21 Lessons For The 21st Century — Book Review & Quotes
Review
Yuval Harari’s books have spanned the past, the future, and now address critical issues of today. I couldn’t even begin to highlight each key point or topic because it’s deliberately wide reaching. I don’t have to agree with everything he says to recognize that he’s trying to speak honestly to the world we live in.
One key idea that I’m sure a big group of people take issue with, myself included, is Harari’s complete dismissal of religion, God, and free will. There is one section in particular where he talks about secularism. In large part, the way he describes thoughtful evaluation and questioning is the way that I try to live my life and even my religion. He does offer one compromise:
“In 99 percent of cases, your choices aren’t made freely but are shaped by various biological, social, and cultural forces. I would be happy to concede that there is such a thing as “free will” and that 1 percent of our decisions are made completely freely if in exchange people investigate more seriously what shapes the other 99 percent.”
His perspective is not a hard-nosed anti-God campaign, but rather the desire to get people to acknowledge that their decisions, and life as we know it, is not just the outcome of God’s will. We live in a dynamic biological world where we need to truly understand and evaluate the forces at work in attempting to alleviate suffering and maximize good. The firm move towards people believing they know why they think what they think, or why what they’re doing is the absolute best thing they could be doing without ever questioning it becomes the root cause of the majority of problems we face today.
“Secular education teaches us that if we don’t know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of acknowledging our ignorance and looking for new evidence. Even if we think we know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of doubting our opinions and checking ourselves again.”
In particular, he defines secular education as not necessarily anti-God, but pro-reflection.
“For similar reasons, secular education does not mean a negative indoctrination that teaches kids not to believe in God and not to take part in any religious ceremonies. Rather, secular education teaches children to distinguish truth from belief, to develop compassion for all suffering beings, to appreciate the wisdom and experiences of all the earth’s denizens, to think freely without fearing the unknown, and to take responsibility for their actions and for the world as a whole.”
That kind of accountability is critical in fixing any problems we face. We should try and evaluate every choice, every action, every course of belief, because that ultimately defines the world we create.
Quotes
In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. We might not even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Most of us can’t afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history does not give discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is unfair; but who said history was fair?
The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse — irrelevance.
Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.
In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero.
The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside us and will enable us to engineer and manufacture life. We will learn how to design brains, extend lives, and kill thoughts at our discretion. Nobody knows what the consequences will be. Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.
In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED Talks, government think tanks, and high-tech conferences — globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning — and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?
Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore. 6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.
When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or other that takes priority over boring stuff like healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.
Obama has rightly pointed out that despite the numerous shortcomings of the liberal package, it has a much better record than any of its alternatives. Most humans never enjoyed greater peace or prosperity than they did under the aegis of the liberal order of the early twenty-first century. For the first time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents. But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption.
Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.
Consequently, creating new jobs and retraining people to fill them will not be a one-time effort. The AI revolution won’t be a single watershed event after which the job market will just settle into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever-bigger disruptions. Already today few employees expect to work in the same job for their entire life. 20 By 2050, not only the idea of a job for life but even that of a profession for life might seem antediluvian.
Yet even if enough government help were forthcoming, it is far from clear that billions of people would be able to repeatedly reinvent themselves without losing their mental balance. For this reason, if despite all our efforts a significant percentage of humankind is pushed out of the job market, we would have to explore new models for post-work societies, post-work economies, and post-work politics. The first step is to honestly acknowledge that the social, economic, and political models we have inherited from the past are inadequate for dealing with such a challenge.
Many jobs are uninspiring drudgery and are not worth saving. Nobody’s life’s dream is to be a cashier. We should focus instead on providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their social status and self-worth.
Alternatively, governments could subsidize universal basic services rather than income. Instead of giving money to people, who then shop around for whatever they want, the government might subsidize free education, free healthcare, free transportation, and so forth. This is in fact the utopian vision of communism. Though the communist plan to start a working-class revolution might well become outdated, perhaps we should still aim to realize the communist goal by other means. 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.
Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human 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 balloon, and so even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before. If universal basic support is aimed at improving the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed at making people subjectively more satisfied with their lot and preventing social discontent, it is likely to fail.
