Board of Governors 2020: Interview with Yuval Noah Harari

the hebrew university has accomplished truly amazing things and its community of researchers continue to contribute to humans ability to cope with the coronavirus our reality has been radically altered and some changes are likely to remain for many years to come i am honored to introduce a leading expert in analyzing historical human and social processes he is an israeli historian and a professor in the hebrew university's department of history professor yuval noah harari professor harari's books including sapiens a brief history of humankind homo deus a brief history of tomorrow and 21 lessons for the 21st century have been translated into over 60 languages and have sold more than 27 million copies worldwide he is considered an expert in his field and is sought by media outlets worldwide join me on a short trip to professor ivanov office in tel aviv to discuss our collective future professor ivanov thank you very much for allowing us to hold this interview in your beautiful office in tel aviv thank you it's a pleasure to host you here and to host everybody else virtually in this meeting yes this is your academic home in jerusalem actually and i wonder in this time of the pandemic the kovit 19 global pandemic did your work is changing right now the way you think and the the project that you develop uh yes you know i've been at the hebrew university i came as a student in 1993 and later as a lecturer so i've it's been my home the hebrew university for almost for most of my life really i've been there and this home remained relatively the same i mean the entire world was changing but this home was very kind of stable and the same in 2019 i would come into the the same class that i entered as a first year student and i i could imagine i it's still 1993 in a good way not in a bad way some things in life you know are stable and and kind of warm and welcoming and then in a couple of weeks everything just became completely chaotic that the the semester or suppose the term was supposed to begin in i was teaching three courses uh supposed to begin march 2020 and within a week or two like everything moves online and uh yeah i had to reinvent everything really i mean it's so difficult to kind of read the atmosphere of the class when everything is online i explained something i can't really tell whether the students understood or didn't understand are they following me have i lost them i tell a joke i don't know if they laughed or smiled [Music] so i find at the end of the class i'm also physically exhausted because i have to be far more alert and all the time looking for tiny clues and signs to what's happening with the students what's happening with the class and it's the same with other things i do like public events or interviews before coffee 19 so everybody demanded if i'm giving an interview for american tv or i'm doing some events in china i obviously must travel there in person so it's the airplanes the the the airports the hotels everything uh and it was unthinkable to say to them well maybe i'll just do it from home via a screen online and now it's it's standard so it's at advantages and disadvantages you think it might change the kind of project you're developing or actually the way you think or the way you prepare yourself to the next semester for example in jerusalem yes i mean i i have to rethink the way that i teach classes and prepare them it already happened in the previous semester i taught three classes and i kind of had to reinvent uh the way the class is organized and also the material that i'm teaching because it's it's a different a different medium you demand that you also change some of the content it's not all bad there were advantages for instance the the fact that in a click of a button i can divide the class into small discussion groups this was a wonderful tool that you i just raise a question and i press a button and they automatically find themselves in these small discussion rooms of five six students and everybody talks and i can move between between the rooms it gives both them and me some kind of break from the uh from the normal way the class is run and also it gives an opportunity for everybody to to even you know you have these quiet students who never say a word in class but in this small discussions group everybody is talking and this is something that the technology actually makes easier because in a physical class if i wanted to do that then it would take a lot of time just to decide who goes into which group and also there is just no space i mean that the class is not big enough physically to have these small groups but from the other hand distance education might increase social gaps because of the need for technological equipment and i wonder how you see the future of the further education or the future of universities in the next decade i don't know i mean it depends on the decisions we make the technology is not deterministic you can use the same technology to create very different kinds of educational systems uh there are a lot of choices to be made you know we've been discussing all this online teaching for years and have been doing very little and suddenly within a few weeks we changed the entire way that the university what it means what are the dangers of this effect there are many dangers ranging from the experience of the students i'm thinking about say a new student first year just entering university now and the whole experience of university of meeting other students and sitting together after class in the cafeteria and having a lively discussion about whatever and you know in many cases the most important discussions are in the cafeteria between