Hello, good evening. Broadcasting on TV Cultura, affiliated broadcasters, and connected on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, Roda Viva starts now. One of the most read writers in the world, he has reached the mark of 20 million books sold, 1 million in Brazil. PhD in History, the man in the center of today's Roda Viva visited in his work the past, the present and the
future of humanity. Three of his books try to explain how the human being transformed from a species with an impact similar to a jellyfish to become the animal who dominates the Earth. Now, he posits other less encouraging
hypothesis of what will come after that. At the center of Roda Viva tonight is one of today's most celebrated minds, Professor Yuval Noah Harari. History teacher of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with doctorate in Oxford in the United Kingdom, author of Sapiens, a brief history of humanity, and 21 Lessons For the 21st
Century, among other books, In his lectures around the world he answers questions like "is there justice in today's world?" Is history divided between "good and bad guys"? Do most people know less than they think they do? To talk with Yuval Noah Harari, we invite Celia Rosemblum, she is the editor of special projects of the journal O Valor Econômico Raul Juste Loures, he is chief editor of the magazine Veja São Paulo. Paulo Saldiva, he is pathologist doctor and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies of USP. Claudia Costin, she is the director of the Center of Excellence and Innovation in Educational Policies of Getulio Vargas Foundation, and
columnist of Folha de São Paulo. Fernanda Diamant, she is the curator of Flip and science editor of Quatro Cinco Um magazine. We also count on the support and the sharp eye of our cartoonist Paulo Caruso. Professor, good evening, welcome to Roda Vida, is a pleasure to have you here in our television program. Professor, you have talked a lot about data protection. Brazil had an election recently and today's part of the discussions in the country happens through social networks or are influenced by them. Rejection to the press and narratives based on science
data became a mark of our times. What is the future of the misinformation
in social networks? That's a big question. Nobody really knows. The future of data is maybe one
of the most important political questions today in the world, because data is becoming the most important asset in the world. In ancient times, the most important asset was land and politics was a struggle to control the land and if too much of the land was concentrated in the hands of one person or a few persons, you got a dictatorship. Then in the last two centuries machines and factories replaced land as the most important asset. Politics became the struggle to control the machines and dictatorship happened when most of the machines and factories were concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small aristocracy and now data is replacing machines as the most important asset and politics becomes a struggle to control the data. Dictatorship now means the concentration or control of too much of the data flow by the government or by a few corporations And we need to prevent that, we need to regulate the ownership of data. But we still don't know how to do it. We have thousands of years of experience regulating the ownership of land and
we have centuries of experience regulating the ownership of machines,
but we don't really have experience in how to regulate the ownership of data, which is why I can't and nobody can predict what the the data market would look like in 20 or 30 years. Before giving the floor to my colleagues, I
would like to ask you one more question: What is the responsability you assign to the big technology companies in the spreading of misinformation, which is changing the politics, not only in Brazil, but other countries like US, what is their responsability? They have a huge responsibility. They are the experts, they should
know better than anybody else what are the potential dangers of the technologies they are developing and they should be responsible. They should think not just about their profits and about their business model, but also about what they are doing to human society and the political system. But, ultimately, it's not the responsibility of these corporations to regulate the technology. Is the responsibility of the political system and of the citizens because these corporations, ultimately, they don't represent anybody. We didn't vote for them. They are not elected officials. So yes, they should act responsibly
that's for sure. But the ultimate responsibility is with the government and with the public who votes for the government. The problem here is that many people, including many politicians don't understand the new technologies well enough. Don't understand the potential for the future And I would like to emphasize that really we haven't seen anything yet. All the recent scandals like the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the United States and all these scandals, they are just the tip of the iceberg. The kind of technologies we are going to see in the next decade or two has potential to revolutionize society, the economic system, and the political system much more than that. So we need to educate the political system and the citizens about the potential. Fernanda Diamant, please. Thank you for your presence, it is a pleasure to be here. I would like to quote a sentence from your book 21 Lessons For the 21st Century which may seem contradictory at first, I would
like you to talk more about that. "the greater the power of science, the greater the powerlessness of reason". I would like to understand. The development of science makes humans lose control of reality? I would like you to talk more about that. Yes, new scientific discoveries and inventions are giving us immense power but we don't necessarily have the understanding and the responsibility to use this power wisely. So, we've seen it before like with nuclear energy that the scientists gave humans the power to either create very cheap energy or also to destroy the world with nuclear bombs and most people at least at first did not really understand the technology and therefore lacked the ability to make reasonable decisions and we are now seeing it again in an even more extreme form. Most people around the world, including most politicians, their understanding of artificial intelligence and biotechnology is very very limited. Now, these two technologies in particular artificial intelligence and biotechnology, bioengineering, they are really giving us divine powers of creation. They are really upgrading humans to be gods. And I don't mean this as a metaphor, but literally we are acquiring abilities which traditionally were thought to be divine abilities. The ability to re-engineer and to create life. But the vast majority of people and politicians, they have a very limited understanding of the technology and its potential and therefore the danger is that we will not make wise decisions about how to use these technologies. Raul. Professor Harari, this moment of technology, of political confrontation now, in the US, the democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren, and Facebook from Mark Zuckerberg are clearly demonstrating the lack of trust in both sides. Do you see the possibility that the EU or the american government will act as Theodore Roosevelt a century ago, against Standard Oil, the possibility of some government to demand the end of these oligopolies, the fragmentation of these companies that have so much power? Potentially, yes. It depends on two things. First of all, it's on the political will and ability to