What to Learn Today to Succeed in 2050

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Yuval Noah Harari on the art of rebuilding oneself and other important skills of the future.

In 2018, Harari released a new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. We have selected and translated the most interesting passages from the teaching chapter.

Humanity is on the verge of unprecedented revolutions. A child born today will be in his 30s in 2050. In a good scenario, he will live until 2100 and may even become an active citizen of the XXII century.

What should we teach this child to survive and thrive in the new world? What skills will he need to get a job, understand the world around him and navigate the labyrinth of life?

Unfortunately, since no one knows what the world will be like in 2050 (let alone the 22nd century), we don't know the answer to these questions either. Of course, humans have never been able to accurately predict the future. But today it is even more difficult to do this, because once technology allows us to artificially create a body, brain and consciousness, we can no longer be sure of anything. Including what previously seemed unshakable and eternal.

A thousand years ago, in 1018, people did not know much about the future. Nevertheless, they were confident that the basic foundations of society would not change. If you live in China in 1018, you know that by 1050 the Song empire could fall, the Khitan tribes could attack from the north, and epidemics could claim the lives of millions of people.

However, it is clear to you that even in 1050, most of the inhabitants will still remain farmers and weavers, and the rulers will continue to recruit people for military and civil service. Men will continue to dominate women, life expectancy will still be about 40 years, and the human body will remain exactly the same.

Therefore, in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk. The rich taught their sons to read, write, and fight on horseback, and their daughters to be humble and obedient wives. It was obvious that such skills would still be needed in 1050. Today, we have no idea what China or other countries in the world will be like in 2050.

We do not know how people will earn a living, how armies and bureaucratic apparatus will be organized, what gender relations will be like.

Some are likely to live much longer than they do today, and the human body itself, thanks to bioengineering and neurocomputer interfaces, can change beyond recognition. Much of what children are learning today is likely to be irrelevant in 2050.

Now, in most schools, students are trying to cram as much information into their heads as possible. In the past, this made sense, because there was little information and even that meager trickle of existing knowledge was periodically blocked by the censorship.

If you lived in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it would be difficult for you to get a lot of data about the outside world. Then there were no radio, television, daily newspapers and public libraries. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, your reading choices were limited to novels and religious treatises.

The Spanish Empire heavily censored all local texts and allowed only a few verified editions into the country. Almost the same situation was in the provincial towns of Russia, India, Turkey and China. Schools teaching every child to read and write, as well as the basic facts of geography, history and biology, have made tremendous progress.

But in the 21st century, we are drowning in information flows. If you live in a provincial Mexican city and have a smartphone, you can spend more than one life reading Wikipedia, watching TED talks, and taking free online courses. No government hopes to hide all the information it does not like. But it's incredibly easy to overwhelm people with conflicting information and newspaper ducks.

It takes a couple of clicks to find out the latest reports on the bombing of Aleppo or the melting of the Arctic ice. But there is so much conflicting information that it's hard to know what to believe. And just as easily, a myriad of other content is readily available. When politics or science seems too complicated, it's tempting to switch to funny cat videos, celebrity gossip, or porn.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give his students is another piece of information. They already have too much of it.

Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, distinguish between important and unimportant, and, most importantly, combine many pieces of data into a coherent picture of the world.

In fact, this has been the ideal of Western liberal education for centuries. But it is still being implemented rather carelessly. Teachers communicate facts by encouraging students to "think for themselves." For fear of falling into authoritarianism, they believe this: since they give students a lot of data and a little freedom, they themselves will form a picture of the world. And even if one generation fails to synthesize all the data into a coherent and meaningful story, there will be plenty of time for that in the future.

But the time is up. The decisions we make over the next decades will shape the future of our very lives. If this generation does not have a comprehensive view of the world, their future will be decided by chance.

So what should you teach your children? Many pedagogical experts believe that they should be taught the Four Ks: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. That is, pay less attention to technical skills and prioritize universal life skills.

The most important thing will be the ability to cope with change, learn new things and maintain psychological balance in unknown situations.

Keeping pace with life in 2050 will require not only inventing new ideas and products, but also rebuilding oneself over and over again. No one can predict the specific changes that await us in the future. Any detailed scenario is likely to be far from the truth.

If someone’s description of the mid-21st century sounds like science fiction, it’s most likely wrong. On the other hand, if this description does not sound like science fiction, it is definitely wrong. We cannot be sure of the details, change is the only certainty.

Since time immemorial, life has been divided into two adjacent stages: training and the work that follows it. During the first phase, you accumulated knowledge, developed skills, formed a worldview, and constructed your identity.

Even if you spent most of your day working in a rice field at 15, the first thing you learned was how to cultivate rice and negotiate with greedy traders from the big city, how to settle disputes over land and water with other villagers.

