The 21st Century

As technology renders jobs obsolete, what will keep us busy? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari examines ‘the useless class’ and a new quest for purpose

In response to advances in neuroscience and technologies that alter or read brain activity, researchers are proposing new human rights to mental integrity. These would guard against brain information being abused, hacked, or stolen.

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

IN JULY 2011 Sebastian Thrun, who among other things is a professor at Stanford, posted a short video on YouTube, announcing that he and a colleague, Peter Norvig, were making their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course available free online.

Creativity is the truly unique feature of Homo Sapiens. It’s not intelligence (even a thermostat can be said to be intelligent) and it is not consciousness (probably most primates and maybe mammals have some kind of consciousness), two “things” which incidentally are also very difficult to define and to study: it is creativity that makes the difference, and creativity is easier to measure and study.
What makes us so much more creative is an innate impulse to be different from previous generations. Humans are the only species whose children “rebel” against the lifestyle of the parents. In all other species the children live the exact same life of their parents. Humans are the only ones whose lifestyle changes in almost every generation.