do it. But, there is something more difficult with breaking the monopoly of the giant data companies and Information technology companies. If you're talking about, let's say, car manufacturing, and you have, say, one company company controlling the whole market of car manufacturing, technically it's not so difficult to split this one giant monopoly into, say, five companies, each controlling twenty percent of the car manufacturing market. It's difficult politically, but technically it's easy. With information technology is not like that because the nature of information technology actually encourages a monopoly. If you think about social media for example, like Facebook, then everybody wants to be where everybody else is. The big advantage of Facebook compared to its potential competitors is not necessarily that it has the best technology or the best services. The big advantage is that everybody else is already there, so I also want to be there. If you have a social media system with 1 billion people and you have another social media system with just 10 million people, everybody would like to be with the 1 billion. Now, if you take Facebook and split it in two then again, it will be a very unstable situation. Because if you have, say, five social media companies each with twenty percent of the market and then one gets a slight advantage then again, everybody will move there because I want to be with all my friends in the same place. I don't want to be with just twenty percent of my friends in one social network and then the rest of the friends, they are on a different network. So built into the technology there is this tendency to monopoly and it's the same ways like data mining. So the more data is concentrated in one place, the better your statistics, the better your predictions. So again, there is this tendency towards monopoly. Think for example about our medical records. Let's say you have one big company which accumulates more and more medical records about everybody. Then it can make better and better predictions about my medical situation and what drugs I should take or what treatments I should take. Now, if you break this company into ten small companies each with just ten percent of the market their predictions, their analysis, will be worse than if you if all that if all the data is in the hands of just one big giant company and if you think about it from a global perspective, you have an even bigger problem. Let's say in the US or the European market you break the medical market of data into a lot of small companies. But in China you have just one big company, which controls, that access to the medical records and, say, DNA of all one billion chinese. Now if you have a company which has access to the records of a billion people and its competitor in the US has access only to 50 million people, then obviously the 1 billion people company will have far better data and statistics and then if I want to have information about my own medical situation I would obviously go to the Chinese and not to these small European or American companies and the only result will be that the Chinese will take over not just China, but all the world. So, there are ways to deal with that but it's difficult when we're talking about breaking monopolies in the data market we should always remember that it's much more tricky than breaking monopolies in car manufacturing or oil or anything else because the nature of data technology often encourages monopoly of data. Claudia Costin. Hi, Professor Harari, It is a pleasure to talk with you. My question is: You talk a lot in your books about the advent of artificial inteligence and accelerated automation, which will extinguish many jobs and raise inequality because many new jobs will be created but not to the same skills. In that way, I would like to ask you what suggestions would you give to the education of the new generations to know how to live in this new world? Well, the basic insight or assumption when we approach the question of Education is that, for the first time in history, we have no idea what the job market would look like in 30 years and what skills people will need. Throughout history it was always difficult to predict the future, of course, what will happen in politics and and so forth, but with regard to the basic skills people will need, change was much more slow, so you knew what to teach the next generation, but now we have no idea what skills people will need in 2040 or 2050. The only thing we are certain about is that they will need to keep learning and keep reinventing themselves throughout their lives. It's not that you learn a profession in your 20s, and then you work in that profession for your whole life. No, you will have to change again and again, so the most important thing is how to teach people flexibility, how to teach people to keep learning and keep changing throughout their lives and this is extremely important and extremely difficult, because change is stressful and especially beyond a certain age people don't like to keep changing again and again, but in the 21st century, it will be a necessity. So this is one key insight that we don't, you shouldn't focus on a particular skill like okay let's teach people how to code computers or let's teach people Chinese. No, we need to teach people how to be mentally flexible. The other key issue is that we need to think globally again because it is going to be a huge difference between different countries. Because of the changes in the job market people will need to keep learning throughout their lives. The big issue will not be the disappearance of jobs. There will be new jobs. The big issue is retraining. Now, rich countries will have the resources to retrain the workforce. But poor countries may lack these resources and the consequence might be that the automation revolution will benefit the rich countries, which are already rich, while completely ruining the poorer countries. In the 20th century the big advantage of poor countries was cheap labor. The ticket to how to advance your economy if you're a poor country, unless you have lots of oil or something, is cheap labor. But cheap labor will not be so important in the 21st century because this is the easiest thing to replace and then the question is so what will the poor countries do if we don't build a global safety net? What we will see is the automation revolution creating immense wealth in some countries like China, in the USA, which are leading the automation revolution and completely ruining the economies
of developing countries, which cannot retrain their workforce fast enough and don't benefit from the AI revolution. Célia. Good evening, Professor. I would like to know, in this context of the necessity of creation of a global safety network, how do you build this kind of network when you have growing populism, commercial war and exacerbated nationalism, how do you think it is possible to do so? It's impossible. If we see an acceleration of the trade war and isolationism and extreme nationalism, there won't be any safety net and some countries will benefit greatly and other countries might completely collapse, but then the collapse of the weaker countries will destabilize the entire world. Over the last four or five years we've seen the world running in the wrong direction exactly when we need greater global cooperation, what we are seeing is greater tensions and some of the most powerful countries in the world, which should be responsible, take responsibility, they are actually the ones, like the United States, which are destabilizing the global system. I don't think that the problem is nationalism. I think the problem is a misunderstanding of nationalism. In itself, nationalism is a wonderful