Quotes About Society

We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximize the human potential.

Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?

secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren't more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There

Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in "digital dictatorships.

Socialism, which was very up to date a hundred years ago, failed to keep up with the new technology. [...] If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few relating disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.

Una de las pocas leyes rigurosas de la historia es que los lujos tienden a convertirse en necesidades y a generar nuevas obligaciones.

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myth.

in 1987, Thatcher said, "There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women…and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves."1

La historia es algo que ha hecho muy poca gente mientras que todos los demás araban los campos y acarreaban barreños de agua.

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.

Technology has changed everything by creating a set of global existential threats that no nation can solve on its own.

When we adopt the proverbial bird's-eye view of history, which examines developments in terms of decades or centuries, it's hard to say whether history moves in the direction of unity or of diversity.

it would perhaps be helpful to view immigration as a deal with three basic conditions or terms: TERM 1: The host country allows the immigrants in. TERM 2: In return, the immigrants must embrace at least the core norms and values of the host country, even if that means giving up some of their traditional norms and values. TERM 3: If the immigrants assimilate to a sufficient degree, over time they become equal and full members of the host country. "They" become "us.

los sapiens no se comportan según una fría lógica matemática, sino según una cálida lógica social. Nos rigen las emociones.

The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.

There is little sense, then, in arguing that the natural function of women is to give birth, or that homosexuality is unnatural. Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define manhood and womanhood reflect human imagination more than biological reality.

online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals – a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step towards uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.

Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.

Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre. It shapes the understanding of the public on things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.

When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new 'niches for imbeciles' were opened up.