“21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari

It isn’t hard to pick up on the fact that I am a fan of Harari’s writings (please see these posts) and that I was pretty excited about his latest book. In contrast to Sapiens, which focuses on the past, or Homo Deus, which focuses on the future, this book is written for the here and now.

Mm, sorta. To be honest, I think that a lot of his chapters aren’t so much the here and now but actually quite a ways off. He writes a lot about the future of jobs and how AI will eventually take over all of them and leave us with increasingly limited and specialized job prospects. But come on, that is not happening anytime soon, although I think that he is correct in his description of that trajectory. What I like about his take on the future of technology is that it does not involve fanatical descriptions of robots killing us, it is more accurate to describe it as simply humanity’s errors writ larger. As in, robots won’t kill us, it’s the people programming the robots that’ll kill us.

What I found fascinating about the book is that he dedicates quite a few chapters to religion and meaning in our lives. And the side that he comes down hard on is that all religions and stories are invented and therefore incorrect. What he prioritizes instead is meditation and knowing yourself as opposed to seeing yourself in someone else’s story. Now you don’t have to read that much of his works to realize that he is firmly on the side of science, so it makes sense that he’s a bit of a nihilist and only wants to follow the things he can sense and observe. What surprises me is that he goes for it so head on in this work. And these parts are the closest he comes to actually giving a concrete lesson that he advertises in the title.

To be honest, the main thing I feel icky about when reading this book is that it is clearly a product of his earlier successes. By which I mean that even just the title, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, is pretty pompous in thinking that he can give us 21 lessons in the first place. And while the chapters are grouped together and he clearly makes an effort to link them, they can seem like just an assortment of advice he’s yelling into the abyss in order to say “I told you so” later. I highly doubt that he would have written this if his earlier works didn’t have so much success, and even then, quite a few chapters follow the same path as sections of Homo Deus, especially the sections I alluded to earlier about the future of technology. Which again, makes sense, but it does seem as though he is merely retreading the same ground at points.

Having gone through all that, I still think that this is a book worth reading. While it may not have very concrete answers to all of our problems, the section on meditation is probably the closest he will get to giving us solid advice going forward. And I maintain the belief that he is one of the greatest thinkers on subjects like the future of humanity and society. But could you also read his other two books and reach similar conclusions? Yes, absolutely. But that is really up to you, this work is more accessible than his others and shorter. Personally I would just go for the longer ones to get the most out of it, but maybe this will get others to at least think about these topics in a slightly different way.