21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Many people might share the fate not of nineteenth-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of nineteenth-century horses, who were increasingly pushed out of the job market altogether.15

No matter how technology will develop, we can expect that arguments about religious identities and rituals will continue to influence the use of new technologies, and might well retain the power to set the world ablaze. The most up-to-date nuclear missiles and cyber bombs might well be employed to settle a doctrinal argument about medieval texts. R

The idea that we need a supernatural being to make us act morally assumes that there is something unnatural about morality. But why? Morality of some kind is natural. All social mammals from chimpanzees to rats have ethical codes that limit behavior like theft and murder. Among humans, morality is present in all societies, even

Moreover, whereas nuclear war and climate change threaten only the physical survival of humankind, disruptive technologies might change the very nature of humanity, and are therefore entangled with humans’ deepest ethical and religious beliefs. While everyone agrees that we should avoid nuclear war and ecological meltdown, people have widely differ

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, are in a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Eve

Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it.

A ruthless dictator armed with such killer robots will never have to fear that his soldiers will turn against him, no matter how heartless or crazy his orders.

ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, the needy, and the fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not “mistreat any widow or fatherless child”

If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data.