Secular Israelis also tend to argue that the ultra-Orthodox way of life is unsustainable, especially as ultra-Orthodox families have seven children on average. 32 Sooner or later, the state will not be able to support so many unemployed people, and the ultra-Orthodox will have to go to work. Yet it might be just the reverse. As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job.
Then again, maybe people will share their information willingly in order to get better recommendations — and eventually in order to get the algorithm to make decisions for them.
Once AI makes better decisions than we do about careers and perhaps even relationships, our concept of humanity and of life will have to change. Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism see the individual as an autonomous agent constantly making choices about the world. Works of art — be they Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen novels, or tacky Hollywood comedies — usually revolve around the hero having to make some particularly crucial decision. To be or not to be? To listen to my wife and kill King Duncan, or listen to my conscience and spare him? To marry Mr. Collins or Mr. Darcy? Christian and Muslim theology similarly focus on the drama of decision-making, arguing that everlasting salvation depends on making the right choice.
“Unfortunately, what was good for survival and reproduction in the African savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible behavior on twenty-first-century motorways. Distracted, angry, and anxious human drivers kill more than a million people in traffic accidents every year. We can send all our philosophers, prophets, and priests to preach ethics to these drivers, but on the road, mammalian emotions and savannah instincts will still take over. Consequently, seminarians in a rush will ignore people in distress, and drivers in a crisis will run over hapless pedestrians.” — This feels fatalistic / final. Can’t people who used to be angry on the road change?
The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century — the attempt to concentrate all information in one place — might become their decisive advantage in the twenty-first century.
Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.”
The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.
The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentive to expand and diversify my compassion. So I strive to understand the mysteries of the stock exchange while making far less effort to understand the deep causes of suffering.
All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse — irrelevance.
Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.
Throughout history the rich and the aristocracy always imagined that they had skills superior to everybody else’s, which is why they were in control. As far as we can tell, this wasn’t true. The average duke wasn’t more talented than the average peasant — he owed his superiority only to unjust legal and economic discrimination. However, by 2100 the rich might really be more talented, more creative, and more intelligent than the slum-dwellers.
In the twenty-first century, however, 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 in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.
In the big battle between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down.
Private ownership of one’s own data may sound more attractive than either of these options, but it is unclear what it actually means. We have had thousands of years of experience in regulating the ownership of land. We know how to build a fence around a field, place a guard at the gate, and control who can go in. Over the past two centuries we have become extremely sophisticated in regulating the ownership of industry; thus today I can own a piece of General Motors and a bit of Toyota by buying their shares. But we don’t have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task, because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as you want.
Up till now, Facebook’s own business model encouraged people to spend more and more time online even if that meant having less time and energy to devote to offline activities. Can it adopt a new model that encourages people to go online only when it is really necessary, and to devote more attention to their physical environment and to their own bodies and senses? What would Facebook’s shareholders think about this model? (A blueprint of such an alternative model has been suggested recently by Tristan Harris, a tech philosopher and former Google employee who came up with a new metric of “time well spent.”)
As Pankaj Mishra and Christopher de Bellaigue have convincingly argued, radical Islamists have been influenced by Marx and Foucault as much as by Muhammad, and they have inherited the legacy of nineteenth-century European anarchists as much as of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. 2 It is therefore more accurate to see even the Islamic State as an errant offshoot of the global culture we all share, rather than as a branch of some mysterious and alien tree.
Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilization for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilization?
War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does.
No group rejecting the principles of global politics has so far gained any lasting control of any significant territory.
Whatever changes await us in the future, they are likely to involve a fraternal struggle within a single civilization rather than a clash between alien civilizations. The big challenges of the twenty-first century will be global in nature. What will happen when climate change triggers ecological catastrophes? What will happen when computers outperform humans in more and more tasks, and replace them in an increasing number of jobs? What will happen when biotechnology enables us to upgrade humans and extend life spans? No doubt we will have huge arguments and bitter conflicts over these questions. But these arguments and conflicts are unlikely to isolate us from one another. Just the opposite. They will make us ever more interdependent. Though humankind is very far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a single rowdy global civilization.
The problem starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultranationalism. Instead of believing that my nation is unique — which is true of all nations — I might begin feeling that my nation is supreme, that I owe it my entire loyalty, and that I have no significant obligations to anyone else. This is fertile ground for violent conflicts.
