Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari in conversation

hi everyone this is kara swisher i'm broadcasting from the east coast of the united states uh welcome to the nexus israel deal makers virtual summit i'm here with two incredible thinkers um and i'd love them to introduce themselves so yuval why don't you start okay i'm a historian i teach at the hebrew university of jerusalem and i think that history is not just the study of the past it's also the study of the present and future they are also part of history so i cover all three aspects of history all right daniel well i'm retired i'm an old psychologist i used to teach well i taught in many places including hebrew university and princeton and now i don't teach anymore you both have written best-selling books on different topics i like your uh being so modest but you're both big thinkers um and have written books that have been highly impactful um in in how people think about humanity um so i want to start off by talking and i just finished uh daniel's new book which is coming out in may called noise which i think is very provocative and interesting way to think about uh how humans interact and about the acceleration of things that have happened since the pandemic so i actually want to start with that i do want to talk about the top global historical trends shaping humankind today but i just want to get your thoughts i know you've all you've just written a really interesting piece on the pandemic and its impact um i'd love you to each of you to sort of comment about where you think we are um coming out of the pandemic as we begin to vaccinate everybody and people begin to move back into a sort of a vague version of normalcy although i don't think anything's going to be normal again uh post this one but why don't you start yuval well i think the two most important things to understand is that nothing is deterministic there are many potential outcomes to this pandemic and it's not written anywhere in the stars it depends on our decisions we can decide for instance to react to the pandemic through global cooperation and this will result in a more cooperative world afterwards all we could decide to react to the pandemic by competition and isolation and greater nationalism and so forth and this will be the world after the pandemic so that's one main thing the other main thing is that different people different countries will have very different outcomes i think there is a lot you know there is a lot of discussion about the how the economy will emerge from the pandemic a u-shaped recovery or a v-shaped recovery or whatever but it will probably be a k-shaped recovery something is going up sharply and something is going down sharply i mean both different industries uh tourism collapsing digital industries uh wealthier than ever ever and also different countries some countries and regions will come out of this much more powerful than before and some might be completely bankrupt so i don't think that humanity has a single future and a single outcome out of this or really out of any historical development you know i sometimes get the question what should you what should we teach our kids it depends who we are and where you live in some places you need to teach your kids how to code that's the most important thing if living in another place you should teach your kids to shoot a kalashnikov that's much more it's going to be much more important than coding computers all right daniel what do you think how do you feel about moving out of the pandemic i don't really believe in in forecasting so uh i don't have any particular predictions about what's going to happen my sense is that i do not see at the moment that there are huge changes i mean we are going to recover i hope a lot depends on the virus a lot depends on on whether we actually do come out but if we come out i don't i don't think that it's going to be a very necessarily a very profound change compared to the changes that were happening anyway before the beginning okay so why don't we each of you talk about the top global historical trends shaping humankind today from is there anything new or unique about our contemporary economic and political landscape or is everything just playing out as it has for centuries as you as you noted you've all i think there are two really new things happening around us first that this is the first time in human history that we have no idea how the world would look like in a very short time let's say 20 years i mean predictions were never very accurate and you know if you live in the middle ages you don't know what will happen in 20 years maybe the vikings will invade maybe the mongols will invade maybe there'll be a plague an earthquake all kinds of things could happen but at least you know that the basic features of human life are going to be the same if you think for example about the job market or the skills you need then you know i should teach my kids how to harvest wheat and bake bread and ride a horse because even if the mongols invade and even if the vikings come and even if there is a plague in an earthquake they would still need to harvest wheat and to ride a horse so that's a safe bet now we look 20 years to the future we have no idea what the job market would look like and what skills people will need so that's the one big thing that is that is changing the it's it's the the pace of change is accelerating other thing is that for the first time in history the deep structure of of human beings is likely to start changing we are the same animals we were in the middle ages we are still the same animals we were in biblical times or even in the stone age this is why we can so easily connect to people or to works of art from thousands of years ago were written by people like us but when i look 100 years say to the future or 200 years to the future i think for the first time it's very likely that not just our technology and economics and politics will change humanity itself will change the bodies the brains the mind structure mental structures of people are now open to greater and greater manipulation and i think it's a it's a reasonable bet i don't know for sure but it's a reasonable bet that in a century or two our planet will be dominated by entities which are much more different from you and me than we are different from neanderthals or even chimpanzees they might be for example inorganic entities you know after four billion years of organic evolution maybe within a very short time we will see non-organic entities taking over so and this is completely new it's nothing like the rise of christianity or the industrial revolution or the second world war so when you're talking about that you know what i i recently interviewed elon musk and he talked about that we are still talking with our meat flaps which are our lips apparently but we're made of meat essentially and it's from a very famous sci-fi story uh the cult i think it's called made of meat um so the idea that they're you're essentially talking about a robotic kind of organism of some sort it's less about the moving parts it's more about the command and control center i mean you know chain replacing your your organic hand for a bionic hand it will make big changes but the really big thing and here it connects also to danny's work on decision making is who is making the decisions for most of history humans thought about life as a drama of decision making you look at religion it's all about you know choosing between good and evil you look it out so every almost every great or not so great piece of art from shakespeare to the latest netflix series it usually revolves around the hero the heroine needing to make some important decision to be or not to be to marry x or to get married to y and in a very short time these decisions might be made not by organic stuff by flesh they might be shifting to the responsibility to the power of inorganic stuff of algorithms and big data algorithms and ai that know us much better than we know ourselves and can make decisions in a wide range of areas okay from investments in banks to decisions about my romantic life uh better decisions in according to some measures less emotional so let's get into that daniel because i your book is wonderful i just uh i read it very quickly uh but i i have been it's issues i've been talking about quite a lot over the years and you talked about this idea of how decisions are made um in the book is called noise uh which essentially noise feels like humanity in some ways maybe i'm wrong you did say in the book there's um uh that we live that our brains are this in our heads we have this wonderful computer it's made of meat it's a computer it's extremely noisy so why talk about your the important trends because this is obviously something you're talking about is how decisions are made and how they're less biased than noisy which is which is a really fascinating concept so why don't you talk about that a little bit well you know this is very much in the present not in the future yeah my my problem in this conversation is that i tend to agree with just about everything that you've well says but on the other hand i'm not in the future as much as he is or very much in the present in the present people make decisions that are both biased and noisy and what we mean by noise is that they're unstable and that they're different from the judgments and decisions that other people would make in exactly the same situation and that it turns out that the mistakes that people make the errors that people make in their judgments and decisions are due just about as much or possibly more to noise than they are to bias and so in in recent years there's been a great focus on bias in decision making i think that uh there's been too much of that focus and that the problem of noise should attract more attention that's what the book was