Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

People already have bionic arms and legs that work by the power of thought. And we increasingly outsource mental and communicative activities to computers. We are merging with our smartphones. Very soon, they will just be part of the body.

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.

People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.

Fundamentally, mankind was unimportant in the ecological system. Then, in one fell swoop, an evolutionary blink of an eye, the human race is transformed from something unimportant to the most important thing in the world.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia.

Everybody since the '60s has been saying the nation is a fiction - the nation is an imaginary unity - but people didn't connect the dots and say all human endeavours sprang from the same principle.

Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.

You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology.

All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption.

Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to describe reality. We use our communication system to create new realities. Of course, not all fictions are shared by all humans, but at least one has become universal in our world, and this is money.

The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.

Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill.

The old 20th-century political model of Left vs. Right is now basically irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. All over the world, this is not the main struggle.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.

Money is the probably the most successful story ever told. It has no objective value... but then you have these master storytellers: the big bankers, the finance ministers... and they come, and they tell a very convincing story.

We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.

The key to victory lies more in manipulation and cooperation than in exceptional personal skills.