thing. What we need to remember is that nationalism is not about hating foreigners. Nationalism is about loving your compatriots and therefore there is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism. In the 21st century, in order to really protect the safety and prosperity of your compatriots, of the people in your nation, you have to cooperate with foreigners both in the economic field, also with regard to climate change, also with regard to dangerous technologies, from nuclear weapons to killer robots. We need... if you're a good nationalist in the 21st century, you have to be a globalist. Because the only way you can protect the people in your country is by cooperating with people in other countries. Unfortunately, there is this misunderstanding that some politicians also spread, that nationalism is about hating foreigners and hating minorities. So, to prove that I'm a big nationalist, I would spread hatred against others and we need to correct this mistake. If you're a good nationalist, show this by taking care of your compatriots, for example by paying your taxes and not taking bribes. This is a good nationalist. It has nothing to do with hating people. Dr. Paulo. Professor Harari, it is a pleasure to talk with you. In the Age of Enlightenment, Decartes imagined that science would save humanity. He treated science as a common, and today it is a commodity. Even from the access point of view, as a doctor, for example, we have to decide whether to take care of someone who needs, or someone who can pay more, because big coorporations want profit. And also with information. Like a hunter-gatherer, Facebook worked like a bonfire where people get around, and now you use this information as a commodity. You talk about principles and global protection mechanisms. Do you think that is possible? You can't have objective ways to answer. But do you believe that us, human beings, the way we are focused on ourselves, wil have that movement? It's possible but very difficult and not not inevitable. I don't know what the chances are, but humans today cooperate globally far better than in any previous time in history. You look at the global trade network, so, you've seen nothing like that previously in history. You see the way that humans, we have nuclear weapons for 70 years now, and we have managed to avoid so far a nuclear war and actually the last 70 years, partly because of the threat of nuclear weapons, have been the most peaceful era in human history. Now, still, wars... I come from Israel, I know this perfectly well, but compared to any previous time in history we are still in the most peaceful era. Today in the world and you probably also know it from your own work, sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder. Many more people die from diabetes and from overeating and things like that than they die from human violence. That's an amazing achievement and to give maybe one more example, if you think about, say, the football World Cup. That's an amazing display of global cooperation. I mean, the World Cup is a competition between nations and people have fierce loyalty to their national team. But you can't have a World Cup unless everybody first agrees on the same rules for the game. Now, a thousand years ago, it would have been utterly impossible to have a World Cup in any kind of sport. Not just because different parts of the world had no communication between them but even if they communicated they couldn't agree on the same rules. So, a thousand years ago or five hundred years ago, you didn't have a World Cup or an Olympic game. Now, at least in some areas, you know, the Brazilians and the French and the Japanese and the Russians, they can at least agree on the rules for football, which is quite an achievement. So, agreeing on rules for how to manage artificial intelligence is going to be much more difficult than agreeing on rules for football. And I don't know if we will succeed. Maybe we will fail and the the results will be catastrophic for billions of people. But I think there is a chance, there is hope. Roda Viva will make a short break. Just to take a breath, the discussion is super rich. Stay with us. We will be back soon. Roda Viva is back with the writer Yuval Noah Harari. Professor, I watched this interview, in which you, quoting what Claudia Costin said earlier in which you talked about education and the impact of this technological break that we will probably face in the next 20 years, how this will change absolute all the way in which we have been educated. Making probably everything we've learned so far useless. You said in this interview that the fact that we don't have a political debate over this problem is what concerns you the most. Do you see any sign of change in this way? And what could bring an alert so that people could start to think about the future in a way, let's say, responsible. Yeah, there is change. I mean, both the political systems at least in some countries and also the public is becoming more and more aware of the potential impact of the new technologies and discussion of the ownership of data, discussion of what's happening with the social media, discussions about the automation revolution, they are becoming, they are entering the political arena. Maybe not enough. Because the time we have to deal with these issues is very short. But there are positive signs that people are noticing that this is very important and this should be a major issue in the political debates. The debate is open. Professor, we have in Brazil a "cloud of pessimism" in the last few years, everything that can get worse, in fact does. But this "cloud" is also seen in the west. United States, Europe, the more informed you are, the more hopeless you become. But in Asia, so far, this situation is very different. I've lived three years in China, And even in the smallest chinese village, people in fact believe that China is in its best direction, in its best moment. Do you think that Asia and other emerging regions will be "armored" from this pessimism or do you see this same bad feeling about technology and future job market getting to Asia? I think that the division, say, between Asia and the West is not the right division. There are countries in both areas which will benefit from the coming technological revolutions and there are countries in both areas which will lose a lot. So I think that the division like Asia and that the West or Asia-America is the less relevant. Also, about, you know, optimism and pessimism, very often the images that people have in their minds are very different from the reality. They are not necessarily influenced or shaped only by objective conditions. They are also shaped by expectations. Now, what we have been seeing throughout history and especially in the last few generations is that the objective conditions of most humans have improved dramatically even in countries like Brazil, if you think about the last 30 years or 50 years, despite... There are so many problems but yet from the objective perspective there has been great progress over the last few decades. Nevertheless, people's... The feeling of people, how satisfied they are, doesn't depend on the objective conditions. It depends on their expectations and we have seen it throughout history that when conditions improve, expectations increase. And therefore, very often, even when conditions improve, people become more dissatisfied. Like Chile, for example. Because the the gap between the rise in condition and the rise in expectations is becoming bigger and very often it happens that after a period of, you know, you have a period of growth and then people have lots and of more and more expectations and no growth is forever. Not in Brazil, not in Japan, not in