Yuval Noah Harari

Of course, by 2033 many new professions are likely to appear, for example, virtual-world designers. But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than current run-of-the-mill jobs, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if they do so, the pace of progress is such that within another decade they might have to reinvent themselves yet again. After all, algorithms might well outperform humans in designing virtual worlds too. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.

Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of chronic air pollution?

...Meanwhile in the USA paranoid Republicans have accused Barack Obama of being a ruthless despot hatching conspiracies to destroy the foundations of American society – yet in eight years of his presidency he barely managed to pass a minor health-care reform.

In the late nineteenth century... [~]40 million Chinese, a tenth of the... population, were addicts.

For modern Europeans, building an empire was a scientific project...

In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism's original characteristics.

For the aborigines of Australia, and to a lesser extent for the Maori of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never fully recovered.

The Far East and the Islamic world... between 1500 and 1950... did not produce anything... close to Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology.

Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.

Smith's claim that the selfish human urge... is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary.., not just from an economic... but... more so from a moral and political perspective. ...Smith says.., greed is good, and... by becoming richer I benefit everybody... is altruism.

[T]o understand modern economic history, you need to understand... a single word... growth.

Our... green and blue planet is becoming... concrete and plastic...