“Ηow Υuval Νoah Ηarari pictures the future”
To begin with, on the last course of Crisis Management Lab, Mrs. Mania Xenou, Managine Director of “Reliant Communications, gave us the opportunity to understand how risks and threats are interdependent and they might cause various effects on corporations, societies and the world in general. At the end of the lab each team was assigned to do an extended research about an organisation or a distinguished individual.
The individual that was assigned for our team to investigate was the historian, philosopher and best selling author Yuval Noah Harari “. He is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. He has written two books about the challenges we face in the future -“Homo Deus” and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” which along with “Sapiens” have sold more than 35 million copies and been translated into 65 languages. His work has been recommended by President Barack Obama, as well as tech moguls, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Our main goal was to find the threats our humanity faces, or will face in the near future, according to him. To get a better understanding about his point of view on these topics we had to do a research about his beliefs and of course his character. We noticed that on his writings he examines multiple subjects such as free will, conscience and intelligence as well as the consequences of a future biotechnological world, where the sense-based organisms are replaced by their own technological creations. After we gathered information and data from his speeches and his articles, we were ready to present the five main threats of the world according to Yuval Noah Harari.
Firstly he is worried about the fragility of the data for every human being, because they are very valuable and will be used to hack the humanity and also to train the artificial intelligence. Once the artificial intelligence is trained and once humanity is hacked the data of individual people is going to decrease dramatically. Now, he mentions is the critical time and the really important thing about whats being accumulated, especially in US and in China is the ability to hack human beings and this is worth trillions not billions. In the abstract the ability to hack human beings means the ability to understand humans better than they understand themselves, which means being able to predict their choices better than they predict their choices, being able to manipulate their emotions, being able to make decisions for them, it should be clear that we are not talking about knowing humans perfectly, this is absolutely impossible, we are talking about the ability to know you better than you know yourself, which is not so difficult because most people know very little about themselves. For example Netflix tell us what to watch and Amazon tell us what to buy, eventually in 10, 20 or 30 years such algorithms could also tell you what to study at college, where to work and whom to marry, even whom to vote for.
One of the dangers Harari also talks is that we will see in the upcoming decades a process of greater inequality than in any previous time in history because for the first time, it will be real biological inequality. If the new technologies are available only to the rich or only to people from a certain country then homo sapiens will spilt into different biological castes because they really have different bodies and different abilities. At Davos (2018) : in the coming generations we will learn how to engineer bodies, brains and minds. The two processes together -human enhancement and the rise of AI- may result in the separation of humankind into a very small class of super-humans and massive underclass of ‘useless’ people. Once a real gap in ability opens between the rich and the poor, it will become almost impossible to close it. If the rich use their superior abilities to enrich themselves futher, and if more money can buy then enhanced bodies and brains, with time gap will only widen. “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.” -21 lessons for the 21st century.
Among the dangers , Yuval Noah Harari highlights the surveillance capitalism. According to him, it’s not a kind of dictation. Moreover, he thinks that all these cooperations and governments are able to monitoring what happens inside our bodies. In the question “What is the difference between the good potentional and the even potentional of these?”, he replied that there is an enormous good potential and we can provide a best healthcare in the world and a cheapest tester in the work for billions of people about this kind of technology. Yuval Noah Harari mentions that it is easy and we can all do this so he advise us to avoid it. He also told that governments abuse the power in order to manipulate people.
Another indeniable threat of our time is fake news. The indisputable power the data has in modern society allows the algorithm to “examine” and therefore understand the human brain and what every human thinks of, wishes for and is concerned of. This results of the proliferation of propaganda and fake news. Threatening not only the economical and political field but our society’s prosperity in general.
Actually, in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari explained that the fake news first appeared in the form of religion. “For millennia, stories about miracles, angels, demons, and witches have been widely regarded as “news” and “events” on human social networks, with daring reporters making vivid responses from the depths of the underworld. We have absolutely no scientific evidence that the Serpent tempted Eve, that the souls of unbelievers burn in hell after death, or that the creator of the universe is annoyed when a Brahman marries an Untouchable — yet billions of people believed these stories. years. Some fake news lasts forever” he stated. Of course he knew that this statement would provoke anger in a large portion of the population, but the purpose of this statement was to give us to understand that when 1000 people believe a false story for a month then we have fake news. When billions of people believe it for thousands of years, then we have a religion and we should not label it as “fake news” so as not to offend believers.
Last but not least we can all agree that, nowadays, climate change and environmental disasters are two serious problems that can not be taken lightly. There are multiple impacts of climate change which affect our every day lives and the fauna also. So, it’s a fact that this huge problem can not be solved solely by each country. That’s where globalism makes an appearance. According to Harari global problems like climate change and ecological collapse, nuclear war, and technological disruption cannot be solved by a single nation. It has to have global cooperation. Everyone needs to promise and cooperate to stop CO2 emissions.
There should be global rules and regulations for digitalization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Therefore Nationalism limits the ability of the human kind to successfully manage this huge challenge of our century. Mostly the nationalists are the ones that deny the problem of climate change and this makes sense as they simply can not comprehend the term of globalism. Yuval Noah Harari also points out that nationalism in essence is not bad. Nationalism means to be loyal to your nation, to pay taxes for someone whom you have never met. “To be a good nationalist means to have loyalty to your country and compatriots. And this in essence means that a good nationalist is also being a globalist.”
To conclude, we are very grateful that we had the opportunity to get in touch with the perspective of this commendable historian and author. We have gained a better understanding of the dangers that run through our society and the world at large. This assignment made us see certain things differently and expand our knowledge and sensitivity to the risks and problems of the coming future.
Say It Social Team: Nikolina Thoma, Έλενα Μιχοπούλου, Eftychios Roti, Evelina Konsolaki, @Maria Antzoulatou, Maria Christopoulou
Sources:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NnoSMMGFH4w
https://www.ted.com/talks/the_ted_interview_yuval_noah_harari_reveals_the_real_dangers_ahead
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frantisekmarkovic/2019/07/22/fake-news-the-power-of-fiction-and-what-we-can-learn-from-it/?sh=400c965252d8yuval-noah-harari-free-information-extremely-dangerous-interview-21-lessons