In the second step, you used the skills you learned to navigate the world, make a living, and be a part of society. Of course, even at 50, you learned something new about rice, traders and quarrels, but these were all just minor additions to the already honed skills.

By the middle of the 21st century, the accelerating pace of change and increased life expectancy will make this traditional model a relic.

This is likely to be associated with tremendous stress. Change is almost always stressful, and after a certain age, most people just don't like changing. When you are 15, your whole life is about change. Your body grows, your consciousness develops, your relationship deepens.

Everything is in motion for you, everything is new. You reinvent yourself. It's frightening but exciting at the same time. New horizons are opening up before you, you just have to conquer the world.

By the age of 50, you don't want change, and most people have given up on conquering the world. We swam, we know, there is a T-shirt as a keepsake. You prefer stability. You've invested so much in your skills, career, identity and worldview that you don't want to start all over again.

The harder you worked to create something, the harder it is to let go. You may still cherish new experiences and small innovations, but most 50-year-olds are not ready to rebuild their personality.

This is due to the structure of the nervous system. Although the adult brain is more flexible than previously thought, it is still not as flexible as the adolescent brain. Making new neural connections is hard work. But in the 21st century, stability is an unaffordable luxury.

If you try to hold on to your identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind as the world whizzing by. And since life expectancy is likely to increase, you could turn into a fossil for many decades.

Keeping up economically and socially requires the ability to continually learn and rebuild oneself.

When uncertainty is the new norm, past experience can no longer be relied on with the same confidence. Each individual and humanity as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things that no one has encountered before: superintelligent machines, artificially created bodies, algorithms that manipulate emotions with amazing accuracy, rapid climatic cataclysms and the need to change professions every 10 years.

What action can be considered correct in a situation that has no analogues in the past? How to act when receiving huge flows of information that cannot be fully assimilated and analyzed? How to live in a world where uncertainty is not a system error, but its main characteristic?

To survive and thrive in such a world, it takes psychological flexibility and emotional balance. You have to let go of what you know best over and over again and feel comfortable in the unknown.

Unfortunately, teaching children this is much more difficult than explaining the physical formula or the cause of the First World War. Teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the 21st century requires, as they are a product of the old educational system.

So the best advice I can give to 15-year-olds stuck in an outdated school is not to rely too much on adults.

Most of them want the best, but they just don't understand the world. In the past, following the lead of elders was almost a win-win because the world was changing slowly. But the 21st century will be different. Because the pace of change is accelerating, you can never be sure if adults are imparting incorruptible wisdom or outdated delusion to you.

What to rely on instead? Maybe technology? This is even more risky. Technology can help, but if it gains too much power over your life, you become hostage to their goals.

Thousands of years ago, people invented agriculture, but it enriched only a small stratum of the elite, turning most of the people into slaves. Most of them worked from dawn to dusk: weeding weeds, carrying buckets of water, cultivating grain under the scorching sun. It can happen to you too.

Technology is not evil. If you know what you want in life, they can help you achieve it. But if you don't have clear desires, they will shape your goals and control your life. And in the end, you may find that you are serving them, not they are serving you. Have you seen those zombies that roam the streets without looking up from their smartphones? Do you think they control technology? Or does technology control them?

Then you should rely on yourself? It sounds great on Sesame Street or an old Disney cartoon, but in reality it doesn't help much. Even Disney began to realize this. Like Puzzle heroine Riley Anderson, most people barely know themselves. And trying to "listen to oneself", they easily become a victim of manipulation.

With advances in biotechnology and machine learning, it will be even easier to manipulate deep emotions and desires. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, search engines, and the government know how to pull the strings of your heart, can you tell the difference between yourself and the marketing tricks?

You will have to make a lot of effort and better understand your operating system - find out who you are and what you want from life.

This is the oldest piece of advice: know yourself. For thousands of years, philosophers and prophets have urged people to do this. But this advice has never been as important as it was in the 21st century. Now, unlike the times of Lao Tzu and Socrates, you have serious competitors.

Coca-Cola, Amazon, search engines, government - everyone is in the race to hack you. They don't want to hack your smartphone, not your computer, or your bank account, but you and your organic operating system.

Algorithms are watching you right now. Where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will be tracking your every step, every breath, every heartbeat. They rely 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 can manipulate and manipulate you, and there is almost nothing you can do. You will find yourself in the matrix or in the Truman show.

Of course, you can be happy to delegate power to algorithms and trust them to make decisions for you and for the whole world. If so, just relax and have fun. You don't have to do anything. The algorithms will take care of everything.

But if you want to retain at least some control over your personal existence and over the future of life, you have to overtake algorithms, overtake Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. And to run fast, do not take heavy luggage on the road. Leave all illusions behind, because they weigh a lot.