# 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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[[ReadWise]]
## Metadata
- Author: [[Yuval Noah Harari]]
- Full Title: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
- Category: #books

## Highlights
- **Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus looked to the future. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century explores the present.**
- How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children?
- The golden thread running through his exhilarating new book is the challenge of maintaining our collective and individual focus in the face of constant and disorienting change
- **In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power**
- Billions of us can hardly afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: **we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents**
- **If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids – you and they will not be exempt from the consequences**
- **I cannot give people food or clothes – but I can try and offer some clarity,**
- My **focus is on current affairs and on the immediate future of human societies.**
- **What are today’s greatest challenges and choices? What should we pay attention to? What should we teach our kids?**
- **They all have far more urgent problems than global warming or the crisis of liberal democracy**. No book can do justice to all of that, and I don’t have lessons to teach people in such situations. I can only hope to learn from them.
- I **look at the major forces that shape societies all over the world, and that are likely to influence the future of our planet as a whole.**
- Reality is composed of many threads, and this book tries to cover different aspects of our global predicament, without claiming to be exhaustive.
- **These lessons do not conclude with simple answers. They aim to stimulate further thinking, and help readers participate in some of the major conversations of our time.**
- Certain chapters celebrate human wisdom, others highlight the crucial role of human stupidity.
- What does the rise of Donald Trump signify? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Is God back? Is a new world war coming?
- **in an era when scientists, corporations and governments are learning to hack the human brain, this truism is more sinister than ever**
- A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality.
- But as usual, **history took an unexpected turn, and after fascism and communism collapsed, now liberalism is in a jam**. So where are we heading?
- **The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality.**
- **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.**
- **this book concentrates on the more immediate social, economic and political crises.** M
- The book does not attempt to cover all the impacts of the new technologies.
- the corporations and entrepreneurs who lead the technological revolution naturally tend to sing the praises of their creations, it falls to sociologists, philosophers and historians like myself to sound the alarm and explain all the ways things can go terribly wrong.
- Homo sapiens capable of making sense of the world it has created? Is there still a clear border separating reality from fiction
- **Who are we? What should we do in life? What kinds of skills do we need? Given everything we know and don’t know about science, about God, about politics and about religion – what can we say about the meaning of life today?**
- People have debated the meaning of life for thousands of years. **We cannot continue this debate indefinitely**
- If you don’t know what to do with the power to engineer life, market forces will not wait a thousand years for you to come up with an answer
- believe liberal democracy is uniquely problematic, but rather because I think it is the most successful and most versatile political model humans have so far developed for dealing with the challenges of the modern world
- After some soul searching**, I chose free discussion over self-censorship. Without criticising the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or go beyond it.**
- If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression.
- 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.
- Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group and nation has its own tales and myths.
- **if we just continue to liberalise and globalise our political and economic systems, we will produce peace and prosperity for all**
- **Countries that try to resist the inevitable will suffer the consequences, until they too see the light, open their borders and liberalise their societies, their politics and their markets**
- may take time, but eventually even North Korea, Iraq and El Salvador will look like Denmark or Iowa.
- Today, few would confidently declare that the Chinese Communist Party is on the wrong side of history.
- Some discovered a liking for the old hierarchical world, and they just don’t want to give up their racial, national or gendered privileges.
- **From killing mosquitoes to killing thoughts**
- Both politicians and voters are barely able to comprehend the new technologies, let alone regulate their explosive potential.
- Did you ever vote about the Internet? The democratic system is still struggling to understand what hit it, and is hardly equipped to deal with the next shocks, such as the rise of AI and the blockchain revolution.
- **As AI improves, we might soon reach a point when no human can make sense of finance any more.**
- Can you imagine a government that waits humbly for an algorithm to approve its budget or its new tax reform? **Meanwhile peer-to-peer blockchain networks and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin might completely revamp the monetary system, so that radical tax reforms will be inevitable**
- **Governments might therefore need to invent entirely new taxes – perhaps a tax on information** (which will be both the most important asset in the economy, and the only thing exchanged in numerous transactions)
- the past, **we humans have learned to control the world outside us, but we had very little control over the world inside us.**
- **We knew how to build a dam and stop a river from flowing, but we did not know how to stop the body from ageing. We knew how to design an irrigation system, but we had no idea how to design a brain.**
- **The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside us, and will enable us to engineer and manufacture life.**
- **Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.**
- It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam across it than it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system. Similarly, it will be easier to redirect the flow of our minds than to divine what it will do to our personal psychology or to our social systems
- **because we don’t understand the complexity of our own minds, the changes we will make might upset our mental system to such an extent that it too might break down.**
- Donald Trump warned voters that the Mexicans and Chinese will take their jobs, and that they should therefore build a wall on the Mexican border
- He never warned voters that the algorithms will take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall on the border with California.
