Mis Resumenes: Libro: 21 Lessons for the 21 century ~ Yuval Noah Harris

 One interesting book about the world's future, even though it covers challenging topics, moves around one thing: AI and Robotics, which seems an accurate forecasting taking into account the recent GPT and AI tools disturbing the market. The best part of the book is when it talks about Job Market, AI, and Big Data. 

- Since the global financial crisis of 2008 people all over the world have become increasingly disillusioned with the liberal story. P. 5

- Our mood of disorientation and impending doom is exacerbated by the accelerating pace of technology disruption. P. 6

- Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. P. 7

- It's much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploration. P. 9 

- Lincoln's principle: you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. Enough citizens will eventually realize and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln's logic, because it prevents citizens from realizing the truth. P. 11

- By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely. P. 11

- Liberalism has no obvious answer to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism relies on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts. P. 17

- Since the beginning of the industrisl revolution for every job lost to a machine at least one New job was created and the average a standard of living was increased  dramatically. P. 20 

- AI is now beginning to outperform humans un More and more of those skills, including in the understanding of human emotions. P. 21

- When considering automation, therefore, it's wrong to compare a single human with a single AI. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network. P. 23

- Connectivity and updatability bring high benefits. Replacing humans with computers makes more sense still if some humans individually do a better job than machined. P. 24

- Much more difficult to replace humans with machines in less routine jobs that demand the simultaneous use of a wide range of skills and involve dealing with unforeseen scenarios. P. 25

- AI might help create new humans jobs in another way. Instead of humans competing with AI, they could focus on servicing and lever-aging AI. If so, the Job Market of 2050 might well be characterized by human-AI cooperation rather than competition. The problem with all such new jobs, however, is that they will probably demand high levels of expertise, and will therefore not solve the problems of unemployed unskilled laborers. P. 30

- Despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and shortage of skilled labor. This volatility will also make it more difficult to organize unions or secure labor rights. Already today, many new jobs in advance economies involve unprotected temporary work, freelancing, and one-time gigs. How do you unionize a profession that mushrooms and disappears within a decade? P. 31

- ***Already today few employees expect to work in the same job for their entire life. By 2050, not only the idea of a job for life but even that of a profession for life may seem antediluvian. P. 33

- ***It is dangerous to just assume that enough new jobs will appear to compensate for any losses. The fact that this has happened during previous waves of automation is absolutely no guarantee that it will happen again under the very different conditions. P. 34

- Government regulation can successfully block new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative. P. 35

- If despite all our efforts a significant percentage of humankind is pushed out of the job market, we would have to explore new models for post-work societies, post-work economies, and post-work polities. P. 36

- Governments could subsidize universal basic services rather than income; instead of giving money to people, the goverment might subsidize free education, free healthcare, free transportation, and so forth. P. 39

- Taking the right steps was more important than making speedy progress. Yet now the bridge is shaking, and soon it might collapse. P. 41

- *** Homo Sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.  Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and so even dramatic improvements in conditions might level us as dissatisfied as before. P. 43

- As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, in the lives of people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job. P. 44

- Elections are always about human feelings. If democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely no reason to give all people equal voting rights or perhaps any voting rights at all. P. 46

- Authority my shift again, divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies, and human authority was justify by the liberal story. Technological revolution might stablish the authority of Big Data Algorithms. P. 48

- Feelings aren't based on intuitions, inspiration or freedom, they are based on calculations. P. 48

- Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality, they embody evolutionary rationality. P. 49. 

- Biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals Ability to hack humans. P. 50

- Given enough biometrics data and enough computing power, external data processing systems can hack all your desires, decisions, and opinions. P. 51

- The decision whether to hire somebody for a job will increasingly be made by algorithms. P. 61

- There is always a danger that the engineers will somehow program their own subconscious biases into the software. P. 61

- We should fear them because they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel (the robots and AI). P. 63

- The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters. P. 64

- In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorship because democracies were better at data processing. P. 67

- AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, AI might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyze. P. 67

- When discrimination is directed against entire groups, these groups can organize and protest against their collective discrimination. But now an algorithm might discriminate against you personally, and you will have no idea why. P. 69

- Instead of just collective discrimination, in the twenty-first century we might face a growing problem of individual discrimination. P. 69

- Science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness and assume that in order to match or surpass human intelligence, computes will have to develop consciousness. P. 70. 

- Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain. P. 70

- It is not absolutely impossible that AI will develop feelings of its own: 1. Consciousness is somehow linked to organic biochemistry. 2. Consciousness is linked to intelligence in such way that computers could develops consciousness. 3. There are no essential links between consciousness and either organic biochemistry or high intelligence. Computers might develop  consciousness but not necessarily. P. 71

- We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and functions as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism. Indeed, we have no idea what our full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. P. 73

- If we are not careful, we will ended up with downgrade humans misusing upgraded computes to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world. P. 73

- Those who own the data own the future. P. 74

- Instead of globalization resulting in global unity, it might actually result in speciation: the divergence of humankind into different biological castes or even different species. P. 77

- Attention merchants. They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and they resell our attention to advertisers. We aren't their customers, we are their product. P. 79 

- Companies often evaluate according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate. A popular app may lack a business model and may even loss money in the short term, but as long as it sucks data, it could be worth billions. P. 79

- As much as we should fear the power of big corporations, history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overly mighty governments. P. 81

- Conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? this may well be the most important political question of our era. P. 81

- Words are cheaper than actions. P. 87

- During the last century technology has been distancing us from our bodies. We have been losing our ability to pay attention to what we smell and taste. Instead we are absorbed in our smartphones and computers. P. 89

- War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does. P. 100

- *** They all use the same discourse of human rights, state sovereignty, and international law. P. 101

- No group rejecting the principles of global politics has so far gained any lasting control of any significant territory. P. 102

- Whatever changes await us in the future, they are likely to involve a fraternal struggle within a single civilization rather than a clash between alien civilizations. P. 109

- Homo Sapiens eventually learned to use culture as a basis for large-scale cooperation, which is key to our success as a species. P. 110

- They easy part is to prefer people-like-us over foreigners. Humans have been doing that for millions of years. Xenophobia is in our DNA. P. 111

- Tax evasion and nepotism come naturally to us, but nationalism says they are "corruption". P. 112

- Cultural relativists argue that differences doesn't imply hierarchy, and we should never prefer one culture over another. Humans may think and behave in various ways, but we should celebrate diversity and give equal value to all beliefs and practices. P. 152

- They are culturist. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of "culturists". P. 154

- The terrorists hope that even though they can barely make a dent in the enemy's material power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact. P. 165

- We intuitively understand that terrorism is the theater, we judge it by its emotional rather than material impact. P. 167

- It is hard to set priorities with hindsight. P. 173

- Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it. The problem is that the world is more complicated than a chees-board, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it. For that reason, even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things. P. 184

- One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious, and cultural tension are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, religion and culture are the most important in the world. P. 185

- All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins, and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation. P. 192

- Holy books, they are just stories invented by our ancestors in order to legitimize social norms and political structures. P. 204

- The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality. P.205

- ***Morality doesn't mean "following divine commands". It means reducing suffering. Therefore 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. P. 206

- ***Emotions such as greed, envy, anger, and hatred are very unpleasant. You cannot experience joy and harmony when you are boiling with anger or envy. P. 207

- Capitalism too began as a very open-minded scientific theory but gradually solidified into a dogma. P. 216

- Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naive reassurance that it cannot happen to us. P- 219

- What gave Homo Sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups. P. 224

- The knowledge illusion. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own. P. 224

- When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. when you have a great power in your hand, everything looks like an invitation to meddle. P. 227

- An inherent feature of our modern global world is that causal relations are highly ramified and complex. P. 231

- The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. P. 233

- We are living in a new and frightening are of post-truth, and that lies and fictions are all around us. P. 238

- When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that's fake news. When billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion, and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful. P. 241

- You cannot organize masses of people effectively without relying on some mythology. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. P. 246

- As species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it. P. 249

- 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 waht is unimportant. P. 267

- *** Schools should switch to teaching the four Cs: Critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. Deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. P. 268

- Technology isn't bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don't know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. P. 273

- You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that's not even half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans. P. 274

- Dharma: The path you must follow and the duties you must fulfill. P. 276

- ***If we cannot leave something tangible behind, such as a gene or a poem, might it be enough if we just make the world a little better? You can help somebody, and that somebody will subsequently helo somebody else, and you thereby contribute to the overall improvement of the world, and constitute a small link in the great chain of kindness. P. 286

- If you are really in love with someone, you never worry about the meaning of life. P. 287

- Most people don't like to admit that they are fools. Consequently, the more they sacrifice for a particular belief, the stronger their faith becomes. P. 293

- People ask "Who am I?" and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story. P. 308

- The universe has no plot, so it is up to us humans to create a plot, and this is our vocation and the meaning of our life. P. 309

- The universe has no meaning, it claimed and human feelings too carry no meaning. They are just ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. P. 309

- The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying. P. 310

- Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. They believe that there is some eternal essence somewhere, and if only they can find it and connect to it, they will be completely satisfied. P. 310. 

- We cannot solve our problems by recreating some imaginary golden past. The past wasn't fun, and in any case, we cannot go back to it. P. 327

- In 99 % of cases your choices aren't made freely but are shaped by various biological, social and cultural forces. P. 328

- You will never get answers by just reading books, discussing theories, and contemplating thoughts. P. 329