THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 51
Hebrew, “Think about a situation where
somebody in Beijing or San Francisco
knows what every citizen in Israel is
doing at every moment—all the most
intimate details about every mayor,
member of the Knesset, and officer in
the Army, from the age of zero.” He
added, “Those who will control the
world in the twenty-first century are
those who will control data.”
He also said that Homo sapiens would
likely disappear, in a tech-driven up-
grade. Harari often disputes the notion
that he makes prophecies or predic-
tions—indeed, he has claimed to do
“the opposite”—but a prediction ac-
knowledging uncertainty is still a pre-
diction. Talking to Rivlin, Harari said,
“In two hundred years, I can pretty much
assure you that there will not be any
more Israelis, and no Homo sapiens—
there will be something else.”
“What a world,” Rivlin said. The event
ended in a hug.
Afterward, Harari said of Rivlin, “He
took my message to be kind of pessi-
mistic.” Although the two men had
largely spoken past each other, they were
in some ways aligned. An Israeli Pres-
ident is a national figurehead, standing
above the political fray. Harari claims
a similar space. He speaks of looming
mayhem but makes no proposals be-
yond urging international coöperation,
and “focus.” A parody of Harari’s writ-
ing, in the British magazine Private Eye,
included streams of questions: “What
does the rise of Donald Trump signify?
If you are in a falling lift, will it do any
good to jump up and down like crazy?
Why is liberal democracy in crisis? What
is the state capital of Wyoming?”
This tentativeness at first seems odd.
Harari has the ear of decision-makers;
he travels the world to show them
PowerPoint slides depicting mountains
of trash and unemployed hordes. But,
like a fiery street preacher unable to rec-
ommend one faith over another, he con-
cludes with a policy shrug. Harari em-
phasizes that the public should press
politicians to respond to tech threats,
but when I asked what that response
should be he said, “I don’t know what
the answer is. I don’t think it will come
from me. Even if I took three years off,
and just immersed myself in some cave
of books and meditation, I don’t think
I would emerge with the answer.”
Harari’s reluctance to support par-
ticular political actions can be under-
stood, in part, as instinctual conserva-
tism and brand protection. According
to “Sapiens,” progress is basically an il-
lusion; the Agricultural Revolution was
“history’s biggest fraud,” and liberal hu-
manism is a religion no more founded
on reality than any other. Harari writes,
“The Sapiens regime on earth has so
far produced little that we can be proud
of.” In such a context, any specific pol-
icy idea is likely to seem paltry, and
certainly too quotidian for a keynote
speech. A policy might also turn out to
be a mistake. “We are very careful, the
entire team, about endorsing anything,
any petition,” Harari told me.
Harari has given talks at Google and
Instagram. Last spring, on a visit to Cal-
ifornia, he had dinner with, among oth-
ers, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder
and C.E.O., and Chris Cox, the former
chief product officer at Facebook. It’s
not hard to understand Harari’s appeal
to Silicon Valley executives, who would
prefer to cast a furrowed gaze toward
the distant future than to rewrite their
privacy policies or their algorithms.
(Zuckerberg rarely responds to ques-
tions about the malign influence of Face-book without speaking of his “focus” on
this or that.) Harari said of tech entre-
preneurs, “I don’t try intentionally to be
a threat to them. I think that much of
what they’re doing is also good. I think
there are many things to be said for work-
ing with them as long as it’s possible,
instead of viewing them as the enemy.”
Harari believes that some of the social
ills caused by a company like Facebook
should be understood as bugs—“and, as
good engineers, they are trying to fix the
bugs.” Earlier, Itzik Yahav had said that
he felt no unease about “visiting Mark
Zuckerberg at his home, with Priscilla,
and Beast, the dog,” adding, “I don’t think
Mark is an evil person. And Yuval is
bringing questions.”
Harari’s policy agnosticism is also
connected to his focus on focus itself.
The aspect of a technological dystopia
that most preoccupies him—losing men-
tal autonomy to A.I.—can be at least
partly countered, in his view, by citizens
cultivating greater mindfulness. He col-
lects examples of A.I. threats. He refers,
for instance, to recent research suggest-
ing that it’s possible to measure people’s
blood pressure by processing video of
their faces. A government that can see
your blood boiling during a leader’s“I was hoping you’d consider this a prelude to a kiss.”