A historian’s look into the future
Trump? Brexit? Immigration? They’re just distractions from the real questions we should be asking, argues author Yuval Noah Harari, whose new book could change the way we see the future
HIS expression is one of slight bewilderment. Yuval Noah Harari is friendly enough but as he peers out from behind his spectacles it’s as if he’s thinking, “I’m not sure what I’m doing here with you.” It seems the Israeli professor hasn’t quite come to terms with his fame, even though it’s been seven years since his first book, Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, turned him into an overnight success, winning him a loyal legion of fans, including former US president Barack Obama and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
On the back of book one came book two, Homo Deus, which also sold millions. And now we’re on the third book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which is being hyped as one of the biggest releases of the year. Which means, like it or not, for the next few months the world’s most famous historian will find himself in the glare of the public spotlight.
We meet up in the art deco Hotel Cinema on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square, which is actually a circle, in the Bauhaus district of the Israeli city. Once he gets over his initial reserve, Yuval turns out to be a lovely, fluent interviewee. His English is almost perfect and he has a pleasant voice. And he answers questions as though they actually matter.
To break the ice, I ask him first for A Brief History of the Hararis. Where did his lot come from?
Most of what he knows he got from his 97-year-old grandmother, he says. Her father left Poland to escape conscription in 1919 and went to Germany. She was born there. In 1933 her mother persuaded her reluctant father that Hitler was not a passing phase and the family decamped to Palestine.
Yuval laughs. “They never had German citizenship,” he says. “They’re completely Polish. But she’s still like, ‘I’m German, you know.’ She lives in the retirement house for Yekkes – that’s the word for German Jews – and to be German is like it’s still the most important thing in the world. For years, I was convinced she was German.”
Both his parents were born in what was then, but only for a little while longer, British Mandate Palestine. His father, Shlomo, was raised on a socialist kibbutz (communal farm) in the Jordan valley where, for the first five years of his life, he “lived the Israeli myth to the full”.
Then, in 1950, Shlomo’s dad had a doctrinal falling-out with the other kibbutzniks. Over what? Yuval smiles. “I think it concerned the micro-management of the kibbutz, of whether you can choose if you want to work in the dairy farm or you don’t get to choose, and who’s supposed to do the laundry – tiny things like that. And on the other hand, world politics – what do you think about Stalin and the Korean War? – and it all got meshed together.”
So Shlomo left the kibbutz and wound up in the small town of Kiryat Ata, near Haifa. There he met Pnina, Yuval’s mother, and became an engineer.
“My father was certainly the intellectual force in the house,” Yuval recalls. “He was the most non-ideological person. He had a very big disbelief in any kind of
authority. But he liked history very much, and we had a lot of discussions about history and about the world. This was the favourite dinner pastime, to talk about all these kind of things.”
What Shlomo didn’t talk about, however, were his own adventures. He fought in both the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
“And he never said a single word about anything that happened there.”
Kiryat Ata, Yuval says, is next to a large petrochemical facility and is famous for being the most polluted place in Israel. “I remember that, as children, we’d drive to my grandmother’s in Jerusalem and on the way back – you know, the ‘Are we there yet?’ – we could tell from the smell we’re approaching home.”
YUVAL was always a brainbox. He started school at six. At seven he skipped a grade. At nine he was sent up from Kiryat Ata to a school on Mount Carmel, two bus rides away, which had a special section for gifted pupils. The symbolism is striking. “I was living at the bottom of the bottom, in the petrochemical industry, and every day I have to go all the way up to the top of the mountain.”
It was, he says, “one of the worst, maybe the most formative experiences of my life, to be for eight years in this jungle where it was, you know, survival of the smartest. We were pressured to excel. The kids were absolutely merciless to one another. There was no empathy.”
Even the girls? “There were only boys. Every year they tried to get some girls in, and every year the girls ran away very quickly. Because they understood what was happening there.”
The gifted section was part of a larger school, but the pupils stayed separate.