the students after class is over not in the classroom itself and how do you provide that i mean this is not something you can do on zoom so this is one very big issue the thinking but realizing that university is not just about academic studies it's also about social connections that's something very important there are also economic and structural issues for instance when everything is online and everything is recorded it can have a huge impact on the status of of lecturers for instance what what's to stop the university to just you know record the class once and then fire the lecturer especially if she or he are just a temporary of just a temporary job and then just using the recording you know if it's an advanced seminar in in chinese philosophy it's probably difficult but if it's an introductory course um then you can just use the recording and then what happens to the status of the uh and the um social security of the staff another thing if if everything is online you don't even need to hire the staff in israel i mean why if you have if you're teaching some online course in computer science to a hundred students via zoom why should the professor be in jerusalem or in eilat why should i sign up to the jerusalem oh why should you sign up for the jerusalem course yes i mean basically you can just have the professor in bangalore or some other place maybe pay 10 percent of what you pay in israel have no social benefits and that's something that needs to be really thought about deeply about the changing structure of the academic job market and the consequences for the university in this changing structure what are the skills we need in order to cope and to function well in the future i think about the children of course we talk about the students that are facing huge global changes in all aspects of life the thing is nobody has any idea how the world and the job market would look like in 20 or 30 years and this is really an unprecedented situation never before in history we were in a situation when nobody not not even the experts could tell you what the job market would look like in 20 years what jobs will be available and what skills will be necessary there will be jobs i don't think that automation and ai will just destroy all the jobs they will destroy a lot of jobs but they will create a lot of new jobs and will they will change also a lot of professions the thing is we can't really predict uh the nature of these changes so we also don't know which skills people will need the only thing we are certain about is that the job market will be extremely volatile we are not talking about a one-time revolution it's not like you have the big automation revolution of 2025 lots of jobs disappear a lot of new jobs emerge you have a couple of rough years everybody needs to kind of get their act together again but after a few years everything settles down into some new normal that's not going to happen because the ai revolution is just beginning we haven't seen anything yet so we are uh entering into an prolonged prolonged revolutionary process really a cascade of ever bigger disruptions so you will have a big ai revolution by 2025 but an even bigger one by 2035 and even bigger one by 2045 so people will have to retrain and reinvent themselves many many times the idea that as a young person whether in school or in university you learn a profession you acquire certain skills and then you use them for the rest of the of your life this is this is dead this is completely outdated of course people always needed to keep learning throughout their lives and gain experience but we are talking about something which is really a fundamental change that people will have to reinvent themselves repeatedly every 10 years or so maybe you need to relearn a profession from scratch because your old profession is just gone and there is a new need but in something else which means that university would or some kind of educational system will have to focus on lifelong learning and the skills that you give people it's above all the ability to keep learning to keep changing and to reinvent yourself and this stresses not technical skills because technical skills will come and go it stresses kind of deeper psychological abilities to maintain a mental flexibility throughout your life some kind of a antibody a technology invasion yes i mean you know i mean when you're 20 your job in life is kind of to invent yourself who am i and that's difficult even when you're 20 but think about doing it again when you're 30 doing it again when you're 40 and 50 and life expectancy is likely to rise and pension age is likely also to be pushed up so we need to think about our students and about young people in general facing tremendous psychological stress both because the future is completely unknown unlike previous generations they couldn't ask the elders whether their parents or grandparents or professors how would the world look like when i'm 50. nobody has an idea how the world would look like when you're 50. the only thing we can tell you that you will be under tremendous pressure to keep changing and reinventing yourself the the kind of fantasy of reaching a point when you can just relax that's it you've got it it's over it's over and that's extremely scary and that's true in all professions so you know whether you're going to study philosophy or computer science you will need this kind of psychological flexibility and resilience so this should be a premium and again maybe in 20 years it will turn out that the people who went to study philosophy actually made a better bet in terms of the job market than those who went to study computer science because coding that's easy that's ai can do but google