As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive.
#Financial times yuval noah harari how to
a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the twenty-first century.”-Bill Gates, The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FINANCIAL TIMES AND PAMELA PAUL, KQED How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today’s most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. Now, one of the most innovative thinkers on the planet turns to the present to make sense of today’s most pressing issues. If we fail to make the right choice, we might find ourselves signing away our most precious freedoms, thinking that this is the only way to safeguard our health. In the days ahead, each one of us should choose to trust scientific data and healthcare experts over unfounded conspiracy theories and self-serving politicians. The coronavirus epidemic is thus a major test of citizenship. YUVAL NOAH HARARI: THE WORLD AFTER CORONAVIRUS (THE FINANCIAL TIMES)įor me, just like Harari, the way that governments choose to deal with the pandemic shows their true colours. For when people are given a choice between privacy and health, they will usually choose health.
The coronavirus crisis could be the battle’s tipping point. A big battle has been raging in recent years over our privacy. Privacy is more nebulous with harms often being in the future, so the trade-off is between the here and now and, well, the opposite.Įven when infections from coronavirus are down to zero, some data-hungry governments could argue they needed to keep the biometric surveillance systems in place because they fear a second wave of coronavirus, or because there is a new Ebola strain evolving in central Africa, or because . . . you get the idea. The trouble, though, is that health is a clear and visible thing, a clear and present danger. Remember the US ‘war on terror’? That led to an incredible level of domestic and foreign surveillance that was revealed by Edward Snowden a few years ago. Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus (The Financial times) The War of Independence has long been won, but Israel never declared the emergency over, and has failed to abolish many of the “temporary” measures of 1948 (the emergency pudding decree was mercifully abolished in 2011). My home country of Israel, for example, declared a state of emergency during its 1948 War of Independence, which justified a range of temporary measures from press censorship and land confiscation to special regulations for making pudding (I kid you not). But temporary measures have a nasty habit of outlasting emergencies, especially as there is always a new emergency lurking on the horizon. It would go away once the emergency is over. You could, of course, make the case for biometric surveillance as a temporary measure taken during a state of emergency.
In it, he talks about post-pandemic society being a surveillance nightmare: They pointed to this article by Yuval Noah Harari from March of this year, which also feels like a decade ago. As someone pointed out on Mastodon, this was entirely predictable. I woke up today to the news that, in the UK, the police will get access to to the data on people told to self-isolate on a ‘case-by-case basis’.