The end of the world as we know it The Sapiens author offers problems but no solutions 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Yuval Noah Harari Jonathan Cape, 352pp. £18.99 In his best-selling book Sapiens: ...a Brief History of Humankind, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes that it was during the Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago, when worries about the future "became central to the human mind". Few authors captured the anxieties of the age with as much bracing clarity as Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in 1862 described London's Crystal Palace, the great glass exhibition hall showcasing the latest technological wonders, as resembling "some prophecy out of the Apocalypse being fulfilled right before your very eyes". Francis Fukuyama's apocalyptic expectation that history had come to a close is the best-known (if least understood) example, while in a 1997 essay, "Our Merry Apocalypse", the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski warned against the vertiginous speeds at which societies were evolving: "I do not say that we are rushing towards catastrophe," he wrote, "only that, like Alice, we must make a huge effort to run very fast to stay in the same place." The millennium was greeted with a surge of penitential exuberance and the dread of hi-tech meltdown. Since 9/11, and certainly since the financial crash of 2008, there has been what the literary critic Frank Kermode once called a perennial "sense of an ending".
Take future election races, for example: in the 2020 race, Facebook could theoretically determine not only who are the 32,578 swing voters in Pennsylvania, but also what you need to tell each of them ...in order to swing them in your favour. The market has proven itself woefully inadequate in confronting climate change and global inequality, and is even less likely to self-regulate the explosive powers of bioengineering and artificial intelligence. ...we should urge other corporations, institutions and governments to contest its vision by making their own ideological commitments. *** Zuckerberg's ideological gambit begins with some very convincing arguments for why, in his words, "progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community". ...the tribes gradually coalesced into a single Chinese nation that had the power to regulate the distribution of water and produce unprecedented prosperity. In a xenophobic dog-eat-dog world, if even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological path, others will be forced to do the same, because nobody could afford to remain behind. ...a global community can succeed only if it gives support to local communities. Yuval Noah Harari lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the author of 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' and 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow'. ynharari.com / Photographs by Helen Marshall of The People's Picture/ *** How the Mark Zuckerberg mosaic was made The mosaic above of Mark Zuckerberg is made up of around 1,000...
Take future election races, for example: in the 2020 race, Facebook could theoretically determine not only who are the 32,578 swing voters in Pennsylvania, but also what you need to tell each of them ...in order to swing them in your favour. The market has proven itself woefully inadequate in confronting climate change and global inequality, and is even less likely to self-regulate the explosive powers of bioengineering and artificial intelligence. ...we should urge other corporations, institutions and governments to contest its vision by making their own ideological commitments. *** Zuckerberg’s ideological gambit begins with some very convincing arguments for why, in his words, “progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community”. ...the tribes gradually coalesced into a single Chinese nation that had the power to regulate the distribution of water and produce unprecedented prosperity. In a xenophobic dog-eat-dog world, if even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological path, others will be forced to do the same, because nobody could afford to remain behind. ...a global community can succeed only if it gives support to local communities. Yuval Noah Harari lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the author of ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ and ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’. ynharari.com / Photographs by Helen Marshall of The People’s Picture/ *** How the Mark Zuckerberg mosaic was made The mosaic above of Mark Zuckerberg is made up of around 1,000...
Hopper interviews Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian and internationally best-selling author of Sapiens, regarding his new book, Homo Deus, a vision of humankind's future. Among other things, ...Harari tells his goals for humanity.
Yuval Noah Harari Marchese, David
The New York times magazine,
11/2021
Magazine Article
With the publication in the United States of his best-selling "Sapiens" in 2015, the Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari arrived at the top rank of public intellectuals, a position he ...consolidated with "Homo Deus" (2017) and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" (2018). Harari's key theme is the idea that human society has largely been driven by our species' capacity to believe in what he calls fictions: those things whose power is derived from their existence in our collective imaginations, whether they be gods or nations; our belief in them allows us to cooperate on a societal scale. The people who wrote the New Testament, if they could see what the Inquisition and the crusaders did with the idea of turning the other cheek and the meek will inherit the earth, I think they would be rolling in their graves. ...much of the debate about gender now, in a weird way it's like these early Christians debating the nature of Christ and the trinity.
