Ten years after our first conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, we return to a question that has only grown more urgent: what becomes of the human in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence? Bringing together reflections from 2016 and 2026, this retrospective traces a decade in which AI moved from hypothesis to infrastructure, transforming not only work and politics, but language, culture, intimacy and the ways we understand ourselves.

From co-operation and polarisation to education, manipulation and the future of creativity, Harari reflects on a world in which power is shifting away from human hands. What emerges is essentially a framework for reckoning with uncertainty: a call to preserve human agency, deepen self-knowledge and resist the illusion that we are immune to being shaped by the systems we build.

PORTRAIT BY RENÉE DE GROOT 
COMPILED BY MERVE ARKUNLAR