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omarahmad 's review for:
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
A Hyperopic Vision:
“As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca Cola, Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull the stings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between yourself and their marketing experts?
To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the 21st Century because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer and not your bank account – they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in an era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.
The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the Matrix or in The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.
Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceasing all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal experience and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the nemesis and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are heavy”.
Yuval Noah Harari’s (author of the internationally bestselling books, Sapiens and Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow) latest tome, ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, is an analysis of the current times. (Sapiens was a study of the human past whereas Homo Deus represented Harari’s brilliant, albeit, disturbingly speculative take on the shape of the future).
It was with great anticipation, therefore, that I got my hands on Mr. Harari’s latest opus only to end up being greatly disappointed with the overall reading experience, as in contrast with the sheer originality of Sapiens or the deep insight into the future represented by Homo Deus, the current book is just a rehashing of the same old ingredients (cherry-picked mostly from Homo Deus).
Furthermore the material, in addition to feeling like some leftover from previous night’s dinner, is organized as a collection of essays that badly lacks a coherent framework. The author falls victim to the highly ambitious goal of casting a wide enough net and failing to do justice to the subject, for instance, the discussion of a wide plethora of themes like Disillusionment, Liberty, Equality, Nationalism, Religion, Immigration, Terrorism, Secularism, Ignorance, Justice, God, Post-Truth and War follows less like a cogent argument and more like the author’s musings on just about everything.
My critique in this case does not preclude the design cover (for while Sapiens had a brilliant white cover which represented the known past whereas Homo Deus had an overall black theme for the future remains unknown) the ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ one is distastefully done and even features a bionic, Big Brother style ‘All Seeing Eye’ in the center.
With ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, Mr. Harari just proved that you can’t write a bestseller every day and that even good Futurists are not exempt from hyperopia which is the most important lesson that I draw from this book.
“As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca Cola, Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull the stings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between yourself and their marketing experts?
To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the 21st Century because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer and not your bank account – they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in an era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.
The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the Matrix or in The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.
Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceasing all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal experience and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the nemesis and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are heavy”.
Yuval Noah Harari’s (author of the internationally bestselling books, Sapiens and Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow) latest tome, ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, is an analysis of the current times. (Sapiens was a study of the human past whereas Homo Deus represented Harari’s brilliant, albeit, disturbingly speculative take on the shape of the future).
It was with great anticipation, therefore, that I got my hands on Mr. Harari’s latest opus only to end up being greatly disappointed with the overall reading experience, as in contrast with the sheer originality of Sapiens or the deep insight into the future represented by Homo Deus, the current book is just a rehashing of the same old ingredients (cherry-picked mostly from Homo Deus).
Furthermore the material, in addition to feeling like some leftover from previous night’s dinner, is organized as a collection of essays that badly lacks a coherent framework. The author falls victim to the highly ambitious goal of casting a wide enough net and failing to do justice to the subject, for instance, the discussion of a wide plethora of themes like Disillusionment, Liberty, Equality, Nationalism, Religion, Immigration, Terrorism, Secularism, Ignorance, Justice, God, Post-Truth and War follows less like a cogent argument and more like the author’s musings on just about everything.
My critique in this case does not preclude the design cover (for while Sapiens had a brilliant white cover which represented the known past whereas Homo Deus had an overall black theme for the future remains unknown) the ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’ one is distastefully done and even features a bionic, Big Brother style ‘All Seeing Eye’ in the center.
With ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, Mr. Harari just proved that you can’t write a bestseller every day and that even good Futurists are not exempt from hyperopia which is the most important lesson that I draw from this book.