Yuval Noah Harari: Covid-19 - a new regime of surveillance?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2020
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The coronavirus pandemic has presented humanity with an almighty shock. Here we are, with our evermore interconnected, technologically-advanced societies, living in lockdown and fearful for our health and economic futures - thanks to an invisible virus. Stephen Sackur interviews Israeli historian and best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari. What 21st-century lesson can we draw from the spread of Covid-19?
(Photo: Yuval Noah Harari lecture on artificial intelligence at the X World Future Evolution 2017, Beijing. Credit: Visual China Group/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:11.4 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is an historian |
| 0:17.5 | who's replying to the question, what period do you specialize in, would probably be |
| 0:23.1 | all of it. Yuval Noah Harari is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. |
| 0:29.2 | What began as a series of lectures for his students, taking in the full sweep of human history, |
| 0:35.7 | propelled him to global fame as the basis of his first best-selling |
| 0:40.1 | book, Sapiens. It was in many ways the story of humanity's exceptionalism, the unique cognitive |
| 0:47.4 | skills which allowed for mastery of the natural world. He's since written Homo Deus, contemplating the future of humanity, and 21 lessons for |
| 0:58.0 | the 21st century, focusing on the great challenges facing us today, which of course brings us |
| 1:04.0 | to the extraordinary times we are now living in, coming to terms with a global pandemic which threatens |
| 1:10.8 | our health and economic future in ways |
| 1:14.4 | unimaginable just a few months ago. So what lessons can we draw from the spread of COVID-19? |
| 1:23.2 | Well, Yuval Noah Harari joins me from Israel now. Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:28.9 | Thank you for inviting me. |
| 1:30.0 | You are known around the world for taking the grand historical perspective of us, Homer Sapiens, |
| 1:38.6 | and you have described with wonderful detail how our extraordinary cognitive abilities have led to a mastery of our environment. |
| 1:49.0 | But this seems to be a moment when we're learning that our mastery of the environment is extremely |
| 1:54.8 | fragile. Do you see it that way? Yeah, it is very fragile, though I have to say that we are still |
| 2:00.4 | in a much better position with regard to infectious diseases than perhaps in any previous time in history since the agricultural revolution. |
| 2:08.9 | You know, this isn't the Middle Ages and we are not facing the black death. |
| 2:13.8 | When the black death spread, nobody understood what was happening, what was killing people. |
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