“We convinced ourselves that the other kids were dangerous, that they would taunt us and things like that,” Yuval says. “Like we were considered very posh. And like snobs. They called us . . .” He uses a Hebrew word that sounds like someone clearing their throat, “khnonim” or
something like that. “It’s literally the material in your nose.” Snot? “Yes, snot in your nose.” He was a gloomy child, he says. And a gloomier adolescent. From an early age he felt the world didn’t make sense.
“I go to my parents, I go to the teachers and I ask them in different ways to explain to me what’s the deal,” he says. “I mean, what’s life all about? And they have no idea. They say things but I know it’s nonsense and I know that they don’t know. But the worst thing is, nobody seems to care.”
He even went to see the school counsellor. “I remember quite distinctly that I had this strong notion that if I explained to her what I just understood, she’d be flabbergasted and she’d say, ‘I’m quitting my job and I’m going to change everything in my life.’ But no. She brushed it aside. The fact that we don’t understand what’s happening, what the meaning of life is, it’s nothing.”
And so it’s left to him, the boy on his hillside, to save the world from the coming flood. He took refuge in the past. Although the school was heavily orientated towards maths and sciences, Yuval’s interest was in history. He studied it at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then went to England and got a PhD at Oxford, specialising in medieval military history. He published studies and became a lecturer.
It was when he was asked to teach the academically unattractive course on the evolution of human history (presumably everyone else wanted to do the Nazis or the Cold War), that the ideas that became Sapiens were developed.
He came out as gay at 21 and, still trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, took up meditation at 24. He’s a famous meditator, apparently practises it for two hours every day and goes on long meditation retreats. Unfortunately the word “meditation” relaxes me so intensely that I tend to fall asleep, so I don’t ask him about it. We have, in his own favourite English phrase, “bigger fish to fry”.
HIS new book consists of stuff edited together with various lectures and articles he’s published since Homo Deus. It originated, he tells me, in questions people had been putting to him about how what was going on right now affected the picture he’d drawn of the future. Or, to put it another way, what have US president Donald Trump and Brexit got to do with it?
The answer in the book is that they’re diversions. Sometimes interesting diversions, but diversions all the same. As the book puts it, “Within a century or two, the combination of biotechnology and AI [artificial intelligence] might result in bodily, physical and mental traits that completely break free from the hominid mould.”
“What I’m trying to do is change the conversation,” he adds. “It shouldn’t be about nationalism, immigration and terrorism and trade tariffs. The conversation should be about climate change, about technological disruption, about AI, about bio-engineering. These are the big issues.”
As with Homo Deus, the new book explores the nexus of artificial intelligence and biotechnology creating new capabilities within decades that could fundamentally threaten, or immensely enhance, what it is to be human.
Look at how the AI algorithm is beginning to be able to know you better than you know yourself, like how to choose music for you, Yuval says. Soon “a machine learning algorithm could analyse the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the impact that a particular song is likely to have on you”.
He then gives a ghastly example of a song list that an algorithm might provide for someone grieving after having been dumped by their lover. It ends with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
But it gets much more serious. We’ll have the possibility of being effectively ruled by algorithms and we’ll create the ability to produce a race of superhumans. That’s if we survive climate change.
And what are we doing to anticipate these problems? In the West, not much.
“Five years ago AI was kind of, hmm, nobody really knows what it’s all about,” Yuval says. “But in 2018 we’re already in a very serious arms race. The Chinese realised it, I think, three or four years ago; the Europeans are realising it now. But the world is in an arms race, and this is terrible news because you can’t regulate this explosive technology if you’re in an arms race.
“Nobody can trust anybody, nobody wants to fall behind and you’re making it more and more certain that the worst possibilities will be realised.”
In biotechnology, for example, we can’t assume that everyone agrees on the ethics of a common humanity.
“There are a lot of people today and certainly in the future who might actually look favourably on a scenario of creating a new race of superhumans and leaving ordinary Homo sapiens behind,” he says.
“And if you look at China, for example, today, it’s out in the open. People speak in terms of high-quality people and lowquality people. And they say one of the reasons we don’t want a democracy, like in the United States, is that then you get Trump because you have all these lowquality people voting, and you shouldn’t give low-quality people so much power.
