Top Quotes: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” — Yuval Noah Harari
AI and Automation
“The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside us and enable us to engineer and manufacture life. We will learn how to design brains, extend lives, and kill thoughts at our discretion. Nobody knows what the consequences will be. Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam than it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system. Similarly, it will be easier to redirect the flow of our minds than to divine what that will do to our personal psychology or to our social systems.
In the past, we gained the power to manipulate the world around us and reshape the entire planet, but because we didn’t understand the complexity of the global ecology, the changes we made inadvertently disrupted the entire ecological system, and now we face an ecological collapse. In the coming century biotech and infotech will give us the power to manipulate the world inside us and reshape ourselves, but because we don’t understand the complexity of our own minds, the changes we will make might upset our mental system to such an extent that it too might break down.
The revolutions in biotech and infotech are currently being started by engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists who are hardly aware of the political implications of their decisions, and who certainly don’t represent anyone.”
“A driver predicting the intentions of a pedestrian, a banker assessing the credibility of a potential borrower, and a lawyer gauging the mood at the negotiating table don’t rely on witchcraft. Rather, unbeknownst to them, their bans are recognizing biochemical patterns by analyzing facial expressions, tones of voice, hand movements, and even body odors. An AI equipped with the right sensors could do all that far more accurately and reliably than a human.
For this reason the threat of job loss doesn’t result merely from the rise of infotech. It results from the confluence of infotech with biotech. The way from the fMRI scanner to the labor market is long and tortuous, but it can still be covered within a few decades. What brain scientists are learning today about the amygdala and the cerebellum might make it possible for computers to outperform human psychiatrists and bodyguards in 2050.”
“Since humans are individuals, it’s difficult to connect them to one another and to make sure that they are all up to date. In contrast, computers aren’t individuals, and it’s easy to integrate them into a single flexible network. What we’re facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers; rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network. When considering automation, therefore, it’s wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.
For example, many drivers are unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations, and they often violate them. In addition, since every vehicle is an autonomous entity, when two vehicles approach the same intersection at the same time, the drivers might miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, in contrast, can all be connected to one another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they aren’t really two separate entities — they’re part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate and collide and therefore far smaller. And if the transportation department decides to change some traffic regulation, all self-driving vehicles can be easily updated at exactly the same moment, and barring some bug in the program, they’ll all follow the new regulation to the letter.
Similarly, if the WHO identifies a new disease, or if a lab produces a new medicine, it’s almost impossible to update all the human doctors in the world about these developments. In contrast, even if you have ten billion AI doctors in the world — each monitoring the health of a single human being — you can still update all of them within a split second, and they can all communicate to each other their feedback on the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge that at least in some line of work it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.”
“The benefits for human society are likely to be immense. AI doctors could provide far better an cheaper healthcare for billions of people, particularly for those who currently receive no healthcare at all. Thanks to learning algorithms and biometric sensors, a poor villager in an underdeveloped country might come to enjoy far better healthcare via her smartphone than the richest person in the world gets today from the most advanced urban hospital.
Similarly, self-driving vehicles could provide people with much better transportation services, and in particular reduce mortality from traffic accidents. Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined). More than 90% of these accidents are caused by very human errors: somebody drinking and driving, somebody texting, somebody falling asleep at the wheel, somebody daydreaming instead of paying attention to the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2012 that 31% of fatal crashes in the U.S. involved alcohol abuse, 30% involved speeding, and 21% involved distracted drivers. Self-driving vehicles will never do any of these things. Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90%. In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year.
It would therefore be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans — not jobs. Displaced drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.”
“AI might help create new human jobs in another way. Instead of humans competing with AI, they could focus on servicing and leveraging AI. For example, the replacement of human pilots by drones has eliminated some jobs but created many new opportunities in maintenance, remote control, data analysis, and cybersecurity. The US armed forces need 30 people to operate every unmanned Predator or Reaper drone flying over Syria, while analyzing the resulting harvest of info occupies at least 80 people more. In 2015, the US Air Force lacked sufficient trained humans to fill all these positions, and therefore faced an ironic crisis in manning its unmanned aircraft.”
“The problem with all such new jobs, however, is that they will probably demand high levels of expertise, and will therefore not solve the problems of unemployed unskilled laborers. Creating new human jobs might prove easier than retraining humans to actually fill these jobs. During previous waves of automation, people could usually switch from one routine low-skill job to another. In 1920 a farm worker laid off due to the mechanization of agriculture could find a new job in a factory producing tractors. In 1980 an unemployed factory worker could start working as a cashier in a supermarket. Such occupational changes were feasible, because the move from farm to factory and from factory to supermarket required only limited retraining.”
“Despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor. Many people might share the fate not of 19th-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of 19th-century horses, who were increasingly pushed out of the job market altogether.
In addition, no remaining human jobs will ever be safe from the threat of future automation, because machine learning and robotics will continue to improve. A 40-year-old unemployed Walmart cashier who through superhuman effort manages to reinvent herself as a drone pilot might have to reinvent herself again 10 years later, because by then the flying of drones may also have been automated. This volatility will also make it more difficult to organize unions or secure labor rights. Already today, many new jobs in advanced economies involve unprotected temporary work, freelancing, and one-time gigs. How do you unionize a profession that mushrooms and disappears within a decade?”
“Alternatively, Governments could subsidize universal basic services rather than income. Instead of giving money to people, who then shop around for whatever they want, the government might subsidize free education, healthcare, transportation, and so forth.”
