Yuval Harari speaks about the main challenges for our civilisation

I really like to listen to Yuval Harari. His precisely formulated thoughts show a broader perspective for the main challenges awaiting us in the near future. Harari says that there are three main developments we should care about: danger of nuclear war, climate change and hacking humans through artificial intelligence. These 3 challenges have the potential to destroy human civilization. All these challenges can be solved only on a global scale. This means that all people and all nations (or at least a big majority) need to cooperate to find proper solutions. 

Climate change can be stopped very quickly if we agree to spend approximately 2% of GDP for developing new technologies and improving production methods. What we need is readiness to act and spend money. The climate agenda of the EU is a good step in the right direction. And I am pretty sure that countries, which start changing their economy in this direction now, will gain huge profit in 2 or 3 decades.

New technologies based upon Big Data and AI can predict our thoughts and behavioural patterns better than we can ourselves. This allows very sophisticated surveillance, control and manipulation of people for economic advantages (private companies) or any kind of dictatorship. Harari speaks here about the possibility of digital dictatorship. We humans need to control this development and define some reasonable rules how it can be used. The EU Commission is going in the right direction with plans for regulations to make AI trustworthy.

It would be really good if we all would spend much more time carrying about these main challenges of mankind instead of wasting our time and resources on topics with little importance for our future.