21 Lessons for the 21st Century – Yuval Noah Harari

Takeaways

Part 1: The Technological Challenge

• Humankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of biotech and infotech confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered.

 

Lesson 1: Disillusionment: The End of History Has Been Postponed

• Humans think in stories rather than facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths. We’ve gone from three global stories to choose from (fascism, communism, and liberalism) to zero.
• Humans have been far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
• In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant.
• Liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological disaster and technological disruption.
• This might be the first generation that will be lucky just to stay in place

 

Lesson 2: Work – When You Grow Up, You Might Not Have a Job

• Scientists have been allowed to hack humans and gain a much better understanding of how we make decisions. Our choices of everything from food to mates results not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition”.
• The biochemical algorithms of the brain rely on heuristics, shortcuts, and outdated circuits adapted to the african savannah rather than to the urban jungle.
• Two important on human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability. Individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network of robots and computers.
• Homo sapiens are not built for satisfaction. Happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people. When things improve, expectations improve.

 

Lesson 3: Liberty – Big Date Is Watching You

• The liberal story cherishes human liberty as its number one value. It argues that all authority ultimately stems from free will of individual humans, as expressed in their feelings, desires, and choices. However, once somebody gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into and emotional puppet show.
• Feelings are based on calculation, not intuition, inspiration, or freedom. We fail to realize this because the rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness.
• The real problem with robots is that they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel.
• Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or numans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.”
• There is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger.

 

Lesson 4: Equality – Those Who Own the Date Own the Future

• Following the Agricultural Revolution, property multiplied and with it inequality. As humans gained ownership of land, animals, plants, and tools, rigid hierarchical societies emerged, in which small elites monopolized most wealth and power for generation after generation. Humans to accept this as ideal.
• During the Industrial Revolution, governments invested heavily in the health, education, and welfare of the masses, because they needed millions of healthy laborers to operate the production lines and millions of loyal soldiers to fight in the trenches.
• If new treatments for extending life and upgrading physical and cognitive abilities prove to be expensive, humankind might split into biological castes. There might be a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens.
• In the 21st century, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated into too few hands, humankind will split into different species.
• Regulating the ownership of data might be the most important political question of our era.

 

Part 2: The Political Challenge

• The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberalism and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion, and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and makes it very difficult to cooperate on a global level.

 

Lesson 5: Community – Humans Have Bodies

• People estranged from their bodies, senses, and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented. We need direct physical interaction to be happy. Technology has been distancing ourselves from our body

 

Lesson 6: Civilization – There Is Just One Civilization in the World

• Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreement.
• People still have different religions and national identities. But when it comes to the practical stuff – how to build a state, an economy, a hospital, or a bomb – almost all of us belong to the same civilization.

 

Lesson 7: Nationalism – Global Problems Need Global Answers

• Technology has changed everything by creating a set of global existential threats that no nation can solve on its own. A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity and humankind now has at least three such enemies – nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption.

 

Lesson 8: Religion – God Now Serves the Nation

• Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.
• Religion divides our civilization into different and hostile camps

 

Lesson 9: Immigration – Some Cultures Might Be Better Than Others

• Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists.” Saying that black people commit crimes because they have substandard genes is out; saying that they tend to commit crimes because they come from dysfunctional subcultures is very much in.

 

Part 3: Despair and Hope

• Though the challenges are unprecedented, and though the disagreements are intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

 

Lesson 10: Terrorism – Don’t Panic

• Terrorism is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage. This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties who cannot inflict much material damage onto their enemies. Fear is the main story in terrorism and there is an astounding disproportion between the actual strength of the terrorists and the fear they manage to inspire.
• Terrorists opt to produce a theatrical spectacle they hope will provoke the enemy and cause him to overreact. In most cases, the overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.
• We judge terrorism by its emotional, rather than material impact.
• A successful counterterrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. First, governments should focus on clandestine actions against the terrorist networks. Second, the media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria. The third front is the imagination of each and every one of us.