“The problem with national and municipal schemes, however, is that the main victims of automation may not live in Finland, Ontario, Livorno, or Amsterdam. Globalization has made people in one country utterly dependent on markets in other countries, but automation might unravel large parts of this global trade network with disastrous consequences for the weakest links. In the 20th century, developing countries lacking natural resources made economic progress mainly by selling the cheap labor of their unskilled workers. Today millions of Bangladeshis make a living by producing shirts and selling them to US consumers, while people in Bangalore earn their keep in call centers dealing with American customers’ complaints.
Yet with the rise of AI, robots, and 3D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the US, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon and print it in NY. The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3D printing centers in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home. Simultaneously, instead of calling customer service in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI rep in the Google cloud (whose accent and tone of voice would be tailored to your preferences). The newly unemployed workers and call center operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing code — so how will they survive?
If AI and 3D printers take over from the Bangladeshis and Bangalorians, the revenues that previously flowed to South Asia will now fill the coffers of a few California tech giants. Instead of economic growth improving conditions all over the world, we might see immense new wealth created in high-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while many developing countries collapse.”
“Perhaps the most successful experiment so far in how to live a contented life in a post-work world has been conducted in Israel. There, about 50% of ulta-Orthodox Jewish men never work. They dedicate their lives to studying holy scriptures and performing religious rituals. They and their families don’t starve partly because the wives often work and partly because the government provides them with generous subsidies and free services, making sure that they don’t lack the basic necessities of life.
Although they’re poor and unemployed, in survey after survey, these men report higher levels of life satisfaction than any other section of Israeli society. This is due to the strength of their community bonds, as well as to the deep meaning they find in studying scripture and performing rituals. A small room full of Jewish men discussing the Talmud might well generate more joy, engagement, and insight than a huge textile sweatshop full of hardworking factory hands. In global surveys of life satisfaction, Israel is usually somewhere near the top, thanks in part to the contribution of these jobless poor people.”
Hacking Humans
“Scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality, and they do not reflect any kind of ‘free will.’ Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren’t based on intuition, inspiration, or freedom — they’re based on calculation.
When a monkey, mouse, or human sees a snake, fear arises because millions of neurons in the brain swiftly calculate the relevant data and conclude that the probability of death is high. Feelings of sexual attraction arise when other biochemical algorithms calculate that a nearby individual offers a high probability of successful mating, social bonding, or some other coveted goal. Moral feelings such as outrage, guilt, or forgiveness derive from neural mechanisms that evolved to enable group cooperation. All these biochemical algorithms were honed through millions of years of evolution. If the feelings of some ancient ancestor were wrong and as a result that person made a fatal mistake, the genes shaping these feelings didn’t pass on to the next generation. Feelings are therefore not the opposite of rationality — they embody evolutionary rationality.”
“When the biotech revolution merges with the infotech revolution, it will produce Big Data algorithms that can monitor and understand my feelings much better than I can, and then authority will probably shift from humans to computers. My illusion of free will is likely to disintegrate as I daily encounter institutions, corporations, and government agencies that understand and manipulate what was until now my inaccessible inner realm.
b*c*d = ahh!
Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals Ability to Hack Humans.
We can already witness how this formula works in medicine. The most important medical decisions in our lives rely not on our feelings of illness or wellness, or even on the informed predictions of our doctor, but on the calculations of computers that understand our bodies much better than we do. Within a few decades, Big Data algorithms informed by a constant stream of biometric data could monitor our health 24/7. They might be able to detect the very beginning of influenza, cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease, long before we feel anything is wrong with us. They could then recommend appropriate treatments, diets, and daily regimens, custom-built for our unique physique, DNA, and personality.
People will enjoy the best healthcare in history, but for precisely this reason they will probably be sick all the time. There is always something wrong somewhere in the body. There is always something that can be improved. In the past, you felt perfectly healthy as long as you didn’t sense pain and you didn’t manifest an apparent disability by, say, limping. But by 2050, thanks to biometric sensors and Big Data algorithms, diseases may be diagnosed and treated long before they lead to pain or disability. As a result, you will always find yourself suffering from some ‘medical condition’ and following this or that algorithmic recommendation. If you refuse, perhaps your medical insurance will become invalid, or your boss will fire you — why should they pay the price of your obstinacy?”
“Who will have the time and energy to deal with all these illnesses? In all likelihood, we could just instruct our health algorithm to deal with most of these problems as it sees fit. At most, it will send periodic updates to our smartphones, telling us that ‘17 cancerous cells were detected and destroyed.’ Hypochondriacs might dutifully read these updates, but most of us will ignore them, just as we ignore those annoying antivirus notices on our computers.
What’s already beginning to happen in medicine is likely to occur in more and more fields. The key invention is the biometric sensor, which people can wear on or inside their bodies, and which converts biological processes into electronic info that computers can store and analyze. Given enough biometric data and enough computing power, external data-processing systems can hack all your desires, decisions, and opinions. They can know exactly who you are.”
“Imagine in 2050 when an algorithm can tell any teen exactly where he is on the gay/straight spectrum (and even how malleable that position is). Perhaps the algorithm will show you pictures or videos of attractive men and women, track your eye movements, blood pressure, and brain activity, and within five minutes display a number on the Kinsey scale. Perhaps you personally wouldn’t want to take such a test, but then maybe you’ll find yourself with a group of friends at Michelle’s boring birthday party, and somebody suggests that you all take turns checking yourself on this cool new algorithm (with everybody standing around to comment on the results). Would you just walk away?
Even if you do, and even if you keep hiding from yourself and your classmates, you won’t be able to hide from Amazon, Alibaba, or the secret police. As you surf the web, watch YouTube, or read your social media feed, the algorithms will discreetly monitor you, analyze you, and tell Coca-Cola that if it wants to sell you some fizzy drink, it had better use the ad with the shirtless guy rather than the shirtless girl. You won’t even know. But they will know, and such info will be worth billions.”
