Yuval Noah Harari on the Talks at Google podcast (and in video form)
He’s marketing his new book extremely well and a New York Times interview on the subject garnered attention:
It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”
. . .
“It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Mr. Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”
. . .
He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale
Not the most heartening view of the future.
21 Lessons is also recommended by Bill Gates as one of 5 books he loved in 2018 (to further corroborate Harari’s points)
The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, he suggests, is not to stop worrying. It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them. As he writes in his introduction: “What are today’s greatest challenges and most important changes? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?”
Or maybe we should be a bit more like Newt Scamander
My philosophy is that worrying means you suffer twice.
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