needed to understand these systems deeply. Unfortunately, it is much easier to manipulate than to understand. It is easier to build a dam over a river than understand the impact it will have on the ecosystem. Therefore we humans often start manipulating things long before we understand the consequences of our actions.
In the past, we humans have learned to manipulate the world outside us. We learned how to control the rivers, the animals, the forests. But because we didn’t understand the complexity of the ecological system, we misused our power. We unbalanced the ecological system, and we now face ecological collapse.
In the twenty-first century we might learn to manipulate not just the world outside us, but also the world inside us. Genetics and AI might enable us to redesign our bodies and minds, and to manipulate our emotions, thoughts, and sensations. But because we don’t understand the complexity of our internal mental system, we might misuse that power. We might unbalance our bodies and minds, and we might face an internal human breakdown paralleling the external ecological crisis. In particular, governments, corporations and armies are likely to use new technologies to enhance skills that they need, like intelligence and discipline, while having far less interest in developing other skills, like compassion, artistic sensitivity or spirituality. The result might be very intelligent and disciplined humans who lack compassion, lack artistic sensitivity and lack spiritual depth. We could thereby lose a large part of our human potential without even realizing that we had it.
Indeed, we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. And yet we hardly invest much in exploring the human mind, and instead focus on increasing the speed of our Internet connections and the efficiency of our Big Data algorithms. I hope that for every dollar and every minute we spend on developing artificial intelligence, we spend another dollar and minute on exploring and developing our own mind.
You often use very provocative terms like “the useless class” or “hacking humans”. Why did you coin these terms, and are you in favor of creating a useless class or of hacking humans?
I have been warning about the dangers of “hacking humans” and the rise of “the useless class” since around 2014, long before these subjects became popular. I think that while AI has a lot of positive potential, if this technology is misused it will pose an existential danger to humanity. AI might make it possible to hack not just our smartphones, but also our brains. And AI might take our jobs and push many of us into a new “useless class”. I coined deliberately-provocative phrases like “hacking humans” and “the useless class” to draw people’s attention to these dangers.
I am glad to see that many people are now worried about these dangers. I am less glad to see that instead of humans uniting against our common threats, we are fighting and blaming each-other. Some people are obviously doing dangerous stuff, but I don’t think we should see any particular group of people as our mortal enemies and as the source of all our problems. Rather, the source of the problem is the dangerous potential of new technologies like AI, and we should unite with as many people as possible to solve the problem together. Hate will destroy our species. Cooperation can save us. Do you prefer spending your time on spreading hate, or on working together to solve the problem?
What’s your view on religion and spirituality? Do they have a role to play in the 21st century?
I make a distinction between religion and spirituality. Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Religion offers us a well-defined contract: ‘God exists. He told us to behave in certain ways. If we obey God, we’ll be admitted to heaven. If we disobey Him, we’ll burn in hell.’ We are usually not allowed to question or change this contract – we just need to believe in it and follow the rules.
Spiritual journeys are nothing like that. They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations. The journey begins with some big question, such as “who am I?”, “What is the meaning of life?” or “ What are good and evil?”. Whereas most people just accept the ready-made answers provided by religious establishments, spiritual truth-seekers are not so easily satisfied. Spiritual seekers question everything, and often challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions. In Zen Buddhism it is said that ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ Which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalised Buddhism, you must free yourself from them too.
For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat. Religions typically strive to rein in the spiritual quests of their followers, and many religious systems have been challenged not by laypeople preoccupied with food, sex, and power, but rather by spiritual truth-seekers who expected more than platitudes. For example, the Hindu religious establishment was challenged by Buddha, the Jewish religious establishment was challenged by Jesus, and the Protestant revolt against the Catholic Church was ignited by a devout monk, Martin Luther. Luther wanted answers to the existential questions of life, and refused to settle for the rites, rituals and deals offered by the Catholic Church.
I think that in the 21st century, spirituality is more important than ever before. For most of history, most people had no wish to embark on spiritual journeys, and tended to ignore the big questions of life. But now technologies like AI and bioengineering are forcing all of us to confront very old and very deep spiritual questions like “what is consciousness?”, “what is humanity?”, and “is there free will?”.
You say that humans don’t have free will. Isn’t this a very negative view of humans?
Freedom is not something you have. Freedom is something you must struggle for. People who believe that their decisions reflect their “free will” are the easiest people to manipulate. People certainly have a will and they make decisions all the time. But most of these decisions are not made freely. They are shaped by various biological, cultural and political forces. The belief in “free will” is dangerous, because it cultivates ignorance about ourselves. When we choose something – a product, a career, a spouse, a politician – we tell ourselves “I chose this out of my free will”. If so, there is nothing further to investigate. There is no reason to be curious about what’s going on inside me, and about the forces that shaped my choice.
Since corporations and governments are acquiring powerful new technologies to shape and manipulate our choices, the belief in free will is now more dangerous than ever. On the other hand, I am not advocating giving all power to the algorithms to make decisions for us. I would recommend that you take a middle path: Don’t just believe that you have free will. Explore yourself. Understand what really shapes your desires and decisions. That’s the only way to ensure that you do not become a puppet of either a human dictator or a super-intelligent computer. The more you question the naïve belief in free will – the more real freedom you actually enjoy.
This, of course, is the oldest advice in the book. From ancient times, sages and saints repeatedly advised people to “know thyself”. Yet in the days of Socrates, Jesus and Buddha you didn’t have real competition. If you neglected to know yourself, you were still a black box to the rest of humanity. In contrast, now you have competition. As you read these lines, governments and corporations are striving to hack you. If they get to know you better than you know yourself, they can then sell you anything they want – be it a product or a politician.
Some people might see you as a prophet, or a guru. How do you feel about that?
I am definitely not a prophet or a guru. I don’t predict the future, and I don’t think anybody can predict the future. History is not deterministic, and nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 2050. All I do is use my historical knowledge in order to raise questions about the future and draw a map of possible scenarios, highlighting the most dangerous scenarios in the hope that we can prevent them. Which scenarios will actually be realized depends to a large extent on our own decisions. The whole point of talking about the future is to be able to do something about it. What’s the benefit of making prophecies about things we cannot possibly change?
Of course, there is always the danger that some people might begin to see me as some kind of guru. It is good to appreciate knowledge and to listen to the opinions of scholars, but it is dangerous to idolize anybody – including scholars. Once a person is idolized, that person might actually begin to believe what people say about him or her, and this can inflate ego and make you crazy. As for the fans, once they believe somebody knows all the answers, they renounce their freedom and stop making efforts themselves. They expect the guru to provide them with all the answers and solutions. And even if the guru provides them with a wrong answer and with a bad solution, they will just accept it. So I hope people read my books as books of questions more than as books of answers, and will see me as somebody who is seeking truth alongside them, rather than as an all-knowing seer.
Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002. He is currently a Lecturer at the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. In 2019, following the international success of his books, Yuval Noah Harari co-founded Sapienship with his husband and original agent, Itzik Yahav. Sapienship is a social impact company with projects in the fields of education and storytelling, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today.
Yuval Noah Harari gave keynote speeches on the future of humanity in Davos 2020 and 2018, on the World Economic Forum’s main Congress Hall stage. He regularly discusses global issues with heads of state, and has had public conversations with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Harari has also met with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Argentine President Mauricio Macri, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Shanghai’s Mayor Ying Yong. In 2019, Harari sat down for a filmed discussion on technology and the future of society with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and in 2018 he presented the first ever TED talk delivered by a digital avatar. Harari was featured in a profile piece on CBS’ 60 Minutes programme in 2021.
Harari originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history. His current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?
Published in 2014, Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has become an international hit, with 25 Million copies sold. It is a New York Times top 10 bestseller, which stayed on the paper’s bestseller list for over half the time during its first six years in the US market. In the UK, he book held positions #1-#3 on the Sunday Times’ bestseller list for 96 consecutive weeks. Sapiens was recommended by Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Natalie Portman, Janelle Monáe, Chris Evans and many others. The Guardian has credited Sapiens with revolutionizing the non-fiction market and popularizing ‘brainy books’.
In 2016 Prof. Harari returned with Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, a critically acclaimed book that examines the big future projects facing humanity in the 21st century. Homo Deus warns of the threats introduced by new and unprecedented technological powers, which could allow some Homo sapiens to artificially upgrade their bodies and minds while other members of society are left far behind.
After venturing deep into the past and then the future, Yuval Noah Harari published 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in 2018. Here he stopped to take the pulse of our current global climate, focusing on the biggest questions of the present moment: What is really happening right now? What are today’s greatest challenges and choices? What should we pay attention to?
In 2020 Harari (as creator and co-writer) joined forces with renowned comics artists David Vandermeulen (co-writer) and Daniel Casanave ( illustrator). Together, they created Sapiens: A Graphic History – a radical adaptation of the original Sapiens into a graphic novel series that is bursting with wit, humor and color. These illustrated books cast Yuval Noah Harari in the role of guide, who takes the reader through the entire history of the human species, accompanied by a range of fictional characters and traveling through time, space and popular culture references. The series will be published in four volumes, and the first two books are already available.
Autumn 2022 saw Harari venturing into the world of children’s books for the first time, with the middle-grade series Unstoppable Us. Here, he tells the unbelievable true story of humans – our all-conquering and insatiable species – in a way that is accessible to kids. The series will be published in four immersive volumes, featuring full-color illustrations by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, starting with Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World. This book quickly became a New York Times bestseller, was listed among the paper’s best children’s books of 2022, and was warmly recommended by Jeff Kinney, Kristen Bell, and Kirkus. In early 2024, the series continued with Unstoppable Us, Volume 2: Why the World Isn’t Fair.
In autumn 2024, Yuval Noah Harari returned with a major non-fiction book that explores humanity’s voyage into the Information Age – Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. As an essential background to understanding the threats and the promises of the current AI revolution, Nexus charts the long-term history of information networks, taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today. This book examines the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power – and addresses the urgent choices we now face, as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Nexus became an instant bestseller, and within a week of publication reached position #2 across the New York Times, The Times and Audible’s bestseller lists. It was the #1 New York Times bestselling audiobook for the month of September 2024, and was recommended, among others, by Mustafa Suleyman, Stephen Fry and Kristalina Georgieva.
Prof. Harari’s writings have received several accolades. In 2021 he was presented with a US Association of Foreign Press Correspondents Honorary Award. In 2020, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from VUB (the Free University of Brussels), and received the CITIC Author of the Year prize in China, for Sapiens: A Graphic History. In 2019, 21 Lessons was honored as ‘Knowledge Book of the Year’ by the German magazine Bild der Wissenschaft, Homo Deus was recognized as the ’Wise Book of the Year’ by Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, and Sapiens won the ‘Academic Book of the Year’ prize at the UK’s Academic Book Trade Awards. In 2017 Homo Deus received Handelsblatt’s German Economic Book Award for “the most thoughtful and influential economic book of the year”, and in 2015 Sapiens won China’s Wenjin Book Award.
Yuval Noah Harari lectures around the world on the topics explored in his books, and offers his knowledge and time to various audiences on a voluntary basis. He writes articles for publications such as The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post and The Economist. In 2020 Harari wrote and interviewed extensively on the global COVID-19 crisis – discussing the pandemic’s implications on major news channels, including CNN and the BBC – and in 2022 he commented publicly on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with his article on this topic becoming The Guardian Opinion’s most-read opinion piece of all time. In 2023, Harari wrote and commented at length on the war in Gaza.
Prof.
Yuval
Noah
Harari
Humanities Building, Room 6523
02-5883780
Personal Website
Harari originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history. His current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?
Harari is the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Sapiens: A Graphic History, and more recently, the children's book series "Unstoppable Us".
Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002. In 2019, following the international success of his books, Yuval Noah Harari and Itzik Yahav co-founded Sapienship: a social impact company with projects in the fields of entertainment and education. Sapienship’s main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yuval Noah Harari
A slender middle-aged bald man with glasses rests his chin on his hand. He is dressed up.
Harari in 2024
Born 24 February 1976 (age 48)
Kiryat Atta, Israel
Known for Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015)
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)
Nexus (2024)
Spouse Itzik Yahav
Academic background
Alma mater
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA)
University of Oxford (DPhil)
Thesis History and I: War and the Relations between History and Personal Identity in Renaissance Military Memoirs, c. 1450–1600 (2002)
Doctoral advisor Steven Gunn
Academic work
Discipline Big History
Military history
Social philosophy
Technology
Institutions Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Website www.ynharari.com Edit this at Wikidata
Signature
Transhumanism
Issues
People
BostromFM-2030FullerGoertzelde GreyHaldaneHansonHarariHarbissonHarrisHuxleyde GarisIstvanKurzweilLandMarinettiPico della MirandolaMoreMullerNietzscheOsbornSandbergSavulescuSorgnerSpencerStockTeilhard de Chardin
Influential Works
Variants
Related topics
vte
Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי [juˈval ˈnoaχ haˈʁaʁi]; born 1976)[1] is an Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual,[2][3][4] and popular science writer. He currently serves as professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[1] His first bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), is based on his lectures to an undergraduate world history class. Among his other works, are other bestsellers like Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024). His published work examines themes of free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering.[5][6][7][8] Although popular, his work has been more negatively received in academic circles.
In his first book, Harari writes about a "cognitive revolution" that supposedly occurred roughly 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthals and other species of the genus Homo, developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators, aided by the First Agricultural Revolution and accelerated by the Scientific Revolution, which have allowed humans to approach near mastery over their environment. Furthermore, he examines the possible consequences of a futuristic biotechnological world in which intelligent biological organisms are surpassed by their own creations; he has said, "Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so".[9]
Early life and education
Yuval Noah Harari was born and raised in Kiryat Ata, Israel, as one of three children born to Shlomo and Pnina Harari and raised in a secular Jewish family of Lebanese Jewish and Ashkenazi Jewish origin.[citation needed] His father was a state-employed armaments engineer and his mother was an office administrator.[2][10][11] Harari taught himself to read at age three.[2] He studied in a class for intellectually gifted children at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa from the age of eight. He deferred mandatory military service in the Israel Defense Forces to pursue university studies as part of the Atuda program but was later exempted from completing his military service following his studies due to health issues.[2] He began studying history and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at age 17.[12]
Harari studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1993 to 1998, where he received a B.A. degree and specialized in medieval history and military history. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford in 2002 where he was a postgraduate student of Jesus College, Oxford supervised by Steven J. Gunn.[13] From 2003 to 2005, he pursued postdoctoral studies in history as a Yad Hanadiv Fellow.[14] While at Oxford, Harari first encountered the work of Jared Diamond, whom he has acknowledged as an influence on his own writing. At a Berggruen Institute salon, Harari said that Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel "was kind of an epiphany in my academic career. I realized that I could actually write such books."[2][15]
Career
Harari has published multiple books and articles, including Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100–1550;[16] The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000;[17] The Concept of 'Decisive Battles' in World History;[18] and Armchairs, Coffee and Authority: Eye-witnesses and Flesh-witnesses Speak about War, 1100–2000.[19]
His book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was originally published in Hebrew in 2011 based on the 20 lectures of an undergraduate world history class he was teaching. It was then released in English in 2014 and has since been translated into some 45 languages.[20] The book surveys the entire length of human history, starting from the evolution of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age. Harari compares indigenous peoples to apes[21] in his fall of man narrative,[22] leading up to the political and technological revolutions of the 21st century. The Hebrew edition became a bestseller in Israel, and generated much interest among the general public, turning Harari into a celebrity.[23][failed verification] Joseph Drew wrote that "Sapiens provides a wide-ranging and thought-provoking introduction for students of comparative civilization," considering it as a work that "highlights the importance and wide expanse of the social sciences."[24]
Harari's follow-up book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, was published in 2016 and examines the possibilities for the future of Homo sapiens.[25] The book's premise outlines that, in the future, humanity is likely to make a significant attempt to gain happiness, immortality and God-like powers.[26] The book goes on to openly speculate various ways this ambition might be realised for Homo sapiens in the future based on the past and present. Among several possibilities for the future, Harari develops the term dataism for a philosophy or mindset that worships big data.[27][28] Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Siddhartha Mukherjee stated that although the book "fails to convince me entirely," he considers it "essential reading for those who think about the future."[29]
Harari's book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, published on 30 August 2018, focused more on present-day concerns.[30][31][32][33] A review in the New Statesman commented on what it called "risible moral dictums littered throughout the text", criticised Harari's writing style and stated that he was "trafficking in pointless asides and excruciating banalities."[34] Kirkus Reviews praised the book as a "tour de force" and described it as a "highly instructive exploration of current affairs and the immediate future of human societies."[35]
In July 2019, Harari was criticised for allowing several omissions and amendments in the Russian edition of his third book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, using a softer tone when speaking about Russian authorities.[36][37] Leonid Bershidsky in The Moscow Times called it "caution—or, to call it by its proper name, cowardice",[38] and Nettanel Slyomovics in Haaretz claimed that "he is sacrificing those same liberal ideas that he presumes to represent".[39] In a response, Harari stated that he "was warned that due to these few examples Russian censorship will not allow distribution of a Russian translation of the book" and that he "therefore faced a dilemma," namely to "replace these few examples with other examples, and publish the book in Russia," or "change nothing, and publish nothing," and that he "preferred publishing, because Russia is a leading global power and it seemed important that the book's ideas should reach readers in Russia, especially as the book is still very critical of the Putin regime—just without naming names."[40]
In November 2020 the first volume of his graphic adaptation of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Sapiens: A Graphic History – The Birth of Humankind, co-authored with David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave, was published and launched at a livestream event organised by How to Academy and Penguin Books.[41]
In 2022, Harari's book, Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World, illustrated by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, was published and is a "Story of Human History — for Kids."[42] In fewer than 200 pages of child-friendly language, Harari covers the same content as his best-selling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, but "he has simplified the presentation for this younger audience without dumbing it down."[42] This book is "the first of four planned volumes."[42]
Published works
Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450–1600 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), ISBN 978-184-383-064-1
Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100–1550 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), ISBN 978-184-383-292-8
The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), ISBN 978-023-058-388-7
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Harvill Secker, 2014) ISBN 978-006-231-609-7
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), ISBN 978-1-910701-88-1
Money: Vintage Minis (select excerpts from Sapiens and Homo Deus (London: Penguin Random House, 2018) ISBN 978-1-78487-402-5
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018), ISBN 1-78733-067-2
Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 1 – The Birth of Humankind (London: Jonathan Cape, 2020)
Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2 − The Pillars of Civilization (London: Jonathan Cape, 2021)
Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 3 − The Masters of History (London: Jonathan Cape, 2024)
Unstoppable Us, Volume 1 − How Humans Took Over the World (Bright Matter Books, 2022), ISBN 0-593-64346-1
Unstoppable Us, Volume 2 − Why the World Isn't Fair (Bright Matter Books, 2024), ISBN 9780593711521
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, (Fern Press, 2024), ISBN 978-1911717089
Articles
"The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles – a Reassessment", Mediterranean Historical Review 12 (1) (June 1997), pp. 75–116.