intended to do so when you're talking about it the idea is define noise for people who don't unders the concept that you're bringing out the idea of what noise is the easiest way to describe it is actually by presenting an example from which the book started really i was consulting in an insurance company and the question i raised was whether underwriters given the same problem within that company would agree on the premium that they should set and i asked the executives what what they expect the difference when two randomly chosen underwriters look at the problem what difference would they expect between the premiums and and the difference that most people think is tolerable is 10 that comes up in many contexts that 10 error is sort of tolerable it's called judgment right judgment was 55 and that is not tolerable and what was very interesting and really was the major finding that prompted the book was that the organization the insurance company had no idea that they had that problem it was completely new to them and uh and that turns out to be quite general that is noise is really underestimated so we came up with a slogan saying that wherever there is judgment human judgment there is noise and more of it than you think that's the auto of the book you also called it a tax an invisible tax on the bottom line of companies which was which is kind of an interesting way to put it but one of the things that you said was you know you talked research has confirmed in many tasks espers decisions are highly variable valuing stocks etc um and so one of the things you talked about and i want to get into sort of future things with both you and yuval is you said it is less well known that the key advantage of algorithms is that they are noise free unlike humans the formula will always return to the same output for any given input superior consistency allows even simple and imperfect algorithms to achieve greater accuracy than human professionals so does that make you say is is that i couldn't tell whether that was you saying that we should rely begin to rely on algorithms i want to begin to talk about where we're going from from a mental state you're essentially suggesting they do make better decisions well there's no question that when presented with data that are representative of the problem that can help solve a problem and when you present the same data to humans and to algorithm the algorithms do better than the humans and that and even very simple rules do bet do better than humans and it turns out that much of that advantage some of the advantage a very sophisticated algorithms come from the ability to find subtle patterns in big data but the advantage of simple rules is that simple rules are noise free and that is enough for simple rules to do better than humans in many situations but one of the things he did so you did say was that um that eventually the robot will have higher emotional intelligence they'll be wiser and that uh that computers will eventually be programmed to do even the most human of things you all how do you look at that when you're looking forward of where decision-making is taking place there's you know there's there's sort of a generalized panic about the idea of these inorganic organisms making decisions for us even if they're better decisions and they're often they they pretty much are daniel was quoted as saying that robot would become would have more higher emotional intelligence this is daniel writing the robot would be wiser and i'll read it directly wisdom is breath wisdom is not having a narrow view that's the essence of wisdom it's broad framing and a robot will be endowed with broad framing i do not see why when it is learned enough it will not be wiser than we people think because we don't have broad framing we narrow thinking we're noisy thinkers it's very easy to improve upon us and i don't think there's very much that we can do that computers will not eventually be programmed to do yeah i i broadly agree that the impact will be everywhere even in areas that people think well no this is human this is a human speciality so okay um computers will be able to ai will be able to drive cars better but things that has to do with emotional intelligence or creativity no this will forever be will remain the human preserve human speciality and i see no reason why i mean emotional intelligence in essence is not not no different from other kinds of intelligence it's also based on pattern recognition and um and i don't think that ai will have emotions of its own one of the of the of the common mistakes is to think that in order to have emotional intelligence in order for example to recognize that somebody else is angry you need to at least some days be angry yourself otherwise how can you recognize it this is obviously not true anger is a biological phenomenon it's all kinds of muscles contracting and neurons firing and hormones being released to the bloodstream and uh humans yes we recognize anger partly by comparing what's happening to the other person to how i feel but it doesn't have to be like that and i know how you're feeling by analyzing signals coming from your body your tone of voice not just the content of your words but your tone of voice the movements of the muscles in in in your face your eyes your mouth i've learned to recognize the signals of anger a computer can do it also without ever being angry it's just you know an algorithm you know okay it has these these signals it means the person is angry and a computer can do much more potentially it can become much better than me at recognizing tiny tiny changes in the color of your skin or in the size of your eyes that indicates anger and it can even look under your skin with biometric with new generations of biometric sensors it could have direct access to your brain to your heart and thereby be able to recognize emotions better than human beings and another thing is um it won't have any emotions of its own so this gets rid of a lot both of the bias and of the noise that uh we discussed earlier but very often what clouds our judgment is our own emotions but an ai which has no emotions is going to potentially have even a higher emotional intelligence than us because it's not clouded by these emotions and again this is relevant everywhere from investing in this in the stock market which we know i mean it's so much of economics is psychology and so much of the boob and bust cycles are driven by the emotions of either individual people or huge collectives so you know one way to try and overcome it is i don't know you put a a a kind of some kind of biometric hat on the head of the broker and when the ai recognizes that you are now entered the irrational zone of exuberance or fear you have a red light coming out stop trading you are not in a position to make good judgments a further step is to just give the algorithm the authority to make the judgments and make the investments itself bypassing the humans and in more and more professions we are likely to see a.i encroaching on on the human domain and they're going to stay on the financial front i think even today it's fair to say that the number of people who understand really understand how the financial system works it's less than one percent of the people on earth and that's a very generous estimate i think in 20 years the number of people who understand how the financial system works might be exactly zero it will be so complicated so fast so dominated by these increasingly sophisticated algorithms that no human being will be able to really understand what's happening on the financial markets so you might still have a human as u.s president sure but you know yeah that this president will get a call from the ai at two o'clock in the morning uh uh dear president we are facing financial crisis we're facing financial catastrophe i see it coming i can't explain to you why because you're a human you can't understand it but believe me there is a financial storm coming i analyze all the data and you must do this but i can explain to you why because you were human right i can't understand so so so you know it's interesting because again i'll mention elon musk again he talked about the idea that eventually the ai will treat us like cats like house cats where we they'll feed us and they don't really have malevolence against us necessarily um because that's sort of the way it's depicted in movies and science fiction um and recently he upgraded it to the idea of a um of a hill of ants that you're driving a highway through that you don't even think about the ants there you might cover them you might not but you don't ever they're never come into your figuring so daniel when you've just written a book about decision making and the things to try to re you're trying to help companies remove the noise why even bother because ai is going to do it like why even is it is impossible to remove noise from from humanity which is essentially judgment right that's what we call it completely removing noise from judgment is certainly impossible what is happening now is that there is uh algorithms are taking over more and more functions that and and there are as yubar was pointing out there are professions that are going to disappear i mean dermatology diagnosis is now better done by on your iphone basically uh then by consulting a dermatologist and this is going to be happening more and more but at the same time we are still in a world where it's humans making decisions and and there is a lot of antagonism to algorithm in fact there is now that phrase algorithm aversion and so our book was written really with the near future in mind that is regardless of whether algorithm in one or two generations take over for the moment it's judgment and mistakes can be avoided and can only be avoided by improving judgment so this was where we were do you think the humans should be removed when