will need a lot of philosophers because we are already seeing it the moral questions yeah the moral questions the questions that for thousands of years were theoretical questions for philosophers that they could discuss and discuss endlessly and they had very little practical implications suddenly these questions are becoming practical engineering questions you know like this entire discussion about free will and self-driving vehicles and you know to have a self-driving vehicle on the road you need a vehicle to make ethical decisions that's very very obvious you need to decode the algorithm so so all these corporations or coding the self-driving vehicle and manufacturing it they are likely to need more and more philosophers and not just uh coders let's talk about political issues yes in the spring you wrote that the kovit 19 epidemic is the ultimate test of democracy and citizenship can we say that we have failed here the test here in israel in israel it seems that we won't be getting a very high mark on this test i mean the basic fuel of a democracy is trust trust between the population and the government both ways government trusting the population population trusting the government the authorities you know a dictatorship can function with a limited amount of trust that's fine but a democracy needs trust and we don't have it we've lost it loudly i would say because of the actions and failings of the previous and current government which have systematically eroded the trust of the public in the authorities we still have a prime minister who for years have been relentlessly attacking the media the universities the police uh the courts and telling people don't believe them don't believe these authorities and now you have a crisis and people don't believe so what can you expect and you see that you know seeds that have been planted for years of deliberately creating divisions within society as a political strategy to you know divide and rule that's a very old strategy dividing rule and uh it has a price that when you have yes you can rule by dividing people but then when you have a crisis like covet 19 uh you can't you can't deal with it because you know like in ordinary times you can govern a democratic country with the support of say half the population that's enough 50 plus one it's enough but in a crisis like this you can't manage the crisis when half the population don't believe a single word you're saying yes maybe some people worship you and if you say the sun rises in the west every day and set in the east they will believe you but the other 50 percent they don't believe a single word you say and you just can't manage a crisis like this in in such a situation um you know other democracies are doing much much better i don't think that there is an inherent problem with the democratic system we see that around the world many democratic countries have been dealing with covet 19 in an admirable way so you're saying israeli is not dealing it as a democracy anymore and i wonder if you pay the price because you're saying those kind of things i think i'm kind of protected i have a strong enough international position that i'm i'm protected but many members of the academic community they are in a much much weaker situation they're afraid to speak they're afraid to speak and we've seen over the last again over the last years in israel that academic freedom is eroding and you know speaking about the current prime minister at present the main challenger to the current prime minister is somebody who is an education minister thought to install the so-called ethical code which is really meant to curb academic freedom of expression and to police and monitor even what uh scholars are saying in the classrooms in the university so i don't see much hope coming from that direction and you just need to look around the world in countries such as you know hungary russia what's happening to academic freedom there we can't take it for granted that israel is immune from these processes is there a way to revive the democracy here in israel another election might be a disaster as well i'm not i'm not a political i'm not a politician and i'm not a political scientist and i'm certainly not an expert on israeli society so i don't know what needs to be done specifically but more generally speaking this is true of many countries not just of israel [Music] as i said unlike dictatorships democracies need trust and they need um i would say a strong sense of of nationalism but not in the wrong-headed way that nationalism is often understood today many people think that nationalism means hating foreigners and hating minorities the more i hate foreigners and minorities the more patriotic i am we have many leaders around the world who are conveying this kind of message and it's a complete mistake nationalism is not about hating foreigners it's about loving your compatriots and many of the leaders who present themselves as nationalists and patriots they are the exact opposite they incite not only hatred of foreigners they incite internal hatreds they depict their political opponents not as legitimate rivals within the democratic game but as enemies and traitors and this ruins democracy democracy to function needs a strong sense of good nationalism that my political opponents may i don't agree with them i think they are wrong but they are not my enemies they are not traitors and if i'm elected to office i take care of their interests not just the interests of my camp and we need to see more of this kind of healthy patriotism which manifests itself in everything from you know from the political discourse to basic stuff like paying taxes you know you look at the us and at least according