From neanderthals to cyborgs

FOR a best-selling author who doesn't hold back on certain politicians, historian Yuval Noah Harari seems a tad reserved in person.

Can this diffident, bespectacled 42-year-old academic, sitting stiffly on the sofa of his hotel suite, be the man French magazine Le Point would put on its cover in September captioned "The most important thinker in the world"?

But, as Dr Harari warms up, he goes from toying with his glass of water to pronouncing the ideas that have propelled him to stardom: "The most real thing in the world is suffering", or "There are no gods or banks or states in the world, objectively".

Such polemics, plucked from the pages of his blockbuster Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, were possibly what made Dr Harari a headline act at July's DBS Asian Insights Conference, when he visited Singapore. A self-styled futurist, the history lecturer at the H…