“Christian and Muslim theology focus on the drama of decision-making, arguing that everlasting salvation depends on making the right choice.
What will happen to this view of life as we increasingly rely on AI to make decisions for us? At present we trust Netflix to recommend movies, and Google Maps to choose whether we turn right or left. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making. Democratic elections and free markets will make little sense. So would most religions and works of art.”
“Maybe Tesla will just leave it to the market. Tesla could produce two models of the self-driving car: the Tesla Altruist and the Tesla Egoist. In an emergency, the Altruist sacrifices its owner to the greater good, whereas the Egoist does everything in its power to save its owner, even if it means killing the two kids. Customers will then be able to choose the car that best fits their favorite philosophical view. If more people buy the Tesla Egoist, you won’t be able to blame Tesla for that. After all, the customer is always right.
In a pioneering 2015 study people were presented with a hypothetical scenario of a self-driving car about to run over several pedestrians. Most said that in such a case the car should save the pedestrians even at the price of killing its owner. When they were then asked whether they personally would buy a car programmed to sacrifice its owner for the greater good, most said no. For themselves, they’d prefer the Tesla Egoist.”
“By using our growing understanding of the human brain and drawing on the immense powers of machine learning, the North Korean regime might be able to for the first time in history to gauge what each and every citizen is thinking at each and every moment. If a North Korean looks at a picture of Kim Jong-un and the biometric sensors pick up the telltale signs of anger (higher blood pressure, increased amygdala activity), that person will be in the gulag tomorrow.
Granted, due to its isolation the North Korean regime might have difficulty developing the required tech by itself. However, the tech might be pioneered in more tech-savvy nations and copied or bought by the North Koreans and other backward dictatorships. Both China and Russia are constantly improving their surveillance tools, as are a number of democratic countries, ranging from the US to Israel. Nicknamed ‘the start-up nation,’ Israel has an extremely vibrant high-tech sector and a cutting-edge cybersecurity industry. At the same time it’s also locked in a deadly conflict with the Palestinians, and at least some of its leaders, generals, and citizens might well be happy to create a total surveillance regime in the West Bank as soon as they have the necessary tech.
Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on Facebook, or travel from one city to another, they are likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones, or spy software. The gathered data is then analyzed with the aid of Big Data algorithms. This helps the Israeli security forces to pinpoint and neutralize potential threats without having to place too many boots on the ground. The Palestinians may administer some towns and villages in the West Bank, but the Israelis control the sky, the airwaves, and cyberspace. It therefore takes surprisingly few Israeli soldiers to effectively control about 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.
In one tragicomic incident in 2017, Palestinian laborer posted to his private Facebook account a picture of himself in his workplace, alongside a bulldozer. Adjacent to the image he wrote ‘Good morning!’ An automatic algorithm made a small error when translating the Arabic letters. Instead of ysabechhum (‘good morning’), the algorithm identified the letters as ydbachhum (‘hurt them’). Suggesting that the man might be a terrorist intending to use a bulldozer to run people over, Israeli security forces swiftly arrested him. He was released after they realized that the algorithm made a mistake.”
“Given 20th-century tech, it was inefficient to concentrate too much info and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the info fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the US, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of info centrality. In fact, AI might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more info it can analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all info relating to a billion dollar in one database, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial info on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data is strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — the attempt to concentrate all their info in one place — might become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.”
“We will increasingly rely on algorithms to make decisions for us, but is unlikely that the algorithms will start to consciously manipulate us. They won’t have any consciousness.
Science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness and assume that in order to match or surpass human intelligence, computers will have to develop consciousness. The basic plot of almost all AI movies and novels revolves around the magical moment when a computer or robot gains consciousness. Once that happens, either the human hero falls in love with the robot or the robot tries to kill all the humans, sometimes both things happen simultaneously.
But in reality, there is no reason to assume that AI will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way.
There are several different paths leading to high intelligence, and only some of these paths involve gaining consciousness. Just as airplanes fly faster than birds without ever developing feathers, so computers may come to solve problems much better than mammals without ever developing feelings. True, AI will have to analyze human feelings accurately in order to treat human illnesses, identify human terrorists, recommend human mates, and navigate a street full of human pedestrians. But it could do so without having any feelings of its own. An algorithm doesn’t need to feel joy, anger, or fear in order to recognize the different biochemical patterns of joyful, angry, or frightened apes.
Of course, it’s not absolutely impossible that AI will develop feelings of its own. We still don’t know enough about consciousness to be sure. In general, there are three possibilities we need to consider:
- Consciousness is somehow linked to organic biochemistry in such a way that it’ll never be possible to create consciousness in nonorganic systems.
- Consciousness isn’t linked to organic biochemistry, but it is linked to intelligence in such a way that computers could develop consciousness, and computers will have to develop consciousness if they’re to pass a certain threshold of intelligence.
- There are no essential links between consciousness and either organic biochemistry or high intelligence. Therefore, computers might develop consciousness — but not necessarily. They could become superintelligent while still having zero consciousness.
With our present state of knowledge, we can’t rule out any of these options. Yet precisely because we know so little about consciousness, it seems unlikely that we could program conscious computers anytime soon. Therefore, despite the immense power of AI, for the foreseeable future its usage will continue to depend to some extent on human consciousness.
The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated AI of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We’re unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mom does and that use this uncanny ability to try to sell us something — be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use these inner leverages against us.”