you're thinking you know you've always just talking about this future which i think a lot of people recognize is coming where a robot calls i'm just using a broad term robot the ai calls the president says this is going to happen is this a good thing is it it causes great emotion among people the idea and obviously they've been um you know watching a lot of sci-fi it always ends in tears for the huma or humanity essentially there is no bigger problem than that possibility of you know what is going if human nature is going to change or if human decisions are going to be superseded by by non-human intelligence as you well were saying nothing of that importance has ever happened i think in the history of humanity and we're not prepared for it the issue of whether those robots or ais will or will not have emotions they will be programmed to have objectives and the issue of how to program ai is to have objectives that are compatible with human interests is an extremely interesting issue that some very very good people in the ai domain stuart russell comes to mind uh are very worried about so what are you worried about when you think about that well i'm worried about the same thing you've all have articulated many of my worries you're going to have a phrase that has haunted me ever since i read it and the phrase was superfluous people and it's the idea that uh with the advent of with ai taking over many of the unskilled uh and possibly some of the skilled activities then there will be people for whom there is seems to be society it won't have much use for these people and the idea of ubi of universal uh guaranteed income basic income being being the solution to that strikes me as a bit of a fantasy i don't i don't think this is coming i don't think it's and i don't think it's a solution so what i see is a huge disruption that is before we get to the world that that yuval envisaged in his description of the future there's going to be a complete destabilization of the human condition and of human societies this is not going to happen quietly and we have no idea what how that is going to happen what a transition to the world that you are was talking about which does seem possible if not likely but how how you can get to that transition with humanity still surviving in any shape or fool is not at all clear we're seeing instability growing with technological change even now and i think some of the changes that we are seeing growing populism in many countries and so on is from people living life whose meaning tends to vanish angus deton has and his wife had that beautiful and tragic phrase deaths of despair where they talk about increasing mortality in some parts of the united states and it's clear that the dignity of work and the meaning of life have been changing even are changing even now and this has major political implications and clearly as we have seen uh this can destabilize the country we were not very far in the united states from this and it and if you take a perspective of decades it will certainly destabilize the world so yuval that's something you've written about a lot in sapiens and other books the idea of these technological shifts technology to farming technology to this that has happened before these massive ships the shift from farming to manufacturing was a massive one caused huge populous uprising everybody shifted talk a little bit about what happens in those transitions and then this one you think is different though how is that because it's more even more technologically amplified or weaponized it happens faster it's on a much bigger scale again it involves for the first time changing not the world outside us but the world inside us it's not no longer just about cutting down forests and planting wheat and building cities it's about changing the brain it's about changing the body so it's it goes much deeper but i'm most worried about the fact that we have very little margin for error when i look at previous big changes in history let's take the last big one the industrial revolution in the 19th century so there was a huge huge change in everything in what people do for a living in where people live in political structures and you can say you know we made some mistakes but in the end all things considered the world became better if you look at the world in the year 2000 or even 2021 and compare it to the world in 1750 at the very outset of the industrial revolution on most of the parameters human parameters that we can measure animals ecology is a different story that's terrible but if you just look at the humans almost all the indicators are positive we live longer far huge decrease in child mortality huge decrease in in famine in violence so on after all we solved it we solved the problem of how to use the power of industry for the benefit of humanity what worries me when i look at the process is that we had a kind of learning curve and in we had a trial of an error and part of the trial and error was european imperialism and was uh the two world wars and the holocaust and the cold war this was all part of the learning experience of how do you manage an industrial society we tried nazism no we tried soviet communism no well finally we got a a better formula we don't have a mountain for error in the 21st century if we go through another cycle okay we now have all these ai and bioengineering and social media and robots and whatnot and we'll have a new round of a new nazi regime and the new soviet regime and another world war we won't survive it so this time we need to get it right in the first go your book about noise opened with this you know scatter shot image we need to hit the bull's eye in the first attempt because there won't be a second attempt so at least not for most what do you think of that but daniel's book opens with a famous uh the idea of a team and one team hits all the bull's-eyes together or other is scattered others uh others scattered in a in a random way and and the other anyway there's four different bull's-eyes and from the back each group that is close together looks like they're organized dan talk a little bit about that this idea that we have to get this right the id of what you've always just said can you react to that i think you're very certainly right in that when the rate of change is very rapid and then that requires adjustments that and there i would be pessimistic but as if the if technological change is exponential as say ray kudzweil proposes not that i believe it it is quite as he says it but but the rate of change is clearly higher than people's ability to cope with it human nature is not changing at the speed that it would need i think even to meet smaller challenges than those that yuval talks about there is a question of whether we can meet climate change with human nature as it is and with the governance structures that we have without their changing so there are other threats that might kick us off the path even before we get to those big choices and i agree with with yuval it's hard not to agree that actually this we are in a situation of great peril because of these huge developments and because of the speed at which they are happening which seems to be incompatible with our limited the ability to react to events you have talked about that the inability to see the broader spectrum uh that humans can't see these can't frame everything at once um and have accuracy in their judgments so do you think the only way to deal with that is to move as quickly as possible to algorithmic decisions because one of the things that you talked even experienced professionals you wrote tend to have high confidence in the accuracy of their own judgments and they also have high regard for their colleagues intelligence this combination inevitably leads the overestimation of agreement um should we just cut and run very quickly uh to to the next stage without struggling against it well i mean you know there will be a lot of resistance and you have to anticipate that and just think about an ai so we can imagine an ai that gives better legal advice than lawyers when they are that can scan precedence to an ai that that gives better diagnosis than physicians that's not very threatening but when you're thinking of an ai who can make better business decisions than business leaders and you think of the business leaders having to implement that ai or resisting implementing it i think we're in for completely unpredictable events when when those developments occur because leaders are not going to go quietly and in general human judgment is not going to go quietly between us and the cyborgs that that you've always written about uh well there is a you know there is a lot of thumb up and there is a lot of bloodshed and there are many events that are completely unforeseeable now but we know that crises are coming so you've all come one of the things you know it's interesting because uh recently peter thiel famously shared that he thinks that we're in an age of technical technological stagnation that nothing has happened in recent decades others disagree i disagree um so when you think about the state of innovation uh today this is sort of a dire look at this that we don't have a chance essentially if we don't get the target exactly right what are what do you see as the greatest area of potential for saving us from that fate i think the big innovation which is changing the world more than anything else is the ability what i and others call the ability to hack human beings to decipher human beings which you know humans have been trying to do from the beginning of history humans are extremely complicated and throughout history we just didn't have the tools to really understand how humans function how they make decisions and and so forth to hack a human being you need massive amounts of data especially biological data because we are biological entities and you