"Inter-Frontal Cooperation in the Fourteenth Century and Edward III's 1346 Campaign", War in History 6 (4) (September 1999), pp. 379–395
"Strategy and Supply in Fourteenth-Century Western European Invasion Campaigns", The Journal of Military History 64 (2) (April 2000), pp. 297–334.
"Eyewitnessing in Accounts of the First Crusade: The Gesta Francorum and Other Contemporary Narratives", Crusades 3 (August 2004), pp. 77–99
"Martial Illusions: War and Disillusionment in Twentieth-Century and Renaissance Military Memoirs", The Journal of Military History 69 (1) (January 2005), pp. 43–72
"Military Memoirs: A Historical Overview of the Genre from the Middle Ages to the Late Modern Era", War in History 14:3 (2007), pp. 289–309
"The Concept of 'Decisive Battles' in World History", The Journal of World History 18 (3) (2007), 251–266
"Knowledge, Power and the Medieval Soldier, 1096–1550", in In Laudem Hierosolymitani: Studies in Crusades and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar, ed. Iris Shagrir, Ronnie Ellenblum and Jonathan Riley-Smith, (Ashgate, 2007)
"Combat Flow: Military, Political and Ethical Dimensions of Subjective Well-Being in War", Review of General Psychology (September 2008)
Introduction to Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, The Bodley Head, 2015.
"Armchairs, Coffee and Authority: Eye-witnesses and Flesh-witnesses Speak about War, 1100–2000", Journal of Military History 74:1 (gennaio, 2010), pp. 53–78.
"Yuval Noah Harari on big data, Google and the end of free will", Financial Times (August 2016).
"Why It's No Longer Possible for Any Country to Win a War", Time (23 June 2017).
"Why Technology Favors Tyranny", The Atlantic (October 2018).
"Game of Thrones: A Battle of Reality Versus Fantasy", Wired (24 May 2019)
"Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus", Financial Times (20 March 2020).
"Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war", The Guardian (28 February 2022)
"The End of the New Peace", The Atlantic (December 2022)
"Will Zionism survive the war?", The Washington Post (May 2024)
Critical reception
Harari's popular publications are considered to belong to the Big History genre, with Ian Parker writing in 2020 in The New Yorker that "Harari did not invent Big History, but updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering."[2]
His work has been more negatively received in academic circles, with Christopher Robert Hallpike stating in a 2020 review of Sapiens that "one has often had to point out how surprisingly little he seems to have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously." Hallpike further states that "we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as 'infotainment', a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria, it is a most successful book."[43]
In 2020, philosopher Mike W. Martin criticized Harari's view in a journal article, stating that "[Harari] misunderstands human rights, inflates the role of science in moral matters, and fails to reconcile his moral passion with his moral skepticism."[44]
In July 2022, the American magazine Current Affairs published an article titled "The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari" by neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan, which pointed to the lack of scientific rigor in his books. "The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker," she wrote. "But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors."[45]
In November 2022, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called Harari a historian and a brand. It pointed out that the Yahav Harari Group, built by his partner Yahav, was a "booming product cosmos" selling comics and children's books, and soon films and documentaries. It observed an "icy deterministic touch" in his books, which made them so popular in Silicon Valley. It stated that his listeners celebrated him like a pop star, although he only had the sad message that people are "bad algorithms", soon to be redundant, to be replaced because machines could do it better.[46]
Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has singled out Harari's "inclination towards a post-human existence" as evidence that the modern Western world is "the civilization of the Antichrist", which he argues that Russia and the Islamic world are justified in opposing.[47]
Awards and recognition
Harari twice won the Polonsky Prize for "Creativity and Originality", in 2009 and 2012. In 2011, he won the Society for Military History's Moncado Award for outstanding articles in military history. In 2012, he was elected to the Young Israeli Academy of Sciences.[48]
Sapiens was in the top 3 of The New York Times Best Seller list for 96 consecutive weeks. In 2018, Harari gave the first TED Talk as a digital avatar.[49][50]
In 2017, Homo Deus won Handelsblatt's German Economic Book Award for the most thoughtful and influential economic book of the year.[51]
In 2018 and 2020, Harari spoke at the World Economic Forum annual conference in Davos.[2]
Personal life
Harari is gay,[52] and in 2002 met his husband Itzik Yahav.[53][54] Yahav has also been Harari's personal manager.[55] They married in a civil ceremony in Toronto, Canada.[56] Contrary to prior reports on Wikipedia, he does not live in Karmei Yosef, a moshav in central Israel, but a middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv.[57]
Though he is an atheist,[58] Harari has practiced Vipassana meditation since 2000[59] and said that it "transformed" his life.[60] As of 2017 he practiced for two hours every day (one hour each at the start and end of his work day[61]); every year undertook a meditation retreat of 30 days or longer, in silence and with no books or social media;[62][63][64] and is an assistant meditation teacher.[65] He dedicated Homo Deus to "my teacher, S. N. Goenka, who lovingly taught me important things", and said "I could not have written this book without the focus, peace and insight gained from practising Vipassana for fifteen years."[66] He also regards meditation as a way to research.[64]
Harari is a vegan and says this resulted from his research, including his view that the foundation of the dairy industry is breaking the bond between mother cow and calf.[11][67] As of May 2021, Harari did not have a smartphone,[68][69] but in an interview in October 2023, he explained that he owned a smartphone only for use in travel and emergencies.[70]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, following former United States President Donald Trump's cut to WHO funding, Harari announced that he and his husband would donate $1 million to the WHO through Sapienship, their social impact company.[71][72]
Harari is among the critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and is specifically opposed to the judicial reform plans of the thirty-seventh government of Israel. In a conversation with Lex Fridman in 2023 he said: "... And now the Netanyahu government is trying to neutralize, or take over, the supreme court, and they've already prepared a long list of laws – they already talk about it – that will be passed the moment that this last check on the power is gone, they are openly trying to gain unlimited power".[73]
Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone, Ever
His blockbuster “Sapiens” predicted the possible end of humankind. Now what?
By Ian Parker
February 10, 2020
Portrait of Harari.
Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher.Photograph by Olaf Blecker for The New Yorker
Listen to this story
In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “Sapiens,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.
“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”
Harari, who is slim, soft-spoken, and relentless in his search for an audience, has spent the years since the publication of “Sapiens” in conversations about this cliffhanger. His two subsequent best-sellers—“Homo Deus” (2017) and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018)—focus on the present and the near future. Harari now defines himself as both a historian and a philosopher. He dwells particularly on the possibility that biometric monitoring, coupled with advanced computing, will give corporations and governments access to more complete data about people—about their desires and liabilities—than people have about themselves. A life under such scrutiny, he said recently, is liable to become “one long, stressing job interview.”
If Harari weren’t always out in public, one might mistake him for a recluse. He is shyly oracular. He spends part of almost every appearance denying that he is a guru. But, when speaking at conferences where C.E.O.s meet public intellectuals, or visiting Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto house, or the Élysée Palace, in Paris, he’ll put a long finger to his chin and quietly answer questions about Neanderthals, self-driving cars, and the series finale of “Game of Thrones.” Harari’s publishing and speaking interests now occupy a staff of twelve, who work out of a sunny office in Tel Aviv, where an employee from Peru cooks everyone vegan lunches. Here, one can learn details of a scheduled graphic novel of “Sapiens”—a cartoon version of Harari, wearing wire-framed glasses and looking a little balder than in life, pops up here and there, across time and space. There are also plans for a “Sapiens” children’s book, and a multi-season “Sapiens”-inspired TV drama, covering sixty thousand years, with a script by the co-writer of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.”
Harari seldom goes to this office. He works at the home he shares with Itzik Yahav, his husband, who is also his agent and manager. They live in a village of expensive modern houses, half an hour inland from Tel Aviv, at a spot where Israel’s coastal plain is first interrupted by hills. The location gives a view of half the country and, hazily, the Mediterranean beyond. Below the house are the ruins of the once mighty Canaanite city of Gezer; Harari and Yahav walk their dog there. Their swimming pool is blob-shaped and, at night, lit a vivid mauve.
At lunchtime one day in September, Yahav drove me to the house from Tel Aviv, in a Porsche S.U.V. with a rainbow-flag sticker on its windshield. “Yuval’s unhappy with my choice of car,” Yahav said, laughing. “He thinks it’s unacceptable that a historian should have money.” While Yahav drove, he had a few conversations with colleagues, on speakerphone, about the fittings for a new Harari headquarters, in a brutalist tower block above the Dizengoff Center mall. He said, “I can’t tell you how much I need a P.A.”—a personal assistant—“but I’m not an easy person.” Asked to consider his husband’s current place in world affairs, Yahav estimated that Harari was “between Madonna and Steven Pinker.”
Harari and Yahav, both in their mid-forties, grew up near each other, but unknown to each other, in Kiryat Ata, an industrial town outside Haifa. (Yahav jokingly called it “the Israeli Chernobyl.”) Yahav’s background is less solidly middle class than his husband’s. When the two men met, nearly twenty years ago, Harari had just finished his graduate studies, and Yahav teased him: “You’ve never worked? You’ve never had to pick up a plate for your living? I was a waiter from age fifteen!” He thought of Harari as a “genius geek.” Yahav, who was then a producer in nonprofit theatre, is now known for making bold, and sometimes outlandish, demands on behalf of his husband. “Because I have only one author, I can go crazy,” he had told me. In the car, he noted that he had declined an invitation to have Harari participate in the World Economic Forum, at Davos, in 2017, because the proposed panels were “not good enough.” A year later, when Harari was offered the main stage, in a slot between Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, Yahav accepted. His recollections of such negotiations are delivered with self-mocking charm and a low, conspiratorial laugh. He likes to say, “You don’t understand—Yuval works for me! ”
We left the highway and drove into the village. He said of Harari, “When I meet my friends, he’s usually not invited, because my friends are crazy and loud. It’s too much for him. He shuts down.” When planning receptions and dinners for Harari, Yahav follows a firm rule: “Not more than eight people.”
For more than a decade, Harari has spent several weeks each year on a silent-meditation retreat, usually in India. At home, he starts his day with an hour of meditation; in the summer, he also swims for half an hour while listening to nonfiction audiobooks aimed at the general reader. (Around the time of my visit, he was listening to a history of the Cuban Revolution, and to a study of the culture of software engineering.) He swims the breaststroke, wearing a mask, a snorkel, and “bone conduction” headphones that press against his temples, bypassing the ears.
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When Yahav and I arrived at the house, Harari was working at the kitchen table, reading news stories from Ukraine, printed for him by an assistant. He had an upcoming speaking engagement in Kyiv, at an oligarch-funded conference. He was also planning a visit to the United Arab Emirates, which required some delicacy—the country has no diplomatic ties with Israel.
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The house was open and airy, and featured a piano. (Yahav plays.) Harari was wearing shorts and Velcro-fastened sandals, and, as Yahav fondly observed, his swimming headphones had left imprints on his head. Harari explained to me that the device “beams sound into the skull.” Later, with my encouragement, he put on his cyborgian getup, including the snorkel, and laughed as I took a photograph, saying, “Just don’t put that in the paper, because Itzik will kill both me and you.”
Unusually for a public intellectual, Harari has drawn up a mission statement. It’s pinned on a bulletin board in the Tel Aviv office, and begins, “Keep your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main global problems facing humanity.” It also says, “Learn to distinguish reality from illusion,” and “Care about suffering.” The statement used to include “Embrace ambiguity.” This was cut, according to one of Harari’s colleagues, because it was too ambiguous.
One recent afternoon, Naama Avital, the operation’s C.E.O., and Naama Wartenburg, Harari’s chief marketing officer, were sitting with Yahav, wondering if Harari would accept a hypothetical invitation to appear on a panel with President Donald Trump.
“I think that whenever Yuval is free to say exactly what he thinks, then it’s O.K.,” Avital said.
Yahav, surprised, said that he could perhaps imagine a private meeting, “but to film it—to film Yuval with Trump?”
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“You’d have a captive audience,” Wartenburg said.
Avital agreed, noting, “There’s a politician, but then there are his supporters—and you’re talking about tens of millions of people.”
“A panel with Trump?” Yahav asked. He later said that he had never accepted any speaking invitations from Israeli settlers in the West Bank, adding that Harari, although not a supporter of settlements, might have been inclined to say yes.
Harari has acquired a large audience in a short time, and—like the Silicon Valley leaders who admire his work—he can seem uncertain about what to do with his influence. Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump.
Harari’s office is still largely a boutique agency serving the writing and speaking interests of one client. But, last fall, it began to brand part of its work under the heading of “Sapienship.” The office remains a for-profit enterprise, but it has taken on some of the ambitions and attributes of a think tank, or the foundation of a high-minded industrialist. Sapienship’s activities are driven by what Harari’s colleagues call his “vision.” Avital explained that some projects she was working on, such as “Sapiens”-related school workshops, didn’t rely on “everyday contact with Yuval.”
Harari’s vision takes the form of a list. “That’s something I have from students,” he told me. “They like short lists.” His proposition, often repeated, is that humanity faces three primary threats: nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption. Other issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. In part because there’s little disagreement, at least in a Harari audience, about the seriousness of the nuclear and climate threats, and about how to respond to them, Harari highlights the technological one. Last September, while appearing onstage with Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, at an “influencers’ summit” in Tel Aviv, Harari said, in Hebrew, “Think about a situation where somebody in Beijing or San Francisco knows what every citizen in Israel is doing at every moment—all the most intimate details about every mayor, member of the Knesset, and officer in the Army, from the age of zero.” He added, “Those who will control the world in the twenty-first century are those who will control data.”
He also said that Homo sapiens would likely disappear, in a tech-driven upgrade. Harari often disputes the notion that he makes prophecies or predictions—indeed, he has claimed to do “the opposite”—but a prediction acknowledging uncertainty is still a prediction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said, “In two hundred years, I can pretty much assure you that there will not be any more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens—there will be something else.”
“What a world,” Rivlin said. The event ended in a hug.
