Yuval Noah Harari on Transhumanism and Eliminating Free Will: Hacking and Bioengineering Humans Using Biometric Data to Replace Evolution with Intelligent Design in Order to Re-Engineer Life

Transcript from Yuval Noah Harari Speeches at Davos:

“We are probably one of the last generations of Homo Sapiens because in the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies, and brains, and minds. Now how exactly will the future masters of the planet look like? This will be decided by the people who own the data. Now why is data so important? It's important because we've reached the point when we can hack not just computers. We can hack human beings and other organisms.

Now what do you need in order to hack a human being? You need two things. You need a lot of computing power, and you need a lot of data, especially biometric data. But control of data might enable human Elites to do something even more radical than just build Digital Dictatorships. By hacking organisms, Elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life, itself, because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it. All of life, for four billion years, dinosaurs, amoebas, tomatoes, humans, all of life, was subject to the laws of Natural Selection, and to the laws of organic biochemistry. But this is now about to change. Science is replacing Evolution by Natural Selection with Evolution by Intelligent Design, not the Intelligent Design of some God above the clouds, but our Intelligent Design, and the Intelligent Design of our clouds, the IBM Cloud, and the Microsoft cloud.

These (Digital Computing) are the new driving forces of Evolution. And at the same time, science may enable life, after being confined for four billion years to the limited realm of organic compounds, to break out into the inorganic realm.

“History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.”

                        –Yuval Noah Harari

Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have a soul or spirit, and that they have Free Will, and that nobody knows what's happening inside me, so whatever I choose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, “This is my Free Will.”, well that's over. Free Will is over. Today we have the technology to hack human beings on a massive scale. Yeah, I mean everything is being digitalize. Everything is being monitored in this time of crisis. You have to follow science.

It's often said that you should never allow a good crisis to go to waste because a crisis is an opportunity to also do good reforms that in normal times people will never agree to. But in a crisis, you see, we have no choice. So let's do it! Vaccines won't help us. Vaccine will only help us, of course, to make things, you know, more manageable with surveillance.

People could look back in a hundred years and identify AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the coronavirus epidemic as the moment when a New Regime of Surveillance took over, especially Surveillance Under The Skin, which I think is maybe the most important development of the 21st century.

It is this ability to hack human beings, to go under the skin to collect biometric data, analyze it, and understand people better than they understand themselves. This I believe is maybe the most important event of the 21st century.

By hacking organisms, Elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life, itself, because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it. Natural Selection is replaced by Intelligent Design. The era of inorganic life is now beginning. In the coming decades, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and biotechnology will give us God-Like abilities to re-engineer life, and even to create completely new life forms. We are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by Intelligent Design, our Intelligent Design.”

                                 Yuval Noah Harari, Davos, Switzerland

Yuval Noah Harari - Transhumanism and Eliminating Free Will: