If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the potential for cooperation among humans compared to chaotic behavior in animals.
Yuval Noah Harari's quote emphasizes the idea that while a large group of chimpanzees would likely result in disorder, humans possess the unique ability to collaborate and innovate, even when they are strangers to one another. This underlines the power of social cooperation and the extraordinary achievements that can arise when individuals come together with a shared purpose.
In practice
In a team-building seminar, you might say, 'As Harari points out, even strangers can cooperate to achieve great results.'
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
It is a rude feeling, because it is natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict.
One who has been touched by grace will no longer look on those who stray as "those evil people" or "those poor people who need our help." Nor must we search for signs of "loveworthiness." Grace teaches us that God loves because of who God is, not because of who we are.
And after death something new begins, over which all the powers of the world of death can have no more control.
Life externalizes at the level of our thought.
I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
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