Yuval Noah Harari's '21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Noah Harari's '21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2019)

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Before reading 

Before you read

- What jobs do you think are likely to be prevalent in the coming decades?

- Are you worried about the future?

- Have you met anyone who is considered to be a nanotechnologist?

- What does the word 'to exploit ' mean?

- What prefix can be found in the word 'irrelevant'? What does it mean?

Work in the 21st Century - a big change - from exploitation to Irrelevance 

The 21st century is a challenge for humanity. For Harari, there are three challenges, which are (1) nuclear war, (2) ecological collapse, and (3) technological disruption. Work in the near future (this year is 2021), will be influenced by technological disruption and ecological challenges, not to mention pandemics and inequality.

For Harari, work will be different. Not for the better unless we are well-prepared. "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. (p. 35)"

AI and automation will create challenges for humans. Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs, and while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether people will be able to learn the necessary new skills fast enough. Suppose you are a fifty-year-old truck driver, and you just lost your job to a self-driving vehicle. Now there are new jobs in designing software or in teaching yoga to engineers – but how does a fifty-year-old truck driver reinvent himself or herself as a software engineer or as a yoga teacher? And people will have to do it not just once but again and again throughout their lives, because the automation revolution will not be a single watershed event following which the job market will settle down, into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions, because AI is nowhere near its full potential.

Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.

On page 35, Harari argues that some humans will be made irrelevant, at least from the economic and political perspectives. This is a serious argument, and it was the correct futuristic picture, it would be scary.

He puts it that "those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite."

Harari urges us to be aware of the AI and automation disruption. Even with primitive AI, it is enough to disrupt the global balance. 

Just think what will happen to developing economies once it is cheaper to produce textiles or cars in California than in Mexico? And what will happen to politics in your country in twenty years, when somebody in San Francisco or Beijing knows the entire medical and personal history of every politician, every judge and every journalist in your country, including all their sexual escapades, all their mental weaknesses and all their corrupt dealings? Will it still be an independent country or will it become a data-colony?

Fears of machines pushing people out of the job market are, of course, nothing new, and in the past, such fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills. And we don’t know of any third kind of skill—beyond the manual and the cognitive—in which humans will always have an edge.

At least for a few more decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI. Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own.

Harari says that most of the new jobs will presumably demand high levels of expertise and ingenuity, and therefore may not provide an answer to the problem of unemployed unskilled laborers, or workers employable only at extremely low wages. Moreover, as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear. 

Just as in the 20th century governments established massive education systems for young people, in the 21st century they will need to establish massive reeducation systems for adults. But will that be enough? Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the early 21st century has produced a global epidemic of stress. As job volatility increases, will people be able to cope? By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.

After reading

Do you agree or disagree with the analysis of the future of work by Yuval Noah Harari?

Harari argues that it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited. Do you agree with his opinion?

Are you worried that AI is taking our jobs?

Some people say that accepting AI within the workplace will cut out mundane jobs no one wants to do and allow humans to focus on more important and enjoyable tasks. Do you agree or disagree with this prediction/assertion?

References

"How to Survive the 21st Century". Available online at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/yuval-hararis-warning-davos-speech-future-predications/

Harari, Noah, V. (2019). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. SPIEGEL& GRAU.

Harari, T. A. (2018). WHY TECHNOLOGY FAVORS TYRANNY. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

About the author

Photo credit: https://www.youtube.com/user/YuvalNoahHarari

Professor Harari was born in Haifa, Israel, to Lebanese parents in 1976. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is now a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.