# Don’t Trust the Adults! Yuval Harari on the Future

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[[ReadWise]]
## Metadata
- Author: [[JEON Byung-geun]]
- Full Title: Don’t Trust the Adults! Yuval Harari on the Future
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://thedissolve.kr/dont-trust-the-adults-yuval-harari/

## Highlights
- Technology is now upgrading humans into gods. I mean this literally. We are acquiring abilities that traditionally were thought to be divine abilities
- in the twenty-first century we will probably learn how to design and manufacture animals and plants and even humans according to our wishes
- The main products of the twenty-first-century economy will not be textiles, vehicles and weapons, but rather bodies, brains and minds.
- Your books are, like you say, very easy to read. What is the secret to your writing? Did you train yourself?
- I address my books not to university professors, but to any inquisitive reader who wants to understand the world in which we live.
- whenever I write about some complicated subject such as capitalist economics or brain science I ask myself: “Would a 17-year-old understand this?”. If I cannot explain capitalism to a 17-year-old—then I probably don’t understand the subject well enough.
- If I explain something like “capitalism” and they don’t understand it—it means that I need to think harder
- If I say something about “climate change” and they are bored by it—I should show them how it is related to their life. If I say something about “gender relations” and they are very interested—better expand on that particular subject.
- Do you find any changes in your life with your literary success?
- I am obviously very pleased with my success—it is good to know that after working so hard on researching and writing these books, they actually reach people and help them understand the world better.
- I travel all over the world, give interviews almost every day, and I also have to disappoint many more people than before.
- By bringing together enough data and enough computing power, corporations and governments could soon create algorithms that know me better than I know myself, and then authority will shift away from me to the algorithm.
- Google and Tencent will follow us around 24 hours a day, and they will not only read all our emails and monitor everything we buy—they will also track what is happening inside our bodies and brains using biometric sensors. Google or Tencent will know what happened to our blood pressure every time we were in a tense situation, and what areas of our brain lit up when we failed in some task
- Such algorithms have great potential, but also great danger. As algorithms come to know us so well, dictatorial governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such dictatorships might be utterly impossible.
- Already today more and more banks, corporations and institutions are using algorithms to analyze data and make decisions about us. When you apply to your bank for a loan, it is likely that your application is processed by an algorithm rather than by a human
- Often, the algorithm does a better job than a human banker. But the problem is, that if the algorithm discriminates against some people unjustly, it is difficult to know tha
- In the past, people discriminated against entire groups such as women, gays, and blacks. So the women, or gays, or blacks, could organize and protest against their collective discrimination. But now the algorithm might discriminate against you, and you have no idea why. Maybe the algorithm found something in your DNA or your personal history that the algorithm does not like
- algorithm discriminates against you not because you are a woman, or gay, or black—but because you are you. There is something specific about you that the algorithm does not like
- Instead of collective discrimination like in the twentieth century, maybe in the twenty-first century we will have a big problem of individual discrimination.
## New highlights added March 16, 2022 at 8:08 PM
- I am most intrigued by the question of mind and consciousness. We have made great progress in understanding the brain, but very little progress in understanding the mind.
- The brain is a material network of neurons and synapses. The mind is a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger and love.
- How come when billions of neurons are firing electrical signals in a particular pattern, I feel pain, and when the neurons fire in a different pattern, I feel love? We haven’t got a clue
- In past centuries we have gained control of world outside us and reshaped the entire planet, but it didn’t make us happy. Even worse, because we didn’t understand the complexity of the global ecology, the changes we made inadvertently disrupted the entire ecological system
- we don’t understand the complexity of our own minds, the changes we will make might inadvertently disrupt our entire mental system
- . I start my day by meditating for one hour. I then have breakfast and work for about 6–7 hours at my computer.
- I then do some yoga and take my dog for one hour to walk in the nearby wood
- (The dog is just an excuse. It is really a chance for me to see some trees and animals, and not just computers and emails.)
- I not only meditate two hours every day, but every year I also go for a long meditation retreat of between 30 and 60 days. That’s my yearly vacation.
- I practice Vipassanā meditation, which I have learned from a teacher called S. N. Goenka
- The only guideline is to observe reality as it is: What is happening right now in my body? What is happening right now in my mind
- Vipassanā offers a way to observe the mind in a systematic and objective manner. The mind is constantly in contact with body sensations
- For me meditation is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality. At least for 2 hours a day I actually observe reality as it is, while for the other 22 hours I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos.
- The most important thing I understood by meditation is that the deep source of all suffering is in the patterns of my own mind.
- When I want something and it doesn’t happen, my mind reacts by generating suffering. Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by the mind.
- Young people are feeling lost about their future. If you were in your twenties, what would you try to do or learn?
- . Many jobs existing today will disappear by 2040, and we don’t know what new jobs—if any—might replace them
- Consequently it is likely that most of what students currently learn at school or college will be irrelevant by the time they are forty.
- ? My best advice is to focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence.
- In the first part of life you built a stable identity and acquired personal and professional skills; in the second part of life you relied on your identity and skills to navigate the world, earn a living and contribute to society.
- By 2040, this traditional model will become obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves again and again.
- Yet after a certain age, most people don’t like to change. When you are 16, your entire life is change, whether you like it or not
- body is changing, your mind is changing, your relationships are changing, everything is in flux
- If you try to hold on to some stable identity, some stable job, some stable worldview—you will be left behind, and the world will fly past you. So people will need to be extremely resilient and emotionally balanced to sail through this never-ending storm.
- current educational model, devised during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, is bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative.
- don’t trust the adults too much. In the past, it was a safe bet to trust adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly
- But the twenty-first century is going to be different. Whatever the adults have learnt about economics, politics or relationships may be outdated.
- Similarly, don’t trust technology too much. You must make technology serve you, instead of you serving it. If you aren’t careful technology will start dictating your aims, and enslaving you to its agenda.
- Know who you are, and what you really want from life.
- This is of course the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century.
- now you have competition. Google, Facebook, Amazon and the government are all relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better
- Once Google knows you better than you know yourself, it can control and manipulate you. If you want to stay in the game, you have to run faster than Google. Good luck!
- Humankind is now gaining access to even more powerful technology than nuclear energy, but we are not sure what to do with the new technology.