Yuval Noah Harari’s History of Everyone
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
That seems to be a very popular syncretic combination these days but it often veers from speculative into science fiction and sometimes even pandering, both to a large mass audience fascinated by AI news and tech elites who like to be told they're controlling the world, even if Harari is scolding them.
On technical topics itself his takes, however, seem surprisingly shallow or outright wrong. There's is a very good case to be made that we're in fact not living in the transhumanist age and that society is not changing that fast at all. (secular stagnation, Robert Gordon on innovation, Thiel in the popular press) etc. In the discussion with Pinker, Pinker was very quick to point out that a lot of Harari's speculations about genetic optimization are fairly unreasonable given what we know about how complex genetic interaction is, and so on.
It seems to me ironically the way he writes is to feed into the common anxieties that are also reflected in the mainstream press and that are also popular among people like Sam Harris or Bostrom or others who have carved out their media niche in this space. They've found their audience but I'm not sure how good any of it is.
And also one thing that I find to be absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a writer who talks about the dangers facing our liberal societies:
"Last summer, he was criticized when readers noticed that the Russian translation of “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” had been edited to make it more palatable to Vladimir Putin’s government. Harari had approved some of these edits, and had replaced a discussion of Russian misinformation about its 2014 annexation of Crimea with a passage about false statements made by President Trump."
Peter Thiel sometimes says random things to sound interesting so he can take a baby step out Elon's shadow.
Paul Krugman referred to the "kitchen test" at one point. If you go to your kitchen today and compare it to 40 years ago, what has changed? Arguably very little, maybe the only thing that would tell you what year you're in is a screen on your wall.
Robert Gordon also proposed imagining going to sleep in 1870 and waking up in 1970 in the same spot in New York. Someone waking up would find the car, skyscrapers everywhere, the discovery of dna, haber bosch allowing 3 billion additional people to grow food, going to the moon, the commercial airplane, the computer, antibiotics,and so on. Go to sleep in 1970 and wake up in 2020 New York and, well it doesn't look so different.
This seems like a test tailor-made to prove the point you’re trying to make. Why not ask the same question about how much your local VHS rental store has changed?
And as to 1870 -> 1970 vs. 1970 -> 2020, isn’t it obvious? One is a span of time twice as long! The fair comparison is 1920 -> 2020, or 1970 -> 2070. In which case I think the point evaporates pretty quickly.
Because a kitchen is significantly more representative on how much our daily lives overall have changed because the kitchen (or really you could pick any other place that represents labour or a place of gathering), says more than the VHS store.
The fact that you're bringing up the VHS store goes to show though what the crux of the problem is. Innovation over the last few decades has primarily only happened in the world of media and communication. Watching netflix instead of renting VHS tapes is nice, but it hasn't significantly expanded our productive capacities. In fact infrastructure, healthcare (remember watson?) and so on have largely stayed the same, or even gotten less productive.
Infrastructure, healthcare and housing represent a significant portion of both daily experienced lives and chunk of the economy. More social networks and more tv shows and online games are pretty cool, but they don't really touch labour organisation, structure of the firm or production, and it shows in stagnating economic growth and cost disease throughout the economy.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/5QdS
I can’t think of a space that hasn’t been heavily impacted since 1980. Even the kitchen. In addition to the obvious examples of kitchen appliances and screens and devices like Echo that weren’t available in 1980, how about the fact that there are many fewer meals eaten at home? Or cooked for families? How about the ways that women’s roles in society and families have changed? How about the rise of single person households? Or meal prep and delivery services? Or the much wider availability of fresh or “exotic” foods year round than 40 years ago?
Sure, you can walk into a kitchen from 1980 or 2020 and see many similarities, but there are also many differences that you can’t see at first glance.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
Do you have some specific examples the people you spoke to frequently criticize regarding Harari?
I do wonder about the value of pop science. It feels like it's almost always oversimplified to the point of being misleading. I have a background in psychology / neuroscience and find it difficult to read any pop neuroscience without grinding my teeth.
Bill Gates and Barack Obama, who both praised Harari, don't know anything about the future and neither does Harari. They make pretty good educated guesses, but are often wrong about what is actually going on. Harari seems like the latest incarnation of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman before him.