Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Yuval Noah Harari in conversation

ladies and gentlemen welcome to this extraordinary session of athens democracy forum which also serves as a grand finale for what has been a thought-provoking three days of debate and deliberation i'm sure you will all remember that line from monty python and now for something completely different well here it is our next conversation is between the prime minister of greece kirigakos mitsutakis and an israeli intellectual yuval na harari who doesn't even have a smartphone and has declared that homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so that prediction may have seemed a bit hyperbolic a few months ago but as we meet virtually and talk through face masks in the midst of the pandemic crisis we have to take it more seriously but while we're still here let me welcome our speakers mr mitsodakis has been prime minister since july 2019 which has given him time to confront a herculean set of crisis from the pandemic to the new tensions with turkey mr harari is a bit harder to define i guess he is what these days we call a public intellectual whose ideas generate excitement controversy and debate a bit like socrates i trust we'll get a bit of that here liz alderman our chief business correspondent for the new york times is here to keep things in check so here's to politics power and the pandemic will this have traces of some herculean and socratian approaches liz over to you well thank you very much for that introduction achilles and we're really pleased to welcome the both of you here today i suppose it is appropriate to call this sort of you know a dialogue between hercules and socrates we do have brains and intellectual brawn here that's for sure um let me dive straight in i do want this to be a a conversation that is an unplugged conversation between the two of you um socrates style um so i'm gonna sort of sit in the background a little bit as the chorus um and jump in from time to time to referee and maybe throw you all a few questions uh to steer the conversation in different directions but you've all obviously you have been thinking a great deal about how the world will be different once we're through this pandemic and mr prime minister you have been very busy um trying to you know managing uh an entire country steering a country through the pandemic um very successfully making greece uh in many ways a kind of a model um for for the world and that uh has obviously uh involved striking a delicate balance in governance so let me kick off your conversation if i may um with something that you've all recently put out there you wrote recently that in times of crisis we face two choices citizen empowerment and totalitarian surveillance and nationalist isolation or global solidarity for the both of you where do you where where is the world coming down on the on on that divide right now you've all do you want to take that and oh yeah well i think it's it's a bit too early to say we are still in the midst of the crisis and we probably haven't seen the worse not in terms of the pandemic itself and certainly not in terms of the economic and political fallout the big battle is not between humanity and the virus the big battle is between us and our own inner demons and as you said we are facing a choice we can react to the crisis by going the way of authoritarianism and totalitarianism trying to fight the pandemic by imposing a totalitarian regime from above or by empowering the citizens and similarly we can react to the crisis by generating hatred and competition between countries blaming the crisis on foreigners and minorities or we can try to cooperate now for me it's obvious what is the right thing to do but as a historian i know that we should never underestimate human stupidity it's one of the most powerful forces in history and in many cases you know like the choice should be obvious but people still do the other thing and my greatest fear is that when people look back in 40 years 50 years and the covet crisis they will not remember the masks they will not remember the virus they will remember this was the time when surveillance really took over this was the time when democracy failed and authoritarian regimes took over it's not inevitable it's still in our power to prevent this from happening um but that's that that's the main fear and you know we are here looking at the birthplace of uh democracy in athens and the acropolis and you know democracy is very very fragile it's like a delicate flower that needs unique conditions to survive whereas dictatorships are like weeds they can grow almost everywhere um here the democratic experiment that began 2500 years ago it lasted only 200 years and then collapsed and for more than 2 000 years this place was ruled by foreign empires and dictatorships took a very difficult road to rebuild democracy and i hope that we are not losing it again is that a legitimate concern in your view it is a legitimate concern although i i would argue that we have enough evidence that in terms of the two dilemmas that you highlighted at least the why do i say that as far as the greek quote-unquote experiment is is concerned we wouldn't have been successful uh in uh in fighting the uh the first wave uh of the pandemic had we not been able to engage citizens proactively uh and build a relationship of trust uh between government and by government i mean the state not necessarily the elected government and citizens it was not easy because we came out of 10 years of crisis when all our institutions were were challenged but we did manage to create a sense of of collective destiny which however also assumed changes in individual behavior which is always as you know quite tricky to to deliver and it can never be totally imposed and we did use technology but i think we did it in a creative way because when we asked citizens for example to send out an sms um as to whether they actually plan to leave their house you can you can argue that this was the imposition of the sort of a surveying state but we deleted all the data and we made it very very