Hardcover Nonfiction TITLE AUTHOR / PUBLISHER THIS WEEK LAST WEEK The Legend of Zelda 1 New Nintendo/Dark Horse Books Hillbilly Elegy 2 2 J.D. Vance/Harper Killing the Rising Sun 3 3 Bill O'Reilly & ...Martin Dugard/Henry Holt & Company This Life I Live 4 1 Rory Feek/Thomas Nelson Jesus Always 5 5 Sarah Young/Thomas Nelson Strengths Finder 2.0 6 7 Tom Rath/Gallup Press Homo Deus 7 New Yuval Noah Harari/Harper The Magnolia Story 8 4 Chip & Joanna Gaines/Thomas Nelson Big Agenda 9 6 David Horowitz/Humanix Books Jesus Calling 10 10 Sarah Young/Thomas Nelson Nonfiction E-Books TITLE AUTHOR / PUBLISHER THIS WEEK LAST WEEK Dereliction of Duty 1 - H. R. McMaster/HarperCollins Publishers Hillbilly Elegy 2 1 J.D. Vance/HarperCollins Publishers Sapiens 3 - Yuval Noah Harari/HarperCollins Publishers How Not to Die 4 - Michael Greger & Gene Stone/Flatiron Books Furiously Happy 5 New Jenny Lawson/Flatiron Books Homo Deus 6 New...
Becoming human gods Gerry, Thomas
Queen's Quarterly,
06/2017, Letnik:
124, Številka:
2
Book Review, Magazine Article
Recenzirano
Relying on statistics, the author shows that humanity's frequently recurring adversaries - famine, plague, and war - have now been largely eradicated. Since history abhors a vacuum, people are ...already working on different missions, including overcoming death, attaining perpetual happiness, and becoming gods. Becoming human gods - homo deus in Latin - could be achieved by human beings taking over from evolution and creating the successor to Homo sapiens through biological engineering, cyborg engineering, and the engineering of non-organic beings. Harari argues, sounding distinctly Nietzschean, that even though religions founded in antiquity and still reliant on ancient scriptures are inadequate to cope with present-day moral and ethical dilemmas caused by technological change, still, millions of people will continue to practise Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism. ...to the old religions, which attribute the meaning of human life to its being part of the divinely created, divinely governed cosmic order, humanism relocates the source of meaning from a god's plan to the inner voice of the individual, whose personal essence is considered to be both private and free. "Whether in politics, economics or art," he writes, orthodox humanism holds that "individual free will should have far more weight than state interests or religious doctrines." Because of its emphasis on the supremacy of personal liberty, orthodox humanism is also called "liberal humanism" and "liberalism." Evolutionary humanism, in contrast, embraces conflicts among individuals and groups as the progressive course of natural selection, whereby superior people prevail. What will happen to society, politics and daily life...
Blizzard Entertainment/Dark Horse Books Spark Joy 10 7 Marie Kondo/Ten Speed Press Nonfiction E-Books TITLEAUTHOR / PUBLISHER THIS WEEK LASTWEEK Frozen in Time 1 New Mitchell Zukoff/HarperCollins ...Miracles From Heaven 2 8 Christy Wilson Beam/Hachette Books Sapiens 3 New Yuval Noah Harari/HarperCollins The Hiding Place 4 New John Sherrill and Corrie Ten Boom/Baker Publishing Rosemary 5 5 Kate Clifford Larson/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt When Breath Becomes Air 6 6 Paul Kalanithi/Random House The Sleepwalkers 7 New Christopher Clark/HarperCollins Joy of Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free 8 New Peter Reinhart and Denene Wallace/Potter-Ten Speed Notes From a Small Island 9 9 Bill Bryson/HarperCollins Unbound 10 New Richard L. Currier/Arcade Publishing Nonfiction Combined TITLEAUTHOR / PUBLISHER THIS WEEK LASTWEEK Miracles From Heaven 1 2 Christy Wilson Beam/Hachette Books The Story of Easter 2 10 Patricia A. Pingry/WorthyKids/Ideals Marie Kondo/Ten Speed Press 3 1 Marie Kondo/Ten Speed Press Animals 4 8 Jennifer Quasha/DK Publishing When Breath Becomes Air 5 3 Paul Kalanithi/Random House The Easter Story 6 9 Patricia A. Pingry/Candy Cane Press Jesus Calling 7 5 Sarah Young/Thomas Nelson First 100 Words 8 7 Priddy Books/Priddy Books On Fire 9 New John O'Leary/North Star Way What Is Easter?