need massive amounts of computing power to make sense of it previously in history we just didn't have this our understanding of biology was extremely limited the ability to gather data on masses of people was also very limited and we didn't have the the computing power either if you think about even the kgb in the soviet union you can't put a kgb officer to follow each and one of the almost 200 million soviet citizens you don't have 200 million soviet agents kgb incense and even if you have what do you do with the data they gather i mean it's i don't know 1960 in moscow they follow you around they write a paper report they send it to headquarters in the center of moscow and then you have piles and piles and piles of paper reports now somebody needs to read them and make sense of them and reach conclusions which will become more paper reports so it's it's even in a totalitarian regime it's really impossible doesn't work doesn't scale it no no it's feasible you don't need human agents to follow everybody around you have these gadgets i mean i i have my own i bought the agent that follows me around the government didn't even have to force me to to to have it you have all these smartphones and microphones and cameras everywhere and you don't need humans to go over all the resulting data and analyze it you now have ai and machine learning so it's becoming feasible for the first time in history to hack all the people and you add to that the increasing biological knowledge and that's the explosion that we are very close to the point when nobody will ever know people a hundred percent that's impossible it's impossible in nature to know something a hundred percent but you don't need to you just need to know people better than they know themselves and that is the the big game changer of the 21st century now this new ability has enormous positive potential as well as enormous negative potential it can create the best healthcare system in history which recognizes illnesses long before you feel there is anything wrong with you and it can create the worst totalitarian regimes that ever existed something far far worse than the soviet union something that can really get into your mind 24 hours a day and that's the big choice that we are facing now there is cause for some optimism because we can still choose to use the technology for good and not for evil it's difficult not only because there are many bad actors out there but also because it requires us to be much more humble about who we are humans resist the idea that they are hackable that somebody can really know me better and manipulate me but to survive what's happening right now we need to come to terms with who we really are with the fact that i personally don't understand myself very well but increasingly some other agents might be able to do it to be in in this sense much more curious about ourselves and much less certain about our opinions about our thoughts and this again it goes back to the work that dany has done not just in this book but for previous books also for decades i mean finding the the the biases finding the usual the shortcuts the heuristics of the human mind it presents when we look in the mirror and it forces us to see ourselves in a much more humble way and if we are able to accept this and embrace it this can be a basis for a much better world but if we stick with the kind of egocentric and arrogant view of ourselves then it makes it it makes us extremely vulnerable to this new kind of technology so daniel you did you have written a lot about these ideas of biases and people knowing themselves and you're both talking about is why even bother why even bother since the computers we'll do we'll figure this out anyway we all have sort of begun to accept that these these devices that follow us around really do know us better i think most people are terrified of it it's been misused it's been easy all the negative parts have been have been accessed with these technologies or it feels like it has been i'd love you to talk about what that means and then are there positive aspects given the the ability to manipulate it so perfectly i was troubled uh by uver's optimism in his last remarks and what troubled me with the use of the word we as we can do yeah i'm not sure there is a we agree that is really the problem that we face is that there is no we it's going to be various people a group of people groups of people acting in their own self-interest and it's not going to be or as they perceive it and and there would be a we for humanity if we were attacked from outer space by another you know species out there but there is no we when we're in dealing even with climate change let alone with ai or with other things now you ask me a question that is almost a personal question why am i still interested in yeah people but when ai is coming well you know the reason is i've been interested in people since i was at trial and and ai isn't in my life yet it's going to be very different certainly the the intellectual interests and the views about human nature are going to be affected by the sort of developments that that yuval was describing and and i think more than anything else possibly even more than ai the possibilities of of hacking human beings of hacking the biology of of children of changing the genetic makeup of people especially which will be available to some people and not available to others the possibility for human enhancement even before we're replaced by cyborgs this is something that we're not absolutely not equipped to deal with at the moment and it's very difficult to see how we as as nations as states can go to cope with it how does that spin out then if you're not able to cope with it if it's coming anyway if the ability to hack into brains not just that but person you know as you said just replacing your hand is one thing but replacing strength there's all kinds of things that you can do to enhance yourself how do we deal with that what is the mechanism then the question is whether democracy can be sustained that's that's going to be a question that will arise before we face the bigger future threats what is happening is that the powerful are becoming more powerful money is becoming more powerful i mean the power of money over democracy in the united states as i think increased radically in my lifetime that i can remember and and clearly when the rich can enhance their children and the poor cannot uh this is going to get much worse so inequality is already a problem and that's the inequality that is given and it's very difficult to cope with although everybody deplores inequality there are powerful forces for example in the united states that that keep it increasing how we're going to be able to deal with that as societies in the future there are no signs at the moment that the ability of governments to deal with this is improving to meet the challenges to my surprise a little more pessimistic than you so daniel when you're talking about that we we do have this similar situation of people that the com companies in this in this country in the united states but they're global companies um the top ten five companies are all technology companies the top to except you leave out saudi aramco i think of that group um and the top 10 richest people i think all of them almost all of them are technology uh billionaires they also have their wealth has risen rather significantly during the pandemic they've benefited from all the services we've used this is you wrote about this yuval very smart as how we've moved into a virtual world rather easily during this pandemic it's been a been a boon for us to be able to do so to be able to do school or even as as problematic as it's been um so when you look at this dana this idea of a small group of people making decisions how do you how do you think about that when there's a one of the encounters i had with one of the google founders uh when i wrote um they were trying to take over all of search and i said they can't be allowed to do this and i use the example of microsoft sort of dominating technology for a long time and i said at least microsoft knew they were thugs um he was offended by this characterization of him as a thug and he called me up and he said i'm not a thug and i said yeah well you're not a thug but who's going to run google in 20 years i don't know maybe they're a thug maybe it's not even a thug maybe it's a machine i don't maybe it's a thuggish machine and the concept of it sort of he was like that's ridiculous we're good people talk about the idea of decision makers right sure they aren't good people as it turns out um they're not bad people either so talk about this idea of making this how when you concentrate in the hands of a small amount of people what disintegrates when that happens well let me first actually before i answer your question uh let me say something about yuva's previous remarks because i think he put his finger on something that is very important we tend to think very naturally that that the events in the world are the events that we know about there are the events in you know in the western world but actually the future will be determined by china it's what's happening internally in china and it's the leadership of china and it's the behavior of china in with respect to other people and to other nations that is going to determine you know the history of the 21st century so i think any thinking really should go in the direction that the yuval's comments were going what is going to happen in china is really very important what is happening in the united states with a growing inequality in wealth and power the inequality as such is means that the democracy becomes sort of a fiction that is if as as we can see even in the united states as it exists now the power of money to to buy politicians not by them in terms of corruption by by supporting them