We are entering the ‘age of bewilderment’

If you think Donald Trump and his kind are the principal threat to the world today, think again. What, for instance, might be the impact of having billions of unemployed people? Or of a digital oligopoly seizing control of the world’s information? Technology-based challenges are coming in about 10 minutes that will dwarf any politician or political movement.

That’s the takeaway from “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (Spiegel & Grau), Yuval Noah Harari’s frightening new book of bigthink. Harari, author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” pulls back from our current enraged squabbling about petty political disputes to consider the evolution of, say, work. Machines put huge numbers of manual laborers and factory workers out of business, but those people largely moved on to jobs organized around the cognitive capacities of humans. Artificial intelligence is racing so far beyond human capabilities, while filling in crucial gaps such as the ability to read and react correctly to human emotions, that cognitive workers could become as redundant as a farm worker cutting grain with scythes. How will people occupy their time when a huge class has nothing to do all day?

Harari combines that image with warnings about another potential mass disruption — tens of millions of refugees coming north and west from parts of the world most affected by climate change — and wonders whether today’s angry politics will soon look like a friendly family brunch. What happens when restless masses of unemployed natives collide with restless masses of unemployed foreigners?

Keep in mind that wealth disparities are only going to go up, regardless of how popular Bernie and the Sandersistas should become. Tinkering with the tax code isn’t going to change the effect of the coming wealth-multipliers. Instead of spending their money mostly on status symbols and real estate, the rich will be able to exploit medical advances to build themselves superior bodies and genius minds that will vastly widen the gap with the middle class.

Given that human happiness is linked to how well you think you measure up to others, the indisputably higher quality of life in the plutocracy is bound to spark social unrest. Think Occupy Wall Street, only this time with more bullets and fewer tweets.

In the 1990s, we were told that we’d reached the end of history. With Soviet Communism defeated, liberal free-market democracy was the undisputed winning political system, and it would be only a matter of time before Honduras and North Korea became the next Denmark and Iowa.

Today, things look so uncertain that Harari dubs this moment “the age of bewilderment.” The Silicon Valley giants play a central role, but imagine how much more power and control they will wield when we’re all wearing biometric gadgets that track everything going on in our bodies in exchange for discounts on our health insurance. (Or, when the government takes over health care, we are simply required to wear them.)

You sneaked a cigarette? Sorry, GoogleUSWellness, the government’s partner in tracking American health, found out. You just voided your health insurance. Also Google sold information about what makes you salivate during TV commercials to Amazon and you will soon be getting a lot of tempting coupons for those cholesterol-bomb onion rings your doctor warned you against.

At some point you will begin to feel like what Silicon Valley already considers you to be: an easily-manipulated mechanism for buying their stuff.

Instead of the Matrix taking over our lives, we’re voluntarily joining it because we like Amazon and Apple and Google and Facebook. Look at how much of our information we’ve already given these companies: If the CIA tracked us so closely as to offer us a deal on flights to Orlando 10 minutes after we checked out the Disney World Web site, we’d panic. But when Google does it, we mostly just shrug.

I don’t agree that things are heading into the abyss: All previous predictions of increased automation causing mass unemployment proved false, after all. And Harari himself offers some soothing chapters about the future in which he, for instance, plays down the threat of terrorism.

But he cautions that everything is about to change for all of us, causing so much stress and unease and confusion that it’ll be as though we are all age 15 at the same time. Strangeness, he says, is the new normal.