Review: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari (Jonathan Cape, 2018)

AdedapoX
AdedapoX
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

We had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us asserts Harari in his recently published books, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Jonathan Cape, 2018).

The author of Sapiens and Homo Deus examines the present day in relation to the effect it will have on our future, especially as humans with no appropriate skill to withstand the technological changes that are happening in the world right now.

Humans, he explains, are at the mercy of being replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and are bordering on a fate worse than disease, war and famine - irrelevance.
Homo Sapiens have over the course of time made themselves master over all that exist by some warped idea of intellectual superiority and spiritual dominion but the gap that have existed will continue to widen now with the emergence of automatons.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take over from humans, ushering in an age of irrelevance. This is far worse than a doomsday prophecy but a reality.

Daily, we spend most of our time on the Internet, watching shows, clicking on adverts, and buying stuff we don't need while giving the algorithms what makes us tick in this age- our data; doing this we will increasingly rely on algorithms to make decisions for us, what to watch, what to do and even whom to marry.

Harari debunked the myth presented in science fiction movies of AI manipulating humans because it is unlikely that the algorithms will start to consciously manipulate us because they won’t have any consciousness. Further, clarifying that consciousness and intelligence are two separate entities often mistaken for one another.

Facebook, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are not exempted as crucial lessons of this century as the Post-Truth era is nothing short of a continuous tradition of post truths as seen in every ideology, religion or creed forced on humans till it became an identity. He wrote, "For millennia, much of what passed for ‘news’ and ‘facts’ in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld.", and this is by no mean different from what is happening now.

Terrorism, on the other hand may not be as serious as we think it is, noting that the state particularly in his idea (the West) has created an empty space for political violence to thrive and this is why there was much uhuru after terrorists attacks in France and Belgium while countries like Nigeria, where terrorism is pretty much alive is placed at the bottom of the catalogue. However insensitive the fact might seem, he argues convincingly that: the less political violence in a particular state, the greater the public shock at an act of terrorism.

What we should teach our children in this age of information overload is critical. Information is available everywhere; in schools, books, the Internet then how best can this be applied is crucial to getting prepared for the next milestone in human progress, the book points.

Ethics, Nationalism, Religion, God, Secularism, Liberalism, Democracy, Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism, Ignorance and more are explored deeply. Even Harari gets personal as he explains his struggle with being gay which he discovered at the age of twenty one, his discovery of meditation and his unbiased views about his race and national loyalties.

This book is unassumingly a great attempt at understanding the madness and the inevitable outcome that we as a race tinker on. One major lesson I took away from it is - what we should worry more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms who seem to know us better than ourselves as we click, log in and sign up.
What should be our focus now especially as it seems that we are holding onto our fantasies and coping mechanisms while in reality we are slowly descending into irrelevance.

AdedapoX

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