21 Lessons for the 21st Century

replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 percent.8 In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year. It would therefore be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect huma

Jobs that require specialization in a narrow range of routinized activities will be automated. But it will be much more difficult to replace humans with machines in less routine jobs that demand the simultaneous use of a wide range of skills and involve dealing with unforeseen scenarios.

After all, emotions are not some mystical phenomenon—they are the result of a biochemical process. Therefore, in the not too distant future a machine-learning algorithm could analyze the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the emotional impact that a p

Nevertheless, in the long run no job will remain absolutely safe from automation. Even artists should be put on notice.

despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor. Many people might share the fate not of nineteenth-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of

By 2050 a useless class might emerge due not merely to an absolute lack of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also to insufficient mental stamina.

Do we enter the immigration debate with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal, or do we think that some cultures might well be superior to others?

People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists.”

While culture is important, people are also shaped by their genes and their unique personal history. Individuals often defy statistical stereotypes. It makes sense for a firm to prefer sociable employees to stony ones, but it does not make sense to prefer Warmlanders to Coldians.