The 21st century will bring changes and challenges unlike any humans have encountered before. Globalism and technological innovations are changing the structures of societies worldwide—and the changes are happening quickly. This book highlights the biggest challenges in the modern world, and it offers advice on making sense of and navigating such transitional times. If people don’t become better informed about the present and participate in shaping the future, the world could have a class of obsolete workers whose jobs have been automated, people could lose their ability to make their own decisions, and nuclear weapons could annihilate much of the world.
Technological innovations are changing the structures of society—from politics to the labor market. If humans are to address these challenges, they’ll need to create new tools and approaches that fit this new context.
For centuries, people have developed political models that fit the political, economic, and social context of the time, and these models provided a story to make sense of the world and an ideal future to work toward. In recent decades, the dominant political story has been liberalism, which promoted individual freedoms—through free trade, low taxes, free elections, peaceful international relations, rights for minority groups, and pro-immigration policies. However, the massive technological innovations are automating jobs, broadening inequality, and altering human behavior in ways that are making the liberal story irrelevant—and people must either adapt an old political model to modern times or create a new one.
Parallel revolutions in infotech and biotech are transforming societies by:
In the 21st century, increasingly sophisticated technology could automate so many jobs that unemployment skyrockets among low-skilled workers. Neurological discoveries and technological innovations will enable machines to do jobs better than people can, because machines are immune to human error and biases.
Large-scale automation will likely cause a net loss in employment, creating a “useless class” of unskilled workers. Some workers will be able to get training in a new set of skills, but technology will continue to change so rapidly that those new skills could also become obsolete a decade later. This could eventually create a post-work society, in which workers face a fight against irrelevance and governments must determine alternative ways to support people.
In addition to threatening jobs, technology threatens human liberty, as algorithms learn so much about people that they gain an immense power to influence and manipulate. Liberalism maintains that everyone has free will to choose how to vote, how to act, and what to buy—but algorithms can make better choices than you do. For instance, Netflix’s algorithm might suggest a movie that fits your tastes better than one you would have picked.
Each decision that algorithms make for you has two effects:
People’s reliance on algorithms can easily snowball to big life decisions, such as where to go to college, which career to pursue, and who to marry.
As technology threatens to create a useless class of unskilled workers and algorithms have the potential to overpower free will, inequality could grow exponentially: On one end of the spectrum will be the useless class, and on the other end will be the wealthy CEOs of tech companies. Making matters worse, biotech innovations could enable wealthy elites to become biologically superior by improving their physical and cognitive abilities and extending their lives. If wealthy elites gain biological advantages over the poor—and the poor are pushed out of opportunities to work and gain wealth—it could create a vicious cycle that continually widens the gap between haves and have-nots. Taken to the extreme, bioengineering could eventually turn the rich into a separate species with no need for the underclass of commoners.
Now that we’ve laid out the challenges, let’s explore potential methods that societies can use to address them.
How will humans tackle the massive challenges they face in the 21st century? One option is to band together and tackle them as communities. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to facilitate this by using AI to suggest groups that might be meaningful to individual Facebook users. The goal is to use the social media platform and the algorithmic tools to rebuild communities online in order to improve connections among people throughout the world. However, the project will only work if these online communities also exist offline, because creating a true connection with someone requires you to interact with her as a whole person, which generally calls for face-to-face interaction. In order to achieve this, Facebook may have to adopt strategies that actually encourage users to spend less time online and more time in the real world.
While you can belong to various communities—such as your family, your religion, and your nation—all humans are part of a global civilization, and cultural identities are merely branches of that civilization. In recent generations, as globalization has connected the world economically, socially, and technologically, all of humankind has merged into one global civilization. Although there are differences among groups within the global civilization—such as religious beliefs and national identities—all of the basic and practical matters are largely in agreement. These include:
Despite the existence of a global civilization, in recent years, feelings of disconnection from global economic forces and fears that globalization would disintegrate national systems of education and healthcare have revived a sense of nationalism. However, nationalism can’t offer solutions to the three major challenges that people will face in the 21st century, all of which exist on a global scale and require an international response:
If political models, governments, and scientists have failed to provide answers for how to navigate the immense challenges of the 21st century, could religion hold the answers? In order to explore this, we’ll look at three areas where religion falls short:
Humans now find themselves in a global civilization, facing global problems, while also being divided by nationalism and religion. Amid this division, tensions have grown among people of different nationalities, and they come to a head in the issue of immigration. Immigration requires an understood deal between migrants and host countries—but immigration opponents say that immigrants aren’t holding up their end of the deal, while immigration advocates say that host countries are falling short.
There are three terms of this deal:
Immigration is difficult to resolve because it is nuanced—both sides have legitimate arguments, but the friction lies in deciding where to draw the line. Difficult as it may be, each nation’s ability to reach an agreement on immigration will be a major indicator of its potential to come together with the rest of the global civilization to address the looming challenges of the 21st century.
