WEF Creep Yuval Noah Harari: Humans May Need to ‘Relearn How to See and Walk’ in ‘Virtual Reality’ Future

Historian, futurist, and noted WEF creep Yuval Noah Harari speculated that human beings may need to “relearn how to see and walk” in a virtual reality future divorcing people from the “physical and biological” world during a discussion with podcaster Tom Bilyeu published on Tuesday.

Harari, an author and World Economic Forum (WEF) adviser, emphasized humanity’s capacity for change and abstract thinking in his contemplation of a technologically-driven paradigm shift in the human condition with the framework of virtual reality.

Humanity may need to “let go” of timeless and ubiquitous components of the human experience, including sight and the ability to walk, he considered.

He remarked:

Maybe the most important quality to survive and flourish in 21st century is to have mental flexibility — not just to keep learning and changing again and again — [but] also to keep letting go.

Part of what makes it difficult to learn new things [is] that we hold on. … I’ll give an example of how deep it goes: it’s not just what you learned in college or what you learned in kindergarten; it’s even what you learned as a baby, as a toddler, like learning how to see, or learning how to walk.

But what does it mean that I have to relearn how to see and walk? As virtual reality improves — and with all the talk of the metaverse and so forth, which we will  discuss later on — increasingly, it’s likely that [there] will be many more activities shifting from the physical biological world that we know into a new reality — a virtual reality — which has different physical and biological laws.

Harari asked, “Can we as humans just shift to the immaterial realm of the Metaverse and leave our biological bodies behind? Or is it impossible or even dangerous to try and separate our kind of mental existence from our bodily and physical existence?”

Bilyeu alluded to the centrality of physicality to the human condition while considering a technologically-driven attempt of divorcing humanity from physical existence.

“I am very grounded in biology,” he stated. “Will it be interesting for an entirely virtual species to inhabit [virtual reality]? Maybe that could be cool, but that doesn’t help us. So even people thinking about uploading their consciousness — I’ve thought through that one a lot — it would be a copy of me, but it wouldn’t be me.”

He continued, “So all of this sadness of death that I would be hoping to avoid by doing that doesn’t help. Maybe it kind of gives the same sense of having a kid, but it wouldn’t by any means save me from having to deal with death.”

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.