Nuclear weapons and cyberwarfare, by contrast, are high-damage, low-profit technologies. At the Battle of Hastings in 1066 William the Conqueror gained the whole of England in a single day for the cost of a few thousand dead.

In the great age of conquerors warfare was a low-damage, high-profit affair. – from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century book by Yuval Noah Harari – #yuval-noah-harari-quotes Unless you are happy to entrust the future of life to the mercy of quarterly revenue reports, you need a clear idea what life is all about. The invisible hand of the market will force upon you its own blind reply. If you don’t know what to do with the power to engineer life, market forces will not wait a thousand years for you to come up with an answer. Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less patient, and investors are the least patient of all. Very soon somebody will have to decide how to use this power – based on some implicit or explicit story about the meaning of life. – from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century book by Yuval Noah Harari – #yuval-noah-harari-quotesĪrtificial intelligence and biotechnology are giving humanity the power to reshape and re-engineer life. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place.

Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing.

Book 21 lessons for the 21st century