China, and then when you hit a break, the gap, I mean, your expectations continue to inflate but the conditions no longer improve or no longer improve so fast, and then there is a crisis and if you look also at China, China has had a very good period economically since the late 1970s, for 40 years the Chinese model have worked very well economically, but it never had to deal with a serious crisis. The big question mark over the Chinese model is how will it deal with a major crisis? If you look at the American model, so, the great advantage of the American model, even today, compared with China is that the American model is much older and it has managed to survive and overcome and improve itself through several cycles of crisis and regeneration. With the Chinese model, we don't have yet an actual example of how it deals with a major crisis and crisis, it is inevitable. It's... it can't be that it will just be for decades and decades, going on without any crisis and we'll wait and see. Of course it will have repercussions all over the world if China hits an economic crisis or an ecological crisis and it slows down the economy further, and there is political turmoil, it will have repercussions all over the world. It's one of the big question marks over the the global system. Even more generally, I would say, that the last big economic and financial crisis the world had was in 2008 and despite all the difficulties in 2008, the major powers of the world worked together effectively to prevent the worst outcome. If the two... If crisis like the 2008 crisis erupts tomorrow and it can erupt tomorrow, any day now, it may be right now. Maybe... our phones are on silent, but maybe your phone is now full of messages that this bank has collapsed and that... maybe. And if it happens now there is no global cooperation like in 2008. If we have the same kind of crisis like in 2008 we might be seeing a complete financial meltdown. Because we lack the necessary global trust and cooperation that we had in 2008 to deal with it. Professor Harari, Adding to what my colleague has asked, the future seems, in every one of your books, potentially tragic. I keep thinking about public policies that could deal with these questions. You talked earlier about a global coorperation to solve these problems, but national public policies can also be relevant. Unfortunately, in the last global elections, and Brazil is no exception, we haven't discussed public policy enough, we discussed the faults of our adversaries. What kind of public policy could be important to avoid a tragic future? Well again, it depends on the country we are talking about, but There are three main issues. I mean, the first issue is to regulate the most dangerous technologies and this ranges from the development of new kinds of weapons, like autonomous weapon systems, killer robots, that some countries around the world are developing to regulating surveillance systems to prevent the creation of digital dictatorships that follow everybody all the time. And this is a danger in every country. I mean, even countries that lack a sophisticated high-tech sector of their own every government in the world today faces the temptation of buying sophisticated surveillance technology from the major players like China and the USA and creating a surveillance regime to monitor the citizens and we can see in the next 10 or 20 years the rise of such digital dictatorships. Dictatorships based on digital surveillance technology that follow everybody all the time. We can see this happening not just in the most developed countries, but even in some of the most backward countries around the world. In Africa, in the Middle East, we can see the creation of these digital dictatorships. So we need to regulate to prevent that. So one issue is regulation, which every country should do about itself. The second issue is education, what we talked about earlier, and the third issue is global trust and cooperation. Because to deal with the most important issues most countries will not be able to do it by themselves. Most countries, they don't have the resources and they are too vulnerable to outside influences for if you think about the automation revolution, so, let's say that your country, you live in a country where many people still make a living from cheap manual labor. There are textile workers and then things like that. Now, the government can have rules, laws, that protect the jobs in the textile industry from automation. But this will not be helpful at all if automation means that it's now cheaper to produce textile in the United States or in Germany than it is in Honduras or in Bangladesh. So if technology reaches a point when it's cheaper to produce my shirt in California than in Honduras, there is nothing the Honduran government can do about it. But to save the economy from collapsing and this will have... if it collapses it has repercussions for entire regions, then we need to build this global safety net that to some of the enormous profits, I mean, automation will result in enormous profits but we need to prevent these profits from being concentrated in only a few countries. We need a mechanism that the enormous profits in California somehow are used to protect and to better the situation of also people in Honduras and for that we need global cooperation and at present we are of course running in the opposite direction. I don't see the current US administration raising taxes on US corporations in order to support unemployed people in Central America. Professor, I would like to talk more about what you said about digital dictatorships. Social networks also brought minorities together in Brazil, that were able to connect to each other through social networks, groups, at the same time, there is an article of yours published on The Guardian, on July 23, in the occasion of the 50 years of Stonewall and which you alert, I was very impressed by that text, about rising homophobia, and the relation between these hate groups and the social networks, which means, these same groups that benefited from the networks, are also threatened by the social network. Should there be a decrease in the use of social networks, greater caution by these groups that are suffering increasing violence? No, no, I mean, every technology has a good side and a bad side. Social networks have been very positive in connecting for example gay people together or connecting all kinds of groups together and we shouldn't stop that. We should take action against the spread of hatred and hate speech and harassment in the social networks, but we should keep the social network functioning, of course. The big problem of digital dictatorships doesn't come from the social network or from the people using it, but from the government, or for maybe some very powerful corporation which are collecting data on the people who are using the social network and then using it to monitor and control people. Again, if you take the LGBT community, so it's now potentially much easier for a homophobic regime to find out to discover all the gay people in the country much faster and more easily than ever before just by monitoring not only the communications that people have, but even unconscious reactions that people have. You could be talking about... I don't know, a 15 year old teenager Maybe I still don't know that I'm gay. Maybe I'm not sure yet. But the algorithm in the computer already knows that I'm gay, because it is monitoring all my activities, like even when I surf YouTube. So maybe I don't watch any gay movies, and I don't look at anything like that, but simply by monitoring how my eyes react to different images of people, the algorithm and the government or corporation behind the algorithm already know