clear that it was a mechanism of collective empowerment rather than us having access to citizen data and monitoring them um where they wherever they are and and we know that when it comes to behavior you can't have a policeman next to uh next to everyone checking whether they where or whether they don't wear a mask so changes in individual behavior are critical but in order for us to achieve them first of all the choices cannot be political so wearing a mask is not a political statement it's an act of self-defense but also an act of solidarity because you protect other people especially your family because we know that most of the transmission is taking place within the household so it's an act to protect those who um who you who you love the most so i'm a big believer that we can actually use data in a public in an open way to help us drive educated decision making now as far as the second point um let's say nativism hatred versus global cooperation i would argue that in in in spite of you know all the noise and everything that has that has happened the fact that we're able to develop a vaccine in months or even let's say 18 months other than 10 years is an unprecedented success of global cooperation and the european union um as a collective entity that rises above the level of the nation state has been able to cooperate when it comes to vaccines so there's no doubt how the vaccines will be distributed it's not going to be it's going to be per capita the european union is purchasing vaccines and then distributing them to rich nations poor nations regardless was using the same basic algorithm depending on the on the population and then it's also putting out general guidelines as to how people will be vaccinated so i'd say that this is a it's a positive example of of global cooperation but of course we need more we had a very interesting discussion yesterday at the council how we can facilitate travel how we can have unified rules how we can make sure we have same guidelines or same yardsticks so as far as the west is concerned because the east that's a different question as far as western democracy is concerned i think we can draw some positive conclusions as to how some countries at least have managed this but i think you're living out maybe the most important part of the west which is the united states uh the eu has indeed been reacting at least in recent months in a much more cooperative way but the united states which was traditionally for decades the leader of the free world and the leader of the west is no longer leading anybody hardly leading even itself um whereas in previous crisis the us was at the front whether it's the 2008 financial crisis or the ebola epidemic now it's in order to be seen in terms of global cooperation actually the us administration has even abandoned the u.s itself basically the central government telling states and and mayors and municipalities you deal with it yourself and what is the future uh that you see for the western world in this crisis and in future worst crisis to come global warming the rise of ai if the united states is really abdicating its job as leader ah i think you raise a fair point although i don't think that in the medium or in the long term this is going to happen because i simply believe that what we call what we used to call for 70 years the transatlantic alliance is simply too strong amount to to be um destroyed as far as its foundation is uh is concerned and when it comes to this level of of leadership i think that it is it also places a burden on us europeans to make sure that we get our act together and that we do take decisions at the european level which will exercise our collective power we are probably the largest economic collectively the largest economic power in the world as far as data protection is concerned we are at the forefront of establishing what i think is an appropriate balance between making sure that we don't put a you know a a block or a constraint on technological progress while at the same time protecting data privacy and of course this is constantly going to evolve because we're just scratching the surface of the challenges that we will face and when when it was necessary two months ago we delivered a big package of economic support to to member states which was way beyond what many people expected the european union could do but i i do think that there's going to be a new chapter as far as our relationship with the u.s is uh uh is concerned which is not necessarily related to the outcome of the election and let me wish you know president trump and his wife uh you know all the best in you know in in fighting this this this virus and if if there's one one point which i would take out of this you know sad story is that in that sense the virus is very democratic it doesn't make any exceptions it can affect all of us um from the most powerful person in the world to um people who would consider themselves um uh uh underprivileged so uh uh let's see how this thing is is gonna it's gonna play out but i wouldn't write off um you know 70 years of institutional um uh building completely because the us over the past years has followed a slightly different let me let me steer you both if i can to a point that the both of you just brought up in that conversation the economy um and and uh the the impact of the pandemic i mean this is obviously a huge sort of turning point in you know human history in many ways um you mentioned prime minister obviously the the the the social and economic support that european countries and indeed other countries in the world are bringing to their economies to their citizens um but at the same time what would you say is the lesson that we have learned so far about the trade-off between trying to keep economies open and and really from because the more they're closed the more they are devastated and jobs lost and the trade-off between trying to maintain public health we're looking at possibly a huge wave of you know mass unemployment that could be with us for a long time you know how how how are we going to manage this this challenge well when the first