I did a cover-to-cover preview, having received my copy of it late yesterday afternoon. I actually spent about two hours, reading short excerpts and getting a feel for how the writer marshals his facts and crafts his arguments. From there, I previewed the enumerated topics of the book, following the flow of argument and the evidence Yuval Noah Harari refers to make his point. The main thing about this book is to understand that the 21st century is going to be unlike anything humankind has experienced in the past. Our prior experience will not necessarily be a trustworthy guide to our future as a species. Harare is an Israeli Jew who came to knowledge of the world rather late. Growing up he mentions that his education Israel was utterly devoid of knowledge of European and world history, nor was he aware of the historical developments that characterized the Middle Ages, the Age of Exploration and European conquest of the non-European world. He knew of European history only in so far as it gave him an understanding about how he and his forebears ended up in the Land of Israel. Coming onto the subject cold, this new cornucopia of knowledge offered him certain advantages insofar as you learn to take nothing for granted or at face value. For people who emigrate to a new land, with different attitudes and customs from those they have known, there is the painful process that all immigrants experience in figuring out who they are, and how quickly they need to learn how to survive in this new environment. Harari is perhaps among the most incisive and farseeing writers I have encountered in recent times. He holds a PhD from Oxford University (no mean feat), and for someone who apparently spent his early years speaking and writing a non-Western language (Hebrew), his ability to translate his thoughts into English, and writing as well as he does, is an accomplishment that is beyond the reach of most other recent immigrants I have encountered in my lifetime. He must've spent an enormous amount of time with the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language!
It is clear to me that Harari is onto something. The strangeness that people feel when they run up against stuff they don't know, and have difficulty figuring out what to do, is going to be far beyond the cultural and linguistic barriers that recent immigrants typically experience. With English, there are thousands of words that have more than one meaning, and thousands of words that have shared meanings, depending upon context, and intent.
Harari is telling his readers to experience the strangeness that he must've felt speaking, writing, and using the English language for the first time. Most Americans are not used to learning foreign languages, because people come to America where relatively few people other than recent immigrants routinely converse and whatever other languages they happen to be trained in, or learn from infancy.
Briefly, the outline of this book is as follows.
In Part 1, Harari begins with a discussion of what he terms, "The Technological Challenge"., Followed by the head note reading, "Humankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of Biotech and Infotech confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered."
He starts with, "Disillusionment; The End of History Has Been Postponed". Basically, Harari argues that humankind, having conquered the world, is vulnerable to technology that turns out to be an insidious threat to what it means to be human. He states that liberalism, as it used to be practiced at large in the world has reached something worse than just simply being a dead end, its consequences are becoming perverse. But conservatives should take no comfort from liberalism's embarrassment; nobody really wants to live in an authoritarian or fascistic state.
In today's world, 'work' is purposeful activity that society finds to be commercially useful, and worthy of paying money to people to perform whatever it is they do to make work productive. Harari says that work as we know it may become scarce because the skills that people acquire over a lifetime to make themselves productive enough to earn a living out of those activities, may be taken over by Artificial Intelligence, in which jobs that are not only repetitive, but includes those that require some form of judgment and discretion may become subsumed in the kind of tasks that AI can do more cost-effectively than people can. Undoubtedly, there will be numerous fixes that will be attempted to preserve jobs, but their prospects are likely to be some form of a rearguard action to delay the introduction of AI into those workspaces. Those worst off will likely be unskilled laborers were currently employed in Third World countries overseas at minimum wages. They will find that their labor is superfluous when a high tech companies in Silicon Valley, California, and elsewhere figure out how to harness 3D printers and comparable technologies to accomplish end-to-end production lines from concept to finished product for just about anything that is manufactured overseas.
So how do ordinary people earn money to meet their needs? How are they to be supported if they are not working in the private sector, for wages or salaries, and how much money will they need to survive. We are looking at Nth-degree consequences of a world in which machines and computer bots can manufacture whatever is needed to sustain human life. Programs of education and training need to be right-sized to meet the needs of the society as it exists nominally at the time of its inception, but for a generation or two down the road as school children mature into maturity, and thereafter into old age.
Political liberty and freedom are also on the auction block. What we experience today is freedom of choice, and how choices are arrived at, comes relatively recently in human history. Decision-making follows a well-trodden path where alternatives are weighed and measured, until the final choices made; what happens when humans are influenced by outside forces that they cannot fathom some of the choices they make benefit someone else, rather than themselves? What is to be said about 'free will' in the face of an AI algorithm that simulates human thinking and emotion? What can we say about 'Equality', when all meaningful data are owned by other people or corporate entities?
I'll leave the review here at this point, because having laid out some of the basic questions that Yuval Noah Harari writes about, I'll invite readers to find out for themselves by reading this highly provocative book.
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Important to read and understand how to survive into the future
Humanity faces many threats, including the potential of future digital dictatorships pushing us into irrelevance. If we want to survive and flourish, humankind must transcend the divisions in the way of achieving a global community forging a common destiny. Resilience, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and really knowing who we are, will better prepare us to deal with change, to prevent the rise of nihilistic artificial intelligent systems, to find meaning in life, and stop suffering. Because the real enigma of life is not what happens after we die, but what happens before we die. That is how we can better understand life and create meaning, by feeling, by thinking, by desiring, and by inventing. And transferring that to create good. This is an important book by the author of Sapiens.
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21 lessons for the 21 century
Reviewed in Mexico on January 17, 2024
