Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the suffering of animals throughout history, emphasizing the cruelty found in industrial farming practices.
Yuval Noah Harari's quote draws attention to the plight of animals as they have been consistently oppressed and exploited throughout human history. He specifically emphasizes the horrific treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms, suggesting that this systematic cruelty represents one of the greatest moral failings of our civilization.
In practice
During a speech on animal rights, one might use this quote to emphasize the moral implications of our food systems.
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.
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
What kind of people do they [the Japanese] think we are?
How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd.
Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at most, What's there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who's in charge here? Who's the author? That's what we really long to know.
My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.
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