Zealous nationalists who cry “Our country first!” should ask themselves whether their country by itself, without a robust system of international cooperation, can protect the world — or even itself — from nuclear destruction.
This might sound like science fiction, but the world’s first clean hamburger was grown from cells — and then eaten — in 2013. It cost $ 330,000. Four years of research and development brought the price down to $ 11 per unit, and within another decade industrially produced clean meat is expected to be cheaper than slaughtered meat. This technological development could save billions of animals from a life of abject misery, could help feed billions of malnourished humans, and could simultaneously help to prevent ecological meltdown.
Global warming, in contrast, will probably have different impacts on different nations. Some countries, most notably Russia, might actually benefit from it. Because Russia has relatively few coastline assets, it is far less worried than China or Kiribati about rising sea levels. And whereas higher temperatures are likely to turn Chad into a desert, they might simultaneously turn Siberia into the breadbasket of the world. Moreover, as the ice melts in the far north, the Russian-dominated Arctic sea lanes might become the artery of global commerce, and Kamchatka might replace Singapore as the crossroad of the world.
As long as the world remains divided into rival nations, it will be very hard to simultaneously overcome all three challenges — and failure on even a single front might prove catastrophic.
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.
Now we need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science — but we are still stuck with only national politics.
Jesus can easily be recruited to the debate on global warming, with the result that current political positions look as if they are eternal religious principles.
“Human power depends on mass cooperation, and mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities — and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities.” — Why do they have to be fictions? Isn’t American identity crafted around the story of the Revolution? That’s not a fiction.
After all, we are God’s chosen nation, the argument goes, so what’s good for our nation is pleasing to God too. There certainly are religious sages who reject nationalist excesses and adopt far more universal visions. Unfortunately, such sages don’t wield much political power these days.
This collision between global problems and local identities manifests itself in the crisis that now besets the greatest multicultural experiment in the world — the European Union.
What complicates matters is that in many cases people want to eat their cake and have it too. Numerous countries turn a blind eye to illegal immigration or even accept foreign workers on a temporary basis because they want to benefit from the foreigners’ energy, talents, and cheap labor. But the countries then refuse to legalize the status of these people, saying that they don’t want immigration. In the long run, this could create hierarchical societies in which an upper class of full citizens exploits an underclass of powerless foreigners, as happens today in Qatar and several other Gulf states.
From a personal viewpoint, however, forty years can be an eternity. For a teenager born in France twenty years after her grandparents immigrated there, the journey from Algiers to Marseilles is ancient history. She was born here, all her friends were born here, she speaks French rather than Arabic, and she has never even been to Algeria. France is the only home she has ever known. And now people say to her it’s not her home, and that she should go “back” to a place she never inhabited? It’s as if you take a seed of a eucalyptus tree from Australia and plant it in France. From an ecological perspective, eucalyptus trees are an invading species, and it will take generations before botanists reclassify them as native European plants. Yet from the viewpoint of the individual tree, it is French. If you don’t water it with French water, it will wither. If you try to uproot it, you will discover it has struck its roots deep in the French soil, just like the local oaks and pines.
Life scientists, and in particular geneticists, have produced very strong scientific evidence that the biological differences between Europeans, Africans, Chinese, and Native Americans are negligible. At the same time, however, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, behavioral economists, and even brain scientists have accumulated a wealth of data for the existence of significant differences between human cultures.
Both of these cases may seem to smack of racism. But in fact, they are not racist. They are “culturist.” People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists.”
In any case, even if you are a tourist from Delhi who knows nothing about American history, you will have to deal with the consequences of that history.
Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians feel extremely uneasy about this issue. On one hand, it all sounds dangerously close to racism. On the other hand, culturism has a much firmer scientific basis than racism, and particularly scholars in the humanities and social sciences cannot deny the existence and importance of cultural differences.
While culture is important, people are also shaped by their genes and their unique personal history. Individuals often defy statistical stereotypes. It makes sense for a firm to prefer sociable employees to stony ones, but it does not make sense to prefer Warmlanders to Coldians.
Those who favor immigration are wrong to depict all their rivals as immoral racists, while those who oppose immigration are wrong to portray all their opponents as irrational traitors. The immigration debate is a debate between two legitimate views, which can and should be decided through the normal democratic procedure. That’s what democracy is for.