that I'm gay. Let's say I'm surfing YouTube and I'm seeing a video of a guy and a girl in swimming suits walking on the beach. Now, the computer can tell where my eyes focus. If my eyes focus more on the guy rather than the girl and it happens repeatedly so the algorithm already knows "oh, he is gay", and this can be used by corporations to sell me stuff for instance the corporation that wants to sell me anything and it has two versions of a commercial, one with a shirtless guy and one with the girl in a bikini, it knows to show me the advertisement with the shirtless guy and maybe I still don't know, maybe I'm still not sure that I'm gay but they already know it and use it against me and that's relatively benign. But if for example if you think about a country like Iran, which has the death penalty for homosexuality, so the Iranian police or the Iranian government could catch gay teenagers just by these kinds of monitoring systems with terrible consequences. So we are reaching the point when the combination of information technology and biotechnology, biotechnology is important to understand what's happening in your brain and your body, when you combine the two. you get the technology to monitor everybody all the time, which was never possible before. If you think about the dictatorships of the 20th century so if you live in the USSR in the time of Stalin, so the secret police cannot follow everybody all the time. It's just impossible. But in ten years some people in the world, billions of people, might be living in a digital dictatorship when not just everything they do but even everything they feel is constantly monitored. Just think about, I don't know, North Korea in ten years when everybody has to wear a biometric bracelet which monitors your blood pressure your heart beat your level of adrenaline in the blood, things like that and you watch on television, it's your home or maybe in school, a speech by the big leader and they monitor your blood pressure and your brain activity and if you start, if they start seeing signs of anger, they know maybe I'm clapping and I'm forcing myself to smile, but they know: "no no, no, he's angry". And tomorrow morning, I mean, some gulag or something That would have been utterly impossible in Stalin's USSR but it is becoming possible with the new technology of the 21st century. Oh my God. Paulo and then Celia. Celia, please. Thank you, Paulo. Since you study this question of surveillance of technology, how is your relation with these technologies daily? Your media accounts are professionally managed, it seems like you don't have a cellphone, that's it? Is it distrust? How do you deal
with technology? In your life. I think that with every technology you need to make sure that you are using it instead of being used by it. I don't avoid the new technology. It can be very helpful and I use social media and so forth, but I try to be very mindful and use technology for my purposes without being controlled and enslaved by it. With smartphones it's a bit more tricky. I don't have a smartphone but my husband carries a smartphone so I'm actually burdening him with all the difficulties of the smartphone. So, you know, It's the new status symbol. If you are really really important, the new status symbol is that you don't have a smartphone. If you have a smartphone, it means you have a boss. Somebody that controls you, that can access you all the time, that can tell you what to do. In many jobs today, you can't refuse. I mean, if you want the job you have, not just to have a smartphone you need to have it on so that the boss can reach you in all kinds of crazy hours. So, you know, this is becoming the new normal. I remember my parents when they... like 30 years ago 40 years ago, they came back home from work, that's it. No more work. There is no way the boss can reach them. But I look at many of my friends and family members today, it can be Friday night and suddenly they have an urgent message from the boss, "you have to do this, you have to do that". Dr. Paulo, I just have to tell you we have four minutes before the next break. I'll try to be smart and brief, which is hard. Let's go back to the subject of nuclear war versus sugar. If we had Instagram back then, we possibly wouldn't have had Nagasaki. The vision of a city like Hiroshima being destroyed would be impeditive for the begining of a nuclear war. This was the good side. But the sugar, the same advertisement that makes us eat wrongly. The best coronary health is from indigenous, hunter-gatherers from Bolivia, who walk a lot, don't eat sugar, processed food, and that also have some tapeworm who steal their fat. The same technology can regulate states, but not companies and consumption. So is there a necessity of a code of ethics to companies? We don't have some kind of UN for companies, should we have an ethical regulation of these companies? Yeah, we certainly need regulations for the companies but, again, it always comes also back to the public and the government. I think that companies should be responsible and should be held responsible. But we shouldn't see them as the ultimate source of responsibility. The ultimate source of responsibility should remain the government, which in turn is answerable to the public, to the citizens. So, yes, companies should think hard about what they are doing in how they earn their money and they should stop harmful practices. But ultimately it's the job of the government to make sure that the companies are not harming us and maybe the worst things that companies do is not this political practice or that particular system, the worst thing they do is that they try to subvert the political system itself. Companies that don't want to be regulated, like, I don't know. I'm not sure about that, but just a hypothetical example, like, if you are the owner of some big food company which makes a lot of money from selling sugar drinks and processed food maybe to schools, you don't want to be regulated. You don't want the government passing a law, Parliament passing a law, that at least in schools people should, students should get healthy food and they shouldn't sell sugary drinks in school or something like that. So you, part of your profits go to paying politicians contributions for their election funds and whatever and then you demand in return that they don't pass such laws and regulations. This is the worst practice that many companies around the world have and this is the first responsibility of the companies to stop doing that. Roda Viva will take a short break, and then we come back to professor and writer Yuval Noah Harari, just a second, stay with us. [music] Roda Viva is back with the interview with writer and professor Yuval Noah Harari. We go straight to Raul Juste Loures. Professor, adding to Fernanda's question on homophobia in the world, I would like to question the relation between the monotheists religions, not just with homossexuality but also with female emancipation, will change? Because religions seem a few decades late regarding acceptance and even respect not just for minorities, but also women. Mm-hmm. Well, I think that religions are not made in heaven. They are made on Earth by humans. I don't think that any religion has any kind of eternal essence. Religions is what people make of them. Christianity is anything Christians make of it. Judaism is whatever Jews make of it. You can make of it a very tolerant and accepting religion and you can make of it a very intolerant and homophobic and chauvinistic religion. It's up to you. It's not like in the text in the book, the text contains so many things. Unfortunately in many cases throughout history we see that people used religion and use God to justify the worst tendencies and they