A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman (2015)

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74 pointsgoodJobWalrus14 comments

On people becoming superfluous to the market and the state as machine intelligence progresses:

"... [in the future, work no longer exists for] most of humanity... That mass of people cannot work, but they can still kill people..."

"and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless?

My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most"

On "one of the big problems with technology":

"It develops much faster than human society and human morality, and this creates a lot of tension. But, again, we can try and learn something from our previous experience with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, that actually, you saw very rapid changes in society, not as fast as the changes in technology, but still, amazingly fast.

The most obvious example is the collapse of the family and of the intimate community, and their replacement by the state and the market."

I really do hope tthat we can make that massive cultural shift ttowards finding meaning outside of laboring for the capitalist class. For most of human history, people had no boss and worked for themselves or werr tradesmen(essentially contractors)

I agree.

Kahneman and Harari also discussed how the shift to agriculture, while a great step forward for humanity as a collective group, was a major bummer for the individual. (Much more interesting and healthier to be a hunter-gatherer than a serf.)

Have you ever farmed before? I spent one summer doing it and it is the definition of toil. I couldn't imagine how much more it sucked without modern tools, yet people built irrigation ditches and terraformed the land.

People often miss the meaning behind the Biblical story of the fall of man. The garden of eden can be seen as a metaphor for the hunter gatherer lifestyle. Knowledge, (a metaphor for agriculture) led to the fall. It is further highlighted when God curses cain for killing abel, that when he tills the soil, it will resist him as an enemy. Farmers have to work day and night doing back-breaking work while a sinlge pig can feed nearly 100 people.

Also, interestingly, hunter-gatherer remains had larger skulls as well as a more developed physique. While they had a more nutritious diet, the mental demands required to be a hunter gatherer in those times required relatively extraordinary cognitive ability...a near encyclopedic knowledge of the safety of foods, its various uses as medicines, the ability to accurately map your entire stomping grounds and the memory necessary to store and recall all this information

To anyone interested about the history of human evolution, I highly recommend Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. It's the best book I have read about human history and how we have evolved until now. The book is also listed on the Gates Summer reading list.

I did not find it particularly good. Sure, I learnt some things I did not know, but for the large part I was turned off by Harari's self-assurance about a time for which little archaeological evidence exists. It seemed very unscientific to me.

I read the book around a year ago and I remember him pointing out the uncertainty to his claims. It was simply his personal research and views which I think should be taken at his face value. Sure, there might be a few things wrong here and there but that book left a lasting impact on me with regards to how I perceive day to day generic things.

His MOOC on thr same topic was even more enriching and enjoyable than thr book. 2nd best online course Ive ever taken (P. Zelikow's history class MOOC is the most useful and best class ive taken online or in oerson) as he has such an engaging personality

And for those interested in the future, I would recommend his other book "Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow". I must say that I enjoyed this a lot and I like how he builds his story by references various studies and summarising the key points from them. The book also felt quite "condensed", too often I get a feeling that book has material for long article, but is then artificially expanded. Homo Deus certainly did not have this problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_...

"...the power of the masses, that we are so used to, is rooted in particular historical conditions, economic, military, political, which characterized the 19th and 20th centuries. These conditions are now changing, and there is no reason to be certain that the masses will retain their power."

When he says humans will become useless in the economic sense, i wonder:

When looking at the value created by the average human job, you see a constant decline in that - most of history human though wars, produced basic food, shelter, health. But today, many humans produce stuff that is far from necessary, we could live well with far less of those products and services. Heck, we even semi-deliberatly construct out economy in that way, for example, by creating/allowing tools like advertising and planned-obsolescence, tools that enable the rise of the consumption economy.

So maybe that's a trend, an we need to look where humans+machines are preferred over machines, just barely, and construct our economy around that ?

I guess it kind of depends on what you mean by value when you say "value created by the average human job", but I think for most definitions the opposite is the case. Average productivity per worker has been rising pretty steadily since the industrial revolution, even if you correct for inflation.

This is a 2015 conversation but was interesting as I recall.

Thanks! Added.

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