Yuval Noah Harari

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.

History teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise due to unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass.

That’s why capitalism is called ‘capitalism’. Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.

There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Gobekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.

Don’t believe the tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

So why study history? Unlike physics of economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.

Often enough, one of the most important obligations of spiritual wanderers is to challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions. In Zen Buddhism it is said that ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ Which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalized Buddhism, you must free yourself from them too.

Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality.

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom — we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

To study history means to watch the spinning and unraveling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendents.

To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability — rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness — explains our mastery of planet Earth.

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

The most important question in twenty-first century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better?

In the early twenty-first century the train of progress is again pulling out of the station -- and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it you need to understand twenty-first century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.

In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.

Today, the richest 1 percent own half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly, the richest one hundred people together own more than the poorest four billion. ... By 2100, the richest 1 percent might own not merely most of the world’s wealth but also most of the world’s beauty, creativity, and health.

Though in the twentyfirst century humans might be upgraded into gods, as of 2018 we are still Stone Age animals. In order to flourish we still need to ground ourselves in intimate communities. For millions of years, humans have been adapted to living in small bands of no more than a few dozen people. Even today most of us find it impossible to really know more than 150 individuals, irrespective of how many Facebook friends we boast. And if we don’t belong to any intimate community, we humans feel lonely and alienated.

But in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way.

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.

History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change.

We humans rule the world not because we are so wise but because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

Scientific institutions are nevertheless different from religious institutions, in as much as they reward self-skepticism. Conspiracy theorists tend to be extremely skeptical regarding the existing consensus, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they lose all their skepticism and fall prey to confirmation bias. The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism.

One of the recurrent paradoxes of populism is that it starts by warning us that all humans are driven by a dangerous hunger for power, but often ends by entrusting all power in a single ambitious human.

The Founding Fathers committed enormous mistakes—such as endorsing slavery and denying women the vote—but they also provided the tools for their descendants to correct these mistakes. That was their greatest legacy.

To summarize, a dictatorship is a centralized information network, lacking strong self-correcting mechanisms. A democracy, in contrast, is a distributed information network, possessing strong self-correcting mechanisms.

The history of print and witch-hunting indicates that an unregulated information market doesn’t necessarily lead people to identify and correct their errors, because it may well prioritize outrage over truth.

Facebook and other social media platforms didn’t consciously set out to flood the world with fake news and outrage. But by telling their algorithms to maximize user engagement, this is exactly what they perpetrated.

One thing that is clear is that the future of employment will be very volatile. Our big problem won’t be an absolute lack of jobs, but rather retraining and adjusting to an ever-changing job market. ... So people will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once but many times, or they will become irrelevant.

The most important human skill for surviving the twenty-first century is likely to be flexibility. ... While computers are nowhere near their full potential, the same is true of humans.

The clearest pattern we observe in the long-term history of humanity isn’t the constancy of conflict, but rather the increasing scale of cooperation. A hundred thousand years ago, Sapiens could cooperate only at the level of bands. Over the millennia, we have found ways to create communities of strangers, first on the level of tribes and eventually on the level of religions, trade networks, and states.

The technologies of the twenty-first century are far more powerful—and potentially far more destructive—than those of the twentieth century. We therefore have less room for error. In the twentieth century, we can say that humanity got a C-minus in the lesson on using industrial technology. Just enough to pass. In the twenty-first century, the bar is set much higher. We must do better this time.

Trusting only ‘my own research’ may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing there is no objective truth. ... science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.