New Religions of the 21st Century | Yuval Harari | Talks at Google

MALE SPEAKER 1: Professor Harari is a good friend of mine and a professor in the University of Jerusalem. He's been teaching an introductory history class for undergrads for quite a few years. And at some point he decided that it would be a good idea to compile the lecture notes to a book so that the life of his students will be a little bit more easy. So he wrote the book and then what happened later was completely unplanned. The book became a bestseller in Israel. It was the top best seller in the nonfiction books for a

few months. Then translations to foreign languages came. The book has been translated to 30 languages. It's being sold now in most of the European countries and in Canada with great success. And now it's coming to the US. And fortunately there was our chance to bring Yuval here to visit us also and to give the talk at Google. So I'm really happy to introduce him. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] YUVAL HARARI: It's a pleasure to be here also, not only to visit [INAUDIBLE], but also to be in Silicon Valley, which for me is a kind of special place

as an historian. As an historian I focus mainly on the history of ideas, ideology, mythology, religion. And I think that the most interesting place in the world today, in religious terms, is Silicon Valley, not the Middle East, not Syria, or Afghanistan, or Israel, or Jerusalem, but Silicon Valley. This is where the new religions that will take over the world are being formulated. And this will also be the topic of my talk for the next hour or so, about the new religions of the 21st century. But in order to understand the future of religion we first

have to say a few words about its past and its present. And I would like to start with describing what is the main religion, or ideology, worldview of the world today in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century. And I think we can say that the dominant ideology of the world at present is liberal humanism, or in short, liberalism. Liberalism is a worldview, an ideology, that thinks that a source of all authority and all meaning in the universe is the individual human, the individual of the specie Homo sapiens. Liberalism has several core

ideas. First of all, it believes in the individual. It thinks that every Homo sapien is an individual, which literally means it cannot be divided. The meaning of the term "individual" is that you cannot divide it. The idea is, yes, of course, you can divide the human body or the human brain, but within each individual there is kind of a seed of light, a spark that cannot be divided further. Within each of us there is this inner voice and this inner voice in each and every one of us is the source of all the meaning and

all the authority in the world. Whenever we face a difficult question, a difficult dilemma, choice in life as individuals, or as collectives, liberalism tells us, listen to yourself, connect to yourself. Try to hear this inner voice within yourself and it will tell you what to do. And listen to that, not to anything else. The second main idea or hypothesis of liberalism is that this inner voice within ourselves comes out of a space of complete freedom. Yes, there are influences, constraints from outside, physical, social, biological, but if we go deep enough within ourselves, we will come,

eventually, to a space of complete freedom. And from the space we need to make our big decisions in life. Thirdly, based on these two ideas or two assumptions, liberalism assumes that only I can really know myself. Nobody else, no outside person, no outside system can really know who I am because, again, who I am really is this inner voice which enjoys complete freedom. So I'm inaccessible from outside. Based on these ideas the main value of liberalism, which gives it its name, is liberty, freedom. We need to preserve the freedom of the individual to think, to

feel, and to act according to what he or she thinks and feels because, again, this is the supreme and source of authority and meaning in the world. Now all this may sound very abstract and very theoretical. So I would like to give a few concrete examples of what liberalism means in practice to our lives as individuals and as collectives. If you think about the field of politics, so what is liberal politics? What is liberalism translated into political terms? You get a democracy with elections and so forth. If we want to know who should rule this

country, what kind of economic policies to adopt, what kind of foreign policy to adopt, to make war or to make peace, who should we turn to in order to get answers? We should turn to the inner voices of each individual. So we have elections and on election day everybody goes by himself or by herself. And at least theoretically tries to connect, I try to connect to myself to listen, what are my deepest feelings? What's are my deepest personal thoughts about this issue? And I vote accordingly. And this is how we know who should rule the

country, whether to make peace or war, and so forth. So this is liberal politics, which argues that the voter knows best. There is no source of authority higher than the voter. You get the same ideas also in the economic field. What is liberal economics? Liberal economics is the view that the customer is always right. There is no higher authority than the authority of the individual customer. How do we know if a product is a good product? If the customers buy it. There is no other method. There is no higher authority that can say, yes, they

didn't buy it, but it's still good. Let's say we are planning a car. And we are organizing a committee of the wisest people on the planet. We take Nobel laureates in physics, and chemistry, and literature, and peace, and whatever and they come together for five years with a lot of money, a lot of helpers. And they design the perfect car. And after five years you start producing this perfect car, engineered, invented by the wisest people on the planet. And it goes on sale and nobody buys it, or very few people buy it. It means that

this car is not a good car according to the tenets of liberal economics. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. YUVAL HARARI: Oh, perhaps. But eventually you cannot blame the customer. Oh, we produce a perfect car and we [? build ?] a perfect PR campaign, but the customers, they are stupid. They don't understand what is good for them. This works in communism, for example. This is the idea of communism. You have really wise people sitting in Moscow. They plan the car, which they think is best. And everybody, at least if they are fortunate, gets this car. And if they don't

like it, it's their problem. But not in liberal economics. In liberal economics the highest authority in economics is the customer. You have the same ideas in the fields of art and aesthetics. Many times in history many periods, many cultures, people had ideas, what is art and what is beauty? And they thought that there are some objective definitions, objective yardsticks to determine whether something is art and whether something is good art. And then comes along liberal art and liberal aesthetics in the 19th, 20th century. And just as in politics the voter knows best. And in economics

the customer is always right. So in liberal art, also, the customer or the viewer, he is or she is the highest authority. According to liberal art, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, in the feelings of the person watching or seeing the painting, the architecture, the play, whatever it is. In 1917, in a very, very famous gesture Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, said this art, called it "Fountain," signed his name, Marcel Duchamp, put it in a museum in Paris, said this is art. This is beautiful. And ever since then in every introductory course to

art, to art history in university they bring this image and the argument starts. Is it art? No, it's not art. Who determines what is art? Is it beautiful? It's not beautiful. And eventually, if you are liberals, you will reach the conclusion that art is whatever I define to be art and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Whatever I think is beautiful, it's beautiful. And nobody out there can come to me and say, you think it's beautiful, but it's not. There is some higher authority. If you think that this is beautiful art and you're

willing to pay millions of dollars for it, and it costs millions of dollars today, this fountain, then it's art. The same idea is also applied to the field of ethics. How do you know if an action is good or evil? If it's ethical or unethical? Well, suppose I live in the Middle Ages. And I fall in love with another guy. And I go to the priest and tell him in confession this and this happened. So the priest will say, this is very evil, what you have done. You will go to hell for this. Why? Because

