By Yuval Noah Harari – 21
Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)
Change is the only constant
Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old
stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How
can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented
transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be
thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in
2100, and might even be an active citizen of the twenty-second century. What
should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the
world of 2050 or of the twenty-second century? What kind of skills will he or
she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and
navigate the maze of life?
Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in
2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of
course, humans could never predict the future with accuracy. But today it is
more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer
bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything –
including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.
A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people
didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the
basic features of human society were not going to change. If you lived in China
in 1018, you knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans
might invade from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was
clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and
weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and
bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be
about forty, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor
Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and
wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write
calligraphy, or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and
obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.
In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of
the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we
don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what
gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than
today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution
thanks to bioengineering and direct brain–computer interfaces. Much of what
kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.
At present, too many schools focus on cramming information.
In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow
trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you
lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for
you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily
newspapers or public libraries.1 Even if you were literate and had access to a
private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious
tracts. The Spanish Empire heavily censored all texts printed locally and allowed
only a dribble of vetted publications to be imported from outside.2 Much the
same was true if you lived in some provincial town in Russia, India, Turkey or
China. When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write
and imparting the basic facts of geography, history and biology, they
represented an immense improvement.
In contrast, in the twenty-first century we are flooded by
enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it.
Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with
irrelevancies. If you live in some provincial Mexican town and you have a
smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED
talks, and taking free online courses. No government can hope to conceal all
the information it doesn’t like. On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to
inundate the public with conflicting reports and red herrings. People all over
the world are but a click away from the latest accounts of the bombardment of
Aleppo or of melting ice caps in the Arctic, but there are so many
contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe. Besides,
countless other things are just a click away, making it difficult to focus, and
when politics or science look too complicated it is tempting to switch to some
funny cat videos, celebrity gossip, or porn.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her
pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead,
people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell 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.
In truth, this has been the ideal of Western liberal
education for centuries, but up till now even many Western schools have been
rather slack in fulfilling it. Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving
data while encouraging pupils ‘to think for themselves’. Due to their fear of
authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives.
They assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of
freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world, and even if
this generation fails to synthesize all the data into a coherent and meaningful
story of the world, there will be plenty of time to construct a good synthesis
in the future. We have now run out of time. The decisions we will take in the
next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can take these
decisions based only on our present world view. If this generation lacks a
comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.
The heat is on
Besides information, most schools also focus too much on
providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills such as solving
differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in
a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world
and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular
skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to
write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code
software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app enables you to
conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even
though you only know how to say ‘Ni hao.’
So, what should we be teaching?
Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to
teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and
creativity.3 More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize
general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal
with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in
unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will
need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to
reinvent yourself again and again.
For as the pace of change increases, not just the economy,
but the very meaning of ‘being human’ is likely to mutate. Already in 1848, the
Communist Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Marx and
Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By
2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a
cloud of data bits.
In 1848 millions of people were losing their jobs on village
farms, and were going to the big cities to work in factories. But upon reaching
the big city, they were unlikely to change their gender or to add a sixth
sense. And if they found a job in some textile factory, they could expect to
remain in that profession for the rest of their working lives.
By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to
cyberspace, with fluid gender identities, and with new sensory experiences
generated by computer implants. If they find both work and meaning in designing
up-to-the-minute fashions for a 3-D virtual reality game, within a decade not
just this particular profession, but all jobs demanding this level of artistic
creation might be taken over by AI. So, at twenty-five you introduce yourself
on a dating site as ‘a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in
London and works in a fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a
gender-non-specific person undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical
activity takes place mainly in the New Cosmos virtual world, and whose life
mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before’. At forty-five both
dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to
find (or create) the perfect match for you. As for drawing meaning from the art
of fashion design, you are so irrevocably outclassed by the algorithms, that
looking at your crowning achievements from the previous decade fills you with
embarrassment rather than pride. And at forty-five you still have many decades of
radical change ahead of you.
Please don’t take this scenario literally. Nobody can really
predict the specific changes we will witness. Any particular scenario is likely
to be far from the truth. If somebody describes to you the world of the mid
twenty-first century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false.
But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century
and it doesn’t sound like science fiction – it is certainly false. We cannot be
sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty.
Such profound change may well transform the basic structure
of life, making discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial
life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by
a period of working. In the first part of life you accumulated information,
developed skills, constructed a world view, and built a stable identity. Even
if at fifteen you spent most of your day working in the family’s rice field
(rather than in a formal school), the most important thing you were doing was
learning: how to cultivate rice, how to conduct negotiations with the greedy
rice merchants from the big city, and how to resolve conflicts over land and
water with the other villagers. In the second part of life you relied on your
accumulated skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to
society. Of course, even at fifty you continued to learn new things about rice,
about merchants, and about conflicts, but these were just small tweaks to
well-honed abilities.