Afterward, Harari said of Rivlin, “He took my message to be kind of pessimistic.” Although the two men had largely spoken past each other, they were in some ways aligned. An Israeli President is a national figurehead, standing above the political fray. Harari claims a similar space. He speaks of looming mayhem but makes no proposals beyond urging international coöperation, and “focus.” A parody of Harari’s writing, in the British magazine Private Eye, included streams of questions: “What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? If you are in a falling lift, will it do any good to jump up and down like crazy? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? What is the state capital of Wyoming?”
This tentativeness at first seems odd. Harari has the ear of decision-makers; he travels the world to show them PowerPoint slides depicting mountains of trash and unemployed hordes. But, like a fiery street preacher unable to recommend one faith over another, he concludes with a policy shrug. Harari emphasizes that the public should press politicians to respond to tech threats, but when I asked what that response should be he said, “I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t think it will come from me. Even if I took three years off, and just immersed myself in some cave of books and meditation, I don’t think I would emerge with the answer.”
Harari’s reluctance to support particular political actions can be understood, in part, as instinctual conservatism and brand protection. According to “Sapiens,” progress is basically an illusion; the Agricultural Revolution was “history’s biggest fraud,” and liberal humanism is a religion no more founded on reality than any other. Harari writes, “The Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.” In such a context, any specific policy idea is likely to seem paltry, and certainly too quotidian for a keynote speech. A policy might also turn out to be a mistake. “We are very careful, the entire team, about endorsing anything, any petition,” Harari told me.
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Harari has given talks at Google and Instagram. Last spring, on a visit to California, he had dinner with, among others, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and C.E.O., and Chris Cox, the former chief product officer at Facebook. It’s not hard to understand Harari’s appeal to Silicon Valley executives, who would prefer to cast a furrowed gaze toward the distant future than to rewrite their privacy policies or their algorithms. (Zuckerberg rarely responds to questions about the malign influence of Facebook without speaking of his “focus” on this or that.) Harari said of tech entrepreneurs, “I don’t try intentionally to be a threat to them. I think that much of what they’re doing is also good. I think there are many things to be said for working with them as long as it’s possible, instead of viewing them as the enemy.” Harari believes that some of the social ills caused by a company like Facebook should be understood as bugs—“and, as good engineers, they are trying to fix the bugs.” Earlier, Itzik Yahav had said that he felt no unease about “visiting Mark Zuckerberg at his home, with Priscilla, and Beast, the dog,” adding, “I don’t think Mark is an evil person. And Yuval is bringing questions.”
Harari’s policy agnosticism is also connected to his focus on focus itself. The aspect of a technological dystopia that most preoccupies him—losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered, in his view, by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness. He collects examples of A.I. threats. He refers, for instance, to recent research suggesting that it’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident. Similarly, Harari has observed that, had sophisticated artificial intelligence existed when he was younger, it might have recognized his homosexuality long before he was ready to acknowledge it. Such data-driven judgments don’t need to be perfectly accurate to outperform humans. Harari argues that, though there’s no sure prophylactic against such future intrusions, people who are alert to the workings of their minds will be better able to protect themselves. Harari recently told a Ukrainian reporter, “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” In this context, to think clearly—to snorkel in the pool, back and forth—is a form of social action.
Naama Avital, in the Tel Aviv office, told me that, on social media, fans of Harari’s books tend to be “largely male, twenty-five to thirty-five.” Bill Gates is a Harari enthusiast, but the more typical reader may be a young person grateful for permission to pay more attention to his or her needs than to the needs of others. (Not long ago, one of Harari’s YouTube admirers commented, “Your books changed my life, Yuval. Just as investing in Tesla did.”)
Harari doesn’t dismiss more active forms of political engagement, particularly in the realm of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but his writing underscores the importance of equanimity. In a section of “Sapiens” titled “Know Thyself,” Harari describes how the serenity achieved through meditation can be “so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.” “21 Lessons” includes extended commentary on the life of the Buddha, who “taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying.” Harari continues, “You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you. . . . ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises, ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ ”
Harari didn’t learn the result of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election until five weeks after the vote. He was on a retreat, in England. In Vipassana meditation, the form that Harari practices, a retreat lasts at least ten days. He sometimes does ten-day retreats in Israel, in the role of a teaching assistant. Once a year, he goes away for a month or longer. Participants at a Vipassana center may talk to one another as they arrive—while giving up their phones and books—but thereafter they’re expected to be silent, even while eating with others.
I discussed meditation with Harari one day at a restaurant in a Tel Aviv hotel. (A young doorman recognized him and thanked him for his writing.) We were joined by Itzik Yahav and the mothers of both men. Jeanette Yahav, an accountant, has sometimes worked in the Tel Aviv office. So, too, has Pnina Harari, a former office administrator; she has had the task of responding to the e-mail pouring into Harari’s Web site: poems, pieces of music, arguments for the existence of God.
Harari said of the India retreats, which take place northeast of Mumbai, “Most of the day you’re in your own cell, the size of this table.”
“Unbelievable,” Pnina Harari said.
During her son’s absences, she and Yahav stay in touch. “We speak, we console each other,” she said. She also starts a journal: “It’s like a letter to Yuval. And the last day of the meditation I send it to him.” Once back in Mumbai, he can open an e-mail containing two months of his mother’s news.
Before Itzik Yahav met Harari, through a dating site, he had some experience of Vipassana, and for years they practiced together. Yahav has now stopped. “I couldn’t keep up,” he told me. “And you’re not allowed to drink. I want to drink with friends, a glass of wine.” I later spoke to Yoram Yovell, a friend of Harari’s, who is a well-known Israeli neuroscientist and TV host. A few years ago, Yovell signed up for a ten-day retreat in India. He recalled telling himself, “This is the first time in ten years that you’re having a ten-day vacation, and you’re spending it sitting on your tush, on this little mat, inhaling and exhaling. And outside is India! ” He lasted twenty-four hours. (In 2018, two years after authorities in Myanmar began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims, Jack Dorsey completed a ten-day Vipassana retreat in that country, and defended his visit by saying, “This was a purely personal trip for me focused on only one dimension: meditation.”)
At lunch, Pnina Harari recalled the moment when Yuval’s two older sisters reported to her that Yuval had taught himself to read: “He was three, not more than four.”
Yuval smiled. “I think more like four, five.”
She described the time he wrote a school essay, then rewrote it to make it less sophisticated. He told her that nobody would have understood the first draft.
From the age of eight, Harari attended a school for bright students, two bus rides away from his family’s house in Kiryat Ata. Yuval’s father, who died in 2010, was born on a kibbutz, and maintained a life-long skepticism about socialism; his work, as a state-employed armaments engineer, was classified. By the standards of the town, the Harari household was bourgeois and bookish.
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The young Yuval had a taste for grand designs. He has said, “I promised myself that when I grew up I would not get bogged down in the mundane troubles of daily life, but would do my best to understand the big picture.” In the back yard, he spent months digging a very deep hole; it was never filled in, and sometimes became a pond. He built, out of wood blocks and Formica tiles, a huge map of Europe, on which he played war games of his own invention. Harari told me that during his adolescence, against the backdrop of the first intifada, he went through a period when he was “a kind of stereotypical right-wing nationalist.” He recalled his mind-set: “Israel as a nation is the most important thing in the world. And, obviously, we are right about everything. And the whole world doesn’t understand us and hates us. So we have to be strong and defend ourselves.” He laughed. “You know—the usual stuff.”
He deferred his compulsory military service, through a program for high-achieving students. (The service was never completed, because of an undisclosed health problem. “It wasn’t something catastrophic,” he said. “I’m still here.”) When he began college, at Hebrew University, he was younger than his peers, and he had not shared the experience of three years of activity often involving groups larger than eight. By then, Harari’s nationalist fire had dimmed. In its place, he had attempted to will himself into religious conviction—and an observant Jewish life. “I was very keen to believe,” he said. He supposed, wrongly, that “if I read enough, or think about it enough, or talk to the right people, then something will click.”
In Chapter 2 of “Sapiens,” Harari describes how, about seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens began to develop nuanced language, and thereby began to dominate other Homo species, and the world. Harari’s discussion reflects standard scholarly arguments, but he adds this gloss: during what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens became uniquely able to communicate untruths. “As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled,” he writes, referring to myths and gods. “Many animals and human species could previously say ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ ” This mental leap enabled coöperation among strangers: “Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.”
A dog owner and her friend look at her dog which is wailing in despair.
“He’s always been a little needy, but the despair is new.”
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In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” (He explained to me, “I would almost always go for the day-to-day word, even if the nuance of the professional word is a bit more accurate.”) Harari further proposes that fictions require believers, and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists. Every social construct, then, is a kind of religion: a declaration of universal human rights is not a manifesto, or a program, but the expression of a benign delusion; an activity like using money, or obeying a stoplight, is a collective fantasy, not a ritual. When I asked him if he really meant this, he laughed, and said, “It’s like the weak force in physics—which is weak, but still strong enough to hold the entire universe together!” (In fact, the weak force is responsible for the disintegration of subatomic particles.) “It’s the same with these fictions—they are strong enough to hold millions of people together.”
In his representation of how people function in society, Harari sometimes seems to be extrapolating from his personal history—from his eagerness to believe in something. When I called him a “seeker,” he gave amused, half-grudging assent.
As an undergraduate, Harari wrote a paper, for a medieval-history class, that was later published, precociously, in a peer-reviewed journal. “The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment” challenged the previously held assumption that, in crusader armies, most cavalrymen were heavily armored. Harari proposed, in an argument derived from careful reading of sources across several centuries, that many were light cavalrymen. Benjamin Kedar, who taught the class, told me that the paper “was absolutely original, and really a breakthrough.” It seems to be generally agreed that, had Harari stuck solely to military history of this era, he would have become a significant figure in the field. Idan Sherer, a former student and research assistant of Harari’s who now teaches at Ben Gurion University, said, “I don’t think the prominent scholar, but definitely one of them.”
In academic prose, especially philosophy, Harari seems to have found something analogous to what he had sought in nation and in faith. “I had respect for, and belief in, very dense writing,” he recalled. “One of the first things I did when I came out, to myself, as gay—I went to the university library and took out all these books about queer theory, which were some of the densest things I’ve ever read.” He jokingly added, “It almost converted me back. It was ‘O.K., now you’re gay, so you need to be very serious about it.’ ”
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In 1998, he began working toward a doctorate in history, at the University of Oxford. “He was oppressed by the grayness,” Harari’s mother recalled, at lunch. Harari agreed: “It wasn’t the greatest time of my life. It was a culture shock, it was a climate shock. I just couldn’t grasp it could be weeks and weeks and you never see the sun.” He later added, “It was a personal impasse. I’d hoped that, by studying and researching, I would understand not only the world but my life.” He went on, “All the books I’d been reading and all the philosophical discussions—not only did they not provide an answer, it seemed extremely unlikely that any answer would ever come out of this.” He told himself, “There is something fundamentally wrong in the way that I’m approaching this whole thing.”
One reason he chose to study outside Israel was to “start life anew,” as a gay man. On weekends, he went to London night clubs. (“I think I tried Ecstasy a few times,” he said.) And he made dates online. He set himself the target of having sex with at least one new partner a week, “to make up for lost time, and also understand how it works—because I was very shy.” He laughed. “Very strong discipline!” He treated each encounter as a credit in a ledger, “so if one week I had two, and then the next week there was none, I’m O.K.”
These recollections contain no regret, but, Harari said, “coming out was a kind of false enlightenment.” He explained, “I’d had this feeling—this is it. There was one big piece of the puzzle that I was missing, and this is why my life was completely fucked up.” Instead, he felt “even more miserable.”
On a dating site, Harari met Ron Merom, an Israeli software engineer. As Merom recently recalled, they began an intense e-mail correspondence “about the meaning of life, and all that.” They became friends. (In 2015, when “Sapiens” was first published in English, Merom was working for Google in California, and helped arrange for Harari to give an “Authors at Google” talk, which was posted online—an important early moment of exposure.) Merom, who now works at Facebook, has forgotten the details of their youthful exchanges, but can recall their flavor: Harari’s personal philosophy at the time was complex and dark, “even a bit violent or aggressive”—and this included his discussion of sexual relationships. As Merom put it, “It was ‘I need to conquer the world—either you win or you lose.’ ”
Merom had just begun going on meditation retreats. He told Harari, “It sounds like you’re looking for something, and Vipassana might be it.” In 2000, when Harari was midway through his thesis—a study of how Renaissance military memoirists described their experiences of war—he took a bus to a meditation center in the West of England.
Ten days later, Harari wrote to Amir Fink, a friend in Israel. Fink, who now works as an environmentalist, told me that Harari had quoted, giddily, the theme song of a “Pinocchio” TV show once beloved in Israel: “Good morning, world! I’m now freed from my strings. I’m a real boy.”
At the retreat, Harari was told that he should do nothing but notice his breath, in and out, and notice whenever his mind wandered. This, Harari has written, “was the most important thing anybody had ever told me.”
Steven Gunn, an Oxford historian and Harari’s doctoral adviser, recently recalled the moment: “I sort of did my best supervisorial thing. ‘Are you sure you’re not getting mixed up in a cult?’ So far as I could tell, he wasn’t being drawn into anything he didn’t want to be drawn into.”
On a drive with Yahav and Harari from their home to Jerusalem, I asked if it was fair to think of “Sapiens” as an attempt to transmit Buddhist principles, not just through its references to meditation—and to the possibility of finding serenity in self-knowledge—but through its narrative shape. The story of “Sapiens” echoes the Buddha’s “basic realities”: constant change; no enduring essence; the inevitability of suffering.
“Yes, to some extent,” Harari said. “It’s definitely not a conscious project. It’s not ‘O.K.! Now I believe in these three principles, and now I need to convince the world, but I can’t state it directly, because this would be a missionary thing.’ ” Rather, he said, the experience of meditation “imbues your entire thinking.”
He added, “I definitely don’t think that the solution to all the world’s problems is to convert everybody to Buddhism, or to have everybody meditating. I meditate, I know how difficult it is. There’s no chance you can get eight billion people to meditate, and, even if they try, in many cases it could backfire in a terrible way. It’s very easy to become self-absorbed, to become megalomaniacal.” He referred to Ashin Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk in Myanmar, who has incited violence against Rohingya Muslims.
In “Sapiens,” Harari went on, part of the task had been “to show how everything is impermanent, and what we think of as eternal social structures—even family, money, religion, nations—everything is changing, nothing is eternal, everything came out of some historical process.” These were Buddhist thoughts, he said, but they were easy enough to access without Buddhism. “Maybe biology is permanent, but in society nothing is permanent,” he said. “There’s no essence, no essence to any nation. You don’t need to meditate for two hours a day to realize that.”
We drove to Hebrew University, which is atop Mt. Scopus. We walked into the humanities building, and, through an emergency exit, onto a rooftop. There was a panoramic view of the Old City and the Temple Mount. Harari recalled his return to the university, from Oxford, in 2001, during the second intifada. The university is surrounded by Arab neighborhoods that he’s never visited. In the car, he had been talking about current conditions in Israel; in recent years, he had said, “many, if not most, Israelis simply lost the motivation to solve the conflict, especially because Israel has managed to control it so efficiently.” Harari told me that, as a historian, he had to dispute the assumption that an occupation can’t last “for decades, for centuries”—it can, and new surveillance technologies can enable oppression “with almost no killing.” Harari saw no alternative other than “to wait for history to work its magic—a war, a catastrophe.” With a dry laugh, he said, “Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran—a couple of thousand people die, something. This can break the mental deadlock.”
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Harari recalled a moment, in 2015, when he and Yahav had accidentally violated the eight-person rule. They had gone to a dinner that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to attend. Netanyahu was known to have read “Sapiens.” “We were told it would be very intimate,” Harari said. There were forty guests. Harari shared a few pleasantries with Netanyahu, but they had “no real exchange at all.”
Yahav interjected to suggest that, because of “Sapiens,” Netanyahu “started doing Meatless Monday.” Harari, who, like Yahav, largely avoids eating animal products, writes in “Sapiens” that “modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.” When Netanyahu announced a commitment “to fight cruelty toward animals,” friends encouraged Harari to take a little credit.
“People told me this was my greatest achievement,” Harari said. “I managed to convince Netanyahu of something! It didn’t matter what.” This assessment gives some indication of Harari’s local politics, but Yoram Yovell, his TV-presenter friend, said that he had tried and failed to persuade Harari to speak against Netanyahu publicly. Yovell said that Harari, although “vehemently against Netanyahu,” seemed to resist “jumping into the essence of life—the blood and guts of life,” adding, “I actually am disappointed with it.” Harari, who has declined invitations to write a regular column in the Israeli press, told me, “I could start making speeches, and writing, ‘Vote for this party,’ and maybe, one time, I can convince a couple of thousand people to change their vote. But then I will kind of expend my entire credit on this. I’ll be identified with one party, one camp.” He did acknowledge that he was discouraged by the choice presented by the September general election, which was then imminent: “It’s either a right-wing government or an extreme-right-wing government. There is no other serious option.”
