21 lessons for the 21st century

Yuval noah harari

When you grow up you might not have a job

Humans have two types of abilities – physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning, analyzing, communicating and above all understanding human emotions

The better we understand the biochemical mechanisms that underpin human emotions, desires and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behavior, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers and lawyers.

It also turned out that the biochemical algorithms of the human brain are far from perfect. They rely on heuristics, shortcuts and outdated circuits adapted to the African savannah rather than to the urban jungle. No wonder that even good drivers, bankers and lawyers sometimes make stupid mistakes

their brains are recognizing biochemical patterns by analyzing facial expressions, tones of voice, hand movements, and even body odors

Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability.

we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers. Rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network.

We shouldn’t be comparing individuals to individuals, but groups to groups.

Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime and terrorism combined).6 More than 90 per cent of these accidents are caused by very human errors

The US armed forces need thirty people to operate every unmanned Predator or Reaper drone flying over Syria, while analyzing the resulting harvest of information occupies at least eighty people more.

Because transfer of skill will continue to go down as job complexity and expertise increases, certain industries won't even have time to unionize before their industry evolves into something else.

In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution created new conditions and problems that none of the existing social, economic and political models could cope with. Feudalism, monarchism and traditional religions were not adapted to managing industrial metropolises, millions of uprooted workers, or the constantly changing nature of the modern economy. Consequently humankind had to develop completely new models – liberal democracies, communist dictatorships and fascist regimes – and it took more than a century of terrible wars and revolutions to experiment with these models, separate the wheat from the chaff, and implement the best solutions. Child labor in Dickensian coal mines, the First World War and the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3 constituted just a small part of the tuition fees humankind paid

we should focus on providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their social status and self-worth.

UBI proposes that governments tax the billionaires and corporations controlling the algorithms and robots, and use the money to provide every person with a generous stipend covering his or her basic needs. This will cushion the poor against job loss and economic dislocation, while protecting the rich from populist rage.

It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise). Both options have advantages and drawbacks. But no matter which paradise you choose, the real problem is in defining what ‘universal’ and ‘basic’ actually mean

Globalization has made people in one country utterly dependent on markets in other countries, but automation might unravel large parts of this global trade network with disastrous consequences for the weakest links.

In medieval Europe, access to church services was seen as even more important than food, because it took care of your eternal soul rather than of your ephemeral body.

In today’s Europe, decent education and healthcare services are considered basic human needs, and some argue that even access to the Internet is now essential for every man, woman and child

Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before