God thinks it's evil, because scriptures say it's evil, because I, the priest, say this is evil. And then I say to the priest, but I feel very good about it. So the priest would say, but we don't care what you feel. Your feelings are unimportant. You don't determine what is good or evil by what you feel. Then came liberalism in the modern age and said no. The highest authority in the field of ethics is also the feelings of individuals. There's nothing beyond that. If it feels good, do it. If you feel good about it, if

everybody feels good about it, then there is absolutely no reason in the world why it should be evil or bad. Now, there are, of course, problems. What happens if a particular action causes some people to feel good and other people to feel bad? This is when you have arguments within liberal ethics. Say, for example, an extramarital affair. I have an affair outside of marriage. I feel very good about it, but if my spouse finds out he will feel bad about it. And probably I will also feel bad about it. And if we, say, we divorce

as a result and we have children, they will feel bad about it. So what is more important, my good feelings at a particular time, or the bad feelings of my spouse, or my children? Different people have different views on this question, but as long as they are liberal, the argument will be done in terms of feelings. The question will be, what feeling is more important? Even very religious people today understand this. And if you think about the terrorist attacks in France on the Charlie Hebdo, after the attack all kinds of organizations, Muslim organizations and even

non-Muslim organizations began to say things like, but look, this newspaper, it was not doing something very wholesome because it was causing millions of devout Muslims around the world to feel bad. It didn't take into account their feelings. Now it's very interesting that they use this argument because even those who try to say it's not good to draw a caricature of the prophet Mohammad, they don't say it's not good because Allah forbade it, or because it's wrong according to the Quran. They say it's not good because it hurts the feelings of people. So even those arguments

are praised in liberal terms of feelings. And finally, just to give a last example from the field of education. What is liberal education? The main idea of liberal education is that the student or the pupil is the highest authority, not the teacher, not the professor. In liberal education the main thing you try to teach your pupils or your students is to think for themselves. They are the highest authority. You go from kindergarten to the university and you ask the teacher, you ask the professor, what are you trying to teach? And he or she will say,

well, I try to teach history, or mathematics, or physics, but above all I try to teach my students to think for themselves. This is the most important thing. If he or she are liberal educators it doesn't always work, of course, not all the universities or schools manage to do it, but this is the general ideal accepted by all liberal institutions of education. Now when we look at the world of today in 2015 we can say that the liberal package dominates most of the world. This liberal package contains human rights, which are these walls, defenses established

to protect the inner freedom of each individual. This is the human rights. This package contains belief in individualism, in liberal democracy, in free market economy. And I think we can say that not everybody accepts this particular package, but it is the dominant ideological package of the world today. And there is very little viable alternatives, or real alternatives to this package at present. Over the last few years, we have seen a lot of social protests in different places in the world, but the vast majority of the protests were done in the name of the liberal values,

not against them. People are coming to the governments and saying, you don't live up to the liberal ideas. We want the politics to be more democratic. We want economics, the economy, to be more free. The vast majority of social protests did not have any alternative to this package. They simply wanted it to be implemented better than it is being implemented today. Another potential source for an alternative which more and more people speak about is China, the rising superpower of the 21st century. However, even though China is definitely an economic giant, it is still an ideological

dwarf. In terms of ideology or religion China has very little to offer the world, at least at present. In theory and officially, it is still a communist country, but it is very far from being communist in practice. And it has no alternative idea to either its official communism or to the liberal package of how else to run human society in terms of values. Maybe in the next decade, two decades, three decades we will see the rise of a completely new ideology in China, but speaking as of 2015, China is extremely good in business, in making

money, in making products, but ideologically it seems to be bankrupt. The third main alternative to the liberal package is radical Islam, or radical religions in general, but very often we focus on radical Islam. However, even though radical fundamentalist Islamic movements oppose the liberal package, they don't really have any relevant alternative that can be offered and implemented in the 21st century. The reason is that most of their ideas are out of date by centuries, by hundreds of years. The 21st century challenges humankind in new ways. We are facing enormous opportunities, enormous new opportunities, and enormous new

dangers that we need to confront. And radical Islam has very little relevant things to say about these new challenges and new dangers. To give just a few examples, perhaps the most important question in 21st-century economics is what do we need people for in the economy? In a situation when it is likely that computers will be able to do more and more things better and better than Homo sapiens, this becomes a real question for the first time in history. The most basic economic value of humans is being put in doubt. And nobody really has an idea

how the job market would look like in 40 years or 50 years, and what humans will still be necessary for, or least most humans. What will they do? If there is a young man or woman today, say, 20 years old, going to college, and asking himself or herself what should I study today so that in 30 years I will have a good job? Nobody knows what to tell him or her. Nobody knows. We don't have a clue how the job market would look in 30 or 40 years. And again, it's not even clear. It's not

that there will be different jobs. It's not even clear that there will be any jobs for most humans. Another very big challenge and opportunity concerns biotechnology. The possibility of extending human life and human health indefinitely, with 80 being the new 40. What will this do to society, to sexual relations, to family structures? This is very big questions. Another very big question, which emanates from this field of biotechnology is the possibility of, for the first time in history, real biological gaps opening between the rich and the poor. Previously in history there were always gaps between rich

and poor, but these gaps were social, economic, legal, not biological. There was no real biological difference between the king and the peasant. They had the same basic physical, cognitive, and emotional abilities. Now with the advent of biotechnology we are facing a possibility, it's not a prophecy, it's not certain, but there is a possibility of real biological gaps opening and Homo sapiens splitting into different biological castes, or even different species. These are the kinds of problems that we need to confront in the 21st century. And the problem of radical Islam and radical Christianity, Judaism, and so