by supporting their campaign the power of money over politics in the united states is poisonous and clearly when there is a threat of universal basic income uh there are quite a few billionaires and i'm thinking of you know rebecca mercer for example will not let that happen so and she and people like her have a lot of power now we are lucky to have quite a few billionaires who are really very benign buffett is behind gates is benign and the google founders want to be benign but the concentration of power in the hands of a few people is really what democracy was created in the hope of avoiding i mean humanity has tried to avoid this and and i think the concentration of power clearly has been getting worse over the last few decades in the united states i mean this is very much a united states-centric uh point that i'm making so when you when you have decision making in those hands i mean you're famously famous about understanding decision making what happens uh at those levels i only know my experience is they get you know i hate to use this term but they get licked up and down all day and they think they're right all the time and when someone challenges their thinking i often do they seem shocked um but that they're totally incapable of making the decisions and you saw that play out in the election with two people deciding to kick one president off uh off of an important platform uh or important social media platforms now while that might have been the right decision it might have followed the rules correctly the fact that there were two people making it seemed troubling to me at least even if i agreed with the decision yeah i think it should be troubling to everybody i mean there is huge power there has been a huge transition of power to the technological companies and some of which are controlled really dictatorially i mean there's no no question those are single individuals making the making decisions with their own self with their own interests i i would not trust any individual to know the true motivations for the actions that they are taking insight is uh is a difficult thing to acquire so yeah clearly very dangerous so why is this happening what do you do about that either of you what is that how do you change that are there opportunities for positive change here in that and it do you feel like governments have the ability to do something about this amount of in this case it happens it used to be oil barons it used to be train barons whatever over history it used to be whatever um how do you how do you change that today because it's been changed there's been lots of powerful people that have been unseated rather unceremoniously over all throughout human history yes i think politics is all about that that and as i said at the very beginning of our talk we always have choices it's never deterministic what's going to happen next technology the same technology can be used to construct very different kinds of social and political systems the technology of the 20th century could be used to create a regime like nazi germany or like the democratic united states it was the same technology there wasn't a big difference in technology between the us andrew roosevelt and germany under hitler if you look today at north korea and south korea the difference is not technological so i'm as a historian i'm very skeptical and also very worried about technological determinism that because we have this technology the only outcome must be that it it's never like this it's usually a fiction told by people who want this outcome so they tell you well it's inevitable because this is what the technology dictates it's not true in the 19th century the big magnates of the coal and steel industry told people well we have to we must have child labor it's this is the new economy we must have eight-year-old kids working in coal mines instead of going to school if we don't do it if you make laws against it the germans will do it and they will overcome us today we look back and first of all we know it wasn't so parliament in the uk and then in germany in other places past laws that kids should go to school and not to the coal mine and we also understand that actually this was even more efficient the country benefits when the economy benefits when eight-year-old kids go to school and not to a coal mine so to now it looks to us obvious but if you go back to 1860 or 1870 it's a huge debate i mean some people say no it has to be like this it's not we don't like it but this is the technology this is the industrial revolution yeah there's actually an argument like that right now with tech people talking about china versus the us like they need to be this big i call it the she or me argument that mark zuckerberg often makes it's that's either china or me and i was like neither what what's the third choice where's my theory i think the other choices we can build choices at least we should build i mean there are certain kind of guidelines for how to build let's say the data economy in a better way to give just a few examples whenever you increase surveillance of individuals at the same time you need to increase surveillance of the government and the big corporations this should be a a a key principle that okay we have this technology it has a lot of potential it like you need to find the the pandemic the covet crisis so surveying people is a very important tool in fighting the pandemic and i'm in favor but on condition that simultaneously you also increase the surveillance of the government the government is now spending trillions i want to know easily where the money goes and who makes the decision to make sure the money goes to the people who really need it and not to some big corporation who happens to be friends with the minister and it's the same technology if it's now easier to survey me it's also easier to survey you and it doesn't make us less efficient than china if we do that because you know again you look at the pandemic there was a huge discussion whether the pandemic would even have erupted in the first place if china was democratic nobody really knows for sure what happens in the first few weeks now i and not for a moment do i believe any of the ridiculous conspiracy theories about it was produced in a lab or something no no no i'm not going in that direction it's just that you know when you first defer when you have the first few cases the inclination of an authoritarian regime that has full control of the media is to repress bad news not to tell bad news not because of some big conspiracy from the top because you know the people at the bottom they don't want to share the bad news and you don't have a free press to write about it so you can hide it and then you have more cases and more cases until it explodes and then it's too late to stop it in a democracy maybe the local officials would also have tried to to clamp down and to prevent the inflammation from spreading but you have journalists and you have bloggers and somebody would have blown the whistle earlier and maybe this whole thing would never have happened similarly if you think about the vaccines so i would trust a vaccine coming from a democratic country i would not trust a vaccine coming from an authoritarian regime and until it is checked by health authorities in a democratic country and for an obvious reason i mean it's such an important tool today the vaccines i don't trust that in an authoritarian regime the university or the laboratory or the health authority if they find that the vaccine is dangerous i don't trust them to tell the truth about it okay so one of the things you've always talked about daniel is noise is the noise that democracies make which are very noisy i want you to make the case for noise then this is what's going to prevent it the idea of people making noise about being unpredictable making bad decisions is it so bad to make bad decisions all the time well uh i think bad decisions are bad and variability can be bad or variability can be very desirable so right yes since what makes life worth living what makes life interesting is variability uh when different physicians looking at the same patient get different diagnosis it's noise so uh right diversity is desirable in many contexts what we are seeing though is and that's the danger to democracy the centralization of power for example in institutions such as facebook on the one hand and fox news on the other uh the the possibilities for misuse of this kind of power is really antithetical to the very idea of democracy and it's you know my imagination i tend to be pessimistic by temperament so good scenarios can do not come easily to my mind but how to have a good scenario where you would have democratization and at the same time undo what has been happening which is the different communities are exposed to different facts now how to undo that is certainly beyond my imagination but unless we undo it the future of democracy is really very much endowed well i'm going to press you then because i feel like you might be a smart person winning all those awards that you have how would you begin to undo just one thing you talked about the poor information diet is what you're talking about is that people get uh you know this is sort of classic propaganda what's going on every day is a different thing whether it's anti-vaxx or it's election fraud or whatever um how do you how do you begin to turn back that tide i live in the united states well two of us do there are countries that are doing it better i mean i think that clearly what is happening in western europe with respect to technology the efforts to control technology the efforts to protect privacy there is a lot that can be learned from what they're doing it is not stopping what looks to be i mean it's it's not clear that populism is really spreading it's it's there are ebbs and flows but it certainly is not stopping some