For instance, would we be willing to give up all personal data to hospitals and research facilities, and further to marketing campaigns, insurance companies, employers, and even our family, in exchange for better health care? Despite decades of research and progress in the social sciences, humanities, ethics, data protection (GDPR), we constantly see how information technology companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google as well as dictatorship countries re-define liberty and equality across issues including personal decision-making, surveillance, data ownership, and algorithm interpretability. In my previous blog post on Fei Fei Li and Yuval Noah Harari’s conversation, I share Harari’s concerns on how the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotech could be used to “hack humans”, specifically, gather information about us and make us depend on AI that pretends to understand us better than we understand ourselves.

He writes and speaks about making changes on the individual level, something which we could all do (more on this later).īefore knowing Harari and reading this book, I have never really thought deeply about how the coupling of information technology and biology technology would change humanity. Harari has beautifully written a book that provides a solid ground for constructive discussions of global problems, while pertaining to Greek philosopher Aristotle’s modes of persuasion: ethos pathos, and logos, in a flowing stream of optimism and hope. On earth, we have somewhat a common consensus on nuclear war (not to have it), some consensus on ecological cataclysms (climate change is real), and few consensus on technological disruptions (AI will forever change our lives). In the first part, Harari discusses concepts and issues surrounding three global challenges: nuclear war, ecological cataclysms, and technological disruptions, and how they have interwoven with our everyday life, for example, work, liberty, religion, community, and nationalism. I would summarize the book as having two major parts (The actual book has five parts).

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