Yuval Noah Harari: A Great Thinker and His Recent Thoughts

We usually are inspired our goals enhanced our benchmarks raised though we may also feel envy and diminished in comparisonIn a life of limited time we can spend our hours being exposed to and learning from those we admire or the things we admire whether they be books or paintings or a places or we can spend time enraged or complaining while surrounding ourselves with those less accomplished so we feel better in comparisonMost of us do both but when we feel ourselves in a downward spiral maybe we should say to ourselves quotLet us spend time with something or somebody we admirequotYuval Noah Harari is a historian author and philosopher who is an extraordinary thinking and feeling filled human being who tells stories while warning us about stories who explains technology while being suspicious about technology and a person who will change the way you perceive and understand things He is one of many people and things I admire This is the first of a series of posts that will focus on these individuals or thingsHere is Yuvalamp8217s website It is teeming with goodiesYuvalamp8217s three books Sapiens Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st century are each absolutely incredible and are worth reading and rereadingLong before data was cool Yuval pointed out that there was a new religious order called quotDataismquot which he described eight years ago in the Financial Times like thisquotFor thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods Then during the modern era humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people quotHumanist 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 Now a fresh shift is taking place Just as divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimized by humanist ideologies so hightech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data quotThis novel creed may be called Dataism In its extreme form proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanityamp8217s cosmic vocation is to create an allencompassing dataprocessing system amp8212 and then merge into itquotYuval has been studying AI for eight years and has some very interesting perspectives including that AI is the first human tool created that can make decisions and can create ideasThe Atomic Bomb could not decide to launch itself or a piano to will itself to create a Beethoven sonata but AI canTo illustrate this thinking I have listed below 10 perspectives shared by Yuval in a recent conversation with Lex Fridman that is nearly three hours long and is worth every minute of your time investment You can listen to it as a podcast on Spotify or watch it on YouTube video belowThe Twilight of HomoSapiens In less than one hundred years HomoSapiens may not exist for a couple of different reasons One possible path is that we destroy ourselves due to nuclear war or climate change or some other calamity The second is we harness AI and Biotech in ways that give us so much power that we reprogram our minds and bodies and create a new generation of us as different from homosapiens as homosapiens are from NeanderthalsIntelligence and Consciousness are very different Machines can be intelligent but they are not yet conscious and cannot feel Life is basically feeling and reacting to sensory experiences and at its core is sufferingStories Rule From religion to economics humans have thrived due to our ability to create believe in and distribute stories Look under most power structures and you will see a scaffolding of stories We fight over stories There are human stories like the US Constitution that can be changed and there are God Stories like those in religion which are infallible and cannot be modifiedAI will feel very human and create intimate feelings because it focusses on us listens to us and knows what stories will resonate with each of us Algorithms already have hijacked our attentions and modern AI is learning our culture by imbibing all our stories and art Today in a world where so many people are lonely ChatGPT resonates because it listens to us answers us and feels more empathetic than another person Increasingly the machine understands us better than we understand ourselvesWithout conversations and learning and checks and balances democracy will not exist Once upon a time politicians in Congress would debate each other and be open to changing their minds This is no longer true In Israel the Prime Minister is trying to remove the checks and balances of their Supreme Court and this has divided the nation The world is constantly changing and requires lots of people and perspectives Truth is complex Growth does not happen by telling simple stories closing minds and hating all those who oppose a point of view Insularity and Messiah complexes lead to disasters such as Putin living in his own mind building a reality free unhinged story about UkraineHow Liberals Differ from other quotismsquot Liberals answer quotyesquot to the following three questions of whether a individuals should choose their government b select their work and c find their mates Conservatives are liberal regardless of their economic and market beliefs Fascists and nationalists and communists are different in that they believe a leader or national interest or a certain class matters more than individuals Aspects of life such as human rights or beauty or truth matter littleWhy other quotismsquot are popular Fascists and nationalists endure because they blame other people for a world which many feel is spinning out of control and where we feel left behind These simple stories never find any fault with those who follow the ideology but blame a cabal of quottheyquot and quotthemquot They do not traffic in truth because truth is complicated and painful and very few people want to deal with realityThe idea of powerful cabals which operate in secret is nonsense but believed all the time for the issues facing people Yes there are small groups who might have massive power like President Xi of China and his Standing committee but they are not secret You cannot be all powerful if nobody knows about you As importantly you can be very powerful but the world behaves in ways nobody can control Everything that the US tried to do in Iraq ended up doing the exact opposite It gave birth to Isis Strengthened Iran Massively hurt the US in lives lost treasure expanded and soft power diminished There is no quottheyquot who are so powerful and secret but we are all susceptible to stories that pin our and society39s troubles on othersFeminism is probably the most successful revolution in history Across eons regardless of geography or time with rare exceptions patriarchy ruled and women were second class citizens with few rights Without firing a shot or breaking an egg a revolution called feminism which is still underway around the world is spreading and it is the one that has inspired everything from gay rights to moreReinvention is the only strategy Nobody can predict the future and it is changing fast Computer coding may be done by AI soon and many programming jobs which were seen as jobs of the future may disappear Translation in real time by your phone and other technologies is already replacing the need for translators and learning languages Industries will rise and fall and change will accelerate The only way forward is to be flexible upgrade oneamp8217s mind and skills and continuously reinvent It is easy to become deluded and make up stories that insulate us from changing but life is change Adaptation requires courage an optimistic mindset help from others and a sense of compassionPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons above or below to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Yuval Noah Harari: A Great Thinker and His Recent Thoughts

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Rishad Tobaccowala

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Yuval Noah Harari: A Great Thinker and His Recent Thoughts

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