populist developments that could lead to fascism and so on but there is an example there i think that today the united states democracy is more threatened in the united states than it is in western europe and there is an interesting thing living here as a foreigner in in the united states that there is a reluctance when you're an american there is a reluctance to look elsewhere for inspiration elsewhere for uh how how could it be that anybody could do things better there than they're done here well you know we're exceptional i don't know if you've gotten that message when you got here we're supposed to give you that book yeah uh and that's that is preventing i think it really is remarkable yeah little people know in the united states about how things work elsewhere like health systems i mean many people in the united states think that they have the best health system in the world now what what is the sort of it's not a conspiracy but what is happening in the culture that allows such facts to remain unknown for decades within a democracy and and clearly when that gets to be manipulated like for example news about climate change get politicized and and manipulate it the threat is very the threat level is very high but when you think about that uh with the the idea of bad information diets humans getting bad information and not being able to avail themselves to other other things can you think historically if there's been a turning point like that because you know we've had the salem witch trials we've had you know there's all kinds of conspiracy theories around forever since the beginning of time you know mussolini didn't need instagram to make this make it happen hitler did not need twitter um i know it sounds silly to phrase it like that but they used newsreels they used whatever was the technology of the time can you talk about something that where it it it was a similar thing where the tide was able to be turned and why i think the situation is bad but it's probably better than almost any time in the last thousands of years but as you say you just took a hundred years back to nazism and fascism and communism and they could spread this information and conspiracy theories and brainwash people on a massive scale with even worse theories and stories than you see today extremely successfully without twitter and facebook and social media you go a thousand years or hundreds of years previously and like you mentioned the the the whole witch-hunting craze that it's the result to a large extent in europe and in uh the british colonies like in massachusetts it's the result of print people think that when gutenberg brought prince to europe the result was the the scientific revolution and everybody would sit around reading galileo galilei and and then copernicus very few people read galileo and copernicus most people either read the bible or they read all these new ridiculous conspiracy theories like uh about witches one of the biggest best sellers of of the first days of print in europe was called the hammer of the witches it was a do-it-yourself guide how to identify and kill witches which is something everybody needs at home of course and people would buy it for for a friend for a fraction of what it would cost earlier before print and they believed it completely because you know books were in such high regards so people would say i read it in a book there are witches and they fly on brooms at night and you can recognize them because they have this walt on the face or whatever and thousands upon thousands of innocent people mostly women were murdered gruesomely because you had this frenzied mobs believing in these ridiculous conspiracy theories so you don't need facebook for that and in a way the situation in the early 21st century again it's bad but it's better than in the early 20th century it's better than in the 16th century the key problem is that the truth is very often first complicated much more complicated than some fanciful story somebody invents and secondly that it's very painful most people don't want to know the truth about themselves as individuals or as collectives like we have an election in israel coming up in a week next week another wow another yeah we were very fond of elections sorry i've lost track and a politician that would tell the israeli public the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth about israeli history has a hundred percent guarantee of losing the elections there is no way that such a politician would ever win an election and that's not unique of israel a politician that would do that in the us is bound to lose the elections and it's the same in italy and in poland and in the philippines and everywhere people don't want to know the full truth about their nation or about their culture or about themselves personally it's an uphill battle we are in a better place than we were previously in history but um again here i'm not very optimistic because the basis for human success is not the truth it's cooperation and it's easier to cause people to cooperate with a fiction than it is with the with the truth because the fiction can be made much easier and much more likeable than the truth so mostly in history you don't see a correlation between the truth of a theory and its political appeal in science yes if you want to build an atom bomb you need a correct physical theory of the universe but in politics no way fiction usually trumps the truth in politics so dale let's talk about this because one of the things that i i study q anon and the others quite a bit and one of the things that's really interesting in terms of dec because it's a lot of his decision making when they're when they're reading this stuff you know they thought the election was cooked obviously and were convinced of it and that was repeated oh very typical propaganda i think constant repetition appeal to fear appeal to financial problems things like that but one of the things that i find interesting is when they're making these decisions the people that read this if you could sort of plummet the one that they the most recent one was that biden is actually trump and they changed faces um i know it sounds crazy but that's one of the ones and and i i was like that's a movie that was with nicholas uh cage just fyi was called face-off it's always a movie it's always some movie that they've decided to pop into reality or their version of reality so what happens is when they when something doesn't happen like the it turns out he isn't them now biden is an ai figure uh oddly enough he's a robot who is programmed by ai also tom hanks and some other people are also robots and the reason they wear masks is because they haven't figured out the mouth around it the ai hasn't perfected the mouth and so i know it sounds crazy to say this but they and then they continue when something gets in their way can you talk about how people do that from a decision-making perspective to shift from one thing to the next to the next crazy theory essentially i mean there is you know there is a basic principle of the way the mind works the mind speaks coherent stories and we tell and we construct coherent stories sometimes they're closer to the truth sometimes they're not what determines our confidence in the theories is not whether they're true or not it's whether they're coherent or not and and by coherence i mean both internal coherence that you can tell a story and it seems to make sense you've now explained to me you know why so many people wear masks and that's ah that's something i hadn't thought before but now you've told me it sounds right and it's very convincing and i believe in it and it's new and i want to tell it to my friends but the the coherence also is emotional coherence that is you have to have the right heroes the people that you already like and you have to to have the right villains the people you already hate and when you can construct a story that has the right heroes the right villains and some coherence it really doesn't have to be true in any scientific way people will have confidence in it because our confidence and this is something that for scientists is very difficult to accept because you talked about confidence in your last book that people have in their beliefs has very little to do with truth the confidence has everything to do with internal coherence and with emotional coherence and that makes it relatively easy to make people believe in all sorts of fictions we just need to remember that the fears that these kinds of stories express they should be taken seriously because if if you now have a theory that biden is actually an ai so the the actual story is ridiculous but it does channel a legitimate and very powerful and very realistic fear we just spent an entire hour talking about a.i taking over the world so when somebody believes that biden is actually an a.i so literally it's of course it's nonsense but it does make sense in the sense yeah ai is taking over the world the president of the us is one of the most powerful people in the world so the president of the us is an ai in in in a kind of uh analogical sense or a metaphorical sense the metaphor is correct or when you say biden is actually trump this again it channels a deep fear that all these politicians are interchangeable republicans democrats in the end they all screw us and we will find nothing so by the means trump is is factually of course ridiculous but it does encapsulate some kind of true metaphor to combat conspiracy theories we also need to understand what makes them attractive right and to um see the legitimate fears or concerns that make them attractive to people it's absolutely true when you think the second part and then i want to we have about 20 minutes i want to finish up on two major issues which is whether we should have humans around at all um and and then what you see is hopeful but when you think