Even with the right tools, people need to have the right mindset and a clear view of the world in order to overcome modern challenges.
In recent decades, fear of terrorism has gripped the world, ignited wars, and shaped politics—and that’s by design. Terrorism is a strategy for those with little power and few resources to inflict major harm, so, instead of causing physical damage, terrorists aim to incite fear and chaos. Terrorists aggravate their enemy so that it overreacts, and that overreaction causes the destruction that the terrorists don’t have the strength to create. For example, the 9/11 terrorist attack caused mass fear and confusion, which prompted the U.S. government to respond with a show of power by declaring a War on Terror. That war ultimately destabilized the Middle East and created space for the terrorists to seize more power. In order to fight terrorism, governments must remember that terrorists have little power, and they must resist the urge to make a public show of their response.
Furthermore, military warfare is becoming an outdated means of gaining prosperity and geopolitical status. Whereas the most valuable economic assets used to be physical—such as land, gold, and goods—modern wealth is information and technology, which are impossible to capture through war. Today, most successful countries have improved their geopolitical status by improving their economies rather than their militaries. Additionally, with nuclear weapons and cyberwarfare, the potential for serious damage or total annihilation is higher than ever before.
Just as people inflate the perceived threats of terrorism and war, many people overestimate the importance of their own culture and its impact on the world. Children are raised with a misunderstanding of their culture’s importance, as school history lessons emphasize certain events, downplay others, and frame history based on how it affected their ancestors. This self-important view shows a lack of humility and a disregard for history, and it makes people more inclined to act in their own interest than in the interest of the global community.
People often think that their community alone possesses virtues like truth and morality. Religions decree that God dictates laws—such as what to wear, who to love, and what not to eat. While these divine laws have helped to maintain social order in many eras and cultures, they have also been the source of violence and discrimination. In reality, religious laws are unnecessary to keep order because morality is baked into human DNA.
In contrast to religion, secularism achieves social order by adhering to a code of ethics, which includes:
In order to address the challenges of the 21st century, you need to be able to make sense of the world. This is increasingly difficult, as technology and globalization make the world more complex—but the threats of technology, nuclear weapons, and climate change make it more important than ever before to understand the world and help shape its future.
In order to find truth, you must recognize what you know—and what you don’t know. Today, individuals don’t need as wide a breadth of knowledge because they have access to a global network of collective knowledge and others’ expertise. However, that access to knowledge has led to two dangerous phenomena:
People’s difficulty in understanding how the world works also jeopardizes justice, which requires an understanding of cause and effect. For example, although you may think you’re innocently shopping for clothes, others may blame you for perpetuating child labor in sweatshops halfway across the world. While it’s unrealistic for individuals to try to close all their knowledge gaps, the best they can do is to acknowledge their ignorance and act with humility.
In a complex world where individuals struggle to understand the way things work, it’s no surprise that lies have become pervasive. In fact, institutions have long used fictional stories in order to get strangers to cooperate for common causes. For example,
People are often willing to believe something enough to act on it, even though, at their core, they know the story is fiction. However, believing lies can cause harm, so everyone has a responsibility to question and investigate the information they consume, and to keep an eye out for biases they unknowingly hold.
Once you’ve identified the challenges ahead, considered ways to address them, and found a way to make sense of the changing world, you must find your role in it. First, we’ll discuss the practical side of finding your role in society, then we’ll explore how to find deeper meaning in life.
As people prepare for the future, they must face the reality that the modern education system is not fit to prepare children for the 21st century. There are several reasons for this, including:
As people prepare for a new reality and new challenges in the 21st century, they’ll inevitably ponder, “What is the meaning of life?” People have been asking this question throughout history, and they generally want the answer to fit into a story, because humans use stories to make sense out of the world. Two common meaning-of-life stories are:
However, these stories don’t give meaning to your life—instead, you assign meaning to your life and experiences. Religion is only sacred because humans believe it to be. The universe is only mighty and beautiful because humans attach their feelings to it. You don’t need a story to prove that your life is meaningful—it’s meaningful because you give it meaning. At a time when global political, economic, and social systems are changing and the liberal story is becoming irrelevant, each person must reflect on how to make sense of the world.
In order to understand life, you must understand your own mind, because your mind determines how you experience, interpret, and react to the world around you. There are many ways to get in tune with your mind, including art, therapy, physical activity, and meditation, which takes your attention away from the noise and distractions of the external world and focuses it on the reality of your breath and bodily sensations.
When most people begin meditating, they struggle to concentrate for more than a few seconds at a time. When your mind inevitably wanders during your meditation, you learn how little control you actually have over your thoughts—and that realization is the first step in gaining that control. If you don’t begin to learn about your own mind, then algorithms will soon know your thoughts, fears, and desires better than you do.
Despite the huge challenges the world faces in the 21st century, humans have many powerful tools in their collective arsenal. These tools give humankind the power to make things much worse or much better—it all depends upon how we educate ourselves about the issues we face, and how well we can address them as a global civilization.