21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harrari, 2018
Table of contents
Disillusionment
- the 21st century had three dominant stories:
- fascism - history as a struggle among different nations, world is dominated by one human group that violently subdues all others
- communism - history as struggle among different classes, world is all groups united by centralized system that ensures equality at price of freedom
- liberalism - history as struggle between liberty and tyranny, world is all humans cooperate freely and peacefully with minimal central control even at price of some inequality
- liberalism became the dominant story after the fall of fascism after WWII and the fall of communism after USSR
- recently, liberalism has been rejected – we see this in election of Trump, or Brexit, for example. A rejection of the thrust of globalization (while still maintaining some tenets of liberalism at home)
- liberalism hasn’t been replaced by a “new story”, and humans need stories to function as groups
- everyone embraces some form of liberalism (except for parts of the Middle East) – China has massive infrastructure spending (Belt-and-Road initiative - modern day Silk Road), Trump is in favor of free markets, etc.
- nostalgic backwards thrust of humanity in 2010s – Trump’s Make America Great, Putin wanted to reinstate tsarist empire, Middle East wanting to teleport back 1,500 years
Work
- humans have two types of abilities: cognitive and physical – in the past machines have competed with humans in the physical, but now AI is outperforming humans in the cognitive too
- human intuition really is just pattern recognition, humans reacting to millions of biochemical signals to do things
- AI allows for connectability and updatability – all machines have much less lossy exchange of information than humans, and you can update all machines at once with new software
- 1.25 million people killed annually in traffic accidents, the majority due to human error – reasonable to assume that AI driving would cut ~90% of those
- rise of the useless caste - many low skill jobs are being completely lost to automation, but high skill jobs are plentiful – losing a low skill job without being able to switch to another low skill job means humans need to either gain new skills or become useless
- disruption by automation won’t just be a single event but a cascade of disruptions
three ways to think about job loss
- how to stop job loss
- how to create new jobs
- what to do if lost jobs outpaces created jobs
two solutions are:
- universal basic income (capitalist utopia) - govt provides stipend to live
- universal basic services (communist utopia) - govt provides all basic services for free
Liberty
- referendums are always about human feelings not rationality
- feelings are biochemical reactions that all mammals and birds have to quickly calculate probabilities of survival
- trolley problem – save children or trolley operator and passengers? applies to self-driving cars
- human emotions trump philosophical ideas and humans use emotions to make life or death decisions
- good samaritan study – theologians on way to present talk about good samaritan story frequently pass by a homeless man on the street coughing and moaning in pain
- in moments of crisis, computers would follow ethical guidelines better than humans, as there is no emotional baggage
- computers just need to be better than humans
- science fiction posits that the day robots take over is when they achieve “consciousness”, but this equates consciousness with intelligence
- consciousness is either 1) linked to organic systems in such a way that prevents anything else from achieving it 2) can be achieved by inorganic entities and is essential to achieve a certain level of intelligence 3) there is no link between consciousness and high intelligence and it is not required
MM Note: Harrari has a tendency so far in this book to over-simplify ideas, such as implying that these “algorithms” are some conglomerate and are working in concert to hack humanity. There is a bit of fear-mongering of these “algorithms” as if they aren’t just very complicated statistical models limited to a few thousand features. Netflix has dedicated millions of engineering hours to its recommendation system, and it doesn’t seem entirely reliable. Humans aren’t just some interface with 1,000 buttons that a computer could learn to play like a piano. We are decades away from algorithms being able to take in enough inputs to mimic even small subsets of human action or emotion.
Equality
- property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality
- equality only became an ideal in late modern era with rise of communism and liberalism
- globalization, instead of leading to global unity, might lead to biological castes/speciation, the rich with access to bioegineering and the poor left behind
- the key according to Harrari is to regulate the ownership of data, where some countries might nationalize data
MM Note:: Harrari isn’t very strong when speaking about “data”, equating all types data, from consumer patterns to biochemical indicators. Additionally, he seems to mythologize data in general. When he calls for philosophers, politicians, and lawyers to help us make sense of the complicated footprint of how we manage our data, he curiously is leaving out technlogy professionals. I don’t think Harrari is a technologist and seems to think data is some abstract thing that floats around our bodies, or that companies hoard like gold. But information as data needs very real infrastructure to hold it. It needs server banks and data engineers to build data pipelines, and business analysts to help separate signal from the noise, and business to agree on what data is actionable and what is useless. Any opinions on “data” need also to take account of the increasingly lowered barrier to entry for building this robust data infrastructure represented by the cloud.
Community
- Facebook has a vision of building a global community, one to replace the waning local communities we find ourselves in
- any community needs to bridge the chasm between offline and online – there is a fundamental unreality to online communities
MM Note: This book was written in 2018 when the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the one where Facebook was selling data via CA to the highest bidder and how it went to a disinformation campaign that, in part, propelled Donald Trump to the presidency, and it’s impressive to see how Facebook’s reputation has hemorrhaged even since then. I do like the idea of extended communities not bound by geographic boundaries. It reminds me of Vonnegut’s idea of extended families, or giving everyone a larger family to supplement their own.
