21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class,” leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle. All the talk about technology and ideology might sound very abstract and remote, but the very real prospect of mass unemployment—or personal unemployment—leaves nobody indifferent.

If we manage to combine a universal economic safety net with strong communities and meaningful pursuits, losing our jobs to algorithms might actually turn out to be a blessing. Losing control over our lives, however, is a much scarier scenario. Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.

Digital dictatorships are not the only danger awaiting us. Alongside liberty, the liberal order has also set great store in the value of equality. Liberalism has always cherished political equality, and it gradually came to realize that economic equality is almost as important. For without a social safety net and a modicum of economic equality, liberty is meaningless. But just as Big Data algorithms might extinguish liberty, they might simultaneously create the most unequal societies that ever existed. 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.

How, then, do we go forward from here, and how do we cope with the immense challenges of the biotech and infotech revolutions? Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place can engineer some technological solution. For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his two billion friends to join forces and do something together.

Once the tech giants come to terms with the human

body, they might end up manipulating our entire bodies in the same way they currently manipulate our eyes, fingers, and credit cards. We may come to miss the good old days when online was separated from offline.

According to this thesis, humankind has always been divided into diverse civilizations whose members view the world in irreconcilable ways.

Stupid logic leap

How, then, to explain the nationalistic wave sweeping over much of the world? Perhaps in our enthusiasm for globalization we have been too quick to dismiss the good old nations. Might a return to traditional nationalism be the solution to our desperate global crises?

If globalization brings with it so many problems, why not just abandon it?

Traditional religions have lost so much turf because, frankly, they just weren’t very good at farming or healthcare. The true expertise of priests and gurus has never really been rainmaking, healing, prophecy, or magic. Rather, it has always been interpretation. A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.

We are trapped, then, between a rock and a hard place. Humankind now constitutes a single civilization, and problems such as nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption can only be solved on the global level. On the other hand, nationalism and religion still divide our human civilization into different and often hostile camps. 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. Built on the promise of universal liberal values, the EU is teetering on the verge of disintegration due to the difficulties of integration and immigration.

Terrorism is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to dominate global politics?

Of course, our current sense of danger is fueled not just by terrorism. Many pundits and laypeople fear that the Third World War is just around the corner, and that the world of 2018 is eerily reminiscent of the world of 1914. Now as then, rising tensions between the great powers coupled with intractable global problems seem to be dragging us toward a global war. Is this anxiety

more justified than our overblown fear of terrorism?

One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious, and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion, and my culture are the most important in the world—and therefore my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole. How can we make nations, religions, and cultures a bit more realistic and modest about their true place in the world?

religions or nations of today existed when humans colonized the world, domesticated plants and animals, built the first cities, or invented writing and money. Morality, art, spirituality, and creativity are universal human abilities embedded in our DNA. Their genesis was in Stone Age Africa. It is therefore crass egotism to ascribe to them a

And among all forms of humility, perhaps the most important is to have humility before God. Whenever they talk of God, humans all too often profess abject self-effacement, but then use the name of God to lord it over their brethren.

Not visiting any temples and not believing in any god is also a viable option. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need.

The other chief commitment of secular people is to compassion.

Says who? Are you the chief Rabbi if secularism?

It takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even greater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown.

Idiotic. Much more courageous to fight an oppressive regime.

Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

As we come to make the most important decisions in the history of life, I personally would trust more in those who admit ignorance than in those who claim infallibility. 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.

This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed “the knowledge illusion.”

This is not necessarily bad. Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of the world, and the knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being caught in an impossible effort to understand everything ourselves. From an evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others has worked extremely well for Homo sapiens.

The power of groupthink is so pervasive that it is difficult to break its hold even when its views seem to be rather arbitrary. For example, in the United States, right-wing conservatives tend to care far less about things such as pollution and endangered species than left-wing progressives, which is why Louisiana has much weaker environmental regulations than Massachusetts. We are used to this situation, so we take it for granted, but it is really quite surprising. One would think that conservatives would care far more about the conservation of the old ecological order and about protecting their ancestral lands, forests, and rivers. In contrast, progressives would be expected to be far more open to radical changes to the countryside, especially if the aim is to speed up progress and increase the human

standard of living. However, once the party line has been set on these issues by various historical quirks, it becomes second nature for conservatives to dismiss concerns about polluted rivers and disappearing birds, while left-wing progressives tend to fear any disruption to the old ecological order.5

But what then about morality and justice? If we cannot understand the world, how can we hope to tell the difference between right and wrong, justice and injustice?

Should we call it quits, then, and declare that the human quest to understand the truth and find justice has failed? Have we officially entered the post-truth era?

We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.

Stupid

The conflicts between nations and religions are something like the rivalries between soccer fans.

If you devote the time and energy, you can discover that nations are elaborate yarns. But in the midst of a war, you don’t have the time and energy.

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.

Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions. Poets, painters, and playwrights are therefore at least as important as soldiers and engineers. People go to war and build cathedrals because they believe in God, and they believe in God because they have read poems about God, because they have seen pictures of God, and because they

have been mesmerized by theatrical plays about God. Similarly, our belief in the modern mythology of capitalism is underpinned by the artistic creations of Hollywood and the pop industry. We believe that buying more stuff will make us happy, because we saw the capitalist paradise with our own eyes on television.

Mustapha Mond explains to the savage that “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise.” Since there are no more wars, revolutions, or social conflicts, there is just no need for nobility or heroism.

Unlike the creators of The Matrix and The Truman Show, Huxley doubted the possibility of escape, because he questioned whether there was anybody to make the escape. Since your brain and your “self” are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self. That, however, is a possibility worth exploring. Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.