Issue 69 - Predictions

Welcome to Issue 69 of Deep Life Reflections, where I share five things I’ve been enjoying and thinking about over the past week.

In this week's issue, we look at our fascination with predictions, particularly about the future. We start with Yuval Noah Harari’s thought-provoking book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which is structured around five major global themes. Next, we journey back to 1974 to revisit Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant yet lesser-known film, The Conversation, which foresaw the invasive role of surveillance in our lives. Finally, we contemplate the origins of our predictive instincts and how we can best use them today.

Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.

1. What I’m Reading

21 Lessons for the 21st Century. By Yuval Noah Harari.

Yuval Noah Harari, best known for his 2011 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which sold more than 25 million copies, returned in 2018 with 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. In this book, Harari tackles what he sees as the most pressing global questions, such as nuclear war, climate change, fake news, and technological disruption. And he wrote this before the global pandemic, the rapid rise of Generative AI, and the current conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The 21st century is indeed moving fast.

In his introduction, Harari writes, “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.” It’s this clarity that enables Harari’s work to stand out. He is a world-class intellectual thinker, able to express his ideas in accessible and powerful language. He often uses what I call his ‘rule of threes’—presenting three connected yet distinct examples to clarify his points.

The book is divided into five parts: The Technological Challenge, The Political Challenge, Despair & Hope (covering topics like Terrorism, War, and God), Truth, and Resilience. Each section is fascinating, with Harari taking a deliberate step to write without self-censorship, valuing freedom of expression over potentially offending or upsetting people, which I believe is an essential ingredient for a debate such as this.

Three topics stood out to me:

• Artificial Intelligence and its impact on work: Harari notes humans possess two types of abilities: physical and cognitive. Machines have long competed with humans in physical tasks (spurring the Industrial Revolution), and now they rival us cognitively, which has huge implications. He talks about the two specific cognitive advantages AI has over humans: connectivity and (rapid) updateability.

• Education and its role in self-reinvention: Harari highlights the calls from teaching experts to transform education from traditional subjects to the 4Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. This approach prepares students to deal with constant change, as by 2050 we won’t just be inventing new ideas and products, we’ll be reinventing ourselves over and over.

• The importance of questioning in a post-truth world: Harari offers this wisdom for dealing with unverified information and the threat of deception: “Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.” (I wrote about this theme last week).

21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a thought-provoking book at a crucial moment of this century. Harari provides clarity, confidence, and some level of calmness in the face of modern complexity and uncertainty. He has teed up an important conversation. It’s on us to continue it.

2. What I’m Watching

The Conversation. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Last week, I wrote about the classic 1974 film noir Chinatown. This week, I'm revisiting that year to explore Francis Ford Coppola's lesser-known work, The Conversation. Both films went head-to-head in the Academy Awards for Best Picture but lost to Coppola’s other film, The Godfather, Part II, highlighting his heavyweight status that decade.

The Conversation stars Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who experiences a crisis of confidence when he suspects the couple he is spying on will be murdered. Hackman is a long way from his hard-boiled, tough-guy character Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Caul is a loner. He’s weary, unhappy, paranoid, and a little meek. As the film progresses, he becomes one of the most tragic characters of the 1970s, with Coppola telling the story of a man who places too much trust in technology and becomes haunted by a guilty conscience.

Francis Ford Coppola has stated that The Conversation is his favourite film he directed. Gene Hackman also considers it his favourite performance. The film is prophetic about the pervasive role of surveillance in society and the ethical dilemmas it poses—the advances in technology that enable everyone to be watched and the discomfort that comes with it. Caul’s descent into paranoia reflects a broader anxiety about privacy and the loss of control over personal information. The film warns of a future where technology not only observes but also shapes our lives, often without our consent or awareness. That feels very 2024.

The film slowly and deliberately pulls the viewer into Caul’s increasingly claustrophobic world, masterfully using sound to achieve this effect (earning it a nomination for Best Sound). Every whisper and background noise carries significant weight. The film opens with a long surveillance sequence where the audio quality fluctuates, mirroring Caul’s obsession with capturing clear sound. The layered use of audio recordings throughout the film not only heightens the sense of paranoia, but also highlights the invasive nature of surveillance.

The Conversation is a bleak and intelligent thriller, but not one of blood and thunder. Instead, it gets under your skin, evoking a sense of being filmed without knowing why or by whom. As the great film critic Roger Ebert observed, “The movie is a sadly observant character study, about a man who has removed himself from life. Here is a man who seeks the truth, but it always remains hidden.”

The final scene is the most powerful and tragic of the entire film. It wasn’t until I watched it for the second time that I recognised its brilliance. The message I think is one of futility: you can try, but you can never really see.     

3. What I’m Contemplating

Predicting the future is a theme reflected—in varying degrees—in the two works discussed this week. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is deeply rooted in the concept of prediction, although Yuval Noah Harari is careful to recognise that the future is never predicted accurately. His lessons emphasise the importance of open discussion rather than precise forecasting. Meanwhile, The Conversation—whether through prediction or insight—was prescient in highlighting the dual role of technology as both a benefit and a threat to society, particularly concerning surveillance. Today, it’s not so much video cameras that concern us, but algorithms and their murky owners.

As human beings, we love to make predictions. It’s part of our evolutionary design; the act of prediction has always been central to our survival. Reacting—or not reacting—to a rustle in the bushes on the African savannah could mean the difference between life and death. We spend a lot of time anticipating what will happen next. Philosopher Daniel Dennett aptly described humans as “anticipation machines.”

We will continue to make predictions, of course, as part of our human nature. But perhaps the only thing we can accurately foresee is how inaccurate our predictions will be. This has been a constant throughout history. Which brings us to perhaps the most valuable lesson: to appreciate the here and now as much as we can.  

4. A Quote to note

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”

- Paul Valéry

5. A Question for you

What predictions have you made in the past that turned out to be inaccurate, and what did you learn from them?

Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.

James

Sharing and Helpful Links

Want to share this issue of Deep Life Reflections via text, social media, or email? Just copy and paste this link:

https://www.deeplifejourney.com/deep-life-reflections/july-12-2024

And if you have a friend, family member, or colleague who you think would also enjoy Deep Life Reflections, simply copy, paste and send them this subscription link:

https://www.deeplifejourney.com/subscribe

Don’t forget to check out my website, Deep Life Journey, for full content on my Pillars, Perspectives & Photography. And you can read all previous issues of Deep Life Reflections here.