Excuse my feet but I just couldn't be bothered to take them down to take this picture of another afternoon well spent listening to the audiobook of Yuval Noah Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". Both very cerebral and yet entertaining.
How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war or ecological catastrophe? What do we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? How should we prepare our children for the future?
"21 Lessons for the 21st Century" is a probing and visionary investigation into today's most urgent issues as we move into the future. As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarised than ever, Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive.
In twenty-one accessible chapters that are both provocative and profound, Harari untangles political, technological, social, and existential issues and offers advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in: How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? Why is liberal democracy in crisis?
Harari's unique ability to make sense of where we have come from and where we are going has captured the imaginations of millions of readers. Here he invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. When we are deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power. Presenting complex contemporary challenges clearly and accessibly, "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" is essential reading.
And all these densely fact-packed 400-plus pages on a memory stick no bigger than your thumb's fingernail holding more than 320MB! Those are indeed technological advances well beyond understanding for someone like me who started his computing career while writing his first program on Hollerith punch cards and then on 256Kb floppy disks in A and B drives.
But back to Harari's "21 Lessons for the 21st Century": even my trusted www.archive.org hasn't got an online copy of the book (unless you're able to read it in Portuguese here), but there are several audiobooks on YouTube, all by AI Voice Recorder, such as this one, which also highlights the text as it reads along. However, I bought myself a beautiful audiobook read by the British narrator Derek Perkins which I have uploaded to the net. I'm happy to email you the URL if you can keep it under your hat!
To whet your appetit, here's the Introduction.
