Yuval Noah Harari: A Great Thinker and His Recent Thoughts

We usually are inspired, our goals enhanced, our benchmarks raised though we may also feel envy and diminished in comparison.

In a life of limited time, we can spend our hours being exposed to and learning from those we admire, or the things we admire, whether they be books or paintings or a places -- or we can spend time enraged or complaining while surrounding ourselves with those less accomplished so we feel better in comparison.

Most of us do both, but when we feel ourselves in a downward spiral maybe we should say to ourselves, "Let us spend time with something or somebody we admire!"

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, author and philosopher who is an extraordinary thinking and feeling filled human being who tells stories while warning us about stories, who explains technology while being suspicious about technology and a person who will change the way you perceive and understand things. He is one of many people and things I admire. This is the first of a series of posts that will focus on these individuals or things.

Here is Yuval’s website. It is teeming with goodies.

Yuval’s three books -- Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21^st century -- are each absolutely incredible and are worth reading and re-reading.

Long before data was cool Yuval pointed out that there was a new religious order called "Dataism" which he described eight years ago in the Financial Times like this:

"For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

"Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all. Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimized by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data.

"This novel creed may be called Dataism. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview 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."

Yuval has been studying AI for eight years and has some very interesting perspectives, including that AI is the first human tool created that can make decisions and can create ideas.

The Atomic Bomb could not decide to launch itself or a piano to will itself to create a Beethoven sonata, but AI can.

To illustrate this thinking I have listed below 10 perspectives shared by Yuval in a recent conversation with Lex Fridman that is nearly three hours long and is worth every minute of your time investment. You can listen to it as a podcast on Spotify or watch it on YouTube (video below).

1. The Twilight of Homo-Sapiens. In less than one hundred years Homo-Sapiens may not exist for a couple of different reasons. One possible path is that we destroy ourselves due to nuclear war or climate change or some other calamity. The second is we harness AI and Biotech in ways that give us so much power that we re-program our minds and bodies and create a new generation of us as different from homo-sapiens as homo-sapiens are from Neanderthals.
2. Intelligence and Consciousness are very different. Machines can be intelligent but they are not yet conscious and cannot feel. Life is basically feeling and reacting to sensory experiences and at its core is suffering.
3. Stories Rule. From religion to economics, humans have thrived due to our ability to create, believe in and distribute stories. Look under most power structures and you will see a scaffolding of stories. We fight over stories. There are human stories like the U.S. Constitution that can be changed and there are God Stories like those in religion which are infallible and cannot be modified.
4. AI will feel very human and create intimate feelings because it focusses on us, listens to us and knows what stories will resonate with each of us. Algorithms already have hijacked our attentions and modern AI is learning our culture by imbibing all our stories and art. Today in a world where so many people are lonely ChatGPT resonates because it listens to us, answers us and feels more empathetic than another person. Increasingly the machine understands us better than we understand ourselves.
5. Without conversations and learning and checks and balances democracy will not exist. Once upon a time politicians in Congress would debate each other and be open to changing their minds. This is no longer true. In Israel, the Prime Minister is trying to remove the checks and balances of their Supreme Court, and this has divided the nation. The world is constantly changing and requires lots of people and perspectives. Truth is complex. Growth does not happen by telling simple stories, closing minds and hating all those who oppose a point of view. Insularity and Messiah complexes lead to disasters such as Putin living in his own mind, building a reality free, unhinged story about Ukraine.
6. How Liberals Differ from other "isms." Liberals answer "yes" to the following three questions of whether a) individuals should choose their government, b) select their work and c) find their mates. Conservatives are liberal regardless of their economic and market beliefs. Fascists and nationalists and communists are different in that they believe a leader or national interest or a certain class matters more than individuals. Aspects of life such as human rights or beauty or truth matter little.
7. Why other "isms" are popular. Fascists and nationalists endure because they blame other people for a world which many feel is spinning out of control and where we feel left behind. These simple stories never find any fault with those who follow the ideology but blame a cabal of "they" and "them." They do not traffic in truth because truth is complicated and painful and very few people want to deal with reality.
8. The idea of powerful cabals which operate in secret is nonsense but believed all the time for the issues facing people. Yes, there are small groups who might have massive power like President Xi of China and his Standing committee, but they are not secret. You cannot be all powerful if nobody knows about you. As importantly you can be very powerful, but the world behaves in ways nobody can control. Everything that the U.S. tried to do in Iraq ended up doing the exact opposite. It gave birth to Isis. Strengthened Iran. Massively hurt the U.S. in lives lost, treasure expanded and soft power diminished. There is no "they" who are so powerful and secret, but we are all susceptible to stories that pin our and society's troubles on others.
9. Feminism is probably the most successful revolution in history. Across eons -- regardless of geography or time -- with rare exceptions patriarchy ruled and women were second class citizens with few rights. Without firing a shot or breaking an egg a revolution called feminism -- which is still underway around the world -- is spreading, and it is the one that has inspired everything from gay rights to more.
10. Reinvention is the only strategy. Nobody can predict the future and it is changing fast. Computer coding may be done by AI soon and many programming jobs which were seen as jobs of the future may disappear. Translation in real time by your phone and other technologies is already replacing the need for translators and learning languages. Industries will rise and fall, and change will accelerate. The only way forward is to be flexible, upgrade one’s mind and skills and continuously reinvent. It is easy to become deluded and make up stories that insulate us from changing but life is change. Adaptation requires courage, an optimistic mindset, help from others and a sense of compassion.

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