Yuval Noah Harari: An Urgent Warning They Hope You Ignore. More War Is Coming!

Harari stresses that money, corporations, nations, and even many conflicts are built on shared stories rather than physical scarcity. Our superpower—creating and believing in fictions—enables large-scale cooperation but also drives wars when groups cannot agree on a common story (e.g., Israel–Palestine). Practically, this means training yourself to ask: “Is this a physical constraint, or just a story we’re all following?” That question is central to avoiding manipulation by ideologies, media narratives, and economic myths.

Unlike the printing press or steam engines, AI can decide what to show, what to prioritize, and can generate original content (music, manifestos, financial products) without direct human instructions. Algorithms already shape loan approvals, hiring, sentencing recommendations, dating, and social media feeds. Individuals and institutions should demand transparency, retain meaningful human oversight, and resist delegating critical decisions (finance, warfare, justice) to systems whose reasoning no human fully understands.

Harari outlines a plausible near future where AI designs financial instruments and runs markets at such speed and complexity that not a single human truly grasps the system. This would leave elected leaders and regulators dependent on algorithms for advice in crises, undermining democratic control. Policymakers should proactively cap complexity, mandate human-comprehensible models, and start treating ‘human intelligibility’ of core financial infrastructure as a safety requirement, much like physical safety in nuclear plants.

Genetic enhancements and brain–computer interfaces may first be accessible only to a wealthy elite, turning economic inequality into biological inequality and potentially splitting humanity into ‘superhumans’ and everyone else. Harari also warns that what’s sold as an upgrade (e.g., more intelligence) might come with unseen tradeoffs (less compassion, less spiritual depth). He argues societies should deliberately move slowly, regulate enhancements, and prioritize safety and ethics over speed—unlike an AI arms race where strategic pressure is much harder to resist.

Harari calls humans ‘hackable animals’: our choices are strongly shaped by cultural, biological, and psychological factors that can be modeled and exploited. People who cling to mystical notions of free will (“no one can manipulate me”) are easiest to manipulate. Actionably, this means engaging in self-inquiry (therapy, meditation, critical reflection) to understand your own triggers and patterns, and being suspicious of systems—social media, political campaigns, personalized feeds—that profit from steering your behavior.