say "I hate? No, God hates. I'm just following God's commands" and you're justifying your own hatred. Now, I don't think that if there is a God that God would punish people for love. If you think about homophobia, for example, why would a loving God punish people just for loving each other. It seems totally unreasonable to me. So, as far as I can tell, the source of homophobia is not in God, is not in Christianity. It's in some Christians who justify their own hatreds and their own mental weaknesses in the name of God. And we've seen how religions change through history that some religions for example supported slavery and then at some point, the same religions became one of the main fighters, warriors against slavery and it can happen in many other things, too. So I think that we shouldn't fall into this trap of believing that there is something deep, inherent in a particular religion that makes it inevitably homophobic or inevitably against women or against this or against that. Fernanda Diamant, then Claudia Costin. I will change the subject a little, I want to talk about your writing works, your books are extremely communicative, they communicate complex ideas, and they have a narrative similar to fiction, in the rhytim, like, the paths you chose. So, I would like to know if fiction literature, especially science fiction literature like Orwell, Huxley, Asimov, have influenced, or influence your written work. Yeah. Very much so. I mean, I think that my job is to kind of build a bridge between the scientific community and the general public. Many scientists are just engaged with their own deep research in various fields from evolution or genetics or climate science or AI and they write only for a small circle of other scientists and we need people that will communicate the latest findings and theories of the scientific community to the general public to service as this kind of bridge and to do that you have to write and you have to talk in a way which will be not only easily accessible but also interesting and captivating for the general audience so you need to know science, of course, otherwise, you're just conveying nonsense but at the same time you need also to master the techniques of literature in order to know how to reach the public and science fiction is one of the genres that can teach us how to do it. And I think maybe today is the most important artistic genre in the world because most people, what they know about AI comes far more from science fiction than from science and again, you can do it. well, or you can do it badly when science fiction can convey accurate ideas and theories or it can mislead the public by focusing on the wrong issues. I'm afraid that in many cases science fiction is not doing the best job. It for example focuses the attention of the public on completely unrealistic scenarios like the most favorite scenario of science fiction books and movies dealing with AI is that the robot and computers suddenly gain consciousness and then rebel against the humans and you have like a Terminator-like scenario, that the war between the robots and the humans. This is extremely unlikely to happen in the next few decades. There is no indication that robots or computers of anywhere on the road to gaining consciousness and rebelling against us. The real dangers of advances in AI are things like robots and computers pushing people out of the job market or new technology empowering a government or a small elite to build a digital dictatorship. The robots are not evil. They don't rebel. They do exactly what the government tells them to do, but if the government is evil and the government is telling them to spy on everybody and to control everybody and the problem is that the robots never rebel. And this is a far more scary and realistic scenario than most of the scenarios that science fiction is dealing with them. Professor Harari. OECD keeps saying that we need to develop in the population the capacity to solve problems collaboratively with criativity. You said earlier that there is a lot to do by the government, by the citizens, and not so much by the companies. What can the citizens do regarding the possible scenario, like I said before, tragical, to solve problems that come up in their countries and in the world? Well, first the citizens need to inform themselves about the new technological developments and the potential impact on fields like economy or politics. Now, it's not that everybody needs a PhD in Computer Science. They don't. They just need to have a basic understanding of what is the potential of AI. I also I don't have a PhD in Computer Science. I don't know how to code computers. I only know if the computer is malfunctioning, close it down, and start again. It's basically the only thing I know, but to understand what AI might do to economics or to politics, you don't need a PhD. So that's the first thing to educate yourself about and you know, it's important for everybody. Some people say no. I'm too poor, I have other issues. That's not my priority. But it's going to have an impact on everybody and actually on the poor even more than on the rich. If you don't educate yourself and you just allow other people to make decisions for you, it doesn't mean you will not be affected. It just means you have no control over the future of yourself and your children. But of course just educating yourself is not enough. Then you need to organize yourself with other people to make a political change. Now, I don't think that individual action can do that. There are lots of people who, you know, like, they just write posts or something and on Facebook and it's important to some extent, but ultimately politics is always about organization. Fifty people who are members of an organization that cooperates are far more powerful than 500 people who are just as individuals doing... each one is doing something separately, so we need to cooperate and we need to change, really, the public conversation. And this is part of my job at the time, like, coming now into Brazil or to different countries, first of all just change the conversation. Change the questions that people ask politicians and that politicians ask themselves. Like, you look at the world in over the last few years. So you see enormous interest in issues like immigration, or, like, terrorism, and far less interest in questions relating to the rise of artificial intelligence, even though AI is far more dangerous to the future of humanity than terrorism. So we need to change the conversation. Yes, we still need to deal with terrorism, it's still a problem. But, comparatively, we should have far more attention focused on the rise of AI and what it will do to the economy and to the political system. Dr. Paulo. Professor, we are talking about... Sorry. Professor, we are talking about billions, but my focus is on the individual person. I can imagine that my biggest concern is not to lose my job to a robot, is to lose the meaning of living. That sense of identity in the world where the information of what I will do is dictated by an average of billions other than me. And paradoxically there is a relation between the rise of AI and the decrease of objective problems with the rise of the suicide rate. Israel, for example, is not sorrounded by friendly neighbors. But the suicide rate is decreasing in Israel is decreasing, unlike what is happening in the rest of the world. And the countries with a lower suicide rate are the ones less benefited from these wonderful technologies. Do you think there will be a space for humans in this world of billions of pieces of information for them to feel part of something? That's maybe the most complicated question. Even more than the economical, political issues is what