New York Times, Nov. 9, 2018<\/p>\n
The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.<\/p>\n
He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.<\/p>\n
He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.<\/p>\n
He worries that because the technological revolution\u2019s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious \u201cuseless class.\u201d<\/p>\n
But lately, Mr. Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley C.E.O.s love him so?<\/p>\n
\u201cOne possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?\u201d a puzzled Mr. Harari said one afternoon in October. \u201cFor me, that\u2019s more worrying. Maybe I\u2019m missing something?\u201d<\/p>\n
When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet\u2019s secretive research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (\u201cFascinating\u201d and \u201csuch a stimulating writer\u201d<\/a>) in The New York Times.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are \u2014 it\u2019s insane he\u2019s so popular, they\u2019re all inviting him to campus \u2014 yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,\u201d said Tristan Harris, Google\u2019s former in-house design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.<\/p>\n Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and\u00a0curious about alternative forms of government<\/a>. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to\u00a0secede<\/a>\u00a0orshatter<\/a>, or for\u00a0the creation of corporate nation-states<\/a>. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. \u201cBasically,\u201d Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, \u201cthrough a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: \u201cUtopia and dystopia depends on your values.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. \u201cSapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,\u201d first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise \u2014 that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident \u2014 seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Mr. Harari tied together existing knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell\u00a0more than eight million copies<\/a>and made Mr. Harari a celebrity intellectual.<\/p>\n He followed up with \u201cHomo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,\u201d which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Mr. Harari\u2019s future is one in which big data is worshiped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.<\/p>\n Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: \u201c21 Lessons for the 21st Century.\u201d It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called \u201cWhy fascism is so tempting \u2014 and how your data could power it.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals\u2019 strange delight. \u201cIf you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,\u201d he told me, sounding weary, \u201csome of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Brave New World\u2019 as Aspirational Reading<\/p>\n Mr. Harari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X\u2019s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Mr. Harari has a sort of owlish demeanor, in that he looks wise and also does not move his body very much, even while glancing to the side. His face is not particularly expressive, with the exception of one rogue eyebrow. When you catch his eye, there is a wary look \u2014\u00a0like he wants to know if you, too, understand exactly how bad the world is about to get.<\/p>\n At the Alphabet talk, Mr. Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said that the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive.<\/p>\n Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Mr. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn\u2019t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.<\/p>\n It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. \u201cPart of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cThey\u2019re chimpanzees. They\u2019re sapiens. This is what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n He was slouching a little. Socializing exhausts him.<\/p>\n As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Mr. Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel \u201cBrave New World,\u201d which depicts\u00a0a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Mr. Harari said, often think it sounds great. \u201cEverything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you\u2019re really hard-pressed to explain what\u2019s wrong with it,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.\u201d<\/p>\n An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Mr. Harari\u2019s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Mr. Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.<\/p>\n He said he had resigned himself to tech executives\u2019 global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. \u201cI\u2019ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they\u2019re good people,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. \u201cSome may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,\u201d Mr. Harari said.<\/p>\n Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. \u201cIt\u2019s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don\u2019t want to frighten them,\u201d Mr. Harari said. \u201cThey can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.