TimesTalks | Yuval Noah Harari
Streamed live on Sep 4, 2018
https://youtu.be/Vxvb7Nw9JCE?t=3855
64:18
Yes it is likely that we are reaching an inflection point beyond which our imagination fails. We cannot say anything to anything meaningful about how the world would look like a hundred years from now. This is how I understand the singularity. Not in terms of some Big Bang or laws of physics or something like that but the point beyond which you just can’t look. So when you looked at the past many physicists called the Big Bang a singularity.
64:52
The question what happened before the Big Bang is meaningless we don’t have the abilities the tools to look before and we are approaching very fast a new point of singularity. Not fourteen billion years in the future but maybe fifty or a hundred years in the future which you simply cannot look behind beyond. Our imagination fails because one of the things that are going to change is our imagination.
65:19
Once you have the technology to re-engineer the human imagination by definition you cannot imagine what will happen after that.
Yes we mentioned in your in this book how important it was for you personally to understand story versus reality it defined who you are as a scientist as a story and a researcher. Which I would I would say majority of the world does not think like that and I will include other scientists historians and researchers.
68:45
This is one of my fears on the internal level of the internal ecological system. We are very far from understanding the complexities of the human mind but we are becoming very good in manipulating emotions and thoughts and so forth and this gap may result in an internal ecological collapse of our mental system.
I don’t know of any scientific evidence for the existence of life outside planet Earth but statistically it sounds quite probable that somewhere there is something whether it will be helpful in uniting us. I think we have enough on our plates on planet Earth even without aliens coming and adding more. I think that again nuclear war and climate change and the threat of technological disruption should be enough to unite our species.
If not we may not live long enough to encounter the aliens.
And on that hopeful note…