wave hit when we didn't know much about the virus the choice was very clear we had to lock down and we took the decision very very early and it was clearly the right decision because we managed to crush the virus during its first wave but we knew that we had to take that decision at that time because we needed time to learn more about the virus and also strengthen our health care system but we also knew that this would have a devastating economic impact although i must say that in a globalized world even countries that didn't do a full lockdown such as sweden ended up paying the economic price but i think there's a general agreement amongst at least european countries that it is very difficult almost inconceivable to go to a second full lockdown uh and we're much smarter now so we can do localized um lockdowns um we we use contact tracing in a much smarter way we do much more testing we can be much more effective in contact tracing but but there's still a big question mark and the question mark is can we manage to live with a virus while maintaining economic normality without a full lockdown and without push putting you know too much strain on our health care system i think no one has the answer yet because we still have three or four very difficult months so we hope um and we're very optimistic that we won't need um to take drastic measures along the lines of what we what we did but can anyone tell you with uh with certainty the answer is is clearly no and as far as economic support is concerned i think that even we in greece um supported the income of practically everyone including the private sector this is essentially the welfare state on steroids what we did and we we actually um made it very clear that we need to spend money to support um the weaker members those who who will be hit the hardest low-paying jobs jobs in the hospitality sector which was hit very hard during the summer because of because of tourism and we can still we can afford to do it we will afford we were able to do it for some time but obviously we cannot do it forever so um we are very concerned with and we watch very carefully the numbers as we enter into the the fall and the winter we're lucky in greece we can still be outdoors for quite some time but then you look at countries such as israel for example that did extremely well during the first wave and are facing a big crisis now and you understand how unpredictable these things are and sometimes are also there is also an element of randomness as you will recognize in some of these events you can have two or three super spreader events and they can make all the difference yeah i think the two main points about the economic crisis and especially also unemployment uh is the issue of automation and the issue of the global perspective of the global safety net first of all we are seeing uh enormous rise in unemployment because of the pandemic and at the same time i mean you could have expected okay there'll be a period of large unemployment gradually within a few years things will return to normal and people will have jobs again but this is this time it's different because at the same moment you also have a dramatic historical shift in the economy which is digitalization and automation so entire industries are being digitalized and automated something that experts thought would take 10 20 years and will have a problem in 2040 it's now accelerating that you know in my own university we talked about moving online digitalizing the university for years and have done nothing when they covered strike um we did it in two weeks just shifted the whole university online now automation means that a lot of the people who lose their jobs will not have any job to return to because the industry has changed or moved and then the big question is retraining there will be new jobs the big problem is how to retrain people that before the crisis had one kind of job i don't know a taxi driver or a truck driver to do something completely different now rich countries whether germany or japan or the us they have the resources to actually massively retrain the workforce but what would poorer countries do if they can't retrain their workforce they are facing not just unemployment like we knew in in in the past they are facing the emergence of a useless class a class of people which not that they don't have jobs they don't have skills that are needed by the economy and the other related problem is the global dimension again conceivably you can imagine that let's say the eu would come to help its weakest members and have an eu program to retrain the workforce even in the poorer members but then what happened in the middle east what happens in africa what happens in south america entire countries might collapse and the resulting cows and violence and waves of immigration will destabilize the entire world now greece which is on the front line of the immigration crisis in the mediterranean obviously needs to think not about only what happens to greece and to italy unto spain also what happens to egypt what happens to turkey what happens to african countries and economically my biggest concern is that so far there is absolutely no economic plan for the world when we are facing a global crisis but we have only national or regional plans we should have had a global economic plan months ago but there is nothing of the sort and the feeling is that on the global level there are just no adults in the room everybody is taking care of themselves and the weakest members of humanity which are really billions of people are being left behind is the crisis is this covid crisis accelerating a return to the nation state certainly covet is a digital accelerator we deliver digital services in weeks we hadn't been able to do it for decades and obviously we had put a lot of work in in transforming the state and i see the digital revolution as the only way to break through you know traditional bureaucratic silos and we've been able to start initiating this sort of state re-engineering process by using digital tools and it is very much appreciated by citizens again very non-ideological