to the latest publications you have a so-called patriotic president who is also a billionaire who apparently paid 750 dollars in annual taxes as president now i would say that the real test of patriotism is is paying taxes one of the big tests it's not hating foreigners uh because you know the taxes you pay yeah what they mean is i pay taxes so that unknown people in another part of the country i don't know i mean in israel we have like 8 million citizens i know maybe 200 of them personally so there are like 7 million 900 and something people i don't know but i pay taxes so that they will get a good education and a good health care and that's an a patriotic act and that's you know like the miracle of of modern nationalism that it inspires enough uh that the people care enough about these strangers that they never met to nevertheless take care of them and if that crumbles that again you don't not just see other other people in in your country as enemies but you stop caring about them so you don't pay your taxes then again a dictatorship can function like that but a democracy cannot you're talking about the us and the way it the ideas of the us might collapse during this yes you're seeing you know 50 years ago democrats and republicans they had their arguments but both of them feared the russians the enemies outside the russians will come and change our way of life today both democrats and republicans fear and hate one another far more than they fear and hate the russians or the chinese that republicans fear that if the democrats take power they will destroy a way of life and the democrats fear exactly the same thing this is something that in the long run is unsustainable in democracy it's not just trump what i'm trying to add he's the symptom but it came from and he's making it worse of course but it didn't start with him doesn't really matter who will elect will be oh it matters a great law yeah i mean again it's you have different political styles that's for sure okay i mean nobody is forcing these leaders to fall to adopt these divisive policies and rhetoric we can have leaders and we do have leaders in in other parts of the world you look i don't know angela merkel she's not this kind of leader she's not in the game of let's divide the german society against itself in order to create a strong loyal base that will follow me no matter what i do and that's how i i will rule germany indefinitely that's not her game so it's not kind of the the only way and it matters a lot which politicians with which which kind of political style is is being elected the people are choosing those leaders yes so this is the power of the people the people decision it's a circle you know ideally you have people forming up opinions and desires and then voting for a government that represents them but we know it works both way the government has enormous power to shape the opinions and desires of the population and this power only increases today with the new technologies of surveillance mass surveillance and social media and so forth so when the government can i mean the government is not just responsive to the will of the people it can shape the will of the people and this really destabilizes the democratic system also you know the media has an enormous role to play in this that if the government has too much control over the media then it's not like people are forming their own independent views about what's happening we now have the power of at least not we but some gov governments and corporations for the first time in history have the power to basically hack human beings there is a lot of talk about hacking computers hacking smartphones hacking bank accounts but the big story of our era is the ability to hack human beings and by this i mean that if you have enough data and you have enough computing power you can understand people better than they understand themselves and then you can manipulate them in ways which were previously impossible and in such a situation the old democratic system stop functioning we need to reinvent democracy for this new era in which humans are now hackable animals you know the whole idea that humans have you know this they they have this soul or spirit and they have free will and nobody knows what's happening inside me so whatever i choose whether in the election or whether in the supermarket this is my free will that's over we need to come to terms with the fact that no but again this is where philosophy meets computer science and biology no matter what you think ultimately is the truth of the universe you have to realize that practically today we have the technology to hack human beings on a massive scale and this means you need we need to reinvent democracy we need we need to reinvent the market again the whole idea of the customer is always right we just do whatever the customers want yes but you can now hack the customers you can manipulate the customers to to want what you tell them to want so this whole idea that corporations just serve the needs of the customers this is this is over you can't hide behind this explanation anymore maybe the pandemic is this disruption of a world pandemic is an opportunity for a change that that we might need listening to you um of course after 10 months of uh covered um nothing will take us back to december 19. but can we begin to imagine a new reality of a post-pandemic world um you know the job market the real estate businesses uh the family the leisure culture performing arts everything changes right now yeah we need i mean we have no choice we need to re-imagine an old feud a new future because we can't go back to the past it's impossible the i mean even before kovind the vaccine won't help us go