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Yuval Noah Harari has written three books that are unlikely to lose their appeal any time soon. In accessible language, Harari takes his readers on a journey into the past, the present, and the future.
Harari’s central argument across these works, is that we must update the language with which we discuss political and philosophical problems to accommodate the technological and social developments of the modern world. We can no longer afford to think about the future in the same way we used to.
The past teaches us about our destructive nature, and our ignorance. But we have no yet attained enlightenment. We have built a world that we do not understand, and many are trying to solve its problems with outdated tools. We must change the way we learn and work, and find meaning and clarity in new things.
This is, of course, a choice. One can choose to go along for the ride, passively giving up more control, privacy, and agency for the world they live in, or or they can take a more active role, in shaping the future, and protecting themselves.
The best way to read Harari is to assess what you want to more about. If you want to know about civilization has evolved, you should read Sapiens. If you want to read about hot button political topics, you should read 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. If you are curious about how the world will look like in the future, and some of the questions we will need to resolve, you should read Homo Deus.
Sapiens
Harari’s first book, Sapiens is about the story of humankind – how we evolved, how we got here, and where we are headed. The most important feature about human beings is that we are wired for stories – It is our ability to tell and believe in fictions that have made organizing forces throughout history such as religion and capitalism so powerful.
Going further back, humans were likely responsible for the extinction of many species of animals.
During these forager times, it is true that life was shorter, but we did not experience constant stressors, and we ate better food, and enjoyed a more active and enjoyable lifestyle.
The Faustian bargain was struck when the first people invented agriculture – a development that would be responsible for all the fictions that exist. The Agricultural revolution protected us from predation, but we ate lower quality food that made us sick, and we invented stories that kept us busy with tribal duties that led to countless wars and deaths.
But many centuries later, we are now at a better place than we used to be. Inequality was far worse, and the boons of civilizational development has only been recently (in geographic time) been enjoyed.
Not long ago, we discovered microbes, how they harmed us, and then how they benefit us. We discovered the importance of mathematics, when previously it was seen as a trivial subject. Our changing memetics have shaped how we see the world, and what we did to shape it. In our current age, it is questionable whether we are truly happier as a result of all this progress.
If you are looking at an introduction to the history of humankind, Sapiens is great, and Harari does well at representing various perspectives and asking questions that scrutinize generally accepted truths about where we are today.
Homo Deus
Homo Deus (Man God) is an extension of the problem of artificial intelligence. Google is investing a lot of money in human immortality. The moral conundrums of the future will be different from those of the past. We need to decide whether AI should have rights, and how much privacy and control we are willing to trade off for a more convenient and secure life. But there are other philosophical questions that we will need to re-examine, such as whether humanism is true, and how to think about consciousness.
The major religion of the next century will not come from the Middle East, but from Silicon Valley – techno-humanism is the view that the time is up for homo sapiens. We had a good run, but our endless wars, injustices, and shortcomings must end, and we must make way for a new, superior species, the techno sapien. The reason Harari likens this new species to God, is because there is no limit to what consciousness can accomplish when freed from its biological limitations.
Humanism emphasized the difficulty of identifying our authentic will. Our inner voice is often a cacophony of conflicting noises. We often try to ignore our authentic voice because it can make us feel uncomfortable, but humanism also demanded that we should face this fear and overcome it, regardless of how difficult it might be to do so.
Technological progress is different, it does not want you to listen to your inner voices, it wants to control them. This is essentially what drugs like Prozac and Ritalin do.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
In Harari’s third book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he departs from the chronological account of history, and writes about the major issues in the modern world. How are the available technologies changing how democracy works, the spread of bigotry, and the face of war and terrorism?
The new world is unlike the past. While previous technological innovations have managed only to create temporary employment, breakthroughs in AI research threatens to eradicate jobs completely. Even more so, it threatens to eradicate mortality itself, previously the one remaining equalizer between all people. The proliferation of a narrow elite with access to these technologies will create an even wider gap between people. Those that are left without jobs will become the useless class, with no refuge or meaning to seek in life, other than indulging their video game and drug addictions.
The dystopic future of Harari is not a prediction that may take centuries to materialize, but is already taking place.
But technology is not the only danger facing humanity. Nationalism and climate change are two other challenges. There is nothing inherently bad about nationalism. But in the modern world, there is a greater need for a global government, because unlike the past, today’s problems, whether technological or ecological, have an impact on the entire world. Ultimately, Harari offers meditation as one answer to these dilemmas.
Harari argues that the “self” is an illusion. You are either manipulated by media or biology, but you are never free. The only remedy is to get rid of the illusion of the self, through meditation. And in the post truth world that we live in, there is a greater need to know what is real and what is a fiction. And no longer can we rely on the advice of our elders for guidance. The world today is vastly more complex and dynamic, changing more rapidly with each year. There is a need to change the way we think about education. Religion must adapt to modern sensibilities, and we must adapt our meaning structures in an increasingly secular world.
Bill Gates had an interesting take on Harari’s thesis on his blog.
As much as I admire Harari and enjoyed 21 Lessons, I didn’t agree with everything in the book. I was glad to see the chapter on inequality, but I’m skeptical about his prediction that in the 21st century “data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset” separating rich people from everyone else. Land will always be hugely important, especially as the global population nears 10 billion. Meanwhile, data on key human endeavors—how to grow food or produce energy, for example—will become even more widely available. Simply having information won’t offer a competitive edge; knowing what to do with it will.
Bill Gates