After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Harari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X’s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. ‘Brave New World’ as Aspirational Reading “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.” Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting - and how your data could power it.”
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Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshipped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than 8 million copies and made Harari a celebrity intellectual. But the casual tone and smooth way Harari tied together knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Nor did its premise - that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident - seem a likely commercial hit. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.” “Basically,” Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.” And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. “I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are - it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus - yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Harari over. Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. When Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. “One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Harari said one afternoon in October. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley CEOs love him so? He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”īut lately, Harari is anxious about something much more personal.
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He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will. He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete. Futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.
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