“Although flesh and blood, Harari is Silicon Valley’s ideal of what a
chatbot should be. He raids libraries, detects the patterns, and boils
all of history down to bullet points.”*
*Buona lettura!
*
*jc*
Yuval Noah Harari’s Apocalyptic Vision
*
/His warning of AI’s dangers is alarming, but does it help us avoid them?
/
By Daniel Immerwahr
“About 14 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into
being.” So begins Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), by the
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, and so began one of the 21st
century’s most astonishing academic careers. Sapiens has sold more than
25 million copies in various languages. Since then, Harari has published
several other books, which have also sold millions. He now employs some
15 people to organize his affairs and promote his ideas.
He needs them. Harari might be, after the Dalai Lama, the figure of
global renown who is least online. He doesn’t use a smartphone (“I’m
trying to conserve my time and attention
<https://archive.jamesaltucher.com/podcast/yuval-noah-harari/>”). He
meditates for two hours daily
<https://tim.blog/2020/10/30/yuval-noah-harari-transcript/>. And he
spends a month or more each year on retreat, forgoing what one can only
presume are staggering speaking fees to sit in silence. Completing the
picture, Harari is bald, bespectacled, and largely vegan. The word
/guru/ is sometimes heard
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/15/21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-review>.
Harari’s monastic aura gives him a powerful allure in Silicon Valley,
where he is revered. Bill Gates blurbed /Sapiens/. Mark Zuckerberg
promoted it. In 2020, Jeff Bezos testified remotely to Congress in front
of a nearly bare set of bookshelves—a disquieting look for the founder
of Amazon, the planet’s largest bookseller. Sharp-eyed viewers made out,
among the six lonely titles huddling for warmth on the lower-left shelf,
two of Harari’s books
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/books/celebrity-bookshelves-anthony-fauci-chris-rock.html>.
Harari is to the tech CEO what David Foster Wallace once was to the
Williamsburg hipster.
[...]
cont:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/yuval-noah-harari-nexus-book/679572/
