Future Of Jobs and Education by Yuval Noah Harari (Historian's Perspective)

uh our lives in the 21st century more than anything else are going to be new technologies especially in a.i and biotechnology i want to bring more clarity to the public conversation on what's happening in the world i think that too much of the public discussion is focused either on the wrong issues or is extremely confused and unclear and people are flooded by enormous amounts of information which they don't know how to make sense of this is maybe the most important thing to know about living right now in the 21st century that we are now hackable animals we have the technology to decipher how humans or what you think what you want to predict human choices to manipulate human desires in ways which were never possible before basically to hack a human being you need two things you need a lot of data especially biometric data not just about where you go and what you buy but what is happening inside your body and inside your brain and secondly you need a lot of computing power to make sense of all that data now previously in history this was never possible nobody had enough data and enough computing power to hack human beings even if the kgb of the gestapo followed you around 24 hours a day eavesdropping on every conversation you had watching everybody you meet still they did not have the biological knowledge to really understand what's happening inside you and they certainly didn't have the computing power necessary to make sense even of the data they were able to collect so the kgb could not really understand you could not really predict all your choices or manipulate all your desires and so forth and but now it's changing what the kgb couldn't do corporations and governments today are beginning to be able to do and this is because of the merger of the revolution in biotech we are getting better in understanding what's happening inside us in the body in the brain and at the same time the revolution in infotech which gives us the computing power necessary when you put the two together when infotech merges with biotech what you get is the ability to create algorithms that understand me better than i understand myself and then these algorithms cannot just predict my choices but also manipulate my desires and basically sell me anything whether it's a product or a politician then you can predict you can manipulate you can eventually also re-engineer or replace if you really hack a system you really understand how it functions then usually you can also re-engineer it or you can completely replace it and again one of the dangers that we are facing today in the 21st century is that computers and ai would be able to replace humans in more and more tasks and maybe push millions of humans out of the job market as a result and most of what kids learn today in school will probably be irrelevant by the time they're 40 or 50. and we don't really know what to teach them because nobody knows how the job market or the world would look like in 2050 it's maybe the first time in history we have no idea whatsoever how the job market would look like in in 30 years traditionally life has been divided into two main parts a period of learning followed by a period of working in the first part of your life you built a stable identity and acquired personal and professional skills in the second part of life you relied on your identity and skills to navigate the world earn a living and contribute to society but by 2040 this traditional model will become obsolete and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves again and again even at the age of 50. the change is usually stressful and after a certain age most people don't like to change when you're 10 years old your entire life is change whether you like it or not your body is changing your mind is changing your relationships are changing everything is in flux you're busy inventing yourself by the time you're 50 you don't want change you want stability but in the 21st century you won't be able to enjoy that luxury if you try to hold on to some stable identity some stable job some stable world view you will be left behind and the world will fly by you with a whoosh so people will need to be extremely resilient and mentally balanced to sell through this never-ending storm and to deal with very high levels of stress the best investment i would say is in emotional intelligence and in mental balance and these kinds of skills of how to keep changing throughout your life how to keep learning throughout your life now how do you learn that that's very very difficult we don't have a college degree in mental flexibility it's much more difficult to teach emotional intelligence or mental resilience than to teach physics equations or to teach history or whatever we don't have the tools at present to scale up this kind of teaching so most of what we see in most schools is just inertia we do what was relatively okay in the 20th century information is the last thing the kids need they have far too much of it anyway the most important thing as today is to be able to focus especially if you have no guidance from an established school or an established program the greatest danger you face is being flooded by enormous amount of information and being completely distracted and unable to to form a clear vision a map of reality now in the past the main problem was lack of information information was scarce censorship worked by blocking what little flow of information there was and especially if you wanted to learn by yourself there was just nowhere to go like you lived in a small town somewhere and there is no library there are no books there is certainly no radio no television or internet so how do you get information and schools were initially established as you know these conduits these reservoirs of of this rare resource of information now information is everywhere we are flooded by it our problem is just the opposite uh censorship actually works now by flooding people with enormous amounts of information whether true or not it doesn't matter just flood people with information to the degree that they can't make sense of reality anymore they can't tell the difference what is important what is not important they can't build a map of reality for schools i would say one of their chief missions now is not to provide pupils with more information it's really the last thing they need but to provide them with either a map of reality or the tools to construct such a map if you are a self-learner and you don't have this kind of of a structure then this is your greatest challenge how to find my way around this enormous ocean of information without drowning in it i don't really have like a magic bullet of how to do it i would just like focus your attention that this is your greatest task my method was really to to focus on the most important questions and then allow the questions to just lead me wherever they they go um like you take a big question like that for example why have men dominated women in almost all large-scale societies for the last last 10 000 years you want to understand why and it's important to take a question which is not only big but it's also very relevant to my life to make it interesting something that really impacts me every day to why is reality like this and when you start reading and researching about it the first thing you'll discover is that you have to cross all kinds of disciplinary borders this is not a question in biology or psychology or economics or philosophy or history it's everything you can't understand gender relations if you don't know by all something about human biology but if you think oh biology is all the answers you also you won't understand much you also need to take history into account and economics into account and so forth so what gives you the structure is is the question i have this big question and i'm on a quest following it wherever it leads me uh so whatever you choose you can go to law school you can go to ballet school but you should keep in mind that much of what i'm learning might be irrelevant in 20 or 30 years so whatever else i'm doing i should also invest in developing my emotional intelligence my mental balance my ability to keep changing and learning and reinventing throughout my life so maybe to give an image or a metaphor if in the past education was like building a stone house with very deep foundations now i would say that education is more like a constructing a tent that you can fold up and move to another location very quickly and easily

Channel: Eclectic

Views: 20,753

Keywords: yuval noah harari, yuval harari, future of education, future of jobs, motivation, inspiration, interview, sapiens, homo deus, motivational speech, history, future, 21 lessons for the 21st century

Id: XaiWLPXYjsE

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021