Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari has warned Donald Trump that global cooperation is crucial if humanity is to face its “existential crisis”, after the US president publicly rejected the approach at the UN this week.
The Israeli academic, whose books about the past and future of humanity, Sapiens and Homo Deus, have sold in their millions, said Trump’s speech embracing “the doctrine of patriotism” was very disturbing.
Speaking on Thursday, Harari said that humankind faced an existential crisis due to three overlapping problems: nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption.
“All these problems are global problems in essence, and it should be clear to everybody – especially to politicians – that there is no national solution to nuclear war, climate change or technological disruption,” Harari said. “You can’t build a wall against nuclear winter or against global warming and you can’t regulate artificial intelligence or biotechnology on a national basis. Because nobody would like to be behind, nobody would like to limit their own research and development if other countries are not adopting similar regulations. Global cooperation is the first and necessary step to successfully facing our challenges as a species.”
Harari also took a dim view of Brexit, which he described as “basically a distraction. I don’t think inherently it’s a bad idea … but the timing is terrible… If the EU breaks up into 28 different countries, it’s going to be much more difficult to negotiate climate agreements, to have a common front against the hi-tech giants. Every minute the UK and EU institutes are spending on Brexit is a minute they don’t spend on climate change. And they spend a lot of minutes on it.
“Also it’s all just a fantasy about being independent. But there are no longer any independent countries in the world. It doesn’t matter what’s written on some document.”
According to Harari, technological disruption – through the rise of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and surveillance programmes – is a threat to freedom, due to the use of personal data by corporations and governments.
“That’s a very big danger,” said Harari, who does not own a smartphone and was meeting press in London to promote his new book about the dangers of accelerating technological development, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. “If we reach a point when governments have the ability to press people’s emotional buttons in a very efficient way, then elections don’t mean anything anymore. And we are quite close to that point.”
Regulation of future technology should be a top political priority, he said, because some countries are likely to adopt it to control their populations: “If we don’t want this to happen we need to think about it now, not in 10 or 20 years, because that will be too late.”
The author found room for hope, however, praising “the amazing peacefulness” of Brexit negotiations.
“In previous centuries a question like this could only have been decided by a major war with millions of people being displaced or injured and as far as I know only one person lost her life,” he said, a reference to the murder of MP Jo Cox. “It’s amazing that you just vote about it and accept it, whichever way it would have gone.”
“For the last few decades, humankind has enjoyed the most peaceful era in history. I don’t think the new challenges are impossible. It depends on what we decide to do.”