Speaker

Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari

Israeli historian and public intellectual, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks (2024) — a run of books that has made him one of the most widely read popularisers of ‘big history’ of the past two decades, with Sapiens alone selling over 25 million copies and translated into more than 65 languages.

Harari’s academic training is in medieval and military history, but his public work is organised around a single recurring claim: large-scale human cooperation — trade, religion, nationhood, money, law — depends on collective belief in stories with no basis in physical or biological fact, a mechanism no other species has matched. He extends the same lens forward to argue that AI and biotechnology are giving a small number of corporations, states, and algorithms unprecedented power to reshape human bodies, minds, and societies, often faster than the political and ethical frameworks needed to govern that power. He is an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and a regular participant in Israeli pro-democracy demonstrations, and has written and spoken publicly about his own experience coming out as gay in Israel in the early 2000s. He has practised vipassana meditation daily for over two decades and credits the practice directly with his working method as a writer and public commentator.

Core positions

  • Cooperation runs on shared fiction, not shared fact. Money, nations, and religions exist only because enough people believe in them collectively; this is the trait, not raw individual intelligence, that let sapiens out-cooperate every other species. See Shared Fictions.
  • Intelligence and consciousness are separate, and conflating them is the central category error in public debate about AI. Intelligence is the capacity to solve problems; consciousness is the capacity to feel. A system can have the first without any of the second, and — because consciousness cannot be proven in any entity but oneself — its attribution to others, human or artificial, runs on social convention rather than logical test.
  • AI is unprecedented because it can decide and originate, not merely execute. Every previous technology required a human decision at the point of use; AI is the first that can make a decision or generate a genuinely new idea without one, which is why he frames it as taking power away from humans rather than extending human power.
  • Conspiracy theories are structurally self-refuting. A group with the coordinated power to secretly control major world events would need a scale of power that, historically, has always required publicity to exercise — real power and total secrecy are close to mutually exclusive.
  • Totalising ideologies succeed by flattery, not by looking evil. Fascism and communism both tell believers they are wholly good and wholly victimised; no one recognises themselves as a monster from inside that mirror, which is why teaching fascism as monstrous does comparatively little to inoculate against it.

In the wiki