will happen to the meaning of life of individuals, because we're used to thinking about human life as a drama of decision making. Life is like a road and every now and then you reach a junction and you need to decide and you know so much of art focuses on that, almost every Shakespeare play or every Hollywood comedy focuses on the hero or heroine needing to make a very important decision to be or not to be to, marry Mr. X. so to marry Mr. Y. And that's... the entire narrative revolves around that. And similarly, in religion, so also religions depict human life is a big drama of decision-making that eternal salvation or damnation depends on making the right decision, the right choice. What happens to human life when more and more decisions are taken for us by the algorithm? What to study in university, where to work whom to marry? I'm not deciding that. An algorithm is telling this to me because the algorithm knows better. Similarly, for applying for a job. It's not a human being that decides whether to give me the job. It's an algorithm. And we don't have really models for understanding a human life in which most decisions are taken for you by an algorithm, by a computer that knows you better than you know yourself. I would almost say that we are facing the kind of philosophical and spiritual bankruptcy Because all the philosophical and religious models and spiritual models we have from the past, they tell us that decision-making, this is the big thing in human life and they can't really conceive of a human life in which most decisions are taken for us by an algorithm and I think this is not a responsibility of government. This is the responsibility of philosophers and poets and artists and individual people to explore that. What does it mean to live in in such a situation and we need a kind of almost philosophical revolution or spiritual revolution to deal with this kind of unprecedented development. The third part of Roda Viva went fast. We will come back for the fourth and last part. I don't even need to say for you to stay there, and I think that's impossible. It'll take a second. Yuval Noah Harari, Roda Viva. [music] We are back with the last part of the interview with professor and writer Yuval Noah Harari. Professor, as you know, here in Brazil, as in other countries, we live in a moment where part of the society operates in an anti-science logic. This expression was used here in Roda Viva by one of the biggest scientist of Brazil, climatologist Carlos Nobre. There is this kind of feeling that teachers, academics, scientists, are under attack. This is the feeling that the academy shares with the country today. On top of what you said to Fernanda, about the necessity of scientists to speak a more accessible language. What would you say to the people who are here in Brazil struggling in this battle for information? But you need to continue fighting this battle. That it's been going on throughout human history. It's not something new throughout human history, people spread not just the truth, but also a lot of fiction and a lot of propaganda. It's nothing new what's happening now. The situation now is actually much better than it was throughout history, at least in some fields people trust the experts and not all kinds of charlatans or people that spread lies. If you think about the medical field for example, for much of history, medicine was the field of expertise of priests and rabbis and shamans and things like that. And this was actually maybe the one of the most important functions of religion, was medicine. Many religious leaders, if you think even about Jesus, most of what they do is heal people and this is no longer the case. The responsibility for medicine has shifted in most of the world from religious leader to doctors, and even the religious people, when they were sick they go to the doctor. They don't go to the priest. Maybe the doctor says there is nothing to do then they say, okay, let's pray. There is nothing else to do. Let's pray. It can't harm. But in many fields... also in agriculture, say, a thousand years ago. There is a drought. So what do you do? You go to the priest and you pray. What do you do now? When there is a drought you don't go to the priest. You go to the engineer. Okay, let's desalinate sea water. Let's build a dam over a river and divert water, all kinds of solutions. But the solutions don't come from praying, they come from science. They come from technology and we have seen this shift in more and more fields and we need to continue working in this direction. Again, I don't think that there is a necessary clash between religion and science in this field, religion can be very helpful. If you think for example about the climate crisis, so we have seen the current Pope making some very helpful statements and trying to enact a good policy. Giving motivation to people to prevent further deterioration of the climate crisis. So it's not... I don't think we should frame it as a kind of battle between science and religion. Ideally, it should be a cooperation when science provides us with the fact, the facts of the matter, this is the responsibility of scientists, to tell us what is happening and then when it comes to deciding what to do, here we need to gain inspiration from good values and here is, this is somewhere where a religion can be very helpful. Celia. Professor, about climate change. This is a subject where the evidences are clear, and close to the people's lives. And there is already a political, institutional construction around that. Now, what is your opinion regarding for example, the Paris Agreement or the goals for sustainable development? The answers are coming as fast as they should? At present we have seen actually a regression, a reverse. Instead of seeing progress, in many places around the world, again, global cooperation on this is breaking apart, is falling apart, at least in some countries there is growing distrust and disbelief that the ecological crisis is real and this is extremely dangerous and I think we need to separate two issues with, very often people confuse. There is the issue of whether the climate crisis is real and there is the issue of what to do about it. Now, the issue of whether the climate crisis is real, that's a purely scientific issue. It's not a matter for politicians or even for voters to say if it's real or not. It's a scientific question. It's like I don't know. Let's say that I have some disease, so I don't go around my family members and say "Let's have a vote. What kind of disease I have?" I go to the expert and if the expert tells me "Oh, you have cancer", then I should believe the expert. I can ask another expert of course, but ultimately it's the responsibility of the scientific experts to tell us what is happening. What is the problem? They've done their job. Now, it's the time for politicians and voters to decide what to do because there are always different things to do. With cancer you can decide to have chemo or you can decide to have this treatment or that or no treatment, you say "ok, I just want to have another last two good years of life and that's it." And it's up to me and my family to decide what to do. Not up to the experts, they just give me advice. It's the same with with climate change. Once we realize it's real, it's happening, then we have different policies how to deal with it. What should be the responsibility of different countries, the rich countries, the poor countries? How fast we should do it, whether we should have a carbon tax. There are many different options and here, we need a political process and if people say, if most people would vote "let's do nothing", then that's the vote of the people. I think it's a bad idea. But in a democracy, if most