Bioengineering
“The superrich will finally have something really worthwhile to do with their stupendous wealth. While up until now they have only been able to buy little more than status symbols, soon they might be able to buy life itself. If new treatments for extending life and upgrading physical and cognitive abilities prove to be expensive, humankind might split into biological castes.
Throughout history the rich and the aristocracy always imagined that they had skills superior to everybody else’s, which is why they were in control. As far as we can tell, this wasn’t true. The average duke wasn’t more talented than the average peasant — he owed his superiority only to unjust legal and economic discrimination. However, by 2100 the rich might really be more talented, more creative, and more intelligent than the slum-dwellers. Once a real gap in ability opens between the rich and the poor, it will become almost impossible to close it. If the rich use their superior abilities to enrich themselves further, and if more money can buy them enhanced bodies and brains, with time the gap will only widen. By 2100, the richest 1% might not only own not merely most of the world’s wealth but also most of the world’s beauty, creativity, and talent.
The two processes together — bioengineering coupled with the rise of AI — might therefore result in the separation of humankind into a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens. To make an already ominous situation even worse, as the masses lose their economic importance and political power, the state might lose at least some of the incentive to invest in their health, education, and welfare. It’s very dangerous to be redundant. The future of the masses will then depend on the goodwill of a small elite. Maybe there’s goodwill for a few decades. But in a time of crisis — like climate catastrophe — it would be very tempting and easy to toss the superfluous people overboard.”
“What if engineers could find a way to grow meat from cells? If you want a hamburger, just grow a hamburger, instead of raising and slaughtering an entire cow (and transporting the carcass thousands of miles).
This might sound like science fiction, but the world’s first clean hamburger was grown from cells — and then eaten — in 2013. It cost $330,000. Four years of R&D brought the price down to $11/unit, and within another decade industrially produced clean meat is expected to be cheaper than slaughtered meat. This technological development could save billions of animals fro a life of abject misery, could help feed billions of malnourished humans, and could simultaneously help to prevent ecological meltdown.
There are many things that governments, corporations, and individuals can do to avoid climate change. But to be effective, they must be done on a global level. When it come to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They’re at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet.”
“Russia might actually benefit from [climate change]. Because Russia has relatively few coastline assets, it is far less worried than China or Kiribati about rising sea levels. And whereas higher temperatures are likely to turn Chad into a desert, they might simultaneously turn Siberia into the breadbasket of the world. Moreover, as ice melts in the far north, the Russian-dominated Arctic sea lanes might become the artery of global commerce, and Kamchatka might replace Singapore as the crossroad of the world.”
“After four billion years of organic life evolving by natural selection, science is ushering in the era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.
In the process, Homo sapiens itself will likely disappear. Today we’re still apes of the hominid family. We still share most of our bodily structures, physical abilities, and mental faculties with Neanderthals and chimps. Not only are our hands, eyes, and brains distinctly hominid, but so are our lust, our love, our anger, and our social bonds. Within a century or two, the combo of biotech and AI might result in physical and mental traits that completely break free of the hominid mold. Some believe that consciousness might even be severed from any organic structure and could surf cyberspace free of all biological constraints. On the other hand, we might witness the complete decoupling of intelligence from consciousness, and the world will be dominated by superintelligent but completely nonconscious entities.”
Church and State
“In countries such as Israel and Iran rabbis and ayatollahs have a direct say about a government’s economic policy, and even in more secular countries such as the US and Brazil religious leaders influence public opinion on matters ranging from taxation to environmental regulations. Yet a closer look reveals that in most of these cases, traditional religions really play second fiddle to modern scientific theories. When Ayatollah Khamenei needs to make a crucial decision about the Iranian economy, he will not be able to find the necessary answer in the Quran, because 7th-century Arabs knew very little about the problems and opportunities of modern industrial economies and global financial markets. So he, or his aides, must turn to Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the modern science of economics to get answers. Having made up his mind to raise interest rates, lower taxes, privatize government monopolies, or sign an international tariff agreement, Khamenei can then use his religious knowledge and authority to wrap the scientific answer in the garb of this or that Quranic verse and present it to the masses as the will of Allah. But the garb matters little. When you compare the economic policies of Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, Jewish Israel, Hindu India, and Christian America, you just don’t see that much of a difference.”
“Japan did not blindly copy the Western blueprint. It was fiercely determined to protect its unique identity and to ensure that modern Japanese citizens would be loyal to Japan rather than to science, modernity, or some nebulous global community.
To that end, Japan upheld the native religion, Shinto, as the cornerstore of Japanese identity. In truth, the Japanese state reinvented Shinto. Traditional Shinto was a hodgepodge of animist beliefs in various deities, spirits, and ghosts, and every village and temple had its own favorite spirits and local customs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Japanese state created an official version of Shinto, while discouraging many local traditions. This ‘state Shinto’ was fused with very modern ideas about nationality and race, which the Japanese elite selected from the European imperialists. Any element in Buddhism, Confucianism, and the samurai feudal ethos that could be helpful in cementing loyalty to the state was added to the mix. To top it all off, state Shinto enshrined as its supreme principle the worship of the Japanese emperor, who was considered a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, and himself no less than a living god.”
“It worked like magic. The Japanese modernized at a breathtaking pace while simultaneously developing a fanatical loyalty to their state. The best-known sign of the success of state Shinto is the fact that Japan was the first power to develop and use precision-guided missiles. Decades before the US fielded the smart bomb, and at a time when Nazi Germany was only beginning to deploy dumb V2 rockets, Japan sank dozens of allied ships with precision-guided missiles — kamikaze. Whereas in present-day precision-guided munitions the guidance is provided by computers, the kamikaze were ordinary airplanes loaded with explosives and guided by human pilots willing to go on one-way missions. This willingness was the product of the death-defying spirit of sacrifice cultivated by state Shinto. The kamikaze thus relied on combining state-of-the-art tech with state-of-the-art religious indoctrination.”