about what's happening with the with the onslaught of technology um one of the things that i spent a lot of time thinking about is the reductive nature of it of how it goes down to short reductive things versus you know pr versus policy phrases versus thought even if uh decision making and judgment is noisy what's happening now is something very different do you think that the human brain is being shifted into a reductive nature where everything is you know you see like they pop up every day like dr seuss which isn't real when you start to explain it it's not really a thing but it becomes a thing do you think things are happening in our brains around decision making because of the reductive nature of these technologies well i don't think that the brain is being changed by what is happening i mean evolutionary changes take longer than yes they do is really the same as it's been what what is happening and i'm not sure how different it is from what was happening earlier if the speed of change and the speed of news uh that seems to be accelerating and the shifts of interest and probably uh the number of times that people consult their their phone during a day this is changing the way the mind works it's not changing the brain but it certainly makes it makes our minds vulnerable to shift and to influence by from the outside more than before no question about that how do you change that the how does it affect decision making because you talk about decision-making a lot in terms of how people make decisions whose decision-making it has it's clearly all that we're saying all that we're seeing is it creates communities i mean i don't think that people you know make all that many decisions on their own i mean people are very influenced by their neighbors decisions and if you want to know you know what people think ask what their neighbors think before we you ask about their personalities or their ideas or whatever uh we're in where in our communities and communities are now being created by social media new kinds of communities are being created and so i don't think that it's changing i don't think that people are less autonomous or more autonomous than they were before they were influenced there were different sources of influence people were under the influence of the church and now it's not a church now it could be facebook but the idea that you're drawing your thoughts from the outside that is not new uh human nature hasn't changed in that respect so you've all that you talk about the sweep of history are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of human i know it's a big question but i'm going to ask you anyway i mean obviously it feels off it feels pessimistic he's just saying it was the church before so what if it's facebook maybe that's even better because it's more transparent what's happening or people have more access to information i think there is ground for some optimism because we do see we do see very positive changes in history and i'm not talking about the material changes that's easy okay we invented vaccines okay i'm talking about positive changes in ethics immorality in in social interactions um the level of violence today in the world is lower than in any previous time in history since the agricultural revolution and in the by a very big margin and even as a resident of the middle east i i i know that there are still wars in the world i live in israel i know that but still you look at almost all the numbers violence is at a historical law and it's not because of some new technology it's people really changed the way they built societies they were the way they make decisions yes technology has something to do with it the threat of nuclear war is a part of of of this reduction but silly people needed to make better decisions and they made better decisions since hiroshima there wasn't another world war and to take another example if i look at the feminist revolution it's one of the biggest revolution ever in human society you know for thousands of years you had political revolutions and economic and technological one thing remained constant that men dominate women and then within a very short time historically about a century it's not that we've reached a point of complete equality far from it but things change dramatically and what makes me even more optimistic about this example it was done peacefully you know many people say that in order to make omelets you need to break some eggs you didn't break any eggs in the feminist revolution maybe the enemies of the feminist revolution they used violence but the feminists didn't they didn't start any war they weren't terrorists they didn't build up guillotines in city square they didn't send people to the gulag and they completely changed the world so it's it's an example it's not a guarantee but it's an example that you can change the world for better quickly peacefully and without inventing a new technology just by changing people's minds all right what is your case for humanity uh daniel not very different from us i mean we draw on the same information things have been improving there is a secular trend clearly that depends a great deal on education so there is hope if you can improve education but the question really is is whether the speed at which things can improve and can match the speed at which dangers are arising and and whether you're an optimist or a pessimist which depends largely on your genes anyway but if you're an optimist you're going to see things one way if you're a pessimist you are going to see a lot of perils and a lot of changes for the worse and and the changes for the better are are fragile and all the improvements that we see and there's no question that we're seeing big improvements they're also quite fragile as as i think all of us could easily agree what is each of you what is the biggest challenge you think we're facing as a planet i guess as a global planet i think we've talked about it the the whole yeah for the whole hour it's uh this accelerating pace of technological change especially this ability to hack human beings you know nuclear war is extremely frightening but at least every nobody wants nuclear war and the only question is how to prevent it the goal is clear and it's the same with climate change nobody wants climate change and ecological collapse some people say it's it's a myth it doesn't happen but even they they don't like it they just say it's not real now with the technological disruption it's very different a lot of people are working very hard to accelerate these things yeah but for some of us our nightmares for them they could be dreams and there is no consensus about what is the desired end ai is coming what to do with it there is no consensus around it it's going to change the very meaning of what it means to be human so at least intellectually it's a much more complicated challenge we are not it's not clear what is the danger and what is if it's not beneficial versus anything else when you look at uh you know a lot of these they're in fact they're all tech billionaires talking about going to space when you see them doing that how do you look at that i don't have any objection to going to space yeah i think it's a kind of escapism you know when one of the main interpretations for the space race in the 50s and 60s is that there was a growing sense that the planet is doomed right so even subconsciously leaders in the kremlin in the white house okay we need to look for somewhere else because this place is going to hell and then the cold war ended and also the space the space age seemed to be forgotten okay planet earth is saved we can just stay here and build a good life here and now when again it seems that everything is going is going down you have these billionaires okay this place is lost we've ruined it we need to look for for a new place to to settle so i think at least some of that is is coming from that psychological uh tendency and that's very very dangerous because we won't do it in time i don't see any way that we can build colonies on mars or wherever in time even if we do it will be enough for i don't know a few thousand people the billions and billions of people on planet earth need vocals that all these giants of industry should focus on how to save this planet before reaching other planets so daniel what is your from your the biggest challenge you see going forward as you've said we've been talking about these challenges you know in principle the big challenge is to tame human nature uh and won't see any quick way of doing it as for the race to space it's a game i mean clearly it cannot be serious so uh and and people do this because they can and because they can create more visible change and they could if they spend their billions in trying to improve the lot of humanity which is slow and difficult and in that sense i would say bill gates looks like an adult in the room that he is not playing those games and he is actually trying to deal with the problems as they exist but there's a lot of playing yeah yeah i was i just did an interview with him and i said you used to be darth vader and suddenly you're luke skywalker or someone i don't know what happened but but speaking of that president company excluded of course who are the most important figures shaping human history right now i suppose there are unknown engineers somewhere working on something which they have no idea what would be the the repercussions of that something that they're probably changing the world more than anybody else and that's reason for concern because going back to the idea of noise that's kind of historical noise suddenly out of nowhere some new technology comes and changes everything and all our expectations and all our predictions are not worth much so i would say these kinds of people are the most important uh changers at the moment with lack of appreciation for