One thing that might help Europe and the world as a whole to integrate better and to keep borders and minds open is to downplay the hysteria regarding terrorism. It would be extremely unfortunate if the European experiment in freedom and tolerance unraveled due to an overblown fear of terrorists. That would not only realize the terrorists’ own goals but also give this handful of fanatics far too great a say about the future of humankind. Terrorism is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to dominate global politics?
However, the terrorists hope that even though they can barely make a dent in the enemy’s material power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact. Terrorists calculate that when the enraged enemy uses his massive power against them, he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create. During every storm, many unforeseen things happen. Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion wavers, neutrals change their stance, and the balance of power shifts.
In this respect, terrorists resemble a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened after 9/ 11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop. Now they flourish in the wreckage. And there is no shortage of short-tempered bulls in the world.
By killing a handful of people the terrorists cause millions to fear for their lives. In order to calm these fears, governments react to the theater of terror with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.
Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theater producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to combat terrorism effectively, we must realize that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to their provocations.
Command of trillions of dollars, millions of soldiers, and thousands of ships, airplanes, and nuclear missiles passes from one group of politicians to another without a single shot being fired. People quickly got used to this and now consider it their natural right. Consequently, sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state. A small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise.
Unfortunately, the media all too often provides this publicity for free. It obsessively reports terrorist attacks and greatly inflates their danger, because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports on diabetes or air pollution.
Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it. Politicians, generals, and scholars treat the world as a great chess game, where every move follows careful rational calculation. This is correct up to a point. Few leaders in history have been mad in the narrow sense of the word, moving pawns and knights at random. Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-Il had rational reasons for every move they played. The problem is that the world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it. For that reason even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.
The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality. But why? Morality of some kind is natural. All social mammals from chimpanzees to rats have ethical codes that limit behavior like theft and murder. Among humans, morality is present in all societies, even though not all of them believe in the same god, or in any god. Christians act with charity even without believing in the Hindu pantheon, Muslims value honesty despite rejecting the divinity of Christ, and secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren’t more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.
“Indeed, you might keep boiling with anger for years, without ever actually murdering the object of your hatred. In which case you haven’t hurt anyone else, but you have nevertheless hurt yourself. It is therefore your natural self-interest — and not the command of some god — that should induce you to do something about your anger. If you were completely free of anger, you would feel far better than if you murdered an obnoxious enemy.” — Don’t do the right thing because God wants you to. But God does want you to do the right thing because he recognizes the good it does for you.
This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world. Without the guidance of scientific studies, our compassion is often blind.
Suffering is suffering, no matter who experiences it, and knowledge is knowledge, no matter who discovers it.
We cannot search for the truth and for the way out of suffering without the freedom to think, investigate, and experiment. For that reason secular people cherish freedom, and refrain from investing supreme authority in any text, institution, or leader as the ultimate judge of what’s true and what’s right. Humans should always retain the freedom to doubt, to check again, to hear a second opinion, to try a different path. Secular people admire Galileo Galilei, who dared to question whether the Earth really sits motionless at the center of the universe; they admire the masses of common people who stormed the Bastille in 1789 and brought down the despotic regime of Louis XVI; and they admire Rosa Parks, who had the courage to sit down on a bus seat reserved for white passengers only.
Secular education teaches us that if we don’t know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of acknowledging our ignorance and looking for new evidence. Even if we think we know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of doubting our opinions and checking ourselves again.
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
There are plenty of Jewish scientists, Christian environmentalists, Muslim feminists, and Hindu human rights activists. If they are loyal to scientific truth, to compassion, to equality, and to freedom, they are full members of the secular world, and there is absolutely no reason to demand that they take off their yarmulkes, crosses, hijabs, or tilakas.
For similar reasons, secular education does not mean a negative indoctrination that teaches kids not to believe in God and not to take part in any religious ceremonies. Rather, secular education teaches children to distinguish truth from belief, to develop compassion for all suffering beings, to appreciate the wisdom and experiences of all the earth’s denizens, to think freely without fearing the unknown, and to take responsibility for their actions and for the world as a whole.
Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naive reassurance that “it cannot happen to us.” Secular science has at least one big advantage over most traditional religions — namely, that it is not inherently terrified of its shadow, and it is in principle willing to admit its mistakes and blind spots. If you believe in an absolute truth revealed by a transcendent power, you cannot allow yourself to admit any error, for that would nullify your whole story. But if you believe in a quest for truth by fallible humans, admitting blunders is part of the game.