At Hebrew University, his role is somewhat rarefied: he has negotiated his way to having no faculty responsibilities beyond teaching; he currently advises no Ph.D. students. (He said of his professional life, “I write the books and give talks. Itzik is doing basically everything else.”) Harari teaches one semester a year, fitting three classes into one day a week. His recent courses include a history of relations between humans and animals—the subject of a future Harari book, perhaps—and another called History for the Masses, on writing for a general reader. During our visit to the university, he took me to an empty lecture hall with steeply raked seating. “This is where ‘Sapiens’ originated,” he said. He noted, with mock affront, that the room attracts stray cats: “They come into class, and they grab all the attention. ‘A cat! Oh!’ ”
“It’s hard to keep a good friendship when someone’s financial status changes,” Amir Fink told me. Fink and his husband, a musicologist, have known Harari since college. “We have tried to keep his success out of it. As two couples, we meet a lot, we take vacations abroad together.” (Neither couple has children.) Fink went on, “We love to come to their place for the weekend.” They play board games, such as Settlers of Catan, and “whist—Israeli Army whist.”
Fink spoke of the scale of the operation built by Harari and Yahav. “I hope it’s sustainable,” he said. With “Sapiens,” he went on, Harari had written “a book that summarizes the world.” The books that followed were bound to be “more specific, and more political.” That is, they drew Harari away from his natural intellectual territory. “Homo Deus” derived directly from Harari’s teaching, but “21 Lessons,” Fink said, “is basically a collection of articles and responses to the present day.” He added, “It’s very hard for Yuval to keep himself as a teacher,” noting, “He becomes, I guess, what the French would call a philosophe.”
While Harari was at Oxford, he read Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” and was dazzled by its reach, across time and place. “It was a complete life-changer,” Harari said. “You could actually write such books!” Steven Gunn, Harari’s Oxford adviser, told me that, as Harari worked on his thesis, he had to be discouraged from taking too broad a historical view: “I have memories of numerous revision meetings where I’d say, ‘Well, all this stuff about people flying helicopters in Vietnam is very interesting, and I can see why you need to read it, and think about it, to write about why people wrote the way they did about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century, but, actually, the thesis has to be nearly all about battles in Italy in the sixteenth century.’ ”
After Harari received his doctorate, he returned to Jerusalem with the idea of writing a history of the gay experience in Israel. He met with Benjamin Kedar. Kedar recently said, “I gave him a hard look—‘Yuval, do it after you get tenure.’ ”
Harari, taking this advice, stuck with his specialty. But his continued interest in comparative history was evident in the 2007 book “Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550,” whose anachronistic framing provoked some academic reviewers. And the following year, in “The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000,” Harari was at last able to include an extended discussion of Vietnam War memoirs.
In 2003, Hebrew University initiated an undergraduate course, An Introduction to the History of the World. Such classes had begun appearing in a few history departments in the previous decade; traditional historians, Kedar said, were often disapproving, and still are: “They say, ‘You teach the French Revolution, and if somebody looks out of the window they miss the revolution’—all those jokes.” Gunn said that “Oxford makes sure people study a wide range of history, but it does it by making sure that people study a wide range of different detailed things, rather than one course that goes right across everything.”
Harari agreed to teach the world-history course, as well as one on war in the Middle Ages. He had always hated speaking to people he didn’t know. He told me that, as a younger man, “if I had to call the municipality to arrange some bureaucratic stuff, I would sit for like ten minutes by the telephone, just bringing up the courage.” (One can imagine his bliss in the dining hall at a meditation retreat—the sound of a hundred people not starting a conversation.) Even today, Harari is an unassuming lecturer: conferences sometimes give him a prizefighter’s introduction, with lights and music, at the end of which he comes warily to the podium, says, “Hello, everyone,” and sets up his laptop. Yahav described watching Harari recently freeze in front of an audience of thousands in Beijing. “I was, ‘Start moving! ’ ”
A woman sardonically reminds her exhusband of who she is and their entire sordid relationship history after he called...
“Paul? Susan! From the gym? I showed you how to use the elliptical? We went for coffee? One thing led to another? We started dating? Then we got married? We had two kids? But we got divorced? I got custody? You see them on the weekends? But you want them for Christmas? I said no way? You called me last night in tears? Susan!”
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As an uncomfortable young professor, Harari tended to write out his world-history lectures as a script. At one point, as part of an effort to encourage his students to listen to his words, rather than transcribe them, he began handing out copies of his notes. “They started circulating, even among students who were not in my class,” Harari recalled. “That’s when I thought, Ah, maybe there’s a book in it.” He imagined that a few students at other universities would buy the book, and perhaps “a couple of history buffs.”
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This origin explains some of the qualities that distinguish “Sapiens.” Unlike many other nonfiction blockbusters, it isn’t full of catchy neologisms or cinematic scene-setting; its impact derives from a steady management of ideas, in prose that has the unhedged authority—and sometimes the inelegance—of a professor who knows how to make one or two things stick. (“An empire is a political order with two important characteristics . . .”) “Guns, Germs, and Steel” begins with a conversation between Jared Diamond and a Papua New Guinean politician; in “Sapiens,” Harari does not figure in the narrative. He told me, “Maybe it is some legacy of my study of memoirs and autobiographies. I know how dangerous it is to make personal experience your main basis for authority.”
It still astonishes Harari that readers became so excited about the early pages of “Sapiens,” which describe the coexistence of various Homo species. “I thought, This is so banal!” he told me. “There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I’m not an archeologist. I’m not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research. . . . It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.”
The Israeli edition, “A Brief History of Humankind,” was published in June, 2011. Yoram Yovell recalled that “Yuval became beloved very quickly,” and was soon a regular guest on Israeli television. “It was beautiful to see the way he handled it,” Yovell added. “He’s intellectually self-confident but truly modest.” The book initially failed to attract foreign publishers. Harari and Yahav marketed a print-on-demand English-language edition, on Amazon; this was Harari’s own translation, and it included his Gmail address on the title page, and illustrations by Yahav. It sold fewer than two thousand copies. In 2013, Yahav persuaded Deborah Harris, an Israeli literary agent whose clients include David Grossman and Tom Segev, to take on the book. She proposed edits and recommended hiring a translator. Harris recently recalled that, in the U.K., an auction of the revised manuscript began with twenty-two publishers, “and it went on and on and on,” whereas, in the U.S., “I was getting the most insulting rejections, of the kind ‘Who does this man think he is?’ ” Harvill Secker, Harari’s British publisher, paid significantly more for the book than HarperCollins did in the U.S.
Harari and Yahav recently visited Harris at her house, in Jerusalem; it also serves as her office. They had promised to cart away copies of “Sapiens”—in French, Portuguese, and Malay—that were filling up her garden shed. At her dining table, Harris recalled seeing “Sapiens” take off: “The reviews were extraordinary. And then Obama. And Gates.” (Gates, on his blog: “I’ve always been a fan of writers who try to connect the dots.”) Harris began spotting the book in airports; “Sapiens,” she said, was reaching people who read only one book a year.
There was a little carping from reviewers—“Mr. Harari’s claim that Columbus ignited the scientific revolution is surprising,” a reviewer in the Wall Street Journal wrote—but the book thrived in an environment of relative critical neglect. At the time of its publication, “Sapiens” was not reviewed in the Times, The New York Review of Books, or the Washington Post. Steven Gunn supposes that Harari, by working on a far greater time scale than the great historical popularizers of the twentieth century, like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, substantially protected himself from experts’ scoffing. “ ‘Sapiens’ leapfrogs that, by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that nobody can say, “We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong,” ’ ” Gunn said. “Because what he’s doing is just building an extremely big model, about an extremely big process.” He went on, “Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.”
Deborah Harris did not work on “Homo Deus.” By then, Yahav had become Harari’s agent, after closely watching Harris’s process, and making a record of all her contacts. “It wasn’t even done secretly!” she said, laughing.
Yahav was sitting next to her. “He’s a maniac and a control freak,” Harris said. In her own dealings with publishers, she continued, “I have to retain a semblance of professionalism—I want these people to like me. He didn’t care! He’s never going to see these people again, and sell anything else to them. They can all think he’s horrible and ruthless.”
They discussed the controversy over the pliant Russian translation of “21 Lessons.” Harris said that, if she had been involved, “that would not have happened.”
Yahav, who for the first time looked a little pained, asked Harris if she would have refused all of the Russian publisher’s requests for changes.
“Russia, you don’t fuck around,” she said. “You don’t give them an inch.” She asked Harari if he would do things differently now.
“Hmm,” he said. Harari drew a distinction between changes he had approved and those he had not: for example, he hadn’t known that, in the dedication, “husband” would become “partner.” In public remarks, Harari has defended allowing some changes as an acceptable compromise when trying to reach a Russian audience. He has also said, “I’m not willing to write any lies. And I’m not willing to add any praise to the regime.”
They discussed the impending “Sapiens” spinoffs. Harris, largely enthusiastic about the plans, said, “I’m just not a graphic-novel person.” She then told Harari to wait before writing again. “I think you should learn to fly a plane,” she said. “You could do anything you want. Walk the Appalachian Trail.”
One day in mid-September, Harari walked into an auditorium set up in an eighteenth-century armory in Kyiv, wearing a Donna Karan suit and bright multicolored socks. He had just met with Olena Zelenska, the wife of the Ukrainian President. The next day, he would meet Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s former President, and accept a gift box of chocolates made by Poroshenko’s company. Harari was about to give a talk at a Yalta European Strategy conference, a three-day, invitation-only event modelled on Davos. YES is funded by Victor Pinchuk, the billionaire manufacturing magnate, with the aim of promoting Ukraine’s orientation toward the West, and of promoting Victor Pinchuk.
As people took their seats, Harari stood with Pinchuk at the front of the auditorium, and for a few minutes he was exposed to strangers. Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, introduced himself. David Rubenstein, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the Carlyle Group, gave Harari his business card. Rubenstein has become a “thought leader” at gatherings like YES, and he interviews wealthy people for Bloomberg TV. (Later that day, during a YES dinner where President Volodymyr Zelensky was a guest, Rubenstein interviewed Robin Wright, the “House of Cards” star. His questions were not made less awkward by being barked. “You’re obviously a very attractive woman,” he said. “How did you decide what you wanted to do?”)
Harari’s talk lasted twenty-four minutes. He used schoolbook-style illustrations: chimney stacks, Michelangelo’s David. Nobody on Harari’s staff had persuaded him not to represent mass unemployment with art work showing only fifty men. He argued that the danger facing the world could be “stated in the form of a simple equation, which might be the defining equation of the twenty-first century: B times C times D equals AHH. Which means: biological knowledge, multiplied by computing power, multiplied by data, equals the ability to hack humans.” After the lecture, Harari had an onstage discussion with Pinchuk. “We should change the focus of the political conversation,” Harari said, referring to A.I. And: “This is one of the purposes of conferences like this—to change the global conversation.” Throughout Harari’s event, senior European politicians in the front row chatted among themselves.
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When I later talked to Steven Pinker, he made a candid distinction between speaking opportunities that were “too interesting to turn down” and others “too lucrative to turn down.” Hugo Chittenden, a director at the London Speaker Bureau, an agency that books speakers for events like YES, told me that Harari’s fee in Kyiv would reflect the fact that he’s a fresh face; there’s only so much enthusiasm for hearing someone like Tony Blair give the speech he’s given on such occasions for the past decade. On the plane to Kyiv, Yahav had indicated to me that Harari’s fee would be more than twice what Donald Trump was paid when he made a brief video appearance at YES, in 2015. Trump received a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
In public, at least, Harari doesn’t echo Pinker’s point about money gigs, and he won’t admit to having concerns about earning a fee that might compensate him, in part, for laundering the reputations of others. “We can’t check everyone who’s coming to a conference,” he told me. He was unmoved when told that Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and self-help author known for his position that “the masculine spirit is under assault,” had cancelled his YES appearance. Later this year, in Israel, Harari plans to have a private conversation with Peterson. Harari said of Peterson’s representatives, “They offered to do a public debate. And we said that we don’t want to, because there is a danger that it will just be mud wrestling.” Yahav had earlier teased Harari, saying, “You don’t argue. If somebody says something you don’t like, you don’t say, ‘I don’t like it.’ You just shut up.”
In Kyiv, Harari gave several interviews to local journalists, and sometimes mentioned a man who had been on our flight from Israel to Ukraine. After the plane left the gate, there was a long delay, and the man stormed to the front, demanding to be let off. There are times, Harari told one reporter, when the thing “most responsible for your suffering is your own mind.” The subject of human suffering—even extreme suffering—doesn’t seem to agitate Harari in quite the way that industrial agriculture does. Indeed, Harari has taken up positions against what he calls humanism, by which he means “the worship of humanity,” and which he discovers in, among other places, the foundations of Nazism and Stalinism. (This characterization has upset humanists.) Some of this may be tactical—Harari is foregrounding a contested animal-rights position—but it also reflects an aspect of his Vipassana-directed thinking. Human suffering occurs; the issue is how to respond to it. Harari’s suggestion that the airline passenger, in becoming livid about the delay, had largely made his own misery was probably right; but to turn the man into a case study seemed to breeze past all of the suffering that involves more than a transit inconvenience.
The morning after Harari’s lecture, he welcomed Pinker to his hotel suite. They hadn’t met before this trip, but a few weeks earlier they had arranged to film a conversation, which Harari would release on his own platforms. Pinker later joked that, when making the plan, he’d spoken only with Harari’s “minions,” adding, “I want to have minions.” Pinker has a literary agent, a speaking agent, and, at Harvard, a part-time assistant. Contemplating the scale of Harari’s operation, he said, without judgment, “I don’t know of any other academic or public intellectual who’s taken that route.”
Pinker is the author of, most recently, “Enlightenment Now,” which marshals evidence of recent human progress. “We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences,” he writes. “Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited.” He told me that, while preparing to meet Harari, he had refreshed his skepticism about futurology by rereading two well-known essays—Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,” published in The Atlantic in 1994, and “The Long Boom,” by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, published in Wired three years later (“We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?”).
As a camera crew set up, Harari affably told Pinker, “The default script is that you will be the optimist and I will be the pessimist. But we can try and avoid this.” They chatted about TV, and discovered a shared enthusiasm for “Shtisel,” an Israeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox family, and “Veep.”
“What else do you watch?” Harari asked.
“ ‘The Crown,’ ” Pinker said.
“Oh, ‘The Crown’ is great!”
Harari had earlier told me that he prefers TV to novels; in a career now often focussed on ideas about narrative and interiority, his reflections on art seem to stop at the observation that “fictions” have remarkable power. Over supper in Israel, he had noted that, in the Middle Ages, “only what kings and queens did was important, and even then not everything they did,” whereas novels are likely “to tell you in detail about what some peasant did.” Onstage, at YES, he had said, “If we think about art as kind of playing on the human emotional keyboard, then I think A.I. will very soon revolutionize art completely.”
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The taped conversation began. Harari began to describe future tech intrusions, and Pinker, pushing back, referred to the ubiquitous “telescreens” that monitor citizens in Orwell’s “1984.” Today, Pinker said, it would be a “trivial” task to install such devices: “There could be, in every room, a government-operated camera. They could have done that decades ago. But they haven’t, certainly not in the West. And so the question is: why didn’t they? Partly because the government didn’t have that much of an interest in doing it. Partly because there would be enough resistance that, in a democracy, they couldn’t succeed.”
Harari said that, in the past, data generated by such devices could not have been processed; the K.G.B. could not have hired enough agents. A.I. removes this barrier. “This is not science fiction,” he said. “This is happening in various parts of the world. It’s happening now in China. It’s happening now in my home country, in Israel.”
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“What you’ve identified is some of the problems of totalitarian societies or occupying powers,” Pinker said. “The key is how to prevent your society from being China.” In response, Harari suggested that it might have been only an inability to process such data that had protected societies from authoritarianism. He went on, “Suddenly, totalitarian regimes could have a technological advantage over the democracies.”
Pinker said, “The trade-off between efficiency and ethics is just in the very nature of reality. It has always faced us—even with much simpler algorithms, of the kind you could do with paper and pencil.” He noted that, for seventy years, psychologists have known that, in a medical setting, statistical decision-making outperforms human intuition. Simple statistical models could have been widely used to offer diagnoses of disease, forecast job performance, and predict recidivism. But humans had shown a willingness to ignore such models.
