Yuval Noah Harari on Digital Surveillance and the Future of Humanity

“I think maybe in a couple of decades when people look back, the thing they will remember from the Covid crisis is this is the moment when everything went digital and this was the moment when everything became monitored, that we agreed to be surveilled all the time, not just in authoritarian regimes, but even in democracies and maybe most importantly, this was the moment when surveillance started going under the skin, because really we haven’t seen anything yet. I think that the big process that’s happening right now, the world is hacking human beings, the ability to hack humans, to understand deeply what’s happening within you, what makes you go. For that, the most important data is not what you read and who you meet and what you buy, it’s what’s happening inside your body. We have these two big revolutions-the Computer Science revolution or the infotech revolution and the revolution in the biological sciences and they are still separate, but they are about to merge. They are merging around I would say, the biometric sensor. It’s the thing, it’s the gadget, it’s the technology that converts biological data into digital data that can be analyzed by computers and having the ability to really monitor people under the skin, this is the biggest game changer of all because this is the key for getting to know people better than they know themselves. I often give the example from my own personal life that I realized I was gay only when I was 21. I keep thinking about the time when I was 15, 16- How could I have missed it? Something so important about myself should have been obvious, but I didn’t know. Now today or in 5 or 10 years, any algorithm of Microsoft or Amazon or the government would be able to know such a thing when I am 12 or 13 just by monitoring what’s happening in my body, what’s happening to my eyes, let’s say I see a boy and a girl walking on the beach. Where do my eyes focus? This is the crucial revolution and Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance. If we want to stop this epidemic, we need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under the skin, their body temperature. We walked in here we had to go through a body temperature test.”

Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and author, known for his works on human history and the future.

Harari poignantly highlights the consequences of digital surveillance and warns of a profound, barely noticed development occurring in our society.

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