![]() The poor machine has written a piece that does in fact sounds vaguely like Harari: In fact, he even asked ChatGPT to write a preface for the new edition of the book. In the new commemorative edition, the author dedicates his best artillery to attack ChatGPT - the fashionable (or almost out of fashion) AI chatbox. He also thinks that it’s likely that the human species will disappear within 100 years and that the planet will be inherited by artificial intelligence and cyborgs, hybrids of people and machines. The historian sees science as a vector of European imperialism and the cultural homogenization of the modern world: he seems convinced that technology will end our species through genetic engineering and synthetic life. His analysis of the scientific revolution is demoralizing for someone who - like me - has dedicated half of their life to trying to explain to the public the importance of science as a force for social progress. Harari is a techno-pessimist, if not a scientific catastrophist. Yuval Noah Harari, photographed in Beverly Hills, in September 2018. This expert sees Harari as a “science populist” - a talented storyteller who weaves “gifted storyteller who weave sensationists yarns around scientific ‘facts’ in simple, emotionally persuasive language.” Harari’s account of the world is not hampered by nuances and doubts: he disguises himself with “a false air of authority.” Like any populist, the author is a source of misinformation who invents non-existent crises to triumphantly resolve them immediately. “We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship, but of his storytelling,” writes neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan of Princeton University, who published an essay that is highly critical of Sapiens in Current Affairs last year. But the question is whether this idea is also another one of those stories about things that don’t exist. It’s undoubtedly a simple and easy idea to buy into. According to this notion, our mastery of the world is due to our talent for fiction, for constructing (and believing) stories about things that only exist in our imagination. This, in turn, is due to our incredible ability to believe in non-tangible things, such as gods, nations, the value of money and human rights. The central thesis of Sapiens is that our species - Homo sapiens - came to dominate the world thanks to its ability to cooperate in large numbers. For a long time now, Harrari hasn’t been a simple essayist: he has become the Oracle of Delphi. When a computer scientist sees that Mark Zuckerberg is calling not him, but Harari, to consult on the effects of technology on humanity, he’s understandably mortified, just as an epidemiologist likely is, when he finds out that UNESCO has asked Harari about the effects of Covid on international scientific cooperation. What accounts for this abysmal discrepancy between the public reception of Sapiens and its harsh academic critics? Well, one can imagine that a guy who sells 45 million copies in 65 languages is condemned to receive more than just praise from other experts, who usually struggle to find readers. Other analysts have pointed out that the text is built on statements that lack empirical evidence, while arbitrary theories and sensational exaggerations abound. “Whenever his facts are broadly correct, they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously,” the anthropologist wrote in a scathing review. While the world press was full of praise for Sapiens, anthropologists such as Christopher Hallpike, from McMaster University in Canada, found that the book offered no “serious contribution to knowledge.” And scientists who deal with these same questions aren’t very comfortable with Harari’s work. But Sapiens has often been considered a popular science book, since it deals with some of the central questions of human evolution, such as the development of language and our cognitive abilities. Harari is an extraordinary publishing phenomenon - there’s no doubt about that. It became one of Bill Gates’ 10 favorite books and has sold 45 million copies to date. Now available in 65 languages - and clocking in at 464 pages in English - it spent 96 weeks in a row on The New York Times’ Bestseller list. The reason was Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a book he published in 2011, which subsequently exploded on the international market a few years later. It has been 10 years since an obscure history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Yuval Noah Harari - became one of the most influential intellectuals in the world.
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