Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

A wise man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. 'Well,' he answered, 'I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven't figured out is why the other people are here.

More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics.

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view.

Human power depends on mass cooperation, and mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities—and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities.

What will happen to the job market once artificial intelligence outperforms humans in most cognitive tasks? What will be the political impact of a massive new class of economically useless people? What will happen to relationships, families and pension funds when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn eighty into the new fifty?

Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real question facing us is not 'what do we want to be come?' but 'what do we want to want?

Darwin and Dawkins

The Google search algorithm has a very sophisticated taste when it comes to ranking the web pages of ice cream vendors, and the most successful ice cream vendors in the world are those that the Google algorithm ranks first—not those that produce the tastiest ice cream.

Statistics courses are now part of the basic requirements, not just in physics and biology, but also in psychology, sociology, economics and political science

they make a desert and call it peace'.

There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.

ask these politicians four questions: If you are elected, what actions will you take to lessen the risks of nuclear war? What actions will you take to lessen the risks of climate change? What actions will you take to regulate disruptive technologies such as AI and bioengineering? And finally, how do you see the world of 2040? What is your worst-case scenario, and what is your vision for the best-case scenario?

find yourself suffering from some "medical condition

Comerciantes, conquistadores y profetas fueron los primeros que consiguieron trascender la división evolutiva binaria de «nosotros frente a ellos» y prever la unidad potencial de la humanidad.

The only serious attempt to manage the world differently – Communism – was so much worse in almost every conceivable way that nobody has the stomach to try again.

ever since the Cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs.

Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas. Therefore it is not enough that we recognize the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now.

By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), but their numbers were dwarfed by the world's 250 million farmers.1

History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.

puesto que solo hay un mundo real, mientras que el número de mundos virtuales potenciales es infinito, la probabilidad de que habitemos el único mundo real es casi nula. Ninguno

Most nations argue that they are a natural and eternal entity, created in some primordial epoch by mixing the soil of the motherland with the blood of the people.

He never warned voters that algorithms would take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall on the border with California.

Ancient Greece the philosopher Epicurus explained that worshipping gods is a waste of time, that there is no existence after death, and that happiness is the sole purpose of life.