Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Climate Change’ May Lead to ‘Technological Noah’s Ark’ for ‘Elites’
Yuval Noah Harari, historian, futurist, and World Economic Forum (WEF) adviser, said on Friday “climate change,” if unaddressed, may cause a “technological Noah’s ark” scenario in which “elites” escape what he framed as planetary catastrophe for humanity.
Harari’s remarks were made as he joined a discussion hosted by the Warwick Economics Summit which framed “climate change” as “the most pressing threat facing humanity.”
Relevant portion begins at 25:40:
Harari framed “climate change” as a function of anthropogenic global warming. He stated:
Technology is obviously the key. It created the problem in the first place. It’s also a key to the solution, but by itself, technology is never a solution, because every technology can be used for for good or for ill. It depends on how you [use] it, [and] on which interests you take into account.
So yes, we need people to work on the technological aspects, but we need the politicians to direct it in the right way for the benefit of the greatest number of people and of the entire ecosystem.
One of the biggest dangers in technological utopianism — [the belief] that, “Oh, the technology will solve it” — is a kind of Noah’s arc syndrome, like in the Bible with the flood, that yes, eventually they built an arc, but just for five people or something like that. Almost everybody drowned.
There is a very big danger that with climate change, when people talk about what our future going to be like, there is no “us.” There is no “our future.” Humanity might divide into a majority – maybe – of people who would suffer tremendously, and a minority that will have the resources, the wealth, [and] the technology to protect themselves, and even flourish in some kind of technological Noah’s arc. This is extremely dangerous.
Again, I think one of the reasons that we don’t see enough urgency — from leaders, from business elites, and so forth — is that in the back of their minds they are counting on a technological Noah’s arc. and that’s very, very dangerous.
CNN’s Bill Weir, who hosted the discussion, described the “COVID pandemic” as a “dress rehearsal” for “the climate crisis” while alluding to the contemporary leftist slogan “trust the science.”
“I keep coming back to the idea that the COVID pandemic is really a dress rehearsal — on a much smaller level — for the for the climate crisis,” Weird said, “and a reminder about how communities that have trust and faith in science, and each other, sort of suffer the least.”
Corporate control in the form of “benevolent capitalism,” he added, may yield “planet-saving” protocols.
File/Israeli historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari makes a lecture of artificial intelligence during the Global Artificial Intelligence Summit Forum on July 9, 2017 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. (Visual China Group via Getty Images)
He continued, “Those who wait for those citizens to start dying suffer the most, but at the same time, we’re still so divided globally within countries about these sorts of things, and there’s a lot of hope that if governments can’t pull it together, then maybe it’ll be corporations, like benevolent capitalism.”
Harari concluded by framing “climate change” as an urgent threat to humanity.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he held, “but it’s still possible to change our priorities [and] to rewrite the rules of the game so that not just a tiny elite — but all the inhabitants of the planet — will have a better future — or, for starters, will have any kind of future.”
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