Harari 2018 Jonathan Cape

Harari YN (2018) 21 lessons for the 21st century. Jonathan Cape London:352 pp.

Harari YN (2018) Jonathan Cape

Abstract: 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. Frequently, we don't even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. .. 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 very unfair; but who said history was fair? As a historian, I cannot give people food or clothes - but I can try and offer some clarity, thereby helping to level the global playing field.

• Bioblast editor: Gnaiger E

Some selected quotes

• Reality is composed of many threads.

• Big data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most poeple 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.

• The revolutions in biotech and infotech are made by engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists who are hardly aware of the political implications of their decisions, and who certainly don't represent anyone.

Disillusionment

• Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.

• The revolutions in biotech and infotech are made by engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists who are hardly aware of the political implications of their decisions, and who certainly don't represent anyone.

• In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant.

• It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

• .. the liberal story learned from communism to expand the circle of empathy and to value equality alongside liberty.

• Democracy is based on Abraham Loncoln's principle that 'you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time'.

• But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption.

Work

• Some believe that within a mere decade or two, billions of people will become economically redundant.

• Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability. .. individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network.

• Today close to .25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime and terrorism combined).

• After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans - not jobs.

• Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.

Liberty

• People will enjoy the best healthcare in history, but for precisely this reason they will probably be sick all the time. There is always something wrong somewhere in the body. There is always something that can be improved.

• We no longer search for information. Instead, we google. And as we increasingly rely on Google for anwers, so our ability to search for information by ourselves diminishes. Already today, 'truth' is defined by the top results of the Google search.

• As authority shifts from humans to alorithms, we may no longer see the world as the playground of autonomous individuals struggling to make the right choices. Instead, we might perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see orgniams as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe than humanity's cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system - and then merge into it.

• Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger. We confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness.

Equality

• Yet the data-giants probably aim far higher than any previous attention merchant. Their true business isn't to sell advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any advertising revenue. We arent't their customers - we are their product.

Civilisation

• Otto von Bismarck allededly remarked (having read Darwin's On the Origin of Species) that the Bavarian is the missing link between the Austrian and the human.

• People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners.

• Even countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Congo have adopted Western muscial conventions for their anthems. Most of them sound like something composed by Beethoven on a rather mediocre day.

• In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine and several other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, drom car accidents, or from suicide. This may well have been the greatest political and moral achievement of our times. Unfortunately, by now we are so used to this achievement, that we take it for granted.

• 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 distruction.

• For thousands of years Homo sapiens behaved as an ecological serial killer; now it is morphing into an ecological mass murderer.

• Unlike nuclear war - which is a future potential - climate change is a present reality.

• A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity, and humankind now has a least three such enemies - nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption. If despite these common threats humans choose to privilege their particular national loyalties above everything else, the results may be far worse than in 1914 and 1939.

• Even on a united planet there will be plenty of room for the kind of patriotism that celebrates the uniqueness of my nation and stresses my special obligations towards it. Yet if we want to survive and flourish, humankind has little choice but to complement such local loyalties with substantial obligations towards a global community. A person can and should be loyal simultaneously to her family, her neighbourhood, her profession and her nation - why not add humankind and planet Earth to the list? True, when you have multiple loyalties, conflicts are somethimes inevitable. But then who said life was simple? Deal with it.