Yuval Noah Harari

[Eric the Green]

Yuval Noah Harari is an historian and futurist with a wide following, and he has a new book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century"  A great model for me!

We need to develop mental and emotional resilience. We need to re-engineer the world inside us. Global cooperation is needed to solve the most significant problems. Control of data is control of society. We have too much information today; censorship today means flooding people with information. Artificial Intelligence might replace human abilities before we know what they are. There's a shift in power underway from humans to algorithms. Every technology opens different doors, and can be used to create hell or paradise; it's up to us. Computers will care about us better than humans; we may downgrade humans in order to make them more efficient. Free media gives us excitement, not information, in the battle for attention. People think in stories, not facts, and we need new stories. We are better off today than ever in history; but things can get worse quickly-- if we think things are completely broken, so we break them in order to start over. There's lots to worry about, but humans have the ability to rise to the occasion. We can't leave the future to the free market or an arms race. These are some of his points.

[Bill the Piper]

I've read the Wikipedia page. Harari has good ideas, but these ideas can be found in Olaf Stapledon as well. I still need to see something that would convince me that he's an original thinker.

Harari: Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthal because they developed language skills and structured societies
Stapledon: Homo sapiens won because they developed reason and charity

Also, Harari's book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow predicts that Homo sapiens will be replaced by a more developed being, this is a corollary of transhumanist thought and started with Stapledon's Last and First Men back in 1930. Or perhaps it started even earlier, as Stapledon looked up to his older missionary peer, H.G. Wells. My nickname for these perfected future humans is Galactic Men

Stapledon used Christian language, which can be difficult for some to swallow, and perhaps that's why he doesn't receive due praise. Harari is gay and practises Buddhist meditation, and that makes him more politically correct as a person.

Speaking about the video, I liked the idea that the main problem with jobs is (or soon will be) irrelevance rather than exploitation.