If you want your religion, ideology, or worldview to lead the world, my first question to you is: “What was the biggest mistake your religion, ideology, or worldview committed? What did it get wrong?” If you cannot come up with something serious, I for one would not trust you.
Individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history has progressed, they have come to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to make her own clothes, how to start a fire, how to hunt rabbits, and how to escape lions. We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well they understood the workings of an ordinary zipper. Most people confidently replied that they understood zippers very well — after all, they use them all the time. They were then asked to describe in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in the zipper’s operation. Most people had no idea. 2 This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed “the knowledge illusion.” We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.
The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently, some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.
Most political chiefs and business moguls are forever on the run. Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.
If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the center, because the center is built on existing knowledge.
The system is structured in such a way that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance, and those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth.
When discussing global issues, I am always in danger of privileging the viewpoint of the global elite over that of various disadvantaged groups. The global elite commands the conversation, so it is impossible to miss its views. Disadvantaged groups, in contrast, are routinely silenced, so it is easy to forget about them — not out of deliberate malice, but out of sheer ignorance.
No one — including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons, and the Elders of Zion — really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively.
As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. Therefore, if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better to try your luck with chimps.
It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need to at least carefully investigate our favorite sources of information — be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network, or a person.
First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. At present, the dominant model in the news market is “exciting news that costs you nothing — in exchange for your attention.” You pay nothing for the news, and get a low-quality product. Even worse, you yourself unwittingly become the product. Your attention is first captured by sensational headlines, and then sold to advertisers or politicians. A far better model for the news market would be “high-quality news that costs you money but does not abuse your attention.” In today’s world, information and attention are critical assets. It is crazy to give up your attention for free, and to get in exchange only low-quality information. If you are willing to pay for high-quality food, clothes, and cars — why aren’t you willing to pay for high-quality information?
if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has gotten many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim.
Scientists, for their part, need to be far more engaged with current public debates. Scientists should not be afraid of making their voices heard when the debate wanders into their field of expertise, be it medicine or history. Silence isn’t neutrality; it is supporting the status quo. Of course, it is extremely important to go on doing academic research and to publish the results in scientific journals that only a few experts read. But it is equally important to communicate the latest scientific theories to the general public through popular science books, and even through the skillful use of art and fiction.
Does that mean scientists should start writing science fiction? That is actually not such a bad idea. Art plays a key role in shaping people’s views of the world, and in the twenty-first century science fiction is arguably the most important genre of all, for it shapes how most people understand things such as AI, bioengineering, and climate change. We certainly need good science, but from a political perspective, a good science-fiction movie is worth far more than an article in Science or Nature.
In the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction. Very few people read the latest articles in the fields of machine learning or genetic engineering. Instead, movies such as The Matrix and Her and TV series such as Westworld and Black Mirror shape how people understand the most important technological, social, and economic developments of our time. This also means that science fiction needs to be far more responsible in the way it depicts scientific realities; otherwise it might imbue people with the wrong ideas or focus their attention on the wrong problems.
Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love — even in the matrix. It doesn’t matter if the fear you feel is inspired by a collection of atoms in the outside world or by electrical signals manipulated by a computer. The fear is still real. So if you want to explore the reality of your mind, you can do that inside the matrix as well as outside it.
Riley is a complex story produced by the conflicts and collaborations of all the biochemical characters together.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.
The decisions we will make in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can make these decisions based only on our present worldview. If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.
Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing students with a set of predetermined skills, such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C + +, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea what the world and the job market will look like in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C + + or speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app will enable you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka, even though you only know how to say “Ni hao.”
So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. 3 More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.
From time immemorial life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of life you accumulated information, developed skills, constructed a worldview, and built a stable identity.
By the middle of the twenty-first century, accelerating change plus longer life spans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life will come apart at the seams, and there will be less and less continuity between different periods of life. “Who am I?” will be a more urgent and complicated question than ever before.
Though the adult brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the teenage brain. Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses is hard work. 5 But in the twenty-first century, you can’t afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whoosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant — not just economically but above all socially — you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.
What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyze it all? How do you live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug but a feature?
Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown while maintaining their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. Teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, since they themselves are the product of the old educational system.
As for the future, physics tells us that planet Earth will be absorbed by an expanding sun about 7.5 billion years from now and that our universe will continue to exist for at least 13 billion years more.
Consider a typical Tea Party supporter who somehow squares ardent faith in Jesus Christ with firm objection to government welfare policies and staunch support for the National Rifle Association. Wasn’t Jesus’s message focused on helping the poor rather than arming yourself to the teeth? The viewpoints might seem incompatible, but the human brain has a lot of drawers and compartments, and some neurons just don’t talk to one another.
People sometimes imagine that if we renounce our belief in free will, we will become completely apathetic and just curl up in some corner and starve to death. In fact, renouncing this illusion kindles a profound curiosity. As long as you strongly identify with whatever thoughts and desires pop up in your mind, you don’t need to make much effort to know yourself. You think you already know exactly who you are. But once you realize, “Hi, these thoughts aren’t me. They are just some biochemical vibrations!” then you also realize you have no idea who — or what — you are. This can be the beginning of the most exciting journey of discovery any human can undertake. A crucial step on this journey is to acknowledge that the “self” is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I come from, where I am heading, and what is happening to me right now.
Between me and the world there are always bodily sensations. I never react to events in the outside world; I always react to the sensations in my own body. When the sensation is unpleasant, I react with aversion. When the sensation is pleasant, I react with a craving for more. Even when we think we react to what another person has done, to President Trump’s latest tweet, or to a distant childhood memory, the truth is that we always react to our immediate bodily sensations.
Since that first course in 2000, I began meditating for two hours every day, and each year I take a long meditation retreat of a month or two. It is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality. For at least two hours a day I actually observe reality as it is, while for the other twenty-two hours I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and cute-puppy videos. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens or Homo Deus.
I definitely don’t think that meditation is the magic solution to all the world’s problems. To change the world, you need to act, and even more important, you need to organize. Fifty members cooperating in an organization can accomplish far more than five hundred individuals each working in isolation. If you really care about something — join a relevant organization. Do it this week.
Q: If humans have no free will, why do you even bother to write books? What do you expect people to do with this insight? YNH: Let’s leave abstract philosophy aside and look at this question from a very practical perspective. For most people, the question of free will is really one about making choices in life. How do you choose what to eat for breakfast? How do you choose where to go on vacation? Where to work? Whom to marry? Whom to vote for? People imagine that they make these choices “freely.” Ideologies such as liberalism and capitalism encourage people to think that way. This makes people very incurious about themselves. As long as I think that my choices reflect my free will, I have no incentive to investigate what made me choose this or that — I simply did it of my own free will. Therefore I completely identify with whatever choices I make, and I remain ignorant about the biological, social, and cultural forces that have really shaped my decisions. This is how belief in free will becomes a big barrier to self-exploration and self-understanding. In the twenty-first century the price we pay for ignorance about ourselves will increase dramatically, because governments and corporations are now gaining unprecedented abilities to hack and manipulate human choice. And the easiest people to manipulate are those who believe in free will — because they refuse to acknowledge that they can be manipulated. So forget the philosophy and be very practical about it. Even if you believe in the theoretical possibility of free will, at least acknowledge that this possibility is not realized in each and every choice you make. Freedom isn’t something you automatically have; it is something you must struggle for. In 99 percent of cases, your choices aren’t made freely but are shaped by various biological, social, and cultural forces. I would be happy to concede that there is such a thing as “free will” and that 1 percent of our decisions are made completely freely if in exchange people investigate more seriously what shapes the other 99 percent.
Part of the problem is that Silicon Valley is led by genius engineers who know mathematics and computer science very well but can be quite naive when it comes to history, philosophy, and politics. This is why historians, philosophers, and social critics have a particularly important role to play today. They need to familiarize themselves with the latest technological trends in order to help both the engineers and the general public understand the implications of these trends.
I try to be a realist. I can summarize the situation of humankind in the early twenty-first century in the following way: Things are better than ever. Things are still quite bad. Things can become much worse. The fact that things are still quite bad and can become much worse should make us wary of being too optimistic. But the fact that things are better than ever implies that we can improve matters. It is not inevitable that things will actually become worse. So we shouldn’t be too pessimistic either.