“In some cases states might create a completely new religion to bolster their unique identity. The most extreme example can be seen today in Japan’s former colony of North Korea. The North Korean regime indoctrinates its subjects with a fanatical state religion called Juche. Juche is a mix of Marxism-Leninism, some ancient Korean traditions, a racist belief in the unique purity of the Korean race, and the deification of Kim Il-Sung’s family line. Though nobody claims that the Kims are descendants of a sun goddess, they’re worshiped with more fervor than almost any god in history. Perhaps mindful of how the Japanese Empire was eventually defeated, North Korean Juche has also long insisted on adding nuclear weapons to the mix, depicting their development as a sacred duty worthy of supreme sacrifices.”
Terrorism
“Terrorists hope that even though they can barely make a dent in the enemy’s material power, fear and confusion will cause the enemy to misuse his intact strength and overreact. Terrorists calculate that when the enraged enemy uses his massive power against them, he will raise a much more violent military and political storm than the terrorists themselves could ever create. During every storm, many unforeseen things happen. Mistakes are made, atrocities are committed, public opinion wavers, neutrals change their stances, and the balance of power shifts.”
“Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theater producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to combat terrorism effectively, we must realize that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to their provocations.
Terrorists undertake an impossible mission: to change the political balance of power through violence, despite having no army. To achieve their aim, they present the state with an impossible challenge of its own: to prove that it can protect all of its citizens from political violence, anywhere, anytime. The terrorists hope that when the state tries to fulfill this impossible mission, it will reshuffle the political cards and hand them some unforeseen ace.”
“In the 14th century the Black Death killed between a quarter and half of the European population, yet no king lost his throne as a result, and no king made much of an effort to overcome the plague. Nobody back then thought preventing plagues was part of a king’s job. On the other hand, rulers who allowed religious heresy to spread in their dominions risked losing their crown, and even their head.
Today, a government might take a softer approach to domestic and sexual violence than to terrorism, because despite the impact of movements such as #MeToo, rape doesn’t undermine a government’s legitimacy. In France, for example, more than 10,000 rape cases are reported each year, with an estimated tens of thousands of additional cases left unreported. Rapists and abusive husbands, however, are not perceived as an existential threat to the French state, because historically the state didn’t build itself on the promise to prevent sexual assault.”
“Back in the Middle Ages, the public sphere was full of political violence. In fact, the ability to use violence was the entry ticket to the political game, and whoever lacked this ability had no political voice. Numerous noble families retained armed forces, as did towns, guilds, churches, and monasteries. When a former abbot died and a dispute arose about succession, the rival factions — comprising monks, local strongmen, and concerned neighbors — often used armed force to decide the issue.
Terrorism had no place in such a world. Anybody who was not strong enough to cause substantial material damage was of no consequence. If in 1150 a few Muslim fanatics murdered a handful of civilians in Jerusalem, demanding that the Crusaders leave the Holy Land, the reaction would have been ridicule more than terror. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you should have at least gained control of a fortified castle or two. Terrorism didn’t bother our medieval ancestors because they had much bigger problems to deal with.
During the modern era, centralized states gradually reduced the level of political violence within their territories, and in the last few decades Western countries have managed to eradicate it almost entirely. The citizens of France, Britain, or the US can struggle for control of towns, corporations, orgs, and even the government itself without any need of an armed force. Command of trillions of dollars, millions of soldiers, and thousands of ships, planes, and nuclear missiles passes from one group of politicians to another without a single shot being fired. People quickly got used to this and now consider it their natural right. Consequently, sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state. A small coin in a big empty jar makes a lot of noise.
This is why the theater of terrorism is so successful. The state has created a huge space empty of political violence, which now acts as a sounding board, amplifying the impact of any armed attack, however small. The less political violence in a particular state, the greater the public shock at an act of terrorists. Killing a few people in Belgium draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence makes them particularly vulnerable to terrorism.”
Geopolitics
“So far the only successful invasion mounted by a major power in the 21st century has been the Russian conquest of Crimea. In February 2014 Russian forces invaded neighboring Ukraine and occupied the Crimean peninsula, which was subsequently annexed to Russia. With hardly any fighting, Russia gained strategically vital territory, struck fear into its neighbors, and reestablished itself as a world power. However, the conquest succeeded due to an extraordinary set of circumstances. Neither the Ukrainian army nor the local population showed much resistance to the Russians, while other powers refrained from directly intervening in the crisis. These circumstances will be hard to reproduce elsewhere around the world. If the precondition for a successful war is the absence of enemies willing to resist the aggressor, it seriously limits the available opportunities.
Indeed, when Russia sought to reproduce its Crimean success in other parts of Ukraine, it encountered substantially stiffer opposition, and the war in eastern Ukraine bogged down into an unproductive stalemate. Even worse (from Moscow’s perspective), the war has stoked anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine and turned that country from an ally into a sworn enemy. Just as success in the First Gulf War tempted the US to overreach itself in Iraq, success in Crimea may have tempted Russia to overreach itself in Ukraine.
Taken together, Russia’s wars in the Caucasus and Ukraine in the early 21st-century can hardly be described as very successful. Though they have boosted Russia’s prestige as a great power, they have also increased distrust and animosity toward Russia, and in economic terms they’ve been a losing enterprise. Tourist resorts in Crimea and decrepit Soviet-era factories in Luhansk and Donetsk hardly balance the price of financing the war, and they certainly don’t offset the costs of capital flight and international sanctions. To realize the limitations of the Russian policy, one just needs to compare the immense economic progress of peaceful China in the last 20 years o the economic stagnation of ‘victorious’ Russia during the same period.