“My view, as a historian, is that seventy years isn’t a long time,” Harari said.
When I later spoke to Pinker, he said that he admired Harari’s avoidance of conventional wisdom, but added, “When it comes down to it, he is a liberal secular humanist.” Harari rejects the label, Pinker said, but there’s no doubt that Harari is an atheist, and that he “believes in freedom of expression and the application of reason, and in human well-being as the ultimate criterion.” Pinker said that, in the end, Harari seems to want “to be able to reject all categories.”
The next day, Harari and Yahav made a trip to Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat. They invited a few other people, and hired a guide. Yahav embraced a role of half-ironic worrier about health risks; the guide tried to reassure him by giving him his dosimeter, which measures radiation levels. When the device beeped, Yahav complained of a headache. In the ruined Lenin Square in Pripyat, he told Harari, “You’re not going to die on me. We’ve discussed this—I’m going to die first. I was smoking for years.”
Harari, whose work sometimes sounds regretful about most of what has happened since the Paleolithic era—in “Sapiens,” he writes that “the forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do”—began the day by anticipating, happily, a glimpse of the world as it would be if “humans destroyed themselves.” Walking across Pripyat’s soccer field, where mature trees now grow, he remarked on how quickly things had gone “back to normal.”
The guide asked if anyone had heard of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—the video game, which includes a sequence set in Pripyat.
“No,” Harari said.
“Just the most popular game in the world,” the guide said.
At dusk, Harari and Yahav headed back to Kyiv, in a black Mercedes. When Yahav sneezed, Harari said, “It’s the radiation starting.” As we drove through flat, forested countryside, Harari talked about his upbringing: his hatred of chess; his nationalist and religious periods. He said, “One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.”
We discussed the tall tales that occasionally appear in his writing. In “Homo Deus,” Harari writes that, in 2014, a Hong Kong venture-capital firm “broke new ground by appointing an algorithm named VITAL to its board.” A footnote provides a link to an online article, which makes clear that, in fact, there had been no such board appointment, and that the press release announcing it was a lure for “gullible” outlets. When I asked Harari if he’d accidentally led readers into believing a fiction, he appeared untroubled, arguing that the book’s larger point about A.I. encroachment still held.
In “Sapiens,” Harari writes in detail about a meeting in the desert between Apollo 11 astronauts and a Native American who dictated a message for them to take to the moon. The message, when later translated, was “They have come to steal your lands.” Harari’s text acknowledges that the story might be a “legend.”
“I don’t know if it’s a true story,” Harari told me. “It doesn’t matter—it’s a good story.” He rethought this. “It matters how you present it to the readers. I think I took care to make sure that at least intelligent readers will understand that it maybe didn’t happen.” (The story has been traced to a Johnny Carson monologue.)
Harari went on to say how much he’d liked writing an extended fictional passage, in “Homo Deus,” in which he imagines the belief system of a twelfth-century crusader. It begins, “Imagine a young English nobleman named John . . .” Harari had been encouraged in this experiment, he said, by the example of classical historians, who were comfortable fabricating dialogue, and by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams, a book “packed with so much good philosophy.” No twentieth-century philosophical book besides “Sources of the Self,” by Charles Taylor, had influenced him more.
We were now on a cobbled street in Kyiv. Harari said, “Maybe the next book will be a novel.”
At a press conference in the city, Harari was asked a question by Hannah Hrabarska, a Ukrainian news photographer. “I can’t stop smiling,” she began. “I’ve watched all your lectures, watched everything about you.” I spoke to her later. She said that reading “Sapiens” had “completely changed” her life. Hrabarska was born the week of the Chernobyl disaster, in 1986. “When I was a child, I dreamed of being an artist,” she said. “But then politics captured me.” When the Orange Revolution began, in 2004, she was eighteen, and “so idealistic.” She studied law and went into journalism. In the winter of 2013-14, she photographed the Euromaidan protests, in Kyiv, where more than a hundred people were killed. “You always expect everything will change, will get better,” she said. “And it doesn’t.”
Hrabarska read “Sapiens” three or four years ago. She told me that she had previously read widely in history and philosophy, but none of that material had ever “interested me on my core level.” She found “Sapiens” overwhelming, particularly in its passages on prehistory, and in its larger revelation that she was “one of the billions and billions that lived, and didn’t make any impact and didn’t leave any trace.” Upon finishing the book, Hrabarska said, “you kind of relax, don’t feel this pressure anymore—it’s O.K. to be insignificant.” For her, the discovery of “Sapiens” is that “life is big, but only for me.” This knowledge “lets me own my life.”
Reading “Sapiens” had helped her become “more compassionate” toward people around her, although less invested in their opinions. Hrabarska had also spent more time on creative photography projects. She said, “This came from a feeling of ‘O.K., it doesn’t matter that much, I’m just a little human, no one cares.’ ”
Hrabarska has disengaged from politics. “I can choose to be involved, not to be involved,” she said. “No one cares, and I don’t care, too.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the February 17 & 24, 2020, issue, with the headline “The Really Big Picture.”
Harari, Yuval Noah HOMO DEUS Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 2, 21 ISBN: 978-0-06-246431-6
In an intellectually provocative follow-up to Sapiens (2015), Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) looks to the future.Throughout history, humans prayed for deliverance from famine, disease, and war with spotty success. For centuries, prophets agreed that all of the suffering was "an integral part of God's cosmic plan." Today, obesity kills more humans than starvation, old age more than disease, and suicide more than murder. Having reduced three horsemen of the apocalypse to technical problems, what will humans do next? Harari's answer: we will become gods--not perfect but like Greek or Hindu gods: immortal and possessing superpowers but with some foibles. Although an atheist, the author does not demean religion. "Up until modern times," he writes, "most cultures believed that humans play a part in some cosmic plan...devised by the omnipotent gods, or by the eternal laws of nature, and humankind could not change it. The cosmic plan gave meaning to human life, but also restricted human power." Even without this agency, this belief gave our lives meaning: disasters happened for a reason, and everything would work out for the best. Deeply satisfying, this remains a core belief of most humans, including nonchurchgoers. Since the Enlightenment, the explosion of knowledge has produced dazzling progress but limited the influence of God. Many thinkers--if not the general public--agree that there is no cosmic plan but also that humans are no longer humble victims of fate. This is humanism, which grants us immense power, the benefits of which are obvious but come at a painful price. Modern culture is the most creative in history, but, faced with "a universe devoid of meaning," it's "plagued with more existential angst than any previous culture." As in Sapiens, smoothly tackles thorny issues and leads us through "our current predicament and our possible futures." A relentlessly fascinating book that is sure to become--and deserves to be--a bestseller.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Harari, Yuval Noah: HOMO DEUS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A471901861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a4ce6b44. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harper. Feb. 2017.448p. photos, notes, index. ISBN 9780062464316. $35; ebk. ISBN 9780062464354. SCI
Harari (history, Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) recaps the cognitive, agricultural, industrial, and scientific revolutions from Sapiens, his previous best seller, to highlight a shift in the locus of divinity, from shared beliefs about nature to gods to social systems and, ultimately, to humankind itself. He posits that current efforts to cure disease, disability, and death will result in biological augmentation that creates a human species beyond Homo sapiens and that this will necessarily happen along socioeconomic lines. Humanistic systems currently holding sway, such as capitalism or socialism, will disappear if humans no longer are subject to scarcity or disease. Accepting the current idea that all change is controlled by deterministic algorithms (social, biological, or computational), Harari foresees a future of data-driven technological utilitarianism if we continue to off-load decision-making responsibility to artificial intelligence. This work is speculative, obviously, and posits that if something is technologically possible, we will try it, not that we will succeed. It leaves readers with questions about consciousness and conscience and whether unrestricted data flow will necessarily lead to wisdom. VERDICT While still appealing to those of a political, historical, or anthropological bent who enjoyed Sapiens, this title will be equally thought provoking to biologists and technological futurists. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Wade M. Lee, Univ. of Toledo Lib.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Lee, Wade M. "Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow." Library Journal, vol. 142, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2017, pp. 121+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A476562439/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b740356c. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Homo Deus:
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari. Harper, $35 (448p)
ISBN 978-0-06-246431-6
Harari (Sapiens), professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provocatively explores what the future may have in store for humans in this deeply troubling book. He makes it clear that it is impossible to predict the future, so claims to be offering "possibilities rather than prophecies"--and builds a strong case for a very specific outcome. The future to which he affords the greatest probability is, in many ways, a dystopian world in which humanism has given way to "dataism"--the belief that value is measured by its contribution to information transfer--and humans play an insignificant role in world affairs or have gone extinct. The roles humans play are diminishing, Harari argues, because increasingly our creations are able to demonstrate intelligence beyond human levels and without consciousness. Whether one accepts Harari's vision, it's a bumpy journey to that conclusion. He rousingly defends the argument that humans have made the world safer from disease and famine--though his position that warfare has decreased remains controversial and debatable. The next steps on the road to dataism, he predicts, are through three major projects: "immortality, happiness, and divinity." Harari paints with a very broad brush throughout, but he raises stimulating questions about both the past and the future. (Mar.)
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"Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 2, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 57. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A477339339/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=45769995. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
HOMO DEUS
By Yuval Noah Harari
Harper
$35, 464 pages
ISBN 9780062464316
eBook available
SCIENCE
What is the next step in human evolution? Will human beings become cyborgs, implanted with chips that enable us to control our environment? Or will humans, in their never-ending quest for perfection, become gods, erasing the human altogether?
In his provocative and lively new study, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2015 bestseller Sapiens, asks challenging questions about the future of humanity and the longstanding belief that places humans at the center of the universe (humanism). In the first section of the book, Harari examines the relationships between humans and animals, contending that if we want to understand how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat humans, we should examine how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. He then proceeds to explore how humans elevated themselves to the center of the universe, developing a humanist creed that continues to have both liberating and oppressive consequences (economic prosperity, democratic institutions, wars, poverty).
In a final section, Harari looks at the next stage of human development, or demise, by asking how humanity's search for "immortality, bliss, and divinity shake the foundations of our belief in humanity." Harari refuses the role of prophet, but he does contend that Homo sapiens will disappear once technology gives us the ability to re-engineer human minds.
Thought-provoking and enlightening, Harari's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of our species.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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Carrigan, Henry L., Jr. "Homo Deus." BookPage, Mar. 2017, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A483701860/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a77c0293. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI may be the first global public intellectual to be native to the 21st century. Where other authors are carpetbaggers, hauling their 20th-century thinking into the new millennium, Mr Harari is its local boy done good. He comes with all the accoutrements of the modern pop thinker: a posh education (Oxford, followed by a teaching gig at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), two bestsellers and the obligatory TED talk. He even meditates for two hours a day.
And he is armed with a big idea: that human beings will change more in the next hundred years than they have in all of their previous existence. The combination of biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) may enable some people to be digitally enhanced, transforming what being human means. As this happens, concepts of life, consciousness, society, laws and morality will need to be revised.
The ballast for these views was laid down in Mr Harari's earlier books. In "Sapiens" he argued that what made humans special was their ability to organise on a large scale around shared beliefs, such as religion, nationalism or capitalism. In "Homo Deus" he looked at how humans may meld with technology, and what this means for inequality. He foresaw a world divided between biologically and digitally enhanced "gods" and the "useless", who lack the cash for an upgrade.
In his new book Mr Harari takes these changes as a given, and turns his attention to contemporary themes such as work, education and immigration, as well as more abstract subjects such as justice, liberty, war and religion. This descent from the ivory tower to the crowded terrain of punditry has inevitably attracted criticism--and there is plenty to mock. Clichés abound: "Strangeness becomes the new normal", Mr Harari tells readers, a few sentences before counselling them to "feel at home with the unknown" and "reinvent yourself". Still, his is a creative mind teeming with provocative ideas. Even--or especially--when they are questionable, they are worth considering.
The most controversial is that so-called "big data"--the notion that more information than ever can be collected about the world--means algorithms will know people better than they know themselves, and that this knowledge can be used by business or governments for manipulative ends. "Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was justified by the liberal story, so the coming technological revolution might establish the authority of big data algorithms, while undermining the very idea of individual freedom."
As more of the world becomes tailored around individuals' personality traits and interests, Mr Harari prophesies, people will become passive recipients of AI decisions. Their autonomy and capacity for free thinking will wither. The individual agency on which democracy and capitalism are predicated may become extinct.
Accept this premise, and Mr Harari is correct that (for example) the way political leaders are chosen, how inequality is treated and how young people are educated will all have to change. But will the technology that generates Amazon book recommendations and micro-targeted ads on Facebook ever be so flawless that people become zombies? In any case, if human brains really do get upgraded, wouldn't advanced critical thinking and free will be enshrined in the code?
The basic danger that Mr Harari identifies is certainly real. AI's machine-learning systems already utilise troves of data to spot obscure patterns and solve tricky problems. Today's web giants hold daunting amounts of information on customers' preferences, intentions and activities. As well as diagnosing the problem, Mr Harari sees a possible way out: "If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data." Yet he is vague as to how that might be accomplished, merely intoning that "this may well be the most important political question of our era", and that, unless it is answered soon, "our sociopolitical system might collapse".
Despite its occasional hyperbole, the book contains many gems. Mr Harari's analysis of the Industrial Revolution is compelling. He traces the political clout of socialism to the economic power of workers, noting that this transmission mechanism has broken down in the 21st century, when workers are no longer "exploited" but "irrelevant". He puts forward an intriguing thesis about the sputtering engines of history. The 20th century, he contends, offered three "global stories" to follow: fascism, communism and liberal capitalism. Today "we are down to zero."
The ideas shine most when Mr Harari discards the strut of the pundit and delves into the areas he knows well, history and religion. His commentary on Judaism, Catholicism and Buddhism in a supposedly post-truth world sparkles. "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," he quips.
The division of the book into thematic sections creates a jagged structure. Some of the material is recycled from old articles and interviews, and indeed from bits of Mr Harari's previous books. This is a collection of ideas, not a fully fledged cosmology. But readers who accept these shortcomings can accompany the author as he peers fascinatingly into the future.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
By Yuval Noah Harari.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"In the kingdom of cyborgs; Visions of the future." The Economist, vol. 428, no. 9107, 1 Sept. 2018, p. 69(US). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A552311571/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=badb22dc. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari
Jonathan Cape, 352pp. 18.99 [pounds sterling]
In his best-selling book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes that it was during the Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago, when worries about the future "became central to the human mind". Since then, fascination with the end of times has been a constituent feature of humanity's cultural and intellectual history. In the European tradition, tributes to progress are regularly offset by nightmares of decline and fall, especially during times of socio-economic turbulence or technological breakthrough, when, like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, societies "sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts".
Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century were haunted by visions of the apocalypse. Many doubted modern states could survive the volatile mixture of public debt, social inequality, and the international struggle for resources that threatened to plunge them into eternal war and revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered alarming descriptions of this future, writing in his book Emile (1762) that societies were "approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions". Europe's monarchies and republics, he later prophesied, had "grown decrepit and threaten soon to die". Others forecast ecological ruin and the rise of populist demagogues, with the Scottish historian Adam Ferguson predicting that sooner or later the "boasted refinements of the polished age" would make way for "the government of force". In 1779, the republican philosopher Gabriel Bonnot de Mably thought the time was "not far away when Europe will languish under the splendour and misery of despotism and slavery".
Discourses of catastrophe endured and flourished throughout the 19th century, as traditional social structures and ways of thinking were upended by the Industrial Revolution. Urbanisation, mass politics and the idea that nothing lay beyond the transformative powers of the state--these developments rocked intelligentsias between giddy optimism and grave despair.
Richard Wagner, whose operas were often set against a backdrop of mythological hellscapes, claimed that "everything mankind did, ordered and established was conceived only in fear of the end". His friend Friedrich Nietzsche also envisaged Europe's tormented atrophy after the death of God: "For a long time now our whole civilisation has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe ... Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist."
Few authors captured the anxieties of the age with as much bracing clarity as Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in 1862 described London's Crystal Palace, the great glass exhibition hall showcasing the latest technological wonders, as resembling "some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled right before your very eyes". His subsequent novels focused on the spiritual desolation initiated by man's agnostic plans for self-redemption. In The Idiot (1869), the character Lebedev describes the mid-i9th century as "the time of the third horse... and there will follow a pale horse and him whose name is Death, and after him Hell".