- **Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.**
- In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant
- government think tanks and hi-tech conferences – globalisation, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning – and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them.
- 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 any more**
- It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation
- instead of uniting the world through free and peaceful commerce they focused on conquering a bigger slice of the globe by brute force
## New highlights added March 12, 2022 at 6:33 PM
- **the liberal story proved to be far more supple and dynamic than any of its opponents. It triumphed over imperialism, over fascism, and over communism by adopting some of their best ideas and practices.**
- As the circle of liberty expanded, the liberal story also came to recognise the importance of communist-style welfare programmes.
- By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed ‘the End of History’, confidently asserting that all the big political and economic questions of the past had been settled, and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets and government welfare services remained the only game in town.
- This package seemed destined to spread around the whole world, overcome all obstacles, erase all national borders, and turn humankind into one free global community
- when it comes to free trade and international cooperation, Xi Jinping looks like Obama’s real successor. Having put Marxism–Leninism on the back burner, China seems rather happy with the liberal international order.
- Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.
- **If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government**
- By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.
- **Russia is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with 87 per cent of wealth concentrated in the hands of the richest 10 per cent of people
- **But I am yet to meet a single person who dreams of emigrating to Russia**.**
- At the end of the day, **humankind won’t abandon the liberal story, because it doesn’t have any alternative.**
- if both liberalism and communism are now discredited, maybe humans should abandon the very idea of a single global story
- even Westerners should take a break from trying to run the world, and focus on their own affairs for a change
- Chinese elites have rediscovered their native imperial and Confucian legacies, as a supplement or even substitute for the doubtful Marxist ideology they imported from the West.
- **Islamists want to copy the system established by the Prophet Muhammad in the city of Medina 1,400 years ago**, while fundamentalist Jews in Israel outdo even the Islamists, and dream of going back 2,500 years to biblical times.
- **the principles of open markets and accountable governance, of democracy and human rights and international law … remain the firmest foundation for human progress in this century**
- despite the numerous shortcomings of the liberal package, it has a much better record than any of its alternatives
- **For the first time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents**
- Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts
- **economic growth will not solve technological disruption – it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.**
- In coming decades, however, owing to a combination of technological disruption and ecological meltdown, the younger generation might be lucky to just stay in place
- **The next decades might therefore be characterised by intense soul-searching and by formulating new social and political models.**
- We are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one. So what next?
- If 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.’
- But before exploring potential solutions to humanity’s predicaments we need a better grasp of the challenge technology poses
- Most people in Birmingham, Istanbul, St Petersburg and Mumbai are only dimly aware, if at all, of the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential impact on their lives.
- It is undoubtable, however, that the technological revolutions will gather momentum in the next few decades, and will confront humankind with the hardest trials we have ever encountered.
- To understand the nature of this technological challenge, perhaps it would be best to start with the job market.
- **The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market, and create a massive new useless class, leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle.**
- **All the talk about technology and ideology might sound abstract and remote, but the very real prospect of mass unemployment – or personal unemployment – leaves nobody indifferent**
## New highlights added March 12, 2022 at 11:01 PM
- We have no idea what the job market will look like in 2050. It is generally agreed that machine learning and robotics will change almost every line of work – from producing yoghurt to teaching yoga
- Some believe that within a mere decade or two, billions of people will become economically redundant. Others maintain that even in the long run automation will keep generating new jobs and greater prosperity for all.
- So are we on a verge of a terrifying upheaval
## New highlights added March 13, 2022 at 8:31 AM
- Fears that automation will create massive unemployment go back to the nineteenth century, and so far they have never materialised
- Yet there are good reasons to think that this time it is different, and that machine learning will be a real game changer.
- AI is now beginning to outperform humans in more and more of these skills, including in the understanding of human emotions.2
- It is crucial to realise that the AI revolution is not just about computers getting faster and smarter. It is fuelled by breakthroughs in the life sciences and the social sciences as well
- It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second.
