Yuval Noah Harari

Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.

You need to constantly remind yourself what is the most important thing that is happening in the world - what is the most important thing that is happening in history. The discipline to have this focus is something I gained from meditation.

Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.

Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.

You have to know how to co-operate with other people if you want to stay alive and raise children. And to do that, you need to know something about them. You need to know who loves whom, who hates whom, who is sleeping with whom. Who is honest, who is a cheat.

I was taught that if you're going to study something, you must understand it deeply and be familiar with primary sources. But if you write a history of the whole world, you can't do this. That's the trade-off.

Everybody since the '60s has been saying the nation is a fiction - the nation is an imaginary unity - but people didn't connect the dots and say all human endeavours sprang from the same principle.

We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with human rights, and we do the same thing with money.

What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster. If Amazon knows you better than you know yourself, then the game is up.

I grew up in a small industrial suburb of Haifa in Israel. As far back as I remember, I was interested in big questions. Who are we? What are we doing here? But the chances to discuss philosophy were quite thin on the ground.

I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.

Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions - what's the meaning of life, what are we doing here - then somewhere in their 20s, they seem to say, 'I'll just get married. I'll just have kids. I'll get back to that later.' But they never do. For me, it kept boiling.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.

It's very, very difficult to reinvent yourself when you're 40 or 50, whether you are a taxi driver who now needs to become a web designer, or anything else. It just becomes more difficult and more scary.

As a historian, I'm sceptical about conspiracy theories because the world is far too complicated to be managed by a few billionaires drinking scotch behind some closed doors. But I do think that the voters are correct in sensing that they're really losing power. And in reaction, they give the system an angry kick.

Humans have two kinds of abilities: physical and cognitive.

Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon, this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves repeatedly.

The basic human reaction to pleasure is not satisfaction, but rather craving for more. Hence, no matter what we achieve, it only increases our craving, not our satisfaction.

I try to be a realist and not a pessimist or an optimist.

Until about 30,000 years ago, there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia, and so forth.

All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption.

Fundamentally, mankind was unimportant in the ecological system. Then, in one fell swoop, an evolutionary blink of an eye, the human race is transformed from something unimportant to the most important thing in the world.

There is a saying that if you get something for free, you should know that you're the product. It was never more true than in the case of Facebook and Gmail and YouTube. You get free social-media services, and you get free funny cat videos. In exchange, you give up the most valuable asset you have, which is your personal data.

You go to a Japanese restaurant and have a wonderful dish, and the thing to do is take a picture with your phone, put it on Facebook, and see how many likes you get. If you don't share your experiences, they don't become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning.

If you think about the great religions that have united large parts of humankind, people believe gods are very concrete - there is an angry old man in the sky, and if I do something wrong, he will punish me.

Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it.

I'm not a very glamorous person. I like to just sit alone in a room and read a book or meditate.

People already have bionic arms and legs that work by the power of thought. And we increasingly outsource mental and communicative activities to computers. We are merging with our smartphones. Very soon, they will just be part of the body.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia.

Those who refuse to liberalise and globalise are doomed to failure.

In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.

When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.

We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.

Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.

Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case.

If we are allowed to do experiments on monkeys because we are superior to them in a certain way, then someone who is superior to me is allowed to do experiments on me.

As beavers build dams and bees build hives, human beings have spears. Or take the high intelligence of human beings, the ability to make plans, to transmit information - that was also there before, but that, together with the tools, was not enough to make man special.

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology.

When you look at the growth of the human economy and its expected growth in the twenty-first century, I expect health will be the most important market of all. Especially as we move from a concept of health which focuses on healing the sick to a concept of upgrading the healthy.

The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.

People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.

My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what's really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what's happening in the world.

The feelings of the individual are the prime authority in ethics. 'If it feels good, do it' is the basic ethical ideal of humanism.