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From time to time, there is a book that I will read, which will inform everything that I write about and lots of the things that I think about, for the period I read the book and for a short time afterwards.

Matthew Walker’s- Why we sleep, was one of those books.

21 lessons for the 21^st century, by Yuval Noah Harari

I loved Harari’s first book - Sapiens, and the second book, Homo deus, where he looked at the future and what he thought was coming.

That 21 lessons goes beyond those again and they are extraordinary relevant books.

Much of it centres around the algorithm. He uses the algorithm as a generic term, to cover what will be one of the most defining facts of humanity in this century (if we let it). The algorithm is the computers ability to filter your requests and your preferences and your wants and your needs and deliver it right in front of your face, the irresistible.

It’s the ability to make choices, that you generally have to make, hour by hour and minute by minute of everyday and to take those choices away, based on your preferences.

The algorithm is your suggested films on Netflix.

The algorithm is your suggested music on Apple music.

The algorithm is your suggested purchases or frequently bought together on Amazon.

This was the start of it, and it has enabled those organisations to become so powerful in selling things, it is almost hard to believe.

It’s the modification, manipulation and misinterpretation of data at its most complex level.

The algorithm doesn’t stop here though, it improves and learns and gets better and better and begins to inform almost every part of our life.

If you use social media, your algorithm controls what you see on social media, based on your preferences, but also based on what the master’s of social media want the algorithm to show you, take Strava for example.

Even the feed on Strava is controlled by the algorithm. If you ever wondered why you don’t see the people you want to see first, it’s because you see the people that the algorithm shows you first. There are reasons for that and strategies beyond what you understand or think about.

There is an interesting part of the story in Ready player one in the book and in the movie, when Nolan Sorrento (the bad guy) presents to his board of directors, how much advertising he can put on a screen before people start to fit.

It’s ok, the algorithm will know how much you can take before you fit.

The algorithm is machine learning, the algorithm is artificial intelligence that will have extraordinary power, to do extraordinarily good, but that coin obviously has a flip side and we may find it hard to resist with everything else that it sends.

It will choose our partners and chose our courses at university and chose our careers.

It will allow employers to choose employees, without meeting them and Husbands to choose Wives (it already does that). You may say that It can never replace human emotion or creativity or instinct, but as you’ll see in the second part of this post, it is likely to do all three and relatively quickly.

I would reference this back to my life and to my work.

If I had 5 years left, I would disregard the algorithm entirely and I would get on with my work, the way I have always done. If I had 20 years left, that might be impossible. If I had 40 years left, I would be studding this extensively.

Blog Post Number - 2071