21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.

The fascist story explained history as a struggle among different nations, and envisioned a world dominated by one human group that violently subdues all others. The communist story explained history as a struggle among different classes, and envisioned a world in which all groups are united by a centralized social system that ensures equality even at the price of freedom. The liberal story explained history as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, and envisioned a world in which all humans cooperate freely and peacefully, with minimum central control even at the price of some inequality.

Some discovered a liking for the old hierarchical world, and they just don’t want to give up their racial, national, or gendered privileges. Others have concluded (rightly or wrongly) that liberalization and globalization are a huge racket empowering a tiny elite at the expense of the masses.

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. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, are in a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Everything is perfectly clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying. Nothing makes any sense.

Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam than it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system.

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.

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realize this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realizing the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others and divert attention to external threats, either real or imaginary.

It is difficult to understand current developments partly because liberalism was never a single thing. Liberalism cherishes liberty, but liberty has different meanings in different contexts. Thus, for one person liberalism implies free elections and democratization. Another person thinks that liberalism means trade agreements and globalization. A third associates liberalism with gay marriage and abortion. Liberalism offers diverse recommendations for behavior in the economic, political, and personal fields, and on both the national and international level.

The liberal story that dominated the world in recent decades argued that there are strong and essential links among all the above six components. You can’t have one without the other, because progress in one field both necessitates and stimulates progress in other fields.

What is now common to populist and nationalist movements throughout the world is that even if they describe themselves as “anti-liberal,” none of them rejects liberalism wholesale. Rather, they reject the set menu approach, and want to pick and choose their own dishes from a liberal buffet.

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

To understand the nature of this technological challenge, perhaps it would be best to start with the job market. Since 2015 I have been traveling around the world talking with government officials, businesspeople, social activists, and schoolkids about the human predicament. Whenever they become impatient or bored by all the talk of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms, and bioengineering, I usually need to mention just one magic word to snap them back to attention: jobs. 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.

In the last few decades research in areas such as neuroscience and behavioral economics allowed scientists to hack humans, and in particular to gain a much better understanding of how humans make decisions. It turns out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition.”3 Good drivers, bankers, and lawyers don’t have magical intuitions about traffic, investment, or negotiation; rather, by recognizing recurring patterns, they spot and try to avoid careless pedestrians, inept borrowers, and sly crooks. It also turns out that the biochemical algorithms of the human brain are far from perfect. They rely on heuristics, shortcuts, and outdated circuits adapted to the African savannah rather than to the urban jungle. No wonder that even good drivers, bankers, and lawyers sometimes make stupid mistakes.

Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.

In the modern world art is usually associated with human emotions. We tend to think that artists are channeling internal psychological forces, and that the whole purpose of art is to connect us with our emotions or to inspire in us some new feeling. Consequently, when we come to evaluate art, we tend to judge it by its emotional impact on the audience. Yet if art is defined by human emotions, what might happen once external algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo, or Beyoncé?

the job market of 2050 might well be characterized by human-AI cooperation rather than competition.

The problem with all such new jobs, however, is that they will probably demand high levels of expertise, and will therefore not solve the problems of unemployed unskilled laborers.

Consequently, despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor. Many people might share the fate not of nineteenth-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of nineteenth-century horses, who were increasingly pushed out of the job market altogether.

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.

In the past, cheap unskilled labor served as a secure bridge across the global economic divide, and even if a country advanced slowly, it could expect to reach safety eventually. Taking the right steps was more important than making speedy progress. Yet now the bridge is shaking, and soon it might collapse. Those who have already crossed it—graduating from cheap labor to high-skill industries—will probably be okay. But those lagging behind might find themselves stuck on the wrong side of the chasm without any means of crossing over. What do you do when nobody needs your cheap unskilled laborers and you don’t have the resources to build a good education system and teach them new skills?27

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.

To really achieve its goals, universal basic support will have to be supplemented with some meaningful pursuits, ranging from sports to religion. Perhaps the most successful experiment so far in how to live a contented life in a post-work world has been conducted in Israel. There, about 50 percent of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men never work. They dedicate their lives to studying holy scriptures and performing religious rituals. They and their families don’t starve partly because the wives often work and partly because the government provides them with generous subsidies and free services, making sure that they don’t lack the basic necessities of life. That’s universal basic support avant la lettre.30 Although they are poor and unemployed, in survey after survey these ultra-Orthodox Jewish men report higher levels of life satisfaction than any other section of Israeli society. This is due to the strength of their community bonds, as well as to the deep meaning they find in studying scripture and performing rituals. A small room full of Jewish men discussing the Talmud might well generate more joy, engagement, and insight than a huge textile sweatshop full of hardworking factory hands. In global surveys of life satisfaction, Israel is usually somewhere near the top, thanks in part to the contribution of these jobless poor people.31

Secular Israelis often complain bitterly that the ultra-Orthodox don’t contribute enough to society and live off other people’s hard work. 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 wi...

Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality. If democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely no reason to give all people equal voting rights—or perhaps any voting rights at all. There is ample evidence that some people are far more knowledgeable and rational than others, certainly when it comes to specific economic and political questions.

2 In the wake of the Brexit vote, eminent biologist Richard Dawkins protested that the vast majority of the British public—including himself—should never have been asked to vote in the referendum, because they lacked the necessary background in economics and political science. “You might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right, or let passengers vote on which runway the pilot should land.”3

However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They are about what we feel. And when it comes to feelings, Einstein and Dawkins are no better than anyone else. Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free. Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, and therefore on election day her feelings—represented by her vote—count just as much as anybody else’s.

scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality, and they do not reflect any kind of “free will.” Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration, or freedom—they are based on calculation.

Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality—they embody evolutionary rationality.

AI often frightens people because they don’t trust the AI to remain obedient. We have seen too many science-fiction movies about robots rebelling against their human masters, running amok in the streets, and slaughtering everyone. Yet the real problem with robots is exactly the opposite. We should fear them because they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel.

The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.

in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way.

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. We are unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability to try to sell us something—be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use these inner leverages against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their existing prejudices.33 While science fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.

To avoid such outcomes, for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving artificial intelligence, it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in advancing human consciousness. Unfortunately, at present we are not doing much in the way of research into human consciousness and ways to develop it. We are researching and developing human abilities mainly according to the immediate needs of the economic and political system, rather than according to our own long-term needs as conscious beings. My boss wants me to answer emails as quickly as possible, but he has little interest in my ability to taste and appreciate the food I am eating. Consequently, I check my emails even during meals, which means I lose the ability to pay attention to my own sensations. 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.

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.

By 2100, the richest 1 percent might own not merely most of the world’s wealth but also most of the world’s beauty, creativity, and health. The two processes together—bioengineering coupled with the rise of AI—might therefore result in the separation of humankind into a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens. To make an already ominous situation even worse, as the masses lose their economic importance and political power, the state might lose at least some of the incentive to invest in their health, education, and welfare. It’s very dangerous to be redundant. The future of the masses will then depend on the goodwill of a small elite. Maybe there is goodwill for a few decades. But in a time of crisis—like climate catastrophe—it would be very tempting and easy to toss the superfluous people overboard.

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is committed “to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience” with others.8 Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences. In the name of “sharing experiences,” people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it. If something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the “likes.” In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions. People estranged from their bodies, senses, and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented.

For nationalism has two parts to it, one easy, the other very difficult. The easy part is to prefer people-like-us over foreigners. Humans have been doing that for millions of years. Xenophobia is in our DNA. The hard part of nationalism is to sometimes prefer strangers over friends and relatives. For example, a good patriot pays his taxes honestly, so that unknown children on the other side of the country will get good national healthcare, even if that means that he cannot treat his own kids in an expensive private hospital. Similarly, a patriotic official gives lucrative jobs to the most qualified applicants rather than to his own brothers and cousins. This goes against millions of years of evolution. Tax evasion and nepotism come naturally to us, but nationalism says they are “corruption.” In order to make people renounce such corruption and put national interests before family connections, nations had to create a mammoth apparatus of education, propaganda, and flag waving, as well as national systems of health, security, and welfare.

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.

While nationalism has many good ideas about how to run a particular nation, it unfortunately has no viable plan for running the world as a whole.

In place of violently establishing a global empire, some nationalists, such as Steve Bannon, Viktor Orban, the Italian Lega, and the British Brexiteers, dream about a peaceful “Nationalist International.” They argue that all nations today face the same enemies. The bogeymen of globalism, multiculturalism, and immigration are threatening to destroy the traditions and identities of all nations, therefore nationalists across the world should make common cause in opposing these global forces. Hungarians, Italians, Turks, and Israelis should build walls, destroy bridges, and slow down the movement of people, goods, money, and ideas.

In a word, the “Nationalist International” envisions the world as a network of walled-but-friendly fortresses. The key problem with this vision is that fortresses are seldom friendly. Each national fortress usually wants a bit more land, security, and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of universal values and global organizations, rival fortresses would not be able to agree on any common rules. All previous attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have resulted in war and genocide.

Such extreme isolationism, however, is completely divorced from economic realities. Without a global trade network, all existing national economies will collapse—including that of North Korea.

Even more important, whether people like it or not, humankind today faces three common challenges that make a mockery of all national borders, and that can only be solved through global cooperation.

In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine, and several other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, car accidents, or suicide.3 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.

Meanwhile, the public has learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (as suggested in Dr. Strangelove) or has just forgotten about its existence. This is why the Brexit debate in Britain—a major nuclear power—revolved mainly around questions of economics and immigration, while the vital contribution of the EU to European and global peace has largely been ignored. After centuries of terrible bloodshed, French, Germans, Italians, and Britons have finally built a mechanism that ensures continental harmony—only to have the British public throw a wrench into the miracle machine.

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.

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

At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings but is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land, and water.