the vaccine will of course it will make things you know more manageable but it won't take the time we can't go back we were already in a process of rapid change fueled by new technologies kovid just accelerated it changes that we thought would take 10 20 years like moving a lot of courses in the university online they happened within two to three weeks or two three months because of kovid but they were already underway anyway there's no reason to live close to work or close to the academic center there's no um the city centers are not are losing their function right now yeah i mean everything is being digitalized everything is being monitored and the elderly are isolated you have not only the elderly also the young are isolated um and we are in the midst of a tremendous social upheaval we can't go back but it doesn't mean that the future has to be bad uh it's it's often said that you should never allow a good crisis to go to waste because the crisis is an opportunity to also do good reforms that in normal times people will never agree to but in a crisis you see we have no chance so so so let's do it and you know we can react to this crisis in very different ways you can react to the crisis by generating hatred blaming the epidemic on foreigners on minorities you can react to the epidemic by generating greed how do i make as much money out of it as possible you can react by generating ignorance inventing and spreading all kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories bill gates created this epidemic in a laboratory to take over the world or you can react by generating wisdom believing science realizing that in this time of crisis you have to follow science not these conspiracy theories you generate not hatred but compassion finding ways to cooperate with people in your country and all over the world because you know the big advantage of humans over viruses is that we can cooperate in ways the virus can't a virus in china can't give advice to a virus in the u.s about how to infect people but doctors in china in the us and israel and brazil can come together share information share uh the results of their observations experiments in order to develop treatments vaccines and you know it's not just insights about the virus it's also psychological insights economic insights countries all over the world are facing the same problems uh why should every country repeat the same mistake i mean if one country tried something and now it realizes that the economic and psychological damage of its wrong decision it should freely share this information with other countries we need this kind of global cooperation we need a global safety net to protect the weakest members of humankind from not just the epidemic but the economic consequences if we do that we'll be able to not just face this crisis but face much bigger future crisis like the ongoing climate emergency and the rise of artificial intelligence and automation will be able to face them much better on the other hand if we you know covet historically speaking is a relatively small crisis as a disease it's a relatively mild epidemic it kills something less than one percent of mortality this is nothing like the black death of the big influenza of 1918 or aids 18th 1980s you got aids you died a hundred percent mortality so covet is a very mild disease in comparison it's like nature has been throwing us a practice ball let's see how you deal with that before i really bring out the big guns like climate change and like the rise of a.i if we can't unite as a species against this virus then our chances against the ecological crisis and against the technological disruption of ai and bioengineering is really really you know distressing to think about it what changes do you think the universities should do to handle those new challenges in our era well there are many things that can be done and we don't have a lot of time so maybe i'll just give one very practical advice very concrete maybe the most important people today that the university trains are the coders the people who write the algorithms that are increasingly running the world and i'm concerned and maybe amazed that we trained the university trains coders but as far as i know during their studies they don't need to take any classes in ethics you know to you can't receive your certificate in medicine without having some courses in ethics it's it's part of the curriculum now coders today are even far more important than doctors they reinvent the world everything and i would recommend that as part of the curriculum in computer science and in other related disciplines there must be it shouldn't be left to the initiative of the students there must be courses in philosophy in ethics because as i said previously the philosophical issues are now migrating from the department of philosophy to the engineering departments and um the people who decide that the the the people should realize they are not coding computers they are coding humans they are coding society and this is something that the university can do i think quite easily just make it a part of the curriculum and more generally i think that we should see far greater cooperation between the humanities and social sciences on the one hand and then natural sciences and especially engineering and computer science because it's no it's you can't as long as you keep them separate you shouldn't be surprised when the results of what we engineer turn out to be um social disasters and humanistic disasters professor ivanov thank you very much for hosting us thank you very much for this lesson thank you

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Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020