Yuval Noah Harari: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The way to peace is through boredom. That applies in more ways than one. What advice would you give to young people today in high school and college, how to have a successful life, how to have a successful career? What they should know, it’s the first time in history nobody has any idea how the world would look like in 10 years. Nobody has any idea how the world would look like when you grow up. Throughout history, it was never possible to predict the future. You live in the Middle Ages, nobody knows. Maybe in 10 years the Vikings will invade, the Mongols will invade, there’ll be an epidemic, there’ll be an earthquake, who knows? But the basic structures of life will not change. Most people will still be peasants. Armies would fight on horseback with swords and bows and arrows and things like that. So you could learn a lot from the wisdom of your elders. They’ve been there before and they knew what kind of basic skills you need to learn. Most people need to learn how to sow wheat and harvest wheat or rice and make bread and build a house and ride a horse and things like that. Now we have no idea, not just about politics. We have no idea how the job market would look like in 10 years. We have no idea what skills will still be needed. You think you’re going to learn how to code because they’ll need a lot of coders in the 2030s? Think again. Maybe AI is doing all the coding. You don’t need any coders. You are going to, I don’t know, you learn to [inaudible 02:25:26] languages, you want to be a translator. Gone. And we don’t know what skills will be needed. So the most important skill is the skill to keep learning and keep changing throughout our lives, which is very, very difficult. To keep reinventing ourselves. Again, it’s in a way a spiritual practice, to build your personality, to build your mind as a very flexible mind. Traditionally, people thought about education like building a stone house with very deep foundations. Now it’s more like setting up a tent that you can fold and move to the next place very, very quickly. Because that’s the 21st century. Which also raises questions about the future of education, what that looks like.…

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