forth, is that they have nothing relevant to say about these questions. They have no answers to these questions because they don't even understand the questions. If you read even very wise books written thousands of years ago, the people who wrote these books knew nothing about genetics, knew nothing about nanotechnology, or computers. So how can you expect to get answers to these questions from people who didn't know anything about the subjects in question? Now it's true that if you count heads, if you count people there are many more people today on the planet that are interested

in God and scriptures than in nanotechnology or genetics, or who understand these subjects. But history is not made by numbers. It's not that you need a lot of people to make historical changes. Very often historical changes are made by relatively few numbers of people. If we go back to the last big technological and economic revolution that swept the world, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, it was done by very few people. Most people in the 19th century knew far more and were interested far more in the Bible and the Quran than in steam engines,

or railroads, or coal mines. The same thing we see today, we saw also in the 19th century. It was also full of religious fundamentalist movements. For example, in the Islamic world, you had in Sudan, the Mahdi in the late 19th century, which established a religious theocracy. And also beheaded people and fought wars and so forth. Caused a lot of [? steel ?] in Victorian England when the followers of the Mahdi beheaded, executed General Charles Gordon, a famous British commander. Nobody almost remembers the Mahdi today. Similarly in India you had a religious revival led by [INAUDIBLE],

whose main idea, the main message [INAUDIBLE] had to India in the 19th century, is that all the answers to all the questions are in the Vedas, in the holy scriptures of Hinduism. The Vedas are never wrong. All the answers are there. If you have any difficulty, open the Vedas or ask the Brahmans. Tens of millions of people followed him. In the Christian world you also saw such movements. Pope Pius IX, the Catholic pope, he, in the middle of the 19th century had this new idea that the pope is never wrong. It is a new idea.

It's not an idea for the Middle Ages. The Catholic dogma, the Papal Infallibility, it's called, the pope is never wrong when it comes to questions of ethics, morality, and so forth. This is not a medieval dogma. It goes back only to the middle of the 19th century. And then millions of people followed Pope Pius IX. In China the biggest war of the 19th century was not the Napoleonic War, was not the American Civil War. By far the biggest war of the 19th century was the Taiping Rebellion, which started in 1850 when this person Hong Xiuquan,

he had a vision. God revealed himself to Hong and told Hong a secret that Hong was actually the younger brother of Jesus Christ. And he had a divine mission to establish the kingdom of Heavenly Peace on Earth starting with China. Millions of people followed him and they did not establish any peace. They waged the most terrible war of the 19th century with at least 20 million dead. These are the smallest estimates. So you had your full share of religious fundamentalism also back in the 19th century. Nobody almost today remembers these people or these movements. They

did not change the world. The Industrial Revolution did. Well, these people in Sudan, or in India, or in China were concerned about scriptures, and God, and heaven, and so forth. A few engineers and a few technicians, and bankers, and financiers in Manchester, in Liverpool, and Birmingham, they changed the world. They shaped the world in which we live today. Now there was one ideological or religious movement which began in the 19th century which did manage to change the world and which is far more important. And when we think back about the 19th century and we ask

ourselves, what was the big ideology, the big ethical ideas that came from this period, we think not about the Pope Pius IX, or the Mahdi, we think about socialism and communism. In 1800 there were hardly any socialists or communists, very few. Even in the middle of the 19th century, there was still a fringe group of bizarre people who have such thoughts, but there was one crucial characteristic about these bizarre people, like Marx and Engels, that enabled them to really change the world and to create an ideology that spread over the entire planet. And helped to

shape our life today. The crucial thing about Marx and Engels, and later Lenin and Trotsky, and all these fellows is that they did not just read old books from hundreds of centuries previously. They studied the technology and the economy of their own day. And they tried to create a new ideology, which will be suited to the new opportunities and challenges of 19th-century technology and 19th-century economics. Lenin was once asked in a very famous occasion, Lenin was asked by his followers, please, Vladimir, tell us in simple language what communism is. We are not going to read

[? "The Capital," ?] a very, very dense book. We don't want to hear now this long philosophical talk. In very few words tell us what communism is. And Lenin answers, communism, communism is power to the workers' councils, the Soviets, plus electrification of the entire country. You cannot have communism without electricity, without the steam engine, without telegraph, radio, railroads. The Communist system of production and economics demands these things. You could not have established a Communist regime in 16th-century Russia. Impossible. First you must have an Industrial Revolution. Communism and socialism are custom built for the world following

the Industrial Revolution. This is why they're so successful. In a way communism and socialism were the harbingers of the new religions we see today in the 21st century in the sense that they were based on technology and on the economy. After thousands of years in which technology played almost no role at all in religious and ideological thought, communism was the first techno-religion, a religion or ideology if you prefer that promises roughly the same things that were promised by the traditional religions. It promised peace, prosperity, paradise, but here on Earth with the use of technology, not

in the afterlife by the act of some divine power. This is the definition of a techno-religion. It promises whatever it promises here on Earth with the help of technology. And communism was perhaps the first to show the way and it completely changed our entire ideological discourse. Previously the main dividing lines between people and their beliefs concerned questions like, do we believe in God, what god? Do you believe in a soul? What kind of soul? What happens after death? These were the main questions that divided, say, Christians from Muslims and Shiites from Sunnis. After communism everything

changed. Now people more and more began to define themselves by how they think about technology and economics. Sounds very strange, but not very long ago, 30 years ago, humankind was almost destroyed in a nuclear war between two camps who were divided not in what they thought about soul, or God, or the afterlife. The were divided in what they thought about how economic production should be organized. So communism really changed the rules of the game. Even if you don't accept what Marx said you started speaking in similar terms in the questions that you asked. And we

see indeed that the traditional religions, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, they did not disappear. It's not that people stopped believing in them. They just became less and less relevant, less influential. They were transformed essentially from a creative force into a reactive force. In the Middle Ages they were very creative forces. Much of the new technological, economic, political, administrative techniques of the Middle Ages were pioneered by the Catholic church. The best equivalent for Silicon Valley in the 13th century is the Vatican. This is where all of the new ideas about administration, about information processing, this is where

