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" 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. "

Yuval Noah Harari

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" Humans have two kinds of abilities: physical and cognitive. "

" I don't like the word 'abstractions' very much because most people don't think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete. "

" 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. "

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

" I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people. "

" 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. "

" Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. "

" What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness? "

Yuval Noah Harari

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

" Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it. "

" Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus. "

" Science is telling us that the reason people die is not because some god said so or because the laws of nature mandate it. People always die because of technical problems. And every technical problem has, in principle, a technical solution. "

" Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe. "

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

" Homo sapiens is a social being, and our well-being depends to a large extent on the quality and depth of our social and family relations - and in the last 200 years, they have been disintegrating. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do. "

" Every day, I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls, and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls, and articles. I don't really know where I fit into the great scheme of things and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad. "

" For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person. "

" 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. "

" Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. "

" Increasingly, our decisions will be made by the algorithms that surround us. Whenever there is a big dilemma, you just ask Google what to do. And what kind of life is that? "

" If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things. "

" All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities. "