Twentieth-century obsessions with disaster emerged from the killing fields of the First and Second World Wars, and were conveyed with the greatest lyrical force by modernist poets such as WB Yeats in "The Second Coming" or TS Eliot in "The Hollow Men", which described the world ending "not with a bang but a whimper". Yet between 1945 and 1989, societies wondered if, in fact, the world might end with the bang of nuclear war. Even in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the entrenchment of neoliberalism as the organising principle of the world, prophecies about the End of Days lingered.
Francis Fukuyama's apocalyptic expectation that history had come to a close is the best-known (if least understood) example, while in a 1997 essay, "Our Merry Apocalypse", the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski warned against the vertiginous speeds at which societies were evolving: "I do not say that we are rushing towards catastrophe," he wrote, "only that, like Alice, we must make a huge effort to run very fast to stay in the same place." The millennium was greeted with a surge of penitential exuberance and the dread of hi-tech meltdown.
Since 9/11, and certainly since the financial crash of 2008, there has been what the literary critic Frank Kermode once called a perennial "sense of an ending". Climate change is making life a living hell, especially in Africa and Asia. More people have been driven from their homes by wars and ethnic or political persecution than at any time in history. Strongmen leaders have entrenched themselves across Europe and Asia. Western interventions in the Middle East helped create the barbarisms of Isis. Globalisation has decimated cultures, hollowed out working-class communities, widened the gulf between rich and poor, and privileged wealth over welfare. Rates of suicide and depression have soared in the world's fastest-growing economies, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt are best-sellers again, and the super-rich are building doomsday bunkers. And as Harari says in his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, "liberals fear that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump portend the end of human civilisation".
If Sapiens examined humanity's deep past, and his follow-up work, Homo Deus, considered its potential long-term future, 21 Lessons focuses on the troubles of the here and now. As Labour and the Conservatives are busy wrestling with their internal psychodramas of anti-Semitism, Brexitand Boris Johnson, it is refreshing to read someone seemingly more attuned to the potential doomsday scenarios we are facing.
How should democracies contend with the quantum leaps in biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI), just as "liberalism is losing credibility"? How should we regulate the ownership of data, which "will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset"? How will societies respond to AI, and the conceivable uselessness of workers? What will a progressive politics look like since it's "much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation"? Should we fear another world war? What can be done about climate change? And what are the best responses to terrorism and fake news?
It would be easier to take Harari seriously if his "lessons" in any way measured up to these global conundrums. Unfortunately, for those who were expecting more from such a celebrated author, his injunctions simply die on contact with the reality of our present moment.
The first problem is one of conception. The book is composed from various op-ed columns, as well as responses to questions asked by readers, journalists and colleagues. These may have worked well as individual pieces. But taken together, the result is a study thick with promise and thin in import. The sort of messages Harari issues --"the only real solution is to globalise politics"; "humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously"; "invest time and effort in uncovering our biases"; "Leave your illusions behind. They are very heavy"; "When you wake up in the morning, just focus on reality"--are either too vague or too hollow to provide any meaningful guidance.
Harari's concluding style comes straight from the insipid "on the one hand, on the other" school of second-rate essay writing. In the meagre ten pages he devotes to "War" and the chances of a third global conflict, he ends by saying that, "On the one hand, war is definitely not inevitable ... On the other hand, it would be naive to assume that war is impossible." And, in the confused and disjointed chapter on "Humility": "It goes without saying," he writes, before going on to say it, "that the Jewish people are a unique people with an astonishing history (though this is true of most peoples)."
"It similarly goes without saying," he continues, before, again, going on to say it, "that the Jewish tradition is full of deep insights and noble values (though it is also full of some questionable ideas and of racist, misogynist and homophobic attitudes)."
Like an undergraduate struggling to reach the word count, Harari ends up trafficking in pointless asides and excruciating banalities. The debate about immigration "is far from being a clear-cut battle between good and evil" and "should be decided through standard democratic procedure". (He then lazily suggests that if Europe manages to solve the issue of immigration, then "perhaps its formula can be copied on a global level".) "The world," we are subsequently told, "is becoming ever more complex." "Humans have bodies." "We just cannot prepare for every eventuality." Nuclear states and terrorism represent "different problems that demand different solutions". "The world is far more complicated than a chessboard." "Putin is neither Genghis Khan nor Stalin." And there are "several key differences between 2018 and 1914".
Then there are the risible moral dictums littered throughout the text, cringeworthy platitudes of fortune-cookie quality. So a "small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise" and "hurting others always hurts me too". "Suffering is suffering, no matter who experiences it" and "pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love". Not forgetting that "change itself is the only certainty", "emotions such as greed, envy, anger and hatred are very unpleasant" and "everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind". Reading Harari reminded me of the line attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I have ever met."
The point about lousy prose isn't just one of style. As Tony Judt argued in the New York Review of Books in 2010, rhetorical fluency doesn't always signify originality or depth of thought. But hesitant, digressive and mediocre writing does indicate an impoverished argument or analysis. As Judt put it, "When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express." This is clear in Harari's chapter on post-truth, for instance, in which he circles around the issue, meandering into subjects such as the history of Nazi and Soviet propaganda, without really landing on any kind of substantive point that helps us make sense of what's going on now. His eventual lesson is typically flat: "instead of accepting fake news as the norm, we should recognise it is a far more difficult problem than we tend to assume, and we should strive even harder to distinguish reality from fiction. Don't expect perfection. One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world."
Fine. But once we have accepted that the world is complex, what then? Harari is silent. He further warns us of politicians who "start talking in mystical terms". We should be "particularly careful" about the words "sacrifice, eternity, purity, [and] redemption". "If you hear any of these words," he instructs, "sound the alarm." By doing what, exactly? He doesn't say. Judt argued that instead of "suffering from the onset of 'newspeak,' we risk the rise of 'nospeak'". Harari's is the sort of shoddy rhetoric he was thinking of.
The larger issue with zi Lessons, however, is its depressingly apolitical message. In both Sapiens and Homo Deus, Harari reminds us that it has been the ability to cooperate that has led to our species' domination of the world. In 21 Lessons, there are occasional doses of political and economic consideration, such as a discussion of universal basic income. But by and large his lessons for living in the 21st century are distinctly Western, individualistic and self-regarding. This is expressed most succinctly towards the end of the book, when he says that, "If we want to make the world a better place, understanding ourselves, our minds and our desires will probably be far more helpful than trying to realise whatever fantasy pops up in our heads." To understand ourselves, we "should observe the actual flow of body and mind".
This is not to undermine the importance of self-reflection, nor to question the virtues of private meditation, which is the subject of Harari's unbearably dull concluding chapter. It is rather to note that such political problems he identifies have invited such diminished political reflection or solution. 21 Lessons offers no thoughts on collective action, and no vision for the common good. The scale of the political crises, however, demand that we face them together and in the political domain. If we are approaching some kind of apocalypse, it is surely not enough to just "know thyself".
Gavin Jacobson is a writer based in Hong Kong, and is working on a book about the history of the 1990s
Caption: Apocalypse now: Arthur Rackham's illustration of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries"
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Jacobson, Gavin. "The end of the world as we know it: The Sapiens author offers problems but no solutions." New Statesman, vol. 147, no. 5433, 24 Aug. 2018, pp. 40+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A553340869/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d333ce8c. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
By Yuval Noah Harari
Spiegel & Grau, $28, 400 pages ISBN 9780525512172, audio, eBook available
If there were such a thing as a required instruction manual for politicians and thought leaders, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century would deserve serious consideration. In this collection of provocative essays, Harari, author of the critically praised Sapiens and Homo Deus, tackles a daunting array of issues, endeavoring to answer a persistent question: "What is happening in the world today, and what is the deep meaning of these events?"
For all the breadth of his concerns, Harari is able to distill the most pressing challenges facing our world down to three: nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption, all of which together "add up to an unprecedented existential crisis." He explains, for example, how this century will see the development of evermore sophisticated algorithms that will alter everything from the way we work (or don't, in complex future economies that won't require many people's labor) to the way we organize and conduct our political lives.
These trends will unfold in a world that clings to what are, in Harari's opinion, already outdated notions of nationalism and religious belief, which will inevitably create tension and conflict. But Harari doesn't ignore our current controversies. His concise essays on terrorism and immigration are examples of the fresh thinking he brings to any subject.
Harari makes a passionate argument for reshaping our educational systems and replacing our current emphasis on quickly outdated substantive knowledge with the "four Cs"--critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. In the book's final piece, Harari argues that the practice of meditation, something he does for two hours daily, offers a productive tool for understanding the human mind. Meditator or not, thoughtful readers will find 21 Lessons for the 21st Century to be a mind-expanding experience.
REVIEW BY HARVEY FREEDENBERG
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
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Freedenberg, Harvey. "21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: What is there to learn?" BookPage, Sept. 2018, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A550998294/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8f7e439c. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Harari, Yuval Noah 21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Spiegel & Grau (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 9, 4 ISBN: 978-0-525-51217-2
A highly instructive exploration of "current affairs and...the immediate future of human societies."
Having produced an international bestseller about human origins (Sapiens, 2015, etc.) and avoided the sophomore jinx writing about our destiny (Homo Deus, 2017), Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) proves that he has not lost his touch, casting a brilliantly insightful eye on today's myriad crises, from Trump to terrorism, Brexit to big data. As the author emphasizes, "humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths." Three grand stories once predicted the future. World War II eliminated the fascist story but stimulated communism for a few decades until its collapse. The liberal story--think democracy, free markets, and globalism--reigned supreme for a decade until the 20th-century nasties--dictators, populists, and nationalists--came back in style. They promote jingoism over international cooperation, vilify the opposition, demonize immigrants and rival nations, and then win elections. "A bit like the Soviet elites in the 1980s," writes Harari, "liberals don't understand how history deviates from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality." The author certainly understands, and in 21 painfully astute essays, he delivers his take on where our increasingly "post-truth" world is headed. Human ingenuity, which enables us to control the outside world, may soon re-engineer our insides, extend life, and guide our thoughts. Science-fiction movies get the future wrong, if only because they have happy endings. Most readers will find Harari's narrative deliciously reasonable, including his explanation of the stories (not actually true but rational) of those who elect dictators, populists, and nationalists. His remedies for wildly disruptive technology (biotech, infotech) and its consequences (climate change, mass unemployment) ring true, provided nations act with more good sense than they have shown throughout history.
Harari delivers yet another tour de force.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Harari, Yuval Noah: 21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2018, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A546323327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=23d1257e. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
By Yuval Noah Harari.
Sept. 2018.400p. Spiegel & Grau, $28 (9780525512172). 909.82.
Convinced that change constitutes the only constant, Harari, author of the award-winning Sapiens (2015), draws from his deep knowledge of the planet's history a wealth of reasons to doubt inherited ways of thinking. What, after all, could customary wisdom ever teach us about how to forge viable twenty-first-century identities in a world where computer algorithms are rendering human skills irrelevant, where political cynicism imperils liberal democracy, and where biotechnology is transforming brain and body? In articulating the 21 lessons he considers essential in facing such unprecedented challenges, Harari focuses on issues likely to frustrate those committed to traditional religious doctrines and conventional political ideologies. In the debates over how much control over their lives humans should cede to artificial intelligence and how many environmental regulations we should accept in devising our modes of transportation, for instance, Harari sees religious orthodoxy--Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Islamic--only obscuring the key issues. Similarly, Harari finds the usual precepts of democratic liberalism quite inadequate for negotiating the inevitable merger of biotech and infotech. Harari believes that his radical skepticism will clarify readers' vision as they contemplate rapidly mutating dilemmas. But the skepticism runs so deep--undermining even stable conceptions of the freely choosing self--that some readers may finally feel not enlightened but paralyzed. A sobering and tough-minded perspective on bewildering new vistas.--Bryce Christensen
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
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Christensen, Bryce. "21 Lessons for the 21st Century." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2018, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A554041100/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a041b636. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY By Yuval Noah Harari 372 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $28.
The human mind wants to worry. This is not necessarily a bad thing -- after all, if a bear is stalking you, worrying about it may well save your life. Although most of us don't need to lose too much sleep over bears these days, modern life does present plenty of other reasons for concern: terrorism, climate change, the rise of A.I., encroachments on our privacy, even the apparent decline of international cooperation.
In his fascinating new book, ''21 Lessons for the 21st Century,'' the historian Yuval Noah Harari creates a useful framework for confronting these fears. While his previous best sellers, ''Sapiens'' and ''Homo Deus,'' covered the past and future respectively, his new book is all about the present. The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying. It's to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them. As he writes in his introduction: ''What are today's greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?''
These are admittedly big questions, and this is a sweeping book. There are chapters on work, war, nationalism, religion, immigration, education and 15 other weighty matters. But its title is a misnomer. Although you will find a few concrete lessons scattered throughout, Harari mostly resists handy prescriptions. He's more interested in defining the terms of the discussion and giving you historical and philosophical perspective.
He deploys, for example, a clever thought experiment to underscore how far humans have come in creating a global civilization. Imagine, he says, trying to organize an Olympic Games in 1016. It's clearly impossible. Asians, Africans and Europeans don't know that the Americas exist. The Chinese Song Empire doesn't think any other political entity in the world is even close to being its equal. No one even has a flag to fly or anthem to play at the awards ceremony.
The point is that today's competition among nations -- whether on an athletic field or the trading floor -- ''actually represents an astonishing global agreement.'' And that global agreement makes it easier to cooperate as well as compete. Keep this in mind the next time you start to doubt whether we can solve a global problem like climate change. Our global cooperation may have taken a couple of steps back in the past two years, but before that we took a thousand steps forward.
So why does it seem as if the world is in decline? Largely because we are much less willing to tolerate misfortune and misery. Even though the amount of violence in the world has greatly decreased, we focus on the number of people who die each year in wars because our outrage at injustice has grown. As it should.
Here's another worry that Harari deals with: In an increasingly complex world, how can any of us have enough information to make educated decisions? It's tempting to turn to experts, but how do you know they're not just following the herd? ''The problem of groupthink and individual ignorance besets not just ordinary voters and customers,'' he writes, ''but also presidents and C.E.O.s.'' That rang true to me from my experience at both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. I have to be careful not to fool myself into thinking things are better -- or worse -- than they actually are.
What does Harari think we should do about all this? Sprinkled throughout is some practical advice, including a three-prong strategy for fighting terrorism and a few tips for dealing with fake news. But his big idea boils down to this: Meditate. Of course he isn't suggesting that the world's problems will vanish if enough of us start sitting in the lotus position and chanting om. But he does insist that life in the 21st century demands mindfulness -- getting to know ourselves better and seeing how we contribute to suffering in our own lives. This is easy to mock, but as someone who's taking a course on mindfulness and meditation, I found it compelling.
As much as I admire Harari and enjoyed ''21 Lessons,'' I didn't agree with everything in the book. I was glad to see the chapter on inequality, but I'm skeptical about his prediction that in the 21st century ''data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset'' separating rich people from everyone else. Land will always be hugely important, especially as the global population nears 10 billion. Meanwhile, data on key human endeavors -- how to grow food or produce energy, for example -- will become even more widely available. Simply having information won't offer a competitive edge; knowing what to do with it will.
Similarly, I wanted to see more nuance in Harari's discussion of data and privacy. He rightly notes that more information is being gathered on individuals than ever before. But he doesn't distinguish among the types of data being collected -- the kind of shoes you like to buy versus which diseases you're genetically predisposed to -- or who is gathering it, or how they're using it. Your shopping history and your medical history aren't collected by the same people, protected by the same safeguards or used for the same purposes. Recognizing this distinction would have made his discussion more enlightening.
I was also dissatisfied with the chapter on community. Harari argues that social media including Facebook have contributed to political polarization by allowing users to cocoon themselves, interacting only with those who share their views. It's a fair point, but he undersells the benefits of connecting family and friends around the world. He also creates a straw man by asking whether Facebook alone can solve the problem of polarization. On its own, of course it can't -- but that's not surprising, considering how deep the problem cuts. Governments, civil society and the private sector all have a role to play, and I wish Harari had said more about them.
But Harari is such a stimulating writer that even when I disagreed, I wanted to keep reading and thinking. All three of his books wrestle with some version of the same question: What will give our lives meaning in the decades and centuries ahead? So far, human history has been driven by a desire to live longer, healthier, happier lives. If science is eventually able to give that dream to most people, and large numbers of people no longer need to work in order to feed and clothe everyone, what reason will we have to get up in the morning?
It's no criticism to say that Harari hasn't produced a satisfying answer yet. Neither has anyone else. So I hope he turns more fully to this question in the future. In the meantime, he has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century.