Civilization
-
clash of civilizations thesis - the world is made up diverse civilizations with irreconcilable differences, and the history of the world is played out in the conflicts between these civilizations. This theory is false or misleading because
- the conflicting civilizations often are generalized, e.g., Islamic states against a generic ‘western’ civ
- biology and history are conflated, implying that human nations are the same as species and natural selection reigns, which is not true
- human tribes, unlike species which never ‘merge’, tend to coalesce over time to larger and larger groups
- the Olympic project is a good example of the enduring power of shared beliefs and identities – political strife has hardly undermined the project
- all humans tend to share the same civilization for science, medicine, manufacturing, etc; the practical stuff
- despite declaring a war on western imperialism, Islamic states never burn American dollars
- corporations are bad vehicles for change
- identity is defined more by conflicts than agreements
Nationalism
- nation states are not some eternal part of human psychology or inevitable
- nationalism as two parts: 1) preferring people like us over foreigners 2) sometimes preferring strangers over friends and family (for the good of the nation)
- democracy can’t really function without nationalism – how would we believe the results of elections, or that our actions were for a greater good (altruism)?
three global existential crises might require a global identity:
- the nuclear challenge - how do we live in a world where nations can destroy everything with weapons of mass destruction?
- the ecological challenge - how can we live in a world where we are doing irreparable harm to the environment, and the effects are often felt by other, unsuspecting parties?
- the technological challenge - how can we live in a world where the access to technology might mean vastly different biological outcomes and potentially biological castes?
- the only real solution is to globalize politics, perhaps using the European Union (which is teetering on failure) as a model
Religion
in the modern era, we have three types of problems
- technical problems - e.g., how to deal with droughts
- policy problems - e.g., what measures to curb global warming
- identity problems - e.g., should I even care about farmers across the globe
- religion isn’t equipped for the first two, so left with identity problems
- religious books are no longer source of truth but now used ex post facto to justify opinions
- human identities play a large role as historical forces – human power depends on mass cooperation, and mass cooperation depends on shared identities
- though many religions espouse universal values and cosmic ideals, they are often used as the handmaiden of nationalism
Immigration
- how do we confront, assimilate, or expel strangers?
immigration broken into 3 terms: term 1: the host country allows immigrant in term 2: in return, immigrant embraces some of host values and ideals term 3: if immigrant assimilate enough, they can be considered a member of host country
there are really four debates around immigration that get conflated debate 1: do countries need to allow immigrants in as a duty or as a favor? debate 2: how far does assimilation need to go? debate 3: exactly how much time needs to pass before an immigrant can become a full member? debate 4: is the deal actually working?
recently, prejudice has moved away from a biological basis to a cultural one: “it’s part of their culture”, which tends to have three problems:
- local superiority is confused with objective superiority - of course within a particular culture certain cultural affects are more or less suited, but this doesn’t mean it is objectively better or worse
- culturist claims skew too general - Islam is an intolerant religion; intolerant of everything?
- used to prejudge individuals
Terrorism
- terrorism works by spreading fear rather than material damage and is the refuge of weak parties
- tries to change the political balance of power through violence without an army
- terrorism kills far few than most things, but maintains power because the prime goal of a modern nation is to keep the public sphere free from violence
- this is amplified nowadays because the public sphere is so limited on violence
- how do we deal with terrorism? 1) govt should focus on clandestine actions against terrorist networks 2) media should keep things in perspective 3) don’t allow our imaginations to be held captive by the specter of terrorism
- if terrorism goes nuclear, that changes the calculus, but we shouldn’t react prematurely to that
War
- in early agricultural societies, human violence made up 15% of deaths. In the 20th century, 5%. In the 21st, 1%
- large scale, exceptionally violent wars of aggression against world powers might be a thing of the past
- example: Putin’s annexation of Crimea – widely derided, and hopefully Putin understands not to take it further
- human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history that we tend to discount
Humility
- most people believe that they are the center of the world and their culture is the most important, but this is frequently untrue
- metaphor of Freud’s mother as argument for how important Judaism is – Freud’s mother gave birth to Freud but no one talks about her, just like Judaism gave birth to Christianity and Islam
- from an ethical perspective, monotheism was a terrible idea – promoted narrow-mindedness and rigidity
God
- many different cultures have conceived of god, and the missing link between cosmic mystery and worldly lawgiver is often some holy book, but these books are always written by humans
- people argue we must believe in a god that gives laws to humans
- the idea we need a supernatural being implies there is something unnatural about morality, that it needs to be learned or divinely inspired
- morality is present in all societies, so maybe there is something natural
- morality can be seen as reducing suffering
- we then could ask why humans would care about misery of others unless predicated on some otherworldly reward, but humans are social animals and happiness depends on relations with others
Secularism
- a response to religiosity
- secularists are fine with multiple, hybrid identities
- highest values are truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage, and responsibility
- most important value is truth based on observation and evidence
- second most is compassion prompted by deep appreciation of suffering
- motivated by compassion rather than obedience (to a god)
- equality of opinions
