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Harari的新书，中文翻译为《今日简史》。我觉得和前两本的连通性没有那么强。有一些许观点在Sapiens和Homo Deus中出现过，比如：未来的大数据主义，人脑意识和智能的分离，等等。但是这本书还是有很多新观点出现。此外，这本书的结构和行文方式与前两本完全不同，推荐给大家。
About the Author
Prof. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 50+ languages, with 12+ million copies sold worldwide. 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' (2014) looked deep into our past, 'Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow' (2016) considered far-future scenarios, and '21 Lessons for the 21st Century' (2018) zoomed in on the biggest questions of the present moment.
Summary
Lesson 1 Disillusionment
During the 20th century, there were three grand stories in the world that explained the whole past and predicted the future: the fascist story, the communist story, and the libral story. However, the 21st century introduces new stories and classes, that of humans, superhumans and artificial intelligence. The simpler the story, he says, the better.
The twin revolutions in infotech and biotech will restructure not just economies and societies but our very bodies and minds. In the past we have learned to control the world outside us, in the future, we will be able to control the world inside us, which might break down.
People are sensing that the future is passing them by and are losing the faith in the liberal story. While there’s a lot of pushback against the liberal story today, Harari says that at the end of the day humankind won’t abandon the liberal story because it doesn’t have any viable alternatives.
Lesson 2 Work
The better we understand the biochemical mechanisms that underpin human emotions, desires and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behavior, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers and lawyers.
At least in some lines of work it might make sense to replace all humans with computers even if individually some humans still do a better job than machines.
Yet if these emotions and desires are in fact no more than biochemical algorithms, there is no reason computers cannot decipher these algorithms – and do so far better than any homo sapiens.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that in 2012, 31% of fatal crashes involved alcohol abuse, 30% speeding and 20% distracted drivers.
Self-driving vehicles have none of these flaws and eventually, we could see the displacement of 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States alone, amongst other driving professions.
Rather than replacing humans entirely though, AI might actually help create new human jobs. Instead of humans competing with AI they could focus on servicing and leveraging AI. The job market of 2050 is likely to be characterised by human AI cooperation rather than competition. However, the new jobs will probably demand high levels of expertise, thus, we might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labour.
Nobody’s life dream is to be a cashier. What we should focus on is providing for people’s basic needs and protecting the social status and self worth. Universal basic income will protect the poor against job losses and economic dislocation while protecting the rich from populist rage. Instead of giving money to people who then shop around for whatever they want the Government might subsidize free education, free healthcare, free transport and so forth. This effectively brings the communist plan to fruition, albeit not by revolution.
The problem with UBI or UBS is that human beings aren’t just built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Our expectations adapt to changing conditions including to the condition of other people (keeping up with the Joneses). When things improve, expectations balloon and consequently even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as a dissatisfied as before. People need not only the basics, but they need to feel like they have enough, that their contributions are worthwhile, that they are learning and growing and that they have access to a community.
Lesson 3 Liberty
You might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right, all that passengers boat which runway the pilot should land. However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They’re about what we feel.
Winston Churchill famously said that ‘democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the others’. Rightly or wrongly people might reach the same conclusions about big data to algorithms that may come to run the world. They might have lots of bugs but we have no better alternative.
The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence, but rather the natual stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.
Intelligence and conciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, while conciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger. Yet if these emotions and desires are in fact no more than biochemical algorithms, there is no reason computers cannot decipher these algorithms – and do so far better than any homo sapiens.
Truth today is defined by the top results of the Google search.
On big data algorithms, once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and who to marry, democratic elections and free markets will make little sense.
Finance
When you apply it to your bank for a loan, it’s likely that your application is processed by an algorithm rather than a human. The bank might refuse to give you alone and you ask why and the bank replies, “algorithm said no”. You ask, “why did the algorithm say no, what’s wrong with me?” The bank replies “we don’t know, no human understands the algorithm because it is based on advanced machine learning but we trust our algorithm so we won’t give you a loan”.
Lesson 4 Equality
Those who own the data own the future.
Unlike land and machines data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light and you can create as many copies of it as you want. So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum. The key political question of our era is quite possibly, “how do you regulate the ownership of data?”
The rise of AI might eliminate the economic value and political power of most humans. At the same time, improvements in biotechnology might make it possible to translate economic inequality into biological inequality. (The super-rich might upgrade physical and cognitive abilities or even buy life itself.)
Lesson 5 Community
It is easier than ever to talk to our friends in another country but it is harder to talk to our family members over breakfast because we constantly look at our smartphones instead of at others.
Lesson 6 Civilisation
10,000 years ago, humankind was divided into countless isolated tribes where we knew no more than a few dozen people. With each passing millennium these tribes fused to larger and larger groups creating fewer and fewer distinct civilizations. In recent generations the few remaining civilizations have been blending into a single global civilization.