- drivers, bankers and lawyers don’t have magical intuitions about traffic, investment or negotiation – rather, by recognising recurring patterns, they spot and try to avoid careless pedestrians, inept borrowers and dishonest crooks. It
- They rely on heuristics, shortcuts and outdated circuits adapted to the African savannah rather than to the urban jungle
- No wonder that even good drivers, bankers and lawyers sometimes make stupid mistakes
- if AI really needs to compete against neural networks in calculating probabilities and recognising patterns – that sounds far less daunting.
- if these emotions and desires are in fact no more than biochemical algorithms, there is no reason why computers cannot decipher these algorithms – and do so far better than any Homo sapiens.
- their brains are recognising biochemical patterns by analysing facial expressions, tones of voice, hand movements, and even body odours.
- An AI equipped with the right sensors could do all that far more accurately and reliably than a human.
- What brain scientists are learning today about the amygdala and the cerebellum might make it possible for computers to outperform human psychiatrists and bodyguards in 2050
- Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability.
- individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network
- These potential advantages of connectivity and updateability are so huge that at least in some lines of work it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.
- The benefits for human society are likely to be immense. AI doctors could provide far better and cheaper healthcare for billions of people, particularly for those who currently receive no healthcare at all.
- self-driving vehicles could provide people with much better transport services, and in particular reduce mortality from traffic accidents.
- Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime and terrorism combined).6
- Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 per cent.8
- Redundant drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.
- Jobs that require specialisation in a narrow range of routinised activities will be automated.
- But it will be much more difficult to replace humans with machines in less routine jobs that demand the simultaneous use of a wide range of skills, and that involve dealing with unforeseen scenarios.
- Alongside care, creativity too poses particularly difficult hurdles for automation
- We don’t need humans to sell us music any more – we can download it directly from the iTunes store – but the composers, musicians, singers and DJs are still flesh and blood
- if art is defined by human emotions, what might happen once external algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Shakespeare, Frida Kahlo or Beyoncé?
- in the not too distant future a machine-learning algorithm could analyse the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the emotional impact that a particular song – even a particular musical key – is likely to have on you.
- Within a few decades, an algorithm that goes over millions of musical experiences might learn to predict how particular inputs result in particular outputs
- No human DJ could ever hope to match the skills of such an AI
- Over time, by monitoring your reactions, the AI could even determine the ideal level of randomness that will optimise exploration while avoiding annoyance, perhaps lowering its serendipity level to 3 per cent or raising it to 8 per cent.
## New highlights added March 14, 2022 at 1:17 PM
- Yet with an algorithm, there are many interesting solutions to this puzzle.
- The algorithm knows it because your heart skips a beat and your oxytocin levels drop slightly whenever you hear that annoying part. The algorithm could rewrite or edit out the offending notes.
- If art is really about inspiring (or manipulating) human emotions, few if any human musicians will have a chance of competing with such an algorithm, because they cannot match it in understanding the chief instrument they are playing on: the human biochemical system.
- The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs
- AI might help create new human jobs in another way
- the replacement of human pilots by drones has eliminated some jobs but created many new opportunities in maintenance, remote control, data analysis and cyber security
- job market of 2050 might well be characterised by human–AI cooperation rather than competition.
- AI might similarly help groom the best detectives, bankers and soldiers in history
- After IBM’s chess program Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, humans did not stop playing chess. Rather, thanks to AI trainers human chess masters became better than ever, and at least for a while human–AI teams known as ‘centaurs’ outperformed both humans and computers in chess.
- In 1920 a farm worker laid off due to the mechanisation of agriculture could find a new job in a factory producing tractors. In 1980 an unemployed factory worker could start working as a cashier in a supermarket.
- But in 2050, a cashier or textile worker losing their job to a robot will hardly be able to start working as a cancer researcher, as a drone operator, or as part of a human–AI banking team. They will not have the necessary skills.
- despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new ‘useless’ class.
- We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labour
- A forty-year-old unemployed Walmart cashier who by dint of superhuman efforts 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.
- How do you unionise a profession that mushrooms and disappears within a decade?
- A closer look at the world of chess might indicate where things are heading in the long run.
- in recent years computers have become so good at playing chess that their human collaborators lost their value, and might soon become utterly irrelevant.
- when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program.
- It was able to calculate 70 million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only 80,000 such calculations per second, and its human creators never taught it any chess strategies – not even standard openings.
