21 Lessons For The 21st Century Summary - Yuval Noah Harari Flashcards
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In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.
Lesson 1: Data has become the most valuable asset, which is why technology disrupts all our systems.
With technology being our prime ideology, data becomes the most valuable asset. That’s why politicians struggle for their nations to win the giant tech race. The problem is that this time around, no one fully understands the implications of our ideology. Just look at the financial markets, where algorithms already do most of the work, with very few traders grasping what’s actually happening.
Lesson 2: We believe we have a lot of knowledge, but we don’t and that’s dangerous.
The knowledge illusion: we think we know a lot more than our ancestors when, actually, we know less in many regards.
For example, we all rely on many experts to live our everyday lives. We can’t hunt our own food, build our own shelter, or make our own clothes. We think we’re smart, but just because we can access all the world’s knowledge doesn’t mean it’s already in our head.
Instead, we should stay humble, be thankful, and do our best to never stop learning.
Lesson 3: School needs to start teaching us how to think, not what to think.
It’s more important that we learn how to navigate the modern sea of information, how to filter out the important, and how to determine what’s downright false, than just remembering more facts.
With more data being created now in a single year than the past few millennia combined, future workers won’t need to know as much as possible, but how to find out only that, which they really need to know.
