Harari’s 3d book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, first chapter is the best summary of this Blog’s major themes. https://short.g4g65.com/Affirmation
If you are a Jungian, you might speculate on a universal, shared connection among human conciousnous and ideas like this one are floating out there and by some “entanglement” mechanism, we can get a “gut feeling” about something, unable to fully explain where it came from. When I suddenly got the urge to throw all my thoughts on technology and politics I was taking the two areas in which I spent my career studying and working and drawing conclusions or “theories” about the magnitude of changes happening. I was heavily influenced by Ray Kurtzweil and his writing and work on The Singularity and Soul of a new Machine which I read many many years ago. I was witness to this “pace of change increasing” to an exponetial rate that biological systems like humans are not made to grasp. In the largest IT shop that was building the information highway(which is never done) I felt I had a ringside seat to the future coming to life. From the Chairman to the new project manager, trying to learn the latest concepts of Software Defined Networks and Cloud stacks was making people a little squirrley. IT people were very use to clearing the memory to allow the deluge of new stuff to learn for a project. But this decade as clearly been a different level of learning need. Everyone needed retraining, back to school and it was an impressive result deliverying online courses from the likes of Coursera and Udacity and many others.
I think I felt compelled to at least throw important information out into cyberspace to counter that nonsense that America is awash in today. And to provide a more coherent view of events. Harari does the world a great service in boiling the ocean down to key points.
In Sapiens, he explored our past. In Homo Deus, he looked to our future. Now, one of the most innovative thinkers on the planet turns to the present to make sense of today’s most pressing issues.
How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant?
He even mentions my target for ridicule, the guy that declared history dead after the Berlin Wall came down”. Mr. Fukuyama. It was a time when coldwar veterans were congratulating themselves on being on the winning side. But, the fog of war extended to the cold as well. I am no longer shocked at the nonsense educated public figures display. The readers were only too happy to endorse a book patting them on the back. Understandable that acceptance of a wild theory was automatic.
Copyright © 2018 by Yuval Noah Harari All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau,
Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (p. vi). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Bill Gates posted a book review of the trilogy on the NYT and is reproduced on Goodreads.