In the 20th century, and even in Orwell's 1984, surveillance was always above the skin. With these things, like the watches and bracelets that measure your heartbeat and your blood pressure, we are not there yet. But say in 10 years or 50 years, we might be in a situation where if you live in North Korea or some other totalitarian regime, you're obliged to wear these surveillance tools on you all the time. And this is terrifying. We are developing the technology that can do that. Of course, it should be very, very clear that this is not a prophecy. It's not deterministic. It’s not inevitable. Technology always gives us a spectrum of
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and philosopher whose books — "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," and most recently "Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World" — have sold more than 40 million copies. He joins Rufus for a wide-ranging conversation about storytelling, life in the Stone Age, the future of democracy, and the threat of AI.
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