Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes.

The only place rights exist is in the stories humans invent and tell one another.

Myths continue to dominate humankind, and science only makes these myths stronger. Instead of destroying the intersubjective reality, science will enable it to control the objective and subjective realities more completely than ever before. Thanks to computers and bioengineering, the difference between fiction and reality will blur, as people reshape reality to match their pet fictions.

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.

So perhaps happiness is synchronising one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

Uma das poucas leis férreas da história é que os luxos tendem a se tornar necessidades e a gerar novas obrigações. Uma vez que as pessoas se acostumam a um certo luxo, elas o dão como garantido.

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.

Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

we might fiddle with Homo sapiens to such an extent that we would no longer be Homo sapiens. Bionic

solo Homo sapiens puede hablar sobre cosas que no existen realmente, y creerse seis cosas imposibles antes del desayuno.

Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they'd be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of.

Again, some scholars try to exonerate Homo sapiens and blame climate change (which requires them to posit that, for some mysterious reason, the climate in the Caribbean islands remained static for 7,000 years while the rest of the western hemisphere warmed). But in America, the dung ball cannot be dodged. We are the culprits. There is no way around that truth. Even if climate change abetted us, the human contribution was decisive.7 Noah's

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and learn to feel at home with the unknown.

Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps

When the nuclear age erupted in the 1940s, many forecasts were made about the future nuclear world of the year 2000. When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination of the world, everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people would be living in space colonies on Mars and Pluto. Few of these forecasts came true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet.

Un virus español puede abrirse camino hasta el Congo o Tahití en menos de veinticuatro horas. Por lo tanto, no habría sido descabellado esperar un infierno epidemiológico, con un envite tras otro de enfermedades letales.

Al igual que un gobierno que reduce el presupuesto de defensa para aumentar el de educación, los humanos desviaron energía desde los bíceps a las neuronas. No

History is not deterministic. It is not a means for making accurate predictions. Our present situation was neither natural nor inevitable, and we have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics.

We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximise the human potential. Indeed we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. (page 50)

In the Middle Ages art was governed by objective yardsticks.

The ancient Chinese believed that when the goddess Nü Wa created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil, whereas commoners were formed from brown mud.

Si los nuevos tratamientos para alargar la vida y mejorar las condiciones físicas y cognitivas acaban siendo caros, la humanidad podría dividirse en castas biológicas.

Soon authority might shift again – from humans to algorithms.