In the light of his theories about the human future, when Yuval Noah Harari was asked what must politicians be questioned for before elections, he said, "Ask them what will they do to lessen the danger of nuclear war, climate change, regulate AI and bioengineering, and their vision humanity in for 2050," he said. "And if they don't answer but keep talking about the past, then don't vote for them."
Taking off from his latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), which hit the shelves in August this year, Mr. Harari delivered the Penguin Annual Lecture 2018 in Mumbai on Sunday, titled ‘The New Challenges of the 21st Century’, during which he addressed topics of nationalism, ethical training, climate change, and the need for more philosophers.
To say that Harari’s last three books have been a global success would be an understatement. The author of 2014 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (translated in 45 languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide) , Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) , and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), has been endorsed by Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and referred to as the “guru of the liberal elites” by the media. In a roundtable interaction with the press before delivering the lecture, the Israeli historian declared that he neither has political skills nor are his books about the immediate politics of any country. “I can’t give particular political advice to any government or how to implement policies,” he said. “But what I try to do is influence the macro agenda of various nations and humanity as a whole.”
One can’t talk about Mr. Harari’s work without contextualising it in today’s socio-political reality — be it his arguments about race, genocide, war, sexuality or artificial intelligence. “What I see as a scientist is that the political debate is focused — almost exclusively — on the immediate local issues and ignores the big common challenges of humankind which will impact everyone,” said the 42-year-old academic. “During the 2016 election campaign in the US, there was a lot of talk by [Donald] Trump and [Hillary] Clinton about immigration, terrorism, state of the US economy but there was nobody talking about artificial intelligence, bioengineering or the future of humanity, even when they talked about the job market.” Mr. Harari believes that robots taking over American jobs is a much bigger problem that Mr. Trump’s fearmongering about Mexicans.
Mr. Harari believes that AI (AI) taking over human employment is not a distant worry. He, in fact, predicts it to be a concern in the next 15 to 20 years. “The worst problem will be for developing countries to retain workforce,” he said. The author believes that the rise of AI could result in a "huge split in the world", where developed countries like the US would retrain their citizens for new jobs, but countries like India and Mexico will struggle with unemployment. He said that India used cheap labour to gain economic momentum during the agricultural revolution. “But after AI revolution, cheap labour will be the least important [commodity],” said Mr. Harari.
Another modern-day concern raised by the Oxford-educated historian was “data colonialism”, as he puts it. “Valuable data will be obtained from poor counties and the benefits will be gained by rich countries,” he said. “The key issue today is not the ownership of land but data.” Sounding several alarm bells, Mr. Harari said that his writings are not intended to provide answers but to ask pertinent questions that all of mankind can agree upon. “I hope [we] take the questions and it shapes [our] political discussion,” he said.