- AlphaZero used the latest machine-learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself.
- AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide
- 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.
- If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that this cannot possibly be a human move – it must be a computer move.
- At least in chess, creativity is already the trademark of computers rather than humans
- The AI revolution won’t be a single watershed event after which the job market will just settle into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever-bigger disruptions
- Obviously, most of this is just speculation. At the time of writing – early 2018 – automation has disrupted many industries but it has not resulted in massive unemployment.
- Nobody can know for sure what sort of impact machine learning and automation will have on different professions in the future, and it is extremely difficult to estimate the timetable of relevant developments, especially as they depend on political decisions and cultural traditions as much as on purely technological breakthrough
- The challenge posed to humankind in the twenty-first century by infotech and biotech is arguably much bigger than the challenge posed in the previous era by steam engines, railroads and electricity.
- given the immense destructive power of our civilisation, we just cannot afford more failed models, world wars and bloody revolutions
- This time around, the failed models might result in nuclear wars, genetically engineered monstrosities, and a complete breakdown of the biosphere
- what to do in order to create enough new jobs; and what to do if, despite our best efforts, job losses significantly outstrip job creation.
- Government regulation can successfully block new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative
- Yet regulations have prevented free trade in human body parts, and though there is a black market in organs, it is far smaller and more circumscribed than what one could have expected.22
- as AI continues to improve, human employees will need to repeatedly learn new skills and change their profession
- if despite all our efforts a significant percentage of humankind is pushed out of the job market, we would have to explore new models for post-work societies, post-work economies, and post-work politics.
- Some may argue that humans could never become economically irrelevant, because even if they cannot compete with AI in the workplace
- However, it is far from certain that the future economy will need us even as consumers.
- Theoretically, you can have an economy in which a mining corporation produces and sells iron to a robotics corporation, the robotics corporation produces and sells robots to the mining corporation, which mines more iron, which is used to produce more robots, and so on.
- In the stock exchange, for example, algorithms are becoming the most important buyers of bonds, shares and commodities.
- the taste of any human being.
  Algorithms obviously have no consciousness, so unlike human consumers, they cannot enjoy what they buy, and their decisions are not shaped by sensations and emotions.
- algorithms select things based on their internal calculations and built-in preferences, and these preferences increasingly shape our world
- When I publish a book, the publishers ask me to write a short description that they use for publicity online. But they have a special expert, who adapts what I write to the taste of the Google algorithm.
- Don’t use this word – use that word instead. Then we will get more attention from the Google algorithm.’ We know that if we can just catch the eye of the algorithm, we can take the humans for granted.
- 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.
- What we should focus on is providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their social status and self-worth.
- One new model, which is gaining increasing attention, is universal basic income
- UBI proposes that governments tax the billionaires and corporations controlling the algorithms and robots, and use the money to provide every person with a generous stipend covering his or her basic needs.
- Maybe we need to turn a switch in our minds, and realise that taking care of a child is arguably the most important and challenging job in the world.
- Alternatively, governments could subsidise universal basic services rather than income
- Globalisation has made people in one country utterly dependent on markets in other countries, but automation might unravel large parts of this global trade network with disastrous consequences for the weakest links.
- with the rise of AI, robots and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labour would become far less important
- Today millions of Bangladeshis make a living by producing shirts and selling them to customers in the United States, while people in Bangalore earn their keep in call centres dealing with the complaints of American customers
- Instead of economic growth improving conditions all over the world, we might see immense new wealth created in hi-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while many developing countries collapse.
- Of course, some emerging economies – including India and Bangladesh – might advance fast enough to join the winning team
- Taking the right steps was more important than making speedy progress
- out. In the past, cheap unskilled labour has served as a secure bridge across the global economic divide, and even if a country advanced slowly, it could expect to reach safety eventually
- Those who have already crossed it – graduating from cheap labour to high-skill industries – will probably be OK. But those lagging behind might find themselves stuck on the wrong side of the chasm, without any means of crossing over.
- What do you do when nobody needs your cheap unskilled labourers, and you don’t have the resources to build a good education system and teach them new skills?27
- What is basic?
