Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known

By rights, Yuval Noah Harari should be an anonymous academic buried in an obscure university department somewhere toiling away on his somewhat dusty discipline – medieval military history. He's a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and there is almost nothing in his background to suggest that he would write a book that has become one of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year – Sapiens. Or that he'd join the globetrotting TED-ocracy: the academic superstars who travel the world delivering keynotes on zeitgeisty topics, in Harari's case, the not inconsiderable subject of the history of the whole of mankind. When I meet him, he's just been the star turn at Penguin Random House's global sales conference. In May, he packed out Hay. Earlier this month, he delivered a TED talk.