The brave talk from Moscow notwithstanding, the Russian elite itself is probably well aware of the real costs and benefits of its military adventures, which is why it has so far been very careful not to escalate them. Russia has been following the schoolyard-bully principle: pick on the weakest kid, and don’t beat him up too much, lest the teacher intervene. If Putin had conducted his wars in the spirit of Stalin, Peter the Great, or Genghis Khan, then Russian tanks would have long ago made a dash for Tbilsi and Kiev, if not for Warsaw and Berlin. But Putin is neither Genghis nor Stalin. He seems to know better than anyone else that military power cannot go far in the 21st-century, and that waging a successful war means waging a limited war. Even in Syria, despite the ruthlessness of Russian serial bombardments, Putin has been careful to minimize the Russian footprint, to let others do all the serious fighting, and to prevent the war from spilling over into neighboring countries.”
Religious History
“A touching case occurred in the jungles of Ivory Coast. After a young chimp named Oscar lost his mother, he struggled to survive on his own. None of the other females was willing to adopt and take care of him, because they were burdened with their own young. Oscar gradually lost weight, health, and vitality. But when all seemed lost, Oscar was ‘adopted’ by the band’s alpha male, Freddy. The alpha made sure that Oscar ate well, and even carried him around on his back. Genetic tests proved that Freddy wasn’t related to Oscar. We can only speculate what drove the gruff old leader to take care of the orphaned toddler, but apparently ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, the needy, and the fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not ‘mistreat any widow or fatherless child,’ and before the prophet Amos complained about social elites ‘who oppress the poor and crush the needy.’
Even among Homo sapiens living in the ancient Middle East, the biblical prophets were hardly original in their moral views. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were well-known in the legal and ethical codes of Sumerian city-states, pharaonic Egypt, and the Babylonian Empire. Periodic rest days long predated the Jewish Sabbath.”
“Monotheism did little to improve the moral standards of humans — do you really think Muslims are inherently more ethical than Hindus just because Muslims believe in a single god while Hindus believe in many gods? Were Christian conquistadores more ethical than pagan Native American tribes? What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecution and holy wars. Polytheists found it perfectly acceptable that different people worshipped different gods and performed diverse rites and rituals. They rarely if ever fought, persecuted, or killed people just because of their religious beliefs. Monotheists, in contrast, believed that their God was the only god, and that He demanded universal obedience. Consequently, as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and religious discrimination.”
“Compare, for example, the attitude of Emperor Ashoka of India in the third century BCE to that of the Christian emperors of the late Roman Empire. Emperor Ashoka ruled an empire teeming with myriad religions, sects, and gurus. He gave himself the official title of ‘Beloved-of-the-Gods’ and ‘the king who regards everyone with affection.’ Sometimes around 250 BCE, he issued an imperial edict of tolerance that proclaimed:
Beloved-of-the-Gods, the king who regards everyone with affection, honors both ascetics and the householders of all religions…and values that there should be growth in the essentials of all religions. Growth in essentials can be done in different ways, but all of them have as their root restraint in speech, that is, not praising one’s own religion, or condemning the religion of others without good cause…Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought ‘Let me glorify my own religion,’ only harms his own religion. Therefore contact between religions is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-Gods, the king who regards everyone with affection, desires that all should be well learned in the good doctrines of other religions.
Roman Emperors adopted a very different approach to religion. Beginning with Constantine the Great and his son, the emperors closed all non-Christian temples and forbade so-called pagan rituals on pain of death. The persecution culminated under the reign of Emperor Theodosius — whose name means ‘given by God’ — who in 391 issued the Theodosian Decrees, which effectively made all religions except Christianity and Judaism illegal (Judaism too was persecuted in numerous ways, but it remained legal to practice it.) According to the new laws, one could be executed even for worshipping Jupiter or Mithras in the privacy of one’s own home. As part of their campaign to cleanse the empire of all infidel heritage, the Christian emperors also suppressed the Olympics. Having been celebrated for more than a thousand years, the last ancient Olympiad was held sometime in the late 4th or early 5th century.”
“Only in the 19th and 20th centuries do we see Jews make an extraordinary contribution to humankind as a whole, through their outsized role in modern science. In addition to such well-known names as Einstein and Freud, about 20% of all Nobel Prize laureates in science have been Jews, though Jews constitute less than 0.2% of the world’s population.”
“You can hardly name a single Jew who was critical to the birth of modern physics, chemistry, biology, or the social sciences. We don’t know what Einstein’s ancestors were doing in the days of Galileo and Newton, but in all likelihood they were far more interested in studying the Talmud than in studying the properties of light.
The great change occurred only in the 19th and 20th centuries, when secularization and the Jewish Enlightenment caused many Jews to adopt the worldview and lifestyle of their Gentile neighbors. Jews then began to join the universities and research centers of countries such as Germany, France, and the US. Jewish scholars brought from the ghettos and shtetls important cultural legacies. The central value of education in Jewish culture was one of the main reasons for the extraordinary success of Jewish scientists. Other factors included the desire of a persecuted minority to prove its worth, and the barriers that prevented talented Jews from advancement in more anti-Semitic institutions such as the army and state administration.”