approach really appealing to them to the young fighting a bureaucracy that has held greece back for uh for ages this i would argue is is almost an opportunity for us to to to leapfrog other countries because we're doing it in such a in such a dramatic fashion and the impact can be so uh significant so certainly the crisis is an accelerator is it a return to the nation state yes yes and no there were also um periods during the pademic where every state was clearly out there on its own i remember very well the first phase of the pandemic where we were all scrambling to find you know protective gear there was no european solidarity at the time it did take us some some time to um to get to that point but i would i would certainly agree with you that if we want the global plan we need the u.s engaged and we probably also need china engaged at some point it can't just happen without the two largest economies being engaged the same is also true for climate change which is probably the biggest existential challenge we we are facing on your comments regarding jobs which i think is absolutely spot-on uh the biggest challenge that we face as you know as as policy makers is how do you put in place um proper you know skills-based retraining programs that are actually appealing and how do you explain to people where the jobs will be not in the distant future but in the near future and how do we also explain to people that you know a traditional university degree from a greek public university may not necessarily be the way to earn a good living we're currently tabling a piece of legislation where we are completely rethinking our technical education you know maybe plumbers or electricians may not be outsourced to robots before other jobs are and we face in greece a big shortage of technically skilled people and you know sometimes we're also talking about jobs which may come from the past traditional craftsmanship is making a resurgence because there's more demand on for it yet i don't see much interest in many you know areas in greece for these types of jobs which actually could be very well and a very good paying jobs and also help and regional development so thinking you know 5 10 15 years ahead and making sure you make the changes now in your educational system is a challenge you know i constantly use the example that a kid that starts elementary school today will graduate in 20 from high school in 2032 and from university if we still have four year university curricula then in 2036 but what sorts of skills are we giving our younger kids today to prepare for that world so this is a difficult question what is certain is that the eu has a lot of funding available for these types of programs but then we also need to convince people that uh it's in their interest to get this type of uh of training it's not just us um offering let's say an economic incentive for people to retrain uh that may not be enough on its own if people don't understand that it that the the concept of getting an education getting a job and getting a pension may no longer it is probably already being it's probably already obsolete so we learn all the time we'll change jobs uh probably more frequently you know we've raised our retirement age uh one good thing with the crisis in greece is that we have already made difficult reforms that other european countries haven't even you know contemplated yet and of course one last point um you know regarding what we learned from covet if you can if you cannot not just live but work from anywhere wouldn't you prefer to work from here um from greece from a greek island if you have you know connectivity safety you know good uh good healthcare it's not just to come to greece it's a pitch of why greece has a significant comparative advantage because in this new and changing world aspects such as you know quality of life become that much more that much more important so there will be winners and losers then there won't just be losers as a result of the covet disruption and you know my job is to make sure that you know we're a medium-sized country of course we we we want to contribute to the global dialogue but you know my responsibility as the prime minister of greece is to make sure that we're on the side of those who come out stronger after corbett can we can we circle i'm sorry did you please question i mean just about this this point of say i don't know accountants from sweden coming to work from econo crete because the infrastructure is here and even in university i mean if you teach online so you can teach in harvard but instead of being in boston during the winter you can be in greece uh why not but then this raises the question of the uh digital infrastructure who owns it i mean as more and more and our social and private life shifts to the digital infrastructure then isn't it time to make it a public good and what kind of world is it when our entire lives are being conducted on platforms owned by private businesses and individuals maybe on the other side of the world that they have their finger on the switch that controls our entire life they also have access to all the data now you mentioned the efforts of the eu to regulate data privacy but the issue is that europe i mean there isn't now a digital cold war between china and the us europe doesn't have any holes in the race i mean none of the big tech companies is european so that's a huge huge problem for europe if it wants to really influence what's going on uh to again give the worst case scenario uh greece has in its history had to deal with a lot of empires and foreign conquests now there is a new form of imperialism and kind of digital imperialism to dominate a country today you don't need to send in the tanks you just need to take out the data if you imagine say greek politics in 20 years when the entire personal records of every politician every mayor every journalist is held by somebody in beijing or san francisco or moscow you know when you're a kid you don't have a facebook account but think about the politician in 20 years that she or he are running for office and somebody has the entire