Are you confined by your own reality of the world ? Are you stressed out by the natural calamities, wars, racism, terrorism? Have you ever come across the thoughts like "are we (humans) actually living in a hatred world" ? The book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" gives you a wide angle view about our world, about human evolution, about the future we are heading to.
The book has five parts. Yuval Noah Harari started the book with the disillusionment. He explains how different countries came up with different political government systems. How the democratic system, liberal system and others evolved with the human evolution. All these systems helped us to live until now. But we have reached a point where these systems are not going to work. The information, the finance, the media are not in the hands of government bodies anymore. We are in the Big Data world where the data are programmed or shared by non-government bodies. How do you think the government controls this modern digital world where each and every human has the access to everything. How do you think the government can take actions to help people to lose their jobs because of the technical evolution? What do you think about the future job possibilities?
The jobs we are doing might not exist in the future. The industrial revolution replaced the human work force in agriculture section with machineries. But we were lucky to have jobs that provides service to the people. But the modern era will replace the service oriented concept itself. One of the example is the online shopping - like Amazon. Yes we are replacing everything with the digital world. When you read the book 'More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth' you could see the transition of magazine based fashion world into the digital world. You cannot deny the truth of replacing your jobs with algorithms. But the author is more concerned about shifting authority from human to algorithms.
Today we are gathering information from the internet. We get to know about a subject in google based on algorithms. What about the self driving cars? How the car is going to decide between hit the kids on the road or kill the driver by hitting the upcoming truck to save the kids. Who is gonna decide the algorithm? Where is our option to chose our instinct? We are going to face digital dictatorship. We are going to be controlled by tiny elites who works in the digital world. We can see how the social media like facebook's impact in our life.
The second part of the book explains the political challenges we are going to face because of the merge of infotech and biotech. When Zuckerberg tries to bring humans together as a one nation without any boundaries, in the offline world you could see the clash of civilisation. Today we have lot of examples for the clash of civilisations like the immigration issues, nationalism, religion. Humans always live as a community. And we believe my community is better than the other. When people from one country immigrate to other country, who should respect whose culture? What about the nationalism? Which is your country - the country you are born or the country you are living? How do you describe nationalism in this modern world?
The third part of the book gives us hope. If we are ready to keep our fear under control and humble enough to be open minded we are heading to a beautiful future. The author explains how the terrorists are controlling the world by the spread of fear. The success or failure of terrorism therefore depends on us. If we free our imagination from the terrorists and then we react in a balanced and cool way, terrorism will fail. When we focus to the next human disaster cause - the war, we are not in the civilisation age where a country need material assets that improves their economy. Now the valuable assets are technical and informative which we cannot gather by conquering other countries. However, we cannot deny the possibility of human stupidity. This can be avoided by humility. When we are ready to acknowledge other nations, religion and cultures by realizing my religion, nation or culture is not superior over others, we can live in a beautiful unified world.
In the world of information, ignorance is a choice. In the fourth part, Yuval Noah explains the importance of getting correct information. He warned about become a victim of misinformation. We think we know a lot. When we compare ourselves with our ancestors who knows how to make her own clothes, how to make a fire, how to escape from the lions we know little about the world. We are in a knowledge illusion. According to the author, humans have always lived in the age of the post-truth. He warned about the fake news. Also explained the future is not what you see in the movies. Everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. You don't have to choose between the blue pill and the red pill like in the movie "Matrix" or you don't have to try hard to get outside of the trapped world like in the 'The Truman Show'. What you experience comes from inside of you.
How are you going to enjoy the upcoming world? Fifth part gives ways to live in new age which is not yet emerged. All information we needed are on our hands. Instead of falling for the misinformation, use the internet to get knowledge. The education must be focussed on telling 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. And realize the meaning of our life. When you identify your life function, no matter how hard the path may be, you enjoy peace of mind and liberation from doubt. Yuval Noah explains that anything that limits the human liberty to feel, think, desire and invent limits the meaning of the universe. The book ends with the observing your own inner world through meditation. The best place to start to find the meaning of life is by observing the suffering and exploring what it is.
The book gives a wider picture of the world and where we are heading to. It helped me to unlearn some of my beliefs about the world. I believe we are heading to a beautiful future where the humans have the luxury of time to dig deep into themselves. And it will be a breakthrough for the infinite human potentials. When we observe our inner self, when we find out the meaning of our life, we get the meaning of the universe. Don't forget that change is the only constant!
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