In the future, Automation will disrupt your job and AI will try to hack your brain—and probably sooner than you think. Historian Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens, and, now, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century) explains why the best preparation has nothing to do with learning to code or building a bunker. Yuval Noah Harari just may know you better than you know yourself. After all, he’s made a career out of studying humans. First, he chronicled the history of mankind in his book Sapiens; then, he followed it up with thought-provoking contemplations about the future of mankind in Homo Deus; and in his latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he’s looking at what’s happening right now and trying to figure out what it means for the rest of this century. The prospects are… gnarly. Basically: technological innovation and artificial intelligence are going to accelerate at a pace we’ve yet to really comprehend. (Fifteen years ago, Facebook wasn’t even around. Now it’s so efficient at micro-targeting that it helped sway a democratic election. Imagine what it might be capable of in another fifteen years.) That means automation will likely disrupt your current job (and your next one, and the one after that), and you’ll be the target of attention-grabbing, behavior-modifying algorithms so exponentially effective you won’t even realize you’re being targeted. The best defense against that? An emotional flexibility that allows for constant reinvention, and knowing yourself well enough that you don’t get drawn into the deep Internet traps set for you. It sounded crazy to us, too. And then we talked to Harari.