record of what they did in college nobody can serve no politician the refutation of no politician can survive such a thing i think everything you've done in high school in college is in the hands of somebody well i would argue first of all just to start from your last point that this level of of transparency there's a thin line between transparency and which we all aspire to and breach of breach of privacy and for us politicians it's very very difficult to draw that line uh but we assume that we live in a glass house and that everything we do is completely public and frankly one of the reasons why many capable people don't want to get involved in politics is exactly because they don't want to go through this and i i know exactly from experience how painful it can be for myself or my family to have to go through that exposure that is a big challenge that we will face in terms of it's a global challenge in terms of attracting talented people um to to the cause of public service now in terms of digital who owns the data and who owns a digital infrastructure look europe has taken important steps in terms of defining you know critical digital infrastructure that it would like and i think rightly so um to have uh within you know european ownership but we need to be honest uh if that means that maybe some of the services will have to be more expensive um there's a trade-off we probably need to to explain and be willing to and be willing to uh to accept when you look at how do you think about new technologies with just um starting the we will be one of the first countries to auction off our 5g spectrum we've taken chunk of the proceeds and rather than putting them in the budget we've created a new um a new fund that will support uh you know 5g ecosystem in uh in greece so we're trying to well within again the capacity of a medium-sized european country to to play our own role in terms of developing um technology but you're right to point out that we need more sort of european champions because the issue that both of you are raising uh is is one that actually has come up a lot during this conference the much bigger issue and concern about uh digital democracy and also digital dictatorship the dangers of digital dictatorship you prime minister talked about how for example uh that this country deleted uh data uh on the app on the tracing app there's a much bigger concern that we're getting in comments even right now from viewers um as you both speak about you know how do we the uh how do we sort of uh deal with sort of the dark side of technology what we've been seeing on social media the use of social media as platforms for digital manipulation for political manipulation um you know is this going to get worse before it gets better how are we going to regulate that especially at a time when as you've all you've pointed out everybody is willingly giving themselves over to a type of a certain type of monitoring now in the name of in the name of health in the name of the greater good what's to prevent that from actually being turned against people in some ways by by their own leaders first of all the tech companies themselves have have work to do that's is very very clear and the boundaries are not always very um very clear but you know if for example facebook has a policy of taking down pages that spread uh hatred or systematic misinformation they have a they are the aggregator at the end of the day and if they don't do it somebody else is going to do it um for them there's there's no doubt uh about that now democracy is uh you know is adjusting and and again uh new uh new media offer an opportunity for politicians to um uh i'd say disseminate their message and there's also there is also an an interesting element uh in that you no longer need which is not good for your job but um you don't no longer need an integrator or an aggregator or an editor it may be problematic because all the news that's fit to print which is what the new york times model is means that there is someone who who places a framework and is editing it on the other hand it also gives the opportunity for someone to communicate directly and gives a and if you if you say something interesting people will listen to you or if you say something inflammatory people will listen to you so um we have to recognize that human nature has two aspects there's always a dark side um to it and social media can be a force for good or it can be a force for bad i don't have an obvious answer on how uh on how you regulate it short of imposing total control and becoming which is not obviously what i advocate which is what some countries do and and having full state control uh over what happens when it happens and what people uh listen to that is not an option for um for western uh for western democracies but it is very very clear that at some point you need a filter and it's either going to be at the level of the of the big tech companies or it's going to be probably at a higher level maybe both would have to take place at the same time i think the key issue is the emerging ability to hack human beings which was never the case before in history there is a lot of talk about hacking computers and smartphones and bank accounts but a really big revolution we are living through is the emerging ability to hack people to collect enough if you have enough data on a person and you have enough computing power you can hack that person you can understand them better than they understand themselves you can know their political views their sexual preferences their personality even better than they and then you can completely manipulate them and this is something that democracy or frankly any other human society never had to deal with before it was impossible throughout history and this really undermines our traditional ideas about democracy and open society but democracy assumes free will from individuals that we ultimately nobody can manipulate us beyond a certain point and it's the same with the free economy that you know the customer is always right in the end corporations say customers have free will but once corporations and