you went, to the Vatican. The first archives, libraries, systems for archiving information, cataloging information, this is something the church was best in doing. If you are a king in the 13th century and you wanted somebody who knows how to handle information, to help you run your kingdom, you turned to monks. You turned to priests. They were the experts. So back then they were still very creative forces. But in the last 200 years they became reactive forces. They're still there, but most of what they do is react to the changes, to the inventions, to the discoveries

that other people make. Like somebody invents the contraceptive pill and completely changes the sexual [? sphere ?]. And then the pope and the priests, they scratch their head, what do we do with this? What do you do? Is it OK? Is it not OK? They react. Similarly somebody invents the internet. And then you have all the Jewish rabbis also scratching their heads, what do we do with that? Is it OK? [INAUDIBLE] just use it like this, like that? And it's not only technology. Also new ethical ideas, the 20th century is full of them. Perhaps the

most important is feminism. After thousands of years of patriarchal society, we have the feminist revolution completely changing social structures, families, and so forth. And again, you have all the rabbis and Ayatollahs, and priests, they think, how do we need to react to that? It's not our initiative, but we have to do something with it. So they are reacting in this way or that way. A very good way of grasping the changing place of these religions in the world is to ask yourself two questions. First, ask yourself what is the most important discovery of the 20th

century. And this is a very difficult question because there is a lot to choose from. Perhaps it's antibiotics. Perhaps it gave each one of you at least 10 years of your life, on average, you owe to antibiotics. It's a huge difference. Maybe it's nuclear weapons. Maybe it's the computer. Maybe it's not technology, but some ethical idea, like feminism. Perhaps feminism is the most important discovery of the 20th century. Difficult question to decide. Now ask yourself a second question. What is the most important discovery made in the 20th century by [? faced ?] religions, religions that

believe in God, like Islam, or Hinduism, or Judaism. Again, it's a very difficult question because you can't think about anything. What did these people discover in the last 100 years that changed our lives? Yes, they are still influential in the way that they react to the inventions and discoveries of others, but what new things did they discover? I, at least, can't think about anything which you can mention in the same sentence with antibiotics, or feminism, or nuclear weapons. So we see that the usual challenges that we think that perhaps there are still in the world

to liberalism are not really challenges. Neither China, nor Radical Islam, nor the social protests, they don't really have a relevant alternative to the liberal package. But this does not mean that liberalism is safe. Just the opposite. It seems that we are on the verge of the collapse of liberalism. And the collapse of liberalism will not happen because of things that people are doing now in Syria, or Iraq, or in Libya, but because of things that people are doing here in Silicon Valley, and in Stanford University, and in my university, and in the Hebrew University. What

kind of things? Well, it starts with the life sciences. The basic problem of liberalism today in the early 21st century is that the life sciences are telling us that it is nonsense. The basic beliefs on which liberalism are built or perhaps sounded sensible in the 18th century, in the era of Locke and Rousseau and these people. But there is a huge gap between what liberalism tells us about the world, and about Homo sapiens, and what the life sciences in the early 21st century are telling us about Homo sapiens. Liberalism believes in individualism as we said

earlier, that each one of us is an individual. We have this ray of light, this inner core which is individual. This is our real self. Well, according to the life sciences today there are no such things. All animals, including humans, are not individuals. They don't have souls. They don't have any essence. They don't have any inner core. They are basically a collection of biochemical algorithms, all kinds of algorithmic systems that build the brain, that build the human beings, the giraffe, the elephant, whatever it is. And if you peel all the layers, all the systems that

make up an animal, an organism like an onion, you peel one layer after the other, one layer after the other, in the end you won't get an inner core of light, or a soul. You will get nothing. There is just nothing left when you take out all these different biochemical algorithms, nothing is left. There is no individual. Secondly, these biochemical algorithms that make up an organism are not free. There is no such thing as freedom according to the life sciences. All systems in nature, including these biochemical algorithms, they work according to just two possible principles.

Either they are deterministic or they are random. Perhaps some events on the quantum level insert a certain randomness into the biochemical processes of our brain, of our nervous system, of our body, but that's it. The word "freedom" simply has no meaning in the life sciences of today. Taking these two ideas together that an organism, including Homo sapiens-- which is just another animal like the chimpanzees, and giraffes, and so forth-- if an organism is just a collection of algorithms, and these algorithms are not free in any sense, this means that at least potentially an external system,

an external entity can understand me perfectly. It just needs to understand all the algorithms that come together to build this machine, this structure. And the crucial insight is that even our sensations, even our emotions, even our feelings, liberalism believes above all else in our feelings, how you feel about politics, about art, about sexuality, this is the holy grail of liberalism, our feelings. But now come the life sciences and say, feelings? Feelings are just biochemical algorithms calculating what? Calculating either of two things, probabilities of survival and probabilities of reproduction. That's it. The Homo sapiens, like giraffes,

like elephants, they are calculating all the time, all their body is just a calculating machine for calculating probabilities of survival and reproduction. This, again, may sound a bit abstract. So I will give two simple examples. First of all, problems of survival. Let's say you are a baboon. And you are somewhere in the Savannah in Africa. And you see a tree with bananas on it. And you ask yourself, should I go and take these bananas? But you also see that there is a lion nearby. Now should I or shouldn't I try and get these bananas and

risk that while I eat the bananas the lion will eat me? Now in order to reach a good answer I basically, what I need to do, is to calculate probabilities and I need to take into account a lot of information in order to do it correctly. I need information about the bananas. How far are they from you? Are there any obstacles in the way? How many bananas? Are they ripe or are they green? It's one thing if there are 20 ripe bananas and it's another thing if there are just two unripe bananas. I also need

information about the lion. How far is it? How big is it? Is it asleep? Is it awake? Does it seem hungry? Does it seem satiated? And thirdly, I need a lot of information about myself. How fast can I run? How hungry I am? If I'm on the verge of starvation, if my energy is so low that I may die within a few hours if I don't eat something, then no matter how big the danger is I should try and get these bananas because otherwise I'll die anyway. If, on the other hand, I just know I

had a big feast, there is no reason to risk my life for these bananas, even if the danger is relatively small. Now to reach a good decision, a good decision means a decision that will enable me to survive, I need to take all that information into account and weigh it together somehow, calculate all the probabilities together. How do I do it as a baboon? I don't take out a piece of paper and pen, or a calculator, or a computer. I don't have it. And I don't need it because my entire body is a calculator that

