"21 Lessons for the 21st Century" by Yuval Noah Harari
Be prepared to face those questions you were not ready to ask.
Harari will ask them for you.
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In his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari takes on the struggles we are facing socially in our world ranging from religion to politics to data security. I enjoyed this book for many reasons, but here are my top two:
Yuval Noah Harari is passionate in retaining human identity (not to be mistaken with individual identity - he argues we don’t technically choose that). He reminds me of Philip K. Dick - especially with his books Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. It’s true that Dick is a science fiction writer, and Harari is a nonfiction writer. Nonetheless, they both always end up trying to explain what makes us human. Over the years, and at an increasingly and alarming rate, the lines are becoming more and more blurred. Dick was able to depict this in his science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, when we couldn’t tell android from human. Now, as Harari points out, we are about to face that in our own reality with the emergence of bio-engineering, AI, and big data. It’s scary stuff.
Speaking of scary, Harari is reassuring in this book in saying, you should be scared and you should feel confused. There is absolutely so much going on in the world and our brains are not evolved enough to handle it. We’ve reached past our mind’s capabilities and instead have created other minds in computer programs that learn much faster than we ever can. It’s in our nature to keep pushing, but at what cost?
Honestly, I recommend all of Harari’s books: Sapiens, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Homo Deus. I recommend reading them in that order to get an idea of where we started and how far we’ve come, to what we are facing now, to possible outcomes for our species. Now can I somehow have wine with Harari and Dick - in a dream, or perhaps (and quite likely) one day in a VR world?
| Pub Date: | September 4, 2018 | Page Count: | 372 Pages | ISBN: | 9780525512172 |