Location 70:

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. We might not even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Most of us can’t afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history does not give discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is unfair; but who said history was fair? As a historian, I cannot give people food or clothes—but I can try to offer some clarity, thereby helping to level the global playing field. If this empowers even a handful of additional people to join the debate about the future of our species, I have done my job.



Location 107:

A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality. Each of us is ensnared within numerous all-encompassing spiderwebs, which on the one hand restrict our movements but on the other transmit our tiniest jiggle to faraway destinations.



Location 171:

Humankind is losing faith in the liberal story that dominated global politics in recent decades, exactly when the merger of biotech and infotech confronts us with the biggest challenges humankind has ever encountered.



Location 243:

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.



Location 264:

In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late.



Location 292:

Whereas in 1940 the Dutch gave up their own independence after little more than four days of fighting, they fought for more than four long and bitter years to suppress Indonesian independence. No wonder that many national liberation movements throughout the world placed their hopes on communist Moscow and Beijing rather than on the self-proclaimed champions of liberty in the West.



Location 337:

Humans vote with their feet. In my travels around the world I have met numerous people in many countries who wish to immigrate to the United States, Germany, Canada, or Australia. I have met a few who want to move to China or Japan. But I have yet to meet a single person who dreams of immigrating to Russia.



Location 381:

But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts. Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the faithful with atheists, natives with immigrants, and Europeans with Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. However, economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption, for it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.



Location 398:

The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clear-sighted. Do you feel like running down the street crying “The apocalypse is upon us”? Try telling yourself, “No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.”



Location 407:

Any story that seeks to gain humanity’s allegiance will be tested above all in its ability to deal with the twin revolutions in infotech and biotech. If liberalism, nationalism, Islam, or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms, and bioengineering but also to incorporate them into a new and meaningful narrative.



Location 561:

Of course, personalized art might never catch on, because people will continue to prefer common hits that everybody likes. How can you dance or sing together to a song nobody besides you knows? But algorithms could prove even more adept at producing global hits than personalized rarities. By using massive biometric databases garnered from millions of people, the algorithm could know which biochemical buttons to press in order to produce a global hit that would get everybody swinging like crazy on the dance floors.



Location 578:

The U.S. armed forces need thirty people to operate every unmanned Predator or Reaper drone flying over Syria, while analyzing the resulting harvest of information occupies at least eighty people more. In 2015 the U.S. Air Force lacked sufficient trained humans to fill all these positions, and therefore faced an ironic crisis in manning its unmanned aircraft.



Location 582:

After IBM’s chess program Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, humans did not stop playing chess. Rather, thanks to AI trainers, human chess masters became better than ever, and at least for a while human-AI teams known as “centaurs” outperformed both humans and computers in chess. AI might similarly help groom the best detectives, bankers, and soldiers in history.



Location 594:

Today, despite the shortage of drone operators and data analysts, the U.S. Air Force is unwilling to fill the gaps with Walmart dropouts. You wouldn’t want an inexperienced recruit to mistake an Afghan wedding party for a high-level Taliban conference. Consequently, 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.



Location 604:

How do you unionize a profession that mushrooms and disappears within a decade?



Location 614:

On December 7, 2017, a critical milestone was reached, not when a computer defeated a human at chess—that’s old news—but when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 was the world’s computer chess champion for 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. It was able to calculate seventy million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only eighty thousand such calculations per second, and its human creators had not taught it any chess strategies—not even standard openings. Rather, AlphaZero used the latest machine-learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of a hundred games the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish, AlphaZero won twenty-eight and tied seventy-two. It didn’t lose even once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They may well be considered creative, if not downright genius. Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours. That’s not a typo. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.18



Location 625:

AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. Many programs now routinely outperform human chess players not just in brute calculation but even in “creativity.” In human-only chess tournaments, judges are constantly on the lookout for players who try to cheat by secretly getting help from computers. One of the ways to catch cheaters is to monitor the level of originality players display. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it cannot possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans!



Location 677:

If a forty-year-old former drone pilot takes three years to reinvent herself as a designer of virtual worlds, she may well need a lot of government help to sustain herself and her family during that time. (This kind of scheme is currently being pioneered in Scandinavia, where governments follow the motto “Protect workers, not jobs.”)



Location 700:

The Google search algorithm has a very sophisticated taste when it comes to ranking the web pages of ice cream vendors, and the most successful ice cream vendors in the world are those that the Google algorithm ranks first—not those that produce the tastiest ice cream.



Location 714:

A related idea proposes to widen the range of human activities that are considered to be “jobs.” At present, billions of parents take care of children, neighbors look after one another, and citizens organize communities, without any of these valuable activities being recognized as jobs. Maybe we need to flip a switch in our minds and realize that taking care of a child is arguably the most important and challenging job in the world.



Location 721:

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, free healthcare, free transportation, and so forth. This is in fact the utopian vision of communism. Though the communist plan to start a working-class revolution might well become outdated, perhaps we should still aim to realize the communist goal by other means. It is debatable whether it is better to provide people with universal basic income (the capitalist paradise) or universal basic services (the communist paradise).



Location 758:

American voters might conceivably agree that taxes paid by Amazon and Google for their U.S. business could be used to give stipends or free services to unemployed miners in Pennsylvania and jobless taxi drivers in New York. But would American voters also agree that these taxes should be sent to support unemployed people in places defined by President Trump as “shithole countries”?



Location 783:

Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and so even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before. If universal basic support is aimed at improving the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed at making people subjectively more satisfied with their lot and preventing social discontent, it is likely to fail.



Location 794:

Although they are poor and unemployed, in survey after survey these ultra-Orthodox Jewish 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.



Location 796:

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.