Yuval Noah Harari

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.

As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners.

For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.

The old 20th-century political model of Left vs. Right is now basically irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. All over the world, this is not the main struggle.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia.

I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.

For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

If you think about the great religions that have united large parts of humankind, people believe gods are very concrete - there is an angry old man in the sky, and if I do something wrong, he will punish me.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

Homo sapiens is a social being, and our well-being depends to a large extent on the quality and depth of our social and family relations - and in the last 200 years, they have been disintegrating.

I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.

Humans have two kinds of abilities: physical and cognitive.

Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.

We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with human rights, and we do the same thing with money.

The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'

The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.

We are living in a global world - but most schools and books still tell us only parochial histories of one particular country or culture. The truth is that there are no longer any independent countries in the world.

Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case.

In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.

I grew up in a small industrial suburb of Haifa in Israel. As far back as I remember, I was interested in big questions. Who are we? What are we doing here? But the chances to discuss philosophy were quite thin on the ground.