was built for millions of years by natural selection to do exactly that. What we call emotions, sensations, feelings, are simply biochemical algorithms that take all that information, all the huge amounts of information from outside and inside, and within a split second reach a certain decision, a certain probability. Now the result does not show up as a number, like in some futuristic science fiction movie that the baboon or the person sees a number in front of his eyes, no. The result will come up simply as a feeling. This is what feelings are. They are the result

of these calculations. If the result is that I should try and get the banana, it will come up as the emotion of courage. I will feel very courageous. My chest will be puffed up and I will run to the bananas. If the calculations reach the conclusion, reach the result that I shouldn't risk my life, the chances are too small, then the result again, will not be a number. It will be a feeling. It will be the feeling, the emotion of fear. I will feel very frightened and run away. And sometimes the calculations are just in

the middle. It's not clear if it's a good idea or a bad idea in terms of survival to reach for these bananas. And this too will show up as an emotion, as a feeling. I will feel confused. I will feel I don't know what to do, to take the bananas, not to take them. This too will be a feeling. The other type of calculation problems that this machine is built to calculate concerns not survival, but reproduction. And again, if you are a peacock, you look at the peacock. If you are a human, you look at

a human. And you need to make up your mind, sometimes very quickly, is this a good mate or not? And again, lots of information floods in from the eyes, from the ears, from the nose, from within the body. And within a split second you get the result, not as a number, but as a feeling. You will feel this is beautiful, this is attractive, or, no, it's not beautiful, it's not attractive, it's disgusting, whatever. All of these sexual feelings, again, they are biochemical algorithms. They are not some spiritual whatever that comes from the sky. They are

the result of very, very complex biochemical algorithms that natural selection has evolved and selected for millions upon millions of generations until they came to us. Now so far these biological insights actually supported liberalism because liberalism, as I said earlier, it believes in feelings as the supreme source of authority. What I feel, this is the supreme source of authority on the planet. And biologists could come and say, this is actually a very keen insight. This is true because if you want to make decisions about your life and you have two potential sources of authority, say the

Bible or your own feelings, biologists will tell you, go with your feelings. The Bible contains the wisdom of a few priests in ancient Jerusalem. That's it. Your feelings contain the wisdom of millions upon millions of years of evolution, the algorithms that are your feelings have passed the most rigorous tests of natural selection. Each one of your genes, and each one of your algorithms is here today because it has succeeded for millions of years to pass the most rigorous tests of natural selection. So if you need to make a decision you better go with your feelings.

This was the situation maybe until today. But now things are changing. In two ways things are changing. First of all, biologists decipher the biochemical algorithms that compose our body and that are responsible for our feelings. They are no longer mysterious entities as they were before. We understand them better and better. Why I feel this way in this particular situation. And secondly, we have computer scientists that are creating better and better electronic algorithms. Now the question that arises today is what will happen once we create an algorithm that knows me better, that understands me and my

feelings better than I can understand myself? What will happen then is that authority will shift. It will shift away from the feelings of individuals to these outside algorithms. Our feelings at present, you can say, are the best algorithms in the universe. But after all, they are becoming outdated. They appeared maybe the way that we have them today maybe a few tens of thousands of years ago in the African Savanna. So far they have been the best algorithms around, but we are now at the position to produce an updated version, something better. And when we have

better algorithms then the authority will shift to them. This is already happening in at least a few fields of life, most clearly in the field of medicine and decisions about your own body, and your own health. I think it's not far fetched to say that all of you are now listening to this talk, including myself, the most important decisions about our bodies during our lifetime will not to be taken by our feelings. They will be taken by external algorithms, algorithms that understand our own internal systems and that have statistics about millions upon millions of other

humans, and therefore can make better predictions and better decisions about our bodies than just my own feelings. To give a concrete example I think it was a year ago, two years ago that this is very famous story came out with Angelina Jolie that she had a double mastectomy. Why? Not because she discovered she had breast cancer. She didn't have breast cancer. But she went and did a genetic test scanning her DNA. And it showed that she carries a mutation in one of her genes that, according to the statistical database, means she has an 87% chance

of getting breast cancer. And she had a lot of breast cancer cases in her family. I think that her mother died at a relatively young age from breast cancer. She did not have breast cancer at the time. Her feelings told her nothing, that she is sick, that she should do something. But the external algorithms told her you have an 87% chance of getting this disease. So she had a double mastectomy, which is a very, very big decision to make in a person's life. And likewise I think most of the big decisions we will make about

our lives in our lifetime will actually be taken by such external algorithms, not based on our inner feelings. Now when this will spread to more and more fields of life, liberalism will collapse, not necessarily violently, but it will simply become outdated. People will move authority to a different place. This has happened before in history. In the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age, in the Middle Ages at the time when the dominance was of [? faced ?] religions, when people had faced a decision, a problem, the practical guideline they received was listen to

scriptures. Read what is written in scriptures. This will give you an answer. Now the rise of liberalism was not a theoretical change. It was not just a matter of philosophy. It was a practical matter of how people actually make decisions in their daily lives. If previously, when they faced a problem, say, who to marry, they opened scriptures and looked for the answer. Now, with the rise of liberalism, the guidance was listen to your feelings. Go maybe at night, climb the high mountain. Look at the moon. Look at the sea. Try to connect to yourself. See

what you really feel and go with your heart. Go with your feelings. This was a practical guidance. It was not just theory. Now we move to the next stage. When people say, don't listen to your feelings, what do they know? Listen to Google, or listen to Amazon, or to Facebook, or whatever. They understand how you feel better than you know how you feel because they have much more information. And they have much better algorithms than what natural selection gave you. They have information not only about your emails and your books and so forth, but the

latest rage is all these biometric devices that you wear on your body, and that gets a constant stream of information about your blood pressure and your sugar levels, and whatever. And, of course, do a DNA test, and so forth and so forth. And if you have all this information and these superbly built algorithms you can get much better answers than from your feelings, or certainly from the Bible. So we see the potential rise of a new kind of religion, a data religion. If previously God was in the center of events and then humans were in

