A review by tonyreadsbooks
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

2.0

I want to start this review by discussing what I call an "Obama book", which is a more specific form of the "Obama media" category. Obama books are books that gain much public success and acclaim despite lacking depth. They are usually by "public approved" authors (inoffensive writers that defend the status quo) and are recommended by people like Barrack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates (the last one even has a Goodreads account!). The main audience is professional middle-class white men and women who seek to enrich their lives by reading their one yearly book. This book by Yuval Noah Harari perfectly fits the bill. It is mostly shallow and contains very little useful advice despite being branded as "21 lessons". Harari is a public intellectual and he really tries hard to flex his intellectual muscles when he talks about AI or robotics. However, his arguments often fall flat as his predictions about the future are made with a lot of handwaving. Mostly, what he says in the first part of the book boils down to: AI is going to control us in the future. It is a fair prediction to make but it is based on no evidence (or very little as I will show shortly). A prediction about the future can be made by any single person on Earth and as Harari himself asserts multiple times in the book, it is pretty much impossible to predict the future. What if "AI", everyone's favorite techbro buzzword, is not the big revolutionary thing that futurist thinkers make it out to be? That certainly seems possible just like many predictions about the year 2000 that were made in previous centuries turned out to be false. There is no point in trying to create "lessons" out of predictions. Also, whenever Harari relies on external sources to support his points, his own sources end up contradicting him. At one point, he says that AI has gotten so advanced that it can predict whether or not an individual is gay based on pictures. His claim is that the algorithm behind the AI is capable of somehow detecting someone's sexuality based on their facial features. There is just one tiny problem, however. The original study was done by taking pictures of identified straight and gay people and feeding those pictures to the AI. The AI was then capable of looking at new pictures and predicting these new individuals' sexuality with a high success rate. What the study mentions (and Harari neglects to mention outside of an endnote) is that a large part of what "gayness" looks like to the algorithm is a social performance. Since the pictures were self-submitted by straight and gay people, the sample data was obviously influenced by social standards of what straight and gay people look like. Obviously, there isn't an exact "gay look" or "straight look." However, people are influenced by what they see and that affects how they look. This is the basic concept of social norms (which Harari, being a respected historian, is obviously aware of). If I spent my time debunking every other iffy comment or argument that Harari makes in this first part of the book, I could write my own book. Other parts of the book can be much better. For example, the chapters on humility, religion, and god are quite decent, despite behind a bit shallow. This book is pretty much a mixed bag of good points and horrible points and the issue is that the arguments can show up back-to-back, granting the bad arguments a form of authority. A person reading this book who lacks the knowledge necessary to debunk the arguments made by Harari might believe what he says and even incorporate it into their worldview. This is my main concern with books like these. These "Obama" books are often branded as deep philosophical works by great thinkers and are presumed to be full of great ideas. It is much easier to form a worldview than it is to change it and a person who does not know any better may truly be mislead by this book, especially since it is so well written. As a nonfiction author, Harari is captivating. His sentences are well constructed and convey a lot without being convoluted. He transitions well between arguments which creates the illusion of ease in his writing. In some places though, his writing style gives him a sense of smugness that ends up making him look quite silly. In a later chapter of the book, he talks about cognitive dissonance and how even the most devoted of us still suffer from it. I generally agree with what he says here. However, the example that he uses to showcase his point is not very convincing. He says that the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks were done by Islamic State (IS) terrorists who were seeking revenge for the involvement of the French air force in combat against IS forces in Iraq and Syria. So far so good. Next, he says that the IS took credit for the attack and said that their fallen comrades are martyrs and have gone to heaven. Then, he claims that the IS is suffering from cognitive dissonance. Harari says that since Muslims want to go to heaven, the Islamic State should not seek revenge for the people who died as martyrs. He even compares this to a man bombing lottery offices after his brother wins the lottery. This is not a valid analogy as the IS terrorists could think that the killing of their people is a bad thing while still recognizing that they are martyrs and that heaven awaits them. I do not believe in what the IS terrorists say yet I see that there is no contradiction where Harari says there is. The reason I do not give this book a 1/5 rating is that some parts of the book can genuinely be good. Take for example the chapter on science fiction. In this chapter, Harari analyzes some popular movies and illustrates the importance of our media for our understanding of new technology such as AI and robotics. This chapter and a few others actually show the "enlightened" side of Yuval Noah Harari that is often absent in other parts. In the end, this is just another "big ideas" book that does not really provide much in terms of big ideas. It creates the illusion of depth and wisdom while lacking both of those things. Final rating: 2/5 (though very close to being 1/5)