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Famous Yuval Noah Harari Quotes

“How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist.”

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Book:קיצור תולדות האנושות
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“What’s true of counterfeiting money should also be true of counterfeiting humans. If governments took decisive action to protect trust in money, it makes sense to take equally decisive measures to protect trust in humans. Prior to the rise of AI, one human could pretend to be another, and society punished such frauds. But society didn’t bother to outlaw the creation of counterfeit humans, since the technology to do so didn’t exist. Now that AI can pass itself off as human, it threatens to destroy trust between humans and to unravel the fabric of society. Dennett suggests, therefore, that governments should outlaw fake humans as decisively as they have previously outlawed fake money.[54] The law should prohibit not just deepfaking specific real people—creating a fake video of the U.S. president, for example—but also any attempt by a nonhuman agent to pass itself off as a human. If anyone complains that such strict measures violate freedom of speech, they should be reminded that bots don’t have freedom of speech. Banning human beings from a public platform is a sensitive step, and democracies should be very careful about such censorship. However, banning bots is a simple issue: it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights, because bots don’t have rights.[55] None of this means that democracies must ban all bots, algorithms, and AIs from participating in any discussion. Digital agents are welcome to join many conversations, provided they don’t pretend to be humans. For example, AI doctors can be extremely helpful. They can monitor our health twenty-four hours a day, offer medical advice tailored to our individual medical conditions and personality, and answer our questions with infinite patience. But the AI doctor should never try to pass itself off as a human.”

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Book:Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
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“Another common but mistaken assumption is that creativity is unique to humans so it would be difficult to automate any job that requires creativity. In chess, however, computers are already far more creative than humans. The same may become true of many other fields, from composing music to proving mathematical theorems to writing books like this one. Creativity is often defined as the ability to recognize patterns and then break them. If so, then in many fields computers are likely to become more creative than us, because they excel at pattern recognition.”

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Book:Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
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“A third mistaken assumption is that computers couldn’t replace humans in jobs requiring emotional intelligence, from therapists to teachers. This assumption depends, however, on what we mean by emotional intelligence. If it means the ability to correctly identify emotions and react to them in an optimal way, then computers may well outperform humans even in emotional intelligence. Emotions too are patterns. Anger is a biological pattern in our body. Fear is another such pattern. How do I know if you are angry or fearful? I’ve learned over time to recognize human emotional patterns by analyzing not just the content of what you say but also your tone of voice, your facial expression, and your body language. AI doesn’t have any emotions of its own, but it can nevertheless learn to recognize these patterns in humans. Actually, computers may outperform humans in recognizing human emotions, precisely because they have no emotions of their own. We yearn to be understood, but other humans often fail to understand how we feel, because they are too preoccupied with their own feelings. In contrast, computers will have an exquisitely fine-tuned understanding of how we feel, because they will learn to recognize the patterns of our feelings, while they have no distracting feelings of their own.”

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Book:Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
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“For Homo sapiens has rewritten the rules of the game. This single ape species has managed within 70,000 years to change the global ecosystem in radical and unprecedented ways. Our impact is already on a par with that of ice ages and tectonic movements. Within a century, our impact may surpass that of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.”

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Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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“Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not – indeed cannot – find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do. Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. If you go to India and see an elephant, you don’t look at the elephant and ask yourself, ‘What do I feel?’ – you are too busy looking for your smartphone, taking a picture of the elephant, posting it on Facebook and then checking your account every two minutes to see how many Likes you got. Writing a private diary – a common humanist practice in previous generations – sounds to many present-day youngsters utterly pointless. Why write anything if nobody else can read it? The new motto says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. If you upload something – share it.”

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Book:Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
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“When humans began cultivating the land, they thought that the extra work this required will pay off. 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.”

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Book:קיצור תולדות האנושות
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