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computer programs can learn to play chess, drive cars, diagnose diseases and invest money in the stock market. In all these fields they might increasingly outperform old-fashioned humans, but will have to compete against each other. They will thus confront new forms of evolutionary pressures. As a thousand computer programs invest money in the stock market, each adopting different strategies, many will go bust but some will become billionaires. In the process, they will evolve remarkable skills that humans can neither rival nor understand. Such a program could not explain its investment strategy to a Sapiens, for the same reason that a Sapiens could not explain Wall Street to a chimpanzee. Many of us might eventually work for such programs, which will decide not only where to invest money, but also whom to hire for a particular job, whom to give a mortgage to and whom to send to prison.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
China’s agrarian system is unjust in the extreme. Speaking of general conditions, landlords and rich peasants who make up less than 10 per cent of the rural population hold approximately 70 to 80 per cent of the land, cruelly exploiting the peasantry. Farm labourers, poor peasants, middle peasants, and other people however, who make up over 90 per cent of the rural population, hold a total of approximately only 20 to 30 per cent of the land, toiling throughout the whole year, knowing neither warmth nor full stomach. These grave conditions are the root of our country’s being the victim of aggression, oppression, poverty, backwardness, and the basic obstacles to our country’s democratisation, industrialisation, independence, unity, strength and prosperity. In order to change these conditions, it is necessary, on the basis of the demands of the peasantry, to wipe out the agrarian system of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation, and realise the system of ‘land to the tillers’.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
In order to understand how thousands of isolated cultures coalesced over time to form the global village of today, we must take into account the role of gold and silver, but we cannot disregard the equally crucial role of steel.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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