 

Lesson 11: War – Never Underestimate Human Stupidity

• Why is it so difficult for major powers to wage successful wars in the 21st century? One reason is the change in the nature of the economy. The main economic assets now are knowledge based.
• The world is far more complicated than a chess board and even rational leadings frequently end up doing very stupid things.

 

Lesson 12: Humility – You Are Not the Center of the World

 

Lesson 13: God – Don’t Take the Name of God in Vain

• Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commands”, it means “reducing suffering.” If you really understand how an action causes unnecessary suffering to yourself or to others, you will naturally abstain from it.
• Humans are social animals, and our happiness depends on our relations with others.

 

Lesson 14: Secularism – Acknowledge Your Shadow

• Enshrines the values of truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage, and responsibility. Forms the foundation of modern scientific and democratic institutions.
• The secular ideal is the commitment to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than mere faith.
• Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

Part IV – Truth

 

Lesson 15: Ignorance – You Know Less Than You Think

• Most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than rational analysis. These emotions and heuristics are inadequate for today’s world.
• Individuality is a myth as well because humans rarely think for themselves. We think in groups. What gave homo sapiens an edge over all other animals was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.
• Individually, humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and have come to know less and less as history has progressed. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all of our needs.
• The “knowledge illusion”. We think we know a lot but individually we know very little. We take others knowledge as if it is our own.
• The world is becoming more complex and we are ignorant of what’s going on.
• Most of our views are communal groupthink. Bombarding people with facts and attacking their individual ignorance doesn’t work.

 

Lesson 16: Justice – Our Sense of Justice Might Be Out of Date

• Trying to comprehend and judge moral dilemmas, people resort to one of four methods. First is to downsize the issue. Second is to focus on a touching human story that stands for the conflict. Third is to weave conspiracy theories. The fourth is to create a dogma.
• Religious and ideological dogmas are still highly attractive because they offer us a safe haven from the frustratingly complexity of reality.

 

Lesson 17: Post-Truth – Some Fake News Lasts Forever

• Home-sapiens are a post truth species because our power depends on creating and believing fictions.
• “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lite told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
• Falso stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth.
• Humans have a remarkable ability to know and not know something at the same time. They can know something then they really think about it, but most of the time they don’t think about it, so they don’t know it.
• Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you have to renounce power.
• As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort trying to control the world than on trying to understand it.
• If you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might as well be the product. If some issue seems important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature.

 

Lesson 18: Science Fiction – The Future Is Not What You See in the Movies

• Authenticity is a myth. People are trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within the bigger box of human society.

 

Part V: Resilience

Lesson 19: Education – Change Is the Only Constant

• We have far too much information, we need the ability to make sense of it, to tell the difference between what is important and unimportant
• If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind. You will need a lot of mental flexibility and emotional balance, and feel at home with the unknown.
• We live in the era of hacking humans. The algorithms are watching you right now. Where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Once they know you better than you know yourself, they can control you and manipulate you and you won’t be able to do much about it. If this happens, authority will shift to them. Almost like living in the Truman Show or the Matrix.

 

Lesson 20: Meaning – Life Is Not a Story

• • To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions. First, it must give me some role to play. Second, it must extend beyond my horizons and give me something bigger than myself.

 

• Any story is wrong, simply for being a story. The universe doesn’t work like a story.

 

• Why do people believe in fictions? One reason is that their personal identity is built on the story, they are taught to believe it from early childhood: they find only what their parent shave hidden from them. Second, our collective institutions are built on them.
• Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it, not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger personal and social cataclysm. In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.
• If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf. Once you suffer for a story, it’s usually enough to convince you that the story is real.
• If you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about you own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is: the answer isn’t  a story.

 

Lesson 21: Meditation – Just Observe

• The deepest source of suffering is the patterns of the mind. It is not objective, rather a mental reactions generated by the mind.