58 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
it will just be mud wrestling.” Yahav had
earlier teased Harari, saying, “You don’t
argue. If somebody says something you
don’t like, you don’t say, ‘I don’t like it.’
You just shut up.”
In Kyiv, Harari gave several interviews
to local journalists, and sometimes men-
tioned a man who had been on our flight
from Israel to Ukraine. After the plane
left the gate, there was a long delay, and
the man stormed to the front, demand-
ing to be let off. There are times, Harari
told one reporter, when the thing “most
responsible for your suffering is your own
mind.” The subject of human suffering—
even extreme suffering—doesn’t seem to
agitate Harari in quite the way that in-
dustrial agriculture does. Indeed, Harari
has taken up positions against what he
calls humanism, by which he means “the
worship of humanity,” and which he dis-
covers in, among other places, the foun-
dations of Nazism and Stalinism. (This
characterization has upset humanists.)
Some of this may be tactical—Harari is
foregrounding a contested animal-rights
position—but it also reflects an aspect of
his Vipassana-directed thinking. Human
suffering occurs; the issue is how to re-
spond to it. Harari’s suggestion that the
airline passenger, in becoming livid about
the delay, had largely made his own mis-
ery was probably right; but to turn the
man into a case study seemed to breeze
past all of the suffering that involves more
than a transit inconvenience.
The morning after Harari’s lecture,
he welcomed Pinker to his hotel suite.
They hadn’t met before this trip, but a
few weeks earlier they had arranged to
film a conversation, which Harari would
release on his own platforms. Pinker later
joked that, when making the plan, he’d
spoken only with Harari’s “minions,”
adding, “I want to have minions.” Pinker
has a literary agent, a speaking agent,
and, at Harvard, a part-time assistant.
Contemplating the scale of Harari’s op-
eration, he said, without judgment, “I
don’t know of any other academic or
public intellectual who’s taken that route.”
Pinker is the author of, most recently,
“Enlightenment Now,” which marshals
evidence of recent human progress. “We
live longer, suffer less, learn more, get
smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures
and rich experiences,” he writes. “Fewer
of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, op-
pressed, or exploited.” He told me that,
while preparing to meet Harari, he had
refreshed his skepticism about futurol-
ogy by rereading two well-known es-
says—Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming
Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Over-
population, Tribalism, and Disease Are
Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of
Our Planet,” published in The Atlantic
in 1994, and “The Long Boom,” by Peter
Schwartz and Peter Leyden, published
in Wired three years later (“We’re fac-
ing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and
a better environment for the whole world.
You got a problem with that?”).
As a camera crew set up, Harari affably
told Pinker, “The default script is that
you will be the optimist and I will be the
pessimist. But we can try and avoid this.”
They chatted about TV, and discovered
a shared enthusiasm for “Shtisel,” an Is-
raeli drama about an ultra-Orthodox
family, and “Veep.”
“What else do you watch?” Harari
asked.
“‘The Crown,’” Pinker said.
“Oh, ‘The Crown’ is great!”
Harari had earlier told me that he
prefers TV to novels; in a career now
often focussed on ideas about narrative
and interiority, his reflections on art seem
to stop at the observation that “fictions”
have remarkable power. Over supper in
Israel, he had noted that, in the Middle
Ages, “only what kings and queens did
was important, and even then not ev-
erything they did,” whereas novels are
likely “to tell you in detail about what
some peasant did.” Onstage, at YES, he
had said, “If we think about art as kind
of playing on the human emotional key-
board, then I think A.I. will very soon
revolutionize art completely.”
The taped conversation began. Ha-
rari began to describe future tech intru-
sions, and Pinker, pushing back, referred
to the ubiquitous “telescreens” that mon-
itor citizens in Orwell’s “1984.” Today,
Pinker said, it would be a “trivial” task
to install such devices: “There could be,
in every room, a government-operated
camera. They could have done that de-
cades ago. But they haven’t, certainly
not in the West. And so the question
is: why didn’t they? Partly because the
government didn’t have that much of
an interest in doing it. Partly because
there would be enough resistance that,
in a democracy, they couldn’t succeed.”
Harari said that, in the past, datagenerated by such devices could not
have been processed; the K.G.B. could
not have hired enough agents. A.I. re-
moves this barrier. “This is not science
fiction,” he said. “This is happening in
various parts of the world. It’s happen-
ing now in China. It’s happening now
in my home country, in Israel.”
“What you’ve identified is some of
the problems of totalitarian societies or
occupying powers,” Pinker said. “The
key is how to prevent your society from
being China.” In response, Harari sug-
gested that it might have been only an
inability to process such data that had
protected societies from authoritarian-
ism. He went on, “Suddenly, totalitarian
regimes could have a technological ad-
vantage over the democracies.”
Pinker said, “The trade-off between
efficiency and ethics is just in the very
nature of reality. It has always faced us—
even with much simpler algorithms, of
the kind you could do with paper and
pencil.” He noted that, for seventy years,
psychologists have known that, in a med-
ical setting, statistical decision-making
outperforms human intuition. Simple
statistical models could have been widely
used to offer diagnoses of disease, fore-
cast job performance, and predict recid-
ivism. But humans had shown a will-
ingness to ignore such models.
“My view, as a historian, is that sev-
enty years isn’t a long time,” Harari said.
When I later spoke to Pinker, he said
that he admired Harari’s avoidance of
conventional wisdom, but added, “When
it comes down to it, he is a liberal secu-
lar humanist.” Harari rejects the label,
Pinker said, but there’s no doubt that
Harari is an atheist, and that he “believes
in freedom of expression and the appli-
cation of reason, and in human well-
being as the ultimate criterion.” Pinker
said that, in the end, Harari seems to
want “to be able to reject all categories.”T
he next day, Harari and Yahav made
a trip to Chernobyl and the aban-
doned city of Pripyat. They invited a
few other people, and hired a guide.
Yahav embraced a role of half-ironic
worrier about health risks; the guide
tried to reassure him by giving him his
dosimeter, which measures radiation
levels. When the device beeped, Yahav
complained of a headache. In the ru-
ined Lenin Square in Pripyat, he told