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In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.
It is a cliché to note that the personal is the political, but in an era when scientists, corporations, and governments are learning to hack the human brain, this truism is more sinister than ever.
At the close of the twentieth century it appeared that the great ideological battles between fascism, communism, and liberalism had resulted in the overwhelming victory of liberalism. Democratic politics, human rights, and free-market capitalism seemed destined to conquer the entire world. But as usual, history took an unexpected turn, and after fascism and communism collapsed, now liberalism is in trouble. So where are we heading? This question is particularly poignant because liberalism is losing credibility exactly when the twin revolutions in information technology and biotechnology
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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.
Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them.
unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties?
What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the twenty-second century?
humans have never been able to predict the future with accuracy.
In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050.
Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.
At present, too many schools focus on cramming information into kids’ brains. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship.
When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the basic facts of geography, history, and biology, they represented an immense improvement.
If you live in some provincial Mexican town and you have a smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED Talks, and taking free online courses.
No government can hope to conceal all the information it doesn’t like.
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.
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.
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 ...
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By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to cyberspace, with fluid gender identities, and with new sensory experiences generated by computer implants.
We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.
Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making discontinuity its most salient feature.
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, ...
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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.4
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.
To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance.
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.
So the best advice I can give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India, or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world.
Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.
Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life.
As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart.
To succeed at such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard at getting to know your operating system better—to know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself.
The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, whom you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better.
In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it yourself, authority will shift to them.
If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy. 20 Meaning Life Is Not a Story Who am I? What should I do in life? What is the meaning of life? Humans have been asking these questions from time immemorial.