governments have the ability to hack humans then there is no longer free will they know how to manipulate me and we're seeing it happening now on a small scale but increasingly on a big scale and you know you have the smartest people in the world coming out of harvard and mit and stanford over the last 10 years working on the problem of how to make you click on ads and they succeeded because they hacked our brains they discovered that the easiest way to grab your attention is to press the hate button the fear button the anger button in your brain when they discover what you already fear or what you already hate and they show you maybe a fake news story about that and you have an irresistible urge to click on it what did he say this time what did he do this time it's really more powerful than you are and and this is a game changer we are still working with the ideological and philosophical ideas of plato and aristotle and kant and the enlightenment thinkers but they did not have to deal with uh machine learning systems that can hack human beings so i think we really need i have a deep faith in the ability of democracy to reinvent itself the advantage of democracy over dictatorships and all other systems is that it is democratic governments are more willing to acknowledge their own shortcomings and mistakes or if nothing helps then they can just be replaced by another government so democracies are more adaptable but we have to be very clear about the nature of the threat we are facing and really i think we need to first of all acknowledge the weakness of human beings the easiest people to manipulate are those who believe in complete free will that anything i choose is my own i do it for my own freedom realizing that no you now live in a world where there are outside systems that can hack you is the first step towards building a more resilient uh democratic system yeah um two points first of all on the value of classical philosophy i would argue that the thinkers of the past were very good at first of all trying to to interpret a world they could not understand and that's what made them you know extremely powerful uh and it's a sort of same thought process that we need to to to to go through now there are aspects there are questions we ask questions which we don't know the answer to but we're forced to come up with some answer because these are extremely relevant questions um to the the issue of data manipulation it is already happening to i mean although the big tech companies are making a lot of money by by using data which we consciously or maybe unconsciously provide them with and making sure they they offer us what they think is of interest to us so they um and it is uh you know i i remember that you know was i don't know remember who the ceo was but it was a ceo of a big consumer goods company in you know in the 60s who said i know that 50 of my advertisement um is is money well spent i just don't know what 50 well now we know um and that is and that of course is uh is is data that can also be used it can be used by private companies but it can also be used by the state and if the state is first of all has the obligation to make data available publicly i'm a big believer in in open data to the extent that it is non-personalized because that data can be a force for good because there's lots of of technologies that are also being developed we talk about ai and let's say and you've written on this and about autonomous driving uh and yes it may destroy jobs but it will also save you know more than a million people die every year so we talk about you know videos and we're going to talk about the value of human life above all well let's think also about that about that angle last point you raised about the you know democracy i think democracy can self-correct uh we saw that in greece after 10 years of populism we have a government now that is i would term a liberal moderate reform-oriented government that wants to make you know big changes and that enjoys a great degree of public support would that have been possible five years ago i don't know honestly i don't i don't know but after 10 years of crisis and experimenting with populists uh in our case on the left greek society was ready and through open democratic process chose to place their face in us and in three years we will again go to the polls and you know if they like us they will probably vote for us again if if not they will choose something else that is a beauty of democracy and its ability to to self correct and we should not forget that we've also gone through uh look at the history of other crises look at the 30s in the us and how leaders came up with extremely bold responses these were democratic responses but they also had a significant level of public support because at the end of the day no democracy no matter how how strong it is can impose big changes by simply referring to an electoral mandate because at some point they need to implement policies and when they implement policies they need to have enough people on board to at least give them the benefit of the doubt that the policies move in the right direction so it sounds like the both of you do have faith that democracy and democratic systems will overcome these challenges at the same time for example i'm getting a lot of questions from our viewers on once again this issue of the the the rise of of autocratic regimes however around the world and again the role that that technology is playing in sort of you know telegraphing that message in a sort of an exponential way people are interested in knowing you know is the world going to basically turn more autocratic in the coming years perhaps partly because of the major opening that the coronavirus is is providing are we going to see a kind of almost a clash of civilizations emerging i don't know it depends on the decisions that people around the world take in the coming months and years history is not deterministic we still have agency we still have the power to decide such things the danger is that once you go autocratic there is no way back i mean again the big advantage of a democracy