\u201d<\/p>\n C.E.O. testimonials to Mr. Harari\u2019s acumen are indeed not hard to come by. \u201cI\u2019m drawn to Yuval for his clarity of thought,\u201d Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email, going on to praise a particular chapter on meditation.<\/p>\n And Mr. Hastings wrote: \u201cYuval\u2019s the anti-Silicon Valley persona \u2014 he doesn\u2019t carry a phone and he spends a lot of time contemplating while off the grid. We see in him who we wish we were.\u201d He added, \u201cHis thinking on A.I. and biotech in his new book pushes our understanding of the dramas to unfold.\u201d<\/p>\n At the dinner Mr. Hastings co-hosted, academics and industry leaders debated the dangers of data collection, and to what degree longevity therapies will extend the human life span. (Mr. Harari has written that the ruling class will vastly outlive the useless.) \u201cThat evening was small, but could be magnified to symbolize his impact in the heart of Silicon Valley,\u201d said Dr. Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence expert who pushed internally at Google to\u00a0keep secret<\/a>\u00a0the company\u2019s efforts to process military drone footage for the Pentagon. \u201cHis book has that ability to bring these people together at a table, and that is his contribution.\u201d<\/p>\n A few nights earlier, Mr. Harari spoke to a sold-out theater of 3,500 in San Francisco. One ticket-holder walking in, an older man, told me it was brave and honest for Mr. Harari to use the term \u201cuseless class.\u201d<\/p>\n The author was paired for discussion with the prolific intellectual Sam Harris, who strode onstage in a gray suit and well-starched white button-down. Mr. Harari was less at ease, in a loose suit that crumpled around him, his hands clasped in his lap as he sat deep in his chair. But as he spoke about meditation \u2014 Mr. Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence \u2014 he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and\u00a0meditation is a competitive sport<\/a>, Mr. Harari\u2019s devotion confers hero status.<\/p>\n He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like \u201cthe customer is always right\u201d and \u201cfollow your heart,\u201d and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.<\/p>\n Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Mr. Harari continued, while most of the world\u2019s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. \u201cNow you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don\u2019t need me,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.\u201d<\/p>\n The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. \u201cIf a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can\u2019t shoot all of us because they need us,\u201d he said, citing army service and factory work.<\/p>\n Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. \u201cYou\u2019re totally expendable,\u201d he told the audience.<\/p>\n This, Mr. Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: \u201cWe don\u2019t need you. But we are nice, so we\u2019ll take care of you.\u201d<\/p>\n On Sept. 14, he published\u00a0an essay in The Guardian<\/a>\u00a0assailing another old trope \u2014 that \u201cthe voter knows best.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don\u2019t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?\u201d he wrote. \u201cHow do you live when you realize \u2026 that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018O.K., So Maybe Humankind Is Going to Disappear\u2019<\/p>\n Mr. Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, who is also his manager, rented a small house in Mountain View for their visit, and one morning I found them there making oatmeal. Mr. Harari observed that as his celebrity in Silicon Valley has risen, tech fans have focused on his lifestyle.<\/p>\n \u201cSilicon Valley was already kind of a hotbed for meditation and yoga and all these things,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd one of the things that made me kind of more popular and palatable is that I also have this bedrock.\u201d He was wearing an old sweatshirt and denim track pants. His voice was quiet, but he gestured widely, waving his hands, hitting a jar of spatulas.<\/p>\n Mr. Harari grew up in Kiryat Ata, near Haifa, and his father worked in the arms industry. His mother, who worked in office administration, now volunteers for her son handling his mail; he gets about 1,000 messages a week. Mr. Yahav\u2019s mother is their accountant.<\/p>\n Most days, Mr. Harari doesn\u2019t use an alarm clock, and wakes up between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., then meditates and has a cup of tea. He works until 4 or 5 p.m., then does another hour of meditation, followed by an hourlong walk, maybe a swim, and then TV with Mr. Yahav.<\/p>\n The two met 16 years ago through the dating site Check Me Out. \u201cWe are not big believers in falling in love,\u201d Mr. Harari said. \u201cIt was more a rational choice.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe met each other and we thought, \u2018O.K., we\u2019re \u2014 O.K., let\u2019s move in with each other,\u2019\u201d Mr. Yahav said.<\/p>\n Mr. Yahav became Mr. Harari\u2019s manager. During the period when English-language publishers were cool on the commercial viability of \u201cSapiens\u201d \u2014 thinking it too serious for the average reader and not serious enough for the scholars \u2014 Mr. Yahav persisted, eventually landing the Jerusalem-based agent Deborah Harris. One day when Mr. Harari was away meditating, Mr. Yahav and Ms. Harris finally sold it at auction to Random House in London.<\/p>\n