- scientific truth is important to know how to reduce suffering
- courage to admit ignorance and explore unknown
- secular people cherish freedom in order to explore, investigate, experiment
- also value responsibility since there is no higher being at the helm
- problem with secularism is it might set the ethical bar impossibly high, meaning that sometimes secularism mutates into dogmatic creed (e.g., communism)
Ignorance
- liberal thought developed immense trust in the rational individual
- this rational individual might be chauvinistic western fantasy glorifying the autonomy and power of upper-class white men
- individuality is a myth – we think in groups
- knowledge illusion - we think we know a lot, but individually we know litle – we treat knowledge of others as our own knowledge
Justice
- most of us are no longer capable of understanding the major moral problems of the world
four responses to world complexity
- downsize the issue
- make a touching human story stand for the whole conflict
- weave conspiracy theories
- create a dogma and put trust in some all-knowing theory, institution or chief
Post-Truth
- Homo Sapiens is a post-truth species whose power resides in creating and believing fictions
- religion is fake news
- “Instead of accepting fake news as the norm, we should recognize it as a far more difficult problem than we tend to assume and we should strive even harder to distinguish reality from fiction.” (250)
- we should invest time and effort in uncovering biases and verifying sources of info
- if you want reliable info, pay good money for it
- if an issue is important to you, read the relevant scientific literature
Science Fiction
- science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness
- Harrari has an interesting take on Pixar’s Inside Out, which is that it is a more sinister tale of humans deluding themselves into thinking there is a self beyond the underlying biochemical signals frenziedly flying through our bodies
- he also talks about the Matrix, and how everything is in our heads anyway and so everything is the Matrix – you escape the Matrix into another Matrix (which I think is how the trilogy actually ended)
Education
- people need the ability to make sense of info, tell difference between what is important and not, and combine bits of information into a broad picture of the world
- education needs to be about ability to deal with change, learn new things, & preserve mental balance in unfamiliar situations
- you will need ability to constantly learn and reinvent yourself, even at the young age of 50
- “we are living in the era of hacking humans”
MM Notes: - Another reference to ‘hacking’ humans. I still haven’t been able to express verbally why this, and references to algorithms irks me. Something about the way it suggests humans are a terminal and you just need to learn a handful of console commands. The idea that our fridge, by processing thousands or hundreds of thousands of datapoints from our biochemical signature, can respond to our mood to create the perfect meal is not as far-fetched as it feels divorced from the possible. Maybe I’m just too narrow-minded, but it feels like we are at least 70 years and some large shifts in what people pay money for away from this being a reality. We have had 10 years with AI and machine learning on our modern machines, and while it feels like we have made strides, most of these ‘algorithms’ are so narrowly purposed that it seems disingenuous to lump them all into this mighty ‘algorithms’ group as if they were conspiring to take us over. It’s just humans.
Meaning
- Homo Sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than numbers or graphs and believes the universe works like a story (275)
- to give meaning to life, a story must 1) give me some role to play & 2) extend beyond my horizons
- most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than the strength of their foundations – founded on a semi-ridiculous claim, but so much is staked on that that it’d be impossible to undermine
- rituals are politically and spiritually important for meaning
- there is a liberal epiphany that all stories are fake, and it is I that imbue all things with meaning, pushing towards solipsism
Meditation
- if we can discover what holds life together, the answer to the big question of death will also become apparent
- difference between the brain and the mind – the brain is a material network of neurons, synapses, and biochemicals, and the mind is a flow of subjective experiences
Reflections on the Book
I would say there are two large themes to all of Harrari’s work: everything is a fiction and humans are apex because of our ability to cooperate widely because of those fictions, and the only thing that is real is suffering and our response to it. This work expounds on those in interesting ways, but where I think Harrari is less powerful is when talking about technology and masquerading as a futurologist. He is a far better historian than speculator. I struggle to put my finger on exactly what about his prognostications feels ‘off’, but I think what makes him so powerful in other realms (synthesizing complicated theories and historical trends into easily digestible tidbits of info) means he tends to over-simplify or mythologize the technological. He talks about algorithms like they are a pathogen, an airborne miasma accumulating mass until they reach some level of critical mass and take over the world. He talks about data as if it’s part of that same floating cloud of gas, as if there aren’t very real and very physical constraints on how data needs to be saved and stewarded. I don’t think you can be a futurologist without being a technologist, and I don’t think Harrari is a technologist.
That said, the book is carried by Harrari’s pop-nihilism, everything is a fiction, nothing is real schtick. I don’t mean that derisively – Harrari is clearly a powerful thinker and his voice is a compelling take on the world as we live it, one I thoroughly am aligned with. In Harrari I found a vocabulary for my nihilism, for my rule breaking and norm shaking. None of the apparatus that envelops us, society, religion, philosophy, capitalism, is real, and we have all just agreed to treat it as real for the sake of getting by. It’s a compelling realization, and one that I found enabling. If all this is made up anyway, we don’t need to do the things we don’t want to do, or we could move outside of limiting boundaries if needed.
I don’t think this is Harrari’s strongest work, but it does give a lovely framework to think through issues, and his ultimate advice, to meditate, might be a worthy pursuit in 2022.