My first book Sapiens was about the distant past of humanity
And the second book Homo Deus was about the distant future
So in this book
I tried to write about the immediate issues that are facing humans today
So the kind of complacent feeling that many people have that oh, there are so many things humans, only humans can do this
Computer will never be able to do that
And suddenly computers are able to do it
And you have the famous cases of Alpha Go that taught itself
How to play Go and then defeated the world champion
In the long run, no job is absolutely safe
If a job involves a lot of creativity and a lot of social interaction
This is more difficult for an AI
But if a job is very repetitive or it involves mainly just analyzing data, then this is something which is easy to replace
So if you compare, for example, doctors and nurses
People think, oh, doctors, they are far more important than nurses
So nurses, this is easy to replace
Actually the opposite
Many doctors, almost the only thing they do is analyze data
Do you have fever? Do you vomit?
And gives you a few tests
And then the doctor takes all this information
Analyzes it against previous cases and previous patterns the doctor knows
And reaches a diagnosis
And this is exactly what
An AI will be able to do much better than humans
The job of a nurse, in contrast, this is far more complicated
The nurse also needs to do things like change your bandage
Or give an injection to a small boy who is afraid
And to do that
She needs good physical skills
And also good social relations
So I think we'll have AI doctors
Long before we have AI nurses
And this is true of many other professions as well
Anger and fear and boredom
They are biochemical patterns
All these recognizing patterns, computers are learning how to do that
Analyze the tone of voice
Analyze the different facial movement in the face
And after analyzing millions and millions of people and interactions
The computer can also learn what is the best way to interact
And ultimately, computers can do things that no human can do
Which is access what's happening inside your body
In the end, I often say that we are entering the era of hacking human beings
Everybody's talking about hacking computers
But really the most, they really want to hack human beings
To understand what's happening not in your smartphone, but in your brain
And the last advantage of computers in this respect is that
They don't have feelings of their own
You shout at me and I become angry and I shout back
And it goes over the database of jokes that make you laugh in the past
And chooses exactly the right joke to make you less angry, less tense
And the danger here is that people will become so used to interacting with computers
Who know them and react to them in a very appropriate way
That people would actually become intolerant of other humans
So this is one of the big questions
How to live in a world when you have these big systems which get to know you better and better
The situation today is a bit like we are all children
And there is this mother who knows us so well
And they are not necessarily
They don't really care about you like your mother cares about you
They just want to sell you something
The most important thing is to teach people how to learn and how to change throughout their lives
So maybe you need to change your profession four or five times during your life
Also a very important thing is to get to know yourself better
Often humans don't understand themselves
But in the days of Buddha, Confucius, you didn't have much competition
But now you have competition
You have all these corporations and organizations that are constantly trying to hack you
And if they understand you better than you understand yourself
They can very easily manipulate you
One of the ways to protect yourself is you get to know yourself
In certain fields, we have no chance
But in other aspects
The one thing that humans certainly have and machines don't is consciousness
Is the ability to feel things
To have subjective experiences like pain and pleasure and love and hate
The key insight is that we don't need to think about it just in terms of competition between humans and computers
We can let the computers do all these things instead of us
And focus on developing our humanity
If we can solve the problem of how to support people without engaging in these jobs
And instead be involved in meaningful community and social relations
This could be far more meaningful than driving a truck or than working in a factory