Three Rules for Living in the 21st Century

Apply them in any context, any time, anywhere.

I loved Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. History seen through the eyes of really smart people becomes a lens that magnifies the traces of our own psychosocial make up. But eye-opening and compelling as Sapiens may have been its follow-up Homo Deus was way less endearing.

The problem lies with the author and its roots are to be found in the very same focus that made Sapiens such an exceptional book to read. Harari is unusual amongst historians in his anthropological and cross-disciplinary extrapolative approach that uses data to link specific points of the past and draw a continuum that allows us to make sense of our journey from our point of origin to today.

The technique is solid when it’s applied to evidence we can see and facts we can examine and its suppositions make the kind of total sense you expect from a historian of Harari’s caliber. But apply this to the future, even the very near future and you’re on shaky foundation from which it is difficult to build much.

“what science fiction takes into account is what Harari doesn’t because, bound by the need for data and the use of as a scientific approach as possible, he…