21 Lessons for the 21st Century

What Hacker News says

1. NitionMay 2026
   I want to share a post from the Red Hand Files blog written by musician Nick Cave, because I think he explains it more eloquently than I could.

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   From: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imaginatio...

   In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant in the work place. This sounds entirely feasible. However, he goes on to say that AI will be able to write better songs than humans can. He says, and excuse my simplistic summation, that we listen to songs to make us feel certain things and that in the future AI will simply be able to map the individual mind and create songs tailored exclusively to our own particular mental algorithms, that can make us feel, with far more intensity and precision, whatever it is we want to feel. If we are feeling sad and want to feel happy we simply listen to our bespoke AI happy song and the job will be done.

   But, I am not sure that this is all songs do. Of course, we go to songs to make us feel something – happy, sad, sexy, homesick, excited or whatever – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.

   It is perfectly conceivable that AI could produce a song as good as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, for example, and that it ticked all the boxes required to make us feel what a song like that should make us feel – in this case, excited and rebellious, let’s say. It is also feasible that AI could produce a song that makes us feel these same feelings, but more intensely than any human songwriter could do.

   But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen – a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation – a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation. We are also listening to Iggy Pop walk across his audience’s hands and smear himself in peanut butter whilst singing 1970. We are listening to Beethoven compose the Ninth Symphony while almost totally deaf. We are listening to Prince, that tiny cluster of purple atoms, singing in the pouring rain at the Super Bowl and blowing everyone’s minds. We are listening to Nina Simone stuff all her rage and disappointment into the most tender of love songs. We are listening to Paganini continue to play his Stradivarius as the strings snapped. We are listening to Jimi Hendrix kneel and set fire to his own instrument.

   What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it. Artificial Intelligence, for all its unlimited potential, simply doesn’t have this capacity. How could it? And this is the essence of transcendence. If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend? And therefore what is the purpose of the imagination at all. Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome. Where is the transcendent splendour in unlimited potential? So to answer your question, Peter, AI would have the capacity to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.

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2. Orange1688Dec 2022
   An excellent gauge for how good a book is can be found in how many times you catch yourself thinking back on it even after some time has passed. Through this, my favorite this entire year is The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank's diary). Without a doubt one of the best books I have ever read, just through how supremely human it is.

   Other books are:

   -The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

   -Sapiens by Yuval Yuval Noah Harari

   -21 Lessons for the 21st Century

   -Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyn man!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman

   -Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

   -Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

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3. koliberOct 2022
   “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, by Yuval Harari. I am blown away.

   His first book, “Sapiens” clarified a few cultural concepts which made the world a little easier to understand. This book is a firehose of more of that. Harari explains complex political, sociological, cultural problems through a practical lens. The book provides little advice, but a lot of tools for understanding. It’s left-leaning, but carnal and if you are sensitive about your views, do not read it. On the other hand, if you are curious, looking for perspectives and tools for understanding the world around us, and are not afraid to have your views challenges or upturned, give it a go.

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4. NoPicklezMar 2021
   I'm struggling to find anything meaningful in this article.

   But it does remind me of a few chapters within Yuval Noah Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" book which I'd recommend everyone read. But essentially he talks about how we're currently seeing a large influx and requirement for digital or technology related jobs, which will over time take some but not all jobs from traditional jobs (not up for debate). Now many of the people who have worked in traditional jobs such as check outs, clerks, factory workers etc will likely be higher in age and will struggle to reskill to other jobs, not just due to the change in technical requirements but purely due to age and our ability to learn completely new tasks.

   Fast forward and the discussion talks about how the current and new workforce might be expected to change jobs many times more than previous generations due to such a rapidly changing world. He therefore raises the point that we all may need to reskill multiple times during our lives and will require significant cognitive strain on older people who may have previously been able to master their professional for decades.

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5. mooseyJun 2019
   But facebook can shrink, and dramatically so.

   The main asset that facebook has is data. I've been reading "21 Lessons for the 21st Century", and I agree with Dr. Harari's argument that we need a regulatory environment for data, and the way that the cultural/political swing is going, all it takes is one election to completely upend the value that facebook holds. I would go one step further and argue that actions that the US has taken in regards to China and Europe endanger facebook in areas where they will most want to be in the coming years.

   What will Zuck need to do to survive and thrive in that? I don't know and I have a strong feeling that he doesn't either, but I'm guessing that he has some investors that do.

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6. philippzDec 2018
   Yuval Harari - Sapiens

   Yuval Harari - Homo Deus

   Yuval Harari - 21 lessons for the 21st century

   Frank Schätzing - The Swarm

   Peter Drucker - The Effective Executive

   Stephen Hawking - A Short History Of Time

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