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PHOTO: Yuval Noah Harari (PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVIER MIDDENDORP) (BR20) DRAWING (DRAWING BY JESSICA SVENDSEN)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
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Gates, Bill. "Thinking Big." The New York Times Book Review, 9 Sept. 2018, p. 1(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A553491960/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3d423f1b. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI
Spiegel & Grau, 2018
400 pp., $28.00
Harari contends that secularism "probably sets the ethical bar too high. Most people just cannot live up to such a demanding code." Moreover, he maintains that "Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow."
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari is the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; and now, to complete the triptych as it were, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. "[I] want to zoom in on the here and now," the author says in his new book. "My focus is on current affairs and on the immediate future of human societies. What is happening right now? What are today's greatest challenges and most important choices? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?" Harari has the credentials to tackle his wildly ambitious task: he is formidably erudite, insightful, and sophisticated. That I found the book both provocative and sometimes exasperating would, I think, please and even amuse him.
I'm not sure "Lessons" in the book's title is appropriate; analyses might be more accurate (more on this later). At any rate, Harari's scrutiny of the most momentous phenomena shaping our world and its future comprises twenty-one chapters (some coincidence!). Part I is called "The Technological Challenge," which is a logical and inevitable choice for investigation, given technology's importance and the awe it commands in so many aspects of our lives. The section is also deeply pessimistic, which might be logical, but is it inevitable? Harari believes that liberal democracy, despite its flaws, "is the most successful and most versatile political model humans have so far developed for dealing with the challenges of the modern world." And he sets out a case for why this model is profoundly stressed by the onrush of incredible new technology.
Harari begins by asserting that "Since the 1990s the Internet has changed the world probably more than any other factor" while the "democratic system is still struggling to understand what hit it, and it is unequipped to deal with the next shocks." Those shocks will probably derive from mind-boggling advances in the realms of artificial intelligence (AI), biotech, and infotech:
The revolutions in biotech and
infotech will give us control of
the world inside us, and will
enable us to engineer and manufacture
life. We will learn how to
design brains, extend lives, and
kill thoughts at our discretion.
Nobody knows what the consequence
will be. Humans were
always far better at inventing tools
than using them wisely.
Harari also posits that by 2050, AI could render most human beings redundant in the workplace, including in the white-collar professions. This state of affairs--millions (billions?) unemployed and unemployable--will indelibly alter governments, social relations, and daily life. What will those superfluous individuals do? Is the nihilism and despair operating in the Western world today a mere foreshadowing of what's to come?
It could be so if Harari's most ruinous scenarios come to pass, wherein external data-processing systems "can hack all your desires, decisions, and opinions. They can know exactly who you are." It gets worse: biometrics (surveying every detail of the human body) allied with new, extraordinary modes of AI will literally, if Harari is correct, change human nature in every conceivable--and inconceivable--way:
[O]nce we begin to count on AI
to decide what to study, where to
work [if we work], and whom to
marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making.
... As authority shifts from humans to
algorithms, we may no longer view the world as the
playground of autonomous individuals struggling to
make the right choices. Instead, we might perceive
the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as
little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe
that humanity's cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing
data-processing system--and then
merge into it.
Harari doesn't provide reasons to be sanguine about the possibilities of such a metamorphosis into what he calls "digital dictatorships." Not depressed yet? Try this, a final fillip concerning Harari's techno trepidation: "Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be connected starting in the womb." I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad I won't be around to see all this.
21 Lessons approaches other subjects that readers might have an easier time discussing reasonably: God, secularism, and free will. "From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history," Harari contends, noting that religious faith isn't necessary to behave morally. (For Harari, morality means "reducing human suffering.") So far, so good. The author also says this about God:
When all is said and done, it is a matter of semantics.
When I use the word 'God,' I think of the God of the
Islamic State, of the Crusades, of the Inquisition, and
of the 'God hates fags' banners. When I think of the
mysteries of existence, I prefer to use other words, so
as to avoid confusion.
A reader could conclude from this passage that Harari's an atheist, but my memory and notes don't indicate that he ever explicitly states that he is.
For Harari, the most important virtues of an exemplary secular person are commitments to truth, compassion, equality, freedom, responsibility, and courage ("it takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even greater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown"). Harari acknowledges that at least some of these moral principles overlap with both secularism and religion, but he also contends that secularism "probably sets the ethical bar too high. Most people just cannot live up to such a demanding code." (I'm guilty as charged.) Moreover, he maintains that "Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow." He means secularists too. "Secularism should not be equated with Stalinist dogmatism or with the bitter fruits of Western imperialism and runaway industrialization. Yet it cannot shirk all responsibility for them, either." He goes on to discuss some of those responsibilities. It's fascinating to ponder the implications of this, and I regret to say that he might be partly right.
Free will doesn't earn its own chapter in 21 Lessons, which is ironic because it's integral to Harari's contemplation of God and secularism, and, indeed, to his whole Weltanschauung. But he doesn't shun it either, writing that "Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound 'free will,' that this 'free will' is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free.'" However, "When the biotech revolution merges with the infotech revolution, it will produce Big Data algorithms that can monitor and understand my feelings much better than I can, and then authority will probably shift from humans to computers. My illusion of free will is likely to disintegrate." He also contends that liberalism is "particularly confused" on the topic: "If by 'free will' you mean the freedom to do what you desire, then yes, humans have free will. But if by 'free will' you mean the freedom to choose what to desire, then no, humans have no free will." Harari sums up by offering humanity a rather feeble anodyne: "Ultimately we should realize that we do not control our desires, or even our reactions to these desires. Realizing this can help us become less obsessive about our opinions, about our feelings, about our desires. We don't have free will, but we can be a bit more free from the tyranny of our will." We've come a long way from college Philosophy 101 and about what Descartes and Kant and other philosophers had to say on all this.
There are, of course, savants who argue for the other side of the conundrum. The late great Martin Gardner had this to say in his book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (1983):
I cannot conceive of myself as
existing without a body in both
space and time, or without a brain
that has free will. I agree with
Samuel Johnson that "All theory is
against the freedom of the will; all
experience for it." I cannot comprehend
how the dilemma can be
resolved, but I am no more troubled
by this than by the fact that
I cannot understand time, being,
consciousness, or the nature of
God. Indeed, it was with a feeling
of enormous relief that I concluded,
long ago, that free will is
an unfathomable mystery.
Gardner concludes: "I am persuaded that somehow, in a way utterly beyond our ken, you and I possess that incomprehensible power we call free will." I find these remarks more congenial, hence more cogent, than Harari's. (Don't you?) As I humbly see it, since I'm held responsible for my actions by society, I'm being honorable, or at least decent, by assuming that those actions are manifested through the exercise of my will. I would also maintain that while people are sometimes ruled by unruly emotions deep in their psyches, major aspects of human endeavor--science, technology, scholarly work, writing, sex (just kidding; I wanted to make sure you're paying attention), and the like--are inconceivable without rational, intellectual, conscious thought processes. Harari's genome didn't create 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. (As for his predictions about future strictures concerning free will, I can only say that the future will have to take care of itself.)
A friend of mine disparages Harari because she finds him "glib." She believes this to be the case, I suspect, because Harari's prose is smooth and clean, and my friend, I presume, expects writing on weighty subjects to be wooden, ponderous, pedantic. But Harari's style is an exemplary instrument for explicating his memes and themes. I have a few qualms about the book, some somewhat more consequential than others. There are a couple of sentences that disturb me: "Though nationalism was leading to horrendous conflicts on an unprecedented scale [during World War I], modern nation states also built massive systems of healthcare, education, and welfare. National health services made Passchendaele and Verdun seem worthwhile." This is unworthy of Harari. Nothing could make the unspeakable carnage that occurred at those two Great War battles seem worthwhile. Elsewhere, Harari says that "the kamikaze [sic] were ordinary planes loaded with explosives and guided by human pilots willing to go on one-way missions. This willingness was the product of the death defying spirit of sacrifice cultivated by [Japan's] State Shinto." But if my memory of my reading about World War II serves me correctly, many of those pilots weren't so willing, were, in fact, coerced. On a lighter note, Harari proves that a scholar can be quite knowledgeable and perceptive about certain subjects, but not others. He's unreliable on movies. He thinks The Matrix and The Truman Show are brilliant and he admires Inside Out. I think all three are pretentious stinkers. (Naturally, I'm right.)
The most disquieting aspects of2i Lessons for the 21st Century probably aren't Harari's fault. They are the same unsettling vibes I found in another recent, also very good book by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking called Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media. Like War works on a smaller scale than 21 Lessons, but it too presents a canvas of humanity's presumed appalling future. Both books also offer suggestions for thwarting the horrors they delineate. Here's the problem: the nightmarish visions that these authors evoke are so powerful, so overwhelmingly unnerving, that the books' correctives--any correctives--seem pitifully inadequate, seem useless. A malign future, rooted in our tremulous present, appears to be inevitable.
This might seem counterintuitive, but the seemingly hopeless prognosis for a hellish new world in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is no reason not to read it (or LikeWar, for that matter). Harari's ultimate goal, I believe, is polemical: he wants to encourage discussion and argument, and I don't doubt that he hopes readers form opinions opposed to his own. Whatever terrors the future holds, it is safe to say that engaging right now with a splendid mind like Harari's is an eminently civilized endeavor.
Howard Schneider is a writer and editor.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Humanist Association
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Schneider, Howard. "21 Lessons for the 21st Century." The Humanist, vol. 79, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2019, pp. 42+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A577396653/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7fa9f8a9. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Harari, Yuval Noah UNSTOPPABLE US, VOLUME 1 Bright Matter Books (Children's None) $24.99 10, 18 ISBN: 978-0-593-64346-4
From the author of the adult title Sapiens (2015), an explanation of how physically weak humans came to dominate other animals.
Spoiler alert: It was through human inventiveness and storytelling. Harari's lively, reader-directed prose and Ruiz's expressive graphics will help young readers grasp an almost-unimaginably distant past, from the start of toolmaking up to (in this volume) Homo sapiens' collaborative extinction of mammoths. The text is dramatically punctuated by large and small illustrations. Ingenious use of perspective, imaginative details, and relevance to the text make the artwork integral to this book's appeal. Most of the illustrations depict cheerful, brown-skinned humans. Bolded sentences in different colors break up text blocks and point to big ideas and questions. Humor is effectively deployed, and concepts like evolution, DNA, and religion are compared to kid-adjacent phenomena (to help kids grapple with the idea of human cooperation, for instance, the author asks readers to imagine all the people, from students to teachers to cafeteria workers to the people who create textbooks, who make a school possible), connected to the next topic, and paced to appeal to middle-grade readers. When an answer isn't known, Harari admits, "We don't know."
An enticingly depicted intro to human history and archaeology, simply expressed but extensive and engaging. (timeline, map, resources, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Harari, Yuval Noah: UNSTOPPABLE US, VOLUME 1." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A729727280/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f5f0ac22. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
In ''Unstoppable Us,'' he presents the provocative ideas that drove his 2015 best seller, ''Sapiens,'' without dumbing them down.
UNSTOPPABLE US: How Humans Took Over the World, by Yuval Noah Harari. Illustrated by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz.
Where are you from?
For most of us, the answer is automatic, and personal. I'm from Galveston. You might be from Poughkeepsie. But anyone with a little knowledge of human origins knows the deeper answer for every human on the planet: Africa.
The story of humans, who rose from a position in nature as fairly unexceptional primates to becoming the world's dominant species -- and a threat to planetary survival -- is vast and complicated and uncomfortable.
How in the world could you explain all that to kids?
Yuval Noah Harari has taken on the challenge.
Harari, the author of the 2015 best seller ''Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,'' is not timid. In ''Sapiens,'' he guided readers through a sweeping tour of revolutions in human development, including the development of cognition, of agriculture and of science. That book garnered praise from Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama (who called it ''interesting and provocative'').
Since that first blazing success, Harari has expanded the project through Sapienship, the multidisciplinary organization he founded with his husband, Itzik Yahav, in 2019. There is the multivolume ''Sapiens: A Graphic History,'' and a coming ''Sapiens Live,'' billed as ''an immersive experience inspired by the works of Yuval Noah Harari.'' And there is the book before us, UNSTOPPABLE US: How Humans Took Over the World (Bright Matter Books, 208 pp., $24.99, ages 10 to 14), the first of four planned volumes.
If Harari were selling ketchup or soda, this would be called ''brand extension.'' But he's selling ideas, so let's call it genius.
And not just marketing genius. Harari has succeeded because his ideas are gripping and thought-provoking. In a neat trick, he has simplified the presentation for this younger audience without dumbing it down.
The new book, with lively illustrations by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, explains why humans have had such stunning success -- ''we rule the world'' -- and the cost of that dominance to competing human species and other animals we have driven to extinction. From the start, he wants his readers to understand the burden of our achievement; that ''we humans are now so powerful that the fate of all other animals depends on us. The only reason lions, dolphins and eagles still exist is because we allow them to.'' And so, from the earliest pages, he lets his young readers know that with understanding comes obligation: ''To be a good human being, you need to understand the power you have and what to do with it.''
Harari begins his sprint through human history with our simple primate ancestors. ''They lived in the wild, they climbed trees to pick fruit, they sniffed around looking for mushrooms, and they ate worms, snails and frogs.'' (He knows that kids love to be grossed out.) And while the early humans learned to use tools, even fire, they didn't make the big steps toward dominance until about 50,000 years ago, he writes. The Sapiens developed an ability that helped drive the other humans -- the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the Hobbit-like Flores Man -- to extinction. That ability, he writes, is that ''we can cooperate better than any other animal,'' even with complete strangers.
The key to that cooperation, he argues, is ''our ability to dream up stuff that isn't really there and to tell all kinds of imaginary stories. We're the only animals that can invent and believe in legends, fairy tales and myths.''
Our fairy tales surround us, bind us, motivate us. And those works of imagination, he tells us, are found in the rules of our games, but also in religion, in the abstract nature of money and even in the creation of corporations. ''McDonald's is a story that grown-ups believe, but it exists only in our imagination.''
Heady stuff, especially for young minds. If you buy ''Unstoppable Us'' for your child, expect some very intense conversations. You know, the kind we parents say we want to have, but which can make us uncomfortable.
Roll with it.
Harari shows how Stone Age people may have lived through the archaeological evidence that has survived, and explains the ways that many of our impulses are rooted in our ancient selves: ''Our bodies think we're still living in the ancient African savanna, and back then it made perfect sense to binge on sweet and fatty food.''
And he explains our destructiveness. With great power comes great responsibility, as Uncle Ben famously told young Peter Parker, and Harari goes into Uncle Ben mode as he describes the ways that our superpower has gone wrong. How we drove the Neanderthals out of existence, except for the vestiges that remain in some of our DNA. How we reached Australia about 50,000 years ago, and began exterminating the giant species that lived there. How we crossed the land bridge into what is now called North America and spread across that continent -- and killed the mammoths and mastodons and giant beavers and so many more.
But he tells his young audience that we can also use our powers for good by inventing stories and cooperating in large numbers to save the creatures that our species has been pushing over the edge. ''If you understand how corporations work, and if you know how to post a story on Instagram or organize a demonstration, then you can help save whales and other animals. From a whale's point of view, you can do so many amazing things that you almost seem like a superhero.''
It's a good message, and one that today's students need to hear; he makes it part of the book's dedication: ''To all beings -- those gone, those living and those still to come. Our ancestors made the world what it is. We can decide what the world will become.''
I couldn't help thinking of the climate activist Greta Thunberg as I read those words, though she is not mentioned. That's understandable; we wrecked species over the last 50,000 years. We didn't get around to wrecking the climate until about 200 years ago. So there are more stories to tell.
I also had to wonder whether this is a book that will get into trouble. With a surge of self-appointed censors building long lists of works to yank from schools and libraries, it wouldn't surprise me. Harari describes religion as a creation of the imagination, and a way to subjugate people to a leader's will. And he says McDonald's is a fiction! In the corners of our nation that are starting to feel uncomfortably like Margaret Atwood's Gilead, exposing our youth to ideas like that could be courting anathema.
Which, of course, would be great for the brand.
John Schwartz, a former New York Times reporter, is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
John Schwartz is a former science writer for The New York Times, who focused on climate change.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: Ricard Zaplana Ruiz's illustrations for ''Unstoppable Us'' follow Yuval Noah Harari's text through human history. This article appeared in print on page BR20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The New York Times Company
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Schwartz, John. "Roots and Revolutions." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Nov. 2022, p. 20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A726337554/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=19098fc9. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Harari, Yuval Noah UNSTOPPABLE US, VOLUME 2 Bright Matter Books (Children's None) $24.99 3, 5 ISBN: 9780593711521
The bestselling science writer explains why human history is rooted in inequality.