the center of events. Now data or information becomes the supreme source of authority and of meaning in the world. It starts with simple things like, you've got to an intersection in the road to turn left or to turn right, don't listen to your feelings. Listen to [? ways. ?] It knows much better than your gut intuition whether to go this way or that way. Then you move to a more sophisticated level. What book to buy? I go, I enter the Amazon website. I want to buy a new book. The first thing that happens is that

a banner pops up and says, I know you. I know you. And I know that you and people like you will enjoy this book or that book, or that film. And the annoying thing is that they are often correct. They really know me better than I know myself. They can recommend the best book for me. So at present it's still based on something quite, not very sophisticated, like they know the previous books that I've read and bought. And they try to make an extrapolation from that. But now we're moving to a far more sophisticated level

when the books start to read me while I read them. If I read a book on a Kindle, or some other electronic device, the device can know whether I finished the book, how quickly I read it, when I stopped in reading the book, which parts I read quickly, and which parts I read slowly. This is a wealth of information, which conveys a very good idea about my experience of reading the book. The next stage is to connect this two facial recognition programs. And the book will know not only when I read fast or slow, but

when I laughed, when I cried, when I was bored. This is an immense device that can, of course, help Amazon not only recommend books, but do many [? more ?] [INAUDIBLE] more sophisticated things. And eventually we will reach even questions like, whom to marry. In the lives of most individuals perhaps one of the most important questions is the question of who to marry. And now instead of going to the priest and asking, Father, who should I marry, or going to my parents, or trying to connect to my feelings, and making bad decisions, I can ask

Google, dear Google, who should I marry? And Google will answer, well, I know you from the moment you were born, at least sometime in the future. I've read every email you've ever written. I've listened to every phone call you've ever made. I remember every failed date you went to. If you want, I can show you the graphs of your sugar level and blood pressure during every date and every sexual encounter you had in your lifetime. And of course, I also know your potential mates, like if I have to choose between two people. So yes, I

know him and I know him, or her and her just as I know you. And based on all this information and not only on all this information, but based on databases off millions and millions of successful and unsuccessful relationships, I can recommend to you at a probability of 87% that you had better go with A and not with B. And one more thing. I know you so well that I also know that you are disappointed by what I just told you. I told you to choose A, but secretly you actually prefer B. And I also

understand why you make this mistake. You give too much importance to physical appearances, to external beauty. Now I'm not saying that beauty's not important. Beauty is very important. But you give it too much weight. In my calculations, which are based on these enormous statistical databases, I know that beauty counts for 9.62% of the success of a relationship. But your old-fashioned biochemical algorithms, because of things that happened in the African Savanna, give this data, beauty, they give it 27.5%, which is far too high. So believe me, even though you feel that B is the right answer,

go for A. And this is an empirical question. If enough people enough times will consult and get a good answer that they will be happy with, then with time more and more decisions about small things and about big things will be done in such a way. Authority will shift from the feelings, from the inner feelings of the individuals to the wisdom of these external algorithms. This is a very favorite topic in many science fiction movies, and books, and whatever. The usual plot of science fiction movies or books goes like this. Computers or robots become very

powerful. Then there is a big war between humans and the robots, or humans and computers. And the computers are so powerful, they know everything. They can do anything, but they don't understand the inner spirit of humanity. They don't understand love or whatever. And this is why humanity wins in the end. This is a very common plot in many of these movies because their audience is humans. So they have to sell this kind of fiction. Otherwise people won't buy it. People won't like it. But there is a fallacy here. And the fallacy is that why do

you think that computers or robots will not understand the emotions, the feelings, love, whatever? It's not some otherworldly spiritual thing. It's, at least according to the life sciences, it's an algorithm. So why think that a computer will not be able to understand an algorithm? OK, it's a biochemical algorithm. It's not an electronic algorithm. But what's the difference? The mathematics is the same. The calculations are basically the same. Why does it matter how it is done? The second fallacy, which is part of it is that most of these movies, not all of them, but most of

them imagine it as a kind of war between humans and computers, or humans and robots. When the far more likely scenario, which we are already seeing now, is not a war but a wedding. We are talking about a merger of the two kinds of algorithms, the biochemical and the electronic, not a struggle, or not necessarily a struggle. Now there is one question that still hovers over this entire discussion. And this is whether the life sciences are right. Does life really mean nothing more than information processing? It may seem like it when you read the latest

articles and books on the discovery of the life sciences, but there is still one big hole in the story. And this is the question of consciousness, of subjective experiences. What is called in philosophy the hard problem of consciousness. We now understand very well, we know how to find correlations between particular biochemical or electrochemical patterns in the brain, and certain subjective experiences. But we are very, very far from being able to understand how is it that a particular pattern of electrochemical signals in the brain creates a subjective experience of love, or anger, or hate, or whatever.

The life sciences-- or currently most of them-- have this dogma that, OK, we don't know how to explain it, but in 20, or 30, or 50 years with more experiments, more knowledge we will understand how electrochemical signals are transformed into subjective experiences. But at present in 2015 this is just dogma. Still today we don't have a clue how electrochemical patterns can turn into subjective experiences. Maybe the life sciences have got it wrong. Maybe humans and other animals are not reducible to algorithms. This is an open question. However, in historical terms, it's not as important as

you might think because a religion or an ideology does not have to be correct in what it says in order to take over the world. We have many cases previously in history when religions and ideologies, which said what we think today to be completely erroneous things about the world, nevertheless managed to take it over. In scientific terms the story, for example, that Christianity tells about the world, how the world was created, how humans were created, how things work in the world, it's not true. It's simply not true, at least according to science. But this did

not prevent Christianity from taking over most of the world. So you don't need the truth to take over the world. Similarly with these new data religions, maybe they are based on a misunderstanding of life, but this will not necessarily prevent them from taking over the world. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: Hi. My question is a bit random, but you mentioned feminism. And how we're now starting with feminism. But some of the other books I read talked about how actually way back when, like around the agricultural revolution, I guess, there was no patriarchy. It was equal society

