Quotes About Change

The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity's search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.

With time, the 'wheat bargain' became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.

Una revolución real exige, tarde o temprano, sacrificios que las empresas, sus empleados y sus accionistas no están dispuestos a hacer.

We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.

medida que la IA continúe mejorando, los empleados humanos deberán aprender sin parar nuevas habilidades y cambiar de profesión.

At the close of the twentieth century it appeared that the great ideological battles between fascism, communism and liberalism resulted in the overwhelming victory of liberalism. Democratic politics, human rights and free-market capitalism seemed destined to conquer the entire world. But as usual, history took an unexpected turn, and after fascism and communism collapsed, now liberalism is in a jam. So where are we heading?

in the long run no job will remain absolutely safe from automation.

mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly.

But evolution has no purpose.

To stay relevant—not just economically but above all socially—you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides.

This raises the possibility that the immense improvement in material conditions over the last two centuries was offset by the collapse of the family and the community.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the idea of giving voting rights to women was generally seen in the USA as outrageous; the prospect of a female cabinet secretary or Supreme Court justice was simply ridiculous; whereas homosexuality was such a taboo subject that it could not even be openly discussed.

technology. Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm. After all, what's the advantage of

Silence isn't neutrality; it is supporting the status quo.

Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.

People tended to reconcile themselves to the status quo, declaring that 'this is how it always was, and this is how it always will be'.

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly.

El aislacionismo nacionalista probablemente sea incluso más peligroso en el contexto del cambio climático que en el de la guerra nuclear.

don't rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don't understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the twenty-first century is going to be different. Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.

other words, while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two.