If you happen to be sick, it makes much less difference where you live now. You will be taken to similar-looking hospitals and the doctors will follow identical protocols and use identical tests to reach very similar diagnoses.
People care far more about their enemies than about the trade partners, says Harari. For every American film about Taiwan there are probably about 50 about Vietnam.
The people we fight most often are our family members.
What does it mean to be European in 2018? It doesn't mean to have white skin, to believe in Jesus Christ, or to uphold liberty. Rather, it means to argue vehemently about immigration, about the EU, and about the limits of capitalism and to worry about the ageing problem.
Lesson 7 Nationalism
Global problems need global answers
Unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next 20 years, average global temperatures will increase by more than two degrees celsius resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.
It isn’t a coincidence that scepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right, says Harari. You rarely see left wing socialists tweet that climate change is a Chinese hoax. When there is no national answer, but only a global answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe the problem does not exist.
To counter this, the advent of unconventional technologies might help. For example, clean meat. This might sound like science fiction but the world’s first clean hamburger was grown from cells and then eaten in 2013. It cost $330,000. Four years of research and development brought the price down to $11 per unit and within another decade, clean meat is expected to be cheaper than slaughtered meat, which can count for a lot towards ecological rejuvenation when you consider that the water footprint of beef alone is 1,800 gallons per pound of beef.
Human beings are facing three challenges: the nuclear challenge, the ecological challenge and the technological challenge.
We now have a global ecology, a global economy and global science but we are still stuck with only national politics. This mismatch prevents the political system from effectively countering a main problems. To have effective politics we must either be globalising ecology economy and the major science or we must globalise politics.
Global governance is unrealistic. Rather, to globalise politics means that political dynamics within countries give far more weight to global problems and interests.
Lesson 8 Religion
God now serves the nation
There are many good things about religions. Belief systems comfort us and bind us together. But ultimately they are all just stories to make us feel better. So it is probably not a good idea to expect religion to provide us with too much guidance about how to prepare for the future.
In order to understand the role of traditional religions in the world of the 21st Century, we need to distinguish between three types of problems: - Technical problems: how should farmers in arid countries deal with severe droughts caused by global warming?
- Policy problems: what measures should government adopt to prevent global warming in the first place?
- Identity problems: should I even care about the problems of farmers on the other side of the world?
As Karl Marx argued, religion doesn’t really have much to contribute to the great policy debates of our time.
Lesson 9 Immigration
A lot of countries are having a backlash against immigrants at a time when the economy is faltering and traditional jobs are under threat. But immigration can be a force for good, both economically and socially in helping different cultures to understand one another better.
Immigration has three basic conditions or terms. - The host country allows to immigrants in.
- In return, the immigrants must embrace at least the norms and values of the host country even if that means giving up some of their traditional norms and values.
- If they assimilate to a sufficient degree over time they become equal and full members of the host country. They become us.
Precisely because you cherish tolerance, says Harari, you can not allow too many intolerant people in. While the tolerant society can manage more liberal minorities, if the number of such extremes exceeds a certain threshold, the whole nature of society changes. If you are bringing in too many immigrants from the Middle East, you will eventually end up looking like the Middle East says Harari.
On culturists: People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted from traditional racism to culturists.
The key is to find the balance between bad immigration and good immigration before everyone is either controlled by Google or wiped out by a natural disaster. This is not easy and we have not yet found the answers.
Lesson 10 Terrorism
We shouldn’t be too scared of terrorism. Far fewer people die in terrorist incidents than die of drinking fizzy drinks. And no one is scared of sugar. Since September 11, every year terrorists have killed about 50 people in the EU, about 10 people in the USA, about seven people in China and 25,000 people globally, mostly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually while air pollution kills about seven million people.
Though if terrorists got their hands on nuclear weapons that would be a bit scary. What should worry us is if computers start global conflicts of their own accord and try to wipe us all out. Hopefully, though, we will have invented a failsafe mechanism to prevent this but no one should take anything for granted.
A successful counter terrorism struggle should be conducted on three fronts. - Government should focus on clandestine actions against the terror networks.
- The media should keep things in perspective and avoid hysteria theatre. As it stands, the media obsessively report terror attacks because reports on terrorism sell newspapers much better than reports of diabetes or pollution.
- The imagination of each and every one of us. Terrorist hold our imagination captive and use it against us. It is the responsibility of every citizen to liberate his or her imagination from the terrorists and to remind ourselves of the true dimensions of this threat.
Lesson 11 War
Today information technology and biotechnology are more important than heavy industry when it comes to war.
Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, goldmines or even oil fields and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.
Lesson 12 Humility
You are not the center of the world
Israeli Jews are educated from kindergarten to think that Judaism is the superstar of human history. People have a very hard time digesting the idea that Judaism had relatively little impact on the world as a whole.