By the middle of the twenty-first century, accelerating
change plus longer lifespans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life
will come apart at the seams, and there will be less and less continuity
between different periods of life. ‘Who am I?’ will be a more urgent and
complicated question than ever before.4
This is likely to involve immense levels of stress. For
change is almost always stressful, and after a certain age most people just
don’t like to change. When you are fifteen, your entire life is change. Your
body is growing, your mind is developing, your relationships are deepening.
Everything is in flux, and everything is new. You are busy inventing yourself.
Most teenagers find it frightening, but at the same time, it is also exciting.
New vistas are opening before you, and you have an entire world to conquer. By
the time you are fifty, you don’t want change, and most people have given up on
conquering the world. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You much prefer stability.
You have invested so much in your skills, your career, your identity and your
world view that you don’t want to start all over again. The harder you’ve
worked on building something, the more difficult it is to let go of it and make
room for something new. You might still cherish new experiences and minor
adjustments, but most people in their fifties aren’t ready to overhaul the deep
structures of their identity and personality.
There are neurological reasons for this. Though the adult
brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less
malleable than the teenage brain. Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses are
damned hard work.5 But in the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford
stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view,
you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given
that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to
spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant – not just
economically, but above all socially – you will need the ability to constantly
learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.
As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past
experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will
become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole
will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such
as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can
manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate
cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the
right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How
should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and
there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyze it all? How to live in a
world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature?
To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot
of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to
repeatedly let go of some of what you know best and feel at home with the
unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their
mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics
or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a
book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental
flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the
product of the old educational system.
The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the
production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large
concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows
of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms
together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every
hour some grown-up walks in and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by
the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another
tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It
is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its
past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far, we haven’t created a viable
alternative. Certainly not a saleable alternative that can be implemented in
rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California suburbs.
Hacking humans
So, the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in
an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don’t rely on the
adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the
world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because
they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the
twenty-first century is going to be different. Due to the growing pace of
change you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is
timeless wisdom or outdated bias.
So, on what can you rely instead? Perhaps on technology? That’s an even riskier
gamble. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power
over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda. Thousands of years
ago humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny
elite, while enslaving the majority of humans. Most people found themselves
working from sunrise till sunset plucking weeds, carrying water-buckets and
harvesting corn under a blazing sun. It can happen to you too.
Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life,
technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it
will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control
of your life. Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you
might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you.
Have you seen those
zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do
you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them?
Should you rely on yourself, then? That sounds great on
Sesame Street or in an old-fashioned Disney film, but in real life it doesn’t
work so well. Even Disney is coming to realize it. Just like Riley Andersen,
most people hardly know themselves, and when they try to ‘listen to themselves’
they easily become prey to external manipulations. The voice we hear inside our
heads was never trustworthy, because it always reflected state propaganda,
ideological brainwashing and commercial advertisement, not to mention
biochemical bugs.
As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will
become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will
become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca-Cola,
Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull the strings of your heart and
press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between
yourself and their marketing experts?
To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work
very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you
are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the
book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged
people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the
twenty-first century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you
have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all
racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank
account – they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You
might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s
hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.
The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching
where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your
steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and
machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these
algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and
manipulate you, and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the
matrix, or in The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if
the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you
understand it, authority will shift to them.
Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority
to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest
of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do
anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however,
you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of
life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the
government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take
much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.
Education
1 Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis (eds.), Encyclopedia of
Library History
(New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 432–3.
2 Verity Smith (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American
Literature (London,
New York: Routledge, 2013), 142, 180.
3 Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the
University to
Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books,
2017); Bernie Trilling,
21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
2009); Charles Kivunja, ‘Teaching Students to Learn and to Work
Well with 21st
Century Skills: Unpacking the Career and Life Skills Domain of the
New Learning
Paradigm’, International Journal of Higher Education 4:1 (2015).
For the website of
P21, see: ‘P21 Partnership for 21st Century Learning’,
http://www.p21.org/our-work/
4cs-research-series, accessed 12 January 2018. For an example for
the
implementation of new pedagogical methods, see, for example, the
US National
Education Association’s publication: ‘Preparing 21st Century
Students for a Global
Society’, NEA,
http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf, accessed
21 January 2018.
4 Maddalaine Ansell, ‘Jobs for Life Are a Thing of the Past. Bring
On Lifelong
Learning’, Guardian, 31 May 2016.
5 Erik B. Bloss et al., ‘Evidence for Reduced Experience-Dependent
Dendritic Spine
Plasticity in the Aging Prefrontal Cortex’, Journal of
Neuroscience 31:21 (2011):
7831–9; Miriam Matamales et al., ‘Aging-Related Dysfunction of
Striatal Cholinergic
Interneurons Produces Conflict in Action Selection’, Neuron 90:2
(2016), 362–72;
Mo Costandi, ‘Does your brain produce new cells? A skeptical view
of human adult
neurogenesis’, Guardian, 23 February 2012; Gianluigi Mongillo,
Simon Rumpel and
Yonatan Loewenstein, ‘Intrinsic volatility of synaptic connections
– a challenge to the
synaptic trace theory of memory’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology
46 (2017), 7–13.