where everybody caught small animals, and harvested stuff, and whatever. So at what point in human history did it become uneven? YUVAL HARARI: Did patriarchy arise? AUDIENCE: Yes. YUVAL HARARI: Well, the simplest-- I have a thing. Do you hear me? The simplest answer is that we don't know. One of the things I like most about science is that when we don't know something, we can simply say we don't know. We have very little idea how gender relations were prior to the agricultural revolution. After the agricultural revolution when we have in mass of first archaeological and then

written records, we know that they were patriarchal. Like you see even 10,000 years ago, you find the remains of people from 10,000 years ago, after the agricultural revolution. You see that in times of famine they allowed the girls to die and kept the boys. The boys were fed-- you see in skeletons that girls suffered far more from malnutrition than boys in the same community. So this is a clear evidence of patriarchy shortly after the agricultural revolution. How did gender relations, or family structures, how did they look like 20,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago? There are

many theories. We have no firm evidence. Even if 50,000 years ago there was a matriarchal society, or an egalitarian society, this is not the case in the last 10,000 years. So even if feminism, the feminist revolution returns things to what they were like 50,000 years ago, in terms of the last 10,000 years, it's still probably the biggest social revolution that occurred. What is even more important to realize is that not only we don't know what was the situation 20,000 years ago, we don't have at present any good explanation for patriarchy. Many people think that the

domination of society by men and the domination of women by men is obvious because men are physically stronger. The problem with this very common theory is that in human societies, and even other ape societies, there is no direct correlation between physical strength and social power. In human society, for example, people in their 60s usually dominate people in their 20s even though they are weaker physically. Or when you look at organizations, like the Catholic church, so the pope is not the strongest Catholic in the world. And he did not become pope by going go around beating

all the other bishops and cardinals. You become pope or you become president by building coalitions of supporters. Social skills are the key for social power among humans. And it's often argued that women have superior social skills. They are better in compromising. They are better at understanding how other people think, what other people want. Whereas men are much more self-centered and have difficulty understanding or caring about what other people think and feel. So if this is true we should have got matriarchal societies. And among our closest cousins in nature, the bonobo chimpanzees, we indeed find matriarchal

societies. So how come in Homo sapiens, nevertheless in most societies in the last 10,000 years women were dominated by men? We just don't know at present. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] it could have been a survival strategy. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. AUDIENCE: By the group. YUVAL HARARI: Which? AUDIENCE: If you had other groups, like if you have more men, you were more likely to win over the other group. YUVAL HARARI: Ah, but it's not a question of numbers. Again, if the main thing is violence, then again you get to a situation in which men are expendable. AUDIENCE: I'm not saying

it is. I'm just saying it might have been, right? YUVAL HARARI: OK. AUDIENCE: It's very dense material. Thank you for your presentation. I have a couple of comments. Maybe you want to expand on them and then one question. So on the point that we don't know what's going to happen in the future with the jobs going away, so there are people thinking about that. Jeremy Rifkin, for example, he talks about the zero marginal cost economics, right? So which poses a problem for capitalism. So we have some ideas about that. YUVAL HARARI: Yeah, there are people

thinking about it. It's not the Islamic state, which is leading the world thinking on the questions of the future of the job market. This is exactly the problem. AUDIENCE: Right. The other thing that I noticed in your talk, so when you say communism slash socialism, and then say, OK, this is an ideology, a religion, think of it as an ideology and a religion and compare it to religions, I sort of disagree there because I think you can't really compare it with religions because they base their belief system on irrationality, whereas socialism was more or less

based on a belief system of rationality. And maybe that's the reason it collapsed so easily, so to speak, because in the end people were trained to think rationally about everything else. So, but let's move on. On the issue of, ask yourself a question, what did liberal society do for us and what did the church do for us, I could think of Gregor Mendel, right, and his genetics experiments. But I will go to something else, which is to say, did the United States invent the nuclear weapon? It didn't. It provided a framework. It provided the funding

to do that. So the church provided the funding for the Sistine Chapel and for a lot of other things. So I think we sort of glanced over it. But my biggest points in the presentation is I agree with liberalism as an ideology. I'm very liberal myself. I probably have 10% that I'm scratching my head over, but one thing that you sort of glossed over is the role of society, of social interaction between humans. I mean, I don't believe that it's only the question of go deep into yourself and think about what your decision will be.

I mean, there's the test for that, or the famous rail or track experiment, or the prisoners in the camp, or whatnot. It's also about the bond between those people. And I think-- would you agree that that has a factor in [INAUDIBLE]. And then speaking of Google and data stuff, I work in privacy. So I'm going to fight from that happening too soon. YUVAL HARARI: OK. So I'll try to answer in quick succession to the different questions. Well, about social interaction, yes, when you look at how people actually make decisions liberalism is wrong. We don't really

go and connect to ourselves and decide from there. The impact of society and culture is enormous. But, again, as I said before, the thing with religions and ideology is they don't have to be true. When they tell us connect to yourself, follow your heart, and make your decisions from there. And this is how we build our economy, our politcs-- it's not true. But in terms of ideology, and this is what they are selling us and this is what many of us believe, that we go to the supermarket and we buy whatever we want to buy.

The fact that our brain was washed for hours and hours by commercials and so forth, liberalism discounts it. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] YUVAL HARARI: Liberalism says no. Within yourself there is an inner core of freedom. And nothing can really touch it. Nothing can really change it. Now, we know that it's not true. But this is why it's an ideology or a religion. Now I will also say a few words about why I call it a religion and not just an ideology. It's really a question of semantics, of how you define things. Many people define religion as belief

in God or supernatural powers. Nobody defines it as believing irrationality. Religious people think they are very rational. They never say, I'm religious, I'm irrational. Maybe a few of them do, but the vast majority of them don't think that religion is superstition or irrationality. Now, if you define religion as belief in gods, then, yes, liberalism or communism, no, they are not religions. And certainly data religion is not a religion. But this is a very narrow definition of religion. There have been religions in history in which gods played a very minor role like Buddhism and Confucianism. And

we still call them religion. For me the basic definition of religion is in terms of the function it plays in history and in society. Religion gives legitimacy to human lows and norms by hanging on to some super human power or law of entity. We come to people and we say, you have to behave like this. And they ask, why? So you don't answer, because I said so or because a couple of people invented this law and now you must obey. This won't work. You must go to some super human authority. Now there are two kinds

