The prophet’s technological warning

Yuval Noah Harari is one of the most fashionable thinkers on the planet right now—and some of his thoughts are deeply alarming, says Cole Moreton in the Mail on Sunday (U.K.). The Israeli academic believes humans will soon become “cyborgs, combining organic and inorganic parts.” He says the human brain “will still be the command-and-control center, but you’ll connect it more and more directly to all kinds of devices, whether it’s bionic arms or direct brain-computer interfaces.” Some of this is already happening, he points out. “People already have bionic arms and legs that work by the power of thought. And we increasingly outsource mental and communicative activities to computers.” Our growing technological dependency will have political ramifications, Harari says. The ruling class of this new world will be people who understand algorithms and biotechnology. And “the pendulum may swing back to dictatorships, because it will become easier to process information centrally.” Tyrants will be able to use technology to “construct a total surveillance regime that follows every individual all the time and surveys not just your emails and your physical movements, but even what’s happening inside your body.”