Lesson 13 God
Morality doesn’t mean following divineties. It means reducing suffering. Hence in order to act morally you don’t need to believe in any myth or story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering. In the long run, immoral behaviour is counterproductive. You’re not likely to live in a society where strangers are constantly being raped and murdered. Not only would you be in constant danger but you would lack the benefit of trust between strangers which supports trade and economic growth among other things.
Religious belief can either create compassion in people or justify and stoke their anger especially if someone dares to insult their God ignores his wishes.
Lesson 14 Secularism
The secular code enshrines the values of truth, compassion, equality, freedom, courage and responsibility. The secular code isn’t an ideal to aspire to rather than social reality.
The most important secular commitment is to truth which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Interestingly, Harari notes that strong belief is often required where the story isn’t true.
It is the commitment to the truth and modern science which has enabled humankind to split the atom, decipher the human genome, track the evolution of life and understand the history of humanity itself.
Finally, secular people cherish responsibility. We need not credit any divine protector with these achievements the resulting from humans developing their own knowledge and compassion. Instead of praying for miracles we need to ask what we can do to help.
As we come to make the most important decision in the history of life I personally would trust more in those who admit ignorance than those who claim infallibility. If I asked you what was the biggest mistake your religion, ideology or worldview committed, and you did not come up with something serious, I for one would not trust you.
Lesson 15 Ignorance
You know less than you think
Behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristics shortcuts rather than on rational analysis and that while out emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age.
No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral and atom bomb or an aircraft. What gave homo sapiens an edge over other animals was not rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.
Individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world and as history progressed we came to know less and less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs.
The reason we think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, is because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.
Lesson 16 Justice
We all like to think we have a sense of right and wrong, but it is becoming far harder to have a natural sense of justice. Am I moral if I do nothing when there is a refugee crisis, computers are taking over the world and we are on the brink of a climate change catastrophe? Perhaps I am, perhaps I’m not.
Lesson 17 Post-truth
When one thousand people believe some made up the story for one month that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years that’s religion and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings but the faithful. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s toolkit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible.
If you blame Facebook, Trump or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. For millennia, much of what passed for “news” and “facts” in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. We have zero evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit – yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.
Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again till people become convinced it is the truth. When I say Coca-Cola, you probably think of young people enjoying it, playing sports and having fun. You probably don’t think about the overweight diabetes patients lying in hospital beds.
Lesson 18 Science fiction
In the early 21st Century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction because very few people read the latest articles in the field of machine learning or genetic engineering, but instead movies such as the Matrix and Her and TV series such as Westworld and Black Mirror shape how people understand technology and its social and economic impacts.
This also means that science fiction needs to be far more responsible in the way it depicts scientific realities otherwise it might give people with the wrong ideas or focus their attention on the wrong problems.
Perhaps the worst failing of present-day science fiction is that it attempts to confuse intelligence with consciousness. As a result it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans when in fact we need to feel a conflict between a small superhuman elite. In thinking about the future of artificial intelligence, Harari says, Karl Marx is still a better guide than Steven Spielberg.
Lesson 19 Education
A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of human society were not going to change.
In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain-computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.
At present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past, this made sense, because the information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the basic facts of geography, history, and biology, they represented an immense improvement.
Today, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.
Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching the four C’s; critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, echoing my earlier sentiments. More broadly schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. Again, learning how to learn, resilience and adaptability.
The best advice for today’s fifteen-year-olds is not to rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well but they just don’t understand the world.
Lesson 20 Meaning
What will give our lives meaning in the decades and centuries ahead? So far, human history has been driven by a desire to live longer, healthier, happier lives. If science is eventually able to give that dream to most people, and large numbers of people no longer need to work in order to feed and clothe everyone, what reason will we have to get up in the morning?
Just consider the next thought that pops in your mind, where did it come from? Did you really choose to think it and only then did you think it? Certainly not.
Realising this can help us become less obsessive about our opinions feelings and desires. Humans usually give so much importance to their desires that they try to control in shape the entire world according to these desires. It is better to understand ourselves, our minds and our desires rather than try to realise whatever fantasy pops up in our heads.
It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spent countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves. If you could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them. Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook or Instagram account.
The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the Universe. - Everything is constantly changing
- Nothing has any enduring essence; and
- Nothing is completely satisfied.
Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, but you will never encounter something that does not change, the has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you.
According to the Buddha, life has no meaning and people don’t need to create any meaning.
Lesson 21 Meditation
Harari echoes what philosophers have been saying for millennia, that the deepest source of suffering is in the patterns of our own minds. When I want something and it doesn’t happen, my mind reacts by generating suffering. Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by our own minds. Learning this is the first step towards seizing to generate more suffering.
Meditation is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, Harari says he could not have written this book. He sees meditation as yet another valuable tool in the scientific talking, especially when trying to understand the human mind, which is an interesting take on conflating calm and clarity with ambition and progress.
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