People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.
Interpretation
Mechanization has historically not led to mass unemployment due to the emergence of new jobs that machines cannot perform as well as humans.
In this quote, Yuval Noah Harari addresses a common concern about mechanization and its potential to cause widespread job loss. He points out that while past trends show that as some professions become obsolete due to technology, new roles have often arisen that require uniquely human skills, ensuring that employment levels remained stable. However, he warns that this trend is not guaranteed to persist indefinitely, suggesting that we must remain vigilant about the evolving nature of work in the face of technological advancement.
In practice
In a discussion about the future of work during a corporate seminar.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.
People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.
Ultimately, users visit your website for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop.
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)
So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.
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