Yuval Noah Harari | it would be very tempting, and easy, to toss you overboard
"Your future depends on the goodwill of a small elite. Maybe there is goodwill for a few decades. But in a time of crisis – like climate catastrophe – it would be very tempting, and easy, to toss you overboard."
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari | “I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back
"I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back, the thing they will remember from the Covid crisis is this is the moment when everything went digital and this was the moment when everything became monitored, that we agreed to be surveilled all the time, not just in authoritarian regimes, but even in democracies and maybe most importantly, this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin, because really we haven’t seen anything yet. I think that the big process that’s happening right now, the world is hacking human beings, the ability to hack humans, to understand deeply what’s happening within you, what makes you go.
For that, the most important data is not what you read and who you meet and what you buy, it’s what’s happening inside your body. We have these two big revolutions-the Computer Science revolution or the infotech revolution and the revolution in the biological sciences and they are still separate, but they are about to merge. They are merging around I would say, the biometric sensor. It’s the thing, it’s the gadget, it’s the technology that converts biological data into digital data that can be analyzed by computers and having the ability to really monitor people under the skin, this is the biggest game changer of all because this is the key for getting to know people better than they know themselves."
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari | to gain control over the world
I mean science, as an institution, is interested in gaining the power — to gain control over the world
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari | flooding people with irrelevant information
"In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. [...] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore."
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari | The chief value of science is power
Die Wahrheit war nie die höchste Priorität der menschlichen Gesellschaft. Sie war die höchste Priorität einiger Individuen, aber niemals der Gesellschaft als Ganzes – denn die Gesellschaft funktioniert nicht auf der Basis von Wahrheit. Wenn man zwei der mächtigsten Institutionen der Menschheit betrachtet – die Wissenschaft (und ihre Gemeinschaft) sowie die Religion (und ihre Kirchen) –, dann hat keine von ihnen die Wahrheit als ihren zentralen Wert. Für einzelne Menschen mag das gelten, aber nicht für die Institutionen als solche.
Der Hauptwert der Wissenschaft ist Macht; der Hauptwert der Religion ist Ordnung und Organisation. Religion dient dazu, Ordnung in der Gesellschaft aufrechtzuerhalten, während es der Wissenschaft in erster Linie um Macht über die Welt geht.