“So, one way of thinking about it is that we need to improve the low-quality people and make them high-quality people.”
The only way to deal with this, he says, is at an international level.
“The first step to regulating AI is to have a strong global community. I’m not saying a global government or a global empire. You don’t need to go all the way there. But you do need strong global cooperation.”
The problem of the past few years, as he says in the book, is that while we now have a global ecology, a global economy and global science, “We’re stuck with only national politics. To have effective politics, we must either deglobalise the ecology, the economy and the march of science, or we must globalise our politics.”
He’s keen to emphasise that he’s not anti-nation per se. He writes that it’s an illusion to think that without nationalism “we’d all be living in a liberal paradise. More likely, we’d be living in a tribal chaos.”
But right now nationalism is holding us up – as in the case of Brexit, Britain’s plan to split from the European Union.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong inherently with nationalism,” he says. “And I don’t think that Brexit in itself is a bad idea. I mean, for Britain to be completely independent of the EU? Well, why not?
“The worst thing about Brexit is the opportunity cost, that at this time in history, when we have these problems to deal with, nationalism is a distraction. Every minute that the UK government is dealing with Brexit is one minute less dealing with climate change and artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and it’ll take years. So, you know, in 10 years, when they already missed the train of regulating AI, they’ll look back and say, ‘Oh yes, because we had this Brexit thing’. ”
In fact, the point of Brexit may be precisely that – a distraction, he says.
“When you have these big frightening problems ahead of you, you want to be distracted by something familiar. You understand independence and national sovereignty and you don’t like immigration, but this is 20th-century stuff. It’s 19th-century stuff.
“It’s like if you have a big meeting in some company and you have a multimilliondollar decision to make about something very complicated and a $100 decision to make about the coffee machine. You’ll spend two hours discussing the coffee machine and two minutes voting about this multimillion-dollar reform about something nobody except the treasurer understands.”
How optimistic is he about our dealing with this big stuff when he lives in a country that can’t deal with its own very local, very intimate problems? Isn’t bigpicture thinking also a distraction, in its own way, from thinking about horribly complicated problems in the here and now?
He admits that Israelis have become very good at the art of just not seeing. “Most people, they’re not, like, evil and malevolent toward the Palestinians,” he says. “They just don’t care. They don’t want to know what’s happening there. The mental distance is immense.”
What does he mean?
“My campus is in Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. And just below Mount Scopus there’s Isawiya, which is a Palestinian neighbourhood. There’s no barrier that prevents you from going to Isawiya. There’s no sign. There’s no block. There are no soldiers guarding you, but since 1993, that’s 25 years, I reach the intersection and turn right to go to Mount Scopus. And I’ve never, ever been in Isawiya.
“I’ve looked at it from the mountain, from above, many times, but you don’t let your mind go there. Like you don’t let your mind go and really think about what it means to be a child in Gaza. Your mind just doesn’t go there.”
Not grounds for optimism. If you can’t mentally get yourself to Gaza, a few kilometres down the road, how do you get to thinking about regulating biotechnology or stopping climate change?
“I’m not saying, ‘ We will overcome’,” Yuval replies. “But I’m saying, ‘We can overcome’. ”
When he was 13 the Berlin Wall came down and – it was a miracle – no one was killed. “This apocalyptic Cold War eventually ended very peacefully and quietly, and all the doom and gloom prophecies from the ’50s and ’60s, they didn’t come true. We can do it. I still have this feeling also about artificial intelligence and about climate change. We can do it. We have what it takes.”
Right now though, in the Trump and nationalism era, we’re headed in the wrong direction, convulsed by the wrong controversies. After Yuval and I finish up I take a long walk along the Tel Aviv beachfront, with its mixture of races and faiths on skateboards, bicycles and scooters, jogging, swimming and schmoozing, wearing bikinis, skull caps, Lycra and tefillin (religious paraphernalia). And I think about our conversation.
He may be a multimillionaire and a publishing sensation but looking back on our interview it’s hard not to see him still as a boy on a mountaintop, trying to get a distracted world to look at what’s really important.
‘It’s left to him to save the world from the coming flood'