“The very same religions that inspire hate and bigotry in some people inspire love and compassion in others. For example, in the early 1960s the Methodist minister Ted McIlvenna became aware of the plight of LGBT people in his community. He began exploring the situation of gays and lesbians in society in general, and in May 1964 convened a pioneering three-day dialogue between clergymen and gay and lesbian activists in California. The participants subsequently set up the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, which in addition to the activists included Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, and United Church of Christ ministers. This was the first American org to dare to use the word ‘homosexual’ in its official title.
In the following years CRH activities ranged from organizing costume parties to taking legal actions against unjust discrimination and persecution. The CRH became the seed of the gay rights movement in CA. Reverend McIlvenna and the other men of God who joined him were well aware of the biblical injunctions against homosexuality. But they thought that it was more important to be true to the compassionate spirit of Christ than to the strict word of the Bible.”
Propaganda and Conspiracy Theories
“In one noteworthy experiment, people were asked to donate money to help a poor 7-year-old girl from Mali named Rokia. Many were moved by her story and opened their hearts and purses. However, when in addition to Rokia’s personal story the researchers also presented people with stats about the broader problems of poverty in Africa, respondents suddenly became less willing to help. In another study, scholars solicited donations to help either one sick child or eight sick children. People gave more money to the single child than to the group of eight.
One method of dealing with with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories. How does the global economy function, and is it good or bad? That question is too complicated to grasp. It’s far easier to imagine that 20 multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media.”
“In the early 1930s left-wing Western journalists and intellectuals were praising the USSR as an ideal society at a time when Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens were dying in the millions from the man-made famine that Stalin orchestrated. Whereas in the age of Facebook and Twitter it’s sometimes hard to decide which version of events to believe, at least it’s no longer possible for a regime to kill millions of people without the world knowing about it.”
“Zionism holds sacred the adventures of about 0.2% of humankind and 0.005% of the earth’s surface during a tiny fraction of human history. The Zionist story fails to ascribe any meaning to the Chinese empires, to the tribes of New Guinea, and to the Andromeda galaxy, as well as to the countless eons that passed before the existence of Moses, Abraham, and the evolution of apes.
Such myopia can have serious repercussions. For example, one of the major obstacles for any peace treaty between Israelis and Palestinians is that Israelis are unwilling to divide Jerusalem. They argue that this city is ‘the eternal capital of the Jewish people’ — and surely you can’t compromise on something eternal. What are a few dead people compared to eternity? This is of course utter nonsense. Eternity is at the very least 14 billion years — the current age of the universe. Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and humans have existed for at least 2 million years. In contrast, Jerusalem was established just 5,000 years ago and the Jewish people are at most 3,000 years old. This hardly qualifies as eternity.
As for the future, physics tells us that Earth will be absorbed by an expanding sun about 7.5 billion years from now and that our universe will continue to exist for at least 13 billion years more. Does anyone seriously believe that the Jewish people, the state of Israel, or Jerusalem will still exist 13,000 years from now, let alone in 13 billion years?”
“What could be more real than actually tasting Christ in your mouth? Traditionally, the priest made these bold proclamations in Latin, the ancient language of religion, law, and the secrets of life. In front of the amazed eyes of the assembled peasants the priest held high a piece of bread and exclaimed, ‘Hoc est corpus!’ — ‘This is the body!’ — and the bread supposedly became the flesh of Christ. In the minds of the illiterate peasants, who didn’t speak Latin, ‘Hoc est corpus!’ got garbled into ‘Hocus-pocus!’ Thus was born the powerful spell that can transform a frog into a prince and a pumpkin into a carriage.”
“The Sabbath starts at sunset on Firday and lasts until sunset on Saturday, and in between Orthodox Jews refrain from almost any kind of work, including even tearing toilet paper from a roll in the lavatory. (There has been some discussion of this among the most learned rabbis, who concluded that tearing toilet paper would break the Sabbath taboo; consequently, devout Jews who want to wipe their bottoms on the Sabbath have to prep a stash of pre-torn toilet paper in advance.)
In Israel, religious Jews often try to force secular Jews and even complete atheists to keep these taboos. Since Orthodox parties usually hold the balance of power in Israeli politics, over the years they have succeeded in passing many laws that banned all kinds of activities on the Sabbath. Though they were unable to outlaw the use of private vehicles on the Sabbath, they’ve been successful in banning public transit. This nationwide religious sacrifice affects mainly the weakest sectors of society, especially as Saturday is the only day of the week when working-class people are free to travel and visit distant relatives, friends, and tourist attractions. A rich grandmother has no problem driving to visit her grandchildren in another town, but a poor one who has no car cannot visit her grandchildren, because there’s no buses or trains running on the Sabbath.
By inflicting such difficulties on hundreds of thousands of citizens, the religious parties confirm and establish their unwavering faith in Judaism. Though no blood is shed, the well-being of many people is still being sacrificed. If Judaism is just a fictional story, then it’s cruel and heartless to prevent a grandmother from visiting her grandchildren or an impoverished student from going to the beach to have some fun. By nonetheless doing so, the religious parties tell the world — and themselves — that they really believe in the Jewish story.”
“While nationalism teaches me that my nation is unique and that I have special obligations toward it, fascism says that my nation is supreme, and that I owe my nation exclusive obligations. I should never prefer the interests of any group or individual over the interests of my nation, no matter what the circumstances are. Even if my nation stands to make but a paltry profit from inflicting much misery on millions of strangers in a far-off land, I should have no qualms about supporting my nation. Otherwise, I’m a despicable traitor. If my nation demands that I kill millions of people — I should kill millions. If my nation demands that I betray truth and beauty — then I should betray truth and beauty.
How does a fascist evaluate art? How does a fascist know whether a movie is good? Very simple — there’s just one yardstick. If the movie serves the national interests — it’s a good movie. If not, it’s bad. And how does a fascist decide what to teach kids in school? He uses the same yardstick. Teach the kids whatever serves the interests of the nation; the truth doesn’t matter.”
