EXPERTS ON EXPERT: Yuval Noah Harari

One of the dangers in the 21st century is that machine learning and artificial intelligence will make centralized systems much more efficient than distributed systems, and dictatorships might become more efficient than democracies.

Philosophy is now more important than ever before because lots of what used to be philosophical problems are becoming very practical problems of engineering. And more and more engineers, I think, need to learn philosophy.

People talk about natural rights and things like that, but on the biological level, just as chimpanzees don't have rights and jellyfish don't have rights, Homo sapiens have no rights.

If you took away my experience with meditation, most of my scholarly achievements will go away with it.

99% of what we do now is just say 'no.' People come with all kinds of requests—from interviews to theater productions... And many of them are really wonderful ideas and good causes. Just the thing with the human being, so far, you can't copy them. So with a book, I can have 12 million copies of my book and can reach everywhere. But, with myself, there is just one pair of legs and one stomach and one head... and you can't copy it.

What is really remarkable about our species is not that we are smarter than everybody else but that we can cooperate in far larger groups than anybody else. We can cooperate in thousands and tens of thousands and millions and eventually. today, we have global networks of billions of people, for instance, trading and belonging to the same economic system.

To understand, to be realistic, about ourselves as individuals, about ourselves as a species, is a very good thing. To align your expectations with reality, to be aware of our own biases, of our own weaknesses, this is an extremely important thing. Especially now because of the really extraordinary powers that we are gaining as a species. We are really... in the process of upgrading of ourselves into Gods.

The scientific kind of enterprise is built on cooperation. Nobody can be an expert on everything.