BOOK REVIEW: 1) Thank You For Being Late 2) Sapiens- A Brief History Of Humankind

1. BOOK REVIEW
1) “Thank You For
Being Late”
2) “Sapiens-A Brief
History Of
Humankind”
BY - RUDRAKSHI CHOUDHARY
ROLL NO.- 17BCL089

2. THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE
THOMAS FRIEDMAN
Thank You for Being Late is one of the best books by Thomas Friedman's. Friedman brings together his asthmatic
exhilaration and journalistic approach with a much more advanced critique of globalization than in his earlier books. He
emphasizes how the combination of technology and market-based policies launched by Britain's Margaret Thatcher and USA
President Ronald Reagan in the 1980's drove today's increasing acceleration of global change. He takes some time to reflect
on the state of the world, arguing that we are living through “one of the greatest inflection points in history”. That critical point
is dominated by “the three largest forces on the planet- technology, globalization and climate change- all accelerating at once.”
We shouldn’t panic about this, he says. Instead, we should pause, try to understand it, and then engage productively. That’s
what the book tries to do.
These global changes affect people across different countries but generally in alarming ways. The Ad Hoc Committee on the
Triple Revolution in the 1960's identified such changes in technology, automation, structural unemployment as requiring a
similar speed-up of social and policy adaptation including proposals for universal basic incomes. System thinkers back in the
1960's including in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1965) understood these accelerating changes as caused by interlinkages and
positive feedback loops. In 1974, the US Congress launched its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to help policy
makers anticipate these technological changes.
Friedman while retaining his market-based corporate-focused view of these technologically-driven global restructuring
processes, steps back in this book and calls for independence from this fast-paced daily whirlwind speeding our lives. He gets
more philosophical---calling for patience, wisdom and recalling on deeper values of community, empathy and trust.
Friedman's title Thank You for Being Late, shows his personal experiences of waiting for his interviewees to arrive at his
favourite restaurant due to unusual traffic delays. As his anxiety and irritation began to give way to periods of reflection,
Friedman greeted the latecomers by thanking them for being late.

3. This book races through Friedman's comprehensible explanations of today's ascending technological assets in digital power, Moore's Law and
sensors, as the three eras of computing: 1) Tabulating Era, 2) Programing Era and, 3) Cognitive Era. He covers his interviews with reports from
key experts from Google (GOOG), Intel (INTC), Hadoop, Autodesk (ADSK), General Electric (GE), International Business Machine (IBM) and
the modernization of the so-called "shareconomy" AirBnB, Uber and their ways of organizing trust. These are learned from reputation ratings
pioneered by eBay (EBAY) and sharing pioneered by Linus Torvald, Jimmy Wales and other founders of the open-source movement. Friedman
gives less consideration to the Blockchain Revolution as Don and Alex Tapsott and the monetary changes disrupting legacy banking and finance
and the reports on the Financial System.
Friedman draws more attention towards describing the global changes caused by human activities on the Earth's climate, loss of biodiversity and
increasing threats to our environment and its life-support systems. He cites the best teachers, including ecologists Tom Lovejoy and Jorgen
Randers, physics and green energy expert Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, agronomist Wes Jackson, restoring prairies' species and
diversity at the Land.
One of the key points here is that these three trends (technology, globalization and climate change) are accelerating so fast that change “can
outpeace the capacity of the average human being and our societal structures to adopt and absorb them”. That leads to cultural angst, unrest, failing
institutions, conflict and migration, scapegoating and extreme politics. If we think we can slow the world down and catch up, we are deluding
ourselves, Friedman suggests.
One of Friedman’s big strengths is that as a well respected commentator, he can get an interview with anyone. And with decades of experience as a
Middle East correspondent, he is not afraid to go where the action is.
Friedman however misses on the expression of the deeper values ingrained in the global sovereignty of cooperative enterprises which employ more
people on this planet than all the for-profit companies combined.
Friedman's conclusions: today's technological revolutions are vast enough to be termed beyond "the cloud" to his description as "the supernova".
He correctly cites the lag in social and political innovations which must now be overcome by such units as OTA, still copied in many other
countries but shut down in the USA in 1996.

4. Many obsolete political parties, health and educational systems, tax and trade policies need overhauling today, as Friedman describes.
And while he clearly gets very excited about new technologies, he is committed to old fashioned human relationships, building trust and
community. He sees the potential of simple interventions as well as high tech ones, and the need to be open to new ideas wherever they
come from. “We need an entrepreneurial mind set, a willingness to approach politics and problem solving with an utterly hybrid,
heterodox and nondogmatic mixing and matching of ideas, without regard to traditional left right catechisms- letting all kinds of ideas
coevolve, just as plants and animals coevolve in nature”.
To restore lost trust in current institutions, Friedman ends with recalling his childhood in Minnesota with its inclusive humanity and the
community responsibility of its civic and business leaders in such innovative groups as the Itasca Project.
Amen to that, and for all my hesitations, I still found “Thank You For Being Late” a thoughtful, generous, and hopeful reflection on the
state of our world. This book is full of new information and insights and a surprisingly good read as well.

