1 Intersubjective
entities are those
ideas or beliefs
that exist only when
shared between
multiple minds.2 According to
Harari’s people,
‘‘Sapiens’’ has sold
more than 20 million
copies worldwide.3 Itzik Yahav,
who doubles as
Harari’s agent.4 In which Harari
discussed the
‘‘emerging religion’’
of ‘‘dataism’’:
‘‘Dataism declares
that the universe
consists of data
flows, and the value
of any phenomenon
or entity is
determined by its
contribution to data
processing.’’5 St. Simeon Stylites,
a Christian hermit
who, in fifth-century
A.D. Syria, stood
atop a pillar for
somewhere between
35 and 42 years.6 The belief that
humans can utilize
science and
technology to
transcend our current
physical and
mental limitations.15you meet guys? What I would say about
Silicon Valley is that they don’t understand
the enormous impact that they are having.
They set out hoping to change the world
with a deep understanding of technology
and not as deep an understanding of histo-
ry and human society and psychology. But,
fi nally, I know as a historian that texts can
gain a life of their own. The people who
wrote the New Testament, if they could see
what the Inquisition and the crusaders did
with the idea of turning the other cheek
and the meek will inherit the earth, I think
they would be rolling in their graves. But
that’s history. What can you do?
Is there an idea that you’re still sort of
germinating that you think is maybe too
radical for your audience? I’ll give two
examples, a big one and a small one. When
I wrote ‘‘Homo Deus,’’ my main interest
was in what comes after humanism and
after liberalism. I thought that liberalism
and humanism were the best stories that
humanity has ever managed to come up
with. We now have to go beyond that
because of the technological revolutions
of the 21st century, which call into question
the most basic ideas and assumptions of
humanism and liberalism. But over the last
fi ve years, I’ve retreated from that fron-
tier because of the political developments
in much of the world. I’ve instead found
myself starting to fi ght these rear-guard
actions to convince people about human-
ism and liberalism when what I really want
to do is to see what comes after.
What comes after? I’m not sure. I haven’t
managed to go much beyond what was
in ‘‘Homo Deus.’’^4 I explored the way in
which the information revolution disinte-
grates the human individual, which is the
foundation of humanism and liberalism.
As far as I could see, the new foundation
becomes the fl ow of data information
in the world to the degree that even the
understanding of what is an organism,
what is a human being — it’s no longer
that a human being is this magical self,
which is autonomous and has free will
and makes decisions about the world. No,
a human being like all other organisms
is just an information-processing system
that is in continuous fl ow. It has no fi xed
assets. What are the implications in polit-
ical terms? In social terms? I’m not sure.
This is what I would be keen to explore.
What was the small example? The small
frontier: I’m reading this book about new
Opening page: Source photograph by Emily Berl for The New York Times. This page: From Meta. Opposite page: Visual China Group, via Getty Images. theories about transgender and nonbinary
transgender people and nonbinary people
and so forth is because people maybe sub-
consciously feel that debates of the future
will be about what we can do with the
human body and the human brain. How
can we re-engineer them? How can we
change them? The fi rst practical place that
we come across these questions is gen-
der. You can say people are bigots and are
always sensitive when you talk about sex
or gender, but I think that subconsciously
people realize this is the fi rst debate about
transhumanism.^6 It’s about what we can
do with technology to change the human
body and brain and mind. Th i s is why we
see these heated debates.
What might it say about you and the sto-
ries you fi nd most appealing that debates
about gender, which could easily be
interpreted as being about one group of
humans wanting to be treated as equal to
any another in the here and now, are ones
that you interpret as being fundamentally
about anxiety over future transhuman-
ism? That’s the point! Transhumanism is
about what it is to be human. I mean, there
are diff erent types of transhumanism, but
one interpretation is that transhuman-
ism is fulfi lling the true potential of the
human. Which depends of course on what
you understand a human to be. This is the
question that we want to pursue, and it’s
not a question with easy answers.is interview has been edited and condensed
from two conversations. A longer version is
online at nytimes.com/magazine.people and so forth. The previous book I’d
read was about early Christianity. It struck
me how similar these things are. So much
of the debate about gender now, in a weird
way it’s like these early Christians debating
the nature of Christ and the trinity. Basi-
cally they were asking, was Christ a non-
binary person? Is Christ divine or human
or both divine-human or neither divine
and human? It resonates with many of the
debates that we have now about the nature
of humans and the person. Can we be both?
Can we be only one? And if you don’t think
like me, then you’re a heretic. I mean, the
champions of the early Christians were
the martyrs and the ascetic monks — you
have this guy Simon^5 standing on a pillar
for years. They were exploring the limits of
the human body with what was available to
them. Now you have, with the gender issue,
more questions of what can we do with the
body; we can change it like this and like
that. There are huge diff erences between
these things, but neurons in my brain start-
ed having this conversation about early
Christianity and current gender debates.
Good thing history shows us that all
debates within Christianity were settled
amicably. The thing is, at the time these
tiny Christian sects having these debates
were insignifi cant! But afterward it turned
out that these doctrinal debates and who
won and who lost had an enormous
impact on the development of human his-
tory. And this is a more serious thought:
I think that the reason that there is so
much political heat around debates about