- From a purely biological perspective, a Sapiens needs just 1,500–2,500 calories per day in order to survive. Anything more is a luxury
- In today’s Europe, decent education and healthcare services are considered basic human needs, and some argue that even access to the Internet is now essential for every man, woman and child
- If by 2050 medical advances make it possible to slow down ageing processes and significantly extend human lifespans, will the new treatments be available to all 10 billion humans on the planet, or just to a few billionaires? If biotechnology enables parents to upgrade their children, would this be considered a basic human need, or would we see humankind splitting into different biological castes, with rich superhumans enjoying abilities that far surpass those of poor Homo sapiens?
- even if some universal support scheme provides poor people in 2050 with much better healthcare and education than today, they might still be extremely angry about global inequality and the lack of social mobility
- Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction
- Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations
- Perhaps the most successful experiment so far in how to live a contented life in a post-work world has been conducted in Israel
- 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.30
- they are poor and unemployed, in survey after survey these ultra-Orthodox Jewish men report higher levels of life satisfaction than any other section of Israeli society. This is due to the strength of their community bonds, as well as to the deep meaning they find in studying scriptures and performing rituals
- In global surveys of life satisfaction, Israel is usually somewhere near the top, thanks in part to the contribution of these jobless poor people.31
- As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model of the future rather than as a fossil from the past
- Losing control over our lives, however, is a much scarier scenario
- 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.
- In politics, liberalism believes that the voter knows best. It therefore upholds democratic elections. In economics, liberalism maintains that the customer is always right. It therefore hails free-market principles. In personal matters, liberalism encourages people to listen to themselves, be true to themselves, and follow their hearts – as long as they do not infringe on the liberties of others.
## New highlights added March 14, 2022 at 9:39 PM
- This personal freedom is enshrined in human rights
- There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women … and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves.’1
- Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality.
- There is ample evidence that some people are far more knowledgeable and rational than others, certainly when it comes to specific economic and political questions.
- for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They are about what we feel.
- Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound ‘free will’, that this ‘free will’ is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free
- Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, hence on election day her feelings – represented by her vote – count just as much as anybody else’s.
- This reliance on the heart might prove to be the Achilles heel of liberal democracy
- For once somebody (whether in Beijing or in San Francisco) gains the technological ability to hack and manipulate the human heart, democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.
- Listen to the algorithm
- For thousands of years people believed that authority came from divine laws rather than from the human heart, and that we should therefore sanctify the word of God rather than human liberty.
- Soon authority might shift again – from humans to algorithms
- the coming technological revolution might establish the authority of Big Data algorithms, while undermining the very idea of individual freedom.
- feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration or freedom – they are based on calculation.
- Feelings of sexual attraction arise when other biochemical algorithms calculate that a nearby individual offers a high probability of successful mating, social bonding, or some other coveted goal.
- honed through millions of years of evolution. If the feelings of some ancient ancestor made a mistake, the genes shaping these feelings did not pass on to the next generation. Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality – they embody evolutionary rationality.
- feelings are in fact calculations, because the rapid process of calculation occurs far below our threshold of awareness.
- we erroneously believe that our fear of snakes, our choice of sexual mates, or our opinions about the European Union are the result of some mysterious ‘free will’
- up until today relying on feelings still made good practical sense.
- it was reasonable to argue that I have free will, because my will was shaped mainly by the interplay of inner forces, which nobody outside could see. I could enjoy the illusion that I control my secret inner arena, while outsiders could never really understand what is happening inside me and how I make decisions.
- soon computer algorithms could give you better counsel than human feelings.
- we are now at the confluence of two immense revolutions. On the one hand biologists are deciphering the mysteries of the human body, and in particular, of the brain and of human feelings
- My illusion of free will is likely to disintegrate as I daily encounter institutions, corporations and government agencies that understand and manipulate what was hitherto my inaccessible inner realm.
- The most important medical decisions in our life rely not on our feelings of illness or wellness, or even on the informed predictions of our doctor – but on the calculations of computers which understand our bodies much better than we do.
- People will enjoy the best healthcare in history, but for precisely this reason they will probably be sick all the time.
- There is always something wrong somewhere in the body. There is always something that can be improved
- by 2050, thanks to biometric sensors and Big Data algorithms, diseases may be diagnosed and treated long before they lead to pain or disability
- you will always find yourself suffering from some ‘medical condition’ and following this or that algorithmic recommendation
- If you refuse, perhaps your medical insurance would become invalid, or your boss would fire you – why should they pay the price of your obstinacy?
- Hypochondriacs might dutifully read these updates, but most of us will ignore them just as we ignore those annoying anti-virus notices on our computers