Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

Sostenemos como evidentes por sí mismas dichas verdades: que todos los hombres han evolucionado de manera diferente; que han nacido con ciertas características mutables; que entre estas están la vida y la búsqueda del placer.

We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades.

truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility.

The system may prefer downgraded humans not because they would possess any superhuman knacks, but because they would lack some really disturbing human qualities that hamper the system and slow it down.

La mayoría de las jerarquías sociopolíticas carecen de una base lógica o biológica: no son más que la perpetuación de acontecimientos aleatorios sostenidos por mitos.

Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours.

What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Is God back? Is a new world war coming? Which civilization dominates the world—the West, China, Islam? Should Europe keep its doors open to immigrants? Can nationalism solve the problems of inequality and climate change? What should we do about terrorism?

As a result, humans can perform very intricate tasks with their hands. In particular, they can produce and use sophisticated tools.

It turned out that 1–4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. That's not a huge amount, but it's significant. A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilised finger from Denisova was mapped. The results proved that up to 6 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.

To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be

Incluso si decidiéramos repudiar por completo el legado de un imperio brutal con la esperanza de reconstruir y salvaguardar las culturas «auténticas» que lo precedieron, con toda probabilidad lo que defenderíamos no sería otra cosa que la herencia de un imperio más antiguo y no menos brutal.

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the others.

Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses, live inside the body of their hosts. They multiply and spread from one host to the other, feeding off their hosts, weakening them, and sometimes even killing them. As long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite, it cares little about the condition of its host. In just this fashion, cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans. They

In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens

Si nuestra mente es la de los cazadores-recolectores, nuestra cocina es la de los antiguos agricultores.

People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent than people who are used to looking at the world from several different viewpoints. Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

we all know that the brain's retrieval system is amazingly efficient, except when you are trying to remember where you put your car keys.

Hace exactamente 6 millones de años, una única hembra de simio tuvo dos hijas. Una se convirtió en el ancestro de todos los chimpancés, la otra es nuestra propia abuela.

Heavy taxation means that a large part of all available capital accumulated in one place – the state coffers – and consequently more and more decisions have to be made by a single processor, namely the government.

Even plants and animals were mechanised. Around the time that Homo sapiens was elevated to divine status by humanist religions, farm animals stopped being viewed as living creatures that could feel pain and distress, and instead came to be treated as machines.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.

The year 2016—marked by the Brexit vote in Britain and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States—signified the moment when this tidal wave of disillusionment reached the core liberal states of Western Europe and North America.

The writing is on the wall: equality is out – immortality is in.

though the technological challenges are unprecedented and the political disagreements intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.