yes democracies sometimes are more slow because it's not about convincing one person you need compromise you need to convince a lot of people but if they make a mistake then it's much more easy to acknowledge it and try something else with an autocratic regime uh whenever they make a mistake they just can blame others demand even more power for themselves and once the authoritarian regime is in power it's in under modern condition it's extremely difficult to shake it off from within if you look at truly totalitarian regimes like nazi germany or the soviet union they could not no matter how bad they were it was impossible to overthrow them from within they could be overthrown only from above like in the soviet union when the leadership itself decided that it's time to try something else or from outside like in the case of nazi germany but not from within and this is you know it's kind of uh once you once people make the choice oh let's try another italian regime it's not let's try it's for life in many cases so it's an extremely dangerous path to go and unfortunately there are many countries now on on the verge of making this dangerous choice i think the big challenge will be reinventing the state within the democratic context because the pandemic has proven that the state is important and especially in times of crisis has a big role to play and it cannot be replaced either by you know individual free will or by the markets that i think was was a very clear lesson um of the uh of the pandemic and i think that uh there are clearly competing visions of how to organize societies uh and uh one should and i'm speaking from the perspective of of a democratic leader we have an obligation to at least look at what's happening in the east first of all the first thing that we see and i think eastern societies and i'm talking about democratic societies in the east have been much better at imposing what we call social discipline and there's a question to be asked why is this happening um what is their set of priorities what is your set of values why do they value maybe human life and what do you call free will discipline i'm very try to be very careful in what i in in in my terminology over the right to party for example and they've been more successful we should be very very very very honest with that there are also aspects of of good governance that are interesting uh do we have this is going to be provocative and this is a question i'm raising but it's provocative if singapore pays its civil servants but also its ministers very very high salaries that are competitive with the private sector um is there um could this ever happen in in the west if it doesn't happen and i'm not sure it will happen then you need a different calling for public service um people as it has happened in the past people enter public service not because they were well paid but because there was a sense of of greater good that was uh that was being served but if there's one thing which is which which is a given is that we cannot as a state we have to be competitive either with the private sector in terms of how we use technology um we cannot outsource technological progress to the private sector uh and it will happen if all the smart people end up working um for silicon valley uh rather than working for uh for the government we're just about to run out of time here let me ask you mr prime minister do you have a question for yuval ah yes well i actually asked him what is his uh what is his uh what is his next book um and how do you how do you communicate very complex uh ideas uh uh in in a simple way which i think he's what he's very good at uh and he actually told me that he's writing now just about to publish a graphic novel a comic book for adults which again tells the history of the world in a very different way it was fun to fund to write it i mean i think it's the most fun thing i ever done is i didn't roll myself i draw like a five-year-old kid i teamed up with experts with artists in belgium and in france and it's it's just coming out and the idea is you know to bridge the gap between the scientific community and the general public to provide people with the latest findings of science but in a fun engaging way uh with comics with fictional characters so um i hope it's good well uh i'm a big believer in the value of history and if you want to read one text if one wants to read one text which is relevant given the context you know revisit pericles funeral oration which was written at a time when democratic athens was struck by plague and it's a magnificent um eulogy to the power of democracy uh in a you know in a time of crisis well that is an excellent advice and uh the perfect note for us to wrap up on thank you both very much for being here for sort of sharing your views um there was a lot of there were some you know desperation some a lot of worry you know that uh has been coming up during this extraordinary period but the both of you um have also given a lot of hope and hopefully a way forward so thank you very much once again for joining us thank you thank you [Music] you

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 48,497

Rating: 4.8868504 out of 5

Keywords: Yuval Noah Harari, Yuval Harari, Sapiens, Homo Deus, History, Humankind, Science, Philosophy, AI, Artificial intelligence, Technology, Revolution, Evolution, Algorithms, Democracy, Global, Data, Politics, Future, Present 21st century, 21 Lessons, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Thought Leaders

Id: FjUyZLvFGuw

Length: 49min 30sec (2970 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/my_other_account_471]

Πάλι ρε παιδιά αυτό; Χτες το ειχαν ξαναποσταρει :(

[u/SatanicBiscuit]

hello mr prime minister may i be bold mareva is looking great today

her sundress hit me like the ax hits the wood the ache in my heart and the confusion she creates in my soul means that we are still alive still humans and still open to this ancient beatury she radiates to this world even tho we have done nothing to deserve it

[u/SoSp]

Φτιάξτε τα μικρόφωνα ρεεεεε, οι φαρσες του φουσεκη εχουν καλυτερη ποιοτητα.