consequences usually they have tunnel vision that they are developing an app or a technology and they are very focused on solving a particular technical problem they don't think very much about what would be the consequences for politics for culture for human psychology and and so forth this is usually the case i mean one of them one of the things that enable them to be such good engineers is that they have little distracting noise from elsewhere thinking about oh what the consequences will be for the the global geopolitical situation they couldn't possibly see the consequences i mean we've been talking for an hour and a half or so as if we could know the future but the fact is you know there is a lot of history to tell us we can't tell the future technological forecasting the forecasting of scientific development has just a miserable record now we can't help but be confident in our ability to predict because we see those trends and we can't imagine other stories and our sense of what is inevitable comes from limited imagination and primary possibility of devising or inventing new stories in fact as as yuval is saying if you're asking who are the most important people in the world today the answer is we have no idea they have no idea it's going to be known in the future and in the future people will be pointing and said oh that was the important development because it had consequences and it's nobody's fault that they couldn't foresee the consequences because our ability to foresee is very limited except if it's ai and then they figured the whole thing out but but but daniel i'm going to push you though okay 20 years ago who was the most important person that that is now today that we can now see since we have hindsight if you want to talk about politics i would find it difficult clearly somebody in china i would say is the most important person whether it's she or somebody else who is controlling the future of politics that's a trivial answer if you're looking at uh at science i think that the people who were the most you know who are the most important today or playing an important role 20 years ago they were children they were scientists they're young people by the way are changing the world it's people in their forties or in their fifties it's that mr sabby's in the context of ai it is jennifer goodnight and and people who are younger than she is she is an elder and compared to some others uh those are the important people and they get identified only retrospectively retrospectively all right so let me let me then put you in a situation only a few more minutes is if you had to start today you want to leave some hope for young people because one of the things that i find very helpful is when i do talk to young people i feel a lot better about the planet for some reason um i just finished a class at the university of chicago and i felt that they really do i do underst are cognizant of these issues in a much broader way than i than i am i feel sort of on a hair on fire a lot of the time if you were to start off right now if you're 20 years old um what would you do each of you what would you pick as your area of expertise if you couldn't pick the one you picked don't say just what i've done all right you know it's sort of obvious i would have gone today either in the study of the brain or in the study of ai because those are the most those look like the most fascinating avenues for future understanding of human nature actually and what of the brain and studying how it works figuring out the computer it is yeah i mean clearly it is a computer and clearly we have very little idea of what it is i mean you know if science continues to develop as it seems to be developing but 200 years or 100 years from now you know with the knowledge of science of today that looks awesome we look childish you know there's a very limited understanding of the world around a century ago so that's what that's the brain what about you evil i would go either to study the mind not the brain um assuming we are now in a race who hacks the mind i mean in the end it's all about the mind not the brain nobody cares about the brain as such we care about the brain because we think this is the door to the mind and i think we are in a race who hacks the human mind first and if the ai does it first then game over and i think that to protect ourselves the better we understand our own minds that's the really only potential safeguard so i would go in that direction or it's not so very different from what i'm doing anyway but um in the direction of i would speak broadly about poetry not writing poems as poems but the autistic imagination because we need a good story to deal with what's happening my view of history is that in the end the most powerful force in history at least until today were fictional stories this is what united millions of people together you can't unite people with science it's not interesting enough it's not easy enough to understand you need a good story and what we are seeing now is a kind of crisis of the imagination that most of the stories not all but most of the stories um you know even if science fiction too many science fiction plots are focused on the wrong thing you have so many movies about the robot's rebellion coming to kill us very few movies about the robots don't try to kill us they just manage the financial system in a way that we don't understand now how to make an interesting sci-fi movie about a world in which the financial system is run by ai nobody is being killed by by the terminator but how does it look so you know something like black mirror or at least some of the episodes in black mirror i i i i will having my life again i would like to be today in a position that i'm i can do something like that to do that to make something like that one of the things i often tell silicon valley engineers when i'm talking to them is i said imagine your invention is an episode of black mirror uh which is always terrible and don't make it like or figure out a way to make it that that that creates it a more benign version of what you're creating what i usually tell them in the same vein is think about the politician you you most dislike in your country or in the world and now think what he or she will do with your invention and now think again about how to plan how to design your invention i have to end on one last question they have at the bottom here because it's going to be a very difficult one um but i'll give you a choice uh the question is what is the meaning of life which is too hard which is too hard everyone has a different meaning i'm going to change that just a little bit and talk about if you say we have to rewrite our stories what does the best future look like in a hundred years for each of you what does this society look like daniel i'll start with you it's a society possibly in which we have hacked human nature and in which we control some of the aggressive impulses and and in which uh education and and maybe more than education may be hacking human beings uh has made people better able to live in peace and to live interesting lives and rich lives that's a hope it's a distant hope well let's have you have the last word i think that two key things is first that the power resulting for all these inventions is shared not equally between everybody but at least not concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite either a human elite or a non-human elite and secondly very close to what daniel just said that the power to hack human beings is used not to manipulate us not to control us but to help us understand ourselves better and improve ourselves you know the old saying that know thyself now we have the technology to do it if the technology is used for our benefit and not for the benefit of some big corporation or totalitarian government then this can be really the the best society that ever existed that sounds like a great thing it sounds like non-fungible tokens well suddenly all you know about those don't we're not even going to get into it um i really appreciate it you two are so amazing and smart and i think this will be this conversation was very uh thought provoking for me at least and i appreciate all your work i'm looking forward to daniel's uh new book getting out there noise and yvonne what are you working on a children's book which is supposed to come out i'm working actually on two a graphic novel for adults which is already out the first part and a children's book which is supposed to come out next year all right well i appreciate it thank you so much both of you

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 433,702

Rating: 4.9184809 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 7yhg7NmTeVg

Length: 90min 38sec (5438 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jum_silli]

~ 38:00

Yuval speaking of Kahneman’s work through the decades pointing out human behavior such as heuristics. If we accept this view of ourselves it will make for a much brighter world. But if we stick with the egocentric, arrogant view of ourselves, it makes us extremely vulnerable to new kinds of technology.

They were broadly speaking about algorithms and AI making more decisions for humanity.

Interesting to hear other thoughts from those familiar with Kahneman’s work.

[u/WideReadandInterests]

I liked the conversation in this interview with Kara Swisher as a provoking interviewer . I have read Daniel Kahneman (loved Think Fast Think Slow ) as well as Yuval Noah Harari. His book Homodeus is particularly thought provoking . Daniel Kahneman is very much focussed on the present whereas Noah Harari is futuristic . Yet , I thought that they both converged. That humanity needs to come to terms with the vulnerabilities- from technology omnipresence , social media , climate .... Embracing the reality and internalising it is a challenge. Yet there is no other way.