5. SAPIENS-A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
YUVAL NOAH HARARI
"HISTORY IS SOMETHING THAT VERY FEW PEOPLE HAVE BEEN DOING WHILE EVERYONE ELSE
WAS PLOUGHING FIELDS AND CARRYING WATER BUCKETS”
SAPIENS is a guide to becoming an expert on the entire history of the human race as it reviews everything our
species has been through from ancient ancestors to our dominating place in the world today.
“YOU COULD NEVER CONVINCE A MONKEY TO GIVE YOU A BANANA BY PROMISING HIM
LIMITLESS BANANAS AFTER DEATH IN MONKEY HEAVEN”
Sapiens presents a work on the evolution of humanity from the time of apes to the present day. The author
Yuval Noah Harari rewrites the history of the human being through time. Mr. Harari suggests, the trajectory of
our species can be traced as a succession of three revolutions: 1) the cognitive revolution (when we got smart),
2) the agricultural revolution (when we got nature to do what we wanted), and 3) the scientific revolution
(when we got dangerously powerful). Humanity, Mr. Harari predicts, will see one more epochal event. We will
vanish within a few centuries, either because we have gained such godlike powers as to become
indistinguishable or because we have destroyed ourselves through environmental mismanagement. Homo
sapiens came into existence more than 200,000 years ago. The term “cognitive revolution” reflects the belief,
held by many anthropologists, that for most of that time the species was just a group of insignificant foraging
bands wandering about east Africa. Then, Mr. Harari says, “beginning about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens
started doing very special things.” In this “Great Leap Forward,” as Jared Diamond has called it, our ancestors
suddenly overcame their inertia and moved out of Africa, meanwhile inventing boats, battle axes and beautiful
art. Mr. Harari suggests that a yet-undiscovered “Tree of Knowledge mutation” altered the “inner wiring” of
our brains, allowing us “to communicate using an altogether new type of language,” one that allowed humans
to cooperate in groups. Mutation in place, humankind exploded across the planet.

6. Agriculture increased the amount of available food, yet the result of prosperity was not happiness but “population explosions and pampered elites.”
Farmers worked harder than foragers and had a worse diet and poorer health. The surplus went to the privileged few, who used it to oppress. “The
Agricultural Revolution,” Mr. Harari says, “was history’s biggest fraud.” Mr. Harari is quite correct, though, about the import of surpluses.
Because farmers can reap much more food from an acre of land than foragers, agriculture made possible societies of thousands or millions, as
permanent settlements grew.
Columbus’s contact with the New World, according to “Sapiens,” was a turning point, “the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution.” The
unveiling of continents unknown to the ancients “not only taught Europeans to favour present observations over past traditions, but the desire to
conquer America also obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at breakneck speed.” Europe’s explorer-conquerors, Mr. Harari says, were
something new. “The Romans, Mongols, and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth—not of knowledge. In
contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.”
Hence, the book addresses the central points of our Evolution and Explores the Positive and Negative points of these developments. Also, the
future of humanity, where these revolutions will lead man and what we will become.
Here are the 3 most interesting lessons this book teaches about our species:
1. The ability to think gave early humans language, which eventually led to agricultural advances allowing them to grow exponentially.
2. Improvements in trade were only possible with the invention of money and writing. With agriculture, humans became more efficient with their
time and energy. This let some people begin doing other work like weaving or blacksmithing. These individuals would then trade or barter with
farmers, exchanging their goods for food. While this new system was better, it quickly became inefficient.
3. With better Economic and Communication means, Scientific Progress gave our race the abilities necessary to get to where we are today. Now
that they had efficient food, trading, and writing methods, our ancestors could begin thinking more. This led to a scientific revolution with many
people considering ways to improve their way of life.
Everything comes together for Mr. Harari in the last few pages of Sapiens, where he takes a superbly reasoned and deeply disturbing telescopic
look ahead into the future of humankind. He believes “we stand poised on the brink of becoming true cyborgs, of having inorganic features that are
inseparable from our bodies, features that modify our abilities, desires, personalities and identities".

7. But there’s no escape from our limitations nonetheless. Despite “the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we
remain unsure of our goals and we seem as discontented as ever", writes Harari. “We are more powerful than ever before, but
have very little idea of what to do with all that power... Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are
accountable to no one...Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they
want?"
Harari’s writing has an increasingly polemical aspect, with passionate argument alternating with characteristic mastery of his
interdisciplinary research materials. Hence, making this book thoughtful, generous, and a reflection of the state of our world in
the coming future.