21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for every job lost to a machine at least one new job was created, and the average standard of living has increased dramatically.1 Yet there are good reasons to think that this time it is different and that machine learning will be a real game changer. Humans have two types of abilities—physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition. Therefore, as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning, analyzing, communicating, and above all understanding human emotions. However, AI is now beginning to outperform humans in more and more of these skills, including in the understanding of human emotions.2 We don’t know of any third field of activity—beyond the physical and the cognitive—where humans will always retain a secure edge.