people, they know the reality, they know the consequences and they still say ok, even though we know, we prefer not to do anything now to have a good life now and in 50 years our children will suffer the consequences. If most people vote for it, that's a democracy. What can you do? It's not the responsibility of the scientists to establish a scientific dictatorship and tell people "no, you make the wrong decision". No. I hope that people won't decide on that. But we should always remember there is a division of labor between the scientists and the voters. The scientists tell us what is the situation and the voters should believe that they are the expert on that, and then when you have the different options what to do This is the job of the voters to decide what they want. What do they desire. Raul. Professor, I want to talk about medicine. In this global wave of depression, anxiety, and suicides. Could you tell a bit more about your experience with meditation? What have changed in your life? And if you think that drugs, which are now legalized, as marijuana is in the US, will be more acceptable for societies in which they were forbidden until not long ago, not just marijuana in the US, which every referendum that it appears, it ends up being approved. Well, about drugs, I'm not an expert, so I'm not sure what the both medical and psychological results of various drugs are. So I don't like to venture my opinion I think we should ask the experts and we should make again a political decision in the end whether to legalize certain drugs or not according to the facts about the impact of these various drugs not because of some preconditions thought, not because of some religious taboos, but according to the scientific facts, maybe it turns out that marijuana is actually far better for use then alcohol. So why do we have a ban on alcohol and we, why we allow alcohol and we have a bit on marijuana. It doesn't make sense. Today, I'm not saying let's ban alcohol and I'm just saying that we should ask the experts, gather the evidence and make the decision on the basis of that and not on the basis of some preconceptions. You ask about meditation so I'll answer most generally that, especially today, it's very important to get to know yourself better. Because you now have all these corporations and governments that are trying to hack you, to monitor, to get you know you better, and exploit your own mental weaknesses against you. Now, get to know yourself is a very old advice, it's what spiritual leaders throughout history told people. This is what Buddha and Jesus and Socrates told people thousands of years ago. Get to know yourself better. But previously you didn't have competition. If you neglected to make the effort to understand your own mind, nobody outside you could look inside you. So the urgency was less. Now, it's very urgent. You have all these corporations and governments getting inside your head, understanding you better than you understand yourself and you need to stay ahead of them. You need to know yourself and especially know your own mental weaknesses better than the government or Facebook or Amazon knows you. And this can be done in various ways. Some people go to therapy. Some people do sports. They go hiking in the mountains. Some people do meditation. I do meditation, I do with personal meditation I meditate every day for two hours. I go every year for a long retreat of 30 days or 60 days to really get to know myself better, understand my mind understand my own weaknesses, understand the deep sources of my misery of my decisions in life. And I think it's now more important than ever before for people to take up some such practice. Again, whatever works for you, if it's not meditation, if it sports, then invest in it. But remember, it's the one thing you cannot outsource to somebody else. If you are, say, the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and you're so busy like every hour of yours is worth a billion dollars and you give everything to somebody else to do for you, this is something you can't give for somebody else to do for you. The only person that can really explore your own mind for you is yourself. So I would encourage everybody from, you know, the poorest person to the richest person in the 21st century. You need to get to know yourself better. We have three minutes left. So I will propose that Claudia and Fernanda ask the question and the professor answers in on way. Is that ok, professor? Ok, thank you. Professor, you are a historian. And there is some kind of disbelief, today, im some governments, and schools of thought in relation with human sciences. I would like you to talk more about the experience of being a historian and think historically today. Perfect, Fernanda. I would like actually to complement the last question, and to know two of your favorites books of science fiction and to know why some people are so in love with you in the silicon valley, where it is precisely one of your main points of criticism, do you think they understand what you say? Well, I'll try to answer briefly, I think they're interested because they understand they have enormous power in their hands and they are not sure what to do with it and they are realizing they have made some problematic decisions and you know, most of them are engineers, they have no background, or mathematicians They don't have a deep background in history, in philosophy, in social sciences. And this also goes to your question and our problem now is not a technology. It's the humans. Technology gives us immense power, but it's still up to us to decide what to do with it. And this is the job of the social sciences and the humanities based, and I think that today philosophers are more important in any previous time in history because many philosophical questions that for thousands of years, we have just theoretical questions, they are now becoming practical questions. Questions about the meaning of life, questions about free will, whether it exists or not, There are now very practical questions. So the people in Silicon Valley, they realize they need the philosophers and the historians and I think also the people in the humanities and social sciences, they should realize they have an enormous responsibility now, and to fulfill that responsibility, they need to understand the technology better. Philosophers shouldn't be afraid of AI or of genetics. They should engage with it more. Now about science fiction, so maybe my favorite book is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which is still I think the most prophetic book of the 20th century. Instead of another book I recommend a TV series. I think that Black Mirror is maybe the best science fiction TV show of the last year I mean some chapters, some chapters are betters some worse, but overall it's very imaginative and fresh and very responsible. They explore at least in some of the of the chapters a very realistic scenarios, so I would end by saying that I think it's now extremely, for the humanities and the Natural Sciences and Computer Sciences to work together. Because only by working together we can take responsible decisions about what to do with AI and bioengineering Unfortunately we are getting to the end of this edition of Roda Viva, I thank very much the participation of Celia Rosemblum, Raul Loures, Paulo Saldiva, Claudia Costin, Fernanda Diamant, and our cartoonist. Paulo Caruso. I thank very you much, that accompanied us, and very especially to the Professor Yuval Harari, it was a pleasure. - I thank you very much - It was trully a pleasure, an honor to have you here in Roda Viva. So I leave you with an invitation, we have next week, monday, this meeting, here in Roda Viva, 10 pm. I wait for you. [music]
