The feelings of the individual are the prime authority in ethics. 'If it feels good, do it' is the basic ethical ideal of humanism.
— Yuval Noah Harari
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
Homo sapiens is a social being, and our well-being depends to a large extent on the quality and depth of our social and family relations - and in the last 200 years, they have been disintegrating.
Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.
Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.
The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it.
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.
In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.
When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
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.
As beavers build dams and bees build hives, human beings have spears. Or take the high intelligence of human beings, the ability to make plans, to transmit information - that was also there before, but that, together with the tools, was not enough to make man special.
Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
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.
As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
You need to constantly remind yourself what is the most important thing that is happening in the world - what is the most important thing that is happening in history. The discipline to have this focus is something I gained from meditation.
If you think about the great religions that have united large parts of humankind, people believe gods are very concrete - there is an angry old man in the sky, and if I do something wrong, he will punish me.
Science is telling us that the reason people die is not because some god said so or because the laws of nature mandate it. People always die because of technical problems. And every technical problem has, in principle, a technical solution.
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.
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.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.
I'm not a very glamorous person. I like to just sit alone in a room and read a book or meditate.
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.
The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever.
Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.
Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case.
If we are allowed to do experiments on monkeys because we are superior to them in a certain way, then someone who is superior to me is allowed to do experiments on me.
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.
We did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated us.
There is no limit to how much health you can provide people.
The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.
My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what's really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what's happening in the world.
Every day, I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls, and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls, and articles. I don't really know where I fit into the great scheme of things and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers.
I don't like the word 'abstractions' very much because most people don't think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete.
Buddhism maintains that the common reaction of the human mind to pleasure and to achievement is not satisfaction; it's craving for more.
I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.
If you don't like the word 'religion,' you can replace it with 'ideology' - it's largely the same thing. At the heart of both religion and ideology is the question of authority and where authority is coming from.
The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.
Increasingly, our decisions will be made by the algorithms that surround us. Whenever there is a big dilemma, you just ask Google what to do. And what kind of life is that?
Those who refuse to liberalise and globalise are doomed to failure.
About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.
You go to a Japanese restaurant and have a wonderful dish, and the thing to do is take a picture with your phone, put it on Facebook, and see how many likes you get. If you don't share your experiences, they don't become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning.
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.
The key to victory lies more in manipulation and cooperation than in exceptional personal skills.
What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?
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.
When you look at the growth of the human economy and its expected growth in the twenty-first century, I expect health will be the most important market of all. Especially as we move from a concept of health which focuses on healing the sick to a concept of upgrading the healthy.
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.
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.