of superhuman authorities we find throughout story. One kind is gods. They are these superior beings with personalities. If you don't do this, they'll become angry. They'll punish you. But there is another option, which was common throughout history and this is to turn to natural laws. The argument is human laws, [? the laws ?] of society were not invented by humans. They reflect the laws of nature. Therefore they are not arbitrary. They are not random and you can't change them. You have to follow them. So this is the case with Buddhism and Confucianism. This is the

case also with communism or with Nazism. The Nazis come and say, look, it's not Hitler that invented this whole racial theory and then that they should be exterminated and so forth. This is the laws of nature. Natural selection, you've read Darwin. There are different biological groups and so forth. Now we can say that the Nazis misunderstood Darwin and the theory of evolution. But in their eyes, the laws, like the Nuremberg Laws did not reflect some whim of Hitler and the party. It reflected the ultimate laws of nature. And if we don't follow these laws we

will disappear, like other species that have disappeared before us. So in this sense I think that we can speak about these ideologies actually as religions because they fulfill the same function. They give legitimacy to human laws and norms. And the last question was about Gregor Mendel, that the church did contribute, say, to genetics. But it's not really the church. I'm not sure that-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. YUVAL HARARI: Yeah, I'm not sure that the pope was very happy if he knew what Gregor Mendel was up to, or what would come out of it. Which is not the

same as the United States financing the Manhattan Project. They knew exactly where they were heading and they got it. So I think that there is a difference there. AUDIENCE: So a few kind of questions dash comments. One is what is your take on, I know of at least a myth or a fact of one society that was matriarchal in history, the Minoan. And I wonder if it actually does end up being supported by historical facts, what are the reasons that this culture kind of vanished? That's one question. And the other one is with respect to

science fiction, not all science fiction is as you've described. And specifically-- YUVAL HARARI: I know. AUDIENCE: No, specifically as you were talking I was thinking of Heinlein and Asimov who exactly have the stories specifically talking about these exact things. And I wonder how you think they would incorporate in our future history, so to speak. YUVAL HARARI: OK. So about the Minoan culture, I'm not an expert. As far as I know, but you have to check it with experts, as far as I know it was for a time believed that it was a matriarchal society, but

no longer. Today the archaeological and the deciphering of the writing system show that it was probably as patriarchal as any other, maybe a little less, but it was still a patriarchal society. We have some genuine examples of matriarchal societies. For instance, I think there is a certain region in China in the southwest of China that there is a genuine matriarchal society there, but this is very, very rare. The vast majority of societies and cultures known to science in the last 10,000 years were patriarchal. About science fiction, yeah, you're of course right. There are many strands

and not all of them follow the basic script that I described, like the "Frankenstein" script, or the "Frankenstein" myth. But even in the case of the writings of Asimov, for me the most interesting tension and connection is between biology and computer science. Very often when people think about the ideas that I raised in the last part of the lecture, they give all the importance to the advances in computer science to our ability to create better and better algorithms and computer programs. But in my eyes the real revolution is actually from the life sciences. The really

big revolution is when the life sciences are telling us that animals are basically biochemical algorithms. If they didn't tell us this then you can have all the advances you want in computer science. It won't impinge on humanity. You will still have humans, which are something completely different. And all the advances in robotics and computers, OK, we'll have better computers. We'll have better robots, but it won't really make much of a difference to us. Where it becomes really amazing and really frightening is that once you realize-- and this is a contribution of the life sciences-- that

actually humans working in the same way, then you can make the connections. And this is the really frightening stuff. This is also why I think more and more companies like Google that started simply as, in the computer business, are moving more and more to the biotechnology business. And then the two industries are merging into one. The most fundamental idea in this respect comes from the life sciences, which says, organisms are algorithms. This is the most important, I think, insight of our age. And also the most important question because we don't have any proof of it.

Currently, it's just dogma. We don't have any explanation of how any kind of algorithm can create subjective experiences. Indeed, in the field of computers we are, as far as I know, we're not even close to creating subjective experiences in computers. It's just a dogma that people will say, yes. It's the same. To give another historical reference, back in the 19th century when they tried to understand humans, and the human mind, and the human soul, or whatever you would like to call it, one of the main theories was that humans were not algorithms. Humans were steam

engines. This is the basic metaphor that stands at the basis of Freudian psychology. Humans usually try to explain themselves in terms of the most sophisticated technology of the day. Ah, we are like this because this is the most sophisticated thing I know. In 1900, the most sophisticated machine, the most sophisticated technology, which was the basis for the whole economy, was the steam engine. So people came and said, ah, the brain is like a steam engine. There are valves and there are pressures and so forth. So even today we say that when we want to unload

our angst, like we pick up the telephone and we release some steam. The idea is that the human being is built like a steam engine. It has all these pressures inside. And if you block it here it goes there. And much of Freudian psychology is built on this. So today this sounds childish and silly. Oh, the human being is like a steam engine? We have a much better technology is the computer. So we say, ah, humans are not like steam engines. They are like computers. But at present at least this is just a dogma. We

don't have the hard facts to actually prove it. AUDIENCE: This is sort of, I believe, a personal question. So you may skip if you don't want to answer. But reading your book it appeared to me and one of friends in India that you have absolutely no bias when I read your book. Is that really true? Do you have any attachments [INAUDIBLE] of any nation, religion? You may skip that. YUVAL HARARI: Well, it's a very big compliment. Maybe the highest compliment you can give a scientist is that he or she has no bias. I tried to

write the book with as little bias as I can. I think you can read between the lines that there are some things I like more than others, some ideologies, religions, and so forth that I like more than others. But I think that my aim as a historian is above all to describe reality, not to judge it. It's very important afterwards to make judgments, to decide what is good, what is bad, where we should progress. But the most basic challenge is first of all to describe reality. And if you start with a certain agenda then very

quickly you become blind to much of reality because one thing almost certain about reality is that it's complex. You take any historical development, the agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution, you will always find some bad things, and some good things, and some neutral things about it. So if you start with the idea of this is bad, you can't see at least half the story. AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, Yuval. It was really, really-- [APPLAUSE]