When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.
For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
If you don't like the word 'religion,' you can replace it with 'ideology' - it's largely the same thing. At the heart of both religion and ideology is the question of authority and where authority is coming from.
We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.
Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality.
As a historian, I'm sceptical about conspiracy theories because the world is far too complicated to be managed by a few billionaires drinking scotch behind some closed doors. But I do think that the voters are correct in sensing that they're really losing power. And in reaction, they give the system an angry kick.
I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.
I grew up in a small industrial suburb of Haifa in Israel. As far back as I remember, I was interested in big questions. Who are we? What are we doing here? But the chances to discuss philosophy were quite thin on the ground.
I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.
About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia.
Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions - what's the meaning of life, what are we doing here - then somewhere in their 20s, they seem to say, 'I'll just get married. I'll just have kids. I'll get back to that later.' But they never do. For me, it kept boiling.
Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.
The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.