How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation; The Guardian, October 4, 2025

 Interview by Alex Clark , The Guardian; How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation

[Kip Currier: One of the most insightful, nuanced, enlightening pieces I've read amongst thousands this year. I've followed and admired the work and wisdom of Maria Ressa and Yuval Noah Harari but wasn't familiar with UK academic and politician Rory Stewart who makes interesting contributions to this joint interview. They all individually and collectively identify in clear-eyed fashion what's going on in the world today, what the stakes are, and what each of us can do to try to make some kind of positive difference.

I shared this article with others in my network and encourage you to do the same, so these beneficial, thought-provoking perspectives can be read by as many as possible.]

[Excerpt]

"What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?...

YNH I think that more people need to realise that we have to do the hard work ourselves. There is a tendency to assume that we can rely on reality to do the job for us. That if there are people who talk nonsense, who support illogical policies, who ignore the facts, sooner or later, reality will wreak vengeance on them. And this is not the way that history works.

So if you want the truth, and you want reality to win, each of us has to do some of the hard work ourselves: choose one thing and focus on that and hope that other people will also do their share. That way we avoid the extremes of despair."

Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain; The New York Times, September 10, 2024

 Dennis Duncan, The New York Times; Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain: 

Review of NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari

"In a nutshell, Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information...

The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don’t hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, “the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.”) It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.

The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick’s HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.

Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves...

“When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,” writes Harari, “they can usually do it.”...

Parts of “Nexus” are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves."

Interview: Yuval Noah Harari: ‘The idea of free information is extremely dangerous’; The Guardian, August 5, 2018

Andrew Anthony, The Guardian; Interview: Yuval Noah Harari: ‘The idea of free information is extremely dangerous’

"Why is liberalism under particular threat from big data?
Liberalism is based on the assumption that you have privileged access to your own inner world of feelings and thoughts and choices, and nobody outside you can really understand you. This is why your feelings are the highest authority in your life and also in politics and economics – the voter knows best, the customer is always right. Even though neuroscience shows us that there is no such thing as free will, in practical terms it made sense because nobody could understand and manipulate your innermost feelings. But now the merger of biotech and infotech in neuroscience and the ability to gather enormous amounts of data on each individual and process them effectively means we are very close to the point where an external system can understand your feelings better than you. We’ve already seen a glimpse of it in the last epidemic of fake news.
There’s always been fake news but what’s different this time is that you can tailor the story to particular individuals, because you know the prejudice of this particular individual. The more people believe in free will, that their feelings represent some mystical spiritual capacity, the easier it is to manipulate them, because they won’t think that their feelings are being produced and manipulated by some external system...

You say if you want good information, pay good money for it. The Silicon Valley adage is information wants to be free, and to some extent the online newspaper industry has followed that. Is that wise?
The idea of free information is extremely dangerous when it comes to the news industry. If there’s so much free information out there, how do you get people’s attention? This becomes the real commodity. At present there is an incentive in order to get your attention – and then sell it to advertisers and politicians and so forth – to create more and more sensational stories, irrespective of truth or relevance. Some of the fake news comes from manipulation by Russian hackers but much of it is simply because of the wrong incentive structure. There is no penalty for creating a sensational story that is not true. We’re willing to pay for high quality food and clothes and cars, so why not high quality information?"