## Metadata - Author: [[Yuval Noah Harari]] - Full Title: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Category: #books ## Highlights - Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clear-sighted. Do you feel like running down the street crying “The apocalypse is upon us”? Try telling yourself, “No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.” ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=399)) - 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. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=428)) - Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability. ([Location 463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=463)) - Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined). ([Location 493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=493)) - Many doctors focus almost exclusively on processing information: they absorb medical data, analyze it, and produce a diagnosis. Nurses, in contrast, need good motor and emotional skills in order to give a painful injection, replace a bandage, or restrain a violent patient. Therefore we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=508)) - The U.S. armed forces need thirty people to operate every unmanned Predator or Reaper drone flying over Syria, while analyzing the resulting harvest of information occupies at least eighty people more. In 2015 the U.S. Air Force lacked sufficient trained humans to fill all these positions, and therefore faced an ironic crisis in manning its unmanned aircraft. ([Location 578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=578)) - A forty-year-old unemployed Walmart cashier who through superhuman effort manages to reinvent herself as a drone pilot might have to reinvent herself again ten years later, because by then the flying of drones may also have been automated. This volatility will also make it more difficult to organize unions or secure labor rights. Already today, many new jobs in advanced economies involve unprotected temporary work, freelancing, and one-time gigs.16 How do you unionize a profession that mushrooms and disappears within a decade? ([Location 601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=601)) - On December 7, 2017, a critical milestone was reached, not when a computer defeated a human at chess—that’s old news—but when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 was the world’s computer chess champion for 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. It was able to calculate seventy million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only eighty thousand such calculations per second, and its human creators had not taught it any chess strategies—not even standard openings. Rather, AlphaZero used the latest machine-learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of a hundred games the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish, AlphaZero won twenty-eight and tied seventy-two. It didn’t lose even once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They may well be considered creative, if not downright genius. Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours. That’s not a typo. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide. ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=614)) - In human-only chess tournaments, judges are constantly on the lookout for players who try to cheat by secretly getting help from computers. One of the ways to catch cheaters is to monitor the level of originality players display. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it cannot possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! ([Location 626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=626)) - As automation threatens to shake the capitalist system to its foundation, one might suppose that communism would make a comeback. But communism was not built to exploit that kind of crisis. Twentieth-century communism assumed that the working class was vital for the economy, and communist thinkers tried to teach the proletariat how to translate its immense economic power into political clout. The communist political plan called for a working-class revolution. How relevant will these teachings be if the masses lose their economic value and therefore need to struggle against irrelevance rather than against exploitation? How do you start a working-class revolution without a working class? ([Location 683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=683)) - today computers and algorithms are already beginning to function as clients in addition to being producers. In the stock exchange, for example, algorithms are becoming the most important buyers of bonds, shares, and commodities. Similarly in the advertising business, the most important customer of all is an algorithm: the Google search algorithm. When people design web pages, they often cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any human being. ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=694)) - In order to cope with the unprecedented technological and economic disruptions of the twenty-first century, we need to develop new social and economic models as soon as possible. These models should be guided by the principle of protecting humans rather than jobs. Many jobs are uninspiring drudgery and are not worth saving. Nobody’s life’s dream is to be a cashier. We should focus instead on providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their social status and self-worth. ([Location 708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=708)) - Universal basic support is meant to take care of basic human needs, but there is no accepted definition for that. From a purely biological perspective, a human being needs just 1,500–2,500 calories per day in order to survive. Anything more is a luxury. Yet over and above this biological poverty line, every culture in history has defined additional needs as “basic.” ([Location 763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=763)) - 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. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=789)) - ancient hunter-gatherer bands were still more egalitarian than any subsequent human society, because they had very little property. Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality. ([Location 1271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1271)) - Once algorithms choose and buy things for us, the traditional advertising industry will go bust. Consider Google. Google wants to reach a point where we can ask it anything and get the best answer in the world. What will happen once we can say to Google, “Hi, Google. Based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics), what is the best car for me?” If Google can give us a good answer to that, and if we learn by experience to trust Google’s wisdom instead of our own easily manipulated feelings, what could possibly be the use of car advertisements? ([Location 1342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1342)) - Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be connected starting in the womb, and if later in life you choose to disconnect, insurance agencies might refuse to insure you, employers might refuse to employ you, and healthcare services might refuse to take care of you. In the big battle between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down. ([Location 1360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1360)) - In less than a hundred years the Germans organized themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. ([Location 1553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1553)) - Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day European Union, celebrating twenty-five hundred years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans. ([Location 1561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1561)) - Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills. No matter what revolutions they experience, they can usually weave old and new into a single yarn. ([Location 1570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1570)) - In 2011, a scandal erupted when the ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn paper Di Tzeitung published a photo of American officials watching the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound but digitally erased all women from the photo, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The paper explained it was forced to do so by Jewish “laws of modesty.” A similar scandal erupted when the paper HaMevaser expunged Angela Merkel from a photo of a demonstration against the Charlie Hebdo massacre, lest her image arouse any lustful thoughts in the minds of devout readers. The publisher of a third ultra-Orthodox newspaper, Hamodia, defended this policy by explaining, “We are backed by thousands of years of Jewish tradition.” ([Location 1583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1583))