#98 Yuval Noah Harari on The 2 Most Important Skills For the Rest Of Your Life

One of the things many people don't realize about the AI revolution and the automation revolution: They imagine it as some kind of a one-time event ... This is an extremely unlikely scenario, because we are nowhere near the maximum potential of AI. The speed in which it develops is only likely to accelerate.

The most important thing to know about living, right now, in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals. We have the technology to decipher... what you think, what you want, to predict human choices, to manipulate human desires in ways which were never possible before.

When you put the two together, when infotech merges with biotech, what you get is the ability to create algorithms that understand me better than I understand myself. And then these algorithms cannot just predict my choices but also manipulate my desires and basically sell me anything, whether it's a product or a politician.

One of the biggest battles in the 21st century is likely to be between privacy and health—and I guess that health is going to win. Most people will be willing to give up a very significant amount of privacy in exchange for far better healthcare.

There are three big challenges to humankind in the 21st century: They are nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption. And these should be the first three items on the political agenda of every country.

If, in the past, education was like building a stone house with very deep foundations, now I would say that education is more like constructing a tent that you can fold up and move to another location very quickly and easily.

I want to bring more clarity to the public conversation on what's happening in the world. I think that too much of the public discussion is focused either on the wrong issues or is extremely confused and unclear. And people are flooded by enormous amounts of information, which they don't know how to make sense of.

This can mean that, maybe in 30 years, the poorest person on the planet can get better healthcare from her or his smartphone than the richest person today gets from the best hospitals and the best doctors.

Our identity is really just a story, which we constantly construct and embellish. I mean, you can say that the entire human mind is a machine that constantly produces stories—and especially one very important story, which is my story.

The profile that people create about themselves in Facebook or Instagram; it should be obvious: It doesn't really reflect your actual existence, your actual reality —both inner reality and outer reality. The percentage of time you smile in your Instagram account is much bigger than the percentage of time you smile in real life.

From very ancient times, all the philosophers and saints and sages tell people to get to know yourself better. It's one of the, maybe the most, important thing in life—to get to know yourself better. But for all of history, this was a process of exploration ... What does it mean when the process self-exploration is being outsourced to a big data algorithm? The philosophical implications are quite mind-boggling.

Nobody really knows how the job market would look like in 2040. So, they should be suspicious of all these kinds of advices by people who pretend that they know what the job market would need in 20 years.

The best investment, I would say, is in emotional intelligence and in mental balance and in these kinds of skills of how to keep changing throughout your life—how to keep learning throughout your life.

In the end, the self is a story and not a real thing.