The gist of Harari's Unstoppable Us (2022): Humans have thrived by creating fictions such as religion and money, a situation that has facilitated cooperation via shared belief in intangibles. In this follow-up work, Harari argues that stories have cemented inequities introduced by the agricultural revolution. Though the domestication of plants and animals led to great innovation, it also made life more stressful. Property made it necessary to keep track of who owned what, which spurred the Sumerian invention of writing and, eventually, bureaucracy and schools. Surveying ancient Egypt, the author discusses concepts such as taxation, ownership, and slavery--"one of the worst things ever invented." Stories and rituals, he notes, reinforced societal stratification; Brahmin priests, for instance, perpetuated the idea that Dalits were being punished for misbehavior in past lives. Stories also served as justifications for war, as well as racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. This simplified narrative doesn't address matriarchies, egalitarian societies, or retreats from settled farming. Still, overall it's cogent and thought provoking, expressed in humorous, conversational prose. Underscoring the power of stories, fictional conversations (identified as such) interspersed throughout make the author's arguments more comprehensible--and entertaining. As in the previous book, Zaplana Ruiz's vivid illustrations round out the work. Ultimately, Harari invites young people to rewrite these harmful narratives.
An engaging, informative work of history sure to draw in readers even as it serves up harsh truths. (timeline, author's note, map) (Nonfiction. 11-14)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Harari, Yuval Noah: UNSTOPPABLE US, VOLUME 2." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A789814576/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=390ae0dd. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Harari, Yuval Noah NEXUS Random House (NonFiction None) $35.00 9, 10 ISBN: 9780593734223
The author ofHomo Deus considers the future of information networks.
His international bestseller laying out ideas on human destiny is a hard act to follow, but Harari manages. The first part examines past information networks, leading with the intriguing declaration that "most information isnot an attempt to represent reality. What information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things." What that means is that "errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too." Information is often wrong, and more information does not necessarily improve matters, so it's essential that institutions contain self-correcting mechanisms. Our Constitution receives high marks for allowing amendments; holy books considered infallible, like the Bible and Quran, create problems and "hold important lessons for the attempt to create infallible AIs." The second part deals with governments whose information networks maintain a balance between truth and order, arguing that just as sacrificing truth for the sake of order comes with a cost, so does sacrificing order for truth. Modern technology enabled large-scale democracy as well as large-scale authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Harari deplores the conception that democracies operate through majority rule. In fact, he argues, democracies guarantee everyone liberties that even the majority cannot take away. This is a sophisticated concept that current events suggest is not universally accepted, and recent advances in artificial intelligence may be an additional destabilizing force. Harari warns that modern societies controlled by carbon-based life forms (us) must deal with inorganic, silicon-based networks (AI) that, unlike the printing press, the radio, and other inventions, can make decisions and create ideas by themselves. AI's ability to gather massive amounts of information and engage in total surveillance "will not necessarily be either bad or good. All we know for sure is that it will be alien and it will be fallible."
Confronting the avalanche of books on the prospects of AI, readers would do well to begin with this one.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Harari, Yuval Noah: NEXUS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8fc40230. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Nexus. By Yuval Noah Harari. Random House; 528 pages; $35. Fern Press; £28
"Let Truth and falsehood grapple," argued John Milton in "Areopagitica", a pamphlet published in 1644 defending the freedom of the press. Such freedom would, he admitted, allow incorrect or misleading works to be published, but bad ideas would spread anyway, even without printing—so better to allow everything to be published and let rival views compete on the battlefield of ideas. Good information, Milton confidently believed, would drive out bad: the "dust and cinders" of falsehood "may yet serve to polish and brighten the armory of truth".
Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, lambasts this position as the "naive view" of information in a timely new book. It is mistaken, he argues, to suggest that more information is always better and likely to lead to the truth; the internet did not end totalitarianism, and racism cannot be fact-checked away. But he also argues against a "populist view" that objective truth does not exist and that information should be wielded as a weapon. (It is ironic, he notes, that the notion of truth as illusory, which has been embraced by right-wing politicians, originated with left-wing thinkers such as Karl Marx and Michel Foucault.)
Few historians have achieved the global fame of Mr Harari, who has sold more than 45m copies of his megahistories, including "Sapiens". He counts Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg among his fans. A techno-futurist who contemplates doomsday scenarios, Mr Harari has warned about technology's ill effects in his books and speeches, yet he captivates Silicon Valley bosses, whose innovations he criticises.
In "Nexus", a sweeping narrative ranging from the Stone Age to the era of artificial intelligence (AI), Mr Harari sets out to provide "a better understanding of what information is, how it helps to build human networks, and how it relates to truth and power". Lessons from history can, he suggests, provide guidance in dealing with big information-related challenges in the present, chief among them the political impact of AI and the risks to democracy posed by disinformation.
In an impressive feat of temporal sharpshooting, a historian whose arguments operate on the scale of millennia has managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly. With 70 nations, accounting for around half the world's population, heading to the polls this year, questions of truth and disinformation are top of mind for both voters—and readers.
Mr Harari's starting-point is a novel definition of information itself. Most information, he says, does not represent anything, and has no essential link to truth. Information's defining feature is not representation but connection; it is not a way of capturing reality but a way of linking and organising ideas and, crucially, people. (It is a "social nexus", he writes.) Early information technologies , such as stories, clay tablets or religious texts, and later newspapers and radio, are ways of orchestrating social order.
Here Mr Harari is building on an argument from his previous books, such as "Sapiens" and "Homo Deus" : that humans prevailed over other species because of their ability to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, and that shared stories and myths allowed such interactions to be scaled up, beyond direct person-to-person contact. Laws, gods, currencies and nationalities are all intangible things that are conjured into existence through shared narratives. These stories do not have to be entirely accurate; fiction has the advantage that it can be simplified and can ignore inconvenient or painful truths.
The opposite of myth, which is engaging but may not be accurate, is the list, which boringly tries to capture reality, and gives rise to bureaucracy. Societies need both mythology and bureaucracy to maintain order. He considers the creation and interpretation of holy texts and the emergence of the scientific method as contrasting approaches to the questions of trust and fallibility, and to maintaining order versus finding truth.
He also applies this framing to politics, treating democracy and totalitarianism as "contrasting types of information networks". Starting in the 19th century, mass media made democracy possible at a national level, but also "opened the door for large-scale totalitarian regimes". In a democracy, information flows are decentralised and rulers are assumed to be fallible; under totalitarianism, the opposite is true. Now digital media, in various forms, are having political effects of their own. New information technologies are catalysts for major historical shifts.
As in his previous works, Mr Harari's writing is confident, wide-ranging and spiced with humour. He draws upon history, religion, epidemiology, mythology, literature, evolutionary biology and his own family biography, often leaping across millennia and back again within a few paragraphs. Some readers will find this invigorating; others may experience whiplash.
And many may wonder why, for a book about information that promises new perspectives on AI, he spends so much time on religious history, and in particular the history of the Bible. The reason is that holy books and AI are both attempts, he argues, to create an "infallible superhuman authority". Just as decisions made in the fourth century AD about which books to include in the Bible turned out to have far-reaching consequences centuries later, the same, he worries, is true today about AI: the decisions made about it now will shape humanity's future.
Mr Harari posits that AI should really stand for "alien intelligence" and worries that AIs are potentially "new kinds of gods". Unlike stories, lists or newspapers, AIs can be active agents in information networks, like people. Existing computer-related perils such as algorithmic bias, online radicalisation, cyber-attacks and ubiquitous surveillance will all be made worse by AI, he fears. He predicts AIs could create dangerous new myths, cults, political movements and new financial products that crash the economy.
Some of his nightmare scenarios seem implausible. He imagines an autocrat becoming beholden to his AI surveillance system, and another who, distrusting his defence minister, hands control of his nuclear arsenal to an AI instead. Some of his concerns seem quixotic: he rails against TripAdvisor, a website where tourists rate restaurants and hotels, as a terrifying "peer-to-peer surveillance system". He has a habit of conflating all forms of computing with AI. And his definition of "information network" is so flexible that it encompasses everything from large language models like ChatGPT to witch-hunting groups in early modern Europe.
But Mr Harari's narrative is engaging, and his framing is strikingly original. He is, by his own admission, an outsider when it comes to writing about computing and AI, which grants him a refreshingly different perspective. Tech enthusiasts will find themselves reading about unexpected aspects of history, while history buffs will gain an understanding of the AI debate. Using storytelling to connect groups of people? That sounds familiar. Mr Harari's book is an embodiment of the very theory it expounds.
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Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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"The information wars are about to get worse, Yuval Noah Harari argues." The Economist, 6 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A807524286/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=94e99ef0. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari
Fern Press, [pounds sterling]25, pp. 528
Yuval Noah Harari has sold more than 45 million books in 65 languages. He is a professor with a PhD from the University of Oxford, has spoken at TED and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and his latest book, Nexus, is considered 'erudite, provocative and entertaining' by Rory Stewart and 'thought-provoking and so very well reasoned' by Stephen Fry.
This is the story the book's cover tells us about its contents, and Nexus itself argues that it is stories which are fundamental to shaping the world. It posits that the strength of humanity comes from building large networks in which we work together co-operatively, but that our weakness is that once we have amassed power this way, we use it unwisely. Information lets us pull together these powerful networks; but information is not based on sharing facts or things that are true so much as on building a shared story.
Gradually new communications technologies increased the group that could share the narrative: print allowed a story to spread, largely unchanged, through books. Radio and TV accelerated the process; but computers, says Harari, have changed its character, since humans are no longer essential at every step in the story chain. Computers can tell their own stories; and so AI might come to dominate humanity either by accident or design, simply by telling its own story better than we tell ours.
This is a sweeping narrative, taking in philosophy, history, economics, computer science and physics to place information and narrative in its 'proper' place in history. Such a feat is now par for the course for an author whose first popular book, Sapiens, encompassed all human history, and whose second, Homo Deus, its future. After two such volumes there can be no room for small ideas in this one--and indeed we learn that it is our 'intersubjective realities' that shape the world.
Harari argues that information technologies made both democracy and totalitarianism feasible, and they are characterised by the different ways information flows in each. Since today's computers can process information beyond human capabilities, we are on a precipice never faced before. Now is, conveniently, the most exciting point in 70,000 years of human history. These are big ideas, backed by hundreds of references, that can sweep you along. Except the problem with stories is that you can always tell them in more ways than one. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Whether a battle was a disaster or a triumph depends on what you highlight.
The alternative stories about Nexus start to form when you resist the sweep of the narrative current. That could be early on, when a chapter that actually asks 'What is information?' first posits that 'biologists' and 'some physicists' think information might be a more fundamental building block of the universe than energy, before rejecting any existing definitions of the term. Information is not necessarily connected to truth, or even to an attempt to represent reality. 'Any object can be information,' Harari argues, before saying that most information 'does not attempt to represent anything'. Instead, it 'always connects'.
This is the kind of profundity typically experienced by teenage weed-smokers the first time they wonder aloud whether the 'red' they see is the same as the 'red' you do. If I tie two pieces of glassware together, that string is apparently now 'information', according to Harari--though who knows what that means beyond a bigger mess if I throw one on the floor.
Once you snag on the narrative, it is hard to be captivated any more. Information defined the Cold War, we are told, before being given a very conventional account of the era that suggests many more factors were actually at play. The massacres of Rohingya Muslim minority communities in Myanmar, because they involved misinformation spread on Facebook (though experts generally think to a lesser extent than Harari suggests), are a sign of the involvement of non-human intelligence in mass slaughter, and so a pivotal moment in history. But Facebook's unwillingness to change its recommendation engine or to hire enough moderators in regions such as Mynamar are human decisions.
From AI's apparent role in the Myanmar massacres, ever more is built: computers might be able to amass all the information in society, giving them power beyond anything we imagined in the previous century, an era in which the world came within minutes of nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion. From the flimsiest of foundations, Harari constructs entire dystopian futures.
Publishing history suggests which narrative will win: readers who have previously enjoyed Harari's storytelling are likely to do so again. But the expected success of this book perhaps itself serves to reassure against the dangers of AI. One major fear experts share for the future of information is the rise of 'slop'--automatically produced online content that engrosses us and occupies our attention, satisfying our desire for culture or for information while having no deeper meaning or sustaining value. If nothing else, Nexus shows us that AI has some way to go before it can match human ingenuity on that particular front.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Ball, James. "The problem with stories." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10231, 28 Sept. 2024, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810959277/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=557b802e. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.
Yuval Noah Harari's study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you'll be both entertained and scared.
NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari
In the summer of 2022, a software engineer named Blake Lemoine was fired by Google after an interview with The Washington Post in which he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he had been working on, had achieved sentience.
A few months later, in March 2023, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, signed by hundreds of technology leaders including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, called on A.I. labs to pause their research. Artificial intelligence, it claimed, posed ''profound risks to society and humanity.''
The following month, Geoffrey Hinton, the ''godfather of A.I.,'' quit his post at Google, telling this newspaper that he regretted his life's work. ''It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,'' he warned.
Over the last few years we have become accustomed to hare-eyed messengers returning from A.I.'s frontiers with apocalyptic warnings. And yet, real action in the form of hard regulation has been little in evidence. Last year's executive order on A.I. was, as one commentator put it, ''directional and aspirational'' -- a shrewdly damning piece of faint praise.
Meanwhile, stock prices for the tech sector continue to soar while the industry mutters familiar platitudes: The benefits outweigh the risks; the genie is already out of the bottle; if we don't do it, our enemies will.
Yuval Noah Harari has no time for these excuses. In 2011, he published ''Sapiens,'' an elegant and sometimes profound history of our species. It was a phenomenon, selling over 25 million copies worldwide. Harari followed it up by turning his gaze forward with ''Homo Deus,'' in which he considered our future. At this point, Harari, an academic historian, became saddled with a new professional identity and a new circle of influence: A.I. expert, invited into the rarefied echelons of ''scientists, entrepreneurs and world leaders.'' ''Nexus,'' in essence, is Harari's report from this world.
First, it must be said that the subtitle -- ''A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to A.I.'' -- is misleading. Really, what we have is two separate books, neither brief. The first 200 pages are indeed historical in their way. Unfortunately, this is a dizzying, all-in version of history that swerves unsatisfyingly from Assyrian clay tablets to a 19th-century cholera outbreak to an adaptation of the ''Ramayana'' on Indian TV to the Peasants' Revolt in medieval England to the Holocaust in Romania, and so on. It doesn't feel controlled, or even particularly expert -- and the effect is a little like a flight where the person sitting next to you is well-read, hyper-caffeinated and determined to tell you his Theory of Everything.
In a nutshell, Harari's thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data.
All of this is sort of obvious-interesting, while also being too vague -- too open to objection and counterexample -- to constitute a useful theory of information. After a lot of time, we have arrived at a loose proof of what we hopefully felt already: Systems that are self-correcting -- because they promote conversation and mutuality -- are preferable to those that offer only blind, disenfranchised subservience.
In the end, however, this doesn't really matter, because the second half of the book is where the action is. The meat of ''Nexus'' is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don't hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, ''the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.'') It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.
The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick's HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment -- legal, financial or military decision-making -- to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.
Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a ''Silicon Curtain'' descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations -- how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves.
None of these scenarios, however, is a given. Harari points to the problem of email spam, which used to clog up our inboxes and waste millions of hours of productivity every day. And then, suddenly, it didn't. In 2015, Google was able to claim that its Gmail algorithm had a 99.9 percent success rate in blocking genuine spam. ''When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,'' writes Harari, ''they can usually do it.''
Even in its second half, not all of ''Nexus'' feels original. If you pay attention to the news, you will recognize some of the stories Harari tells. But, at its best, his book summarizes the current state of affairs with a memorable clarity.
Parts of ''Nexus'' are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.'s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves.
That may just sound like common sense, but it is valuable when said by a global intellectual with Harari's reach. It is only frustrating that he could not have done so more concisely.
NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI | By Yuval Noah Harari | Random House | 518 pp. | $35
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PHOTOS: An Intel employee holds a wafer -- a thin slice of semiconductor substance used in the production of integrated circuits -- at the company's Fab 42 manufacturing plant in Arizona. (PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) This article appeared in print on page BR21.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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Source Citation
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Duncan, Dennis. "The Silicon Curtain." The New York Times Book Review, 27 Oct. 2024, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813730586/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e24f326c. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.