“The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying. You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you’ll never encounter something that doesn’t change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you.
Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. They believe that there’s some eternal essence somewhere, and if only they can find it and connect to it, they will be completely satisfied. This eternal essence is sometimes called God, sometimes the nation, sometimes the soul, sometimes the authentic self, and sometimes true love — and the more people are attached to it, the more disappointed and miserable they became when they fail to find it. Worse yet, the greater the attachment, the greater the hatred such people develop toward any person, group, or institution that seems to stand between them and their cherished goal.
According to the Buddha, then, life has no meaning, and people don’t need to create any meaning. They just need to realize that there’s no meaning, and therefore be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena. ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises: ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ The whole problem is that we constantly do something. Not necessarily on the physical level — we can sit immobile for hours with closed eyes — yet on the mental level we are extremely busy creating stories and identities, fighting battles, and winning victories. To really do nothing means that the mind also does nothing and creates nothing.”
“In the 18th century, the royal dynasties of both Burma and neighboring Siam prided themselves on their devotion to the Buddha, and gained legitimacy by protecting the Buddhist faith. The kings endowed monasteries, built pagodas, and listened every week to learned monks who preached eloquent sermons on the five basic moral commandments of every human being: to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual abuse, deception, and intoxication. The two kingdoms nevertheless fought each other relentlessly. In 1767, the army of the Burmese king Hsinbyushin stormed the capital of Siam after a long siege. The victorious troops killed, looted, raped, and probably also got intoxicated here and there. They then burned down much of the city, with its palaces, monasteries, and pagodas, and carried home thousands of slaves and cartloads of gold and jewels.
King Hsinbuyshin didn’t take his Buddhism lightly. Seven years after his great victory, the king made a royal progression down the great Irrawaddy River, worshipping at the important pagodas along the way, and asking Buddha to bless his armies with more victories. When Hsinbyushin reached Rangoon, he rebuilt and expanded the most sacred structure in all of Burma: the Shwedagon Pagoda. He then gilded the enlarged edifice with his own weight in gold, erected a gold spire on top of the pagoda, and studded it with precious gems (perhaps looted from Siam). He also used the occasion to execute the captive king of Pegu, his brother, and his son.
In 1930s Japan, people even found imaginative ways to combine Buddhist doctrines with nationalism, militarism, and fascism. Radical Buddhist thinkers such as Nissho Inoue, Ikki Kita, and Tanaka Chigaku argued that in order to dissolve one’s egoistic attachments, people should completely give themselves up to the emperor, excise all personal thinking. and observe true loyalty to the nation. Various ultranationalist orgs were inspired by such ideas, including a fanatical military group that sought to overthrow Japan’s conservative political system by a campaign of assassination. They murdered the former finance minister, the director general of the Mitsui corporation, and eventually the prime minister. They thereby speeded up the transformation of Japan into a military dictatorship. When the military then embarked on a war, Buddhist priests and Zen meditation masters preached selfless obedience to state authority and recommended self-sacrifice for the war effort. In contrast, Buddhist teachings on compassion and nonviolence were somehow forgotten and had no perceptible influence on the behavior of Japanese troops in Nanjing, Manila, or Seoul.”
“When you give up all the fictional stories, you can observe reality with far greater clarity than before, and if you really know the truth about yourself and the world, nothing can make you miserable. But that is of course easier said than done.
We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality. Overlooking this difference has been a matter of survival for us.”
Conclusion
“People usually fear that machines will be cold and uncaring. But the problem might be exactly the opposite. Humans yearn to be understood. We want somebody to understand how we feel. Humans often fail to understand our experience — because they’re too busy with their own experiences. But computers will be different. They will have an exquisitely fine-tuned understanding of how we feel, because they will have direct access to our hearts and our brains, while they have no distracting feelings of their own. So when you come back home from work grumpy and stressed, perhaps your husband won’t notice it, but your fridge will immediately take note and offer you the food that best matches your mood.
We might become so accustomed to computers that perfectly understand how we feel that we will become very intolerant of all the imperfect and self-centered humans who don’t understand us. What will that do to human relationships and society? What happens when your fridge is more attuned to your emotions than your husband is?”
“Aong our closest relatives in nature — the chimps — homosexual behavior is quite common. Most sexual activities among chimps aren’t done in order to procreate little chimps. Rather, chimps use sex to cement political alliances, establish intimacy, and defuse tensions. Is that unnatural? It’s wrong to think that sex exists only for the purpose of procreation. It’s true that sex initially evolved for that purpose, but like almost every evolving trait, things have changed over time. There's not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Feathers first appeared to keep ancient reptiles warm. Now birds use them to fly. Fingers appeared to help our ancestors climb trees. Now we us them to play the piano. Is that unnatural? Mouths appeared to enable organisms to take food into their bodies. Now we use them to speak and to kiss — is that unnatural?”
“Love [to me] is being connected. To love means to be liberated from the obsession with whatever thoughts, emotions, and desires pop into my own mind right now, and instead to listen to others and see what’s happening with them. It starts with simple things, such as listening. When you talk with someone and you care mainly about what you want to say, you can’t really hear that person. You’re just waiting for the moment they stop talking, so you can finally get a word in. But when you let go of your own thoughts, you can listen. Similarly in romance, if you are with someone just because that person makes you feel good, sooner or later you’ll leave that person, because they’re bound to say and do things that will make you feel really bad. If you’re in a relationship just in order to have pleasant experiences for yourself, that relationship will not last for long.”
