Author:: Yuval Noah Harari
Full Title:: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Tags:#media/book
- themes::
- theme 1
- Summary::
- summary 1
* highlights from 2021-02-08
* Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance. ([Location 122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=122))
* the fascist story, the communist story, and the liberal story. ([Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=180))
* 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. ([Location 211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=211))
* If a mosquito buzzed in our ear and disturbed our sleep, we knew how to kill the mosquito, but if a thought buzzed in our mind and kept us awake at night, most of us did not know how to kill the thought. ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=237))
* Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. ([Location 240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=240))
* 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? ([Location 261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=261))
* 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. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=269))
* In particular, the liberal story learned from communism to expand the circle of empathy and to value equality alongside liberty. ([Location 285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=285))
* 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.” ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=322))
* Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition.” ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=440))
* 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))
* You don’t like what the IBM doctor told you? No problem. Even if you are stranded somewhere on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, you can easily contact the Baidu doctor for a second opinion. ([Location 487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=487))
* **Note**: Assumezs no monopoly arises from advanced artificial intelligence
* might object that the AI would thereby kill serendipity and lock us inside a narrow musical cocoon, woven by our previous likes and dislikes. What about exploring new musical tastes and styles? No problem. You could easily adjust the algorithm to make 5 percent of its choices completely at random, ([Location 535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=535))
* If art is really about inspiring (or manipulating) human emotions, few if any human musicians will be able to compete with such an algorithm, because they cannot match it in understanding the chief instrument they are playing on: the human biochemical system. ([Location 564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=564))
* At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we are duly warned that the canary is dying. ([Location 629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=629))
* separate the wheat from the chaff, ([Location 655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=655))
* A related idea proposes to widen the range of human activities that are considered to be “jobs.” At present, billions of parents take care of children, neighbors look after one another, and citizens organize communities, without any of these valuable activities being recognized as jobs. Maybe we need to flip a switch in our minds and realize that taking care of a child is arguably the most important and challenging job in the world. ([Location 714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=714))
* 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 ([Location 755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=755))
* Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. ([Location 783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=783))
* But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job. ([Location 804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=804))
* Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships. ([Location 807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=807))
* This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles’ heel of liberal democracy. ([Location 850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=850))
* Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration, or freedom—they are based on calculation. ([Location 861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=861))
* Even more than algorithms, humans suffer from insufficient data, from faulty programming (genetic and cultural), from muddled definitions, and from the chaos of life. ([Location 953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=953))
* The ability to navigate is like a muscle—use it or lose it. ([Location 978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=978))
* Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism see the individual as an autonomous agent constantly making choices about the world. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=992))
* In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing. A democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas a dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy. ([Location 1160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1160))
* Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. ([Location 1217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1217))
* While science fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking. ([Location 1241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1241))
* Not just entire classes but entire countries and continents might become irrelevant. Fortifications guarded by drones and robots might separate the self-proclaimed civilized zone, where cyborgs fight one another with logic bombs, from the barbarian lands where feral humans fight one another with machetes and Kalashnikovs. ([Location 1321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1321))
* I talk about what “we” need to do about “our” problems. But maybe there is no “we.” Maybe one of our biggest problems is that different human groups have completely different futures. Maybe in some parts of the world you should teach your kids to write computer code, while in others you had better teach them to draw fast and shoot straight. ([Location 1324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1324))
* Politicians are a bit like musicians, and the instrument they play on is the human emotional and biochemical system. ([Location 1369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1369))
* Private ownership of one’s own data may sound more attractive than either of these options, but it is unclear what it actually means. ([Location 1376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1376))
* how do you regulate the ownership of data? ([Location 1382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079WM7KLS&location=1382))