Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of these these big ideas and big words about machine learning and genetic engineering and blockchain and globalization, and they are not there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories - the liberal, the fascist, the communist - is that the big heroes of the story were the common people, not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim, but when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. He assessed widespread contemporary disillusionment among “common people” as being rooted in a fear of being “left behind” in a future run by “smart people.” Such fears are justified, he added, given his projection that emerging technologies will displace economic needs to many categories of existing work:Ī lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. Harari’s remarks were made in an interview with Chris Anderson, the head of TED, published on Tuesday. Yuval Noah Harari, historian, futurist, and World Economic Forum (WEF) adviser, said, “We just don’t need the vast majority of the population” in the early 21st century given modern technologies’ rendering human labor economically and militarily “redundant.”

人類大命運：從智人到神人 by Yuval Noah Harari