Locator: 48621BOOKS.
Yuval Noah Harari is back in the news with an interview in the weekend edition of The WSJ, link here.
I've written about this author before, link here, after reading his first book a year or so ago. Actually, I read it twice, thinking I must have missed something when the likes of Bill Gates and Barack Obama thought it was a great book.
This is how Harari viewed mankind in his #1-selling book, Sapiens, page 415 in the afterword:
Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.
Besides ending the theme sentence with a preposition ... but I digress.
At the time I read that, I pointed out:
- Carnegie libraries across the US
- vaccines eradicated smallpox, tetanus, and polio
- art by Monet
- Tesla
- the Bible, the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Shakespeare
- the iPhone
- martinis
- the Kentucky Derby
- Olga Kern and the Santa Fe Orchestra
- life expectancy and quality of life
- Neil Armstrong
- the Rolls Royce
- We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
- cowboy boots and cowboy hats
- equal rights for women
- the horse would have gone extinct without Homo sapiens: Tim Winegard, 2024.
And now he's worried about AI. If nothing else, he knows how to sell books.
The Algore of AI prognostications.
